Once Ros had reached her precarious refuge in Moscow, her years in the intelligence services had enabled her to cope reasonably well with the enormous adjustment she had to make to her new circumstances. Thanks to the nature of her work, she was no stranger to assuming a false identity and creating a persona other than her own. She was living illegally in a country that was intensely alien, and her survival depended largely on how convincing she could make that persona. But now she was no longer doing it merely for the duration of an operation where, if things became too dangerous, her superior officer would take the decision to pull her out and close it down. There was no limit set to the length of this 'operation', and that was what Ros feared the most. In her lowest moments, as she trudged home physically exhausted from a long shift, or queued in a stuffy gastronom, trying to work out how much chewy, gristle-filled Russian sausage she could afford to buy, she would sometimes feel a claustrophobic panic suffocating her. It took all her resources of self-discipline to stifle the burgeoning scream at the thought that this was not only her present, but her future too; that this was all there was, and all there would ever be.
The astonishing, incredible arrival of the note was her equivalent of someone tapping on the cell wall of a prisoner in solitary confinement. It was the hand Harry Pearce had tried to extend to her as Juliet Shaw jabbed the syringe into her neck, but freed of its restraints. It was reassurance that Rosalind Myers wasn't just an unwanted, slowly fading memory in a few minds far away. It offered the merest, distant, whispered hint of redemption.
As Ros discovered over the next three days, it also nudged ajar the mental doors she had worked so hard to keep tightly locked on her former life. Adam had instructed her to 'walk away and don't look back. Not ever.' And she hadn't, because she knew that however harsh and uncaring the words seemed, he was right. Mourning what she had lost and yearning for what she could never have again would distract her, sap her strength, and expose her to the danger of making a possibly lethal mistake. So she had worked ruthlessly to suppress all that Ros Myers had been and everything she had once had. She had almost convinced herself that the woman had been nothing but a quirk of her imagination. But it had taken just five words on a scrap of paper to make a healthy dent in that conviction. Usually, the long, gruelling hours on her feet at the club meant that Ros would sleep like the dead, too tired to dream. Now she lay awake, digging her nails into her pillow in frustration, made restless by a physical longing for Adam that she couldn't control. When she eventually slept, it was Harry Pearce who joined her, circling round and round her like a shark, his eyes stripping the tattered remnants of her defences from her, the menace of his courteous tone more threatening than the barely-contained fury it concealed. She jerked awake, sweating and trembling, to his bellowed 'shut up!' and scrabbled for the reassurance of the note that every tenet of intelligence protocol dictated that she should have already destroyed. You are my outstanding officer.
In the end she got up earlier than she needed to, despite her tiredness, and prepared to make the trek to Novodievichi, which was on the other side of the city. When she had been an ambassador's teenage daughter, there had been so few private cars in Moscow that she had been able to jaywalk nonchalantly across its broad eight-lane avenues. These days the city's traffic jams were legendary, and the possibility of endless delays had to be factored into any journey. Besides, purchasing a car would have been beyond Irina's financial reach and meant the kind of red tape and paperwork best avoided, so Ros used trams or the metro. Moscow's buses were ancient Soviet fossils, prone to breaking down, and often fell victim to the city's gridlock.
At least it wasn't either snowing or raining. Ros carefully opened the fortochka, the tiny opening in the corner of the window pane there to provide the minimal ventilation which was all the bitter cold of Russian winters allowed. The air temperature confirmed what the scudding clouds suggested – that despite the intermittent glimpses of feeble sunlight, a strong – and cold – wind was scouring the streets. Ros sighed, tugged on a pair of woollen stockings under her jeans, added several top layers, and finished her ensemble off with her padded coat, boots, a woollen ski cap and a shawl tied over the top of it. Other than the jeans and one cheap, but obviously Western-made sweater hidden from immediate view, everything she wore had been obtained from the street stalls around the nearby Dinamo football stadium. Several items were second-hand, bought from the babushkas who stood, sometimes for hours, selling off whatever they could to supplement their meagre pensions. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror as she left the flat, and for a second, heard Adam's mocking laughter at her appearance. She slammed the door hard on both the flat, and the sound.
The nearest metro station, Aeroport, was on Leningrad Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk away through a maze of back streets and scrubby courtyards containing a few rusty swings and slides and populated by menacing-looking breeds of dog. Ros kept her head down to protect her eyes against the swirling dust, and tried to ignore the icy gusts slicing through her clothes. She slipped deftly through the crowds that always thronged the stalls and kiosks around the Metro station and headed for the platform. With impeccable Soviet logic, the station was nearly twenty miles from the nearest airport at Sheremyetyevo, and Ros couldn't help cynically wondering how many bewildered tourists had emerged from it over the years searching desperately for an aeroplane.
