John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

‘It’s been a very long time coming.’ He still spoke softly. ‘You must have dubious connections, my friend.’

‘I don’t know what that message means, comrade General. I only know that the man who told me to pass it on is also most anxious for you to do this thing. We are also to take two French officers with us. They wait in my personal aircraft.’

Berzin began to laugh. First a chuckle, then a full-blown cascade of mirth. He turned, and though he laughed, his face showed no humour or merriment. It was as though an animal was baying for no particular purpose, except to make a sound meant to convey drollness. ‘Who said that life is a comedy, Stepakov?’

‘I think . . .’

‘I don’t need an answer, you fool,’ Berzin snapped. ‘Of course I’ll do what is asked. In fact, I’m delighted to do it. Nothing would please me more. Come. Come and lunch with my officers. We will set things in motion immediately after we’ve eaten. We have a long way to go before this day is out.’

Nigsy Meadows had done as M instructed. Now he camped with another agent and a Lapp guide, high in the Arctic Circle where they monitored radio signals from Russian military units on the far side of the border. They were one of five groups spread out as secret listening posts from the Baltic to the far North.

In the Lapp’s tent they set up the sophisticated portable electronics which grabbed signals and telephone calls from the air. The other agent’s name was Wright, always known as ‘Pansy’, for his affectation of wearing that particular flower in his buttonhole when it was in season, which for Pansy Wright seemed to be the year round. He even had a bedraggled specimen inside his cold-weather clothing now.

Nigsy also had a portable Model 300, set, as the one in Moscow had been, to pick up Bond’s homing device. On top of this, he had lugged along another piece of portable electronics. A reduced unit which would duplicate squirt signals, such as the one they had grabbed from the air at the Moscow Embassy. Like the Model 300, this would only talk to Bond’s transmitter.

They took it in turns to monitor the equipment, and Nigsy was on duty, listening to radio telephone communications which seemed to be coming in to a location some twelve miles distant in the dense forest within the Russian border.

He heard the tiny crackle of static and his eyes just caught the flick of the needle as the telescoped transmission flashed in.

A minute later he was shaking Pansy Wright, bringing him out of a dream which featured a carpet of wild flowers and a young woman by the name of Marge.

‘This had better be good,’ Wright swore at him. ‘I’ve been after this wench for a long time and I nearly had her tonight.’

Nigsy did not know what he was talking about, but he did have the co-ordinates which would pinpoint Bond.

16

THE BLUES IN THE NIGHT

When Bond got back to their room, he found Nina in her towelling robe, still sound asleep on the bed where he had left her. She looked peaceful, lovely and detached. The robe had fallen open to reveal part of her left thigh and Bond automatically covered it. He had known since yesterday that this casual operational necessity which had thrown them together, had, for him, gone over the borderline, making them what the Americans might, in understatement, call kissing cousins.

Quietly he stretched out next to her, staring into the darkness, his mind a cauldron of confusion. Once every couple of years the Service invited him to speak to the new entrants at the kindergarten, as they called the training establishment some ten miles east of Watford. He always began with the old saw. ‘Field agents and airline pilots suffer from the same occupational hazard – nine-tenths boredom followed by one-tenth sheer terror.’

So far, this job had certainly fallen into the larger portion of that hazard, but he had followed every rule, obeyed the command given to him by M, namely, done nothing but keep his eyes and ears open. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, just wait,’ the old spy had told him. ‘Wait for the catalyst.’

He had allowed himself to be inserted with Pete Natkowitz into what Stepakov insisted was the heart of Chushi Pravosudia . He had played at being Guy, the recruited cameraman, and accepted Nina from Stepakov at face value. But he was no nearer to the absolute truth regarding the Scales of Justice . Had he been magically spirited this moment into his Chief’s presence, all he could have said was that the terrorist organisation appeared to be run by General Yevgeny Yuskovich, Commander-in-Chief Red Army Rocket Forces, and that Yuskovich was passing himself off for the sake of this charade of a trial as the army’s Judge Advocate General.

He supposed he could add that the innocent Joel Penderek had behaved like a docile, guilty man, but after that he was left with nothing, only the sound and fury of paradox and conflicting absurdity. Now Bond tried to put his feelings for Nina to one side, letting his mind zero in on logic and facts.

The facts were that a phoney trial was being acted for cameras in some godforsaken edifice, ten miles or so from the Finnish border, if Emerald Lacy was to be believed. Nina had been foisted on them and he had formed a sexual relationship with her. At the same time, Pete Natkowitz had fallen into similar intimacy with the girl Natasha, whom he said was a member of his own Service.

During the discussions – the ring of conspiracy – which had taken place that night, he had been struck by two things. First, Natasha had taken no part in the conversation and second, Michael and Emerald Brooks’ contribution had been worthless. Indeed, the pair of them had become dubious assets in Bond’s suspicious mind.

The kernel of information offered by Brooks could be summed up in the man’s own words – ‘. . . The whole thing about this war criminal Vorontsov is a blind, a sleight, a way to throw the Kremlin and the President off-balance. It’s only part of something greater, an evil which will have appalling consequences. We know some of it but not all. The gist is that hardline military people are about to launch a plot which will destroy America and probably Britain also. And I mean destroy .’ That was what he had said, and the pivot of the information was contained in eight words – ‘ We know some of it but not all .’

Neither Brooks nor his wife had offered to share what little knowledge they were supposed to have. Instead, Bond and Natkowitz had been shown the inside of a box of mirrors, a story about the hotel having been built on the site of a monastery, a smoothly conducted tour around a secret hiding place. He had not really bought their tale of night-stalking through the building, of ‘finding’ the Boys’ Own hidden tunnel, a tale of luring three soldiers to their deaths in order to provide them with three P6 automatics. He had not even seen the bodies of these dead soldiers.

A thought snapped into his head. It was almost audible, like the tumblers on a security lock dropping into place. Silently, Bond slid from the bed. He had put his pistol, together with the spare magazines, on the floor wrapped in a towel and had advised Nina to do the same on her side of the bed. Quietly he picked up the bundle and crept into the bathroom.

First he examined the ammunition. The weight and feel were right. The magazines slid neatly into the pistol’s butt, so if anything was wrong it had to be in the gun itself. Quickly he disassembled the weapon and his fear was confirmed in a matter of seconds. The firing pin had been carefully filed away, so this particular P6 was of no value unless you wanted to use it as a bludgeon.

He reassembled the automatic, wrapped it in the towel and returned to the bedroom, crossed the floor silently and exchanged his little towelled bundle for the one on Nina’s side of the bed.