The Margin of Evil! (51 page)

'
Come on, it tells you that there is someone who doesn't want this information known! It does, doesn't it?'Reilly paused for a moment and then said. 'What do you know of a Joseph Stalin?'

'
Not that much. Crossed his path a few times, about eighteen months ago, when he was editor of Pravda. Don't really know that much about him, except that he's a small-time player,' Julia said.

'
Pah ... is that it? Well you should! According to my late friend Goldstein, this man Stalin, has his finger right here in Moscow, in every single pie!'

'
Oh come on,' Julia said, 'he's only small fry. The joke was you gave Comrade Stalin the files to file, or you went to him if you wanted a titbit of information.'

'
Jesus wept woman! They told me that you'd got an education and been 'up' at Cambridge! Don't you fucking see?'

This time Julia fel
t that Reilly was going too far and, if he kept on raising his voice, there would be complaints from her neighbours. 'See what?'

'
Don't you see it? That little man has been Empire Building and he's been doing it right under their noses! And the amusing thing is ... that none of them have noticed it. Not one of 'em. And it's now almost too late,' Reilly said. Just at that moment there was a loud banging on the door and a voice on the outside was telling them, 'You and your boyfriend shut up!'

Next time they met they went for a walk by the river.
They talked at length free from interruption.

'
Our boss in London wants you, Julia, to get close to this investigation. Now I am doing everything I can do to help you. I am calling in favours, I'm getting people out; but there is a problem, I am well known to the Cheka. If they catch me, my British passport won't be able to save my hide,' Reilly paused and said, 'It will be off to a shallow grave. So even though I'm tolerated, if I give them an excuse, believe me when I say it, they will kill me!'

Julia listened very carefully to Sidney Reilly.
He explained to her on that riverside bank, that the investigation into Joseph Stalin appeared, in all sense and purposes, to have stalled itself.  But he was reliably informed that even though the official investigation was on hold at the moment the intention was to start it up as soon as they possibly could. Julia asked him who his new source was. Reilly explained to her that, at this time, it was best that she didn't know. He carried on, 'This person tells me that their, appears to be, in light of their recent failed assassination attempt, clear evidence of a power struggle going on in the Kremlin. The person that has moved this onto the agenda is none other than the heir apparent, Lev Trotsky. I'm also reliably informed that Trotsky and Stalin have never got on. There is some added impetus from Trotsky in that, should anything happen to Lenin, and it appears that Kaplan's bullet is still firmly lodged in the base of Vladimir Ilyvich's neck, then 'The Central Committee' will be split down the middle as to who the successor should be.'

The penny dropped and Julia started to see. Reilly
's ramblings were starting to make sense. At their next meeting things became clearer.

'
Also my informant tells me that the investigation has started up again, but this time it is not being led by a 'Central Committee' member, it is being led by a former Okhrana operative, now working for the Cheka, his name is Georgii Radetzky; Julia said that she had never heard of this Georgii Radetzky. Reilly said that he did not know that much about him himself, but he was considered good, if not a little unorthodox; but he was, and the powers that be knew this, a man who could get the job done. Not much else was known about him except that, during the war, he had served as an adjutant to Aleksei Brusilov.

'
Jesus Christ!'  Julia exclaimed, 'So they've brought in a heavyweight!'

'
My source tells me that this man, Radetzky, likes to work on his own.  By all accounts he's a bit of a loner. I suspect that they have selected him because, when he worked for the 'Ancien Regime', he had a lot of them arrested. I know for a fact that he arrested Trotsky back in nineteen hundred and five. So, judging by the recent turn of events and the way we know they think, that when the jobs done they will regard him as expendable.

'
Two birds for the price of one!  An old score settled,' Julia muttered.

'
Quite so! Be that as it may, I want you later in the week, to take a look at this Georgii Radetzky. I want you to go to a Kremlin soirée I've managed to get you into. Its Lenin and Trotsky, talking about ... the 'Future' and 'The Way Forward, anyway it`s some claptrap like that!'

Indeed Julia saw her quarry, he didn
't notice her.  She also noticed Joseph Stalin, and the way that he and his sycophants kept themselves apart. He was certainly different to how she remembered him back in Petrograd. Now he seemed almost invisible, but he was there alright; right there in the here and now.

From there it was quite easy to keep an eye on him.
But Reilly wanted her to get closer, he wanted her to get to the heart of the investigation. Once again she was helped by the hand of fate.

By early summer it appeared that the authorities were beginning to lose their grip
on what was going on in Moscow.  It was of no surprise that people did not want to stay in the city. By night people walked out of the city and on into the forest. Julia assumed that the people; fed up with four and half years of war, broken promises and starvation, just wanted to go home and get back to the commune. Why should they stay? It seemed in that early summer of nineteen-nineteen, that the 'Civil War' could have swung either way; one minute Deniken was marching up through the Ukraine and on, so they said, to Moscow! Why should they stay? The blackmarket was rife, if you could afford it and Julia Kilduff didn't need Sidney Reilly to tell her, that organised crime was operating here with impunity. She too had heard the rumours that the Black Markets here were being run by 'Fat Cat' Georgians with good Bolshevik connections.  In the meantime Moscow braced itself for the oncoming 'White' onslaught.

Her masterstroke had been when she had found out that Georgii Radetzky had been transferred to command the Nizhny Novgorod gate.
She went back to the local Soviet and managed to get a few a strings pulled and, within a few days, she found herself working, albeit it on the wrong shift, on Nizhny gate. The day she got to know him was the day that her life had changed, but Georgii Radetzky was not to realise this until quite sometime later ...

