John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

M sat in a comfortable chair nursing a cup of tea. ‘Have some, Nigs?’ His smile was that of a wily old alligator. Meadows declined, asking if the place was secure.

‘Safe as a tomb,’ Bill Tanner supplied. So Nigsy told them they had KGB in the lobby.

‘Yes,’ M looked unruffled, ‘we’re hosting a small, and very private, meeting.’

‘Ah,’ Meadows said. Then, ‘They all laughed when I sat down to play.’

‘Always the wag, Meadows,’ M gave a tired sigh. ‘You lost one of our favourite sons, I gather.’

He nodded, inwardly furious. ‘Snow. Ice. Moscow nights. The whole show. Thought we were right on top of him. Then they flew him out, straight over my head in a damned great chopper.’

‘Yes.’ M took another sip of his tea. ‘This is really rather good. Sure you won’t have any?’

‘No, sir.’ Meadows spent a lot of his life telling his wife, Sybil, that when he refused food or a cup of tea, he meant it. She always pressed him when he said no.

‘We’ve put people straight into the field.’ M seemed to be talking at the teapot. ‘You did get a good signal from him?’

‘You could hear it chime from ten miles, sir. Then there was only the usual intermittent loss. It wasn’t the equipment.’

‘So, you came a pearler, Meadows.’

That triggered another memory. His father laughing over a line in one of Graham Greene’s books – he could not remember which – where the head of a private detective agency greeted one of his errant sleuths with almost the same words. ‘Another of your pearlers . . .’

‘If you mean they got away so fast that I couldn’t follow, yes, sir. You can’t very well take to the skies in a Volga, especially when it’s snowing and you’ve only got limited liability.’

‘ They did.’ M smiled to show he was playing with his agent. ‘Not your fault, Nigs.’

‘No, not my fault, sir. But that doesn’t make it any easier.’

‘Course not. Sit down and go through it with us. I want the minutiae.’

So he talked, giving them the whole story from the moment Wilson Sharp fielded Bond’s squirt-transmission until it was over. They put a spiral-bound map of Moscow and environs on the table for him to trace every move, and M constantly interrupted. He had said he wanted the trivia and he pressed for it – other cars in the vicinity, the exact holding patterns Meadows had driven while trying to lock on.

‘The MVD surveillance vans,’ M growled. ‘You get their numbers?’

Meadows surprised himself by rattling off the licence plates without even thinking. That kind of thing was second nature to a good field man. In training, at the SIS prep school, they spent hours playing a complicated version of Kim’s Game – the one where a tray of objects was uncovered for a minute, then the subject was asked to write a list of everything on the tray. In their field games they learned mnemonics to aid memory and stored away licence and telephone numbers like jackdaws.

M circled his finger around the streets Nigsy had driven with the minder, Dave Fletcher. ‘You went quite close to the Moscow State University. That annexe they have downtown, not the main buildings out in Leninsky Gory.’

‘Within a block, yes.’

‘Nothing untoward? No oddities? Cars driving in a strange manner?’

‘Everyone was moving slowly. At times it snowed quite hard.’

‘You didn’t see an ancient Zil?’ M repeated a plate number, and Meadows shook his head.

‘You were very near to a violent death. Did they report a murder before you left Moscow?’

‘Not that I know. There are always murders in Moscow. Every night. It’s getting like Washington.’

M grunted.

‘Something special?’ Nigsy asked.

‘A professor in English from the university had half his face blown off. Sitting in a parked car. Man called Lyko. Vladimir Ilich, if I’ve got it right. It’s possible he was the driver who brought them into town for the contact. The Scales of Justice have done another one as well.’

‘They seem to keep their promises.’

‘This was a double event, as they say. One of the foreign policy advisers. They garotted him and his wife right in their dacha. It was his day off.’

‘What a way to spend a vacation.’ Meadows had always been prone to making sick remarks which slipped out before he could stop them.

M scowled at him, his faced twisted like a man who has tasted spoiled fish. ‘They scrawled Chushi Pravosudia over the mirror with the woman’s lipstick. I blame these serial-killer films for all the sensationalism.’ Then he turned to Bill Tanner. ‘I think we should ask Bory to come up. Make sure he knows we had no ulterior motive in keeping him waiting. I’d hate him to think we were pulling a psyop on him.’ By psyop, M meant psychological operation.

While Tanner was away, M told Meadows whom they were about to meet. ‘Boris Ivanovich Stepakov,’ he filled in the details, ‘head of their counterterrorist department. Lives outside the law, as it were. Reports only to the top. Has no dealings with the rest of the KGB. None of his files are on Centre’s mainframe computers. This is the man who asked for our help, and I trust him eighty per cent of the way.’

‘What about the other twenty per cent?’ Meadows asked.

‘We must always leave room for doubts. If there were no X factors, we would be obsolete. Accountants could do our work.’

‘I sometimes think accountants are taking over the world.’

‘Perhaps they are,’ M replied, and at that moment Bill Tanner returned, bringing with him the tall man with the long clownish face and a lick of blond hair which he constantly kept brushing back from his forehead.

‘You mind if I smoke?’ Boris Stepakov pulled a packet of Marlboro from the pocket of his shabby crumpled suit and lit a cigarette with a Zippo lighter. The lighter had the sword and shield KGB crest affixed to one side in gold and red. Stepakov threw it in the air and caught it. ‘A friend brought it in from LA,’ he laughed. ‘We couldn’t get such a thing, not even in the new Russia. Anyway, the crest is incorrect. We’ve removed the sword.’

‘Yes, but for how long?’ M asked.

Stepakov shrugged. ‘Who knows? History teaches us that man is basically a psychopath. He never learns. This is why history is circular. One day the sword will return.’

He did not want to talk in the hotel suite, and they understood that, for it was against all his training, so they went outside and walked along the quay in front of the hotel. M’s people surrounded them at a distance and Stepakov’s two men – the street fighter and the one who looked like Tweedledum – stayed very close, though just out of earshot.

‘We also tried to follow them,’ Stepakov said. ‘We had vans and two surveillance teams followed you ,’ he nodded towards Nigsy Meadows. ‘The helicopter was large and powerful, a new version of the Mil Mi-12. What NATO calls a Homer. Its range is nearly seven hundred kilometres. They were very efficient. They even took out the man who drove your agents into Moscow.’

‘Mine, and yours , Bory.’ M had his head down as a chill wind blew along the quay. ‘You also infiltrated the operation.’

Stepakov nodded, then continued. ‘Lyko was murdered within half-an-hour of the drop, which means Chushi Pravosudia have close inside knowledge. It is also clear their links go right into the military and, almost certainly, as I have feared, KGB itself. Probably the Politburo and Central Committee also. But I still hold strong cards. There is a man, one of my men, who works deep within the military air traffic control. I think we have the flight plan of the Homer. Therefore, I think I know where they are.’