“We figure it was bugged,” he said defensively. “That’s how the Russians traced you to Ivanovka. It’s how they knew you were on theEstonia. ”
“Jesus, Cameron! When were you going to tell me about this?”
“Frankly,” he said coldly, “I didn’t realize it was my responsibility to keep you informed of the workings of the Embassy.”
Katherine ignored that. Something occurred to her. “Does Victor know I’m out of the U.S.S.R.?”
“I don’t see how he could.”
“Cameron, remember what I told you about our rendezvous in the bell tower in Zagorsk on the ascension of the Large Magellanic Cloud?” she asked excitedly.
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s a meeting there in two days. That’s still three days before the lobotomy is scheduled, time enough to stop it. As long as Victor thinks I’m still in the Soviet Union, he will go there. Someone from the embassy could go to the bell tower and warn him!”
Cameron thought about that. “I’ll talk to the ambassador.”
It was late afternoon the following day when Cameron came to Katherine. She had spent the day pacing the compound like a caged lion, deep in thought, mumbling to herself. By the time Cameron appeared, the shadows from the trees had already plunged the embassy into twilight and the temperature was dropping fast toward the cold Finnish night.
“You’re wearing a path in the grass,” he said.
Katherine ignored the attempt at levity.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“The Finns have dismissed the charges.”
Katherine frowned, confused. Then she remembered — the hearing.
“Oh, that’s great news,” she said unenthusiastically.
Cameron threw up his arms. “That’s all the excitement I get? Katherine, you’re going home! There’s a flight out tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. You’ll be dining in New York tomorrow night!”
Katherine nodded. “Thanks, Cameron,” she said with all the graciousness she could muster. “Thank the ambassador . . . everyone.”
“I will.”
“Now, please, tell me what the Moscow ambassador said about Anton?”
Cameron grimaced. “He said ‘No.’”
Katherine gaped. “No?”
“He feels that meeting Victor is beyond the scope of our mission. Sorry.”
“My god, Cameron! He has to change his mind!”
“He won’t. In the first place, he says your theory about Yevgenia Perova is just — ”
“It’s not atheory! She was in the cabin that night! I know it!”
“Even if you’re right, no one really knows quite what to make of it. The ambassador feels the U.S. government would be reckless to get involved without knowing all the facts.”
“What facts does he need? Doesn’t he know what’s going to happen to Anton if Victor doesn’t get that message?”
“You have to understand, our mission has a very narrow scope — to further the interests of the citizens of the United States.”
“Won’tyou do it for me, Cameron? As a personal favor? Just go to the tower — ”
“Katherine, Ican’t. In fact, the situation is even worse than I have told you. If Victor Perov were to call me, say through the central switchboard, I’m forbidden to say anything about this to him. I can only say that you are no longer in the country. I’m sorry, but those are my orders.”
Katherine turned on her heels and left the room.
My god. It WAS all for nothing.
That night, Katherine lay in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling and listening to the tick of the clock beside her bed.
A terrifying idea was taking shape in her mind. She was almost afraid to think about it; sometimes thinking led to doing. She got up and went to her dresser, where she found her counterfeit documents in the name Yekatarina Yurgina — the Soviet internal passport and the Soviet international passport stamped with a departure from Tallinn. She turned the documents over in her hand and went over the idea again, looking — almost hoping — for a flaw.
Yekatarina Yurgina was a Soviet citizen, and a Soviet citizen didn’t need an entry visa for her own country. She would simply flash the passport and be waved through passport control. Of course, there was the issue of the “black list,” but surely that was only for peopleleaving the country. Who would expect Yekatarina Yurgina toreturn?
TheEstonia ran from Helsinki to Tallinn every Wednesday at 7:00 A.M. She would kill a day in Tallinn and take the sleeper train to Moscow. She would lose an hour when she entered the Moscow time zone. That would put her in Leningrad Station in Moscow about nine o’clock in the morning. Then two hours by taxi from the station to Zagorsk. Eleven o’clock. She would arrive at the bell tower of St. Sergei one hour before noon on the day of the ascension of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
It was possible to warn Victor. Theoretically. But only if she could really get a ticket and . . .