There was nothing else for i
t. She told Pyotr and Anna what they had to do, they were to make all speed and get to the safety of the river. There she would find them, once she had found Georgii. But they were not, under any circumstances, to hang around here. They grabbed their few possessions and headed off in the direction of The Vistula. Once they had gone Julia, in spite of her aching back, made all speed after Georgii. He must have, by now, been gone at least an hour.

In fact, unbeknownst to Julia Kilduff she had made good time
. But in the heat of the moment, she had made a crucial error. She had let her heart govern her mind. Not only was she locked in internal debate as to the rights and wrongs of her actions when she walked past the hidden Georgii Radetzky, she was quite oblivious to it all. But then that might not altogether have been a bad thing. Because five minutes further on, her sixth sense, told her that she was no longer alone in this area of the forest.

But by that time it was too late,
'If you don't stop Yulia Klimtsov ... I'll shoot,' a voice shouted.

Yulia stopped right in her tracks.
She would have known that voice anywhere, it was the voice of that 'Greaseball,' Sidney Reilly. She turned around, he had his forefinger raised up to his lip.

'
This is what I want you to do,' he whispered.

Chapter Fifty Two

The call signal sounded again. Dominik waited a minute. Cautiously he poked his head up and peered over undergrowth. In front of him, maybe twenty yards away, a young boy was standing where before there had been no one. Ducking down Dominik Falkowski tugged three times at the cord which was firmly attached to his leg. Then he gave it an extra tug, this signalled to his fellow countrymen that it was now safe to stand up.

The young boy signalled to them to come over.
The boy smiled and indicated for them to follow him. They walked through the forest for, maybe, thirty minutes, in fact Dominik had been timing them on his wrist watch and, according to him, it took them twenty nine and a half minutes to reach their rendezvous.

The meeting place was a small clearing in the forest.
In front of him there was a group of three people. Now four with the addition of the young boy, or man, Dominik couldn't work out whether their contact was a boy or a young 'Midget' man. Whichever way, he was small, very, very small. In the centre of the clearing there was a tree stump, and on it sat a small man smoking a pipe. The man did not have an unfriendly face, indeed his eyes seemed to sparkle and smile at you. He was dressed in the usual military coat, as Dominik Falkowski duly noted, the man was dressed in current period apparel: cavalry boots, riding breeches and carried a holster on the hip. The man looked up and beckoned the group of Poles over. He spoke for a moment to the boy and then eyed up Falkowski 's party.

On closer inspe
ction, Dominik saw that the man with the pleasant eyes, had quite a badly pockmarked face, small pox probably he thought.  When he spoke Russian it was with quite a heavy accent, unlike any that he'd ever heard before, but, at least, the man made himself understood. Judging by the respect the others in his group paid him, he most definitely was the leader of their party; the opposite number that Dominik had been told to deliver the message too. Then he must be his Excellency Comrade Commissar Stalin; that General Pilsudski had told him to deliver, 'the most important of' messages too.'

The man with the pock
marked face took the package from Dominik. He then got up, and moved over to the far side of the clearing and showed the package to another man, Dominik watched the two men, he watched 'The Commissar', carefully open the package, pull out the contents, it appeared to be a document or a letter, the two men spoke. This Comrade Stalin was reading it to the other and, whilst he was reading, they would stop and he assumed they were debating the letters contents. The two must have stood there, in conference, for about twenty minutes. Whilst the light in the forest faded, whatever the contents, every now and then whilst the men weighed up its contents, they would occasionally look over, nodding their heads towards the group of Poles. But as they were out of earshot Dominik was in complete ignorance as to what they might be talking about. Elsewhere, in the clearing, the other man and the boy had disappeared on several occasions, only to reappear a few minutes later lugging several large rectangular boxes. The two other men, whom moments before had been vigorously discussing the contents of Pilsudski's communiqué, walked over to Dominik. They turned and spoke in Russian to the man and the boy. They started opening the boxes. To his horror Dominik could see that the boxes contained a belt fed, Lewis machine gun. He shouted to his colleagues to draw their guns.

'
No point Polski, they only contain blanks! It had been agreed that this was going to be ... now let me see ... this was going to be a little ... your going away present ... But today is your lucky day ... I have other plans for you,' the leader with the pockmarked face said. He then added, 'But don't, 'Polski', let me down, or tonight you will be sleeping with the worms!'

Until now Dominik had not, really, given it a second thought.
Of course he'd known about the risk; that he and his fellow countrymen had been taking, when they had been asked, by Pilsudski, to wear Red Army fatigues under their Polish army tunics. Now it was dawning on him, that he had been set up, not only had he been set up, but he had been set up in a very big way. What was there to do? The 'Pocked Marked' Russian had asked him to go back into the forest and find a man, a defector and a woman and, possibly, two children that might be accompanying them. The young boy was going to accompany them and two of his party were going to be held hostage until he returned with them. So Dominik Falkowski led the remainder of his party, along with the young boy-man, back into the forest. The light was starting to fade. They walked back the way they had come. After about ten minutes they fanned out into a skirmish line. Dominik thought that the fading light might well work to their advantage. They started to climb a densely wooded ridge, when one of his men on his right indicated that they were not alone. They all went to ground in an instant. Dominik crawled over to where the soldier had positioned himself. The soldier pointed over into the darkness. Once his eyes had adjusted, he noticed the faint outline of a man sitting on the forest floor. The man was facing them, he was partially lent up against the bough of a large tree, and he seemed to be expecting them. Dominik crawled back and signalled to the others in the party to come over. Then he'd told them what the order of engagement would be, the boy would stay here until they had captured, and then once the order was given the others would all fan out, and surround the would-be defector. Judging by what the Russian had told him back in the clearing, this had to be their man. But where were the others?