'Holding out, Dmitri?'
'Yes, sir.'
'You showed the man Glazunov this photograph of someone who was pretending to be him - was he not outraged?'
Priabin did not feel called upon to smile. He said: 'Colonel - I don't think he knows who is in the truck with Upenskoy.'
'But - you and I agree the truck is heading for Bilyarsk?'
'Yes, Colonel - it must be.'
'Then this man, whoever he is, and from wherever he comes - must be a saboteur?'
'Probably, Colonel.'
'Undoubtedly, Dmitri.' Kontarsky rubbed his blue jowl. 'But, what can one man do to the Mig-31 that cannot be done by Baranovich and the others already on the spot - eh?' He was thoughtful for a moment, then he added: 'What kind of operation could it be? If we knew who he was, then we might net ourselves something very useful.' He smiled, and Priabin wondered again at his motives. Kontarsky was enjoying himself, of that there was no doubt. He expected some kind of additional success, connected with this man but what? Priabin would have stopped the truck by now.
Kontarsky went on: 'I shall delay my flight to Bilyarsk by a few hours. Meanwhile, alert the security there concerning this truck ... Borkh, get me Colonel Leprov in Records - I want this man identified as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Dmitri, get back to our friends and ask them once more who he is!'
Kontarsky's finger tapped the photograph of Gant as Borkh dialled the number and Priabin left the room.
Gant was tired, cramped with travel, his mind numbed by the endlessness of the Russian steppe, that great sweep of plain stretching as far as the Urals, two hundred miles beyond Bilyarsk. His mind had plumbed his own past, prompted by the similarity of the country to his own Mid-West. It had not been a pleasant experience, and he was sick with the memories and the petrol fumes that seeped into the cab.
It was dark now, and Upenskoy had switched on the headlights. The tail-car was a steady five hundred metres behind. It had picked them up on the outskirts of Kazan, taking over from its predecessor as they had crossed the vast new Lenin Bridge over the Volga which had replaced the ferry. The tail-car was not using its lights - but both he and Pavel knew it was there.
'How far now?' he asked, breaking a long silence.
'The turn-on is about four miles further on - then Bilyarsk is fourteen miles up that road.'
'And I have to meet the pick-up on that road - at the point you showed me on the map?'
'Yes.'
'Then it's time for me to leave you...' Gant said.
'Not yet.'
'Yes. The first copse up ahead, and I'm going to jump for it,' Gant said decisively.
Pavel looked across at him, then said, 'Very well. I will try not to let them overtake me for as long past the guard-post as possible. Then, with luck, I shall leave them behind when I abandon my trusty vehicle, which is bringing the benefits of modern plumbing to the Volga Hotel at Kuybyshev!' Pavel, curiously to Gant, roared with laughter.
Gant said, 'Don't get yourself caught.'
'Not if I can help it,' Pavel replied. 'Semelovsky will have passed through the guard-post less than fifteen minutes ago.'
'How do you know?" 'He was at the petrol station in Kazan. I didn't speak to him, but he was there.'
'How - did he get out of Bilyarsk? I thought it was sealed up tight until after tomorrow's show.'
'It is. He's from Kazan - his mother is dying, so they let him out - in company with a KGB man, of course.
No, don't worry. The KGB man saw him on his way.
They're not worried about him. They know he's one of us, and they expect him to return to Bilyarsk.'
'His mother is - really dying?'
'It would appear so - to the doctor, that is. However, she is a very tough old lady...'He smiled.
'Semelovsky will be waiting for you on the road.'
It seemed to Gant that every man he had come into contact with was under sentence of death. A sentence they all accepted as their lot. He wanted to say something to Pavel, in the selflessness of the moment.
Pavel's voice cut across his mood. 'Trees coming up, and a few bends in the road, just to keep truck drivers from falling asleep!' He looked at Gant, and added: 'Don't say anything - your words would be useless, maybe even insulting. Just fly that damn aeroplane out of Russia!'
Three.
THE SUSPICIONS.
A pair of men's shoes were placed on Police Inspector Tortyev's desk, under the hard strip-lighting, and the young man's attention seemed to be riveted upon them.
