The Rocket Man (27 page)

At first Nihal didn't understand; it was too horrible to take in. The words made sense, but he couldn't relate them to reality at all. Then all the strength seemed to drain out of his legs; he sat down on the edge of the sofa bed. He realised that he had not taken the warning signs seriously enough; now he couldn't pretend to himself any longer that this was some kind of game. He asked, still unable to believe it, wanting to be sure there could be no mistake, ‘You mean Dmitry Gavrilov is dead?'

The inspector was cool and impersonal. ‘No; my information is that he arrived at the hospital in a moribund state and is undergoing emergency surgery.'

Nihal found that he could say nothing. He could imagine Dmitry, at this very moment, laid out on the operating table; he wondered if there was any chance… and, oh God, somebody would have to tell Katie. He asked if he could smoke; it was ridiculous, of course, to ask for permission in his own apartment, but that was the effect these policemen had. He said, ‘I suppose they could have been after Gavrilov when they came here tonight. But that doesn't make sense. But it wouldn't have been Bradman they would have been after. They killed him instead of me; I suppose that's an obvious mistake.'

‘You mean that someone had reason to kill you?'

‘It's possible they wanted to stop me writing a particular story.'

‘Would you tell us about it?'

Nihal said, ‘I suppose I have to. Do I have to do it tonight? This is rather a shock.'

The inspector said, ‘Well, I imagine you may be wanting police protection. I think you should tell us all about it now, don't you?'

The inspector questioned him for over two hours, listening intently to everything Nihal said, and writing rapidly in his notebook. At one point he broke off and asked if he could use the phone; he seemed to be asking someone else to come. Then the inspector said that if what Nihal said was true, it was clearly a matter for the intelligence services, and someone would be joining them shortly.

An Austrian intelligence agent turned up a little later. He told Nihal he would be frank with him, and that it was very unlikely that they would ever clear up the crime. ‘In these cases, you must realise that it is most unusual to ever get the killer. We are dealing with a professional. There is nothing to link them personally with the crime. The people who hire them never know their true identity and they do not know who they are working for. Usually they have two, three identities at their disposal, passports, and so on; they know all the tricks. It is not unknown for these people to have plastic surgery to change their appearance. We hope of course to get a description of this assassin from Dr Gavrilov if he lives, but by then he will probably have left the country.'

The inspector shrugged. ‘Still, we must do what we can. Is there anything else you can tell us which you think may be of help?'

‘No,' said Nihal. ‘I suppose I will have to contact Bradman's family. Oh God, what will they think? I suppose in a way I am responsible. I should have warned him.'

‘Well, you've got a story out if it, if you've the heart to write it,' said the inspector on the way out. ‘If you're quick you can get something in the morning papers.'

Dmitry woke sometime in the night. The ward was in darkness, except for the light thrown by the individual lamps above the beds. The darkness and silence were tangible, oppressive. He heard the sound of something ticking near him; it was too slow to be a clock; the sound irritated him. Eventually he realised it was the drip.

His mouth was unbearably dry; the drugs they had given him must have worn off a little, because now he was aware of pain, a deep burning which seemed to involve his whole left side. Breathing was painful and difficult, despite the oxygen. Nobody came to him; he supposed they had no need, they had the monitors. He could not sleep properly; he kept seeing, over and over, the assassin entering the room, the glint of the light on the metal of the gun, the horror of looking down into the black barrel. He still did not understand why he wasn't dead.

The door to the ward opened and closed; he saw the light from the corridor shine in. He heard muffled footsteps and thought someone might be coming, but no-one did. He must have dozed on and off; the night seemed interminable. It would have been all right if he had been able to stop thinking, but incoherent chains of thought kept breaking through the muzziness in his head. What frightened him most was the fact that they might still think it was not too late to silence him. Everything seemed ruined; his term in Vienna, his relationship with Katie, his health, perhaps his career. He felt utterly alone.

Towards morning something woke him again. A doctor, a man he hadn't seen before, was fiddling with his drip. For some reason this made him feel uneasy; in the dim light he tried to make out the man's features more clearly. He asked, ‘Who are you? Where is the other doctor?'

‘He's not on duty. There'll be someone coming to see you in the morning. That's done now; try to sleep.' The man went away. Dmitry thought; what could be easier than to send someone into the hospital, dressed us a doctor, to put poison in the drip. In panic, he called out, despite the pain this caused him. He called several times; they must have heard the desperation in his voice. In a few minutes, the doctor came, and a nurse; without even saying anything to Dmitry, the doctor took his left arm, put a band round the upper arm and turned the arm over to expose the elbow. ‘Make your hand into a fist,' he said; when Dmitry did not respond, the doctor took the hand and roughly pressed the fingers together. ‘Like this,' he said. ‘We are giving you something now to help you sleep.' The nurse passed him the syringe.

Dmitry said, trying to express himself clearly, ‘What are you giving me? I don't want it.' He felt the prick of the needle in his arm and the pain of the fluid being injected. For a moment he thought he would be sick. A feeling of light-headedness came over him; the bed suddenly felt very soft; he was sinking into it. Little fragments of thoughts broke off and whirled round in all directions. The green walls spun around very slowly, and in the distance, so far off as to be hardly visible, a small squat figure which was death crouched behind a hedge.

