Page 97 of The Half Life of Valery K

Valery nodded and said nothing, because he didn’t feel as though any of it could possibly happen.

‘Anyone you know who might help?’ George said. ‘Military types?’

Valery shook his head.

The three secretaries were upset in the morning. The KGB agents outside the embassies had started to get bored of watching, and they had begun to stop people in the street. They weren’t asking directly about Valery; they were just checking papers, but they had taken someone’s away because of some flaw on the nationality page, and they had told someone else that hers were invalid for reasons they weren’t going to say, and that she could expect to be deported. When Valery came into the dining room, everyone glanced at him, and he felt that same pressure on his chest he had felt at the biology lab in City 40. As though the radiation were still on his clothes, and he was contaminating anyone who came near him. They couldn’t last much longer.

The phone in Harrison’s office was not bugged, as far as anyone knew.

Valery had no idea if military phones were. Probably.

He tried anyway, half because he was almost certain that Svetlana’s home number wouldn’t be the same.

But it was.

‘If this is you again, Kresnik, I’m going to garotte you with this phone cord.’ She sounded exactly the same.

‘Hello,’ he croaked. ‘Is that Svetlana Kolkhanova?’

Silence on the other end of the line.

He swallowed hard. ‘Uh, sorry. I’m calling about – window sales. May I have a moment of your time?’

If she didn’t recognise his voice, that was it.

Silence again. But then, ‘Do you know what? This is serendipitous. A kid smashed one of my windows with a baseball yesterday. What have you got?’

‘Oh really?’ he managed. ‘Well, madame, we actually have some of the very best glass just in, made in the UK. But it’s going very quickly indeed, so if you’d like to have look at it, it might be best to come to the warehouse soon. We always advise coming to look.’

‘Right. I will. Thanks.’ She hung up.

He wondered if he had just signed her arrest warrant.

She arrived that evening. She walked straight in through the front door, in full uniform, called Valery a silly bastard, and told him there was a military transport to England setting off in the morning.

35

The West

Durham, 1964 (two months later)

Valery liked airports, always had; he still had a zing of excitement whenever he saw a plane take off, and they were even better when he didn’t have to go anywhere but only pick someone up. He had never been more nervous to go anywhere, though, than Newcastle airport that morning. He did not like driving in England, with the insane insistence that everything should be on the left, and he did not enjoy English passive-aggressive drivers, either. At least at home, if someone was annoyed then they yelled; here, they just drove much too close for miles and then overtook fast at some inappropriate traffic lights. And they hated it if you didn’t know where you were going, even though there were no road signs. He was starting to think that there must be a low-level telepathy among English people.

But he was glad he didn’t like English roads, cars or people, because it was a distraction.

The call from Moscow had come at five o’clock that morning. It was George, the intelligence-services man.

‘We’ve got Konstantin Shenkov on a plane to you today. Have you got a pen?’ He gave the flight number and the timing, the terminal at Newcastle. Valery had only just managed to write it down.

‘How likely is it to actually land rather than ending up diverted to Leningrad?’ Valery asked.

‘Oh, I should say a healthy sixty per cent,’ George said in his honest way. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any leaks, but sometimes the KGB are crafty. Anyway, good luck.’

And that was it. All there was to do was go to the airport and hope.

He got there two hours early, because he couldn’t sit at home any more. The flight desk did know that the plane had taken off and was still in the air according to the tower; they seemed puzzled that he was so worried.

He settled down at the cafe near arrivals, or tried, and read three newspapers cover to cover. His English had swooped right back up to fluent in the last couple of weeks. Weeks; it was hard to believe he had been here for weeks. For the first few days, he had waited by the phone, but heard nothing; and nothing, and nothing. He’d started to think, after six or seven days, that there was never going to be news. George wouldn’t think to tell him if Shenkov was dead, shot behind the hospital or vanished into the Lubyanka. It had made him numb at first, and then it hit him gradually, like he’d fallen down the stairs incredibly slowly, and he felt aching and exhausted even to look at the almost certain future: he was just going to keep doing this now, forever, being a foreigner in a bizarre country, where he was either going to stay alone, or settle down with someone matronly and reassuring, just to have another human around.