George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“The offer — if one may call it an offer — came through an intermediary. A Swiss at a clinic where I’d taken Marjorie — my wife — for treatment when her symptoms first appeared.”

“Did he set it up?”

“No. Somebody else, here in London. A Bulgarian. I’ve given all this to Carrington.”

“He has, Tarp.” Carrington’s voice came from his stretched-out form like a voice from sleep. “It’s all in the transcript. We’re after the fellow now, but it was more than two years ago and we think he’s left London.”

“All right. You passed Maxudov’s messages to Buenos Aires?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know what was involved?”

“Never.”

“Did you suspect?”

“I wasn’t interested. Didn’t want to know. Sorry.”

“All right. The last message you sent from Maxudov to Buenos Aires. Was it different from the others?”

Matthiessen was both tired and jumpy from missing his evening ration of alcohol. “Yes!” he snapped.

“How?”

“It was longer.”

“Was it coded?”

“Yes.”

“Did you understand the code?”

Matthiessen hesitated. “I’d worked some of it out. It was very simpleminded.”

“What was the message about?”

“It was about Beranyi. Something about his going to Buenos Aires, and he was to count as a shipment.”

“All right. Will you send a message to Maxudov for us?”

Matthiessen still had the self-confidence to sneer, “Out of the goodness of my heart? Never!” He bent toward Carrington. “Is this to be part of our arrangement?”

Sepulchrally, Carrington’s voice entered the room. “Yes.” His eyes were closed now.

“Then I’ll send your damned message.”

“You are to tell Maxudov that another payment is coming because the last shipment was so valuable.”

“I don’t care what the message is. ‘The line is immaterial’!” “Then I want you to send a message to Buenos Aires.”

“Oh, do you!”

Carrington swung his legs to the floor and sat up; he rubbed his eyes and muttered, “Don’t be rude, Ramsey; it’s so pointless.” Already he had asserted himself. Matthiessen’s treason moved him up a notch in the MI-5 pecking order; his getting credit for the discovery might move him into Matthiessen’s job. “I must have some tea, I think. There’s got to be a porter about, doesn’t there?”

“Dial five,” Matthiessen said blandly. His acid smile returned. “Sorry. I’ve used this place so often, myself.”

Carrington stood up. “I’ve been instructed to tell you, Tarp, that the government will now cooperate with you on what’s left of your Moscow venture. The tilt in the other direction, it seems, was in good part Ramsey’s doing, anyway. We’ve made an arrangement with Ramsey, which, if everything he says checks out, will allow him to resign without public prejudice and to withdraw from public life to take care of his wife. That assumes, of course, that his dealings with Moscow were limited strictly to this Maxudov thing.”

“They were,” Matthiessen said.

Carrington ignored him. “And it assumes that you will not press the matter of the attack on you here in London — press his involvement in it, I mean.”

Tarp thought about Carrington’s arm and about the dead man in the passage. He looked at Matthiessen. “Was it worth it?” he said.

Matthiessen’s lip curled, merely from habit. “I would have done much more to help my wife,” he said.

“ Did it help her?”

Matthiessen hesitated. “For a few weeks, after each injection, she was better.” He could not keep the roughness of emotion out of his voice. It was the first time that Tarp had really believed in the depth of this unlikable man’s love for the woman for whom he had traded his career and what, for lack of a better word, Tarp thought of as his honor.

Repin was waiting for him at the farmhouse. He had messages from Andropov and from “Mr. Smith.” “We go,” he said. He was grim.

Tarp told him what had happened in England, but Repin seemed to listen with only half an ear. For him it was Moscow and the Soviet traitor that mattered.

They left within an hour by helicopter. They would go to Paris, to the Seychelles, to Oman, and to Syria. There, a Soviet military jet would be waiting for them.

There was a Russian Fiat waiting for them in Moscow. Behind the wheel was a heavyset, thirtyish man who said his name was Gorchakov and who produced papers to identify himself as a major in the Guards. On the seat beside him were three boxes the size of reams of letter paper, each so crammed that the top was held on with rubber bands. Files on our three possibilities .

Repin walked around the car, inspecting it. His shoes crunched on bits of stone that had worked out of the asphalt. The day was wet but springlike, and he had opened his alpaca coat to get cool. “I don’t like that license very much,” Repin said to the guards major in Russian.

“Why not?”

“Too easy to remember.”

The major sighed. He reminded Tarp of policemen he had known — intelligent, unimaginative, unable to put himself into the worries of others. Repin was quite right, Tarp thought: there should be nothing distinctive about the car.

“I’ll have it changed,” Gorchakov said.

“Good.”

A car came out to the military airport from Moscow and they lost an hour while a new plate was put on. During that time Repin and the major found they disliked each other. They had too many antipathies — old-young, Stalinist-modernist, Guards-Operations. Repin became very busy with the files. Tarp realized for the first time that Repin was nervous.

They drove into an area of small factories and dumps and wooden shacks that looked like badly made dollhouses; Tarp could not orient himself. He saw the ugly buildings of the university rising beyond what looked like a mountain of mud, but he could still not place where he was. Repin seemed unconcerned. Repin purported to dislike Moscow and therefore to know nothing about it.

They parked in the submanager’s space of a bicycle-wheel factory, and Repin went inside with Gorchakov, who came out only seconds later as if he were afraid that Tarp would steal the car. Watching his eyes, Tarp knew that he was worried about the files and not about the car. He had probably not been told that Tarp had seen these same files some weeks before.

“He’s making a telephone call,” Gorchakov said.

“Of course.” Repin had a tape recording of Pope-Ginna.

They sat without speaking. Gorchakov lighted a Russian cigarette and held it out the window as if he knew that Tarp disliked it. He’s had my file , too , Tarp thought. This kind of intimate prying was Repin’s justification for hating Moscow. “You fart in Moscow, they make a note in Dzerzhinsky Square,” Repin had told him. “You fart in Tiflis, people ask you how you are.” It was only a joke, of course, because there were informers in Tiflis, too, but Moscow was the center and therefore the focus of Repin’s distaste for his own system, now that he was one of the victims instead of one of the managers of it.

Repin came out and nodded curtly, then got into the back of the Fiat with Tarp.

“Ready?” Gorchakov said.

“We are ready to be driven, if that is what you mean.”

“Where?”

“Next we go to the Children’s Park.”

“This is where it starts?”

“Maybe.”

Gorchakov reached under his seat and took out two boxes one at a time and handed them back. There was a 9mm Makarov in each one with a full clip and an unopened box of cartridges.

“Are you armed?” Repin said to the major.