Page 95 of The Half Life of Valery K

Valery nodded. He drew a line of ink on the paper and watched it as the shine faded and dried. ‘They’ll send us back, won’t they?’

Harrison looked honestly shocked. ‘No, I doubt that very much. You’re all in very clear and present danger. Not to mention that the intelligence you can offer is – well, significant.’ He hesitated, awkward. ‘Mr Kolkhanov, can I get you anything? You don’t look too …’ He stopped, because Valery had flinched oddly. ‘Shall I get a doctor?’

‘No.’ It had been the ‘mister’. He wondered if it would make even one atom of sense to this man, to say that it felt like a jab in the crotch to have his gender pointed out to him every time someone said his name. He had clean forgotten they did that. Mr, Mrs, Herr, Frau; every single person reminded every single time they were named of that one part of them that defined everything they were meant to be, and nobody ever seemed to sit back and say, but we would never call anyone Penis Harrison; how’s mister any different? They didn’t think that way. ‘This is – going to sound bizarre, but it’s comrade, not mister. I’m not mister in the way you mean it.’

Harrison looked blank.

‘Never mind,’ Valery said. He swallowed. ‘How are they? The others.’

‘Well,’ Harrison said, plainly relieved to have a question he could answer, ‘the villagers are having an absolute whale of a time in the staff canteen. Your Mrs Nanya has already told our cook everything that’s wrong with her shchi soup and they’re getting on famously—’

‘Sorry,’ Valery said, ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying. Simple English. Please.’

‘They like each other,’ Harrison amended. He smiled. ‘We all speak in dialect and we have no idea.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Valery said, and let Harrison decide if he was agreeing or disagreeing.

‘Oh, well, that’s very good of you. Anyway, yes; they’re fine. The doctors are – well, shocked, though, at the level of radiation complications.’

‘So was I. And the people in hospital, are they … ?’

‘Well, no one’s dead yet,’ Harrison said, with what he probably hoped was optimism. Shenkov, Pyotr and the other two test subjects were in a hospital now whose location Harrison wouldn’t say, under British names. It must have been close by, though. ‘With their doses, the doctors say it’s fifty-fifty, with medical care.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Valery nodded at the plate of biscuits. With the journey, and now this, he hadn’t spoken to Shenkov since they had left City 40. Very slowly, he was beginning to understand that he never would again. Even if Shenkov lived, the only thing he would want with Valery would be to punch him in the eye for forcing him to go without the children.

‘The KGB are looking for you,’ Harrison said gently. ‘We all had telephone calls this morning, all the embassies. They’re calling you a mass murderer. Dangerous madman, I believe is the phrase. If I let you out on to the street for even a moment, someone’s going to shoot you.’

‘Am I going to prison, then?’

‘Mr Kolkhanov. I find that when the KGB are at their most hysterical is when there is something extremely serious to cover up. I don’t believe a word of it. You don’t seem like a man who could kill anyone to me.’ He fixed Valery with a careful blue look. ‘The claims they’re making against you are utterly absurd. Fifty men at a labour camp killed in a chemical bomb, five people in a lab from something they can’t even explain; all they’re doing is trying to discredit you. But fortunately, you brought seventy-four cases of absolute proof that what you’re saying about City 40 is true. And if there’s anything in that statement you’re writing now to suggest you aren’t a model citizen who would be entirely suited to being settled in the West, I’ll fetch you a fresh sheet of paper and you can correct it.’ He leaned across the little table and squeezed Valery’s shoulder. ‘Between you and me, I think the intelligence boys are going to be very pleased with you indeed.’

Valery studied him and tried to tell if he was acting. There was every chance they were going to make him tell them everything, then hand him over to the KGB. He couldn’t refuse to talk, or bargain; he couldn’t say he would tell them once everyone was safe in England. They had Shenkov. One word from Harrison and he would be out on the street, with radiation sickness.

Harrison smiled his cheery, open smile. ‘Why don’t you stop that for now and we’ll have dinner.’

Valery had to give up. He had never been able to read between the lines, he had never spoken the special code, and no amount of urgency was ever going to help him learn, any more than it would help him learn to fly.

He knew the new man was from the intelligence services, because he spoke fluent Russian. It wasn’t a tourist’s stumbling. It was the kind you got from hanging round the Kremlin.

By then, Valery and the villagers had been at the embassy for forty-eight hours, and things were getting difficult. Harrison had locked the place down on the first night – no one from City 40 was to go out, ever – because quietly, unremarkably, Bolshaya Ordynka Street had filled with people who had taken to hanging around outside all the embassies. They knew, Harrison said, that Valery must have brought everyone to one of them, but no one knew which one. Whenever one of the secretaries went out for a coffee, someone followed.

It was hard to keep seventy people hidden in what was not really that large a building, away from all the doors and windows. They’d distributed everyone through the guest bedrooms, six or eight to a room, and they were keeping the curtains shut.

Incredibly, every other embassy on the street was also keeping the curtains of their bedroom windows shut. Harrison must have rung around, and while one part of Valery was amazed that people would bother to do that, another spun with anxiety. The more people Harrison told, the more chance there was that someone would go to the KGB. There would be money involved, or whatever it was that diplomats liked to be paid in. Handshakes, secrets.

The new man’s name was George. That was all he would say; he didn’t claim to have a surname. Like every spy Valery had ever met, he was nothing like people thought spies were. He had the manner and appearance of a secondary-school maths teacher. A bit shabby, a bit balding, friendly in an impersonal way; forgettable.

‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to wait here for so long,’ was the first thing he said. They were in Valery’s room. Harrison had given Valery a room to himself. He had framed it as a reward for getting everyone out, but it wasn’t. If there was a mole in the building, it would mean that any hand grenade someone threw in through the window would only kill him, not a bunch of kids from the village.

Valery shook his head at the carpet. It was deep and cream-coloured, and there were silk Turkish rugs everywhere. And a television, incredibly, that showed the BBC. The BBC: he had inhaled their news for an hour, enraptured. They showed debates in Parliament where MPs yelled at each other and made themselves look like morons. They showed journalists giving the Prime Minister an open bollocking on the steps of Downing Street. They interviewed random people on the street who said the government were rubbish and ought to be replaced. And not a single one of them was hurried away by anyone in a grey coat. He was still trying to get to grips with how anyone could run a functioning country like that. ‘It’s okay.’

‘No it bloody isn’t,’ George said, gently huffy. ‘It’s a nightmare trying to get a flight into Moscow at the moment, everyone’s off on holiday. I should have been here yesterday. How are you doing?’

‘Fine,’ said Valery, not sure why he was asking. It didn’t matter how Valery was doing.