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“Keep me posted,” said the Head of Station. Fields checked his watch. One hour between calls and five minutes gone. At a public phone in the lobby of a bank two blocks from the militia building, Inspector Novikov also checked his watch and decided to take a coffee to fill the intervening fifty minutes. Then he would report to another public phone a block further down and wait.
Fields left the embassy ten minutes later and drove slowly to the Kosmos Hotel on Mira Prospekt. Built in 1979, modern by Moscow standards, the Kosmos has a row of public phone booths close to the lobby.
An hour after the call came to the embassy he checked a notepad from his jacket pocket and dialed. Public booth-to-booth calls are a nightmare for counterintelligence organizations and virtually uncheckable because of the sheer numbers of them.
“Boris?” Novikov was not called Boris. His given name was Yevgeni, but when he heard “Boris” he knew it was Fields on the line.
“Yes. That drawing you gave me. Something has come up. I think we should meet.”
“All right. Join me for dinner at the Rossiya.”
Neither man had any intention of going to the vast Rossiya Hotel. The reference was to a bar called the Carousel halfway up Tverskaya Street. It was cool and dark enough to be discreet. Again the time lapse was one hour.
¯
LIKE many of the larger British embassies, the Moscow legation contains on its staff a member of the British internal security service known as M15. This is the sister service of the foreign intelligence-gathering Secret Intelligence Service, wrongly but popularly called MI6.
The task of the MI5 man is not to gather information about the host country, but to guarantee the security of the embassy, its various outstations, and its staff.
The staff do not regard themselves as prisoners and in Moscow during the summer frequent a pretty bathing spot outside the city where the River Moskva curves in a manner that exposes a small sandy beach. For diplomatic staff this is a favored picnicking and bathing spot.
Before he was elevated to the rank of inspector and transferred to Homicide, Yevgeni Novikov had been the officer in charge of that country district, including the resort area known as Serebryani Bor, or Silver Woods.
It was here he had got to know the then British security service officer, who introduced him to the newly arrived Gracie Fields.
Fields cultivated the young policeman and eventually suggested that a small monthly retainer in hard currency could make life easier for a man on a fixed salary in inflationary times. Inspector Novikov became a source, low-level it was true, but occasionally useful. During this week the homicide detective was going to repay all the effort.
“We have a body,” he told Fields as they sat in the gloom of the Carousel and sipped chilled beer. “I’m pretty sure it’s the man in the drawing you gave me. Old, steel teeth, you know. …”
He narrated the events as he had learned them from his colleague Volsky on the John Doe desk.
“Nearly three weeks, that’s a long time to be dead in this weather. The face must be ghastly,” said Fields. “It might not be the same man.”
“He was only in the forest for a week. Then nine days in a cold box. He should be recognizable.”
“I’ll need a photograph, Boris. Can you get one?”
“I don’t know. They’re all with Volsky. Do you know of a man called Inspector Chernov?”
“Yes, he’s been around to the embassy. I gave him one of the drawings too.”
“I know,” said Novikov. “Now they’re all over the place. Anyway, he’ll be back. Volsky will have told him by now. He’ll have a real photograph of the corpse’s face.”
“For himself, not for us.”
“It could be difficult.”
“Well try, Boris, try. You’re in Homicide, aren’t you? Say you want to show it around some gangland contacts. Make any excuse. This is a homicide now. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Solve murders?”
“Supposed to,” admitted Novikov gloomily. He wondered if the Englishman knew the cleanup rate for gang killings was three percent.
“There’ll be a bonus in it for you,” said Fields. “When our staff are attacked we are not ungenerous.”
“All right,” said Novikov. “I’ll try and get one.”
As it happened he did not need to bother. The mystery man file came to Homicide of its own accord and two days later he was able to abstract one of the sheaf of photos of the face taken out in the woods by the Minsk Highway.
Langley, November 1986