And what the hell was she thinking about?
The sun rose promisingly on a clear morning in Helsinki. In his suite on the embassy compound, Cameron Abbott whistled happily as he dressed for his trip to the airport. Along with an escort of four Marine guards and four Finnish policemen, he would be putting Katherine Sears on a morning flight to New York City. After seven months of supervising one of the most trying cases of his career, he was hours from victory over the Soviets.
He was just knotting his tie when the Marine guard knocked at his door.
“Come in.”
“Sir, we have a problem,” said the Marine.
Cameron straightened his tie, checked his image in the mirror and turned to face the visitor.
“She’s gone,” said the Marine.
“Who’s gone?”
“The woman — Dr. Sears. We can’t find her anywhere.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cameron scoffed. “Did you check outdoors? She likes to walk — ”
“We looked everywhere. Her room is empty. She took her Russian clothes, and all her things, including her Russian documents. All we found was this.”
He put something in Cameron’s hand. Cameron looked down at it — Katherine Sears’s new American passport. Tucked inside the passport was her plane ticket.
Cameron closed his eyes in defeat.
Katherine had gone back to the U.S.S.R.
44
Victor Perov woke that Thursday morning feeling like an athlete the day after he scored the winning goal.
He jumped out of bed and went to the bathroom to shave. As he did, he had an idea.
He found Oksana in the kitchen in her bathrobe. She had the coffee on the table and was frying potatoes for breakfast.
She must have read something in his face because she said, “You talked to Yevgenia last night, didn’t you?”
Victor grinned. “Next week. She said Anton will be transferred out of Little Rock to Perm Hospital on September 26.”
“We can see him?”
Victor nodded.
“And the charges . . .”
“Dropped. He’ll spend a few days at the hospital under observation, and then we can bring him home.”
“Oh, Victor!” said Oksana. “He’s really coming home.”
Victor went around the table and took his place behind the cup of coffee.
“I was thinking,” he said. “We should all go together to Perm to see him.”
“Grisha too?”
“Of course. Anton will want to see him. It could be the best medicine.”
Her face was radiant.She was radiant. A lump swelled in Victor’s throat. Anton had a lot to come home to.
Victor took a sip of his coffee. “I have my rendezvous today.”
Oksana nodded. “Any word from Yekatarina?”
He shook his head. “I called the embassy, but the line was disconnected.”
“Maybe that means she got out.”
“Maybe.”
“We owe her a lot,” said Oksana.
“
More than I can ever repay,” said Victor. “The least I can do is keep my promise until she gets word to me, somehow, that she’s safe. Anyway, Father Andrei is expecting me.”
Oksana smiled mischievously and stirred the potatoes in the oil. “Are you becoming religious, Victor?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I am.”
They were both quiet a moment, then Oksana said, “I still can’t believe it’s really over — ”
At that moment, the hot oil in the pan exploded. Drops sailed into the air and landed on Oksana’s arm. She jerked her hand reflexively, and the pan crashed to the floor. Potatoes and oil spilled onto the linoleum.
In the other room, Grisha began to cry.
Father Andrei and Victor Perov had found the kind of friendship that perhaps only boyhood friends share. They could talk on any subject with complete honesty. They disagreed, sometimes bitterly, but it was inconceivable that the friendship could suffer. Father Andrei had a strength that expressed itself as steadfastness, not to be confused with calm, for the priest could be fiery when roused. He was like a ship onto which you could pile a great load and yet the water line would barely sink. Waves could swell around him, but the mighty bow of his character just cut right through. In this respect, Father Andrei reminded Victor of Anton. But Anton had been troubled and often angry. Father Andrei could be troubled, yes, but even then he was buoyed by a reserve of strength that Victor assumed came from his faith. It mesmerized Victor like a painting he didn’t understand, but somehow fathomed.
