That was why he was here, that was why he’d travelled so far and risked so much. How could he come all this way only to save the man who’d murdered his wife? He was not seeking the moral satisfactionof being a betterperson than his adversary. He would find no sense of pride in saving this man. The anger and anguish he suffered over his wife’s death were as raw today as they were on the day he heard the news – those feelings should be acted upon, rather than a preconceived notion of decency. Knowing the truth of what happened was no tonic to his hurt and provided him with no sense of inner peace. His fury was just as strong, his emotions as unsettled as they had ever been. Maybe if he let Yates die, alone in his basement, a sad and pathetic death, one befitting a man ruled by hatred, he would feel differently, he would achieve the peacehe’d been seeking. Let him die!
Let him die.
Nara touched his arm.
– Leo?
When he turned to her, he did not see Raisa, but she was by his side as surely as Nara was standing there. The truth is that Raisa would have hated Yates even more intensely than Leo. She would never have forgiven Yates for allowing Jesse Austin to die. She would never have forgiven him for not passing on her last words to Elena. His silence had contributed to Elena blaming herself, carrying a burden of guilt that had altered her character and shaped her life. Even so, even feeling that degree of hatred, Leo was sure that Raisa would call for an ambulance.
He dialled the number, handing the phone to Nara.
– Tell them the address. Tell them to hurry.
– Where are you going?
– To help Yates.
New York City Brighton Beach
Same Day
Leo sat on the beach watching the ocean break against the shore. The sunset had contracted to a smudge of red, night closing in on what remained of the day. He rolled a smooth stone from hand to hand, back and forth at regular intervals, as if he were an elaborate timepiece counting down to darkness. One fact was clear to him now – the truth had brought him no comfort. His discoveries did not make Raisa’s death any easier to bear. With grief, there was no resolution, no closure. There was no end to it. He missed her now, today, on this beach, as much as he had ever missed her. He found a future without her as hard to picture as the moments after he’d first heard she was dead. The thought of waking up tomorrow morning without her by his side, after many years of doing exactly that, still made him sick with loneliness. In truth, his investigation had been an elaborate, fifteen-year-long diversion from the fact that he did not know how to live without her. He would never know.
As contradictory as it might seem, he had been trying to keep Raisa alive by exploring the mysteries surrounding her death, to legitimize obsessing about her by framing that obsession as the work of a detective. In an unsolved mystery there was immortality. Looking back he realized that Zoya had always perceived the true nature of his investigation and had always known it would bring him no comfort. She was right. He had found out who’d murdered his wife, he had found out why and how she’d been killed. He could now picture the events of that night in New York, understanding every detail, fully grasping the motivations. Yet what was important was that he finally grasped the futility of trying to keep Raisa alive, understanding that the unsolved mystery had only ever offered the illusion of her company, a man chasing the reflection of a woman he loved.
He would never see Raisa again. He would never sleep beside her, or kiss her. And with that thought, he let the smooth, heavy stone roll out of his hand. Night had come. The red smudge of sunset was gone. The lights of Coney Island were bright.
Hearing footsteps, he turned around. Nara and Zabi were approaching. They arrived by his side, standing over him, unsure what to say. Leo patted the ground beside him.
– Sit with me a while.
Nara sat on one side, Zabi on the other. Leo took Zabi’s hand. She sensed something was wrong even if she didn’t understand what it was.
– Are you leaving us?
Leo nodded.
– I have to go home.
– Isn’t this home?
– It is for you. I must return to Russiai›
– Why?
– My daughters are there. They’re in trouble. They’re being punished instead of me. I can’t allow that to happen.
– Can’t they come here? They can live with us. I don’t mind sharing my room.
– They won’t be allowed to come here.
– I don’t want you to go.
– I don’t want to leave you.
– Can’t you stay until Christmas? I’ve been reading about it at school. I want to celebrate it with you. We can buy a tree and cover it with lights.
– You can still do that with Nara.
– When are you coming back?
Leo didn’t reply.
– You are coming back, aren’t you?
– I don’t think so.
Zabi was crying.
– Have we done something wrong?
Leo took hold of her hand.
– You’re the most amazing girl. You’re going to have a wonderful life here with Nara. I’m sure of that. You can achieve anything you set your mind to. And I’m going to enjoy hearing about your success. But there is something I must do.
ONE MONTH LATER
Soviet Airspace above Moscow
13 December
Peering out of the window of the passenger plane chartered by the Soviet government to bring him home, Leo was disappointed that Moscow was hidden below angry clouds, as if shunning the gaze of the returning traitor, refusing to show him the city that he’d once sworn to protect against all enemies, domestic and foreign. No matter what rationale he applied, he could not deny that he felt ashamed. He was a man who’d fought proudly as a Soviet soldier and he would gladly have died for his country. Yet he had ended up betraying it. While his sense of personal shame was intense, he felt far greater shame that his nation had squandered its opportunity for social progress, instead industrializing darkness, making its citizens complicit in a murderous command economy, building death-factories in every corner of the country, from Kolyma’s gulags to the secret police headquarters, the Lubyanka, a building that lurked somewhere underneath those winter clouds. To the ideals that underpinned the Revolution, they were all traitors to one degree or another.
