Her struggle for the right reply was pitifully obvious and Yuri felt a further wash of pity. Natalia said: ‘It was his job to be there.’
‘Were you able to travel at all?’
‘Once,’ she said. To Disney World, in Florida.’
‘Did your father like it?’
‘He said it was for us,’ she avoided.
‘Sometimes your father went away without you, didn’t he?’
‘For his job at the United Nations,’ she insisted defensively.
‘Did he ever talk about it?’
‘That would not have been correct.’
‘Did he ever talk about a particular part of America: somewhere he preferred more than anywhere else?’
‘No,’ she said again.
Another cul-de-sac, accepted Yuri. It was hardly likely anyway that already the FBI would have settled Levin under a new identity in a location of his choice. At this stage there would be interrogations far harder than this, bleeding the man of everything he knew.
‘When she goes will I be able to go too?’ demanded the old lady. ‘I’m Galina’s mother. I’ve got no one else.’
Another confident expectation, thought Yuri. Improvising, he said: ‘There’ll have to be the proper application.’ It was the first time he’d known she was a grandmother. Which made incomplete the dossier Kazin had provided. What other more important things had been omitted, to entrap him?
‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ blurted Natalia, abruptly and with forced braveness.
Yuri momentarily hesitated, seeking an answer. Then he said: ‘You can’t understand why your father defected and neither can we: it could be that he was forced, in some way.’ The reply was not as good as he would have liked it to have been but Yuri thought it was adequate. He didn’t anticipate the development from it.
‘The letters don’t indicate he is being forced to do anything he doesn’t want to,’ said the girl.
Which was true, Yuri accepted, another shapeless, unformed image from the correspondence hardening into a positive shape. Yevgennie Pavlovich Levin was a senior KGB officer with twenty-five years’ service to his country. He had defected to a country regarded as the Soviet Union’s chief enemy, subjecting himself, his wife and a son to a lifetime of false indentities in hideaway homes. And by so doing abandoned a daughter he unquestionably loved. Yet apart from Natalia, the letters showed no uncertainty or regret. Surely there would have been? If not uncertainty or regret, then at least an effort at justification or attempted explanation: I have taken the decision which makes me a traitor because… But there was nothing. Yuri made the decision to study them again, for that specific detail, but he was sure he was correct. It was, of course, an exaggeration but rather than the outpourings of a man who had taken the most momentous decision of his life, the tone of the letters could equally come from the back of a ‘wish you were here’ holiday postcard.
Before Yuri could speak further the grandmother said: ‘I have read in Pravda and Izvestia of defectors being tried in absentia’
‘I am not involved in such things,’ said Yuri.
‘What will happen if he is tried?’ asked Natalia.
‘That is a matter for the courts.’
‘I meant to me?’
‘That is not my decision either,’ said Yuri, avoiding again.
At the possibility of some action against her father, Natalia’s defiance leaked away as abruptly as it had come. Blinking against a fresh outburst of tears, she said desperately: ‘I want to be with my mother and father.’
Yuri recognized he had lost control of the encounter by feeling sympathy when he should have shown sternness. But this was not the sort of intelligence for which he’d been trained and was proud to perform: this was brutality and he had no stomach for it. Not against innocents like these anyway. What about other people in other environments? His father’s words intruded into his mind – I think I could kill someone who tried to kill me. And someone had. So would he be able to consider killing, by proxy? Striving for the attitude he’d so far failed to achieve, Yuri said: ‘Your difficulties are of your father’s creation, no one else’s.’
‘He loves me!’
For the first time since he’d entered the neat apartment, Yuri detected an indecisiveness in the insistence. Illogically Yuri thought of Caroline, in a New York which seemed at that moment to be part of another planet. The Caroline whose sympathy had obviously been sincere when he said he was having to go away because of his father’s death (the least danger is in the least lies) and told him to get back as soon as he could and that she’d ache for him until he did. He searched for a comparison between the two, knowing there was not one. Not physically, at least. Natalia was reasonably pretty, despite the glasses, but the dark hair was untrained and a figure that one day might be desirable still bubbled with puppy fat. Wasn’t there a possible connection, though? Levin had abandoned Natalia. Shouldn’t he abandon Caroline? Too tenuous. No way comparable, either. He said: ‘Don’t tell your father in letters of this visit.’
Natalia seemed about to respond but then closed her mouth tightly. If she did write about it Yuri knew he could intercept and prevent the letter.
‘What else must I do?’ she asked obediently.
‘Tell him it’s cold here.’
The girl looked blankly at him. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘There’s no reason why you should,’ rejected Yuri. ‘And write frequently. I want there to be a lot of letters from you.’
As he splashed down the odorous steps Yuri tried to sift in his mind what he had achieved by the encounter. A lot, he decided. But still not sufficient to warn him where Kazin was setting his trap.
The questions routed to him from Paris, requiring the confirmation that Washington sought, was the signal to Victor Kazin that Levin was being debriefed by the CIA. Kazin felt dizzy at the immediate realization, passingly worried that he often felt dizzy lately and that thoughts seemed to wriggle away before he could grasp them. But then his head cleared, becoming clearer than it had been for longer than he could remember.
It had worked!
Now, at last, it was time fully to brief Comrade Chairman Chebrikov on his brilliant concept. There was too little remaining of Vladislav Belov’s proposal for any shared credit. And as the unassailable head of the First Chief Directorate the credit was deservedly his anyway, as a matter of right.
Kazin prepared graphs and progress sheets for a formal presentation and felt the dizziness again at Chebrikov’s ecstatic endorsement of everything that had been done. Not even Kazin anticipated that the KGB chairman would recommend he be awarded the Order of Lenin and when Chebrikov announced his intention Kazin relented and disclosed Belov’s minimal involvement.
The Director of the American division learned from a memorandum of praise from the KGB chairman, congratulating him upon his ‘help and assistance’, how the idea that had taken years to formulate had been stolen from him. Briefly Belov came close to physical collapse, slumped over his desk like a man suffering a stroke or a seizure: for a while his vision was actually hazy and blurred.
He’d been robbed, Belov acknowledged: robbed after five long, wearisome, jigsaw carving years of the recognition he had been sure would rocket him through the promotion ranks to at least the leadership of a Chief Directorate.
The next immediate awareness was worse. He knew that, trapped beneath Victor Kazin, there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it.
28
Yevgennie Levin was disturbed by the tightened security, some of the men in the guardhouse visibly having guns and clattering helicopters frequently overhead, but was glad it had not interfered with the altered system for
