Brian Freemantle - The Lost American

From his command post ironically less than half a mile from where Blair was moving Sokol muttered to the attentive technicians. ‘Got him! This time we’ve got him!’

The Russian snapped his fingers expectantly and was obediently handed another map, this time of the underground system. Sokol gave his instructions over the radio crisply and concisely, identifying the interchange points from which Blair might try to switch, moving cars and men to them to be ready above and below ground: within minutes one of the men who had descended into Dzerzhinskaya emerged to report through the waiting radio the direction in which Blair caught the underground train and Sokol began to track the American’s route on the map, with a wax pencil.

Blair was vaguely aware that for the time of the day the carriages seemed more crowded than normal and he wrinkled his nose at the cabbage smell that seemed so pervasive in the city. The seeming indigenous smell had worried him when he first arrived but now – apart from rare occasions like this – he ceased to notice it. Ann still smelled it, of course. Poor Ann; Blair reckoned that she could recite every disadvantage of the Soviet capital, without missing one. Blair made his first move at Kropotkinskaya, alert for anyone who followed. Three people did but only one remained on the platform and Blair hung back, letting the man take the next train without attempting to board it himself. He got confidently on to the second connection, unaware that the two who had hurried up the stairs had done so to alert four more at ground level who came down in time to follow the American on to the train. Blair disembarked again at Arbatskaya and climbed to street level, setting off down Suvorovskiy Boulevard and abruptly hailing a taxi, which would have worked had the surveillance been less complete. As it was there were two radio-linked cars able to alternate the pursuit and give -literally-a running commentary back to Sokol at the KGB headquarters. Sokol moved his pencil from the underground to the street map.

‘Staying close to the river,’ he realised. At once to the people around him, he said, ‘Get a boat.’

Blair paid his cab off on the Ulitza Bol’shiye Kamenshchiki, going at once underground again but only for a short journey this time, emerging once again at Kiyevskaya and walking the remaining distance to the park.

‘Krasnaya!’ identified Sokol triumphantly, as the pencil stopped its movement. ‘Encircle it,’ he ordered. ‘I want people moved in carefully, replacing any staff there. Attendants, sweepers. Everyone.’

In the park Blair settled himself near the archer statue, feigning to read his copy of Pravda. How long would it all take? he wondered. It could be weeks – months possibly – before Orlov could get on to a delegation. He hoped it wasn’t months. He wanted to resolve things with Ann quicker than that. And the problems could be resolved. He knew they could. Everything could be resolved and they could be happy again, if they had the chance. It was only Moscow. He’d be glad to get out, now. Once he’d regarded it as the most important posting of his career – which it undoubtedly was – but now he regarded settling things with Ann as more important.

Blair checked his watch, seeing there were only fifteen minutes to go before the appointed meeting, idly watching a park attendant emerge from a side path, stabbing at leaves with a spiked stick. From another path a couple came hand in hand, appearing unaware of anyone or anything, and sat on a bench facing him from across the circle. Blair hoped their presence wouldn’t disturb Orlov, if the Russian kept today’s meeting. There was no reason why it should; from their absorption in each other, which was getting increasingly intimate, it was more likely that the presence of the two men would eventually disturb the lovers.

‘Noon,’ guessed Sokol, aloud, as the information about the American’s watch check was radioed into the control room.

Sokol was tensed in anticipation of what was going to happen. It would be a coup to trap Blair actually in the act of proveable espionage. If he could do the same with Brinkman – and he was determined to do the same with Brinkman – Sokol knew it would be the coup to make everything possible. Sokol stayed crouched forward over his maps table but not looking at them, concentrating instead upon the slow moving clock mounted against the far wall, watching the quarter, half and then three quarters eventually pass with no news from the now completely occupied park.

On his seat in that park, Blair decided to allow more time. There were a dozen reasons why Orlov could be late, although he’d never been late on the previous occasions. And a dozen more reasons why he wouldn’t be able to keep the appointment at all, this Friday or several Fridays after. Blair was still unsettled by Orlov’s non-appearance; although Blair knew all the reasons and all the difficulties he’d still unprofessionally convinced himself of the Russian’s appearance and was disappointed that it hadn’t happened. It still could, he thought, checking the time once more; it was still only one-thirty.

The park attendant completed his leaf collection and the lovers stopped short of positive intercourse and Blair actually read the Soviet newspaper, from cover to cover. At three o’clock he finally quit, rising slump-shouldered and catching the first taxi he managed to stop. Blair’s expertise was still such to prevent his being ordinarily careless, although his hop-scotch from car to metro to bus was always monitored, because the surveillance was extraordinary.

In the Dzerzhinsky Square radio room an equally dejected Sokol stared down at the scrawled pencil lines losing interest momentarily in the crackled requests for further instructions from the radio.

‘It was supposed to be a meeting,’ Sokol said, more to himself than to anyone else in the room. ‘I know it was intended to be a meeting.’

When he got back to his own office, Sokol found waiting for him the request to contact the chairman of the KGB, for a personal interview. Sokol threw down the memorandum, sighing. He was surprised it had taken so long in coming.

The reaction from Washington came close to hysteria. Blair factually reported that he had attended, as arranged, but that Orlov failed to appear and then emphasised that from the beginning he’d anticipated a quite understandable interruption to any regular, weekly meetings and arranged the fallback with the man. His attempted assurance – with which Blair was unhappy anyway – failed entirely to placate Langley headquarters. Blair’s attempts to maintain an open line of communication were constantly broken, with a flurry of questions some of which his messages had already answered and some of which were beyond answer at all. Aware, despite being so far away, of the growing inquest, Blair repeated Orlov’s concern about any approach to Harriet being made and asked for a categoric assurance that the agreement had been kept and that no KGB watch squad could have themselves become aware of the American surveillance. The apparent guarantee came but Blair thought it was muted and decided he’d made a telling point. He bet that Harriet Johnson was as sanitised and isolated as any goldfish-bowled astronaut on a moonwalk. And bet further that any intelligence operator worth his salt could have picked the observation up in five seconds flat, allowing for natural blinking.

Brinkman timed perfectly his arrival at the public kiosk on the Ulitza Gor’kova, its possible use the only uncertainty. It was empty, so even that wasn’t a problem. Brinkman hadn’t bothered to evade what he still believed to be only the normal embassy personnel attention, because having established his undetectable contact routine, evasion simply wasn’t necessary. Professional to the letter, he made the pretence of seeking a coin at the moment of entry and snatched the telephone from the rest at the beginning of the first ring, so successfully that Sokol’s radio van, with its directional pistol microphone, failed to pick up that it was an incoming call. Orlov hadn’t managed to get a delegation and Brinkman had nothing to say except that he would be at the subsequent kiosk at exactly the same time the following week. Brinkman succeeded in covering the exchange against any outside interest by fumbling with the rare and tattered directory until Orlov disengaged and then calling his own number, coin ready in the slot, finally – again for external observation if there was any – slamming down the headpiece, a man frustrated at being unable to make a connection.