The journey from New York had been eerie, Leo surrounded by unoccupied seats, the flight empty except for the KGB operatives guarding him and the diplomatic officials sent from Moscow to oversee his return. Upon boarding he’d felt no sense of apprehension, instead pondering the money wasted on his repatriation. As a traitor of international status, he had been granted an entire plane to himself. Recalling the perks he’d once desired as a young agent, he marvelled at the irony that not even the most powerful KGB officer, with the largest dacha and longest limousine, would ever have been granted the use of an entire airliner. It was a simple matter of appearances. Leo’s deportation was taking place upon a global stage before a worldwide media circus and no economies would be tolerated. Just as Raisa had been sent to New York in the nation’s most modern airliner to impress the main adversary, so the defector Leo would be brought home in the most modern Soviet aircraft available, flying direct to Moscow from New York. The Soviet government was keen to show the world that it was not experiencing financial worries. Carefree spending was an attempt to mask the strain caused by the ever-spiralling cost of the Afghan war, a fact Leo had described in detail to the Americans.
In negotiating his return to the Soviet Union, it was clear that the Americans were pleased to be rid of him. He was a troublemaker, a loose cannon, and they’d extracted the information they needed, understanding from his briefings that Soviet failure in Afghanistan would leave their enemies humiliated. Providing aid to the Afghan insurgency would drain Soviet resources, pulling in more troops and making their ultimate and inevitable defeat even more expensive politically.
As for Leo’s incident with former Agent Jim Yates –
the attack had been covered up. Yates survived. His revelations would never see the light of day. The history books had been written and they would not be re-written: lies had been chiselled into the encyclopaedias and textbooks. The shooting of Yates in his pleasant suburban house in Teaneck had been blamed on an armed intruder, an opportunistic robbery gone wrong. Leo had assured the American authorities that he would not cause any further problems, or give any statements regarding the death of Jesse Austin, as long as Nara and Zabi were left alone. A pact of silence had been agreed. Leo took some satisfaction from the symmetry of Yates’s shooting being concealed as a matter of convenience, just as Austin’s murder had been. Though Yates had agreed to go along with the story, he’d pointedly told local reporters that all he remembered about the intruder was that he was black.
With regards to the Soviet government, Leo had been unable to obtain any guarantees except for one – if he returned, the punitive measures against his daughters would stop. He had requested that within twenty-four hours of his plane touching down he would be permitted to see them, but he was in no position to insist upon anything. His guilt was not in question. He’d shared sensitive information with the main adversary and was to be tried for treason, a trial whose verdict had already been decided.
As the plane descended, Leo tried to imagine the events of the past eight years, the things that had happened since he was last in Moscow – eight years in which he’d been missing from the lives of his daughters and their husbands. As he thought upon the letters he’d received, it suddenly struck him that he wasn’t anxious about returning to a city filled with memories of Raisa. Something had changed. He was excited. This was the place where he’d fallen in love. He would be closer to his wife here than at any point during his investigation into her death. As the wheels touched down, he closed his eyes. He was home.
Moscow Butyrka Prison Pre-Trial Detention Centre 45 Novoslobodskaya Street
One Week Later
Arms and legs cuffed together, secured so tightly that he was forcedto stoop even when standing, Leo had been waiting for several hours in an ancient interrogation room within a prison notorious almost from its inception one hundred years ago. He’d supervised this arrangement countless times: the humiliating restraints, the atmosphere of intimidation and psychological pressures of surveillance, watched by guards in all corners of the room. No threats of violence had been made. Instead, a torture far more astute than physical pain had been applied.
This was Leo’s seventh day in Moscow and he’d not yet seen his daughters. He hadn’t spoken to them by telephone – he’d received no word of their welfare. Every morning upon being woken he’d been informed they would visit him that day. He’d been brought into this interrogation cell and told that they would arrive shortly. He’d waited, eager, feet tapping. Minutes had passed but they’d felt like hours. There was no clock on the wall and no answer ever came from the guards. Part of the torture was the difficulty of judging time. There were no windows, no sense of the outside world. In response, he had devised a way of maintaining his sanity. There was an exposed pipe running across the ceiling. At one of the rusted joints water was leaking, collecting at the line, forming a drop. Once the drop had enough weight it fell and the process began again. Leo counted the seconds of an entire cycle. He then counted them again, and again. There were roughly six hundred and twenty seconds to each drop and he used this number to gauge how long he’d been waiting. So far today he’d been waiting for forty-eight drops, eight hours.