He leaned back in his chair, one foot pushing against the desk, steepled fingers tapping insistently at his pursed Ups. At that moment, he was alone in his office and had been for half-an-hour, because he had wanted to think. He had still not decided what to do about the shoes.
The chair creaked as he regained an upright position, and reached out a hand. He picked up the white label tied to one of the shoes, and read again that it was the property of Alexander Thomas Orton. Shaking his head, as if in puzzled amusement, he shunted the left and right shoes, which were not a pair - one being black, the other brown - together. One shoe was a size-and-a-half bigger than the other. The black shoe from Orton's body was still damp from its ducking in the Moskva. The other shoe, still shining and barely worn, though the heel was showing signs of wear already - the other shoe had been taken from Orton's room at the Moskva Hotel.
He shunted the shoes apart, then together again, his lips pursing as he did so. He whistled softly, tunelessly, his eyes staring at the shoes, as if willing them to inform him of the cause of their discrepancy in size. The hat size had been the same, the collar size the same, the overcoat at the hotel had fitted the dead man, the suits had fitted, the socks ... but not the shoes. Why not? Did any man have shoes that varied so much in size? Why?
He pushed back his chair again, assuming his former position. It was, indeed, mysterious. The answer, of course, forming itself in his mind all the time he had been alone in his office, was that the man in the river was not the man who had booked into the Moskva Hotel, the man who had passed through security at Cheremetievo, who had taken that walk from the hotel along the embankment, only to be murdered.
Why was it not the same man? The question was more important than the discovery, the solution to the problem of the shoes. One of the three men who had met Mr. Orton had - taken his place in the river? Why?
The question might not have interested an ordinary policeman, not as directly, or as insistantly as it interested Tortyev. But then, Tortyev was not an ordinary member of the Moscow police. He held a police rank, and his offices were situated in the Police Headquarters but, like many of his colleagues, he was a member of the KGB 2nd Chief Directorate. His only superiors, the only people to whom he was answerable, were KGB officers in the Political Security Service.
Tortyev had been in charge of the Orton case since the first addiction cases had come to the attention of the Moscow police and, naturally and inevitably, to the attention of his section of the KGB. His rank in the police had been made up to Inspector, at thirty-three and he was given authority to co-opt suitable resources in order to unearth, and smash, the ring creating the addiction.
Tortyev had a hatred of drugs, and of pushers. It was as burning a hatred as belonged to any member of any drugs squad anywhere in the world. Tortyev would have done equally valuable work in New York, or London, or Amsterdam. He hated Orton. When Holokov, fat, efficient Holokov, had informed him of the Englishman's death, he had been pleased, though, in another way, frustrated. He had wanted to confront Orton, see him sentenced. Yet his death had not mattered - they knew the others, the ones Orton had supplied.
Yet now, Orton was not dead at all, he admitted.
His teeth ground together audibly in the silence of the room. He picked up the telephone. An operator at a special switchboard divorced from the switchboard that served the rest of the police building, answered.
'Get me the Seventh Directorate - the office of Colonel Ossipov,' he said, and waited for his call to be answered. When it was, he swiftly requested assistance, in the form of men and time, from the KGB Colonel responsible for the surveillance of English tourists. The call took less than a minute. Tortyev had priority with the Seventh Directorate.
When he had put the telephone down again, he went back to studying the shoes, pushing them together, pulling them apart, as if making them perform some simple dance. Now that he had requested more men, to begin checking on Orton's movements, he would need Stechko, Holokov, and possibly the sergeant, Filipov, even if the man was a Jew, to begin checking through their records of the previous visits of Orton to Moscow, their records of his contacts, behaviour-pattern, habits...
As he pressed the intercom switch to summon his subordinates, he was still staring at the odd shoes. He was smiling, as if they represented a challenge to him.
At the moment he was about to speak, he suddenly wondered what had become of the transistor-radio that had been itemised at the airport - and had been inspected for drugs. It had not been in his hotel room, nor on the body. Of course, it might be at the bottom of the river.
