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  And he was going to have to recognize him. Recognize him and work with him. An experiment, the KGB chairman had called the decision to divide the Directorate control: an experiment from which greater efficiency was expected. If only the chairman had known what real sort of experiment he was creating!

  Malik sighed, staring around the still-new office, momentarily unwilling to confront the necessary decision. It had been naive expecting the approach to come from Kazin; preposterous, even if he had just been the newcomer into the other man’s domain. And he was anything but that. His had to be the offer, not the other way around.

  Kazin’s agreement to Malik’s request for a meeting took three days, which Malik considered pointedly too long, almost childishly petulant; he, not Kazin, had been the victim, after all! Kazin’s memorandum stipulated the encounter should be in his office – making Malik go to him – rather than somewhere neutral like the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters. Passingly Malik thought of suggesting an alternative but just as quickly dismissed the idea: it would have been matching petulance with petulance. He did not want any longer to fight.

  Kazin’s office was at the front of the Directorate headquarters and obviously better established than that of Malik. The furnishings were predominantly Scandinavian, all light wood except for a conference area to one side where there were dark leather chairs and a couch and a long, chair-bordered table around which at least a dozen people could have assembled. Kazin’s desk, which was quite bare, even the blotter unmarked, was directly in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the traffic-clogged ring road. There was complete double glazing, creating a disorienting effect of scurrying vehicles devoid of noise, television picture with the sound turned down.

  Malik hesitated immediately inside the door, unsure now that they were at last face to face how to proceed. Malik’s immediate impression was of Kazin’s weight. When they were friends the man had been stocky, but Malik had never imagined his becoming this fat. Kazin seemed bloated, like an inflated carnival figure. Malik knew he would not have recognized the other man if the encounter had been unexpected.

  From the far side of the room, seated behind his desk, Kazin examined Malik. The hair, which Kazin remembered to be deeply black, was absolutely white now but still thick, and Malik wore it surprisingly long, almost an affectation. And the stance was peculiar. After the return from Stalingrad and that one confrontation there had not been many meetings – not with Malik, at least – so Kazin’s strongest memory was of the man before his injury: certainly there was no recollection of him like this, oddly sloped and lopsided. Old; until this moment he’d never thought of Malik as being old.

  ‘Victor Ivanovich,’ greeted Malik, not moving.

  ‘Vasili Dmitrevich,’ responded Kazin. He did not rise from his high-backed seat.

  They remained motionless, each looking expressionlessly at the other. It was Malik who moved, limping uninvited further into the room. There was a stiff-backed seat near the desk but Malik ignored it, making much of bringing one of the leather chairs from the conference area and lowering himself heavily into it.

  ‘I did not seek the transfer,’ announced Malik at once.

  Kazin said nothing.

  ‘And there’s no feeling left, about what happened before.’

  Why was the lying bastard even bothering! Kazin said: ‘Comrade Chairman Chebrikov explained the idea to me: an experimental division from which a permanent decision could be made.’

  He’d made concessions enough, Malik decided. By rights Kazin should be the supplicant, not him. Malik said: ‘So there has to be a working arrangement, difficult though it might be.’

  You can’t begin to imagine the difficulties I am going to create, thought Kazin. Stiffly he said: ‘Comrade Chairman Chebrikov defined the responsibilities, too.’ And allocated you Afghanistan, Kazin thought: he could not have devised the trap better himself. The division of the First Chief Directorate between them was not going to be the demotion that everyone would regard it as being: it was going to be the opportunity for which he’d dreamed, all these years. His chance: the chance he was not going to miss.

  ‘Olga’s dead,’ said Malik, in another abrupt announcement.

  ‘I know,’ said Kazin. Like I know the very day and the very year and the very cemetery plot in which she is buried: the plot I have discreetly visited so often and from which I have so often cleared the wind-flustered leaves and so often tidied the stones and where I have held so many one-sided conversations. One-sided conversations where ‘why’ had been the most frequently uttered word, the most frequently uttered question.

