The Red Eagles E-Book

David Downing

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 342

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

FIENDISHLY CLEVER AND GRIPPING HISTORICAL THRILLER SET IN THE LAST DAYS OF WW2 1945. The Red Army tears through Europe towards Berlin, exacting vengeance on a biblical scale, while the British and the Americans close in from the west. Victory over Hitler seems certain. But deep inside the Kremlin, Stalin worries about a new enemy. When the war is over, how will the Soviet Union protect itself against the overweening American behemoth? Meanwhile, ever more desperate, Hitler paces up and down his study in the Berchtesgaden. He knows he needs a miracle to avoid unthinkable and humiliating defeat. For both, the atom bomb is the answer. And both are willing to sacrifice their best spies to get it.

Leseprobe

 

PRAISE FOR DAVID DOWNING

 

‘Think Robert Harris and Fatherland mixed with a dash of Le Carré’

Sue Baker, Publishing News

 

‘A wonderfully drawn spy novel … A very auspicious début, with more to come’

The Bookseller on Zoo Station

 

‘Excellent and evocative … Downing’s strength is his fleshing out of the tense and often dangerous nature of everyday life in a totalitarian state’

The Times on Silesian Station

 

‘Downing’s outstanding evocation of the times (as masterly as that found in Alan Furst’s novels or Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series), thematic complexity (as rich as that of John le Carré), and the wide assortment of fully rendered characters provide as much or more pleasure than the plot, where disparate threads are tied together in satisfying and unexpected ways.’

Library Journal on Masaryk Station

 

‘Exciting and frightening all at once … It’s got everything going for it’

Julie Walters on Zoo Station

 

‘A master at work’

Huffington Post UK

 

‘An outstanding thriller … This series is a quite remarkable achievement’

Shots magazine

THE RED EAGLES

David Downing

He has fully become a man

who has in his heart no mother, father

who knows that he gets life

only as an extra to death

and, like something found, he will give it back

at any time, that’s why he keeps it safe,

who is not a god and not a priest

either to himself or anyone.

 

—from “Consciousness” by Attila Jozsef

Contents

Title PageEpigraphPrologueConceptionOneTwoThreeFourExecutionFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenEpilogueCopyright

Prologue

New York City, 1944

Her contact stood with his back to the delicatessen window, in one hand the book with the green binding, in the other the spare pair of gloves. Though it was night, Amy could tell he had a rather nice face; there was a hint of innocence about it. As if by rote, she glanced up and down the street one more time, saw nothing, and then took the orange out of her bag and started walking toward him.

Amy was strangely nervous – she could tell from the way the sound of her heels on the sidewalk seemed to echo. He noticed her and the orange, looked surprised for an instant, then wary.

“Can you tell me the way to Grand Central Station?” she asked.

His face relaxed. “I’m going that way myself,” he said, as if it were an old joke.

“Harry’s sick and couldn’t make it,” she said, and it was at that moment that she saw, reflected in a window, a man staring at them. Her reaction was so quick she even startled herself. She took her companion’s arm and forced them both into motion with a suddenness that almost knocked him over.

“What …”

“We’re being watched. Don’t turn around,” she whispered.

They walked west toward Lexington Avenue, the clicking of her heels sounding louder than ever.

“What do we do?” he asked.

“Where are you staying?”

“The Pierre.”

“Stop and tie your shoelaces.”

As he did she looked back. The man was there, staring at a fire hydrant. “Damn,” she murmured to herself. She’d been so careful and still it hadn’t been careful enough.

They resumed walking, turning onto Lexington past a newsstand announcing the Allied attack on Monte Cassino.

“They must know something,” he said, but there was no panic in his voice, and for that she was grateful.

“If they knew anything, you wouldn’t still be on the street,” she said, as much to convince herself as him. “It’s just routine surveillance. I’ve got an idea. It’s risky, but there’s nothing else we can do. You’re a single man in New York. If they believe I’m a hooker …”

“But …”

“Can you think of anything better?”

He said nothing. She hailed a cab and watched through the rear window as their tail signaled a car that had been cruising along behind him.

Reaching the hotel, they crossed the lobby to the elevators. Amy was conscious of the stares she received from the men as she strutted by with an exaggerated sway of her hips. She hoped she wasn’t overdoing it for her intended audience.

