actually within view of the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square – with the exception only of the photographs which he decided were too gory to risk their being accidentally seen in such a public place. The photographs had given Yuri most difficulty the previous night, when he had got back to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, each brutally taken to show up and expose rather than to minimize. He’d had to swallow against the sensation that rose in the back of his throat, lips moving in a private promise to himself. There were twelve photographs, and Yuri removed just one of the originals, the least horrific, but showing most clearly the delineated tyre tread outlined in his father’s blood. The rest he returned to the master file, which he delivered to the central document receiving desk at the First Chief Directorate headquarters, for internal distribution to the office of Colonel Lev Konstantinovich Panchenko.
From the forensic evidence he now knew in such detail, Yuri recognized the investigator’s insistence upon checking garages to be the next obvious step, but he held back from taking it, ingrained KGB professionalism overriding personal impatience. He illegally possessed a police file and he possessed a dossier illegally assembled by his father. Neither complete, perhaps, but both in terms of his training invaluable intelligence. And he’d been lectured about invaluable intelligence at the KGB training academy on Metrostroevskaya. Protect had been the dictum: protect absolutely, secure absolutely. Neither of which he could do here in Moscow, in an uncertain apartment, subject at Kazin’s or Panchenko’s whim to search. Absolutely to protect and to secure meant, almost absurdly, that he had to get both sets of records out of the Soviet Union. Which he could do, he realized, without the slightest risk of interception or detection; his return to Russia this time had been official, on compassionate grounds. So he could openly travel on United Nations documentation as the international diplomat he was supposed to be and which relieved him of any Customs or immigration check upon his re-entry into the United States.
The time difference between Russia and America meant it was still early afternoon when Yuri landed at Kennedy Airport. He took the taxi to central Manhattan and although he was sure from the journey into the city that he was unfollowed he still spent an hour on foot clearing his trail before entering the Chase Manhattan Bank on Second Avenue. He opened the safe-deposit box in the name of William Bell, using the passport for identification, and put into it everything with which he had returned from Moscow, including the unread letters between his mother and father.
He was reluctant to go immediately to the UN building, needing to unwind from the constant tension of the Moscow journey. He went to the UN Plaza Hotel directly opposite and the glittering bar to which he had taken Inya that failed night, able at that time of the afternoon to get a place at a concealing corner table.
So he had his invaluable intelligence and now it was protected and secure. But so what? There was still nothing, in any of it, positively linking Panchenko to a crime or departmental infraction: and even less positively a provable link to Kazin. Like trying to fit together an intricate jigsaw puzzle without knowing the picture it would represent, thought Yuri. No, he contradicted at once. He was sure he knew the picture: it was the necessary completing pieces that were missing. What would he do – could he do – if he found the pieces and made up his picture? Always questions, never answers, he thought. Now the most pressing unanswered question of all: was the Kazin-ordered assignment, to try to locate the recent defector, part of the same picture? Or something altogether different? About that, at the moment, he was only certain of one thing. That unquestionably it represented a personal danger: the sort of personal danger that had destroyed his father.
Colonel Panchenko read through the experts’ reports and then studied the photographs with a professional detachment, nodding admiringly in the solitude of his office at the well-assembled and obvious evidence of a crime. His initial feeling was to destroy everything, as he’d had removed by the garage off Begovaya any trace on the Lada’s nearside wing of the collision with the wall. And then he hesitated, because there was a difference. The car had been one of the dozens used for unsuspected KGB surveillance, with an untraceable civilian registration, MOS 56-37-42. The definite association with him came from the listing in the records of the Directorate motor pool. But there was nothing personally incriminating in what the militia had produced. No danger, therefore, in retaining it in the safe on the far side of the office to which only he had the combination: the safe which already contained the tapes of his car and gazebo conversations with Victor Kazin.
30
The Crisis Committee reacted to the persistent and impatient demands of the CIA director that speed of detection was the foremost consideration and tried to shortcut when they got the apparently vital leads from Paris. And disastrously delayed the identification of John Willick.
Their mistake – which they were intended by Moscow to make – was to try to combine the name supposedly remembered by Yevgennie Levin with the provable date and transfer intentionally disclosed by Sergei Kapalet.
Cots were moved into the debriefing building for Myers, Norris and Crookshank to work around the clock to scour the CIA records to find an internal relocation one month either side of 30 June of any Langley-based official or officer who had the remotest links with Ramon Hernandez in Nicaragua. The CIA station in neighbouring Honduras, through which Hernandez was run, was warned against the man and ordered to carry out an investigation into his loyalty. Additionally the station was instructed to relay back each and every name within the Agency of people through whom Hernandez operated – or thought he operated – in the hope one might be different from those listed on those same records as being members of the man’s headquarters control group.
There weren’t any. Neither was there the slightest evidence to doubt Hernandez’ commitment. And nor did the personnel records show up an internal transfer of anyone connected in the remotest way with the man’s activities or reports in Latin America. Refusing to be deflected, Myers extended the transfer period to two and then three months either side of the June date. Still there was no one who could be linked with the Nicaraguan.
‘It doesn’t make any fucking sense!’ erupted Myers.
‘It has to, somehow,’ said the more controlled Norris.
‘How!’
‘If I knew that, I would not be sitting here looking at a blank wall, would I?’
‘We’ve approached it the wrong way,’ realized Crookshank.
‘What wrong way?’ demanded Myers, whose decision it had been.
Instead of replying, Crookshank said: ‘What’s the most positive thing we have?’
Neither of the other two men replied at once. Then Norris said: ‘The date?’
‘The date,’ agreed Crookshank. ‘And the fact that there was a relocation.’ With a lawyer’s pedantry, he searched through his papers, then smiled up. ‘ “He said the move almost coincided with his transfer,” ‘ he quoted. ‘Drew’s verbatim record of Kapalet’s account. Two months and three months isn’t almost coinciding. We’ve confused ourselves, trying to involve Hernandez.’
‘What have we got, without him?’ demanded Myers, irked at the criticism.
‘What we’ve just agreed to be the most positive lead there is,’ lectured Crookshank. He went back to his papers again, coming up with a single sheet. ‘The first list,’ he said. ‘Of internal transfers one month either side of June thirtieth. Fifteen people: five seconded to overseas stations, six retired, four departmental moves.’
‘I think you’re right,’ agreed Myers reluctantly.
‘We could sweat them all on a polygraph in a week,’ accepted Norris.
‘But no advance warning,’ agreed Crookshank.
John Willick didn’t need it. He’d handled three of the Crisis Committee’s requests for names and biographical details of people affected by internal movements. And knew from casual gossip over coffee and two hurriedly sought-out cafeteria lunches on successive days with others in the personnel department that there had been at least five further inquiries, all for precisely the same sort of material. That by itself, after Oleg’s warning, would have been sufficient to alarm the American. But it was not by itself. The requests clearly specified movements either side of the date when the controller he knew only as Aleksandr had been moved from Washington. And came from an unspecified committee sufficiently important to qualify for a scarlet-classified, respond-this-day security designation. So it was not alarm Willick felt; it was terror.
He used the number he had been given by Shelenkov and had reconfirmed as an emergency contact by the man’s successor, careless of the panic he heard in his own voice when he demanded an immediate meeting, refusing in even more panic to wait until the following day for the opening of any of their customary public monuments or places and agreeing at once and without thought to a bar he didn’t know in Georgetown.
It was not where he expected it to be, on M Street, but against the river and directly beneath the skeleton of