  ‘It’s too long ago for anything to be left between us,’ persisted Malik. Was it important, to make such an effort? If Kazin were going to have conceded any sort of response – the proper sort of response – it would have come by now.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ protested Kazin, who did but who was enjoying the other man’s efforts to rebuild bridges across divides too wide ever to be crossed again.

  Malik sighed determinedly. He said: ‘Whatever happened, happened. It’s past. Gone…’ He hesitated and said: ‘Olga and I were very happy, afterwards. She loved me. I loved her.’

  Fool! thought Kazin. He wanted to speak: was desperate to hurt the other man as he knew the words would hurt him, but Kazin held back because the words weren’t any longer enough. With a difficulty he thought he managed to keep from Malik, Kazin said: ‘Yes. It all happened a very long time ago.’

  ‘I did not seek this.’

  ‘You already made that clear.’

  ‘I’m prepared to try: not to forget – we neither of us could ever forget – but to try.’ Malik felt once more that he was prostrating himself too much.

  ‘So am I,’ said Kazin, a remark for his own benefit. ‘I am prepared to try.’ Starting with the meeting which is directly to follow this, he thought.

  Deciding upon a test he felt necessary, Malik said: ‘Did you know that my son served in this Chief Directorate?’

  ‘No,’ said Kazin immediately.

  The man was lying, Malik knew at once. He’d already checked the posting records and identified Kazin’s signature on the authorization for Yuri to be sent to Kabul. Malik was glad he had not interfered when Yuri had asked him to block the assignment.

  Malik stood, towering over the other man in his unusually apportioned height. He regretted the movement at once, recognizing it to be physically intimidating, which it was not intended to be. He said: ‘I hope we will be able to work successfully together,’ already resigned to the fact that they would not.

  Kazin said: ‘I hope it will be successful, too,’ and knew it would be, although differently from how Malik imagined.

  KGB activities in Afghanistan are the responsibility of the Eighth Department of the First Chief Directorate, whose head was Igor Fedorovich Agayans. He was a gauntly featured, almost ungainly bachelor whose flop of prematurely grey hair appeared permanently to curtain his forehead. It came forward as he entered Kazin’s rooms and he thrust up to clear his vision, smiling in apparent apology. Because regulations were specific Kazin had already received copies of the organization’s monitoring doctors reporting the medical evidence – the increasingly spreading psoriasis and sleeplessness needing ever stronger barbiturates – and Agayans’ uncertain demeanour supported their assessment of nervous stress. Which had been the diagnosis returned upon himself, Kazin remembered in abrupt irritation. The doctors were bloody fools. He made a conscious effort to quieten his pumping leg and took his nibbled finger from his mouth. Nervous, possibly; but not stressed. He didn’t need any soothing balms or multi-coloured tablets. He said: ‘The memorandum from Comrade First Deputy Malik demanded that efforts should be made to locate mujahideen cells for possible punishment.’

  ‘I would have welcomed clearer indication of precisely the sort of punishment required,’ said Agayans.

  ‘An operation of the utmost severity,’ said Kazin.

  ‘That was not stipulat
ed in the original memorandum,’ argued Agayans.

  ‘This is an authorized demand for retribution,’ insisted the obese man.

  Agayans hesitated momentarily and Kazin thought the division head was going to argue further that the order should come from Malik, who was now the controller of that part of Asia. Instead Agayans took a dossier from his briefcase, offering it across the desk, and said simply: ‘I propose gas attacks on selected villages proven to support the mujahideen. Well-poisoning, in addition, along all the major and recognized supply and infiltration routes.’

  Agayans had a clerk-like mentality, his life ruled by regulations and documentation, and he’d assembled his proposal with a single-sheet precis uppermost, encompassing the most important of the listed suggestions. Kazin’s eyes fixed upon just one part of the summary: he had never expected the man positively to refer to Vasili Malik and his Kabul memorandum by name in the file that lay before him. Curbing his excitement he said: ‘What is the casualty estimation?’