Yesterday he’d sat for twelve hours, counting drops, in a state of great anticipation only to receive word that his daughters were not coming. This excruciating routine was repeated every day, forcing Leo to lurch from hope to despair. He hadn’t been given any information on what the problem was, whether his daughters had been spitefully refused permission or whether they did not want to see him. His tormentors were, of course, aware that Leo would obsess upon the possibility that his daughters were choosing not to visit him and they did nothing to alleviate this corrosive thought which, like a pearl of concentrated acid, bored through his thoughts.
There was a chance his daughters wanted nothing to do with him. Leo could not be sure how they had reacted to the news of his defection, or his return. The girls would be angry with him for causing them so many problems – they’d been arrested, questioned, their families collectively punished for his defection. In the six months that he’d spent in America he could not be sure how their careers had suffered, or how their reputations had been damaged. Perhaps they were afraid of visiting him, concerned with how their lives would change. As he ran these thoughts over and over in his mind he could feel every muscle in his back tightening, his hands clenching.
The door opened. Leo stood up as far his restraints allowed, his throat dry, desperate to see his daughters. He squinted at the shadows.
– Elena? Zoya?
From the gloom of the corridor a KGB officer entered.
– Not today.
Same Day
Leo had been given his own cell – not out of kindness, more likely they feared that as an older man he would be at risk of tuberculosis and might not survive until the trial if thr had beto one of the communal cells. At regular intervals the grate in the door slid open and an officer checked that Leo hadn’t tried to kill himself. Since his arrival he’d slept for no more than thirty minutes. As the days progressed he’d almost given up on sleep altogether, pacing backwards and forwards – four steps by two steps were the dimensions of his cell – his thoughts revolving around the prospect that he might never see his daughters again.
The cell lights were turned on. Leo was surprised. He received no visitors at night. The door opened. A man in his mid-forties entered accompanied by a guard. Leo didn’t recognize him although it was obvious from his smart suit and shoes that he was important, a politician perhaps. He seemed nervous, despite his trappings of power. He would not hold eye contact with Leo for longer than a second. They did not close the door, the guard remaining close by the man’s side. It was only at this point that Leo noticed the guard was ready with a truncheon, to protect the visitor.
Plucking up the courage to look Leo directly in the eye, he said:
– Do you know me?
Leo shook his head.
– If I told you my name it would mean nothing to you. However, if I told you the name that I used to go by…
Leo waited for the man to continue.
– I used to be known by the name of Mikael Ivanov.
Leo’s first thought was to step forward and crush Ivanov’s throat, assessing the likelihood of success considering his own age and physical condition. Dismissing his instinctive reaction, he managed to control his anger. He had not achieved the one thing he wanted – a visit from his daughters. Whatever blunt satisfaction might come from killing Ivanov, it would guarantee that he would be executed without having seen Zoya and Elena. Apparently relieved that he’d not been attacked, Ivanov pointed out:
– I was forced to change my name.
Leo spoke for the first time.
– A hardship, I’m sure.
Ivanov was irritated with himself.
– I’m trying to explain why you couldn’t find me. Frol Panin advised me to change my identity. He was sure you’d come looking for me, no matter how many years went by. You did. That was why I had to pretend – To be dead?
– Yes.
– Panin was wise. It saved your life.
– Leo Demidov, do you believe a person can change?
Leo considered Ivanov carefully, sensing genuine remorse and wondering if it was a trick – another form of punishment. Modulating his tone from outright hostility to deep scepticism, he replied:
– What do you want?
– I didn’t come to apologize. I know how meaningless that gesture would be. Please do not think me vain or boastful when I say that I have become a man of considerable influence and power.
– That does not surprise me.
Leo regretted the insult, which was childish and petty. But Ivanov accepted it.
– It had been decided that you would not be given permission to see your daughters. It was seen as the only punishment that would hurt you. You would not hear from them, see them, or talk to them.
Leo felt weak, unsteady. Ivanov hastily qualified his remark.
– I cannot intervene in your trial. However, I have been able to petition for Zoya and Elena to be granted permission to visit you. I have succeeded. They will arrive tomorrow.
The shift from despair to elation was too much. Exhausted from a lack of sleep Leo sat on the edge of his bed, head in his hands, breathing deeply. Ivanov added:
– In exchange I ask only one thing. Do not tell Elena that I arranged it. Please do not mention me at all. It will ruin it for her.
It took Leo a moment to recover. His voice was weak, the anger and indignation was gone.
– You could have arranged this without telling me?
Ivanov nodded.
– I could have done.
Ivanov turned around, about to leave. Leo called out:
– Why?
Ivanov hesitated, taking out a photograph and showing it to Leo, his fingers trembling. It was a photograph of Mikael Ivanov seated beside his wife. She was pretty rather than beautiful with generous eyes and open features. Leo asked:
– You told her what you were doing?
– Yes.
– Did you tell her why?
– She thinks it’s a random act of kindness, an expression of my good nature.
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