Firefox by Craig Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

investigated.
    Edgecliffe was smiling. In his signal to Aubrey, that night at least, he could report a state of satisfactory progress.
    Besides the false papers he had shown to the KGB searching the metro, to protect himself from identification as a suspected drug-trafficker, Pavel had in his pocket, among other things, something that would have caused Gant to become far more ill than he had thus far seemed to be: it was a red card, such as was only carried by members of the KGB. It was a card which he sincerely hoped not to have to use since it was a fake, but which he knew he might have to employ if there was no other way out of the station.
    He had watched them arrive. As yet there were few, but they were thorough. He had already shifted his ground a dozen times in less than fifteen minutes, straining his nerve and patience to make his movements appear casual, unobtrusive. There were KGB men at the main entrance, where a hastily erected barrier had been thrown across the gap into the square and the night, and all departing and arriving passengers were having their papers inspected. They were a motley collection of duty and off-duty personnel from the various departments of the 2nd Chief Directorate, and some faces he knew from Edgecliffe’s files on the Political Security Service. They were looking for the murderers of Orton, the ‘economic criminals’ that formed one of their main interests in life.
    He had seen Vassily, the third man on the embankment, only once, sitting in a station restaurant, eating a huge, doughy cake, and sipping coffee. The coffee was good, and the pastries and cakes cheap and filling for a man like Vassily, whose papers proclaimed him to be a night watchman. Vassily could stay in the restaurant for a couple of hours yet, and be searched and questioned, without arousing suspicion. So might he - but not Gant.
    The remainder of the KGB personnel, who had not dropped out of sight to the lower levels and platforms of the metro station, were engaged in searching all possible places of concealment in the station foyer. A small team was busy opening all the left-luggage boxes set against the far wall. Others checked papers, questioned ascending passengers, bullied and threatened.
    Pavel watched, with a degree of fascination, a typical and very thorough KGB operation against the citizens of Moscow.
    He tried to keep in his line of sight the entrance to the gents’ where Gant had retreated. The man was having a bad time. He could not comprehend how Gant had ever been selected for this mission. Pavel himself was only a link in the chain, one of Edgecliffe’s small Russian force in Moscow, but he knew more than perhaps he should have done, since Edgecliffe respected all those native Russians who worked for him, Jew or non-Jew, with a more than ordinary respect. He, unlike Aubrey, appreciated the risk they took - and, if he could avoid it, he wouldn’t let them walk in the dark: in the case of Pavel, not even for the Firefox.
    Pavel almost missed the KGB man heading down the steps to the gents’, because he was watching the furore as someone was arrested at the entrance to the station. Some irregularity in the man’s papers, in his travel visas or work permit, perhaps - it had been sufficient. As soon as he saw the KGB man, head bobbingly descending the steps, he moved away from his position near the restaurant, coming casually off the wall like a hoarding unstuck by the weather. It still wasn’t sufficient to prevent another KGB man coming from the restaurant, wiping his lips with a dark blue handkerchief, from asking him for his papers. For a moment, but only for a moment, Pavel considered ignoring the order. Then, he turned his head and tried to smile nervously, reaching slowly, innocently, into his breast-pocket.
    Gant was still in one of the closets, seated on the lavatory, his coat pulled around him, one hand gripping the lapels tightly across his throat, the other clenched in a pocket in an