Bearpit

by Brian Freemantle

  Not like Bryansk at all, he thought. Worse. But there was a comparison. For the Bryansk exercise the spetsnaz had been alerted to what he was attempting. Just as the helicopters and the armed men and dogs – unimaginable protection but for one obvious reason – had been forewarned, back there.

  He knew, at last, what Kazin intended by the instruction to locate the defector. I think I could kill someone who tried to kill me, he thought. So it hadn’t ended with the death of his father: destroy or be destroyed, he accepted.

  ‘What was it?’ demanded Levin. They were in the main room of the house, Galina nervously close by his side, Petr by the window watching the car lights of the returning searchers.

  ‘False alarm,’ assured Proctor. ‘The observer in the helicopter thought he saw someone but it couldn’t have been. We’ve covered every inch.’

  ‘What then?’ asked Galina, unconvinced.

  ‘An animal,’ insisted the FBI man. ‘We’ve had them trigger the sensors before. The observer is a new guy: too jumpy.’

  ‘You can’t be sure,’ argued the woman.

  ‘Isn’t there something more important to think about?’ reminded Proctor, who had brought Yuri’s false message. ‘Moscow are actually thinking of letting Natalia out!’

  Petr turned away from the window, back into the room. His decision would be the same, if his sister were allowed to come. It wasn’t a melodramtic exaggeration that he hated his father. That genuinely was his feeling for what the man had done. Betrayal for betrayal, he decided. God, how he hated the man.

  The rucksack had admitted some water, at which Yuri was not surprised, but the clothes inside were damp, not soaked. Yuri changed into them and let them dry on him as he followed the river bank at first light, locating the lake and from it picking up the avenue that bordered its western side. It was still early, not yet six, when he got to Thomaston, which was deserted, still sleeping. He recovered the car and got to New York by ten. He telephoned Caroline’s apartment, not to speak to her but to ensure she was not there and likely to see him in the condition he was. Having ensured she had already left for Madison Avenue, Yuri illegally parked the car against a fire hydrant very close to 53rd Street, knowing the vehicle would be towed back to Hertz and the penalty automatically charged to his William Bell credit card. In the apartment he stripped himself naked, searching for the damage in the full-length bathroom mirror. His face was scratched but not as much as he had feared and the swelling in his wrist was diminishing. Far better than he had expected.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Granov the moment he encountered the rezident at the United Nations.

  ‘An accident,’ said Yuri.

  ‘You’ve got to go to Moscow,’ announced the man.

  ‘Orders from there!’

  ‘Courier from here: the function you are supposed to be fulfilling,’ said Granov, who resented not being officially informed of the mission to which Yuri had been assigned by the Kazin message. ‘I’ve already advised them.’

  So Kazin had not instigated the recall. There would have to be an acceptable excuse to be away from the UN. Time enough then to go to the safe-deposit box at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Destroy or be destroyed, he thought. Which would he be?

  35

  ‘So there has to be another one, buried deep?’

  It was Myers who voiced the inevitable conclusion, on the day the Crisis Committee agreed from the review of the final computer analysis that neither Latin America nor the Caribbean had featured in any assignment with which John Willick had ever been associated from the time of his recruitment into the Agency.

  ‘Inevitably,’ said Crookshank.

  ‘We can’t reassign every bloody agent in the two regions!’ protested Norris. ‘It would come to hundreds.’ Another twenty people disclosed to the KGB by Willick had been recalled from Finland and England after being identified as CIA operatives in left-wing publications. At least there had been no further attacks, as there had been in Bonn.

  ‘We’ll have to do exactly that, over a period. We can’t do anything else,’ said Myers.

  ‘And every analyst working out of here on raw material coming from anywhere in the area will have to be moved, as well,’ insisted Crookshånk.

  ‘You know what you’re saying, don’t you?’ asked Norris. ‘You’re saying that the Agency has got to undergo the biggest agent turnover it’s had in its entire history. And it’s not just a question of moving people around. Some of these guys have been specifically trained for nothing else: cultivated for a lifetime’s career. Most speak Spanish better than English.’

  ‘Then a lot more are going to have to be specifically trained,’ said Crookshank, unimpressed.

  ‘I know Ramon Hernandez appears to check out but I think he should be isolated, too, until we’re one hundred per cent sure,’ said Myers.

  The other two men nodded in agreement, effectively closing off from the CIA its best and most loyal source in Nicaragua.

  ‘And we mustn’t lose Kapalet, just because he’s being withdrawn to Moscow,’ said Crookshank.

  ‘I don’t intend to,’ said Myers. ‘I’m recommending to the Director that because of their special relationship Wilson Drew should be shifted there from Paris to continue as control.’

  ‘It’s not going to be easy for Kapalet, is it?’ said Norris, recalling the warning that had come from France after Drew’s last meeting with the Russian.

  ‘Nothing’s easy about this whole fucking mess,’ said Myers. ‘We can’t judge until we know the department or division to which he’s being posted but he could be even more important there at headquarters than he was in France.’

  ‘What about Levin?’ asked Crookshank.

