‘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.
‘If it’s worth it.’
‘Now.’
‘Later, when we find the garage.’
‘There are a lot: the anti-corruption campaign is a joke.’
‘Keep the meter running, all the time.’ The man’s physical presence could be an advantage.
‘You looking for engine damage? Engineers?’
Yuri hesitated. ‘Bodywork,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘No need for you to know.’
There appeared to be a lot, as the man said. Because it was on the way into Moscow from the airport they stopped at Khimki and after there near the Dynamo sports stadium and crossed to the northern river terminal, where they unsuccessfully checked two places from which the driver, who by now had identified himself as Leonid (‘like Brezhnev: he enjoyed living well, too’) said stolen cars were sold as well as unrecorded repairs carried out. At every garage there was a wall of rejecting hostility towards him and Yuri quickly realized just how much he needed the man with him. The pattern developed of the questions being put through the driver rather than directly from him. Yuri became hopeful at a service station on the road to Krasnogorsk when a paint-sprayer remembered a 1984 Lada and was just as quickly disappointed when he said the colour had been green.
‘Sure you want to go on?’ asked Leonid as they turned off the ring road to appraoch the centre of Moscow.
‘Quite sure.’
‘You see what’s on the clock?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘This must be pretty important to you.’
‘It is.’
There were four more garages and two more wrongly coloured Ladas before the taxi pulled into Begovaya Street. It appeared to be a three-man business, one of the owners the sprayer himself, anonymous behind a protective mask, his overalls multi-coloured from previous jobs. From the attitude Yuri guessed he knew Leonid personally: instead of answering the first question the man nodded in Yuri’s direction and said: ‘He OK?’
‘Yes,’ said the driver.
‘How OK is OK?’
Yuri didn’t understand until the driver said: ‘Of course he’ll pay; he’s with me, isn’t he?’
‘A 1984 Lada?’ queried the garageman. He had lifted the visor of his mask but it was still not possible to see what he really looked like.
‘Around October fourteenth,’ prompted Yuri.
‘Fifteenth,’ said the man at once.
He’d got this far before, thought Yuri, curbing the optimism.
‘What was the damage?’ asked Leonid.
‘Scraped nearside wing,’ said the man. ‘And the light assembly was smashed.’
‘What colour?’
‘Fawn. Managed a good match.’
A feeling of satisfaction engulfed Yuri. Abandoning their established system and taking over from the driver, he said: ‘Remember anything about the man?’
‘He was a soldier,’ declared the sprayer at once.
‘A soldier!’ demanded Yuri. ‘You mean he wore uniform?’
The man shook his head. ‘The way he walked; held himself. Always tell a military man.’
The fit was there, decided Yuri. He said: ‘What else about him? Anything at all?’
Instead of replying, the sprayer said to Leonid: ‘You sure this is all right?’
‘Dollars,’ promised Leonid.
‘How much?’
‘Twenty,’ opened Yuri.
‘Fifty,’ bargained the man.
The ultimate satisfaction would be charging it to KGB expenses, Yuri decided as he handed the money over: ‘payment for essential information’ perhaps. He said: ‘So what else about him?’
‘Nothing about the man: just that he had a positive military bearing.’
Yuri felt a flare of irritation, imagining he had been tricked into parting with money upon the promise of something more, and then recognized the qualification in the reply. He said: ‘What else, if it wasn’t about the man?’
‘You sure this isn’t official?’
‘You often get paid in American dollars by the police?’
The man hesitated and then went into the cubby-hole office in one corner of the paint shop, re-emerging at once with a ledger-sized book. ‘Wouldn’t have mattered if it had been official,’ he said, offering it already opened at a page.
Double book-keeping, as a protection against any police raid! Yuri realized. He took the book eagerly but before he could study the work record, the man said: ‘Everything is properly detailed. Everything. Even the registration.’
‘Registration!’
‘On the first line.’
