New Jerusalem Read online

  It was a long walk to the residential tower blocks. Wide spaces separated the square-edged towers. My body heat seeped through the soles of my shoes. As I passed a nondescript building, a door banged open and two large men came out, towing an unconscious comrade by his shoulders, face to the black sky, heels scraping runnels through the snow. It might have been a KGB snatch, but more likely it was drunkards dragging their friend home.

  Up ahead, Zadok was entering a tower block.

  I moved across snow-covered ground and stopped beneath a shadow-black tree. A third-floor light came on, then a bearish silhouette passed across the window. So this was where my target lived.

  Or where Ignatieff wanted me to believe a foreign-born agent, a defector from New Jerusalem trained in assassination, was making his temporary base.

  In this temperature and these clothes, I couldn't stand here for long. Just as I was about to give up, Zadok's light snapped off. Gone to bed already? After a minute Zadok reappeared in the ground level hallway. From behind two skeletal trees in the otherwise bare space, I watched him head for the unmarked bar where the two men had dragged out their friend.

  It's bloody cold.

  But movement might trigger Zadok's professional paranoia. I held still, waiting until he was inside the bar, then counting up to a thousand before leaving cover. Crossing unmarked snow, I reached the outer door of Zadok's block. It was unlocked.

  Go on.

  There's not much crime in the heart of the Soviet Union. You can walk around in safety, unless the state security apparatus decides to snatch you off the street because you made a wisecrack about Premier Kruschev, and who's laughing now? But the front doors to apartments still have locks.

  I was carrying a set of Allen keys and feeler gauges, the kind you use for setting spark-plug gaps, unusual in a country where no one owns cars. They have other uses. In a minute the lock clicked. Pushing the door open, I breathed in air that smelled of stale cabbage.

  Moving through the rooms, I tried to get a feel for the place. Back in the small sitting-room, I opened the window, creating an emergency exit. Then it was time to search the drawers and cupboards.

  There were payslips in the name of Andropovitch. A cover name, or real? Andoprovitch/Zadok worked at Sheremetyevo Airport on aircraft maintenance. The dossier had indicated a master's degree in aeronautics.

  A slower search uncovered a hidden space at the back of the pantry. Here was a plastic bag containing a sheaf of documents which I placed in the middle of the floor before continuing the search. In Zadok's musty-smelling bedroom, fastened to the bottom of the bed frame, was a long, dark-green rifle bag. It felt like a Browning .303.

  A woman's voice sounded from the outer hallway. Fear locked my muscles.

  Get ready.

  The window, cracked open, was directly behind me. I rehearsed the sequence of moves to get me over the sill, closing the window from the outside before anyone could—

  The voice diminished, then a door slammed upstairs.

  Returning to the documents, I scanned down tabular data showing mortality rates versus exposure to radioactive fallout, as measured in millirads per cubic metre of air: the technicalities of death. The implication was that the authorities were using their own citizens as test subjects, but some would say this wasn't news.

  Then I found the photographs.

  How do you picture him? With the wild hair and brush moustache, the quintessential scientist-genius and photographic icon? The first photo was from his younger days, with dark hair and a soccer player's physique, still recognizable to me. Other pictures were more recent, variously showing him with Bohr, Gödel, Pompidou and Kennedy.

  Zadok's? Or planted by Ignatieff?

  Photographs of President Einstein, plus a long gun secreted beneath the bed. The great man himself due to visit in four – no, three – days time. This looked like the setup for an assassination, but I'd been pointed in this direction by a KGB colonel. In our world, appearances aren't just deceptive, they're leaves camouflaging a landmine, and when Jean-Paul taught me to tread carefully, he meant it. So I replaced the photos in Andropovitch's pantry, knowing that he might be innocent, Andropovitch his real name, having no idea that his larder contained hidden documents as well as food, or that someone had fastened a sniper rifle underneath his bed. What I should do was—

  Get out now.

  Trusting my intuition, I was already shutting the window and moving to the front door, slipping out into the hallway as voices bounced around the bare concrete stairs below.

