Read Online Bearpit by Brian Freemantle - Free Book Online

Politically was exactly how he was thinking: politically and beyond his father’s fragile eyrie. Time to shit or get off the pot. He said: ‘I would like to include something in tonight’s shipment.’
    â€˜A personal package?’
    Yuri no longer felt contempt for the man. If there were an emotion it was pity. He said: ‘Something addressed to my father …’ He paused again, deciding to offer the man a way out. He added: ‘Will you require it to be left unsealed, to be read?’
    â€˜No!’ said Solov. The rejection burst out in his eagerness to dissociate himself from any more unknown and unimagined dangers. ‘Our part of the pouch has to be completed by five,’ advised Solov, helpfully. He’d debated enough; he wanted the meeting over, to think.
    Yuri offered no explanation for what was a memorandum, not a letter. He presented it with absolutely correct formality, at the same time embarrassed that the phrasing were as if the person to whom he was communicating were not his father. Don’t invoke our relationship , he thought. Yuri’s arguments were so well formulated that it did not take him long and he was back at Solov’s office – again avoiding Ilena’s cubicle – with an hour to spare.
    Solov accepted the sealed envelope and hurried it into the larger leather package in which other parcels and letters were already secured against unauthorized interception during the journey to Moscow. The interruption had allowed the rezident to recover some of his composure and he was anxious, too, to recover something of what he considered was the proper superior-to-subordinate relationship with the other man. He said: ‘There’d better be the right sort of reaction to this.’
    There was.
    Because of Vasili Malik’s rank it was delivered within minutes of its arrival in Moscow, ahead of all the other pouch contents, and because of the source – and obvious sender – Malik opened it at once, initially believing in worried irritation that his son was improperly using a diplomatic communication channel. Which, technically, he was. But that was the briefest of Malik’s thoughts, just as quickly dismissed as irrelevant. The assessments and implications of what was apparently being planned in Afghanistan – a country for which he was supposed to be responsible – crowded in upon him, appalling him. There was initial and instinctive fury, which he subdued, not wanting his reasoning clouded by emotion. And there was a lot to reason out, beyond the immediate crisis.
    Malik personally issued and signed the cabled instructions to the Kabul rezidentura to abandon the gassing and poisoning and insisted that the rezident , Georgi Solov, acknowledge each section of the abandonment instructions to ensure that it was completely understood but more importantly to guarantee that no detail was overlooked. Still determined to be absolutely sure, Malik contacted – personally again – the Ministry of Defence and insisted upon duplicate orders being sent to the army, air force and spetsnaz units and acknowledged in the same manner as he demanded from the KGB personnel in Kabul.
    The preliminary planning – air transporting the gas and poison, for instance – made it inevitable that the GRU were already aware of most, if not all of the planning. Malik accepted that their knowledge would become complete by his involving the military in the cancellation plans and that the back-biting gossip would begin within days. Just as he accepted that despite the supposed compartmenting within the KGB, details would spread throughout Dzerzhinsky Square. Which he welcomed, wanting as wide a circulation and awareness as possible that it had been his name upon the abort orders and no one else who made the calls to the Ministry of Defence.
    Because even while he worked upon the cancellation, Malik was thinking beyond. This had not been a mistake, an