Yuri didn’t ask, unwilling to risk a refusal. He walked to the cubby-hole and copied MOS 56-37-42 on to a scrap of blank paper on the desk top, put it in his pocket and left the account book there. He could actually feel the throb of his own heartbeat and wondered if he were flushed with the excitement. He’d got the most positive evidence yet. And already knew how he could use it further! He was close, he decided: close enough to reach out and touch!
‘Thank you,’ he said, with more sincerity than either of them knew.
‘You ever need a car resprayed, you know where to come.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
‘Where now?’ asked Leonid, back in the car.
‘The ring road building,’ said Yuri.
When they got there Yuri handed over the additional hundred dollars and settled the meter fare, which registered a hundred and seventy-five roubles. Yuri guessed it had been tampered with, to run quicker.
‘By the time any search squad gets to where I live, there won’t be anything there,’ said Leonid.
‘You’re safe,’ said Yuri.
‘You really KGB?’
‘What do you think?’ said Yuri.
‘What I’ve always thought,’ said the man, turning the remark. ‘You can’t trust the KGB: they’re assholes. Money’s good, though.’
Yuri did not report at once to the reception area. Instead he took the elevator to the basement garage, where he’d once regarded the people who’d cleaned and looked after his father’s car – the car in which he’d lost his virginity – as allies if not friends. His luck held. The duty clerk was a man he recognized: Andrei, he thought. The smile of recognition was returned but faded at once, embarrassment at a misplaced expression. ‘Sorry about your father,’ Andrei said.
‘It’s being investigated,’ said Yuri.
‘Let’s hope they get the fucker.’
‘Let’s hope,’ said Yuri. He produced his official accreditation and said: ‘I want to know from records if a Lada numbered MOS 56-37-42 is one of our cars. And if it was booked out on fourteenth October.’
With a positive date to work from it took the clerk only minutes. ‘Colonel Panchenko,’ he said. ‘He kept it a week.’
‘Is it here now?’
The clerk consulted a chart on the wall and said: ‘Bay 38.’
The paintsprayer had not been exaggerating, acknowledged Yuri: the colour was an excellent match. Like another positive match, the provable tread of the tyres compared against those outlined in his father’s blood, at the scene of the killing: outlined in the photograph he possessed.
He had it all, thought Yuri, taking the elevator back up to the reception area. Now what was he going to do with it? He imagined the question answered when he identified himself and was told he had to report to Vladislav Belov.
The despair lumped in John Willick’s throat and he swallowed against breaking down, although there was no one in the Karacharovo apartment to witness his crying. No one anywhere. The drivers taking him to and from the debriefings appeared unable to speak English and his interrogators rotated and every one treated him with an attitude bordering on
contempt anyway, so he was resigned against any possibility of acquaintanceship, let alone friendship. The system had been established for him to be paid but he had been granted no concessionary facilities. He had not yet been able to buy anything without lining up for hours and having to use sign language when he’d bought the purchase ticket and then moved into the second queue to reclaim what he wanted, against the price already paid. He found the language sessions impossible. The instructor was impatient with him and Willick knew it would take him months – years – to get even a limited mastery of Russian. He was so miserable, he thought; more miserable than he’d ever been in his entire life. He didn’t know what to do; there was nothing he could do. He choked, unable to hold on any longer, sitting at the stained table, the sobs shuddering through him.
The revelation of the CIA headquarters personnel was as devastating as Vladislav Belov had predicted during the last interview with Kazin. The identities were disclosed over a period, for maximum and sustained impact, were published throughout Europe, and from the outlets there picked up and carried on television and in newspapers across America.
Harry Myers was named as the Agency’s security chief and Edward Norris as the deputy controller of the Soviet Division in the second batch released.
‘Holy Mother of Christ!’ exploded Myers.
‘I know,’ anticipated Crookshank, uncertain if the disclosures were over and fearing his name could still come. ‘If you could, you’d kill him. I would, too.’