  "—evening, Comrade Andropovitch?"

  "Ballet and vodka, what could be better?"

  The neighbour laughed, the sound providing cover as I went upstairs fast. On the next landing, I waited. Andropovitch/Zadok opened his door, went inside, and rattled the chain as he fastened the locks.

  If he was Zadok and therefore professional, he might react to subliminal traces of my presence, regardless of how much vodka he'd drunk. Tugging off my shoes, I winced at the chill of the steps, then descended in silence, not stopping until I reached the ground floor and pulled my shoes back on. Then I went outside, careful to let the outer door close softly.

  The air was cold and bracing. Moscow in December, what could be better?

  Then it was back to Dobrininskaya Station, where the proletariat could admire Italianate mosaics and dream of a secular paradise they would never live to see, while I worried about Albert Einstein, president of my country and the nearest I would ever have to a hero, knowing I would have to act, no matter what Ignatieff had planned. And there'd be no calling for help – there was no way of contacting Branch 7 – so whatever happened I would be solo, and that was all right because some wolves run with the pack but others come fully alive when hunting alone. Forget dojos and fight-gyms: this is my home, where I truly belong.

  On the edge.

  FOURTEEN:

  MOSCOW, December 1962

  At 3:27 by the bedside clock, a whisper dragged me into wakefulness. An envelope lay beneath the door. My ankle tendon protested as I rolled from the bed and moved across the floor, still awakening. I pulled the door open, glimpsing a woman's coat as she disappeared. A Natasha going home after a night at work? To chase her would mean running down the corridor in my shorts, and what would the upravdom think?

  Going back in, I switched on the light. Inside the envelope was a ticket, this time for the Institute of Economic Achievements, more boring than the ballet.

  I flicked off the light and went back to bed.

  As a loyal Party member with free time, I did what anyone would, heading for the Lenin Museum to take the tour. In case you don't know, it's a place of worship. Here the State is omnipresent and omnipotent, and you can see the sacred relics of their prophet's life. Observe, if you will, the black coat in the glass display case, the bullet hole in the fabric, in the back, testimony to the coward's assassination attempt that the great man survived.

  A Browning rifle. Photographs of Einstein.

  Standing in the multi-hued light of a stained glass window, the guide related Lenin's life in the present tense: "He speaks twelve languages. These are some of his books." On the wall hung a painting of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as the consummate rabble-rouser, standing before dockyard workers, inflaming them with his rhetoric. His features were nothing like those of my contact who had died in the marshalling yard; only the beard had been trimmed the same way.

  Glistening intestines, with the steam still rising.

  Feeling depressed, I made my way out of the museum and went shopping. New York has Bloomingdale's, London has Harrods, and Berlin has the Ka-De-We. But this was Moscow, where the big department store is GUM. The U stands for Universalni, but don't get your hopes up. I bought a small carved wooden bear, which involved queuing up three times: once to hand over the bear and receive a signed slip; then to line up at the payment counter, where the girl's fingers flew across the abacus with a maestro's touch, before marking the slip as paid; and the final ti
me, back at the first counter to pick up the bear that was now paid for.

  There is no unemployment in the great Soviet State.

  At dawn there had been pretty girls shovelling snow from the city streets, young women whose startling Slavic looks alone would bring them decent jobs in the West. The shovels were simple: a flat wooden board nailed to the end of a stick. The implements looked like placards, here where disgruntled protest leads to the schizo ward, if not the gulag.

  Leaving GUM, I walked to Dzerzhinski Square.

  If I betray the tiniest hint...

  A statue of the fearsome Beria stood in the centre of the square. People walked past, fewer than you'd expect if you didn't know the meaning of this place. Heads down, sometimes glancing up, but never at the statue. Nor at the rearing black monolith.

  For this is KGB Headquarters.

  Booths stand near each corner of the building. Their pale-blue tinted, armoured windows make them resemble airport control towers in miniature. From inside and on the street, stone-eyed guards in uniform keep watch.

