The Russia House (48 page)

‘Do you mind telling me why?’

I had not been admitted to the inmost secrets of the Bluebird material, but I knew that if I ever had been I would not have been able to make head or tail of them. But conscientious Ned had taken himself to night-school. He had sat at the feet of our in-house boffins and lunched our grandest defence scientists at the Athenaeum in order to bone up.

‘Interface,’ he said with contempt. ‘Mutually assured bedlam. We track their toys. They track ours. We watch each other’s archery contests without either of us knowing which targets the other side is aiming at. If they’re aiming for London, will they hit Birmingham? What’s error? What’s deliberate? Who’s approaching zero-CEP?’ He caught my bewilderment and was pleased with himself. ‘We watch them lob their ICBMs into the Kamchatka peninsula. But can they lob them down a Minuteman silo? We don’t know and they don’t. Because the big stuff on either side has never been tested under war conditions. The test trajectories are not the trajectories they’ll use when the fun starts. The earth, God bless her, is not a perfect globe. How can she be at her age? Her density varies. So does the old girl’s gravitational pull when things fly over her, like missiles and warheads. Enter bias. Our targeteers try to compensate for it in their calibrations. Goethe tried. They pour in data from earth-watch satellites, and perhaps they succeed better than Goethe did. Perhaps they don’t. We won’t know till the blessed balloon goes up, and nor will they, because you can only try the real thing once.’ He stretched luxuriously as if the topic pleased him. ‘So the camps divide. The hawks cry, “The Sovs are pinpoint! They can knock the smile off the arse of a fly at ten thousand miles!” And all the doves can reply is, “
We
don’t know what the Sovs can do, and the Sovs don’t know what the Sovs can do. And nobody who doesn’t know whether his gun works or not is going to shoot first. It’s the uncertainty that keeps us honest,” say the doves. But that is not an argument that satisfies the literal American mind, you see, because the literal American mind does not like to grapple with fuzzy concepts or grand visions. Not at its literal field level. And what Goethe was saying was an even larger heresy. He was saying that the uncertainty was all there was. Which I rather agree with. So the hawks hated him and the doves had a ball and hanged themselves from the chandelier.’ He drank again. ‘If Goethe had only backed the pinpoint boys instead, everything would have been fine,’ he said reprovingly.

‘And the shopping list?’ I asked him again.

He peered whimsically into his glass. ‘The targeting of one side, my dear Palfrey, is based on that side’s assumptions about the other side. And vice versa.
Ad infinitum.
Do we harden our silos? If the enemy can’t hit them, why should we bother? Do we superharden them – even if we know how – at a cost of billions? We’re already doing so, as a matter of fact, though it’s not much sung about. Or do we protect them imperfectly with SDI at a cost of more billions? Depends what our prejudices are and who signs our pay cheque. Depends whether we’re manufacturers or taxpayers. Do we put our rockets on trains or autobahns or park them in country lanes, which happens to be this month’s flavour? Or do we say it’s all junk anyway, so to hell with it?’

‘So is it ending or beginning?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘When did it ever end? Turn on your television set, what do you see? The leaders of both sides hugging each other. Tears in their eyes. Looking more like each other every day.
Hooray, it’s all over!
Bollocks. Listen to the insiders and you realise the picture hasn’t altered by a brush-stroke.’

‘And if I turn my television off? What will I see then?’

He had ceased to smile. Indeed his good face was more serious than I had ever seen it before, though his anger – if such it was – seemed to be directed at no one but himself.

‘You’ll see
us
. Hiding behind our grey screens. Telling each other we keep the peace.’

17

The elusive truth that Ned was speaking of came out slowly and in a series of distorted perceptions, which is generally the case in our secret overworld.

