Colonel Sun by Amis Kingsley

Author:Amis, Kingsley [Kingsley, Amis]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

General Incompetence

IT WAS a beautiful morning. Out at sea the rising _meltémi__ was blowing the tops off the waves, but off the southern shore of Vrakonisi it did no more than impart a pleasing sense of motion to the slightly flawed surface of the water, as if a giant mirror of liquid blue stone were perpetually moving south and perpetually renewing itself from the edge of the land. And on the land, in the house on the islet, all that could be felt was a mild breeze, gusting a little at times and fluttering the natural-coloured linen curtains, raising the corners of the papers on the long pale Swedish desk by the window, but cool and delicious.

Sitting at the desk with a glass of tea before him, Colonel-General Igor Arenski felt comfortably relaxed. This was his first undercover assignment outside the Soviet Union, though as a high official of the KGB (Committee of State Security) he had naturally made frequent trips to foreign countries in the guise of trade delegate, manager of cultural mission and the like, and had worked for over five years as a counsellor at the Russian Embassy in Washington.

Arenski folded his hands behind his bald head and gazed out over the placid stretch of the Aegean. Supervising the security arrangements for this conference had been a simple matter to a man of his experience. All the real work had been done weeks before in his Moscow office. Coming all this way merely to witness the operation of the foolproof machinery he had devised was, between himself and his professional conscience, quite unnecessary. Half a dozen of his subordinates - that charming dark-eyed lad Gevrek from Soviet Armenia, for instance - could have done this part of the job equally well. That was the sort of thing these _yobannye__ politicians never understood. They thought in terms of rank, of roubles, of protocol, of producing senior Security officers when senior diplomats were being taken under protection. As if these Arabs and Levantines would know the difference between a distinguished higher member of the _apparat__ and a provincial area-controller!

Still, he must not complain. It was a good thing to have got away from Moscow for a time; even a short trip like this helped one to maintain an international outlook. And, although not up to the climate and standard of comfort to be enjoyed at his villa outside Sevastopol, this was an agreeable enough location. The inhabitants were a barbaric lot in general, uncouth and suspicious, but his contact with them for intelligence purposes had had to be no more than minimal, and it was true that his contact with one inhabitant - a fisherboy or something of the kind from the port - was turning out to be unexpectedly interesting. Life was treating Igor Alexeivitch well.

Though he would have denied it strenuously, Arenski was himself a politician of the most durable sort. Under Beria in the MGB, the old Security Ministry, he had conducted himself with a

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