He read the escape plan for the last time in the bathroom then struck a match. He watched the cellophane sheet flare up with an acrid flash before he flushed it down the toilet. Then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a half glass of vodka. He drank it straight down, then poured the rest of what was in the bottle into the sink. He washed it out with cold water, then splashed water into his eyes and drew a deep breath. "So. I'm ready."
The telephone rang. It was Yulia's father, Jana Valerov, the retired KGB general.
"Nikolai! It's Yulia's old man, the man who's going to inherit you one million rubles!"
"We can wait on that," Nikolai chided back, "no rush."
"Come for supper at seven tonight," said Valerov. "I'll cook a nice chicken in garlic."
Nikolai thought fast. The invitation for 7 p.m. clashed with the escape preparation. The KGB eavesdroppers listening in on the bugged telephone would be suspicious if he turned it down. If he accepted, they would be expecting him at his father-in-law's home at Davitkova on the city outskirts at the very moment when, with luck, he would be free of surveillance. "Thank you," he said, "I'll look forward to it."
The phone rang again. It was Mikhail Mashky, urging him to come and stay at his dacha for a few days the following week. Nikolai, again thinking quickly, accepted the invitation. He would come on next Tuesday, he said, catch the train arriving at Zvenigorod at 11:13 p.m., and travel in the last carriage. On the notebook by his telephone, he wrote, Zvenigorod 11:13. Here was another false trail for the KGB.
Nikolai wanted to look smart for his rendezvous with MI6, even if the KGB was waiting. He dressed in suit and tie, put on shoes that were probably radioactive, and picked up his English leather cap. At the last minute, he took along his Border Troops uniform in a Tesco shopping bag.
He walked two blocks and withdrew money. There were no ordinary banks in Moscow, only primitive savings banks, and he knew that the most he could draw from his account without attracting notice was three hundred rubles. He intended to leave most of this for his mother. Eighty rubles would be plenty for his train ticket, a couple of taxis, and meals during his journey. At the end of it, rubles would be of no further use to him. He would either be out of the Soviet Union or dead.
He walked two kilometers to the row of shops closest to home, taking care never to look behind for the agents trailing him. He stepped inside a dry cleaner and stood at the front window, watching. He saw no other eyes. Upstairs he went on an interior stairway to a real estate office. Now he had a view of the street below. Then he ducked into a busy food shop where he walked along in a line. The employees assembled a sandwich while he watched from the other side of the counter. After ducking down a rear stairway, he ran down two alleyways and into a public restroom. He went inside and waited in a stall for a full hour. Then he exited the building and hailed a taxi. He had the driver make a U-turn while he watched behind for the same maneuver—the classic moment when a spy knows whether he's been successful at his dry-cleaning. At Teatralnaya, he boarded a Metro train, jumped off at the first lurch forward, and jumped onto a train heading opposite. He exited that car and ran to the farthest carriage where he re-entered the station. He jogged up the stairs, and once on the street, hailed a taxi to Red Square and Saint Basil's.
Once there, he darted inside the cathedral and removed a hymnal from the back of the first pew. He went forward and placed the book beneath the open bible on the lectern. Then he ducked out a side door and hurried to the cover of a bus stop.
It was Rodney Mallard's turn to monitor the signal site since Roy and Sue Ellen Longfellow were going out to an embassy party with a Russian acquaintance, a former diplomat. As they pulled onto Diruvsky Prospekt in their embassy car and headed east, a surveillance car slotted in behind as usual. It was easy to spot the KGB vehicles since the brushes of the KGB carwash, for reasons unknown, could not quite reach a spot in the middle of the hood, so each car had a telltale triangle of dirt on the front. Longfellow glanced across the wide avenue and froze. A man resembling Nikolai's grainy picture was entering Saint Basil's. The time was 6:40. Nikolai's instructions were to leave immediately after placing the hymnal.
Rodney's missed him, thought Longfellow, swearing under his breath. His heart went straight to his toes. He poked Sue Ellen in the ribs, pointed across the road, and drew on the dashboard the letter T for TINKER. Sue Ellen resisted the urge to swivel in her seat and stare; she knew exactly what he meant.
Longfellow had ten seconds to decide if he should swing the car around and go inside the church, but the KGB was already tight on his bumper, and any change of behavior would instantly arouse suspicion. The KGB would know, from bugging the telephone, that they were going out to a dinner party, and suddenly performing a U-turn, jumping out of the car, and running into the cathedral would lead the KGB straight to TINKER. He drove on, feeling as if the world had fallen in, and he had done the wrong thing for the right reasons.
The party was hellish. Their host was an unreconstructed Communist apparatchik who spent the whole meal talking about how great Stalin was. All Longfellow could think about was the spy waiting for a call from Somerset Maugham. He was unaware, of course, that Nikolai no longer even visited that office.
While Longfellow had driven east on Diruvsky, Rodney Mallard passed the cathedral in his Peugeot, slowed a little, and scanned the sidewalk. There seemed to be lots of people milling around, noticeably more than usual for a weekday evening. And there, on the edge of the sidewalk, he was almost certain, was a man wearing a peaked cap like the man in the picture. The man had hurried inside the cathedral.
Mallard drove home, adrenaline racing, made a U-turn at the end of the avenue, entered the compound, and parked in the garage. Trying to appear unhurried, he took the elevator to the flat, dropped his briefcase, and loudly called to Cindy, "I need to see our priest." She immediately knew what was happening.
The elevator took an eternity. He walked to the cathedral, fighting the urge to run. The man had gone. He wondered if he would recognize him anyway since he had only ever seen one grainy photograph of ULYSSES that morning.
"I was so convinced I had seen someone," Mallard recalled later. He queued at the chemist's, keeping one eye on the street, which seemed even more crowded than before. Mallard decided to make another pass by the cathedral then go inside. That’s when he saw him. A man of about 6’1 around 80 kilograms, held a Tesco bag on the sidewalk near a bus stop outside Saint Basil's. He appeared to be enjoying the light breeze and a cigar.
Nikolai spotted Mallard at the same moment. On the point of leaving, he had drawn back from the sidewalk edge. It was the man’s demeanor. To Nikolai's hungry eyes, the man walking toward him, whistling, looked wholly, unmistakably, British.
Their eyes locked for less than a second. Nikolai heard himself silently shout at the top of his voice, "Yes! It's me!" Mallard took another deliberate step then turned inside the cathedral. He found the hymnal on the pulpit just minutes later and came back outside. The man had vanished.
General Valerov was annoyed when Nikolai finally arrived at his flat, sweaty and apologetic, nearly two hours late. His special garlic chicken was overcooked. Yet his son-in-law seemed strangely elated and devoured the burned meal with gusto.