He kissed her on the lips, the way it used to be. And it was as sweet as it had ever been. She rose and walked away across the clearing. When she reached the fringe of the trees, he called after her.

“Valentina, what is in this?” He held up the package.

She paused and turned.

“My job,” she said, “is to prepare the verbatim transcripts of the Politburo meetings, one for each member. And the digests for the candidate members. From the tape recordings. That is a copy of the recording of the meeting of June tenth.”

Then she was gone into the trees. Munro sat on the tombstone and looked down at the package.

“Bloody hell,” he said.

CHAPTER FOUR

ADAM MUNRO sat in a locked room in the main building of the British Embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment and listened to the last sentences of the tape recording on the machine in front of him. The room was safe from any chance of electronic surveillance by the Russians, which was why he had borrowed it for a few hours from the head of Chancery.

“... goes without saying that this news does not pass outside those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”

The voice of Maxim Rudin died away, and the tape hissed on the machine, then stopped. Munro switched it off. He leaned back and let out a long, low whistle.

If it was true, it was bigger than anything Oleg Penkovsky had brought over, twenty years before. The story of Penkovsky was folklore in the SIS, the CIA, and, most of all, in the bitterest memories of the KGB. He was a brigadier general in the GRU, with access to the highest information, who, disenchanted with the Kremlin hierarchy, had approached first the Americans and then the British with an offer to provide information.

The Americans had turned him down, suspecting a trap. The British had accepted him, and for two and a half years “run” him until he was trapped by the KGB, exposed, tried, and shot. In his time he had brought over a golden harvest of secret information, but most of all at the time of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In that month the world had applauded the exceptionally skillful handling by President John F. Kennedy of the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev over the matter of the planting of Soviet missiles in Cuba. What the world had not known was that the exact strengths and weaknesses of the Russian leader were already in the Americans’ hands, thanks to Penkovsky.

When it was finally over, the Soviet missiles were out of Cuba, Khrushchev was humbled, Kennedy was a hero, and Penkovsky was under suspicion. He was arrested in November. Within a year, after a show trial, he was dead. That same winter of 1963 Kennedy, too, died, just thirteen months after his triumph. And within two years Khrushchev had fallen, toppled by his own colleagues, ostensibly because of his failure in the grain policy, in fact because his adventurism had scared the daylights out of them. The democrat, the despot, and the spy had all left the stage. But even Penkovsky had never got right inside the Politburo.

Munro took the spool off the machine and carefully rewrapped it. The voice of Professor Yakovlev was, of course, unknown to him, and most of the tape was of him reading his report. But in the discussion following the professor, there were ten voices, and three at least were identifiable. The low growl of Rudin was well enough known; t

he high tones of Vishnayev, Munro had heard before, watching televised speeches by the man to Party congresses; and the bark of Marshal Kerensky he had heard at May Day celebrations, as well as on film and tape.

His problem, when he took the tape back to London for voiceprint analysis, as he knew he must, was how to cover his source. He knew if he admitted to the secret rendezvous in the forest, following the typed note in the bathing towel, the question would be asked: “Why you, Munro? How did she know you?” It would be impossible to avoid that question, and equally impossible to answer it. The only solution was to devise an alternative source, credible and uncheckable.

He had been in Moscow only six weeks, but his unsuspected mastery of even slang Russian had paid a couple of dividends. At a diplomatic reception in the Czech Embassy two weeks earlier, he had been in conversation with an Indian attaché when he had heard two Russians in muttered conversation behind him. One of them had said, “He’s a bitter bastard. Thinks he should have had the top slot.”

He had followed the gaze of the two who had spoken, and noted they were observing and presumably talking about a Russian across the room. The guest list later confirmed the man was Anatoly Krivoi, personal aide and right-hand man to the Party theoretician, Vishnayev. So what had he got to be bitter about? Munro checked his files and came up with Krivoi’s history. He had worked in the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee; shortly after the nomination of Petrov to the top job, Krivoi had appeared on Vishnayev’s staff. Quit in disgust? Personality conflict with Petrov? Bitter at being passed over? They were all possible, and all interesting to an intelligence chief in a foreign capital.

