black saloons of Kontarsky’s team parked in the forecourt of the block, while it was hardly light, and the men moved in swiftly. The whole operation took hardly more than three minutes, including the ascent of the lift to the fourteenth and sixteenth floors. When the team returned, the two additional human beings appearing satisfactorily disturbed, barely awake, and deeply frightened, Priabin knew that his chief would be satisfied.
Priabin grinned into the frightened, wan faces of the two men taken from their beds as they passed him with nervous side-glances. They knew, he sensed, why he had come for them - and they knew what to expect when they were returned to the Centre, to Dzerzhinsky Street. He watched them being loaded into two of the black cars, and then glanced up at the block of flats.
On the sixteenth floor, he could make out the smudge of a white face at a dark window - the wife, or perhaps a child. It did not matter.
His breath smoked round him in the cold dawn air as he returned to his car. Dipping his head at the passenger window, he said to the driver: ‘Very well - give the order for the surveillance-team to move in on the warehouse. Let’s get Upenskoy as well, while we’re about it!’
Gant woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep as the doors of the removal van were opened noisily by Pavel Upenskoy. Shaking his head, muttering, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the mattress which had been laid just behind the driver’s cab. Gant had boarded it in the warehouse of the Sanitary Manufacturing Company of Moscow.
The light of cold, high bulbs filtered into the interior of the truck, but Upenskoy was hidden from Gant’s view by the stacked lavatory bowls and cisterns that he was to drive that day to Kuybyshev, a town lying more than seven hundred road miles from Moscow. A new hotel being constructed in Kuybyshev awaited the toilet fittings.
‘Gant - are you awake?’
‘Yes,’ Gant replied sullenly, trying to moisten his dry, stale mouth with saliva. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly five-thirty. We leave for Bilyarsk just before six. If you want, the old man has made some coffee come and get it.’
Gant heard the heavy footsteps retreat across the concrete floor of the warehouse, and ascend some steps. A flimsy door banged shut. Then, the only sounds were those of his hands rubbing at the stubble on his chin, and the sucking of his lips as he tried to rid himself of the dry, evil taste in his mouth. He brushed a hand across his forehead and examined the thin film of sweat on his fingertips carefully, as if it were something alien, or something familiar the appearance and nature of which he had long forgotten.
Then he wiped his hand on the trouser leg of his faded blue overalls into which he had changed when he arrived at the warehouse.
He had not slept well. He had not been allowed to sleep for more than two hours after being brought by Pavel to the warehouse, in a narrow commercial street that ran off the Kirov Street. They were only a quarter of a mile from the Komsomolskaia Metro Station.
Pavel had not allowed him to sleep as he had hammered home to him the facts and nuances of his new, and third, identity - that of Boris Glazunov, driver’s mate, who lived in a block of flats on the Mira Prospekt. who was married with two children and who, in reality, Pavel had explained, would be staying home and out of sight, while Gant accompanied him in the delivery truck as far as Bilyarsk. The briefing had been conducted entirely in Russian - Gant had been forcibly reminded more than once of his language training with the defector, Lebedev, at Langley, Virginia.
At last, after a recital of his assumed life history, and a repeated account of what papers he carried, and what they represented, he had been allowed to sleep - to sleep as soundly as his own mind would allow him. He had relived the strangulation of the KGB man in the washroom, in a grotesque, balletic slow-motion in endless
Priabin grinned into the frightened, wan faces of the two men taken from their beds as they passed him with nervous side-glances. They knew, he sensed, why he had come for them - and they knew what to expect when they were returned to the Centre, to Dzerzhinsky Street. He watched them being loaded into two of the black cars, and then glanced up at the block of flats.
On the sixteenth floor, he could make out the smudge of a white face at a dark window - the wife, or perhaps a child. It did not matter.
His breath smoked round him in the cold dawn air as he returned to his car. Dipping his head at the passenger window, he said to the driver: ‘Very well - give the order for the surveillance-team to move in on the warehouse. Let’s get Upenskoy as well, while we’re about it!’
Gant woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep as the doors of the removal van were opened noisily by Pavel Upenskoy. Shaking his head, muttering, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the mattress which had been laid just behind the driver’s cab. Gant had boarded it in the warehouse of the Sanitary Manufacturing Company of Moscow.
The light of cold, high bulbs filtered into the interior of the truck, but Upenskoy was hidden from Gant’s view by the stacked lavatory bowls and cisterns that he was to drive that day to Kuybyshev, a town lying more than seven hundred road miles from Moscow. A new hotel being constructed in Kuybyshev awaited the toilet fittings.
‘Gant - are you awake?’
‘Yes,’ Gant replied sullenly, trying to moisten his dry, stale mouth with saliva. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly five-thirty. We leave for Bilyarsk just before six. If you want, the old man has made some coffee come and get it.’
Gant heard the heavy footsteps retreat across the concrete floor of the warehouse, and ascend some steps. A flimsy door banged shut. Then, the only sounds were those of his hands rubbing at the stubble on his chin, and the sucking of his lips as he tried to rid himself of the dry, evil taste in his mouth. He brushed a hand across his forehead and examined the thin film of sweat on his fingertips carefully, as if it were something alien, or something familiar the appearance and nature of which he had long forgotten.
Then he wiped his hand on the trouser leg of his faded blue overalls into which he had changed when he arrived at the warehouse.
He had not slept well. He had not been allowed to sleep for more than two hours after being brought by Pavel to the warehouse, in a narrow commercial street that ran off the Kirov Street. They were only a quarter of a mile from the Komsomolskaia Metro Station.
Pavel had not allowed him to sleep as he had hammered home to him the facts and nuances of his new, and third, identity - that of Boris Glazunov, driver’s mate, who lived in a block of flats on the Mira Prospekt. who was married with two children and who, in reality, Pavel had explained, would be staying home and out of sight, while Gant accompanied him in the delivery truck as far as Bilyarsk. The briefing had been conducted entirely in Russian - Gant had been forcibly reminded more than once of his language training with the defector, Lebedev, at Langley, Virginia.
At last, after a recital of his assumed life history, and a repeated account of what papers he carried, and what they represented, he had been allowed to sleep - to sleep as soundly as his own mind would allow him. He had relived the strangulation of the KGB man in the washroom, in a grotesque, balletic slow-motion in endless
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