  ‘I am putting the figure provisionally at between seven to eight thousand,’ said the twitching man. ‘I have already ordered the rezidentura in Kabul to identify target villages for the maximum impact.’

  ‘Initiate it,’ instructed Kazin. There would be a supreme irony in establishing himself in the eyes of the Gorbachov regime not as the traditionalist he was suspected of being but as someone embracing the new principles when he very publicly cancelled what amounted practically to genocide.

  ‘What about Comrade First Deputy Malik?’

  ‘I will be responsible for Comrade First Deputy Malik,’ said Kazin. There was something almost orgasmic in openly uttering the private promise.

  3

  Yuri Malik stood at the window of his cramped quarters in the guarded and prison-like Soviet compound in Kabul, looking out over the Afghanistan capital. The sun was almost down, reddening the sky against the foothills of the faraway mountains and from two separate mosques the muezzin prayer calls to the Muslem devout jarred slightly out of unison, priests in competition with each other for the salvation of the faithful. Priests or mullahs? It didn’t matter. Whatever, they were cheer-leading a lot of press-ups for nothing: this place was beyond redemption. Beyond anything. Where’s my salvation, Comrade God? If he’d believed it would work he would have prayed himself, Malik thought: even done the press-ups. Are you listening, Comrade God? Malik wished someone were. Yuri still could not lose his astonishment at his father’s attitude: always before the man had been omnipotent, the purveyor of miracles. OK, so maybe when he was attached to an entirely different Chief Directorate there was a barely acceptable explanation for his refusal, but that did not apply any longer. The damned man was actually joint chairman of the very Chief Directorate controlling this stinking country. So why hadn’t there been any intervention, the sort of intervention he’d pleaded for that last night, during that stiff and resentful final dinner? Nepotism had been another of his father’s arguments: said it was an accusation he could not risk, at that time. Rubbish, like every other excuse. The Soviet Union existed and ran on nepotism, family helping family, friends helping friends! Always had done: always would do. There had to be another reason, a proper reason. So far it didn’t make sense; nothing made sense.

  It was dark outside now, smoke from the fires cooking the inevitable lamb roping up whitely against the sky, but Yuri was not looking any more out into Kabul but at his own reflection, mirrored in the blackened window. Not even his appearance made sense! The tan from the Afghan sun accentuated the fairness of his hair and although it was not as positive as a mirror he knew it heightened the blueness of his eyes as well. Actually Western, not Slavic! And more incongruous – ridiculous, considering the posting – positively unlike the other Asian-skinned and Asian-featured and Asian-speaking operatives at the embassy. He looked – and felt – as conspicuous as a VD warning tattooed on a tart’s navel.

  And to be inconspicuous, a never-seen, never-heard man, had been the repeated lesson at those training centres at Gofkovskoye Shosse and Metrostroevskaya Street and Turnaninski Pereulok. And insisted upon again in those mock-up American and Continental cities specially built at Kuchino where he had been trained to think and behave and live like a Westerner. To be the Westerner he had become.

  All wasted: four years of dawn to dusk study – of top-grade passes in every test and examination – utterly and completely wasted. But Yuri’s concern was not in the KGB’s loss. His concern was as his own, personal potential loss.

  Yuri had liked – come to need and expect – the cosseted life of the son of someone secure within the Soviet hierarchy. He’d never known anything but an apartment in Kutuzovsky Prospekt and the dacha in the Lenin Hills and the cars that had always been the surefire aphrodisiac with the girls. He’d enjoyed the concessionary allowances and the freely available foreign imports and never having to wait or to queue for anything; and then to be told it was not available. Nothing ever had been unavailable to him.

  So it was unthinkable for it not to continue. But eventually properly awarded and allowed, for himself, not obtained through his father. Which was why he had responded so immediately to the KGB recruitment approach at college – and until his enrolment kept that approach secret from his father, striving then for the independence he would so willingly have surrendered now, to be spared Afghanistan. He’d never doubted his ultimate promotion to the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters, with all its benefits. Nor underestimated that irrespective of his ability – and Yuri had never been unsure of his own ability – there would be political pitfalls it was necessary to avoid.

