John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

Alex and Nicki stood by the door and the lovely Nina walked between the round table and the coffee, filling cups and bringing extra toast. She did all this with dignity and no sense of servility. The fact that she was obviously on the team did not make her role as table-server demeaning.

The sterile room was in a basement carved out and cemented like a bombproof shelter. The walls, Bond noted, were lined with the thick anti-electronic material they used in embassy bubbles, the bubble that had been more or less stolen from the American practice, as it took up little space, and was one hundred per cent secure, though it caused much discomfort to those who had to use the igloo-like facilities in embassy bowels. Here, at the dacha, there was a whole large room and it was clear that no expense had been spared. Though the walls and ceiling were well-lined, there were also small electronic bafflers, grey boxes with winking red lights, fitted into the roof and at each corner of the room. The door had an extra sliding section which sealed it off from the crude wooden stairs and there was no telephone – an extra precaution lest security was somehow breached and the instrument made live.

They sat in comfortable leather chairs, arranged in a half-circle, and nobody was given a chance to take notes. No pens, pencils or paper were allowed in the room.

‘This must be absolutely secure,’ Stepakov began. ‘We have taken great pains to make it so, for I suspect we know far more about Chushi Pravosudia – what you call the Scales of Justice – than any of our visitors from France and the United Kingdom. Let me first explain my position in all this. My name, as you know, is Boris Ivanovich Stepakov and I hold the rank of General, KGB. More than that, because of our fears of internal terrorism, I do not report through normal channels. I don’t present myself to the Central Committee or the Praesidium. I don’t have to make a physical report to dva 2 Ploshchad’ Dzerzhinskogo, the postal address of KGB Moscow headquarters as I’m sure you know. I answer directly only to the Chairman, KGB, and the General Secretary, who is now also our President. You will realise why in a moment.

‘You have met my immediate staff – Alex, Nicki and Nina. They are my most trusted people, and we have others, both here and at another dacha a couple of miles away in the forest. They act in a number of ways – they are bodyguards, go-betweens, analysts and keepers of my closest data bases. We are a kind of task force, and apart from these, others work unseen – in the Kremlin itself and secretly both in and outside our borders. We make up what is commonly known over here as Stepakov’s Banda. In English, I suppose it might be translated as Stepakov’s Mafia. Many within KGB and the army do not like us at all, and I have to be exceptionally careful both with information and my personal movements, particularly in Moscow.

‘You must understand that we in the Soviet Union have not been in this business of international counterterrorism for very long. We have not yet started to share completely as you in the West share. This is, I suppose, the reason we have not altogether been forthcoming about the organisation you call the Scales of Justice .’

He coughed, clearing his throat before continuing. ‘The Scales of Justice , or Chushi Pravosudia as we call them, first came to your attention in the October of last year. I fear we have had knowledge of them for much longer than that, and our knowledge will undoubtedly alarm you.’

It was as though he had begun to soften them up for something sinister – facts which possibly had escaped the West entirely. Whatever it was, James Bond felt an old familiar stirring – the desperate need to know everything about his enemy. He also sensed something else. It was as though all his experience had brought him to this one point. He had squared off against evil many times in his long career. Larger-than-life evil. Criminal, political and military wickedness. At the time, much of it had seemed unreal. Now it felt as if he were about to come up against a kind of reality he had never faced in the past.

The Scales of Justice , Stepakov told them, had come into being within the Soviet Union and her satellites of the old Eastern Bloc as early as 1987. Primarily, they had been Russian in concept, and at first KGB had believed they were another manifestation of unrest. Early on there had been informers. They knew, by the autumn of 1987, that Chushi Pravosudia was organised much as a network of agents was organised. ‘Initially there were three rings, or cells, here within the Soviet Union. They have now amalgamated these into one.’ Stepakov’s manner was grave. His natural happy and boisterous personality seemed to have retreated as though the people of which he spoke were too dangerous to laugh at or joke about.

‘We know there was another ring in what used to be East Germany, one in Poland, one in Czechoslovakia. We were also aware of American, British and French connections. We detected this through informants. People we trusted. And this is significant – even those who informed did not know the full reality. From the autumn of 1987 until the autumn of 1988 we followed up on forty-two of these informants. They took us only to the people who made the first approach, the primary contacts. Let me tell you how it worked.

‘It started with a whispering campaign. First, simply the name, Chushi Pravosudia , repeated over and over, passing from ear to ear. It spread through Moscow in a strange, confused manner. Through the more luxurious apartments along the Nevsky Prospect, among students at the university, like wildfire in the eggbox apartments of the workers, in the factories, in the illegal markets and bargaining places, in Gum and the other department stores, inside military barracks, and so into the Kremlin itself. Within days the name was known to everyone except foreign journalists from whom people instinctively kept this strange name. So Chushi Pravosudia became a household word. It also became something tangible. Through the repetition of the name, the organisation took on a life of its own.

‘Then the informers began to pass information which was routed into my relatively new counterterrorist department. They used the MVD and special units of the police, following up on each reported case. But it led to nothing. Dead ends littered the filing cabinets and in-trays of my Banda.

‘It was an exceptionally clever and ingenious ploy, when they ran traces back to those who had contacted the informants they came up against a frustrating wall. For the recruiters had been chosen by the Scales of Justice because of their own innocence. These recruiters fell into several distinct types: they were often people who lived alone, sometimes simpletons with only enough intelligence to carry out easy tasks, sometimes old women whose lives had become barren and useless, people who yearned for some task to keep themselves occupied. The call came to these innocent folk from strangers in a meat line or a bar, even in a group waiting at a bus stop. Those with telephones were contacted quietly, often early in the day, and always there was a promise. This is good work, they were told. Easy work. Work for the State. Nothing criminal. Each was given a name – usually it was someone they knew, even slightly. They had to ask this one person a number of questions: do you wish to serve your country so that life will become better? Are you willing to undertake some special job, for which we believe you are well-suited? Always there were the mystic words, Chushi Pravosudia . Always there was a special promise – a few roubles, a new television set, a food parcel.

‘These simple, mainly good folk were lured into recruiting like men and women in Britain or the United States are offered lucrative work from home – addressing envelopes, canvassing over the telephone. We all know how that works,’ Stepakov said. ‘And the hell of it was that these people received their rewards, the few roubles, the television set, in one case a week’s vacation. These were truly unwitting agents. They had no idea that they were canvassing for an illegal terrorist group. When they had the answers to their set of questions, they would pass them on. They would be told to await a messenger or a telephone call. The messengers were often children they had never seen before or even someone in the very place they had first been approached. All insubstantial. Traces which led nowhere.’