An army lieutenant moved forward and saluted. ‘One of them is still alive, two dead, Colonel Maslovsky. What are your orders?’
Maslovsky ignored him and said to Kelly, ‘You weren’t supposed to carry a gun.’
‘I know,’ Kelly said. ‘On the other hand, according to the rules of the game, Murphy was not supposed to be an informer. I was told he was IRA.’
‘So, you always believe what you’re told?’
‘The Party tells me I should, Comrade Colonel. Maybe you’ve got a new rule book for me?’ Maslovsky was angry and it showed for he was not used to such attitudes – not from anyone. He opened his mouth to retort angrily and there was a sudden scream. The little girl who had sold Kelly the poppies pushed her way through the crowd and dropped on her knees beside the body of the police sergeant.
‘Papa,’ she wailed in Russian. ‘Papa.’ She looked up at Kelly, her face pale. ‘You’ve killed him! You’ve murdered my father!’
She was on him like a young tiger, nails reaching for his face, crying hysterically. He held her wrists tight and suddenly, all strength went out of her and she slumped against him. His arms went around her, he held her, stroking her hair, whispering in her ear.
The old priest moved out of the crowd. ‘I’ll take her,’ he said, his hands gentle on her shoulders.
They moved away, the crowd opening to let them through. Maslovsky called to the lieutenant, ‘Right, let’s have the square cleared.’ He turned to the man in the leather coat. ‘I’m tired of this eternal Ukrainian rain. Let’s get back inside and bring your protege with you. We need to talk.’
The KGB is the largest and most complex intelligence service in the world, totally controlling the lives of millions in the Soviet Union itself, its tentacles reaching out to every country. The heart of it, its most secret area of all, concerns the work of Department 13, that section responsible for murder, assassination and sabotage in foreign countries.
Colonel Ivan Maslovsky had commanded Department 13 for five years. He was a thickset, rather brutal-looking man, whose appearance was at odds with his background. Born in 1919 in Leningrad, the son of a doctor, he had gone to law school in that city, completing his studies only a few months before the German invasion of Russia. He had spent the early part of the war fighting with partisan groups behind the lines. His education and flair for languages had earned him a transfer to the wartime counter-intelligence unit known as SMERSH. Such was his success that he had remained in intelligence work after the war and had never returned to the practice of law.
He had been mainly responsible for the setting up of highly original schools for spies at such places as Gaczyna, where agents were trained to work in English-speaking countries in a replica of an English or American town, living exactly as they would in the West. The extraordinarily successful penetration by the KGB of the French intelligence service at every level had been, in the main, the product of the school he had set up at Grosnia, where the emphasis was on everything French, environment, culture, cooking and dress being faithfully replicated.
His superiors had every faith in him, and had given himcarte blanche to extend the system, which explained the existence of a small Ulster market town called Drumore in the depths of the Ukraine.
The room he used as an office when visiting from Moscow was conventional enough, with a desk and filing cabinets, a large map of Drumore on the wall. A log fire burned brightly on an open hearth and he stood in front of it enjoying the
heat, nursing a mug of strong black coffee laced with vodka. The door opened behind him as the man in the leather coat entered and approached the fire, shivering.
‘God, but it’s cold out there.’
He helped himself to coffee and vodka from the tray on the desk and moved to the fire. Paul Cherny was thirty-four years of age, a handsome good-humoured man who already had an international reputation in the field of experimental psychology; a considerable achievement for someone born the son of a blacksmith in a village in the Ukraine. As a boy of sixteen, he had fought with a partisan group in the war. His group leader had been a lecturer in English at the University of Moscow and recognized talent when he saw it.