At six p.m. Barley was seen to ‘exit’ the VAAP offices, as our screens now insisted on advising us, and there was a flurry of apprehension that he might be drunk, for Zapadny was a drinking buddy and a farewell vodka with him was likely to be just that. He emerged, Zapadny with him. They embraced fulsomely on the doorstep, Zapadny flushed and a little excitable in his movements and Barley rather rigid, hence the watchers’ worry that he was drunk, and their rather odd decision to photograph him – as if by freezing the moment they might somehow sober him up. And since this is the last photograph of him on the file, you may imagine how much attention has been paid to it. Barley has Zapadny in his arms, and there is strength to their embrace, at least on Barley’s side. In my imagination, if no one else’s, it is as if Barley is holding the poor fellow up in order to give him the courage to keep his half of the bargain; as if he is literally breathing courage into him. And the pink is weird. VAAP is a former school on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street in the centre of Moscow. It was built, I guess, at the turn of the century, with large windows and a plaster façade. And this plaster was painted in that year a light pink, which in the photograph is transformed to a flaming orange, presumably by the last rays of a red sun. The entwined men are thus caught in an unholy scarlet halo like a red flash. One of the watchers even gained the entrance hall on the pretext of visiting the cafeteria, and tried to achieve the reverse shot. But a tall man stood in his way, watching the scene on the pavement. Nobody has identified him. At the news-stand, a second man, also tall, is drinking from a mug, but not with much conviction for his eyes too are turned to the two embracing figures outside.

The watchers took no note of the scores of people who had passed in and out of the VAAP building during the two hours Barley had been in the place, how could they? They had no idea whether the visitors had come to buy copyrights or secrets.

Barley returned to his hotel where he had a drink in the bar with a bunch of publishing cronies, among them Henziger, who was able to confirm, to London’s relief, that Barley was not drunk – to the contrary, that he was calm and in thoughtful spirits.

Barley did mention in passing that he was expecting a phone call from one of Zapadny’s outriders – ‘We’re still trying to stitch up the Trans-Siberian thing.’ And at about seven p.m. he suddenly confessed himself ravenous, so Henziger and Wicklow took him through to the Japanese restaurant, together with a couple of jolly girls from Simon & Schuster whom Wicklow was counting on for light relief to ease Barley’s passage to his evening rendezvous.

Over dinner Barley sparkled so brightly that the girls tried to persuade him to come back to the National with them, where a party was being thrown by a group of American publishers. Barley replied that he had a date but might come on afterwards if it didn’t run too long.

Exactly at eight p.m. by Wicklow’s watch, Barley was summoned to the telephone and took the call in the restaurant, not five yards from where the party was sitting. Wicklow and Henziger strained, as a matter of routine, to catch his words. Wicklow recalls hearing ‘That’s all that matters to me.’ Henziger thinks he heard ‘We’ve got a deal’ but it might have been ‘
not
a deal’ or even ‘not yet real’.

Either way, Barley was cross when he resumed his seat and complained to Henziger that the bastards were still holding out for too much money, which Henziger regarded more as a sign of his internal stress than of any great concern for the Trans-Siberian project.

Quarter of an hour later the phone rang again and Barley returned from his conversation smiling. ‘We’re on,’ he told Henziger jubilantly. ‘Sealed, signed and delivered. They never go back on a handshake.’ At which Henziger and Wicklow broke out clapping and Henziger remarked that ‘we could do with a few more of
them
in Moscow.’

It seems not to have occurred to either man that Barley had never before shown so much enthusiasm for a publishing agreement. But then what were they supposed to be looking for, except the night’s great coup?

Barley’s dinner conversation was later painstakingly reconstructed, without result. He was talkative but not excitable. His subject was jazz, his idol was Slim Gaillard. The great ones were always outlaws, he maintained. Jazz was nothing if not protest. Even its own rules had to be broken by the real improvisers, he said.

And everyone agreed with him, yes, yes, long live dissent, long live the individual over the grey men! Except nobody saw it that way. And again, why should they?

At nine-ten p.m., with less than two hours to kill, Barley announced that he would stretch out in his room for a bit, he had letters to write and business to clear up. Both Wicklow and Henziger offered to give him a hand, for they had orders not to leave him to himself if they could avoid it. But Barley declined their offers and they could not insist.

So Henziger took up his post in the next-door room and Wicklow placed himself in the lobby while Barley stretched out, though in reality he cannot have stretched out even for a second, for what he accomplished verges on the heroic.

