‘With great anticipation,’ said Yuri honestly. He was about to add that it was precisely what he had been trained for but realized it might indicate some criticism of the briefing, so he stopped.
‘There will be long periods when you are absolutely by yourself, without the support of any rezidentura,’ warned Belov.
That had always been made obvious during his training. Yuri knew he would have no difficulty operating entirely alone. He said: ‘How will my absences from New York be explained?’
‘Without difficulty, if we succeed in the United Nations assignment we want.’
Which they did. Yuri’s posting was into the public affairs division, from which representatives travelled freely and frequently around America, explaining to colleges and universities and contributing governmental bodies the value and necessity of the organization’s existence. The travelling was not even restricted to America because the United Nations has separate establishments in Geneva and Vienna.
On the morning of his departure for New York, Yuri said to his father: ‘I think I should know what it is between you and Kazin.’
The older man hesitated, unsure, and then once more shook his head in refusal. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘When this business is all over.’
‘Why not now?’ said Yuri, exasperated.
‘This way it’s better,’ said Malik stubbornly.
John Willick was finding it difficult to hang on. He knew he had to because if he collapsed – collapsed more than he already had, that is – he would risk discovery and if he were discovered it was a trial and jail, with the key thrown into the Potomac or whatever river ran near whatever penitentiary he was sent to. All he needed was a run of luck: just six months with the market going in his favour, his stocks rising as fast as they had been falling, and the horses being on form, and he’d be out of trouble. That’s all it was: bad luck. A lot of bad, cruddy luck, hitting a market slide when that bitch of a wife got her alimony settlement and the horses started running badly and he’d needed three months hospitalization after the ulcer had proven worse than they expected under the exploratory operation and some intestine had to be removed. Jesus, would anyone believe the cost of hospitalization in America! Or such bad luck!
He hadn’t given a lot away to the Russians. Well, not at first anyway. Just the sort of assessments and judgements that he’d come to recognize after five years as a senior analyst on the CIA’s Soviet desk were nearly always cobbled together from newspaper and magazine opinions: the sort of thing the Russians could have assembled themselves, if they’d taken the trouble. A bit more important when he’d become deeply involved, dependent upon the money, and the fucking stock market and the fucking horses had continued to lose instead of win. Spy-in-the-sky stuff, giving them the chance to realize the accuracy and the precise positioning of the satellites, but that really wasn’t such a big deal either. They weren’t stupid. They knew the satellites were there and they were technologically advanced enough to know the precision that was possible. He’d never disclosed anything to endanger anyone’s life. Important, that. Just facts, never anything life or death.
He was certainly due a change of luck after Burrows getting the supervisor post! Burrows, whose guts he couldn’t stand and who couldn’t stand his guts in return and was proving it – and his power – by the transfer. It was the transfer that was worrying Willick most of all. He’d had a value on the Soviet desk: known his worth. How valuable would he be in personnel records? Fucking clerk’s job, after all.
And then there’d been the switch to Paris of his control, whom he’d only ever known as Aleksandr. Another uncertainty there. He had a kind of trust in Aleksandr. Not friends, of course: more of an understanding. Willick didn’t know what to expect from the new guy – didn’t even know the new guy – and he felt nervous at the unknown.
Willick had it all worked out, when his luck changed. He’d be straight in six months if he could go on getting the sort of money that Aleksandr paid and the losers became winners, which the law of averages said they had to do soon. Quit then. Explain he wanted to call it a day – say he thought he was under suspicion or something like that – and end the whole episode. No problems. No problem at all, providing he got a bit of luck.
Willick obeyed Aleksandr’s parting instructions and joined the perpetual queue feeding into the Washington monument – an untidy, disordered man, scuff-shoed, unpressed, yesterday’s shirt fraying at the collar.
‘Is this your first visit?’
Willick twitched at the contact phrase, turning to the man beside him: plump, bespectacled, owl-like.
‘Yes,’ he replied dutifully, with his own contact reply. ‘It is strange how you never sightsee in your own city.’
‘I didn’t expect such a queue,’ recited the man.
‘Neither did I,’ said Willick, filling in his part.
‘I think I might come back another time.’
‘That would probably be a good idea,’ completed Willick.
They walked away side by side in the direction of the Reflecting Pool. The Russian said: ‘You must know me as Oleg.’
‘My transfer has been confirmed.’
‘What division?’
‘Personnel,’ disclosed Willick apprehensively. Essential as it was to know if his source of income were going to dry up, he said anxiously: ‘Will that still be of interest to you?’
‘Oh yes,’ assured Oleg. ‘Of very great interest.’
Willick’s relief was a physical sensation. He said: ‘There was a regular understanding, between Aleksandr and me.’
‘A thousand a month,’ acknowledged the Russian. ‘I know.’
‘It will stay at a thousand a month?’
‘Why shouldn’t it?’
It was changing! Willick thought euphorically: at last his luck was changing. He said: ‘What will you want?’
Oleg looked sideways, briefly, as if he were surprised by the question. ‘The sort of things that are contained in personnel records,’ he said, simply. ‘Names, biographical details, postings, specialities. We’ll want all that, John.’
Willick swallowed in uncomfortable awareness, the excited relief seeping away. It meant he would be giving away details of people.
14
Yuri Vasilivich Malik was not prepared: despite all the defectors’ lectures and all the videos and the itemizing details of the facsimile houses and streets and cities at Kuchino, he was still not properly prepared for New York. There had been no briefing on the me-first aggressiveness against ‘have a nice day’, which anyway had mutated since his instruction to ‘have a nice one’. He had not anticipated the perpetual day and night noises and that fire and police sirens did shrill all the time, like they did in the films he’d sat through, which were not called films but movies. He had not been told about the parting-at-the-seams decay of Harlem, which he drove past on FDR Drive on his way in from Kennedy airport. Or of the holed and cracked streets, like an earthquake aftermath. Or about the permanent, barely moving traffic jam of clogged vehicles, horns wearing out before their engines. The identified- from-photographs skyscrapers (‘the Chrysler Building is the one that goes to a point, the PanAm Building straddles Park Avenue, those two together are called the Trade Towers and more people work in them than live on the entire island of Manhattan, and the UN building where you will work is green-glassed’) were taller and more awesome than he’d been warned to expect. And he was awed. And excited and impressed. He thought it was wonderful. Not in any imbalanced or ridiculous way, like the defector Levin appeared to have regarded it. Although the experience was only of brief hours, to grow to brief days, Yuri knew quite positively – without the slightest doubt – it would never affect him like that. An immediate – and to become lasting – impression was that New York was going to be like a mistress, something to be enjoyed and explored to the full but never once considered as a wife.
The Moscow-designated position as courier meant Yuri had greater freedom than any other Russian – and certainly any other KGB agent – at the United Nations. Of which he was fully aware. It was still one of the first