Krivoi, he mused. Maybe. Just maybe. He, too, would have access, at least to Vishnayev’s copy of the transcript, maybe even to the tape. And he was probably in Moscow; certainly his boss was. Vishnayev had been present when the East German Premier had arrived a week before.

“Sorry, Anatoly, you’ve just changed sides,” he said as he slipped the fat envelope into an inside pocket and took the stairs to see the head of Chancery.

“I’m afraid I have to go back to London with the Wednesday bag,” he told the diplomat. “It’s unavoidable, and it can’t wait.”

Chancery asked no questions. He knew Munro’s job and promised to arrange it. The diplomatic bag, which actually is a bag, or at least a series of canvas sacks, goes from Moscow to London every Wednesday and always on the British Airways flight, never Aeroflot. A Queen’s Messenger, one of that team of men who constantly fly around the world from London picking up embassy bags and who are protected by the insignia of the crown and greyhound, comes out from London for it. The very secret material is carried in a hard-frame dispatch box chained to the man’s left wrist; the more routine stuff in the canvas sacks, the Messenger personally checks into the aircraft’s hold. Once there, it is on British territory. But in the case of Moscow, the Messenger is accompanied by an embassy staffer.

The escort job is sought after, since it permits a quick trip home to London, a bit of shopping, and a chance of a good night out. The Second Secretary who lost his place in the rota that week was annoyed but asked no questions.

The following Wednesday, British Airways Airbus-300B lifted out of the new, post-1980 Olympics terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport and turned its nose toward London. By Munro’s side the Messenger, a short, dapper, ex-Army major, withdrew straight into his hobby, composing crossword puzzles for a major newspaper.

“You have to do something to while away these endless airplane flights,” he told Munro. “We all have our in-flight hobbies.”

Munro grunted and looked back over the wing tip at the receding city of Moscow. Somewhere down there in the sundrenched streets, the woman he loved was working and moving among people she had betrayed. She was on her own right out in the cold.

The country of Norway, seen in isolation from its eastern neighbor, Sweden, looks like a great prehistoric fossilized human hand stretching down from the Arctic toward Denmark and Britain. It is a right hand, palm downward to the ocean, a stubby thumb toward the east clenched into the forefinger. Up the crack between thumb and forefinger lies Oslo, its capital.

To the north the fractured forearm bones stretch up to Tromsø and Hammerfest, deep in the Arctic, so narrow that in places there are only forty miles from the sea to the Swedish border. On a relief map, the hand looks as if it has been smashed by some gigantic hammer of the gods, splintering bones and knuckles into thousands of particles. Nowhere is this breakage more marked than along the west coast, where the chopping edge of the hand would be.

Here the land is shattered into a thousand fragments, and between the shards the sea has flowed in to form a million creeks, gullies, bays, and gorges—winding, narrow defiles where the mountains fall sheer to glittering water. These are the fjords, and it was from the headwaters of these that a race of men came out a thousand years ago who were the best sailors ever to set keel to the water or sail to the wind. Before their age was over, they had sailed to Greenland and Iceland, conquered Ireland, settled Britain and Normandy, navigated as far as North America. They were the Vikings, and their descendants still live and fish along the fjords of Norway.

Such a man was Thor Larsen, sea captain and ship’s master, who strode that mid-July afternoon past the royal palace in the Swedish capital of Stockholm from his company’s head office back to his hotel. People tended to step aside for him; he was six feet three inches tall, broad as the pavements of the old quarter of the city, blue-eyed, and bearded. Being ashore, he was in civilian clothes, but he was happy, because he had reason to think, after visiting the head office of the Nordia Line, which now lay behind him along the Ship Quay, that he might soon have a new command.

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net