He had a suite on the fifth floor. It was large and luxurious; the United States Government obviously was not economizing when it came to important scientists. “We’d better get undressed,” she said, kicking off her shoes and taking off her coat.

He looked at her as if she’d gone mad.

“They’ll check,” she said patiently. If they’re any good, they will, she added to herself.

She peeled off her precious nylons, unbuttoned her skirt and blouse. “I’ll get in bed,” she said, carrying her clothes through to the bedroom.

“Shall I?” he asked almost apologetically.

“They won’t check that thoroughly.”

A few moments later he came in and sat on the end of the bed, looking extremely ill at ease in his underpants. She smiled at him reassuringly, though she felt anything but assured. Excited perhaps. He did have a nice face, and his body, though thin, was well-proportioned. It was a long time since she’d made love with a complete stranger … but this wasn’t the time for thinking about it.

They sat silently, waiting for more than ten minutes. “No one’s coming,” he said at last, but before he could utter his next thought there was a firm rap on the outer door.

“Put the dressing gown on,” she said. “Take your time answering. Be annoyed.” She removed her brassiere, and he got a glimpse of small, perfectly formed breasts with large dark nipples.

She heard him open the door amid his angry protests.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fuchs,” a voice replied, “but we have to check the water in all the rooms. It won’t take but a second.”

She slipped out of bed and stood with her back to the window, completely naked. The door opened abruptly and the man walked in, stared at her for what seemed an eternity and then backed out muttering apologies. She could hear him still apologizing in the living room as the scientist resumed his protests. Then the outer door slammed, leaving silence.

She began to dress. He came back into the bedroom and did the same, neither of them speaking. Amy felt an almost incontrollable urge to laugh, but the young scientist’s face was pale, his mouth pursed in a grim line.

“Was it the same man?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t even check the water.” He looked at her. “You weren’t in bed when he walked in on you.”

“I didn’t want him to look at my face,” she said coolly.

He looked at her with admiration. “Well, we fooled them!”

“It’s not over yet. Let me think a minute.”

He left her sitting on the bed, straightening her nylons. What was going to happen when she left? Would they check her out? They might be satisfied.

He returned a few minutes later with a small manila envelope. “That’s what Harry asked for,” he said.

She folded it in two and put it in her handbag. “Is there any reason why you shouldn’t have had it in your possession, innocently I mean?”

“No. We’re always scribbling things like that.”

“Good. If I’m arrested, tell them I stole it. Say you threw me out when you caught me looking through your wallet but you didn’t realize I’d taken anything.”

“Would they believe it?”

She shrugged. “It’s better than nothing. They need you presumably, so they’ll want to give you the benefit of the doubt. And tomorrow you’d better bring a real hooker up here.”

“But I …”

“You must. They can’t remember this night in particular. Believe me, it’s more fun than the electric chair.”

“You’re right.”

She grimaced. “Look, if they’re waiting to question me, they’ll be in the lobby. I don’t think they’ll approach me if you’re there, so why don’t you call a cab for me and then see me to it. I’ll take it from there.”

“I thought I threw you out.”

“You threw me out like a gentleman.”

He called down to reception, watched her applying her lipstick as he waited, a dark crimson shade that suited her shining black hair.

“What name should I know you by?” he asked.

“Rosa. But Harry should be back next time.”

They went down in the elevator and walked across the lobby as fast as they could without arousing suspicion. She saw the man out of the corner of her eye, pulling himself out of an armchair.

The taxi was waiting. “Times Square,” she told the driver as he pulled out onto Fifth Avenue. Looking back, she saw Fuchs walking back into the hotel and the man getting into a car that had pulled up for him.

Damn, damn, damn. For the first time she felt really frightened, and almost wished she’d brought the scientist with her – as long as she’d had him to worry about she hadn’t had time to worry about herself. She reached inside her bag, felt the butt of the small revolver, but it offered no comfort. There was no way she could lose the pursuit in a cab, and the moment it stopped he’d have her.

“Make that Forty-second and Madison,” she told the driver.

He swore and swung the cab under the nose of a bus and down another canyon. “Tell me when you change your mind again.”

Amy ignored him and noticed that her fists were clenched tightly in her lap. She took out a cigarette and fumbled with the lighter. The cab screeched to a halt. “You’re there, lady.”

