The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(52)

Having begun boldly, I decided to continue so, and reaching into my pocket for my papers, making a show of having a hard time finding them, I barked, “Mikhail Kamin, comrade, state security. My office rang.”

“Never heard of you.”

“Then you should get a better secretary,” I barked, “because I’ve been travelling for eight f*cking hours to get here and I’m damned if I’m going to waste another second on some bloody memo. Have you received the latest description?”

The commander’s eyes flashed from me to the private. This was a man paid to think, a man who really should not have permitted anyone to talk to him with less than suitable rifle-point deference. I could see his mind heading in a direction I didn’t want it to go, so slammed my fist hard on to the tabletop to drag it back and snapped, “For Christ’s sake, man, do you think the mole is going to sit around waiting for you to sort the paperwork out? We need to move now before he receives the warning.”

Tyranny can do marvellous things for a person’s independent will. The commander’s eyes flashed to sudden, focused attention. “A mole? I’ve heard nothing of this. Who are you again?”

I rolled my eyes with a little too much drama, turned to the private and barked, “You–out!”

He obeyed with the shuffle of a man not quite sure where his loyalty lies, mind going one way, legs taking him the other. I waited for the door to close, leaned forward on the table, looked the commander deep in the eye and said, “Get on the phone, and get me Karpenko.”

Hesitation resolved itself into action.

“I don’t know you,” he repeated firmly. “You come in here, making these accusations…”

I pulled the gun from my pocket. The Mikhail Kamin papers came too, unprofessionally tangled up in the depths of my coat, but as they tumbled on to the table they only mildly undermined the emphasis of the moment. “Vitali Karpenko,” I repeated softly. “Get on the phone and bring him here.”

Heroism fought with pragmatism.

To my relief, pragmatism won. I really had no idea what I was going to do if it hadn’t.





Chapter 43


I will never fully understand the notion of a suicide mission. For us it is relatively simple, entailing only the considerable boredom of youth as its primary consequence. Certainly I regretted how likely it seemed that I was going to have to blow a hole in my own skull to escape the situation I had so effectively talked myself into, but by far the more intimidating prospect would have been capture and questioning, and I considered a few years’ boredom to be infinitely preferable to that.

But I have seen men for whom death truly is the end walk towards their demise for reasons no greater than that it was what they were told to do. On the beaches of Normandy, where the bodies floated in the water beside the falling ramps of the landing craft, I saw men run into machine-gun fire who would say, “Hell, I never thought it would come to this, but now I’m here, what’s a guy to do?” With no going back, and no going forward, they went to their deaths with no better plan immediately to hand, having gambled that their choices would not narrow so far, and having been found to be wrong.

For my part, it seemed likely that I would die in this place for little more than a speculation. For a crystal in a radio which was a few years ahead of its time; for the name of a man who saw the future; for a secret hidden by men with guns.

The commander was so good as to point all of this out to me. “You’re going to die here,” he explained as we sat in his office, waiting for Karpenko to come. “Make it easier for yourself.”

I grinned. “Make it easier for yourself” implied that death was my primary concern, as well as being a phrase I associated with New York policemen rather than Soviet commanders in a hidden base. My levity surprised him, his thin grey eyebrows twitching over his paper face. “You’re handling this very calmly,” I pointed out, “for a man on the wrong end of a gun.”

He shrugged. “I’ve had my time and lived it well. You, though–you are a young man. You will have things which tie you to this world. Are you married?”

“That’s a very pious question,” I answered. “Will it have the same emotional implication if I say that I enjoy living in sin?”

“What else do you enjoy? Perhaps you can enjoy them again.”

“That’s a really nice thought–” I sighed “–and I’m grateful for it, but there comes a point when one realises that gratification of the flesh is only so fulfilling. It’s fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief involved outweighs the satisfaction gained.”

To my surprise, he raised his eyebrows. “You clearly aren’t having the right sort of gratification.”

“A professional ear masseuse in Bangkok once said exactly those words to me.”

“You’re not Russian,” he suggested.

“Is there something wrong with my accent?”

“No Russian would do this.”

“That’s a terrible indictment of the Soviet spirit.”

“You misunderstand. You do not appear to be in a fragile enough state to have chosen this as your particular suicide, and yet neither do you seem to have an agenda which could further the cause of others. I see in you no clear explanation for what you do…”