At least it's warm, she thought gratefully, as the vertiginously steep wooden escalator plunged her swiftly downwards into the human anthill that was the Moscow Metro. That the air she was sharing with her fellow passengers was thick, foetid and probably germ-laden as well as warm, was a price worth paying.
She took a green line train South for the five stops to where she had to change. Moscow tourist guides understandably vaunted the speed and reliability of the Metro's service and boasted of the beauty of the station décor. What they didn't mention was the bouncy ride that turned Ros's already tense – and empty – stomach queasy, the clanking and rattling of the carriages, or the ear-splitting screech of wheels on rails that made conversation impossible. Still, that was an asset to her; it reinforced the travelling Muscovite's propensity for withdrawing into a grim, unapproachable silence, and meant that she could fade into her shabby clothes and into the background more easily.
As she changed to the red line at Okhotni Ryad, the stop nearest the Kremlin and a quarter of a mile from the Lubyanka, Ros kept her face blank and her demeanour humble, but she was conscious of adrenaline causing her heart to beat faster. This was dangerous territory. Already she could see Western tourists around her and hear English being spoken. It sounded almost like a foreign language to her; she had been thinking and speaking in nothing but Russian. Deliberately, she shut her ears to it, while uneasily registering the increased police presence. Armed, black-clad officers from the OMON riot police units lurked menacingly about in pairs, supplementing the regular militiamen. Ros thanked God, Russian Orthodox or otherwise, that she was blonde with green eyes. Terrorist attacks in Moscow meant that the police force, already not known for its racial tolerance, deemed dark eyes to be suspect automatically. A dark skin guaranteed document checks and a search. One was taking place a few yards ahead of her. Ros averted her eyes, darted past, and hurried onwards to the southbound Red Line platform. In her haste, she skidded on the dusty marble steps and almost fell.
"Hey, careful, ma'am!" The voice, and its owner, who had grabbed her arm to steady her, was American. Ros span round and wrenched herself free from a tall young man in the tourist winter uniform of ski-jacket and jeans, topped off despite the weather with a baseball cap, worn – inevitably - backwards. "You OK?" He hesitated. "Speak English?"
Ros almost snapped, 'better than you by the sound of it'. She glared at him, spat in Russian, 'This isn't your America. This is our country. You speak our language!" She heard, and ignored, the 'wow, friendly folks around here' as she ran across the platform and jumped just in time into the train.
By the time it reached Sportivnaya station, she had developed a headache from a combination of hunger and tension, the latter not helped by two OMON officers who had come through the train scrutinizing the passengers. They hadn't given her more than a cursory glance, but by the time she re-emerged into the street, Ros's hands, shoved deep in her pockets, were shaking. She stopped at one of the kiosks behind the station and bought a pirozhok, the nearest Russia had to a Cornish pasty. It was hideously greasy, and Ros didn't care to imagine what animal – assuming an animal was involved – the meat had come from, but it was hot, and eating it steadied her nerves as she walked along the street to Novodievichi convent and the adjoining cemetery. A glance at her watch told her she was early, so instead of going straight into the cemetery she bought a ticket for the convent, reflecting ironically that as a Russian citizen, Irina Selesnikova was paying a fifth of the price that would have been extorted from Rosalind Myers, visiting Englishwoman.
It was still early in the tourist season, and mid-week, so there were few people in the Cathedral of the Virgin of Smolensk. Ros crossed herself as she walked in, and bought two of the thin wax candles on sale in every Russian church. For a few moments she stood looking at the glorious iconostasis, drinking in its beauty, letting the quietness calm her. Mindful to stay in character, she then kissed the icon of the Virgin and one of Christ in Majesty, and left a candle in the stand in front of each. As she left, she noticed one of the officious little elderly women who seemed to inhabit every Russian church fussily putting her candle in a different holder. Russia's babushkas. Never mind Ivan the Terrible and Vladimir Putin. They're the real law of the land. Hastily, Ros suppressed a smile, bowed her head in respect and slipped back out into the grounds.
She skirted a group of chilled-looking French tourists being lectured on the history of the complex, and passed through the gate underneath the Church of the Transfiguration that led directly into the cemetery. Another few roubles secured her a plan of the graves. Ros checked her watch again. Twenty minutes to go. Again she could feel a tightness growing in her chest and, despite the chill, a trickle of perspiration under the bulky layers of clothes. In London, she would have thought of it as being alert and ready, but Irina had inherited Ros Myers's brutal honesty. She might be alert and ready, but her rapid pulse and the dryness in her mouth weren't signs of alertness; they were signs of fear.
