circuitry so thin, that nothing but the cigarettes and earbuds had been found. Orlov reached for the cigarettes, his heart rate still up, and Loban fetched a silver lighter from his pocket. He lit the cigarette and quietly waited through the first few puffs before his expression clearly indicated he wanted an explanation, and soon.
“Who is she?” he said again, much louder this time as he rolled the earbud between his thumb and forefinger, and the result made an end of anything Orlov could think of doing to somehow squirm out of the situation.
“Let me check that…” the voice in the earbuds continued. “This might answer your question. ‘She’ is a third person pronoun referring to a female person or animal, or anything considered as by personification to be feminine, for example, a ship.”
Loban looked down at the earbuds in his hand, a startled expression on his face. “What the hell?” he said in Russian, half annoyed, half amazed. Then he raised the earbud closer to his mouth and spoke sharply.
“You think this is some kind of a joke, eh? Well laugh now, because we’ve got a line on your signal and we’ll have men on you in a matter of minutes, you stupid bitch!”
Loban was lying, of course, simply trying the time honored trick of flushing the hidden accomplice out with a threat. This time he had not squeezed the earbuds to enable their listen mode, so there was only silence, much to Orlov’s relief.
“Very funny,” Loban said again to Orlov.
“Don’t bother looking for her,” said Orlov. “She’s long gone by now. Yes, Svetlana can be very annoying at times,” Orlov told him, desperate to find a way to get the train back on the tracks again. By naming a woman, he hoped he would divert Loban’s attention away from the earbud gaffe. “Very well... She is my controller, Svetlana, and yes, she can be a bitch at times. That was all too typical.” He gestured dismissively to the earbuds in Loban’s hand. “But I suppose there’s no point playing games any longer.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Loban. “So what is it? Are you NKVD? GRU? Naval Intelligence?”
“NKVD,” said Orlov matter of factly in a long breath of smoke. He was taking the air of a man talking to his peer now, and this was his last chance, hoping that the status of alliance between Britain and the USSR at this point would get him out of the hot water he was in. But Loban was still playing with the earbuds, still rolling them between his thumb and finger, and he had again activated the listen mode, his next question picked up by the microphone.
“So where did you come from?” Loban gave him an expectant look, thinking he might hear that Orlov was attached to the Madrid NKVD Cell that had been in place there since 1938 in the midst of Franco’s private little civil war. Then ‘Svetlana’ spilled the beans, and all over the table this time, and Orlov knew his fate was as good as sealed.
“This file was downloaded from the ship’s open library, BCG Kirov, at zero-ten-forty hours, 13 August, 2021. Logged user: Captain Gennadi Orlov, Chief of Operations.”
Loban didn’t quite get what the AI had said. The word “download” was techspeak and only first used in the year 1977 as a noun and then gaining broader use as a verb by 1980. But the word was descriptive enough as it stood, and two other words leapt out at him.
“The ship?” he said, again startled by what he had heard, now looking from the earbuds to Orlov and back again. “Captain Gennadi Orlov? Thirteen August 2021? What’s going on here?”
That same evening a car was heading for a plane on the graveled tarmac of North Field at Gibraltar, but Orlov was not there. Loban had managed to move his charge out by other means, through the long warren of tunnels beneath the Rock to a secret exit on the northeast side of the peninsula. There, he led Orlov, at gunpoint, down a long rocky slope to the ragged shore where a small fishing boat had been tied off. Three men were waiting by the boat, and Loban glanced at his watch before he reached in his pocket and handed the Chief a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“For the journey,” he said quickly. “I’m afraid you’ll be going east instead of west, Mister Orlov, back to your friends on the Black Sea Coast where you can tell them