At Piccadilly, Ziegler stole a look around, checking eyes, then hurried off the bus. Nikolai waited until the next corner, keeping an eye on Ziegler the entire time. Then he turned and walked back up the sidewalk, spotting his target at a newsstand, thumbing through a magazine while doing a bit of dry-cleaning himself.
Unfortunately for him, he missed Nikolai entirely.
Satisfied after another twenty pages in the magazine that he wasn't being followed, Ziegler walked ahead two blocks south, then a block west, before stopping in front of one of two identical buildings. He stepped through the entrance of the first and disappeared from Nikolai's view. It didn't matter. Nikolai had him now.
However long it took, there would come a night when Ziegler would leave his flat for some errand, meeting with Anchev, or other, and Nikolai would be waiting.
For now, he turned and walked away.
A week of nights went by. Days, Nikolai was finding it difficult to stay awake at his desk. Which meant he spent many afternoons ostensibly recruiting, so he told Anchev, while he was sleeping on the rickety couch at the safe house.
Late after work, Nikolai finally found a parking space on the street a block down from his flat building. The night was dark and visibility poor with rain. Streetlamps illuminated only patches of the sidewalk and street. As he shifted the car into park, a man walked beneath a halo of light. To Nikolai’s surprise, it was Ziegler who was walking up the sidewalk, calling for someone named Esther. For the first few moments, Nikolai was puzzled, thinking the man had lost his mind. But then he understood when "Here, Esther!" changed into "Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty!"
And he knew he had him. All this time, Ziegler had been living just around the corner from Nikolai. The irony of life.
He stepped out of his Jaguar and set off toward Ziegler.
"Kitty, kitty!" Ziegler called out again, scanning the bushes and trees staggered along the sidewalk. Like the poor MI5 agent he was, Ziegler wasn’t watching his surroundings and didn’t see Nikolai approaching.
Just as they passed each other on the sidewalk, it was KGB School 1010 as Nikolai spun on his heel, dropped the picture wire around the target's neck, and pulled. As promised at spy school, the razor-thin wire neatly cut through the jugular veins on either side of Ziegler's neck, and he went down on his knees, then slumped onto his side. Nikolai reached into Ziegler’s back pocket and jerked his wallet free.
Silenced.
He casually walked back to his Jaguar and switched on the vehicle's interior light to check his hands and jacket for blood. Seeing just a small amount on the thumb webbing on both hands, he switched off the light and reached for the handkerchief he had thought to bring along. With a bit of saliva and effort, he removed the blood enough that Carolina, babysitting Sasha, wouldn't notice before he made it into the bathroom and finished it off with hot water and soap.
Ziegler hadn’t fully bled out, but he would by the time Nikolai entered his flat in less than five minutes.
Nikolai slept that night for ten hours. At midday, Sasha came in to jump on his bed and make sure he was awake.
He was awake, he told her, tossing and catching her.
Awake and very, very free of the fear he'd lived with for weeks on end.
* * *
“Ziegler was garroted,” Bolling told him when they next met at the safe house.
"No," said Nikolai. "What a great sense of relief! I'm free!"
Bolling smiled. "It was perfect timing. The police inspector believes it was a simple robbery. His wallet was missing."
"Whoever robbed him, put me down as very, very grateful."
"We thought you would be relieved."
Nikolai's eyes narrowed. "Was it you?"
"It was not," Bolling exclaimed. "Though we discussed it. But in the end, we knew we would be the obvious perpetrators if the police started snooping motives. So we passed."
"How about you?" asked Donovan, who had been nursing a cup of tea.
Nikolai shrugged. "Haven't you heard? The KGB doesn't actually exist."
Donovan nodded. "I won't ask again."
"You can ask, but my answer's the same. I brought documents today. Do you still want them?"
They broke up a half-hour later.
Nikolai drove back to the embassy, ready to go back to work.
Poor Anchev, he thought when he happened to use the men's bathroom while the rezident was washing up. His chance for glory at running down the ULYSSES mole kaput.
Poor Anchev. The man would find out soon enough that Lana was now gone, along with the answer to ULYSSES' identity. Nikolai would be taken off the case, but he already got what he’d wanted from it. It was time to move on.
36
Nikita Khrushchev appeared before the KGB personally. He had to deliver his message himself. Notepads, pens, and paper were left at the door to the meeting room. Everyone got searched. Khrushchev's first words to the KGB top staff: America was about to launch a first strike and burn the Soviet Union off the map.
Gasps went up, even among the steely, hardline KGB officers present. The worst had come. But why hadn't they known about this ahead of time? Where was his information coming from?
"Never mind," Sergei Tupolev, the head of the KGB, told his underbosses. "Our President has spoken. Our job is to take it at face value and do what we can to save our country from destruction."
Khrushchev made it clear what he wanted to be done. "The task of the KGB is to discern that this attack is imminent and give sufficient warning that the Soviet Union might attack the Americans first."
Nikolai and all KGB London were suddenly on red alert. They held meetings and made decisions about the types of information they would look for that might be predictive of war. Nikolai began haunting British seaports and airports. The teams returned empty-handed.
"What other investigations are we to perform?" Nikolai asked Anatoly Anchev at the end of two weeks.
"The President has given us his orders," Anchev replied, a grim set to his jaw. "We must find his evidence of war preparations by the British and save the motherland from annihilation. Look harder!"
With that, the spies in Great Britain roamed far and wide again. Their desperate charge: to turn over rocks until the British plan was revealed. The same KGB hunt was ongoing in America, too.
Nikolai wasted no time taking the witch-hunt news to the ULYSSES team, who passed it onto the MI5 Soviet experts at River House. MI5 reacted with disbelief, but MI6's double-agents confirmed.
On 20 August 1962, the information divulged made the British spies sit up and swallow hard, and their hearts hammer. KGB had learned of the activation of Operation Anadyr just that day as Khrushchev was taking troops and missiles into Cuba. ULYSSES had delivered those war plans to MI5. In what they received, there was no detail omitted.
The six seniors accepted the top-secret information as gospel. MI6 spies inside Russia reported secret troop movements and matériel accumulation at Russian ports. War machinery, tanks, APCs, howitzers, and even missile launchers accumulated seaside.
Then, the final sentences of the report. The Kremlin believed, wrongly, that the West was about to launch a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. The West was about to launch its missiles and drop its bombs from one end of Russia to the other.