“I’ll have a bottle of pepper vodka ready,” said the voice, and Borisov hung up.
“Not on my account,” muttered Karpov. Unlike most Russians, Karpov hardly drank at all, and when he did, he preferred a decent Armenian brandy or the Scotch single malt that came to him in the bag from London. Vodka he regarded as an abomination, and pepper vodka even worse.
Bang goes my Sunday afternoon at Peredelkino, he thought, and rang to tell Ludmilla he could not make it. He made no mention of Borisov; just told her he could not get away and that he would see her at their central Moscow apartment at about midnight.
Still, he was perturbed by Borisov’s unusual truculence; they went back a long way together, too long for him to take offense, but Borisov’s mood was odd in a man habitually so genial and phlegmatic.
That Sunday afternoon, the regular Aeroflot service from Moscow came into London’s Heathrow Airport at just after five.
As with all Aeroflot crews there was one member who worked for two masters, the Soviet state airline and the KGB. First Officer Romanov was not a KGB staffer, only agyent—meaning an informer upon his colleagues and from time to time a runner of messages and errands.
The whole cre
w closed the aircraft down and left it in the hands of the ground staff for the night. They would fly it back to Moscow the next day. As usual, they went through the flight-crew entry procedures, and customs made a cursory check of their shoulder bags and hand luggage. Several were carrying portable transistor radios, and no one took any notice of Romanov’s Sony model on its shoulder strap. Western luxury items were part of the perks of foreign travel for Soviet citizens—everyone knew that—and although they had an extremely tight foreign-currency allowance, cassettes and players, along with radios and perfume for the wife back in Moscow, were among the top priorities.
After clearing immigration and customs formalities the whole crew boarded their minibus for the Green Park Hotel, where Aeroflot crews often stay. Whoever had given Romanov that transistor radio in Moscow just three hours before takeoff must have known that Aeroflot crews are hardly ever shadowed at Heathrow. The British counterintelligence people seem to accept that though they may constitute a risk, it must be a tolerable one compared to the mounting of a pretty major surveillance operation.
When he got to his bedroom, Romanov could not help looking at the radio with curiosity. Then he shrugged, locked it in his suitcase, and went down to the bar to join the other officers in a drink. He knew exactly what to do with it after breakfast the next day. He would do it, then forget all about it. He did not know then that on his return to Moscow he would be going straight into quarantine.
* * *
Karpov’s car crunched up the snow-clogged track just before six o’clock, and he cursed Borisov’s insistence on having his weekend cottage in such a forsaken place.
Everyone in the service knew Borisov was one of a kind. In a society that regards all individualism or deviation from the norm, not to mention eccentricity, as extremely suspect, Borisov got away with it because he was unusually good at his job. He had been in clandestine intelligence since he was a boy, and some of the coups he had mounted against the West were legendary in the training schools and the canteens where the junior men took their lunch.
After half a mile down the track, Karpov could make out the lights of the izba, or log cabin, that Borisov favored for his retreat. Others were content, even eager, to site their weekend places in the approved zones according to their station in the pecking order, and those areas were all west of Moscow, along the curve of the river across the Uspenskoye Bridge. Not Borisov. He liked to retire on the weekends—or on those when he could get away from his desk—to play rustic peasant in a traditional izba deep in the forest well east of the capital. The Chaika came to a halt in front of the timber door.
“Wait here,” Karpov told Misha, his driver.
“I’d better turn around and get some of those logs under the wheels or we’ll stick solid,” grumbled Misha.
Karpov nodded his agreement and climbed out. He had not brought galoshes because he had not envisaged wading through snow up to the knees. He stumbled to the door and hammered on it. The door opened to reveal an oblong of yellow light, thrown apparently by paraffin lamps, and in the glow stood Major General Pavel Petrovitch Borisov, dressed in a Siberian shirt, corduroy trousers, and felt boots.
“You look like something out of a Tolstoy novel,” remarked Karpov as he was shown into the main sitting room, where a brick stove full of logs gave the cottage a womblike warmth.
“Better than something out of a Bond Street window,” grumbled Borisov as he took Karpov’s coat and hung it on a wooden peg. He uncorked a bottle of vodka so strong it poured like syrup, and filled two shot glasses. The men seated themselves, a table between them.
“Bottoms up,” Karpov offered, raising his glass, Russian style, between forefinger and thumb, pinkie extended.
“Up yours,” Borisov replied testily, and they drained the first slug.
An old peasant woman shaped like a tea cozy, looking like an incarnation of Mother Russia with her blank face and gray hair in a tight bun, came in from the back, banged down a collation of black bread, onions, gherkins, and cheese cubes, and left without a word.
“So what’s the problem, Starets?” asked Karpov.
Borisov was five years older than himself, and not for the first time Karpov was struck by the man’s close resemblance to the late Dwight Eisenhower. Borisov, unlike many in the service, was much liked by his colleagues and adored by his young agents. They had long ago given him the affectionate nickname Starets, a word that originally meant village headman but now had the connotations of the English “Old Man” and the French patron.
Borisov stared moodily across the table. “Yevgeni Sergeivitch, how long have we known each other?”
“More years than I care to remember,” said Karpov.
“And in that time, have I ever lied to you?”
“Not that I know of.” Karpov was pensive.
“And are you now going to lie to me?”
“Not if I can help it,” said Karpov carefully. What on earth had got into the old boy?