She paid the driver and got out, not daring to look back. After stamping out the cigarette she began walking east on Forty-second Street, unbuttoning her coat and avoiding the eyes of the women who occupied the doorways. Eventually finding one empty, she leaned against the doorjamb wondering what she was supposed to do next. The man’s car stopped right in front of her. Amy forced a smile to her face. He was sitting in the back, pulling down the window to stare straight at her, a lecherous grin on his face.

Drive on, she pleaded silently.

He got out of the car and walked over to her, showed her his police shield. “Come with me, miss,” he said, looking her up and down.

“What for? Why are you picking on me?”

He took her arm and threw her into the backseat of the car, then got in beside her, holding his thigh tight against hers. He stank of sweat and stale beer. “Drive, Junior,” he told the man in front.

“What’s your name, honey?” he asked.

“Eileen. Where …”

“Eileen what?”

“Eileen McCarthy.”

“How long have you been a whore?”

“Not long. Look …”

“You’re gorgeous naked.”

Now she knew. More fun than the electric chair, she’d told Fuchs.

“Wasted on that egghead, I thought,” he said, placing his hand on her thigh.

“He was rather sweet,” she said, frantically trying to think of something that would stop him.

He guffawed. “Yeah? So am I, so am I. Look, honey,” he said, suddenly tightening his grip on her thigh, “we can take you in and you’ll get twenty-four hours in the slammer and a fifty-dollar fine, or you can give me twenty-five dollars’ worth of your time and be back on the street in half an hour. Your choice.”

They were entering Central Park. There was no way out of it, no way at all. If she was taken in, they’d find the gun and the envelope and her real name. “Okay, I’m yours,” she said.

He smiled that smile. “You know where, Junior,” he told his partner.

A few minutes later they turned off the road and coasted down a slope and into the trees. “Junior’ll make sure we have some privacy,” he said, and the young driver, with one disinterested glance at her, got out of the car and walked away.

“Look,” she said, but he was already opening up her blouse, squeezing a breast as if he was testing the ripeness of a peach. She felt her hand brush the metal clasp of her bag, and for a second almost succumbed to the urge to pull out the gun. But somehow it helped just knowing it was there, knowing that she could blow his head off if she wanted to.

He wasn’t gentle but at least it was quick. She pulled up her skirt and buttoned up her blouse, not daring to look him in the face.

“I’m pretty sweet too, eh?” he said.

“Can I go now?” she asked quietly.

“We’ll take you back.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“Your choice. I’ll see you again, Eileen.”

She got out of the car, clasping her handbag, and walked away, passing Junior. At least it had been only one of them.

After walking for several minutes she suddenly felt weak and sat down on the grass, her back against a tree. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She wanted to be angry with the cop, but he really had thought she was a hooker. She’d been so goddamn clever. “I didn’t want him to see my face” – she could hear herself say it, so cool and collected and pleased with herself. Well, he’d seen it now.

With an effort she pulled herself to her feet and walked out of the Park at Columbus Circle. Then she took a cab to Penn Station and caught a train back home to Washington with minutes to spare.

In the washroom at the end of the car she stripped and washed herself. She stood still, her arms astride the basin, looking at her face in the mirror.

Ten years, she thought, ten years of deception. Deceiving others, and maybe herself as well. She was thirty-three years old. No husband, no children, no country. No future.

Remembering the manila envelope, she took it from her bag and opened it. Inside there was a single sheet of paper, and on it a complicated diagram surrounded by notes written in her and Fuchs’s native tongue. At the head of the sheet were two heavily underlined words – “Die Atombombe.”

Conception

One

Josef Stalin stared gloomily out of the limousine window at the rain-swept Moscow streets. It was only eleven o’clock, but the city seemed already to have put itself to bed, and the swish of the limousine’s tyres seemed to echo in the emptiness. His eyes returned again to the piece of paper that rested on his knees, this diagram drawn by a German scientist in far-off America. Just one sheet of paper. There has to be some way of speeding up the process.

But deep down he feared that there wasn’t, that this time the odds were stacked against him. Ten years earlier he’d told the Party of the German danger, had spelled out what needed to be done to prevent the Soviet State from being crushed. It had been close, closer than even the Germans knew, but he’d done it. This, though, was something altogether different. Some things could not be simply commanded, no matter how great a sacrifice was made.

