The Clown Service

BACKGROUND DOCUMENT

a) Yalta, Crimean Coast, Ukraine, 1962

The man splayed by the side of the pool was dead.

Seated on the lawn, Olag Krishnin smoked a cigarette and watched as a pair of flies circled the wet head of the corpse. The insects danced in the light of the winter sun, a pale yellow fire that added glints to the thin, tousled strands of the dead man’s hair.

The grass of the lawn had been cut ruthlessly short. A fraction further and it would have revealed earth. It reminded Krishnin of the crew cut he had worn in the army. That fine stubble that tingled against the palm like furry static. It didn’t surprise Krishnin that a man like Andrei Bortnik would have taken such fastidious care over his grass (or rather ensured his staff did so). Bortnik had been a man who obsessed on detail. Not the sort of man to tolerate weeds within his garden, literally or metaphorically. That was, after all, why Olag had been forced to kill him.

‘You’ve gone too far,’ Bortnik had said in that wheezy, fat-choked voice of his. ‘I can’t cover for you any longer – even I have my orders.’

Krishnin had known this moment was coming. It had been inevitable as soon as he had joined the committee. Bortnik might be someone who could spend his whole life following orders. Krishnin was not. He had toed the line, given good service – as long as it had benefited him to do so. Now, in anticipation of being plucked from his position of authority, a weed in Bortnik’s flowerbed, Krishnin had reached up and choked the man, stilling the hand that had sought to remove him. It was survival, of course, but also an act of principle. The moment his superiors lost heart they relinquished their right to be his superiors.

‘We cannot do this,’ Bortnik had insisted, his voice suddenly fearful as he realised the danger he was in. ‘There is no honour in a victory like this – we cannot become monsters.’

‘Not monsters,’ Krishnin had replied, gripping the man’s neck, ‘masters of monsters.’

Bortnik had been surprisingly difficult to kill. Krishnin had expected it to be quick but all men, even weak old men like Bortnik, fought for life when they recognised how close they were to losing it.

He had pushed Bortnik’s head down into the pool, his knee pressed hard between the man’s shoulder blades. The water had bubbled and frothed with Bortnik’s last frantic attempts to breathe. Krishnin had held him there longer than necessary, hypnotised by the slow circling of a leaf that was working its way across the surface of the pool. A thing at the mercy of wind and current. He saw something of himself in that leaf. It felt good to finally be free.

He finished his cigarette, stubbing it out in the grass – savouring this small act of vandalism – got to his feet, and began to walk towards the driveway.

Looking out of one of the upstairs windows of Bortnik’s house, Valentina Denisov, his general maid, thought she saw a man walking across the lawn. She had been startled at the time, knowing that her master had insisted he wasn’t to be disturbed all morning. She would have been even more startled had the angle from the window not prevented her from seeing her master’s corpse. It would be another two hours before the body was discovered. Moving closer to the window, perversely hopeful of a stranger on the property and the panic and anger that would cause, she was disappointed to see there was nobody there. She returned to the boredom of her cleaning.

Later, when the questioning began in earnest, Valentina decided not to mention thinking she had glimpsed someone. After all, it would only cause her trouble. Besides, it must have been a trick of the light: a man cannot just vanish.

b) Vienna, Austria, 1962

The journey between Ukraine and Austria had been leisurely. Krishnin knew that the murder of Bortnik would have set off a panic within the upper echelons of the KGB, but he wasn’t worried that the trail would lead to him. He had certain advantages, not least of which being that the majority of the committee were unaware he even existed. Bortnik would have kept the circle of those who knew of Krishnin tight, and those few privy to the knowledge would now be doing their best to cover up the fact. They would also be worried for their own lives, scuttling to their holiday homes, hiding behind locked doors. Much good it would have done them. If Krishnin wanted them dead, they would be.

But Krishnin had other plans and they took precedence.

He made his way down Schönlaterngasse, stopping not to look at the ornate street lantern that gave it its name but rather at the building opposite. An ancient myth held that in 1212 a baker’s servant had fought a basilisk there. The mythical serpent, said to be hatched by a cockerel from a snake’s egg, was believed so poisonous it would kill with no more than a glance. The servant had held a mirror up to the basilisk, turning its own poisonous gaze back on itself. Krishnin approved. Perhaps there was a metaphor there, he mused. After all, was he not about to turn his enemies on themselves?

He took a seat at a small coffee shop nearby and waited for his contact.

The man was a smuggler, American, but so totally corrupt that his politics had become meaningless. Krishnin disliked the man but was pragmatic enough to take what he needed from wherever he could find it.