  It was a slim chance, but I'd studied schedules and timed my walk perfectly. Colonel Arkady Ignatieff was walking out of HQ. He would be entitled to use an official Zil, one of the few vehicles to travel along the broad, impressive streets. But there are uniformed watchers posted at every major intersection, and they would log the Zil's movements, because in the Soviet state everyone watches everyone else, and how else would you run a country?

  Ignatieff walked to a bus stop and stopped. He may have spotted me hanging back, tucked around a corner. Once the bus arrived and he got on board, I followed, moving past him to the rear of the bus, neither of us showing signs of recognition.

  At the next crossroads, the obvious direction to go in should have been left, but this was the Soviet Union where things are different. The driver continued to the next U-turn gap in the central reservation, swung us around, and headed back towards the junction where he could turn right and take us out of the city. That's how it works, no turning across the lanes, and since the roads are empty it's no problem. You may have noticed that American roads form simple grids, while British cities are tangled spaghetti, but Moscow is a spider's web, its thoroughfares radiating outward, crossing concentric ring-shaped roads.

  The predator lurks off-centre, in Dzerzhinski Square, watching.

  Away from the city stands a series of great pavilions: baroque buildings, ornate with touches of gold. They're called the Institute of Economic Achievements, and if you remember that the country was feudal in the previous century, you might think they had something to boast about. If you knew nothing of the gulags.

  As we walked along the footpaths, the temperature was twenty below. Ignatieff headed for a pavilion marked KOCMOC. It was shaped like a hangar and painted white. We went inside, where a wall-thermometer read minus 24, even colder than outside. Heat seeped downward from my feet.

  Satellites, both replicas and unlaunched specimens of the real thing, stood on the floor or hung suspended on wires. There were posters, technical information about rocketry, photographs of cosmonauts.... and there was the capsule that Gagarin himself had flown in, a flimsy metal construct that had orbited the Earth. Travelled through space for real.

  "He's a brave man." Ignatieff was standing at my shoulder. "Or did he merely follow orders?"

  There was a never-launched Sputnik, identical to the one that circled the Earth five years earlier, panicking America. The Martians were invading. The Reds had taken the ultimate high ground. Death rays from orbit, bound to happen. Except that the payload was usually chimps.

  "Animals or machines don't know what's going on," I said. "A man does."

  "Sometimes."

  "Well, yes. For example, do you have any idea what Zadok's up to?"

  "Probably." Ignatieff tugged his beard. "It's how to prevent it that puzzles me."

  "Have him arrested."

  "My friend in the GRU might find out who gave the order, so no, I don't think so."

  "Why is he working with Black Path, do you know?"

  "He's not a fascist, except that sometimes extremists of opposite poles have more in common with each other than the ordinary folk."

  This was rich, coming from a KGB colonel, but perhaps I shouldn't judge.

  "So why, then? Anti-semitism?"

  "Exactly. Inside the GRU, he can only target Russian Jews. This way he gets to spread the hurt."

  It was perhaps the inverse of Ignatieff's motivation, and that was something to steer clear of, because he was Pinchas's asset and if I screwed up the relationship, Schröder would rip my balls off.

  Some Oriental tourists, possibly Soviet citizens but more likely Japanese, were taking photographs. We moved away.

  "What about Zadok? I can understand the others' motivation, but why would a Jew work with Black Path?"

  A Jewish Nazi was surely the ultimate in contradictions.

  "You've never heard of someone turning against their own kind? He was a Hasidic Jew, very serious, and now he sees Jewry as the enemy."

  "That's insane."

  But then, no one featuring in the dossiers was normal, and who am I to judge?

  Ignatieff stared up at the Sputnik, then gave a snort. "Come on. I'll show you insanity."

  Ten minutes later we were in the Agricultural Pavilion, where exhibits showed the massive wheat yields accruing from a series of Five Year Plans. It was impressive. If you hadn't seen the bakery queues, you might even believe it.

  "We're talking about leading edge developmental science." Ignatieff gestured at a patch of fake golden grain. "The splendour of Lysenkoism, bringing food to millions."