  ‘Vital,’ replied Myers at once. ‘There isn’t anyone more important. I still think we might shortcut the search for the Latin American source through him.’

  ‘How?’ asked Norris.

  ‘He’s Russian so let’s use his knowledge of the way they operate and react,’ proposed the security chief. ‘Let’s get as much and as many electronic intercepts of Soviet traffic as we can, from the National Security Agency. Use our own stuff, too. And put him to work on them. Working from source backwards, we might be able to find the spy without all the turmoil we’ve been talking about.’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ agreed Norris doubtfully. ‘But it would mean disclosing all our sources. And those of the NSA as well.’

  ‘That’s a minimal consideration,’ argued Myers. ‘Levin’s on our side now. He’s proved that, unquestionably.’

  ‘If it’s a shortcut to discovering who our second spy is, then I’ll go for it,’ endorsed the lawyer.

  ‘It would require taking him on,’ pointed out Norris.

  ‘We’ve made consultants out of defectors before,’ reminded Myers. ‘Yuri Nosenko was appointed when he came across and told us the KGB had no part in Kennedy’s assassination.’

  ‘Not as quickly as this,’ said Norris.

  ‘Time we don’t have,’ said Myers.

  ‘I don’t think we can bring Levin properly aboard soon enough,’ said Crookshank.

  Yuri made more than one trip to the Chase Manhattan Bank. On the first, by himself, he retrieved and recopied both sets of files, including this time the tyre-mark photograph. The originals he sealed and addressed in an envelope. The copies he put in the briefcase he intended taking with him, back to Moscow.

  Caroline accompanied him on the second visit, frowning with curiosity as they went through the formality of signatory and withdrawing authority being extended to her, and then looking more puzzled in the vault itself, when she saw the envelope addressed to the New York Times.

  ‘I thought you worked for an Amsterdam magazine?’

  ‘I do,’ said Yuri. This was a very special assignment.’

  ‘Special enough to be kept in a bank vault!’

  That special,’ assured Yuri. ‘You understand completely what I want you to do?’

  ‘Not exactly the intelligence test of
the decade, is it?’ she said. ‘You’re going away on an assignment tomorrow and if you’re not back within a week I’m to collect the package from here and post it to the Times.’

  ‘Right,’ said Yuri. It was incomplete and bewildering and he had no idea if the newspaper would make any use of it arriving anonymously. But if anything happened to him this time in Moscow and they did publish, it might just conceivably cause Kazin and Panchenko harm.

  ‘Why not just give it to them now?’

  ‘It would be too soon.’

  ‘Remember what I said, that first night?’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  That you were mysterious,’ she reminded him. ‘And you are. I still don’t know a damned thing about you, with one important exception: how I feel about you.’

  The safe-deposit box also contained the still unread letters between his father and mother, Yuri realized. It was preposterous – insanity – to go on with Caroline like this. He would end it shortly, he promised himself. But not quite yet. He needed her now.

  Kazin was surprised that Vladislav Belov had not volunteered the open commitment he had once shown, particularly now that the control of the First Chief Directorate was undisputed and beyond challenge. The man was a fool, like Panchenko was a fool although for different reasons. Kazin decided he didn’t need supporters or sycophants any more. His position was beyond dispute: he was unassailable.

  Kazin gazed across his desk at Belov and said: ‘The New York courier is being recalled?’ One of Kazin’s new edicts, since his sole appointment, had been that he was advised of all agent movements.

  ‘Yes,’ said Belov. Why so much interest in Yuri Malik?

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some time ago we obtained partial copies of a new IBM computer design: he is bringing back the remainder.’ It was the man’s function in the United States, scarcely requiring a personal explanation, surely?

  The idea was a sudden one. Kazin said: ‘Are you satisfied with his performance in New York?’

  ‘Completely,’ said the chief of the American division. ‘He’s carried out everything asked of him and in addition successfully identified the head of the publicity division to which he’s attached as a homosexual. We are instigating a blackmail entrapment.’

  ‘I am unsure he was not prematurely promoted,’ declared Kazin. A decision of his father’s, after the inquiry embarrassment: proper that it should be rescinded, then. And Kazin was having second thoughts of trying to manipulate the man’s embarrassing discovery by the Americans. A feint, in the attack of his own personal chess game. The game – the pleasure of the torment – would be far better if the man were withdrawn here to Moscow, to be prodded and goaded. Making the decision, Kazin said: ‘See him yourself when he gets here. Tell him he is being reassigned: that he is to settle whatever is outstanding in America and prepare to return permanently.’

  ‘To do what?’ asked Belov. The permanent recall was ridiculous, an order with no logical reason or purpose.

  The man’s attitude was dangerously near contempt, discerned Kazin. Perhaps someone else who needed reassigning, into oblivion. Savouring his power as if he could actually taste it, Kazin said: ‘Whatever I decide.’ He would have to devote more thought than he had to that hurriedly conceived idea at the graveside. Definitely too rushed: he’d do better next time.

  It was as if Kazin were paranoic about the son of the former joint Chief Deputy, thought Belov. He said: ‘The last batch of CIA identification is going to be the most embarrassing. We’ve got the names of forty headquarters officers at Langley: every division chief and most of their deputies.’

