He watched them twirl down from the rapelling tower like spiders spinning filament webs. In growing darkness he walked out of the compound and unbuttoned the flap of one holster before he reached the gate; he walked across the road and up the twilit driveway with all his instincts alert. Cooper’s van was parked at the step and he examined both sides of it and had a look inside before he let himself into the house: he curled inside without being fired on and Sergei came away from the corner setting the safety on the Mannlicher.
Cooper came to attention and Alex answered his salute. “Is that thing warmed up?”
“Yes sir. I been monitoring the band since noon like you told me.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing but a bit of cypher from that Frog underground transmitter what uses the same frequency.”
Vlasov had said he wouldn’t be able to signal before half past six but if something had gone wrong there might have been an earlier squeal. The silence ought to be encouraging but things were too portentious for that.
He heard the Austin’s tires on the gravel and Irina’s quick step; then she was inside. Her eyes told her what she wanted to know; she said, “We’re all right then.”
“We won’t know that until we have his signal.”
“We’d have heard before now if it had gone wrong. The whole world would have heard it.”
He wished he had her aplomb.
It was six-twenty, six-thirty and then six-thirty-five and nothing triggered the brass key. He began to sweat, imagining all the things that could have happened. What if Vlasov had let something slip and they’d nailed him? Without Vlasov they were blind. It had been the one weakness for which there’d been no compensation from the beginning; he’d tried to devise alternate plans that didn’t depend on Vlasov but there wasn’t any way to do that because it always came down to the same thing: there had to be an insider who could keep them in touch with Stalin’s movements. If you didn’t know where your target was you couldn’t very well hit him.
It was one of the factors in Vassily’s plan that had always eluded him: the only answer was that Vassily had had someone of his own-or planned to get the name of Oleg’s contact. But there was a possibility Vassily had intended to operate through Mikhail’s Kremlin network-and if Vassily had already made contact with any of them before he died then they’d spill it to Beria’s interrogators now and blow the operation wide open.
Six-forty. Irina’s eyes were locked on him and her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. No one spoke. Alex turned his head to stare at the transceiver. What if Mikhail’s people had intercepted Vlasov and silenced him before he could alert Stalin and Beria?
KOLLIN X KOLLIN X…
The key chattered faster than he’d ever heard Vlasov’s fist before and Cooper’s pencil jerked across the note pad in a rush to keep up. The staccato burst was less than two minutes in duration. Cooper tapped out the acknowledgment and Alex ripped the pages off the pad and went back through the house with Irina.
The decoding was a one-person operation because they had only the one copy of the St. Petersburg edition of Clausewitz. He left Irina to it because she was faster and surer at it than he was; but the waiting ragged him until he could hardly stand it.
KOLLIN X KOLLIN X SABOTEURS TRAPPED AS PLANNED X STEEL BEAR UNTOUCHED X INTERROGATIONS UNDERWAY FOUR MEN ONE WOMAN X INTERROGATION MAY LEAD TO OTHER CONSPIRATORS X SUGGESTION AT LEAST ONE CONSPIRATOR STILL AT LARGE X MUNICH CONNECTION NOT YET REVEALED X LOCATION OF STEEL BEAR DOUBLE UNKNOWN X WILL RESUME NORMAL COMMUNICATION SCHEDULE TOMORROW X KOLLIN X CARNEGIE
She said, “It’s half a victory for us, darling. But it leaves a great many things open.”
He wasn’t unnerved by that. He couldn’t help his sense of relief. It had been too close to an end to the whole thing: the planning, the training, the operation, the fate of the two hundred million. Most of the time he tried not to think in those terms because then everything became apocalyptic. It had to be held down to its own scale, not the scale of things it might affect. This was a precision military campaign with exact methods and finite individual goals: a few square meters of railway track, a few armored carriages, an airfield, two communications centers-a transmitter and a trunk switchboard-and a handful of men inside a railway car. Think beyond any of that and there was a risk of too much fear and then paralysis.
He said, “Put on your best dress. My spies tell me they’ve got good Angus beef at one of the pubs in town.”