‘Not enough,’ insisted the American, tight-mouthed.
‘How much?’
‘Two.’ The pain in his gut was worsening and he could feel the sweat damp on his forehead.
The Russian gave a sharp intake of breath and started to move, taking Willick with him. ‘There would have to be higher approval for that,’ he said. ‘Much higher approval.’
‘Get it,’ insisted Willick.
The Russian frowned, very slightly, at the rudeness. ‘You said you had something pretty good.’
‘Wouldn’t the confirmed identities of every CIA agent operating out of the Moscow embassy be pretty good?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Oleg at once. ‘That would be very good indeed.’
‘Not just names,’ expanded Willick, promoting what he had to sell. ‘Full biographies. Dependants. Everything.’
‘Moscow will be very pleased,’ said the Russian.
‘We haven’t agreed the price,’ refused Willick.
The Russian stopped near a moving display of an early steam engine, not immediately replying. Then he said: ‘I see. No financial increase, no more information?’
‘In a nutshell,’ concurred Willick. He was troubled now not just by the nagging pain but by the need for a lavatory.
‘So it’s an ultimatum?’
Like I got from fucking Eleanor and her fucking lawyer, thought Willick. He said: ‘The sort of information I can provide now is worth it.’
‘Sometimes Moscow resents being pressured like this: being threatened with an ultimatum,’ said the Russian mildly.
Dear God, don’t let them turn me down, thought Willick, who had no religious beliefs. He said: ‘I didn’t call it an ultimatum. You did.’
‘But if we don’t increase the payment to two thousand, you won’t help us any more, isn’t that what you’re saying?’ reiterated Oleg. ‘To me that sounds just like an ultimatum.’
‘Revising the business relationship,’ said Willick, trying a definition of his own.
‘It would be a great pity if we were to cease being friends,’ said Oleg.
‘I don’t want that to happen,’ said Willick. How the hell would he survive without even the $1,000?
‘I don’t, either,’ said Oleg. ‘You see, John, Moscow’s reaction might be that now we’ve so positively established what you call a business relationship there really isn’t any way you could back away from it.’
At the blackmailing threat the ridiculously grinding wheel’s and cogs blurred in front of Willick’s eyes. He’d always recognized the possibility of it happening. To remind the other man of his own strength, Willick said: ‘I suppose you could force me to go on. But what sort of information do you imagine you would get, if we weren’t friends any longer?’
‘I’ll take it up with Moscow,’ promised Oleg.
‘Please,’ said Willick, belatedly realizing that now he was pleading instead of demanding, like before.
‘It would be a gesture of goodwill if you let us have those names now,’ encouraged Oleg. ‘It might convince Moscow that the increase would be justified.’
As Willick turned to leave ahead of the other man their hands brushed and the details of the CIA’s Moscow postings were exchanged. Willick knew that if he didn’t get to a rest room quickly he’d mess himself.
‘They wouldn’t!’ insisted Natalia. ‘They just wouldn’t! I know they wouldn’t!’ Her eyes were red from the soreness of the operation and there had actually been an injunction against crying but she had not been able to stop herself, so that she wept now from the pain as well as from the abandonment.
‘I don’t believe it either,’ said her grandmother, Galina’s mother.
‘It’s a mistake,’ said the girl. ‘It’s got to be a mistake.’ ‘No,’ said the old woman. ‘There’s no mistake.’ ‘But what’s going to happen to me?’ wailed the girl. ‘I don’t know, my darling. I wish I did but I just don’t know.’
16
The material comprised more than half the blueprints of an IBM mainframe computer being developed for the nineties and stolen on microfilm from the company’s headquarters at Armonk, in upstate New York, but Yuri was never to know that. Or how Vladislav Belov wanted to use the recall for other reasons. Yuri was not even told where the microfilm was concealed within the travel writer’s camera equipment, the 35mm Nikon, with two spare lenses and three rolls of already exposed film taken in Yellowstone National Park, about which a photographic feature duly appeared in the Amsterdam monthly. There was a further half-exposed role, also of the park, in the camera: the microfilm was secreted within the wind-on spindle by which the camera could be operated quite normally.
Yuri’s first proper operation also taught him that remaining undetected was considered more important than the speed of delivery. After being alerted by Anatoli Granov at the United Nations, Yuri had to wait until a necessary excuse for his absence could be manipulated, an address on the international importance and value of the United Nations to a group of lobbyists in Washington DC. It took three days to arrange, three days for Yuri to grow increasingly unsettled by what he might be returning to in Moscow. He wished there had been some way of contacting his father, to be warned if a warning were necessary.
Anxious to extend his knowledge of America as much and as quickly as possible, Yuri travelled to the American capital by Metroliner, gazing from the window, reminded again of the parting-at-the-seams decay of Harlem when the express went through Baltimore. Why was it that trains always seemed to pass the worst back gardens in any city? Only when they began approaching Washington did he concentrate upon the already prepared speech, making the small changes that Smallbone had assured him were permissible for the address to appear his own and not an opinion written by someone else, annotating the main text with reference numbers from his back-up books.
Washington impressed him. He guessed there were exceptions but it seemed a freshly washed and newly swept city. He knew from the Kuchino lectures that Greek architecture had been a predominant theme in its planning and decided it had succeeded, with the broad avenues and massive, squat buildings which also reminded him of Moscow. He’d become accustomed to New York skyscrapers and their absence here was another surprise until he recalled that city ordinance prevented any building higher than the Capitol, which really did look like the decoration at a Western wedding feast which was how it had been described to him by the homosexual defector who’d tried to teach him the idioms of the American language.
It was a breakfast address, important for the necessary timed-to-the-minute operation, and it went perfectly and Yuri was pleased both by his performance and by his reception. As his taxi drew away from the Mayflower Hotel he tried to imagine what the reaction of these people whose vocation was influencing American government thinking would have been if they’d known their lecturer to be a Soviet agent on his way to Moscow to deliver a consignment of American secrets. Mass panic and then mass diarrhoea, he decided. Or maybe diarrhoea first, then the panic. Possibly followed by Congress convening a panel for televised hearings, to impress the folks back home.
Yuri cleared his trail by taking the cab to Union Station, utilizing the covered-in construction work he’d noted on his arrival, sure the boxed and enclosed walkways would hide the initial avoidance manoeuvre. He re-emerged through the side door to catch the shuttle bus back down the hill. He went as far as 13th Street, fascinated by the continuing reflection as he passed the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvannia Avenue; if only they knew, too, he thought. He used the side entrance of the flagship Marriott Hotel, gained the reception area by the escalator and then dodged into the bookshop directly at its top. There he pretended to leaf through the latest publications displayed at the entrance, in reality intent upon any hurried ascent up the escalator by a pursuer momentarily nervous at losing sight of his quarry. No one followed showing that sort of anxiety. Yuri still memorized the faces of the initial five – three men and two women – and was alert for their attention when he crossed the massive foyer to emerge at the main entrance, nodding agreement to the doorman’s invitation to another taxi. None of the isolated five followed him.