Eighteen months, the GRU told him. The American bomb would be ready in eighteen months, ready for the “peace.” The Soviet Union would have less than three years to match the American achievement while war weariness and the sentimental attachment to the “Grand Alliance” remorselessly ebbed away. A collision course was set. He’d had no illusions about the Germans, he had none about the Americans. A bare twelve months ago the taking of half of Europe had promised an impregnable buffer, and now it seemed almost irrelevant.

He felt a surge of self-pity. Were all his achievements to be reduced to nothing by this single sheet of paper? It was not long since he’d told Beria that he almost felt sorry for Churchill and the English, whose world was being dragged out from under them, who would soon be no more than the curators of an island museum. But was Churchill, with his pathetic faith in American generosity, the only deluded one? He himself had talked to the American generals at Tehran, and it had been like talking to the Germans at the time of the Pact. The stench of raw arrogance. The moment the Germans and Japanese were beaten the Americans would be everywhere, easing out the British and French, buying up the biggest empire the world had ever seen, brandishing their new bomb. Russia would be alone again. And defenseless. He slammed his fist on the seat, making the chauffeur jump. There must be some way of speeding up the process.

The limousine swept through the Spassky Gate and into the Kremlin, which was ablaze with lights now that the air-raid precautions had been lifted. He was, as usual, an hour late for the council meeting and felt able to expend some of his frustration on a brisk walk to the chamber overlooking the Alexandrov Gardens. Perhaps, he thought to himself as he climbed the stairs, but any lingering hopes were erased by the twin rows of gloomy faces lining the table. He wasted no time on preliminaries.

“Well, Andrei Andreyevich?” he barked as he eased himself into his chair.

Comrade Zhdanov, the head of the newly formed Atomic Division, shuffled his papers.

“Well?” Stalin repeated. “Tell me about our atom bomb.”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary,” Zhdanov began. “I have conducted the investigations required, but I regret to have to inform the council that there is no significant change in the forecasts. We simply do not have the materials. It may be possible to complete the ten-year development program in eight years, but the consequences of such a concentration of resources will put immeasurable strains on the rest of the economy.

“And,” he added morosely, “it would also have a severe effect on the development of the aircraft required for delivery.”

It was as he had feared.

“The other option?” he asked.

Zhdanov shuffled his papers again. “The possibility of stealing the material required has been thoroughly investigated. The trains the Americans use to carry their refined uranium from the plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Los Alamos are not heavily guarded. The actual theft could probably be accomplished by one of our partisan bands without too much trouble. Getting it and them back home might be difficult, and the political consequences of exposure would undoubtedly be grave. But these problems can be overcome.

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “there is another which cannot be. Each train carries only enough atomic material for the making of, at most, two bombs. For us to have anything less than thirty would be worse than useless. The Americans would not take us seriously. We could hardly hope to hold up fifteen trains.”

Zhdanov turned to look at Stalin for the first time, but the General Secretary’s face held a strange expression, almost a quizzical smile. He was in fact remembering a train holdup he’d organized forty years before, in the days of the Georgian armed bands. One hundred thousand rubles had been the prize, but the denominations of the bills had been so large that anyone who’d tried to cash one had been instantly arrested. Those were simpler days.

“Thank you, Andrei Andreyevich,” he said perfunctorily. “Has anyone anything positive to suggest?”

He was answered with a stony silence.

“So we cannot make it, and we cannot steal it,” Stalin said softly. “But make no mistake, we must have it. The alternative is at least five years during which the capitalist world will have the power of life and death over us. I refuse to accept that we shall win this war only to lose the peace. From this moment an atomic bomb is First Priority.

“You” – he looked straight at Zhdanov – “will solve the unsolvable.”

 

Anatoly Sheslakov thought to himself that it had been all very dramatic, but not very logical. If it was unsolvable, it couldn’t be solved; if it could be solved, it was not unsolvable. The word game did not help very much. But he had appreciated the seriousness of the situation since two that morning, when everyone in the Atomic Division had been summoned from their beds and harangued by a white-faced Zhdanov.

Sheslakov leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and watched the people walking past his door. He left it open for the occasional glimpse offered of Zhdanov’s secretary, Tania, she of the wonderfully erect stance and lovely ankles. He harboured no amorous ambitions – in fact her personality rather grated on him – but he loved watching her; she had that physical arrogance of youth which he, and indeed his much-loved wife, had long ago lost.

