The Lost American Read online

  There wasn’t any formal introduction because that wasn’t the way these sorts of interviews were conducted, but Brinkman knew the man’s name was Maxwell and that he was number three on the Moscow desk and the person who would, after analysis and checking, ultimately receive his report. Maxwell waved him to a chair and offered a round tub of cigarettes which Brinkman, who didn’t smoke, refused. Maxwell took one, coughed lighting it and said, ‘Shouldn’t, I know. Filthy habit.’

  Brinkman smiled, politely, but said nothing, waiting for his superior to lead. There was a protocol about everything in the Foreign Office and Brinkman knew every coda of it.

  ‘Finished the rounds?’ Maxwell had a rough, hello-me-hearties voice. If the tie the man was wearing designated a rugby club then Brinkman guessed he knew all the bar-room songs.

  ‘I think so, sir,’ said Brinkman. ‘It seems a lot of advice is necessary.’

  ‘Civil servants, justifying their existence,’ said Maxwell.

  Brinkman decided he liked the man. He said, ‘What’s the proper briefing?’

  ‘If it were thought necessary to give a lecture you wouldn’t have been selected in the first place,’ said Maxwell, gruffly. ‘As it is you’ve jumped over quite a few heads.’

  His father’s influence? wondered Brinkman at once. But that didn’t follow, if the man were trying to prevent his joining the department. Unless he’d accepted that persuasion was impossible and decided instead to get the best possible posting for his son. Probing, he said, ‘I’d hoped I’d got it on merit.’

  ‘Course you have,’ said Maxwell. ‘How else?’

  Very early Brinkman had learned the advantage of apparent ingenuous honesty. He said, ‘It doesn’t seem to be any secret within the department that my father is attached to the Foreign Office.’

  ‘Hasn’t made any sort of approach to me,’ said Maxwell and Brinkman believed the man. Maxwell went on, ‘You got it because of your ability with the language and your pass-marks and your general aptitude, in all the examinations and tests.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Brinkman.

  ‘Which don’t mean a damn, on the streets. Not much, anyway,’ deflated Maxwell. ‘Give me common sense compared with a 98% pass-mark in an examination and I’d choose common sense every time.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Brinkman, too glibly, regretting it as soon as he spoke.

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Maxwell, maintaining his directness. ‘There’s no way you can, not yet. But I think you will. Every assessment and aptitude test you’ve taken repeats the same characteristic – you’re fast on your feet. Cunning was one word used, not unkindly. And you don’t make mistakes, not twice.’

  Brinkman felt the burn of embarrassment at the public examination. He wished he could think of some proper response. Knowing it was insufficient, he said, ‘I’ll try.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘You’ve got to do better than that. I don’t want you making any mistakes, not even once. Classrooms and mock-these and mock-thats can never properly equip you for the real thing. You’re going to a sensitive place: the most sensitive place. I know you’re ambitious – that’s another finding of the aptitude tests and psychiatrists’ reports. I’m glad. Someone without ambition isn’t any good to me. But use it properly. I’m not expecting – no-one’s expecting – sensations: no Krushchev-like denunciations of Brezhnev or Andropov at secret Politburo sessions. I want steady, practical work. I want the analysis to be correct and I want the assessments to accord with the facts, as best you can obtain them. Don’t ever take a chance, to impress me or anybody else. You got that?’

  ‘Yes sir, I’ve got that,’ said Brinkman, knowing he had to. He didn’t intend taking any chances: not stupid ones, anyway. But if one came that wasn’t stupid he was going to grab it like a drowning man snatching at passing driftwood and show everyone – Maxwell and his father and everyone – just how good he was.

  ‘Ingram’s staying over, to ease you in.’

  ‘That’s kind,’ said Brinkman. He didn’t want to be eased in by anyone, picking up cast-off contacts like second-hand clothes but it wouldn’t have been politic to say so.

  ‘He’s done a good job there,’ said Maxwell. ‘He won’t be an easy act to follow.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Brinkman. Modesty, like apparent honesty, was another thing he practised.

  ‘Do more than that,’ said Maxwell, in his hearty voice. Brinkman wondered if he took the part of Santa Claus at the department Christmas party. ‘This could make or break a career, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ said Brinkman. Just as he knew it was going to be the former, not the latter.

  Maxwell stood, ending the meeting. The man offered his hand and said, ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Brinkman, modest still. Luck wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.