‘It’s all there,’ the man said as he dropped a newspaper on the table between them, a buff envelope poking out from between its fold. ‘And my work speaks for itself. I can assure you nobody will bat an eye at any of it. I’m a professional.’

A professional. The use of the word rankled with Krishnin. Nonetheless he picked up the paper and unfolded it so that the ‘secreted’ envelope fell into his lap.

‘I don’t need reassurance,’ he said, pulling from the inside pocket of his coat a similarly-sized envelope of cash and folding it inside the newspaper. ‘If I didn’t consider you reliable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

He handed the paper back, a false smile on his face, two men sharing a news story in an outdoor cafe.

‘I have a reputation,’ the American admitted, his smile genuine and somewhat arrogant.

‘Indeed,’ Krishnin agreed, finishing his coffee. ‘I hope that one day it gets you shot.’

c) Vienna International Airport, Schwechat, Austria, 1962

Krishnin couldn’t think how they had found him and it was that lack of knowledge that angered him most. He had grown so used to being in a dominant position that the sudden loss of authority seemed a savage insult. He wasn’t overly worried that they would catch him, but a little surprised they were even trying… One of Bortnik’s colleagues must have had more resolve than he had credited. Good for him. If Krishnin ever found out the name he would eliminate the problem in his usual way.

There were two officers waiting by the departure gate and three more milling around hoping to catch him before he got there. Krishnin followed one of them into the toilet, partly to gather intelligence, partly just to vent his anger.

Having slowly garrotted the man with the cistern chain, his legs wrapped around the man like a lover to stop his thrashing feet from making too much noise, Krishnin knew no more than he had five minutes earlier. No matter. Let them send whoever they liked – he would kill them all if need be.

d) BOAC Flight B127, Vienna to Heathrow, 1962

Analiese Bauer had been joking the night before that the most important skill for a stewardess was never to be surprised. Over a few drinks with an old school friend, she had recounted her favourite stories of shocking sights seen at twenty-thousand feet. The usual old chestnuts, though tired amongst her colleagues, were brand new to this audience: couples having sex in toilet cubicles, ludicrous propositions from businessmen flying home to their wives, a particularly notorious pilot frequently so drunk he had to be carried into the cabin. Her friend had listened and laughed in all the right places.

Now, Analiese seemed to have forgotten her own rule – she was very surprised indeed. The man in seat 23B was unremarkable in every way: plainly-dressed, quiet, gazing sleepily out of the window. What had so surprised her was that he hadn’t been sitting there when they had taken off. More than that – and it was the impossibility of the idea that really set her heart racing – she would have sworn blind that he hadn’t been on the plane at all. Even as she was thinking this, she tried to find excuses and explanations: he had been in one of the toilets (though she and her colleagues had checked them before take-off); he had been late embarking and she had somehow missed him (she hadn’t, she knew she hadn’t); her memory was simply mistaken (it never was – in this job you grew to remember faces, building a mental catalogue of who was onboard for any given flight, assessing the troublemakers or the tippers).

But he couldn’t have simply appeared inside the cabin once the plane was in the air…

‘Can I get you anything, sir?’ she asked. He looked at her, his tired eyes struggling to focus. For a moment she wondered if he was on something – he would hardly be the first passenger to dose himself up before hitting the air. Or maybe he didn’t speak German? She asked once more, this time in English.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he replied, ‘just tired.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

She did so, attending to the rest of her passengers. The man didn’t speak to her again, just fell asleep, jolting awake only once the wheels hit the tarmac at Heathrow.

Analiese did her best to persuade herself that she had been mistaken. The passenger must have been there when they had taken off – it had simply slipped her mind. Yet she remained unconvinced.

e) Office of [REDACTED], Lubyanka Building, Moscow, Russia, 1962

‘You let him go?’

‘Not by choice, but you know his skills.’

The man in authority gave a slight nod, rubbing his weary eyes with the tips of his fingers. It had been two days since the death of Bortnik and he had been struggling to sleep ever since.

‘And now he is out of our control,’ the other man ventured, hoping to prompt his superior into either letting him go or issuing new orders.

‘Not quite,’ came the reply. ‘I took the precaution of having our man whisper in a few ears over there. The British are expecting him.’

‘They can’t know what he’s capable of, surely?’

The other man stared at his subordinate who wilted slightly, aware that he had spoken out of turn.

‘Naturally not. But they will be watching him; we can only hope that will be enough.’

His subordinate couldn’t help but feel that it wouldn’t be, but knew better than to question a second time. Besides, did it matter? Krishnin was nothing less than a weapon, one capable of the most terrible destruction. The British would know him for what he was soon enough; by which time it would be far too late to do anything about it.