He was approaching fifty, and most of his face bore the signs of his age. The eyes though were still bright and sharp, evidence of the undimmed intellect behind them. People had often said of him, sometimes kindly, sometimes not, that he had the perfect planner’s brain, an ability to juggle an almost infinite array of variables into patterns of breathtaking simplicity that was matched only by his lack of imagination. He always replied that imagination was only the ability to stretch logic beyond what seemed, to lesser mortals, logical.

He had been twenty at the time of the Revolution, and had joined the Red Army in a fit of enthusiasm that he still found hard to explain. But it had paid dividends. His brilliance had outweighed his late arrival in the Party, and soon he was a commissar on the way up. After the Revolution he’d risen through the ranks of the state planning organs, prospering as they did with the adoption of a fully planned economy in the late twenties. The purges of the following decade decimated his colleagues but Sheslakov always survived; he had too good a brain for the Party to waste, too austere a brain for the Party leadership to feel threatened. He was a political neuter, a problem solver whose only demand of authority was that it should provide him with an endless supply of interesting problems. The outbreak of war and his assignment to the GRU and Atomic Division had changed the nature of the problems but not, fortunately, the scope they offered to his talents.

The First Priority was clearly a case in point. Sheslakov had all the relevant information – the military reports, espionage reports, industrial reports, scientific reports – scattered across his desk. Most of what they contained was now filed in his brain. He could see no reason to dispute Stalin’s statement that they could neither make nor steal enough atomic bombs, but his intuition insisted that this was one riddle that had an answer. And intuition, he had always thought, was nothing more than logic making use of facts that were stored in the unconscious.

He lit another cigarette and closed his eyes. What were the arguments against the theft? He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, in neat capitals, “NOT ENOUGH CAN BE STOLEN.” Not enough for what? For a possible war against the Americans? No, for deterring the Americans from starting such a war. The Americans would know how much of the Uranium-235 had been stolen, and consequently how many bombs could be made. A dead end, it had to be. So why didn’t it feel like one? He could see no hidden assumptions. There had to be something else.

Sheslakov spent the rest of the afternoon attacking the problem from the other end, checking through the reports covering a possible acceleration of the Soviet program. He could find no hopes there. Feeling, for him, unusually frustrated, he ate dinner in the GRU canteen and went for a walk along the river. It was a warm evening for early May, the sky clear after the day’s spring showers, and he surrendered himself to pleasant reveries, secure in the knowledge that parts of his mind were still carefully sifting through the problem.

It was just after eight when, sitting on an old capstan and staring across the water at a factory gutted by a German bomb, he found the hidden assumption he’d been searching for. And in the seconds that followed the pieces of an answer seemed to slip into each other like the parts of a matryoshka doll.

He lit a cigarette and sat for a few moments more watching the evening shadows lengthen. Then he walked briskly back to Frunze Street, collected a bottle from his office, and took the elevator back down to the floor that housed the GRU Secretariat. As expected, he found Olgarkov still at his desk, a mountain of a man surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. Seeing the bottle, Olgarkov produced two glasses from a drawer with a magician’s flourish.

They drank each other’s health and Sheslakov sank into the sofa beneath the window.

“Two things, Pyotr Alexeyevich,” he said.

“First Priority, I assume.”

“Word spreads fast.”

“Words like those do.”

“One, I want a report from Rosa, in Washington, as quickly as possible.” He dictated the questions he wanted answered. “How long?”

“It will have to come out through Alaska,” Olgarkov replied. “A week, perhaps ten days.”

“That’s quick enough. The other half won’t be so easy. I want a man with experience in covert operations and the sort of loyalty rating that Comrade Beria would envy. Plus, he must be completely fluent in American English.”

“And you need him tomorrow, I assume.”

“Of course.”

Olgarkov examined the bottom of his glass, then looked up. “Is the NKVD cooperating?”

“So I’m told.”

“Then I know one possibility,” he said, holding out his glass.

 

After making the drop, the pilot wiggled his wings in farewell and disappeared over the trees.

“What the fuck do they think we’re doing out here?” Kuznetsky shouted angrily, kicking the half-open crate. “Holding nonstop parties?”

Yakovenko groaned. “Not more vodka?”

“Enough to keep the brigade drunk for a week.”