On this day, they talked mostly about Anton. As noon neared, Victor spoke briefly of his plan to continue Pavel Danilov’s work for Soviet Psychiatry Watch.
“That’s fine, Victor, but remember: Bars do not imprison men,” said Father Andrei. “Our minds do. There are men in prison camps more free than you and me.”
Victor nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”
At that moment, the bells of St. Sergei rang to life. The sound startled Victor; he had lost track of time.
“You had better go,” said the priest. “We can talk more when you come back.”
Victor got up and went out through the rectory doors. As he crossed the courtyard alongside the cemetery, something up in the bell tower flashed in the corner of his eye — movement, a bit of color. He stopped and looked up. The platform was still.
He shrugged and walked on. He reached the tower’s door and went inside. It was cool and musty-smelling, like a basement. He climbed the stone steps to the second-floor chapel, found the spiral staircase and began to climb, round and round. He reached the first overlook and went immediately to the next level of the staircase. He climbed on. He reached the second overlook and stepped out onto the tiny platform.
Her voice came from behind him, in Russian.
“Nice of you to make it, Victor.”
45
Victor Perov is eight years old. He stands on a river bank in the hot sun on a perfect August afternoon. He squints at a spot on the swift-moving surface of the Moscow River. It is the spot where his twin brother has dived down after a burlap sack of puppies. Time has passed. Too much time. The boy-Victor takes his eyes from the spot and turns to his mother. She is beside him. She, too, stares at the spot.
Why doesn’t she do something?
He looks at her the way any eight-year-old boy looks at his mother. She is beautiful in a way that defines beauty. She is his universe. Her arms are the arms that hold him when he is hurting. Her face is the face in the dark room after a nightmare. Her lips are the lips that kiss him and tell him everything is all right. Her body is the body that gave him life.
Why doesn’t she do something?
The boy-Victor sees in her face an expression he knows — a set jaw, a shimmer in the eye. It is the look of hard decision. The Iron Perova.
There by the river, he sees that look on his mother’s face, and he recognizes it. But he does not acknowledge it. For he is a boy and this woman is his mother, and what kind of mother would wish her own son to die?
Victor now knew the answer. For until Katherine Sears had finished telling him what had happened in the cabin that April night in Lubertsi — that Yevgenia had been there supervising the interrogation — Victor had never rid himself of that eight-year-old boy’s vision of his mother.
Now, with the eyes of a man, Victor looked back on that scene by the river and understood it perfectly.
And he knew what he had to do.
But first he needed permission from Oksana. He would have to break a promise.
46
KGBMajor Konstantin Tarasov had turned up on Victor’s doorstep nearly five weeks earlier, shortly after Victor and Oksana returned from their two-week camping odyssey on Bald Top. Victor was coming home late one night after a meeting with Yevgenia. He turned the corner to his apartment, and there was Tarasov, the mysterious, vanishing KGB man, sitting on the stairs. It gave Victor a start.
It was Tarasov, but it wasn’t. He was like a different man, and not just because of the lost arm. He looked beaten, desperate, no longer the cocky detective who had stood in Victor’s office doorway the night after the meeting of the SAPO collective. He was in hiding, he said, and could not even go to his wife, who had, in any event, married another man. He had been betrayed by someone in the KGB. Someone had sabotaged his helicopter. He thought he knew who.
Tarasov’s words tumbled out fitfully, between furtive gazes up the corridor when he would listen warily for the sound of pursuit. Then he would relax and go on.
Victor agreed to listen to Tarasov’s story only because he knew the KGB man had not been involved in Katherine’s abduction. Maria Danilova had “blown” Koos van der Laan to the KGB — not Katherine, as Koos had assumed that day in the park. Tarasov had been telling Victor the truth that day outside his SAPO office.
Victor was puzzled that Tarasov should come to him. Why? What did Victor have to do with KGB internal intrigue?
Then Tarasov sprang his surprise: He had information relating to Anton. It involved a foreigner who had been killed near Norway last November while trying to cross the border.
