Russian Roulette (6 page)

Soon the whistle of jets and the rumble of piston engines heralded the airport. The car came out of the trees and they found themselves driving along the perimeter wire of Sheremetyevo.

Alexei Pudovkin seemed to rise up out of his shabby overcoat.
His neck came out like a tortoise
, thought Vasily, looking from the corner of his eye. The senior militiaman suddenly seemed to radiate alertness. Vasily had noticed this before, on a job. The apathetic slouch went and the captain's eyes seemed to get harder and brighter.

He began snapping orders as he surveyed the geography of the airport buildings. ‘Park well away from the terminal – over there will do.'

Vasily drew up in a corner of the car park, the militia car hidden behind a fire tender.

They walked over to the old terminal building, which was still being used for internal flight arrivals, the international terminal gleaming in the sunlight across the main runway. The whine of a nearby Ilyushin made conversation impossible until the doors of the terminal swung behind them. A bored official behind the reception desk told them that the Leningrad plane was due in at that moment and, sure enough, the whistle of great engines almost drowned his last words.

An Aeroflot TU-104 flashed down the runway and taxied back up to the terminal. It came at a screaming crawl almost up to the windows of the lounge and swung around to stop almost at arm's length from the detectives as they watched from a window.

‘What do we do now?' yelled Vasily, as they waited for the jets to die down.

‘Retire to a safe distance and watch … that's what we seem to do most of the time,' Alexei added rather despondently.

They waited until the steps were run up to the Tupolev's door and watched as the trickle of passengers swelled to a flood across the tarmac apron.

‘Here they come – tweed suits and woollen jackets!' chuckled Vasily.

‘And no sunglasses or raffia handbags,' added Pudovkin.

Dealing as they did with the central area of Moscow, with its tourist hotels, they prided themselves that they could tell the nationality of any visitor by appearances. Though they exaggerated a great deal, the twinsets and cardigans of the British women and the solid, subdued suiting of the men could usually be distinguished from the more flamboyant trappings of the Americans.

One section of the plane's load were obviously British.

‘That must be their “keeper” – that tall one,' observed Vasily, nodding in the direction of Gilbert Bynge, who was rounding up his charges like a sheepdog at a country show.

‘I wonder which is
our
man?' mused Pudovkin, ‘Let's get into a corner and look inconspicuous.'

They retired to a couple of easy chairs in a corner, where the broad red stripe down their trousers could not be seen, and picked up copies of
Izvestia
and
Komsomolskaya Pravda
to screen their faces.

The Trans-Europa party joined the shuffle into the reception lounge, fighting their way through the revolving doors.

‘Here they come,' muttered Alexei, ‘The capitalists coming to brave the terrible Bolsheviks!' His mild sarcasm was without rancour – he appreciated and deplored the gulf that existed between their two worlds.

‘That must be Smith,' he suddenly whispered to Vasily, behind their paper screens. ‘Ilyichev said he was the only young man apart from the courier – fair wavy hair and good looks. And a scarf around his throat.'

The lieutenant at once spotted the man his chief had singled out, but his gaze was distracted by the glamorous Mrs Treasure, about whom the man Smith was fussing like a bumble-bee. He was trying to carry her case as well as his own two, but she seemed reluctant to part with it.

Pudovkin's practised eye ran over the whole party, but saw little else of interest. They were all middle-aged or elderly, apart from Smith, the girl and the courier. The only other person under forty-five was a tall, bearded man dressed in sloppy, beatnik-style clothes.

Smith looked innocuous enough. He appeared to be in no immediate danger of committing mayhem or arson. Alexei nudged his assistant and they slipped quietly out of the lounge, whilst the tourists still milled around the reception desk.

They went back to their Volga and sat watching while the party came out of the terminal to board their blue Intourist coach.

The procession, headed by three old ladies recently disinterred from a Cheltenham tea shop, came slowly down the steps to the waiting bus, harried by the elegant Gilbert Bynge, complete with fistfuls of new forms and vouchers.