  ‘And the chaos has only just started,’ mused Kazin.

  ‘The Foreign Ministry have confirmed Washington’s application for a diplomatic visa for Wilson Drew,’ disclosed Belov.

  ‘Maintaining Kapalet’s control?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Through whom we can go on feeding them what we like, for years,’ said Kazin, reflective still. ‘This really has been the most brilliantly devised and executed disinformation coup!’

  The megalomaniac appeared sincerely to believe he was its architect instead of its on-the-sidelines approver, Belov realized, incredulous. Kazin had to be mentally unstable: there wasn’t any other explanation.

  36

  Yuri routed himself through Spain and Germany, so it was a long flight, but up to the last hour before the Moscow touchdown he had not properly worked out how he could advance into the necessary destructive indictment the information he carried in the briefcase at his side. Or even into the unquestionably more necessary protective one. And then he remembered rust-coloured vodka and body odour and a contemptuous disregard for authority and coupled it to the militia investigator’s insistence upon the importance of back-street repair shops in discovering who had killed his father. And decided, in rare assurance these days, that he had nothing to lose.

  Yuri walked slowly along the line of waiting taxis, peering in and ignoring the inviting gestures, finding the man he wanted five vehicles from the front. He got into the car, ignoring the hornblasts of protest from the others ahead, which the driver did as well. The lead taxi protested the loudest and as he passed Yuri’s driver thrust up a single middle finger and said: ‘Fuck you.’ As they negotiated the exit loops from Sheremet’yevo the man said: ‘Come far?’

  Yuri was too impatient to endure a full repeat of the sales pitch of the previous journey so he leaned forward against the seat in front, the fifty-dollar note folded upward and almost directly in front of the man.

  The driver said: ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What’s it look like?’

  ‘Fifty American dollars.’

  ‘That’s what it is.’

  ‘Piss off,’ dismissed the man. ‘Is that how you get promotion in Gorbachov’s anti-corruption militia? By entrapment! Amateur: fucking amateur.’

  ‘Last time you offered me girls and vodka and said I wouldn’t get a better rate anywhere for my dollars,’ reminded Yuri.

  He was conscious of the man’s attention in the rear-view mirror and moved, to make himself more visible.

  ‘Who are you?’ demanded the driver.

  Yuri didn’t reply to that question, either. He let the note drop and said: ‘It’s yours.’

  ‘You haven’t asked the rate.’

  ‘I don’t want to know the rate.’

  ‘You’re not making sense.’

  ‘I want help: the sort of help I think you can give me.’

  ‘You notice I’m not touching that money? Don’t know it’s there,’ said the man. ‘You’ve got to get up much earlier in the morning to trick me, asshole. You know what I think I’m going to do? I think I’m going to stop here and throw you out of the cab. That’s what I think I’m going to do.’

  As close as he had to be, Yuri saw that the collar of the driver’s coat was even blacker than before from his greased hair and the miasma of tobacco appeared stronger, too. As the car began to slow and move to the side of the highway, Yuri took another fifty-dollar note from his pocket and held it up, like the previous one. ‘You know whose portrait that is?’ he said. ‘That’s Ulysses S. Grant.’

  The man looked from Yuri to the money and back to Yuri again. He said: ‘I asked you who you were.’

  ‘And I said I wanted help.’

  The driver’s eyes went back to the money, briefly, and he said: ‘What sort of help?’

  ‘Garages which repair cars that have been in accidents that can’t be reported. For unaccounted money.’

  ‘You …?’ began the man and then stopped, looking back at the airport and shaking his head. He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Yuri let the fifty-dollar note drop beside the first and said: ‘I’m talking about money.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘This isn’t a trap.’

  ‘Convince me.’

  ‘Look c
losely.’

  The tobacco breath was disgusting as the man turned fully to him. ‘So?’

  ‘Recognize me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Try harder.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘For the hundred dollars beside you.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about a hundred dollars beside me.’

  ‘You weren’t so careful last time. You wanted to deal in anything American that I wanted to sell or barter.’

  ‘I don’t remember any last time: there wasn’t one.’

  ‘You wanted to sell vodka and to buy dollars and anything American that I had,’ repeated Yuri.

  ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

  ‘You took me to the KGB building on the ring road.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘I could have reported you then to the anti-corruption militia,’ said Yuri, remembering how strong the temptation had been and glad he had not succumbed to it. ‘I didn’t. If I had done and you’d been intercepted how would you have explained the vodka? And all the cash you were carrying as a money black marketeer?’

  ‘There wasn’t another time,’ insisted the man.

  The denial was weak and Yuri knew the man had at last remembered him. He said: ‘I didn’t do it then. I am not going to do it now. Not unless I have to.’

  ‘What’s that mean, unless you have to?’

  ‘It means there’s two ways,’ said Yuri. ‘One way makes you money. The other way makes you unhappy: subject to stop and search and harassment, whenever, however.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be frightened?’

  The bravado was weaker than the denial. Yuri said: ‘What would a search squad find right now, where you live?’

  ‘Two hundred dollars,’ capitulated the driver.