  The doctrine began with Lamarck in Paris: the idea that lessons learned during an individual's lifetime are passed on to the offspring. More recently, scientists allegedly taught planarian worms to navigate electrified mazes, then chopped them up and fed them to other worms, who acquired the knowledge. But it's a question of rigorous experimental design. A hallmark of bad science is when only sympathetic, specially sensitive observers are capable of running the experiments.

  Silly bastards.

  "There is a divinity that shapes our ends," I said in English, "rough-hew them how we will."

  "Ah. You are a fan of Shakespeare?"

  "No, Julian Huxley, the English biologist. That was Huxley's way of pointing out that if Lamarckian genetics existed, Jewish and Muslim boys would be born minus foreskins."

  Ignatieff chuckled.

  "Simple and logical. No one in the Academy of Sciences could have thought of it."

  Lysenko, beloved of Stalin, was convinced that putting crops into poor soil would automatically improve them. His 'science' dovetailed so neatly into the Party's philosophical worldview that no one dared question its relationship to reality. Hard facts, as Uncle Isaak says, are the ultimate arbiter. And they rarely get much harder than starvation.

  "So really," Ignatieff added, "you yourself could disprove Lysenkoism right now, merely by dropping your trousers."

  "Perhaps we should leave that demonstration for another day."

  (Actually I'm intact, not circumcised – but it proves the argument, either way.)

  "Although you joke, Comrade Wolf" – Ignatieff's prominent eyes focused on me – "that really is the empirical method, isn't it? One contrary fact disproves a theory."

  "Have you any particular theory in mind?"

  "Two of them. I have an idea that Black Path are going to get away with murder. And I have an idea that someone in your organization is a KGB asset. We picked up on the Black Path theft of uranium not from our own security, but by observing your operation."

  I needed to listen and remember everything, even if I believed nothing.

  "Who is it?"

  "I don't know. And you wouldn't take my word for it, even if I did."

  "Not uncorroborated, no."

  "It would be risky for me to find out. But I'll try."

  "Thank you."

  Ignatieff
nodded. Then he turned and walked out of the pavilion. That appeared to be the end of our meeting.

  There are kidon specialists in Branch 7, but I'm not one of them. No one has ever asked me to carry out an assassination. If they did, I would refuse. So I wasn't going to take down Zadok purely on Ignatieff's say-so, or on the basis of papers and a hidden rifle that Zadok himself might have been surprised to find.

  There's a mole inside Branch 7.

  There are hard facts, and soft-minded interpretations. There was a lot of ground to cover before I could accept that Zadok, aka Andropovitch, was an enemy.

  Fern. It could be Fern.

  I really did not trust Colonel Ignatieff.

  No. Fern's no traitor.

  Ignatieff exited the bus at the same stop where we'd both got on, but I stayed on board because the bus continued south. From outside, he flicked a glance in my direction, then began walking to Dzerzhinski Square.

  The bus moved off.

  Schröder could have sent Christensen to Poland instead of me, but while Lars's command of the language beats mine hands down, he wouldn't know a computer from a washing-machine. And Schröder could certainly have saved time by sending someone else to Moscow while I was doing my thing in Kowary Podgórze. Here my Russian fluency might have been the deciding factor, or perhaps my local contacts from previous ops, but more likely it was because Braun would have needed a full support cell while I could do the hard stuff on my own.

  Schröder couldn't have known about the airport, not in advance.

  Zadok's papers, as Andropovitch, showed him as working in the airport. Without inside information, I might have tried to take him out in his apartment and interrogate him, but that's something else I'm not comfortable with. Luckily I have friends in the scientific world besides Charles Montagu, and one of them, name of Vanya, lived here.

  When the bus reached the sports stadium, I got off and made my way across a bridge spanning the colourless Moscow River. A militia patrol was in the process of arresting two French tourists who had attempted to take a snapshot. It's an offence to take pictures of roads, railways or bridges, and their travel agent should have told them so. As Alexandr Fyodorovitch I glanced at the couple with contempt, then walked on toward the Lenin Hills that formed the south side of the river.