“Maybe there’s food in the other crate.”

The two men walked around the edge of the clearing, dousing the circle of fires as they went. The other crate had also broken open, spilling chocolate bars across the damp grass.

Yakovenko took the wrapping off one and bit into it. “Better than nothing,” he said. “In fact it tastes good.”

“Chocolate and vodka,” Kuznetsky said disgustedly. “Moscow’s idea of a balanced diet.”

“Imported chocolate at that,” Yakovenko added, passing him the wrapper. “Where’s it from?”

“Made in the U.S.A.,” Kuznetsky translated, “For Military Personnel Only.”

“That’s us. Should make you feel young again.”

Kuznetsky grunted. “Come on, let’s load this up. Plus a few bottles of vodka, say fifty. We’ll leave the rest here.” They picked up the crate and carried it across to their vehicle, a T-34 tank that had clearly seen better days. The bodywork was pitted with the scars of battle, and the gun barrel was missing. But it still moved as long as there was gas in its tank.

“How are we going to carry the vodka?” Yakovenko asked as they lashed the crate behind the turret.

Kuznetsky’s reply was drowned by the sound of another plane, this time unmistakably German, passing overhead at about five hundred feet.

“Good thing we had the fires out,” Yakovenko said placidly, opening up another bar of chocolate.

“That’s three tonight—”

“It’s only the second.”

“I was talking about German planes. There’s going to be another sweep soon.” He stared up at the sky. “The full moon’s due in a couple of days … Forget the booze. We’re going back.”

Driving the T-34 through the forest was a slow, nerve-racking business, but Yakovenko enjoyed the challenge, and Kuznetsky, on the rim of the turret, was left to his thoughts. He wondered whether it would be better to go back underground this time rather than move the whole brigade east for a few weeks. Surely the Germans couldn’t spare that many men anymore, not with the offensive that everyone knew was coming in June. Yes, they should go underground and sit it out. In two months they’d be behind their own lines again. And he’d have to find a new job. And make a decision about Nadezhda.

The first light of dawn appeared through the trees ahead; the birds seemed to be clearing their throats for song. Kuznetsky loved this time of day: its sense of promise was indestructible, immune to human realities. He would miss the forest, really miss it. He’d have to join the bigwigs and get a dacha in the woods, somewhere like Zhukovka but farther out.

They were nearly home now, though no outsider would have noticed signs of habitation. The brigade, some eighty strong, lived in a connecting series of camouflaged dugouts beneath the forest floor; fires were lit only at night, and then only underground. Even the T-34 had a subterranean garage. The lookouts, Kuznetsky noted with satisfaction, were as alert as ever, signaling them in from their perches in the trees. He was reminded yet again of the tales of Robin Hood, which he’d read as a boy.

Nadezhda was still sleeping, her long black hair falling across her face. As he lay down beside her, determined to get an hour or so’s sleep, she snored gently and placed her arm protectively around his chest. He smiled and stroked her hair.

When he was her age he’d been playing hookey from school in Minnesota, bad-mouthing his parents, feeling up Betty Jane Webber in the hay loft, ignoring stupid questions like “What are you going to do when you grow up, Jack?” He had known nothing, experienced nothing, done nothing.

This sixteen-year-old lying beside him had seen her parents and brothers hanged, had killed at least three Germans, and had had at least one lover before him. It was only in sleep that she still looked a child. In sleep she almost had enough innocence for both of them.

He was wakened by Ovchinnikova less than an hour later. “We’ve got a visitor,” she said.

It was a young girl, seven or eight years old, from a nearby village. She was sitting with Yakovenko eating a chocolate bar. “They’ve got an informer,” Yakovenko explained. “They were going to string him up right away, but Mikhailova – remember her? – insisted that they follow all the proper procedures and have a trial. So Liliya here was awarded the fifteen-mile walk to fetch you.”

Kuznetsky groaned.

“Breakfast?” asked Yakovenko, holding out a chocolate bar.

 

It was a beautiful spring morning, a bright sun warming the air and flooding the eyes with fresh colours. Swiveling his head around, Kuznetsky couldn’t find a single wisp of cloud in the sky.