  Which was why Afghanistan was so dangerous. Moscow was trapped in a no-win situation and so, correspondingly, was every Russian posted here. Georgi Solov, the rezident, and all the others in the KGB rezidentura were mad, pissing over their boots in their vodka celebrations and infantile boasts of success after the Moscow edict entrusting them with greater responsibility. Yesterday the GRU, tomorrow the KGB. Then there wouldn’t be any luxury flats or weekend villas or chauffeured cars: if it were anything like the Hararajat disaster it could be instead a cell in Lefortovo or Butyrki.

  Yuri supposed he could write to the old man. But to say what? Something his father already knew? And had already refused to do anything about, despite the danger argument being patiently set out and actually agreed! He wouldn’t beg, Yuri determined. Not like he’d begged at that farewell dinner, demeaning himself like some pant-wetting schoolboy and to be humiliated again as he had been then. Yuri actually flushed, hot with embarrassment at the memory. Never again, he thought. Ever.

  What then?

  Continue jockeying Ilena and the translator, he supposed, although more for what was in their heads than beneath their skirts. Maybe explore beneath the bedcovers with the eager wife of the cultural attache and that of the Third Secretary, as well and for the same reason. If he were going to establish a personal, protective intelligence system the wisdom of extending it as widely as possible overrode the hazards of outraged husbands who seemed to be limp-pricked anyway. Anything else? Nothing that he could think of. He wished there were. It didn’t seem enough.

  The embassy mess was in the basement, the ceiling-level windows taped against bomb blasts and with defensive sandbags beyond after the repeated guerilla mortar attacks. The air conditioning was broken, as it always was, and the stale air was thick with tobacco smoke and body odour. There was the obligatory portrait of Gorbachov on the inner wall, as far away as possible from any attack damage, and posters of Black Sea holiday resorts and of Red Square during the May Day parade of two years before, showing the pass-by of SS-22 missiles.

  Solov was holding court at his accustomed table, close to the serving hatch, with the other three senior officers in the rezidentura – Gusev, Bunin and Anishenko – in obedient attendance. They all had their jackets off and their collars loosened, because of the heat, but they were all sweating, adding to the smell of the room. Yuri, who was still considered junior from the newn
ess of his posting, did not intend to join them but as he went to the hatch Solov thrust a chair away from the table with his foot and said: ‘Sit down.’

  It was more an order than an invitation and Yuri guessed the men were drunk: because of his father’s changed position within the KGB the attitude had for the past few weeks been more cautious. Yuri sat but brought his own beer to the table, shaking his head against their offer to share the diminishing bottle of vodka. Another stupid celebration to imagined triumphs to come, he decided.

  ‘The GRU rezidentura is being scaled down,’ announced Solov. ‘They’re only replacing with ten embassy officers, not fifteen like before. Less than half the field agents, too.’

  The controller spoke proudly, as if he were personally responsible for the continued demotion. Taunting, Yuri said: ‘It’s a recognized algebraic equation: one KGB man equals two GRU.’

  ‘Bloody right,’ slurred Gusev. ‘Right every time.’

  Fool, thought Yuri. The alcohol heightened Gusev’s blood pressure, so that he appeared almost cosmetically made up. Yuri said: ‘When are they arriving?’

  ‘Beginning tomorrow,’ said Anishenko.

  ‘Officer in charge is named Nikandrov, Anatoli Nikandrov,’ further disclosed Solov. ‘Being transferred from Vienna.’

  Poor bastard, thought Yuri: coming from Austria to Afghanistan would be like arriving from another planet. The amount of information his superior officers appeared to possess could only mean that during the withdrawal of the military intelligence personnel the KGB had managed to get a tie-line into the restricted GRU telex and cable channels normally precluded to them. He wondered how long it would take for the GRU to discover and remove it. Not too long, he guessed: they were stupid, each of these men sitting and sweating and smelling around him, to boast so openly. He said: ‘They will be cautious after what happened.’