  The love-making was good, like it always was, because he was more experienced and unselfish, knowing how to bring her up and then keep her there, so that she had orgasm after orgasm and even then didn’t want to stop but kept pulling at him, urgently demanding. When they finished Ann still clung to him, wanting his nakedness next to hers. After a long time she said, ‘Eddie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why not,’ he sighed, confronting the familiar demand.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a reason.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Dozens of men your age have kids. You’re only forty-five, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘And you’re only twenty-six. And when I’m sixty – if I get to be sixty – you’ll only be forty-one.’

  ‘So what!’ she demanded, exasperated. ‘If we had a baby now he or she would be eighteen or nineteen when you’re sixty. And of course you’re going to live beyond that.’ Ann wanted a baby, for all the natural, proper reasons but there was another one as well. A child would occupy her, completely; take away the aimlessness of her life in Moscow.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘You’re avoiding it.’

  ‘I said we’ll see.’

  Ann detected the note in his voice and accepted it was time to retreat. ‘I want a baby, Eddie,’ she said, firing the final salvo. ‘I want a baby very much.’

  The headquarters of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti is largely a pre-revolutionary building, an ochre-coloured, rococo place dominating the square named after Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the organisation: in 1961, Nikita Krushchev unveiled a statue to commemorate the man whose groundwork makes it possible for the Soviet Politburo to rule the country. Before 1917 the seven-storey building within the long shadows of the Kremlin housed the All Russian Insurance Company. During World War II political and captured German prisoners were conscripted to build a nine-storey extension for the already greatly expanded intelligence service. There was an attempt to maintain the architectural style but it failed and the two buildings look as if they have been stuck together by children given different sets of building bricks for Christmas. Behind the haphazard, uneven facade is Lubyanka, the prison which gained terrifying notoriety under the purges of Stalin and the murderous zeal of intelligence chiefs like Yagoda and Beria. Lubyanka is no longer a prison. The unremitting expansion made it necessary for once bloodstained cells to be refurbished into offices and part of that expansion is occupied by the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB.

  There are other directorates and divisions entrusted with the internal control of the Soviet Union but the Second Chief Directorate has the primary responsibility. That responsibility extends to the surveillance of all Western embassies and the identification and monitoring of the intelligence activities within those embassies.

  Vasili Sokol was the director, officially designated deputy to the chairman himself, Aleksai Panov. Sokol was a heavily moustached, thick-bodied man of great determination and the focus of that determination was to rise one floor to the chairman’s pine-panelled office. It couldn’t be long, now. Desp
ite the doctors’ warnings about the effect upon his emphysema Panov still chain-smoked those stinking tube-filtered cigarettes and the absences when he couldn’t even leave his bed were increasing to the point of his replacement becoming an open speculation. Sokol knew that all he needed was a coup, to single him out to the Politburo. The difficulty was in finding one.

  Sokol was a methodical man, always early in the office to assimilate the overnight reports segregated in a series of In-trays hedged the entire length of his desk, one for each province, with a separate division for Moscow. He devoted particular attention to the reports of the grain shortages. Sokol had succeeded to the position he now occupied because his predecessor failed to anticipate and then quell unrest through food riots and Sokol didn’t intend suffering the same fate. He put the file to one side, for more detailed attention later and went to the reports from the capital.

  The Foreign Ministry internal memorandum was on top of the pile, recording the British application for a diplomatic visa in the name of Jeremy Brinkman. Sokol noted that it had been granted and that the designation was cultural attache.

  Sokol smiled down, wearily shaking his head. Sometimes he wondered why any of them – Russia included – bothered with the ridiculous pretence. Each side – the professionals at least – invariably knew what the other was doing, who was doing it and what the covers were. Cultural attache was the favourite. So the intelligence replacement for the British was someone named Jeremy Brinkman. Sokol routinely marked it for a file to be opened and went back to the grain reports. They were the important consideration, at the moment: a new intelligence Resident could wait.

  Chapter Three

  Farewell parties were usually the best. There was a purpose to them, a positive reason for going beyond the customary excuse of escaping from one set of four walls to another set of four walls. There was the official ceremony for Ingram, at the embassy on Morisa Toreza, but the bigger gathering was at the man’s own apartment, in the official diplomatic compound off Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It wasn’t limited to the British but included all Ingram’s friends from the other embassies as well, and this was the one Ingram assured Brinkman he would find the most useful. Ingram was a small, rotund man given to quick, fussy movements; he wore spectacles which Brinkman considered wrongly designed, with large round frames which made the man look like an owl, an owl in an unfamiliar hurry. Towards Brinkman the attitude was clearly that of mentor to pupil; Brinkman resented the patronising attitude but gave no indication of doing so.