Nihal had spent a wretched night. In the early morning he finally rung the hospital and established that Dmitry was still alive. Later he tried to ring Katie but no-one answered; he assumed that she might be at the hospital. Nihal didn't know what to do.

At about midday he went up to the International Centre and took the lift to the twentieth floor. The area round Dmitry's office had been taped off and the police were at work. Nihal found Hilde having coffee with one of the other secretaries in the office. She was very upset and had obviously been crying.

Hilde had spoken to the police earlier. She told them about the call she had taken yesterday morning; the man had had a faint accent, but she couldn't say what, North American, Australian; she was not very good at placing accents and her conversation had been brief. She said, ‘I shouldn't have told him anything. Dmitry told me off for it; I was angry, I was getting sick of his paranoia.' Her face crumpled. ‘Obviously it wasn't paranoia at all.'

Nihal went and spoke to the IAEA press officer, Anil Kumar, who was very helpful. The reports from the hospital that morning had been good; Gavrilov's condition was described as stable and it was anticipated that he would make a good recovery. Anil knew quite a lot about what had happened; he had been up there shortly after the shooting and had seen Gavrilov carried out on the stretcher. He had spoken to the man who had tried to help Katie and had gone to fetch Kaisler. He told Nihal that the assassin had left behind his gun and gloves; this might help the police. The gun had a silencer; nobody had heard the shots. There was no clue as to how he had got into the building undetected.

Anil said that he was also suspicious of Kulagin, the man who had been in Gavrilov's office. He was employed as a translator but Nihal might as well know, because the rumour was circulating everywhere, that it was said that Kulagin was KGB.

The Russians had made an enormous fuss. It was a diplomatic incident. The Ambassador had complained in the strongest terms about lack of decent security arrangements, both to the UN and to the Austrian Government. The security people were downstairs with Kaisler now being hauled over the coals. It had emerged that Gavrilov had been to the UN security staff two or three weeks ago and had been given no more help than the standard photocopied sheets of paper on personal security precautions. This was unforgivable.

Since the UN building had extraterritorial status the police had had to be formally asked in to investigate. Anil didn't know if they had any leads. He showed Nihal the Viennese papers, spread out over his desk; they reported only the bald facts under headlines such as ‘Russian atom scientist shot.' Nihal sat and read through them. One of the papers mentioned that Gavrilov had a mistress who was married to another UN employee but did not name her. Anil gave him the official statement; it simply condemned the incident and said it had nothing at all to do with the work this respected scientist had been carrying out for the IAEA.

Anil's phone kept ringing; he answered then passed callers over to his assistant to read out the statement. He told Nihal that all the journalists were asking about espionage. ‘They are obsessed with spying,' he said. ‘Just because it's Vienna, he is a Russian and because of the nuclear angle. I tell you I am going crazy here.'

Nihal went back upstairs towards Dmitry's office. He thought how perfectly the building had been designed for an assassination. The curved shape of the building meant you could not see along the corridors for more than ten or fifteen yards and made it easy for the assassin to have entered the office without being noticed. Opposite the door to Dmitry's office was a link between the two corridors which ran along either side of the building, providing four escape routes. Nihal thought about it carefully. The assassin would have had to check that Hilde was not there. That had been easy; he had telephoned earlier, from an internal phone, to check their movements. He must have known he had to choose exactly the right time; he would have known he had to be quick. Still, it didn't take more than a minute to open a door, fire the shots, get out again. The assassin could have gone into her office and shut the door, entered Dmitry's office by the connecting door. Probably he had been interrupted, shot Kulagin, dropped the gun, and got out quickly. It was well timed, too; there were as many as 3,000 people leaving the building at the end of the day, and even if the alarm had been raised it would have been impossible to stop and question everyone.

Nihal looked at his watch. He walked down the corridor. It took only a few seconds to reach the lifts. This is where he would have been sweating, thought Nihal, waiting for the lift to arrive; it could take a few minutes at that time of day when the lifts were busy. Nihal timed the whole operation, from leaving the lift to getting out of the main entrance. The assassin could have been out of the building within a few minutes of the shooting. He must have taken the chance that the alarm would have been raised; that's why he had to leave the gun, in case they were searching people leaving the building.

It was a brazen operation. The man would have had to have the most immense self-confidence. He must have entered the building earlier in the day, and spent some hours in the building. He would have had to have got hold of a pass that gave him permission to enter. He couldn't get in as a visitor, because visitors had to check through the airport-style security at the front entrance. Nihal as an accredited journalist had a permanent pass and could get in unchecked; in fact, it had always occurred to him that this was a weakness in the security system. He took the lift to the press bureau on the ground floor.

Lopez Varga, who dealt with press accreditation, looked irritated when he saw Nihal coming. He said, ‘Can I help you? I'm afraid I haven't got much time. We're incredibly busy. The police have asked us to check all the journalists accredited to us because of this business last night.'