At once, Victor made the connection to Anton’s letter:
On November 9,1983, I was on the Kolsky Peninsula near Norway. I wasmaking a survey of the border fortifications in advance of my escape attempt thenext day. By chance I saw a man gunned down as he fled across the forbiddenzone . . .
A coincidence?
Tarasov went on to say he had evidence of a scandal that went all the way to the Politburo. He didn’t know the connection to Anton, except that there certainly was one. He said he hoped they could help each other.
Victor had sent him away: There was the matter of his promise to Oksana that he would never ask for help from anyone in the KGB.
But before he left, Tarasov had given Victor a way to contact him. Now, with Katherine Sears in Moscow and Yevgenia days from supervising a frontal lobotomy on Anton, Victor was ready to do just that.
That afternoon, Victor took Katherine, Oksana and Grisha on a suburban train to his old family dacha in Petrovka, two hours from Moscow. He left them at eleven o’clock that night, saying only that he had to meet someone. Oksana and Katherine were on the sofa, deep in conversation. Initially, there was some suspicion between them, but it quickly disappeared. They seemed to have hit it off.
Victor found Tarasov in a cabin south of Moscow, right where he had said he would be. Tarasov ushered him inside enthusiastically. The cabin was small, with a tidy garden out front and two small rooms upstairs and down. In the corner of the living room, stacked six feet high, were hundreds of books — thrillers, one after another. Victor tried to picture the KGB agent passing his days reading spy stories, cooking and working in his garden. Victor gave up: It didn’t fit. Could Tarasov have changed so much?
Tarasov offered him tea from a samovar, and they sat at the kitchen table talking far into the night, swapping information. Tarasov leaped from his seat when Victor told of Anton’s letter. This was the
link Tarasov had been looking for: Anton had witnessed the shooting of Stepan Bragin.
They began to construct a plan. Victor admired Tarasov’s ruthless mind, but he found it a bit unnerving too. Tarasov’s eyes glowed fiercely as he plotted his revenge, and Victor could believe that he had once been a very good KGB agent. Perhaps Tarasov had not changed so much after all.
Victor returned to Petrovka at dawn and slipped into bed for a few hours’ sleep. At 9:00 A.M., he gathered Katherine and Oksana in the living room. Grisha played out back in the very gazebo where the collie Emma had once given birth to a litter of puppies. The two women sat together on the sofa facing Victor.
Victor began to talk. He told them about Tarasov and what the KGB man had found out. He told them what he thought it meant. Finally, he told them his plan.
Victor watched the women carefully. Katherine was captivated: He could see her mind calculating, weighing risks, looking for holes — ever the scientist. Oksana’s face was impenetrable. It was like a Greek bust of Aphrodite, beautiful, but cold. For the plan to succeed, Konstantin Tarasov would have to tame the lioness. Victor did not envy him.
Victor said his piece. It took an hour.
“So you have already contacted this KGB man?” asked Oksana.
Victor nodded. “Last night. We talked for five hours.”
“I see,” said Oksana.
“I won’t do anything without the consent of both of you,” he said.“AllI ask is that you hear the man out.”
Katherine and Oksana exchanged glances. Katherine shrugged.
“You know how I feel,” Oksana said to Victor. “But if Katherine agrees, then I’ll listen.”
“Let’s hear what he has to say,” said Katherine.
Victor went to the window of the dacha and raised the shade.
A minute later, there was a knock at the door. Victor pulled open the door, and into the dacha stepped Konstantin Tarasov.
Katherine took her cue from Oksana and did not get up. She watched the KGB man from the sofa. Tarasov wore peasant clothes: a loosely woven sweater, gray polyester slacks and cheap black shoes. He looked like a poor collective farmer come to the big city. His cheeks and forehead were raked with pink scars from his helicopter crash. His left sleeve was sewn closed at the bicep. Katherine’s eyes were drawn to his stub the way a person’s gaze is drawn irresistibly to human deformity. The little stub moved as though it still believed it slung a heavy arm.
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