Moscow Rules. Ros remembered Adam talking about them once. Well, there would never be a better place or time to apply them. Glancing alternately at the map and, apparently, at the graves around her, she moved deeper into the cemetery along its neat gravel paths, listening and watching surreptitiously for any activity that seemed out of the ordinary, and stopping occasionally to examine a stone or monument. Here, jumbled together in a charming Russian disorder, lay some of the country's greatest musicians, writers and artists – Rostropovich, Chekhov, Sergei Eisenstein – alongside military heroes, members of the Tsarist nobility, and those who had run the system that had overthrown them – the Khrushchevs, Yeltsins, and Gromykos. Ros knew that Kim Philby was buried somewhere here in a secluded, unadvertised grave. Had she the knowledge of its location and the time to spare, she would gladly have gone to spit on it.
Time. She turned quickly onto an intersecting path. There were a few more people in this part of the cemetery, but all the Russians were in couples or family groups, and none of them looked like a possible contact. Ros couldn't believe Harry would have risked sending her a message through a random Western tourist. She ducked to avoid a tree branch and saw Gromyko's grave ahead of her.
It was strikingly modern design for a man so conservative in every respect, she thought as she stood there, although the stone – black, red and grey polished granite – was more in character. The shape reminded her of the jagged edges of a glacier. Maybe that wasn't so wrong, either.
"He was a good man." A male voice spoke quietly next to her in Russian. "A fine representative of our country when it was strong." A fist clenched. "He was respected in the West. He made us respected."
"Y - yes, he did. He was honest. Hard-working." Despite all her precautions Ros had been taken completely by surprise, and she had to fight to keep the quiver from her voice. She glanced to her right. The man was in his mid-twenties, red-haired, obviously Russian. He was holding a handful of single carnations. Now he smiled and held one out to her. "We should show our respect. Don't you think?"
"Yes, we should." Ros was recovering. "Thank you. I – er – I should have … but the flowers are so expensive."
"Yes. Even death has a price in Russia now." There was bitterness in the young man's voice that she suspected was genuine. He gazed at the monument for a moment longer until a couple trailing two squealing and obviously very bored children had gone past, then, with a gesture so swift and discreet that Ros wasn't even sure she'd seen it, slipped something into the cheap plastic shopping bag she carried over her shoulder. "That is everything you need." His voice was a whisper. "Garry Peers says be careful. You are Rangefinder. I am Pyotr."
For a second Ros didn't recognise the Russified pronunciation of Harry's name. She stooped to lay the carnation across the base of Gromyko's grave. He'll be turning somersaults in it if he can hear this conversation.
"How is he? How do you know him?" They weren't, strictly speaking, relevant or necessary questions. Ros knew that she shouldn't be prolonging contact, but this nondescript young Russian was a tangible link to Harry and everything that he meant to her. For an instant her longing to know something, however trivial, about him, over-rode the imperatives of her field training.
'Pyotr' laid his carnation next to hers. "He is fine, but he needs your help." A pause. "He knew my mother in Germany. Long ago. Good luck." He straightened and let his voice rise slightly. "Those good days will come again. Tsarstvo vam nyebyesnoiye, Andrei Andreyevich."
God rest your soul. Ros doubted Gromyko had had one, but she bowed her head, and looked up just in time to see the young Russian walking away down the path. She switched her bag to her left shoulder, and in doing so, felt the shape of something like a small packet in the bottom of it. A slight tremor rippled its way down her spine, partly because she had become cold from standing still, partly from apprehension about what a search by militia officers might find now.
Pull your bloody self together! she raged silently. She had been in the intelligence services for fifteen years. She had single-handedly kept herself safe throughout her flight across Europe. And why the hell would the police be interested in Irina Selesnikova anyway, impoverished, plain, downtrodden little mouse that she was?
Do not be afraid! She started making her way towards the street exit, still walking casually and admiring the graves as she passed. I shouldn't be, but I am. She had to admit it. It was fear that was making her shiver as much as the chill, and fear that was urging her to run rather than stroll. This time she was really out on a limb, without back-up or protection, surrounded by wolves in hostile territory. I am. But I wouldn't be afraid if you were with me. If I knew you were here somewhere.
The crunch of footsteps advancing rapidly on the gravel behind her made her turn. For a split second the glimpse of uniforms almost paralysed her. Then the two army officers pushed arrogantly past as if she were invisible, almost shoving her off the path. Irina cringed against the monument she had stumbled into, stammering an unheard apology. Ros watched them go, instinctively clutching her bag to her side.
But you are. She could feel the packet pressing against the thin, cheap padding of her coat. You are here. And they have no idea.
Irina Selesnikova brushed stone dust from her sleeves, hunched defensively into her coat and thrust her chilled hands into her pockets. Rosalind Myers allowed herself the luxury of shooting a freezing glare after the two officers and felt the small gesture of defiance ease her tension. Harry needs your help. She took a deep breath and headed briskly back towards the metro station.