37
It took Yuri the time to pass through the entry formalities on the ground floor and reach Belov’s quarters on the sixth storey to evolve his approach. Where he was almost immediately off-balanced. The reception from the other man was different again from what it had been before, neither the surprising affability of their earlier meetings nor the frozen reserve of the cemetery encounter. Yuri searched for the word and decided it was weariness: Vladislav Belov appeared bowed by some sort of fatigue. The remainder of the IBM mainframe computer blueprints had once more been carried in a film cassette and as before Yuri went patiently through the hand-over ritual, waiting.
‘I am seeing you personally to inform you of changes,’ announced Belov. He had decided to do exactly as he was told; recall the man, announce some unknown reassignment and avoid getting involved from then on. That was the way to avoid any difficulties for himself: just see his time out. Fifteen years, he thought, agonized: a lifetime! What else could he do?
‘Involving me?’
‘You are being withdrawn from New York.’
‘Upon the instructions of Comrade Directorate chairman Kazin?’ anticipated Yuri.
Belov blinked at the astuteness of the question. With stiff formality, he said: ‘It is not permissible to discuss or question reassignments.’
‘I would like to show you something,’ said Yuri, going to the documentation that bulged his briefcase. He handed across the table the photograph he had taken of the defector and his son in Connecticut: the pictures were blurred and grainy but brought up under a magnifying glass it was just possible to make an identification, which Yuri knew because he had done it.
‘Who are they?’ demanded Belov, examining them first without enlargement.
‘The man is Yevgennie Pavlovich Levin. The boy is his son, Petr,’ said Yuri simply.
‘What!’
Yuri was tensed for the response from the other man, whom Kazin had instructed could not be told, wanting to learn from it. But he learned nothing: it sounded like outrage, which Yuri could not understand. There could be no turning back, not now. He said: ‘When I was in Moscow on compassionate leave after the death of my father, I was ordered by the Comrade First Deputy to locate Levin, which I did. He and his family are near a small township called Litchfield, in Connecticut…’ He paused and then announced: ‘The American authorities were warned, in advance.’
Belov sat shaking his head and once again Yuri’s inference was of overwhelming tiredness. ‘Why?’ said the man, his voice exhausted like the rest of him. ‘Why?’
Defectors were pursued, thought Yuri curiously. He wished he could infer more from the other man. ‘I would also like to present to you irrefutable evidence that my father was murdered,’ Yuri plunged on, producing the police files, with what he had discovered himself that day uppermost. ‘And by whom,’ he finished.
Belov read, head bent, for a long time, the sound of concentrated breathing the only noise in the room. Yuri could see the traffic streaming around the peripheral road but not hear it through the double glazing. Would the taxi driver by now have cleared anything incriminating from his home? Yuri guessed he probably had: already converted the incriminating dollars, too.
The lassitude had gone from Belov when he finally looked up. In its place was an attitude of intense wariness. He said: ‘Who else has seen this?’
‘No one, not in its complete form.’
‘There are no copies?’
‘Not in its complete form,’ reiterated Yuri, wary himself.
‘Is there anything else?’
Yuri hesitated, unsure. But why unsure? If he’d made a mistake it was irreparable so there was no safety in holding back what his father had accumulated. He passed over the second dossier and again there was uninterrupted silence for a long time. When Belov looked up again he did not immediately speak but remained gazing blank-faced across his desk.
Say something! Do something! Yuri thought desperately. Anything! As forcefully as he could, Yuri said: ‘My father was killed to prevent his pursuing an inquiry that would have proven the involvement of Colonel Panchenko in the death of Igor Agayans.’
‘Yes,’ said Belov at last. It was not so much an agreement with Yuri’s insistence but a personal acceptance of all that he had read during the previous hour. He went on: ‘How did you trace Levin?’
‘Through the letters between the family and the daughter.’
