The Red Eagles by David Downing

Author:David Downing [David Downing]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781908699978
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2014-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Amy sat on the edge of the basin with her legs dangling over the side and watched him walk toward her around the rim. He looked American, dressed in chinos and a checked shirt, but she knew it was him. She took the orange out of her bag and absentmindedly tossed it from one hand to the other like an impatient baseball pitcher waiting to be relieved.

He bought a Coke and sat down about fifteen feet away, separated by a fat man, watching, she knew, to make sure he hadn’t been followed. They’d done a good job in Moscow. The haircut was perfect, the army boots looked as if they’d seen a few Pacific Islands. She wondered how good his English would be – twenty-six years was a long time.

After about ten minutes the fat man got up to leave and Kuznetsky took out a cigarette, patted both shirt pockets, and discovered that he had no matches. “Would you like a light?” she asked, taking her cue. “Thanks,” he said with a flat Midwestern twang. He moved closer and casually took the matches and offered her a cigarette. As he lit hers their eyes met.

The last thing he’d expected to see was her half-veiled amusement. Nervousness yes, cold efficiency perhaps. She was either very right or very wrong for this sort of work, and he wasn’t in an optimistic mood. She looked so young too. You could go from one end of the Soviet Union to the other and not find a thirty-three-year-old that the years had treated so kindly.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a soft, almost accentless English. She picked up the orange. “The absurdity of things like this …” He was a remarkable-looking man. Not in a purely physical sense, but he seemed to radiate … power, that was the only word for it. His eyes had seemed to look straight through her, utterly clinical. And yet, as he walked around the basin, even as he’d sat not five yards away, she’d had an almost opposite impression, a sort of bearlike shambling …

He seemed to relax. The eyes switched to neutral, gazing blankly across the water. He was thinking about something that woman with Sheslakov had said. “She will be driven, she will drive herself …” Now that did sound absurd on a day like this, in a place like this.

He told her, slowly but precisely, what he had told Yakovlev about their problem with the escape route. She didn’t interrupt, merely asked whether it was still on.

“Until we hear otherwise, and I doubt whether we will. The Party would have us cross the Pacific on a raft rather than let this chance go by.”

She was pleased, he could see that. That was something. “All I need for now,” he said, “is a good look at your German friend.”

“He’s American. He’ll be picking me up outside the Library of Congress at six on Tuesday evening and dropping me at the same place later, I don’t know how much later.

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