XPD by Len Deighton Page B

Grechko offered, and there was no doubt that Shumuk noted it too.
    Stanislav Shumuk opened his briefcase and began to sort through his papers. The other two men watched him. There was only a few years’ difference in age between Edward Parker and Shumuk but they represented two different generations. ‘Stash’ Shumuk had been a combat soldier with the Soviet army – or the Red Army as it was still called then. He was one of the young officers who had taken NKVD detachments forward during the first big German attack in the summer of 1941. They had had to stiffen Red Army resistance, and they had done it by means of the firing squad. Colonels, generals, even political commissars had fallen to his bullets during those grim days when the Germans advanced as far as Moscow’s suburbs.
    The reputation his execution squads had gained for him then had done his career no harm. After the war he had applied the same single-minded determination to his studies at Moscow University before returning to become deputy chief of the Training Section and later to chair the First Main Directorate’s Purchasing Committee for a year. Shumuk had changed very little from that tall, young NKVD lieutenant in the badgeless uniform, his shoulder bruised blue from rifle recoil and his face impassive. He had the same toneless voice in which he had read the death sentences, the same unseeing pale grey eyes, the same shaved skull, and the same trim waistline that came from a daily routine of strenuous exercises.
    Shumuk looked up and studied his two colleagues, and there was no admiration in his gaze. He decided that they were mentally, morally and physically inferior to him. Yuriy Grechko, with his expensive western clothes, curly hair and soft mouth, was decadent, if not depraved. He had been corrupted by western living and the sheltered life of the diplomatic service; and he should never have been appointed to the vital position of legal resident in the USA. He was too young, too inexperienced and too lacking in stamina. Shumuk decided to say so in the report. Edward Parker was little better: he had spent the years between 1941 and 1945 not in resisting the Fascist hordes but in guarding some remote Red Army supply depot from a Japanese invasion that never came. Now, while his wife and grown-up daughter worked as booking clerks for Aeroflot and struggled to make a living in one of the less salubrious suburbs of Sverdlovsk, Parker was sharing his bed with some Japanese woman and living in a vast house in Chicago. The woman was a long-term Party member, of course, and the whole arrangement had been approved if not instigated by Moscow Centre, but Shumuk was old-fashioned enough to find it distasteful.
    He lit a cigarette. He was old fashioned about cigarettes too; he preferred this coarse Makhora tobacco. Waving the smoke away impatiently with thin bony fingers, he noticed Edward Parker’s nose twitch. He must have detected the aroma of the tobacco; did it remind him of his youth, as it did Shumuk?
    Little wonder then that the meeting was bitter and recriminatory. Shumuk started by announcing that he had already decided to pull Parker out, and proposed giving him until the end of June to get his networks prepared for regrouping. Parker would report in person to Moscow Centre on Monday, 2 July.
    There was a moment’s hushed silence before Yuriy Grechko attacked this plan. It was obvious to everyone present that there was little chance that Grechko would survive such a drastic reshuffle as would surely follow the change in illegal resident. The arguments continued for over two hours. Grechko and Shumuk had clashed before, in the Dzerzhinsky Square building, and this time the discussion degenerated into what was little more than a shouting match. It was Edward Parker who decided the matter. He explained that he had gone to Los Angeles simply because his agent needed him there. As resident, such a decision was rightfully his to take. Furthermore, he told