‘This must be one of the expensive tours,' commented Vasily. ‘The kids and the workers come in larger and cheaper parties – there are only about twenty of these.'

They watched Bynge helping the old ladies up the steps of the coach.

‘What now, do we follow that hearse all the way back in second gear?' Moiseyenko sounded aggrieved.

Alexei, who had shrunk back into his overheated overcoat, emerged momentarily. ‘No, you can drive at your favourite reckless speed straight back to the Hotel Metropol … I want to get there well ahead of them; we've got some arrangements to make with the manager!'

³
Delinquent teenage rock-and-roll-loving children of affluent parents.

Chapter Four

Room 513 seemed an oasis of peace after the drive from the airport.

Simon Smith sank into an easy chair with a sigh of relief. His neck was killing him, his feet were aching and his head was reeling with a mixture of genuine headache and the pressure of so many fears.

Liz Treasure was playing up again, after a temporary lapse into tenderness over his misadventure in Finland. She was starting the hard-to-get act again.

After a few moments blissful inertia, Simon painfully raised his head to look at his new quarters. The large room was high and airy, with one long window filling most of the outer wall. Rather Victorian in appearance, in spite of the modern writing desk and twisty wire table lamps, it had a bathroom in one corner, the door being in the L-shaped recess next to the corridor.

The bed was large and soft; it had the usual continental super-eiderdown instead of sheets and blankets.

He looked around uncomprehendingly – these solid signs of normality seemed to make the reality of his terrible position a dream. Yet here he was, a couple of thousand miles from home and God knows how many inside the Iron Curtain, with both a homicidal rival and possibly the Soviet secret police after his blood.

He sighed but it ended in a shudder. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had been sitting in fair contentment in that cafe in Helsinki – then reading that damned newspaper report about Kramer's death seemed to have triggered off disaster.

He touched his neck gingerly, to see how sore it really was. His voice was still hoarse, but the earlier tenderness over his Adam's apple was much less. There were vague bruises there, hidden under a silk cravat, and the muscles creaked when he turned his head.

‘Always thought there was loss of memory before unconsciousness,' he muttered bitterly, ‘but
I
bloody well didn't get it – I can still feel those fingers going around my throat.'

He shuddered again. Thankfully he had been spared the memory of being tossed into the water and of being fished out of Helsinki harbour like a drowned rat … the first thing that had come back to him was staring up at a policeman from the floor of a Finnish police wagon on its way to hospital. From then on, his recovery had been rapid and, in spite of efforts by the police and casualty doctor to get him to hospital, he had resolutely insisted on being taken back to the
Yuri Dolgorukiy
. After a night in the sick bay, he had been well enough to walk ashore at Leningrad the next morning.

All he felt now as he slumped in the chair was fatigue, not illness. Even the marathon walk around the corridors of the Hotel Metropol seemed calculated to increase his tiredness. He had stupidly insisted on carrying one of Elizabeth's cases as well as his own, before finding that they had to trudge about half a mile around the fourth floor to get to their rooms. With unfathomable Russian logic, the management had blocked off the main corridor on one side of the lift, so that to reach the rooms immediately behind this partition, one had to walk around four sides of the enormous building to arrive within a dozen yards of the starting point.

All these fatuous thoughts marched through his mind as if to keep out the main nagging fear – who had tried to kill him yesterday?

If there was any silver lining to the black clouds now rolling in on him, it was that the Soviets were unlikely to be responsible – they had no need of back-alley assassination when they were going to get him deep inside their territory within a few hours.

His frantic rationalising was interrupted by a rap on the door. Gilbert Bynge, finding it unlocked, poked his head inside, then bounced in after a quick glance as if to make sure that Simon didn't have Elizabeth Treasure pinned to the bed.

He trotted across the room, waving sheaves of paper.

‘Here we are, meal tickets, programmes, maps, leaflets; all sorts of bumf with the compliments of Intourist – and some forms to sign.'

He doled out the documents and then looked casually around the room, his receding chin and prominent nose making him look like a stage characterisation of the idiot English aristocrat.

