The Man Who Was Saturday
A classic Cold War spy story from the bestselling thriller writer Derek Lambert.Moscow treated defectors from the West with kid-gloves. That is, until they had outlived their usefulness. But the American Robert Calder was different. He had defected to Russia with information so explosive that even the iron-clad regime of the Kremlin shook with fear. It had kept him alive. Until now. For Calder is desperately keen to return to the West. So they place the ruthless and scheming Spandarian on his trail, a KGB chief with a mind as sharp as the cold steel of an ice pick. And as a back-up they unleash Tokarev, a professional assassin who kills for pleasure…‘Certainly puts Lambert up there with today’s top suspense writers’ Book Browsing‘Mr Lambert’s Moscow experience comes chillingly through’ Sunday Telegraph‘This terrific novel puts Lambert in a league with the best espionage writers of the day’ United Press International‘Another winner’ Pittsburgh Press‘Lambert is at the top of the class’ UPI‘Splendid stuff. Mr Lambert’s scenes have the clear reality of a Moscow winter, his people are three-dimensional and affecting and best of all he spins a fast story’ Baltimore Sun‘A white-knuckle number … Lambert produces straight-ahead, foot-to-the-floor excitement’ New York, New York‘Superior espionage fiction’ Waterbury Ct. Republican
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The Man Who Was Saturday
DEREK LAMBERT
(with apologies to the memory of G.K. Chesterton whose man was Thursday)
Collins Crime Club
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1985
Copyright © Derek Lambert 1985
Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008268480
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008268473
Version: 2017-11-09
To Roger and Lise.
‘… for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it …’
Benjamin Franklin
CONTENTS
Kreiber peered into the black wound in the river ice and in the light of a kerosene flare saw the face of a young man peering up at him.
He wasn’t surprised because nothing surprised him when he had been nipping steadily at the vodka bottle, but he was intrigued, so intrigued that he scarcely heeded the footsteps behind him.
Probably another fisherman who had left his hole carved in the frozen curve of the River Moscow to pick his way through the darkness to cadge some bait.
The footsteps slithered, stopped.
Kreiber continued to stare at the reflection of the young man whose face occasionally shivered into rippled particles in the iced wind blowing in from Siberia.
A face from the past.
My face.
Kreiber, packaged against the cold with felt and newspaper and a fur hat with spaniel ears, took a long pull of Ahotnichaya, hunter’s vodka, and smiled sadly, almost paternally, at the young warrior, armed to the teeth with ideals, that he had once been.
Twenty years ago a girl who had crossed the wall from East to West Berlin had espied those ideals and sunk sharp teeth into them. A refugee was what she had claimed to be; a recruitment officer seeking Western brains was what she had proved to be.
‘Look at the decadence around you,’ she had fumed to Kreiber, nuclear physicist, harnessing awesome powers to preserve peace. ‘Look at the capitalists, hedonists, wheeler-dealers and neo-Nazis. Do you think they give a pfennig for humanity?’
And so persuasive was her tongue, so compliant her magnificent body, that, reversing the trend, he had trotted from West to East of the divided city and thence to Moscow, losing the girl in transit, only to discover that in Russia there were those who didn’t give a kopek for humanity.
A long time ago. At forty-five he was now an old man in a still-alien city finding contemplative pleasure in long night-watches beside the black hole in the ice threaded with a line and tackle.
Taking another nip of firewater, he winked at the Kreiber he had once been. ‘Don’t worry,’ the wink said, ‘we’ll show them yet.’ He warmed mittened hands against his charcoal brazier and found strength from it.
The man in the long black coat stood directly behind Kreiber, eyes glittering in the holes in his grey wool mask.
A fish attracted by the kerosene flare tugged Kreiber’s line and the young face in the water disappeared in the commotion.
Kreiber pulled; the fish pulled. A fat lunch there judging by its strength, probably bigger than anything the other anglers hunched beside their flares and charcoal braziers had caught. Not that he would ever know: they didn’t discuss their catches with the foreigner who fished alone on the fringe of the ice-camp.