He was sitting on a piece of rubble waiting for the trial to begin. He’d given Morisov half an hour to put together the evidence, and it seemed like longer. He opened his pocket watch and was caught as usual by the beauty of the face that stared out of the photograph inside the lid. Anna, he called her, but he had no idea what her real name was. The only thing he knew about her was that the man who’d carried her picture had died in a ditch outside Lepel, with both hands vainly trying to stop the hole where his throat had been.

It was almost eleven. “Grigory,” he shouted.

“Ready,” Morisov shouted back. “Bring out the accused,” he said to Mikhailova, who stood holding a pitchfork.

The man was brought out. He was about thirty, with a broad face that seemed ill at ease with his emaciated body. His face was covered in red welts; obviously not everyone had been prepared to wait for the proper authorities. He was clearly terrified.

The same old scene, Kuznetsky thought. The same circle of cottages, the same ring of onlookers, eyes bright with fear and lack of food. The crimes had changed, and the names of the criminals. Counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs, kulak profiteers, Nazi informers. His duty was the same. Liquidation. He listened to Morisov.

“… the accused was seen entering and leaving the Fascist administrative headquarters in Polotsk. That afternoon a Nazi punishment detail arrived here, where they immediately discovered a clearing sown and cultivated against their orders by Comrade Poznyakov. After piling the clearing with loose branches and setting fire to it, they hanged Comrade Poznyakov, his wife, and two children. The accused returned later that day, feigning ignorance …”

Why had he come back? Kuznetsky asked himself. What stupidity.

The accused sat on the ground, his head bowed, his right arm twitching. Kuznetsky wondered which of the stock explanations it would be.

Morisov had finished and was now joking with one of the village women. The other partisans looked bored; they’d seen this play too many times before. “Do you still deny collaboration?” Kuznetsky asked.

The man spoke without raising his head, a torrent of words. “I had to do it. They have my daughter in the brothel at Polotsk. She’s only eleven and they promised to let her go. I only informed on Poznyakov, no one else …”

The rush abated.

“I find the accused guilty as charged,” Kuznetsky said. “Have the straws been drawn?” he asked Morisov.

“Yes.”

Young Maslov walked forward, pulled the accused to his feet, and half dragged him off between two cottages. Why, Kuznetsky wondered, do we still have this need to execute in private? Who was the privacy for – the victim or the executioner?

The shot echoed through the village, silencing the birds for a few seconds. Kuznetsky walked over to the group of villagers.

“You’ll be better off in Vaselivichi,” he told them, but they knew better.

“Poznyakov wasn’t the only one who sowed a clearing,” they told him.

“Stenkin wasn’t a bad man,” one muttered. “He was right; he could have turned in the lot of us.”

* * *

Sheslakov arrived early at his Frunze Street office and found the NKVD messenger waiting outside his door with file in hand. He signed for it in triplicate, ordered his usual three cups of coffee from his secretary, and settled himself behind his desk. While he waited he studied the photograph that came with the file. Did the man look American or did he think that only because he knew he was American? Perhaps it was the half-amused expression on the face, not a common feature in NKVD portraiture. He put it to one side as the coffee arrived; faces were Fyedorova’s speciality, not his.

The man’s real name was Jack Patrick Smith; Yakov Kuznetsky was a literal translation of the first and last names. He’d been born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1900 to second-generation Anglo-Irish immigrants. His father had been a cop and his mother a seamstress. There had been no other children.

Jack had joined the U.S. Army in 1918 – “to see the world” he’d told his first Soviet interrogator – and had been posted to one of the battalions used in the American intervention. In August of that year his battalion was guarding the Suchan mines near Vladivostok, the only source of coal for the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian, a footnote helpfully pointed out. For several weeks the Americans and the local population had gotten on well, but when the Revolution reached the area the Americans sided with the Whites and the mining community with the Reds. The Americans occupied the mines. One day one of their officers was shot, and the Americans went out looking for a culprit. Smith and another man, O’Connell, were sent to search the house of a miner who lived some way from the village.

They didn’t come back.

The Americans assumed they’d been captured by Red partisans and offered to exchange two arrested miners. They didn’t believe it when the Reds told them Smith was not a prisoner, so a meeting was arranged between him and the American commander on neutral ground. Smith told him that O’Connell had attacked the Russian miner’s daughter and that he’d shot and killed O’Connell. Smith told his commander he’d joined the Revolution and that was all there was to it.

