Season of Storm (42 page)

Prologue

The jet stood at some distance from the terminal building, engines quiet, its door open onto the steps that ran down to the tarmac. Near it, on the runway exit ramp, was parked a long black car. The two machines had been standing in these positions for half an hour, while men walked back and forth at intervals between them. Throughout there had been an unnatural silence: no one ran, no one shouted; if they spoke, their voices did not carry.

A grey-haired man in a nondescript coat came out of the plane and briskly down the steps to rejoin two that stood waiting by the car.

"This is it," he said quietly, and his two companions, in similar dress, turned to open the rear door of the car.

Now the first whisper of excitement breathed across the scene, for the man who got out of the back seat of the long car was not in the mould of the other three. As he stood beside them, short, thin and wiry, his tension was palpable. Beside the nondescript coats of his companions his leather jacket and creased trousers seemed incongruous, as did his obvious emotion.

His three escorts surrounded him, and at the aircraft four men appeared at the top of the steps. As though at a signal, these two groups started silently forward, across the tarmac and down the steps, and so measured was their motion that an alien being might have watched, fascinated, for this elaborate ritual of the coming together of eight to produce, perhaps, a ninth.

Simultaneously, at a distance of about five yards from each other, both parties stopped, and it then became obvious that a fourth man in the group from the plane also did not fit the mould of his three protectors. Easily the tallest of all and very thin, his broad gaunt frame was covered by a badly fitting suit, and his hair was shaved close, like a convict's. His eyes searched hungrily over the heads of his escort, though there was nothing to see in the fading light save grass and tarmac and, in the near distance, the large terminal building. In the far distance there were the lights of tall buildings, but it was impossible to say whether it was at these that he gazed.

Without apparent signal, the two waiting groups parted within themselves to allow each odd fourth man, slowly and hesitantly, to walk towards the centre of that empty space between them. The short man walked easily, his well-knit, wiry muscles giving him a smooth gait, but the big man held himself rigidly and walked stiffly, as though he saved himself from stumbling only by an effort of will.

There was no sign of salute as the two passed each other and moved towards the opposing groups without pause.

In that moment there was not a whisper, a breath of movement, from the waiting six. The motion of the two men, one jaunty, the other painstaking, seemed to require all the concentration of the watchers, until each group had been joined by a new fourth man.

Then a sudden burst of emotion electrified the atmosphere. Each group received its newcomer protectively, joyously, like a mother bear or a lioness with her lost cub, and drew him, quickly now, back to each respective den.

The blast of noise of the jet engines drowned out that of the car, and within moments the only evidence that the scene had taken place was their departing roar.

Chapter 1

"You what?" asked Harry Waller, his manner preoccupied, as he looked up at the girl leaning intently over his desk on the back bench of the newsroom of the
London Evening Herald.
 

He was not surprised to see Laddy Penreith waving the last edition of that evening's paper practically under his nose, because Harry Waller had been the news editor of the
Herald
for nearly seven years now and very little had the power to surprise him anymore. But he was interested, because he was always interested in the things that got particular people going, especially Laddy. In her three years on the paper he had grown used to her appearing in front of his desk every now and then, passionately demanding that something be said about an injustice or asking to be assigned to cover a story that interested her.
 

"What is it this time?" he began, and then he realised, and he smiled at the memory of how the story had broken just in time to catch the last edition.

"BUSNETSKY RELEASED" was the headline she was pointing to, all right, and he waited to hear why.

Laddy's name on her birth certificate and her by-line was Lucy Laedelia Penreith, but she had been Laddy as long as she could remember. It had suited her in the days when she had looked more like a boy than a girl, when she had worn torn shirts and grubby trousers, and raced along fences and climbed trees with the best of them. But she didn't look like a boy anymore. Now, at twenty-five, she was very much a woman—slim and full breasted, with "the longest legs in the newsroom"—and there were times when her dark eyes and full mouth made her almost beautiful.

This was not one of those times. When her "conscience was up," nobody noticed whether Laddy was beautiful or not. They only saw that her eyes were alight with the fires of passion and truth and that it seemed as though she would be consumed by them.

"Harry," she said, as he knew she would, "I've got to go on this story. You've got to let me cover Mischa Busnetsky's arrival." Her low voice had a faint transatlantic accent, and Harry Waller was conscious of being soothed by it. But he couldn't resist his little gibe. He threw down his pencil, leaned back and regarded her with the amused look she knew so well.

"You know, my love, when you get to be as old and jaded as I am, it's a great pleasure to see the young ones running around caring about Issues. Now why, I ask myself, has this one got our Laddy so concerned? Mmm?"

Laddy laughed. "What a liar you are, Harry. A less jaded man in this newsroom I do not know, but you say what you like. And you know perfectly well that I'm always interested in dissidents."

That was certainly true, but Mischa Busnetsky was much more than a dissident in Laddy's mind. Harry could not have said how he knew that, but he was as certain as if she'd said it aloud.

