The Factory by Brian Freemantle Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t know if he could do it – actually pull the trigger – when the moment came. Hopefully the moment wouldn’t come. Hopefully Tanya Kulik would accept the harm her staying would cause and flee with him to the guaranteed safety of a new life that would be provided for her in England.
    Whitehead flew to Moscow on a passport describing him as a travel writer to justify his moving around the country, which was possible for Westerners for the first time under the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. He did not, however, leave the capital immediately. The security existing at all airports made it impossible to carry a weapon into Russia, just as it was impossible for him openly to approach the British embassy on Morisa Toreza Street because there could be no official connection between himself and the British government. The gun had been sent to the embassy, however, beyond any Soviet interception in the untouchable diplomatic pouch. With it, too, was a genuine British passport containing an intelligence record photograph of Tanya. The passport was in the name of Tanya Jenkins. She was described as a university lecturer, aged thirty-four. The gun, an American-made, short-barrelled Smith and Wesson, together with the passport, was left by an embassy-based British intelligence officer beneath a cracked gravestone slab in a cemetery on Kadashovskiy Road.
    The moment of collection connected Whitehead positively with incriminating espionage and he went cautiously to the cemetery, the day after his arrival, keeping the dead-letter drop under observation for a long time to ensure it was not being watched by a Russian squad before hurriedly making the pick-up. He returned at once to the Moskva Hotel, not opening the package until he was in his locked room.
    Whitehead concentrated entirely upon the passport. Tanya Kulik was quite beautiful, open-faced, her blonde hair worn long, almost to her shoulders. Whitehead gazed at the picture, then at last at the gun lying on the bed and then back at the photograph again, hoping more fervently than before that she would agree to accompany him back to England and not force the alternative upon him.
    He left Moscow the following day. It was a long journey and he chose to make it by train because the official restrictions were easier than for internal air travel. He journeyed alert to everything around him, professionally tensed against the slightest hint that he was being watched. He did not attempt to reach Liepaja direct. Instead he went to Riga and took a room at the Metropole Hotel and spent two days moving around the city as a further precaution against surveillance.
    Early on the morning of the third day, again by train, he made the final part of the journey, arriving in Liepaja in the midafternoon. It was a depressing, grey seaport town. There was a smell of fish mixed with another, heavier odour which he guessed at being engine oil or grease. The people were hunch-shouldered and unsmiling. Autumn was still some weeks away but the sky was already overcast, adding to the impression of greyness, and a bitterly cold wind swept off the Baltic, chilling him. It would be an easy place in which to die, Whitehead thought worriedly. Or in which to be killed, he added even more worriedly.
    He booked into a hotel deep in the middle of the town, away from the colder seafront, staying only long enough to complete the formalities before going out on to the streets again, to fix the geography in his mind. He quickly found Revolutionary Highway, a broad, multi-lane thoroughfare, and obeyed the instructions given to him in London by following it towards the port, counting off the side streets as he went. He found the contact point at the first attempt.
    It was a Catholic church, not separated from its surroundings by any cemetery or grounds but practically adjoining the buildings around it: only an announcement board and the shape of its door marked it differently. The door gave easily,