Five letters were traced to this short span, not to mention two telephone calls to England, one to each of his children, both monitored within the United Kingdom and bounced through to Grosvenor Square but neither of operational consequence. Barley was merely concerned to catch up with family news and enquire after his granddaughter, aged four. He insisted she be brought to the telephone, but she was too shy or too tired to talk to him. When his daughter Anthea asked him how his love-life was, he replied ‘complete’, which was held to be an unusual sort of reply, but then the circumstances were not usual.

Ned alone remarked that Barley had said nothing about returning to England the next day, but Ned was by now a voice in the wilderness and Clive was seriously considering taking him off the case altogether.

Barley also wrote two shorter letters, one to Henziger, one to Wicklow. And since they were not tampered with, so far as the laboratories could afterwards determine, and since – even more remarkable – the hotel delivered them to the correct room numbers promptly at eight o’clock next morning, it was assumed that these letters were in some way part of the package that Barley had negotiated while he was inside the VAAP building.

The letters advised the two men that if they left the country quietly that day, taking Mary Lou with them, no harm would come to them. Barley had a warm word for each.

‘Wickers, there’s a real publisher in you. Go for it!’

And for Henziger, ‘Jack, I hope this won’t mean you take premature retirement in Salt Lake City. Tell them you never trusted me anyway. I didn’t trust me, so why should you?’

No homilies, no apt quotations from his large, untidy store. Barley, it seemed, was coping very well without the assistance of other people’s wisdom.

At ten o’clock, he left the hotel accompanied by Henziger only, and they had themselves dropped on the northern outskirts of the town where Cy and Paddy were once more waiting in the safe truck. This time Paddy was driving. Henziger sat beside him and Barley got in the back with Cy, slipped off his coat and let Cy put on the microphone harness and give him the latest operational intelligence: that Goethe’s plane from Saratov had arrived in Moscow on time; and that a figure answering Goethe’s description had been observed entering Igor’s apartment block forty minutes ago.

Soon afterwards, lights had come up in the windows of the target flat.

Cy then handed Barley two books, one a paperback copy of
From Here to Eternity
which contained the shopping list, the other a fatter volume, leather-bound, which was a concealment device containing a sound-baffler to be activated by pulling open the front cover. Barley had played with one in London and was proficient in its use.

His body microphones were tuned to defeat the impulses of the device, but normal wall microphones were not. The disadvantage of the baffler was also known to him. Its presence in the room was detectable. If Igor’s flat was microphoned, then the listeners would at once be aware that a baffler was being used. This risk had been passed by both London and Langley as acceptable.

The other risk had not been considered, namely that the device might fall into the hands of the opposition. It was still in the prototype stage and a small fortune and several years of research had been lavished on its development.

At ten-fifty-four p.m., just as Barley was leaving the safe truck, he handed Paddy an envelope and said, ‘This is for Ned personally in case anything happens to me.’ Paddy slipped the envelope in his inside jacket pocket. He noticed that it was a fat envelope and, so far as he could see in the half-light, it was not addressed.

The most lively account of Barley’s walk to the foot of the apartment block was provided not by the military reportese of Paddy, still less by the Haig-speak of Cy, but in the boisterous tones of his good friend Jack Henziger who escorted him to the entrance. Barley did not utter, he said. Neither did Jack. They’d no wish to be identified as foreigners.

‘We walked alongside of each other out of step,’ Henziger said. ‘He has this long step, mine’s short. It bothered me we couldn’t keep step. The apartment house was one of these brick monsters they have out there with like a mile of concrete round them, and we kept on walking without getting anywhere. It’s like one of those dreams, I thought. You keep on running but you don’t make any distance. Very hot, the air. Sweaty. I’m sweating, but Barley’s cool. He was collected, no question. He looked great. He looked straight into my eyes. He wished me a lot of luck. He was at peace with himself. I felt it.’

Shaking hands, Henziger nevertheless had a momentary impression that Barley was angry about something. Perhaps angry against Henziger, for now in the half-dark he seemed determined to avoid Henziger’s eye.

‘Then I thought, Maybe he’s mad at Bluebird for getting him into this. Then I thought, Maybe he’s mad at all of us, but too polite to say it. Like he was being very British somehow, very laid back, very understated, keeping it all inside.’