"Dear girl," he said, "as far as I can make out, you are interested in everything." Certainly, she had dedication, but Harry was trying to see if he could lead her off the topic, and Laddy laughed.

"Come on, Harry, someone's got to do it, with Brian away," she pressed, and her dark eyes lost their smile and willed him to say yes.

Harry Waller added this information to his mental file of what made Laddy Penreith tick. "Brian may be back in time," he said, for no other reason than to see her face fall.

"But he's bound to be in Brussels till tomorrow, isn't he?" she protested. "When is Busnetsky arriving?"

"We don't know," said Harry.

Laddy burst out, "Harry, you must have a very good idea!"

Of course, she would realise that he had read the national press-release bulletin and even that he had been the one to dash off the front-page story that afternoon, and he always had some information that was not going to be printed.

Abruptly Harry tired of his game. "He'll be staying the night in Zurich," he told her, "but the word's out he's flying straight on to London tomorrow. I'll call you when I get the word."

"Tomorrow!" Laddy breathed. "Thanks, Harry."

There was too much relief in her voice, and Harry's curiosity, already aroused, heightened.

"What—" he began, but she had already left him to go back to her own desk, and Harry shelved his curiosity and went back to the overnight report that he would be leaving for the night-duty reporter.

Harry blessed the powers that be for the timing of Busnetsky's release. The news had broken in time for the last edition of the evening papers, and now the morning papers would be scrambling for a new angle on what would otherwise be stale news. With luck, Busnetsky would arrive in England tomorrow in time for the early-afternoon edition of the
Herald.
Unless the newly-free man came up with something very newsworthy tomorrow evening, the mornings would be making do with "in-depth analyses" and backup stories again on Saturday.
 

Harry Waller checked the overnight report with a smile on his face and thought about Laddy Penreith's interest in Mikhail Busnetsky. He might have assigned her to cover the story without her asking, he reflected; it had been in his mind. With her strong background of involvement in her late father's interests, she was a natural choice.

Laddy had expressed an interest in Soviet affairs when she had been hired into the
Herald
newsroom from a smaller paper three years earlier. But the Russians were Brian March's exclusive domain, and he was not about to move over for the dark-eyed dedicated young woman who was a good enough reporter to be a threat to anyone—including, Harry reflected, himself.
 

Laddy had had to be satisfied with being among the general run of news gatherers for two and a half years, until Harry, recognizing that her brain and her nose for research were being wasted, had asked her to act as the paper's London expert on Israel.

But of course she still routinely covered other stories, and now Brian March was in Brussels covering the latest SALT talks impasse, and he could hardly complain—although he would, bitterly—if Laddy were assigned to cover an area that she had been so intimately involved with all her life.

Harry Waller threw the overnight list into his drawer and decided to go home. Brian March would be filing a backup story from Brussels tonight on the political inside of the Busnetsky release, and Harry would decide tomorrow where that would go, depending on how interesting it was to the man in the street. The rather uneducated man in the street, he amended mentally, and grimaced. In older days the full text of Brian's report would have gone on page two regardless, but stiff competition from what Harry called the "yellow" papers was inexorably forcing down the intellectual tone of what used to be an evening paper he was proud of. With passing contempt he cursed the
Herald'
s editor for his short-sightedness.
 

Harry put on his jacket in the empty, echoing newsroom. Tonight the paper seemed more to have died than to have been put to bed. But that was just his mood: he had been thinking of the lowered tone of the
Herald.
 

The light in the library was still on, so Laddy must be in there, researching Busnetsky's background. That was interesting. He would have thought her father's own papers would have been far more valuable than the library clippings of the last eight or ten years. Extremely interesting, unless she was looking for some particular piece of information.... Harry crossed to the library door.

A long tattered grey envelope lay on the desk, and he could read the upside-down "Busnetsky" scrawled in red across the back of it. Laddy's head was bent intently over the tiny pile of newsprint, her dark curls glossy in the yellow light.

"Slim pickings," Harry said, indicating the pile, and she looked up, her hand resting almost caressingly on the tiny column-wide piece of newsprint she was reading. It was from the
Times,
he could tell from the type style: the
Herald
library, like that of all newspapers, kept clippings from every London paper in its files.
 

"Very slim," she agreed, smiling at him, but she was preoccupied, her brown eyes were distant, and Harry filed away the information in his capacious brain that this story meant very much indeed to Laddy Penreith. Now, what special connection had her father had with Mikhail Busnetsky? As far as Harry knew, very little of Busnetsky's work had ever seen the light of day in the West, though it was a known fact that he was a writer.

"Don't work all night," he said, in a fatherly tone that was most unlike Harry Waller, but his brain was ticking over so rapidly he didn't notice.

"On this?" Laddy laughed, indicating the scanty pile of clippings that she had yet to read. "Another ten minutes at most." And she bent her head again, unconsciously dismissing him.