‘Everything OK? … damn nasty show about the fall you had … sure you don't want me to get a quack to see you again – it's all free; on the house in Russia!'

Simon shook his head, slowly and painfully.

‘No, I'm fine, really.'

Gilbert seemed reluctant to leave.

‘Funny that you should hit your throat on the jolly old railings and then fall into the drink … you can't have been sloshed at four in the afternoon, eh?'

He spoke jocularly, but it was apparent that he thought Simon's explanation to be highly unlikely.

Simon grunted. ‘I'm that sort of chap – if there's anything to fall over, I'll find it.'

Gilbert grinned feebly. Simon noticed for the first time that he had a small tic, a slight twitch of the corner of the mouth every moment or two.

‘The room seems all right' he said, as the courier made no move to go.

‘As long as you don't drown again in the damn great bath,' Gilbert haw-hawed. ‘You want to watch the flush, too, some of 'em go off like depth charges!'

He turned to the door at last, then looked back.

‘Hope you appreciate the way I fixed the room numbers.' He cast a roguish eye at the communicating door leading to Liz Treasure's room, and gave a leer.

Simon grunted again – he was in no mood for salacious chit-chat. ‘Thanks – I'll stand you a drink on it sometime – is all the party up on this floor?'

Gilbert smirked and his mouth twitched again, ‘Only the elite – the “hoi polloi” are downstairs.'

‘Who do you reckon are the elite?'

‘Yourself, of course … Mrs Treasure, the “reverend gentleman”, our little Swiss chappie, “Arty” Shaw – when he's sober – and a couple of the less senile old dears – and yours truly,' he added without modesty.

He moved a little nearer the door. ‘I'll hold you to the offer of that drink later on – there's no bar, by the way. In Russia, you have to sit down in the restaurant to tipple – the stuff they sell makes it advisable, anyway!'

He actually opened the door and said his last piece – ‘Cheerio, hope the old neck improves.'

Waving his papers with a flourish that almost screamed ‘anyone for tennis?' he vanished, leaving Simon's jangling nerves that much more tense.

‘Blasted idiot!' he mumbled after him, ‘Pseudo-Oxford accent and the brains of a peacock.'

He settled back to continue his gloomy stocktaking of the crisis.

He was being got at, in a big way, but by whom? Must be someone in the Trans-Europa party … the same one that knocked off Harry Lee Kramer and searched his own flat the following night. Again, equally clearly, the same person turned over his cabin on the ship two nights before.

But who – who – who?

He called down into the deep recesses of his jittery brain, but answer came there none.

Not finding a ‘who', Simon turned to the ‘why' and the ‘how' of it all. The first question seemed straightforward enough – if it wasn't the Committee of State Security, it must be a competitor for the tool steel. Kramer had hinted as much in the Happy Dragon … who had he mentioned; the Germans and someone else? The French, of course.

French – Fragonard! The two names slipped together like fish and chips or Laurel and Hardy – yet it seemed ridiculous to accuse the portly little Swiss of murder just because he was the only one with a Gallic name.
And anyway, the poor little guy is too short to reach up to my neck
!

Yet the nagging suspicion would not leave him and, with no German in the Party, Fragonard remained as a possible.

Simon swore as logic fought with prejudice ‘I'm working for the Yanks, but God knows I'm no American, so why should he work for the French – and, hell, he's Swiss!'

He left the problem, to think about the ‘how'.

At first sight it seemed impossible that the killer of Kramer could murder one night and be on the ship after Simon the very next day, unless he had booked up in advance.

He suddenly realized that Fragonard had not joined the
Yuri
the next day, in fact. He had come aboard at Copenhagen, two days later! His intuition about the voluble Swiss flooded back in force.

But why had Kramer been done away with? Simon mulled this one over again, getting almost masochistic delight in frightening himself mortal.

‘They knew what Kramer wanted and who he was sending to get it – but perhaps they didn't know the local arrangements in Moscow … all this guff about the German chap, Pabst, and the place I'm supposed to make contact. What if they wrung the truth out of Kramer and killed him in the process – or disposed of him afterwards to keep his mouth shut?'