Sheslakov put down the file, took the handbook of Siberian flora off the second cup of coffee, and watched the steam escape like a smoke signal. An apparently ordinary American boy “joining the Revolution,” just like that. It didn’t bode altogether well. The Mongols had always slaughtered deserters on the grounds that they’d shown they could never be trusted. Still, he mused, the current condition of Mongolia didn’t say much for their judgment.

Sheslakov went back to the file.

After the Revolution, Smith – now Kuznetsky – had been thoroughly investigated. He’d come out clean, and since he’d already proved himself with the partisans, commanding his own group in the Chita area for over a year, he’d been snapped up by the Cheka in Irkutsk. Since then it had been all promotions and special assignments: head of the Chita NKVD 1931–34, commissar attached to special anti-kulak forces in the Saratov area, the West Ukraine, and the Crimea, 1934–37, administrative adviser in Spain 1937–39. He’d been sent back to the Far East in 1939 to a post in the Commissariat attached to Zhukov’s General Staff, had still been there when the Far Eastern divisions were redeployed on the Moscow Front in November 1941. Finally, he’d volunteered for partisan duty and been parachuted into Belorussia in May 1942 as a replacement brigade commissar. For the last six months he’d been commanding the brigade, as the previous commander had been killed and not replaced.

Why, Sheslakov wondered, would a man with Kuznetsky’s glittering record volunteer for partisan duty? The noble-gesture theory didn’t fit with the rest of his career. Had he been trying to recreate his idealistic youth? And why, in twenty years of promotions, had he never gotten himself a position in Moscow? It wouldn’t have been difficult if he’d wanted one. But he hadn’t, and that was unusual.

Sheslakov took the fauna handbook off the third cup and took a sip. In all other respects the man was perfect, and choosing a more difficult life was no indication of disloyalty. The reverse, some would say. He lit his first cigarette of the day, watched the smoke wafting upward, then reached for the telephone.

He was on his third call when Fyedorova arrived. He passed her the photograph without speaking, and she took it across to the window.

Fyedorova was his “administrative assistant,” and had been since the beginning of the war. She was ten years older than Sheslakov, a small, thin woman who had worked for the GRU since its founding. Fyedorova drank to excess, cared nothing for authority, and did next to no work. Her only function, which both she and Sheslakov found self-justifying, was to act as his sounding board. For this she was perfectly equipped. Her intelligence was as purely psychological as his was purely logical; she had a wisdom, an insight into people, which he found as vital as it was irritating.

“First reaction?” he asked as he put down the phone.

“A wild card,” she replied, pinning the photograph to the wall opposite her chair.

“Try this one,” he said, passing across a picture of a young, dark-haired woman.

Fyedorova stared at it for some time. “This one tells me nothing,” she said finally, “and that’s unusual.”

“A good start,” Sheslakov murmured. “Put it up with the other one and I’ll tell you who they are and what I have in mind for them.”

He went through his plan, clarifying his own appreciation of it in the process.

“Ingenious,” she said when he’d finished. “But you know that.”

She looked up again at the two faces, both with the half-smile, as if they were looking at the same thing. “Even the best play …”

“Depends on good acting,” he completed drily.

“And one of our two leading actors has been forced on us by circumstance. Her file is about as useful as the people who wrote it.”

“I’ve got Nikolai trying to trace the man who recommended her recruitment. Luerhsen, Josef. According to her file, he’s in Moscow, but his file’s disappeared.”

She was still staring at the photographs. “Neither of them is Russian,” she said. “Zhdanov won’t like that.”

“Zhdanov will like the alternative even less. Let’s get the script right first, then worry about the actors.”

He picked up the phone again and, after some playful banter with the switchboard girl, whose name he kept forgetting, was put through to Sergei Yanovsky, an old friend and the head of the GRU’s German section.

“I need to talk to you, Sergei Ivanovich.”

“I can’t make it today or tomor—”

“First Priority. How about twenty minutes?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I must remember that for the bread queue,” Fyedorova said. “I assume you want me here.”

“Yes, we have a long day ahead. Yanovsky is only the first.” He picked up the phone again and made three more appointments, two in his office and one at a research institute outside the city. He’d barely put the phone down when Yanovsky arrived. The two men embraced.

“Right,” Sheslakov said, sitting down and twirling his jade letter opener. “All you know of the German atomic program.”

Yanovsky looked surprised for a moment. “There’s none