He came out with a sheepish grin on his face and shaving-foam on his cuffs. I didn’t stop to gloat. My flood of relief made the spittoon-sized aluminium toilet-bowl ring. Then I splashed cold water on my face, opened a few more buttons on my shirt and smeared deodorant awkwardly under each armpit, dried my beard, brushed my short-back-and-sides, rubbed a towel over my bald top and put on a tie. As I had to stoop or squat throughout, and the mirror would have been about adequate on a ladies’ pocket compact, the overall effect wasn’t easy to judge. I was still chuckling over the reason why Reid’s hair, though as grey as mine, was so long and thick.
Gene-fixing shampoo, indeed! What vanity, I thought, as I held the mouthwash for a minute to do its work, then spat it out and checked the gleam of my teeth.
North British Mutual had spawned a security agency, and Reid had been heavily involved in its management buy-out several years earlier. If this flight was anything to go by, the Mutual Assured Protection Company were doing well. The biznesman-jet they’d hired for this leg of the trip might be a little cramped, a little Spartan, but it did have its own stewardess, an Uzbek lass with a fixed smile and no English. Breakfast had been served by the time I returned to my seat: microwaved croissants and a coffee which, I guessed after the first sip, had also been microwaved. Neither was quite hot.
‘Microwaved, huh,’ Reid grumbled. ‘Waved in front of the radar for a bit, more likely.’
‘Might account for the turbulence,’ I said.
‘Turbulence?’ Reid snorted. ‘That was anti-aircraft fire, man.’
‘What!’ I turned in alarm to the window.
‘Don’t worry,’ Reid said. ‘Just bandits. They couldn’t hit a 777 at this height.’
Our bodyguard, Predestination Ndebele, nodded slowly. A lithe, wiry Zimbabwean, one of Reid’s employees.
‘You think this is bad,’ he said, ‘you try landing at Adnan.’
‘I’ll take your word for it, Dez.’
Reid looked up from his papers. ‘Last I heard,’ he said with a vague frown, ‘it was called Grivas.’
We flew for hours over a terrifyingly featureless plain, and then, in the middle of all that nowhere, descended to a full-sized international airport buzzing with military and civilian craft. In the far distance a clutter of launch silos and gantries; closer by, a town of low pre-fabs: Kapitsa, capital (and only) city of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, aka the Number Three Test Area, in the wasteland somewhere between Karaganda and Semiplatinsk. Part of former Kazhakstan.
‘I have a suprise for you,’ Reid said as we waited for the transit bus.
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ll see.’
I looked at him and shrugged, huddled against the dust-dry wind and trying not to breathe too much. The levels were supposed to be safe by now, but I was already interpreting the effects of jet-lag as incipient radiation sickness.
The airport main building was like any such, a neon-lit space of seating and screens and PA systems, but the differences were striking. The duty-free wasn’t in a separate area, because there was no customs barrier. No passport control, either – just a cursory weapons registration and a walk through a scanner. The only thing anyone could smuggle in here that could make any difference was an actual atomic bomb, and they’re not easily hidden. No tourists: all the arrivals and departures were of serious-looking customers: men in suits or uniforms. Very few women, apart from among the airport workers, who all – even the cleaners, I noticed – moved about their tasks with an almost insolent lack of haste, under enormous posters of Trotsky, Koralev and Kapitsa. The men who gave the Soviets the Red Army, the rocket, and the Bomb and who all got varied doses of Stalin’s terror in return.
From every part of the concourse came an irritatingly frequent popping of flashbulbs. Photographers roamed the crowd, scanned faces hungrily, snapped officers and officials and company reps as eagerly as they would video stars. Their subjects responded in a similar manner. All over the place, poses were being struck by ugly, scowling men: shaking hands, bear-hugging, standing shoulder to shoulder and mugging like mad.
‘Where to now?’ I asked, as Ndebele and myself hesitated for a moment at the edge of the concourse. Reid glanced at me with a flicker of impatience.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is where the deals get done. It’s gotta be public, that’s the whole point.’
He set off purposefully towards an open-plan Nicafé franchise. I hurried after him.
‘Hence the paparazzi?’
‘Of course. Stay cool,’ he added to Dez, who was glowering at anyone who looked at us.
We sipped our first decent coffee of the day around a table too low to be comfortable, as if designed to hasten the through flow of customers. On the television four pretty Southeast Asians in pink satin ballgowns sang raucously in English, thrashed instruments and leapt about the stage. The continuity caption gave their name: Katoi Boys.
‘Boys?’ Dez raised his eyebrows.
‘Thai refugees,’ I said. ‘My youngest granddaughter tells me they’re the latest pre-teen heart-throbs.’
‘Kinky, man,’ Dez said with severe Calvinist disapproval. ‘Decadent.’
‘Yeah, that’s what the Islamic Republic told them.’ Reid spoke idly, scanning the crowd. He stood up.
I turned. A tall, slender woman in an ankle-length fur coat was walking up to us, with a wide and welcoming smile. Photographers trotted behind her, at a respectful distance. I nearly fell back into my seat as I recognised her: Myra, my long-ago ex from the Soviet Studies Institute in Glasgow.
‘Well, hi guys,’ she said. She caught my hands and put her cheek to mine and whispered, ‘Smile, dammit!’ and I turned with an idiot grin to face the flash.
One of my earliest memories, oddly enough, concerns the Soviet Union, space, and the Bomb. (I don’t remember being born, but I’m assured that event took place on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died. Make of that what you will.) I was playing on the carpeted floor of our house in Streatham, a suburb of the city of London. I was playing with a toy rocket. If you put your eye to the hole in the end you could see part of a picture of trees on the inner surface, because the toy had been made in Hong Kong from a recyled tin can. This wasn’t because of ecological concern, which at that time hadn’t been invented. It was because it was cheap.
My father, sitting at the breakfast table, peered at me over his copy of the Manchester Guardian.
‘The Russians have sent a rocket into space,’ he told me. ‘Way up in the sky, going right around the world.’ He traced a circle in the air with his forefinger.
I felt disturbed by this. The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father’s, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful.
I zoomed the toy rocket up and when it reached the limit of my arm’s reach, I turned it and brought it down, nose-first. Its shape, I noticed for the first time, was just like a bomb. I had once seen a bomb being craned cautiously out of a garden at the end of the road, in front of two policemen, a dozen soldiers and a fascinated crowd. It had been buried in the ground for ten years after the war between the British and the German capitalists.
‘Does that mean they can send bombs through space?’
My father had returned to his paper, perhaps disappointed by my preoccupied response to his exciting news, and now lowered it again and gave me a brightening look.
‘Yes!’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s exactly what it means. Very clever, Jonathan. And now the Americans and everybody else will build rockets and put bombs on them.’