‘He stopped her leaving, didn’t he?’ said Belov, again in some private conversation. Concentrating more, he said: ‘Did you realize Levin was trying to convey as much as possible, about his acceptance?’
‘Acceptance!’ queried Yuri, baffled once more.
‘An incredible man,’ said Belov admiringly.
‘The man is a traitor.’
‘Yevgennie Levin is carrying out a service to his country unparalleled in Soviet intelligence,’ corrected Belov. ‘All the indications are that he has succeeded brilliantly, although we will not get confirmation for many months, when he can make contact.’
‘Make contact?’ said Yuri weakly.
‘After his absolute infiltration into the CIA,’ announced Belov. And he talked on, in complete and chronological detail, a catharsis for the impotent frustration he felt at being cheated by Kazin. Belov recounted the manipulation of John Willick and explained how the apparent disclosures by Levin coordinated with those of Sergei Kapalet, in Paris. And how they were to get a secondary benefit by the recall to Moscow of Kapalet to continue as an apparent source, through which they could feed whatever disinformation they chose to Washington.
‘Unbelievable!’ said Yuri, in genuine awe.
‘On the contrary,’ said Belov, wanting to boast. ‘From what the CIA have done already we know it is all believed. Absolutely.’
‘Your idea?’ said Yuri, guessing the man’s need and wanting to bring the conversation back to his father.
‘It took years to formulate and put into practice,’ confirmed Belov. ‘And Kazin has taken the full credit: I was congratulated, for peripheral assistance. I believe Kazin is paranoic: certainly mentally unstable in some way.’
Pleased with the direction of the remark, Yuri indicated the material lying between them on the desk and said: ‘And now you can bring him down.’
Belov snorted a laugh that had no humour, shaking his head bitterly. ‘Panchenko, certainly. But there’s no proof of anything against Kazin except for the negligence for which he’s already been found culpable and apparently forgiven. It wil
l be his word against Panchenko’s.’
‘You can’t be serious!’ said Yuri, aghast. Everything wasted! he thought: everything! He said: ‘Kazin is involved!’
‘I don’t have any doubt either,’ said Belov. ‘But there’s not enough here to do anything about it: certainly insufficient for me to go to Chebrikov himself.’
It was more than just lack of evidence, Yuri guessed. Belov was unwilling to become linked to an attack that might misfire: headquarters survival politics about which his father had lectured him before his posting to Afghanistan. Exasperated and not caring that it showed, Yuri said: ‘So no action is taken against him! He goes on doing what he likes, to whom he likes! Someone you think to be paranoid!’ What sort of nightmare would he be coming back to, if he were brought back from New York with Kazin still in control?
‘Nothing can be done against him: nothing that is sure to succeed,’ said Belov, confirming Yuri’s thoughts.
‘There is,’ insisted Yuri, as the idea came.
‘What?’
Yuri found it easy to explain and Belov was nodding, in growing agreement, before he finished.
‘Yes!’ said Belov, excited. ‘Yes, it could succeed that way!’
Their contact procedure was arranged before Kapalet’s transfer from Paris and Wilson Drew responded instantly the Russian initiated it, hurrying early to the Museum of Early Russian Art at the monastery on Pryamikova. Despite the American being ahead of time, Kapalet was already watching, although the need for self-protection no longer existed as it had in Paris.
He approached Drew in an icon room dating from the time of Peter the Great and said: ‘Very different from France.’
‘You can say that again!’ complained Drew. He thought Moscow was the pit of all pits.
‘I’m not enjoying it either,’ said Kapalet, which was true.
‘Is it always going to have to be this sort of place?’
‘We’d be far too obvious in any restaurant.’
‘You got something about Latin America or the Caribbean?’ asked Drew eagerly. There were daily demands from Langley and there had been six separate messages from the Crisis Committee when he’d advised them of the contact summons in advance of the meeting.
The Bearpit Page 35