Read Online Bearpit by Brian Freemantle - Free Book Online Page A

aberration. This had been an attempted entrapment, something intended to destroy him within the first tentatively exploring weeks of his appointment.
    The truth had to be investigated by official inquiry.
    And such inquiries – certainly the sort of official inquiry Malik envisaged, damning indictments against the perpetrators, resounding praise for himself – needed documentary proof. Which had to be seized before there was any opportunity of it being destroyed or altered.
    It was late afternoon before Malik was satisfied everything in Afghanistan was safely closed down. At once he issued a fresh set of instructions, the most urgent to the cipher room that all cable traffic between Moscow and Kabul for the preceding two months be sealed and delivered to him at once. He remembered his own memorandum well enough, of course. He recalled it from records and reread it carefully. Satisfied completely with its propriety, Malik put it to one side of his desk, ready to form part of the file he intended to create when the cables arrived.
    What about witnesses? Yuri, he decided: the resounding praise deserved to be spread and nepotism wasn’t a charge here. And Agayans, of course: the most significant cog in the entire machination. Vital not to miscalculate here by one iota. Certainly necessary to avoid any personal interrogation, to appear as if he were interfering or prejudging: it had to be the inquiry which returned a verdict, not him. Wrong, equally, not to make some sort of investigatory move into what could – without Yuri’s intercession – have been an inconceivable catastrophe. Malik smiled to himself, at the ease of the resolve. It was an investigation. And on the prima-facie evidence there was sufficient for Agayans to be put under detention.
    Vasili Dmitrevich Malik reached once more for the telephone that had been used so much that day. And made his only – but disastrous – mistake.
    The security sections of all KGB directorates are run upon military guidelines – uniforms are invariably worn, for instance – with military requirements. One of those requirements is monthly attendance at a firearms installation to ensure that a necessary standard of marksmanship is maintained. The installation is established at Gofkovskoye Shosse and it was here that Malik located the newly promoted head of his directorate’s internal discipline, Colonel Lev Konstantinovich Panchenko.
    In his own office, which was just one hundred yards from that in which Malik had minutes before completed his conversation, Victor Kazin went physically cold, actually shivering, at Panchenko’s immediate warning on the private, untraceable telephone.
    â€˜I’m to arrest Agayans,’ reported the colonel. ‘Something to do with Afghanistan.’
    Kazin swallowed against the sensation of paralysis, driving himself to think. ‘Do it,’ he said, hoarse-voiced. ‘But do it the way I’ve already ordered you to do it.’
    â€˜I need more time!’
    â€˜Do it!’
    Georgi Solov still did not completely understand – in fact, he understood very little – but he was fairly sure that what could have created some personal difficulties for him had been avoided. He smiled across the desk in the Kabul rezidentura and said: ‘Everything cancelled.’
    â€˜Of course,’ said Yuri curtly. He guessed Solov wanted to make it appear a joint intervention.
    â€˜And you’re to return at once?’ smiled Solov, gesturing to the message that lay between them.
    â€˜That’s what it says,’ agreed Yuri. He didn’t try to keep the impatience from his voice: he couldn’t think now why he’d earlier felt pity for the dance-to-any-tune idiot.
    â€˜Seems as if we were right to intervene,’ attempted Solov, directly.
    â€˜I was, wasn’t I?’ corrected Yuri. If there were to be credit given, Solov literally had to be weak in the head to