  Brinkman, who was taking over the Ingram apartment, arrived late from his temporary accommodation at the embassy, looking proprietorially around the smoke-filled, noisy rooms and hoping there wouldn’t be too much damage or too many stains to get repaired, afterwards. He knew – miserably – the smell of smoke would last for days. A temporary bar was set up along a wall directly adjacent to the kitchen, and Ingram stood beside it, urging people to take fresh drinks, eye-flickering around in happy contentment at being the object of so much attention. His wife bustled back and forth from the kitchen, ferrying food to a separate table near the window. Lucinda, remembered Brinkman, from their brief embassy encounter. Taller than her husband and not so obviously excited as he was by all the fuss; short, practical hairstyle and flat-heeled, practical shoes and a practical day dress instead of the cocktail creations all about her. Brinkman identified Lucinda Ingram as the sort of woman whom, at another time in another place, the natives would have instinctively addressed as ‘Mem-sahib’.

  It was she who saw Brinkman first, standing just inside the door. She smiled and beckoned through the crush for him to come further in. As he started forward he saw her speak to her husband on the way to the kitchen on another food mission and at once Ingram looked in his direction.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ urged Ingram, thrusting through the crowd to meet him. The departing intelligence man cupped Brinkman’s arm with his hand and propelled him towards the drinks and Brinkman wished he hadn’t because he didn’t like that sort of physical contact. Brinkman chose scotch, frowning as the other man gushed an overly large measure into a tumbler and gave it to him without ice or water. Brinkman took it but didn’t drink.

  ‘Quite a crowd,’ he said.

  ‘More to come yet,’ said Ingram. ‘More to come. Lucky to have made a lot of friends.’

  ‘Certainly looks like it.’

  Briefly the owl settled on a perch. ‘Important that some of them become your friends, too,’ said Ingram.

  ‘Who, for instance?’ said Brinkman, obediently.

  ‘Australians are useful, although not for the obvious reason. Get a lot of playback from Canberra on what’s happening in Peking…’ Ingram smiled, a man about to impart a secret. ‘No reason to consider yourself limited by the boundaries of the country you happen to be in, is there?’

  ‘None at all,’ agreed Brinkman. He decided that as irritating as Ingram might be, he wasn’t a fool.

  ‘Canada is important, too. By the same token. Ottowa was the first to recognise Mao, way back. So there’s a lot of playback through here: analysis requests on how something or other that appears to be emerging in Peking will be viewed in Moscow. It’s a worthwhile tennis game to watch.’

  With China the subject Brinkman thought ping-pong would have been a more appropriate metaphor. He said, ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘French are pretty good but they’re an awkward bunch of bastards, all give and no take,’ judged Ingram. ‘Always a one-sided affair, dealing with them.’

  Only if you let it be so, thought Brinkman. ‘Sounds typically French,’ he said.

  ‘And there’s the ace,’ said Ingram.

  Brinkman followed Ingram’s look. The object of it was on the far side of the room, actually leaning against the wall, a tall, loose-limbed man. He wore an open-necked plaid shirt and jeans and appeared to be feeling the heat, from the flush of his face: the fair hair was already disordered, falling forward over his face.

  ‘Name’s Blair,’ said Ingram, from his side. ‘Eddie Blair. Been the CIA Resident here for a couple of years. Hell of a guy.’

  Brinkman looked back curiously to Ingram at the open admiration. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Every way,’ said Ingram. ‘Straight as a die, first of all. He’ll help, if he can, but if it interferes with anything he’s doing or he can’t, because of orders from above, then he’ll say so, straight out. There isn’t a member of the Politburo he can’t quote chapter and verse about, going back as far as their grandfathers and his political judgment is superb.’

  ‘Like you said, a hell of a guy,’ said Brinkman.

  ‘It doesn’t end there,’ said Ingram, enjoying the lecture. ‘Technology is the name of the game: that’s what the Russians want, to catch up with us. But with America most of all. And technically Blair’s got a mind like a computer. He actually understands all of it. Do you know what the joke is?’