striking solid ground. His left wrist twisted under him and he felt a sear of agony and what little breath he still held was knocked out of him.
It was the rucksack, still acting like a float, which prevented his drowning in those first few minutes. He groaned breath back into his body and, unable to use his left arm, paddled instead with his right, combining the rucksack’s support and the river’s current to get himself to the pebbled bank.
Yuri lay for a long time unmoving, recovering, at last with his right hand groping along his left arm, trying to assess the damage. The wrist was already swelling but he could just move his fingers: sprained, not broken, he decided. He tore the sleeve of the shirt away at the shoulder, soaked it further in the water, and then bound it as a cold compress around the wrist with his good hand and his teeth before pulling himself further away from the river to drier ground.
Not like Bryansk at all, he thought. Worse. But there was a comparison. For the Bryansk exercise the spetsnaz had been alerted to what he was attempting. Just as the helicopters and the armed men and dogs – unimaginable protection but for one obvious reason – had been forewarned, back there.
He knew, at last, what Kazin intended by the instruction to locate the defector. I think I could kill someone who tried to kill me, he thought. So it hadn’t ended with the death of his father: destroy or be destroyed, he accepted.
‘What was it?’ demanded Levin. They were in the main room of the house, Galina nervously close by his side, Petr by the window watching the car lights of the returning searchers.
‘False alarm,’ assured Proctor. ‘The observer in the helicopter thought he saw someone but it couldn’t have been. We’ve covered every inch.’
‘What then?’ asked Galina, unconvinced.
‘An animal,’ insisted the FBI man. ‘We’ve had them trigger the sensors before. The observer is a new guy: too jumpy.’
‘You can’t be sure,’ argued the woman.
‘Isn’t there something more important to think about?’ reminded Proctor, who had brought Yuri’s false message. ‘Moscow are actually thinking of letting Natalia out!’
Petr turned away from the window, back into the room. His decision would be the same, if his sister were allowed to come. It wasn’t a melodramtic exaggeration that he hated his father. That genuinely was his feeling for what the man had done. Betrayal for betrayal, he decided. God, how he hated the man.
The rucksack had admitted some water, at which Yuri was not surprised, but the clothes inside were damp, not soaked. Yuri changed into them and let them dry on him as he followed the river bank at first light, locating the lake and from it picking up the avenue that bordered its western side. It was still early, not yet six, when he got to Thomaston, which was deserted, still sleeping. He recovered the car and got to New York by ten. He telephoned Caroline’s apartment, not to speak to her but to ensure she was not there and likely to see him in the condition he was. Having ensured she had already left for Madison Avenue, Yuri illegally parked the car against a fire hydrant very close to 53rd Street, knowing the vehicle would be towed back to Hertz and the penalty automatically charged to his William Bell credit card. In the apartment he stripped himself naked, searching for the damage in the full- length bathroom mirror. His face was scratched but not as much as he had feared and the swelling in his wrist was diminishing. Far better than he had expected.
‘What happened?’ asked Granov the moment he encountered the rezident at the United Nations.
‘An accident,’ said Yuri.
‘You’ve got to go to Moscow,’ announced the man.
‘Orders from there!’
‘Courier from here: the function you are supposed to be fulfilling,’ said Granov, who resented not being officially informed of the mission to which Yuri had been assigned by the Kazin message. ‘I’ve already advised them.’
So Kazin had not instigated the recall. There would have to be an acceptable excuse to be away from the UN. Time enough then to go to the safe-deposit box at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Destroy or be destroyed, he thought. Which would he be?
35
‘So there has to be another one, buried deep?’
It was Myers who voiced the inevitable conclusion, on the day the Crisis Committee agreed from the review of the final computer analysis that neither Latin America nor the Caribbean had featured in any assignment with which John Willick had ever been associated from the time of his recruitment into the Agency.
‘Inevitably,’ said Crookshank.
‘We can’t reassign every bloody agent in the two regions!’ protested Norris. ‘It would come to hundreds.’ Another twenty people disclosed to the KGB by Willick had been recalled from Finland and England after being identified as CIA operatives in left-wing publications. At least there had been no further attacks, as there had been in Bonn.
‘We’ll have to do exactly that, over a period. We can’t do anything else,’ said Myers.
‘And every analyst working out of here on raw material coming from anywhere in the area will have to be moved, as well,’ insisted Crookshank.
‘You know what you’re saying, don’t you?’ asked Norris. ‘You’re saying that the Agency has got to undergo the biggest agent turnover it’s had in its entire history. And it’s not just a question of moving people around. Some of these guys have been specifically trained for nothing else: cultivated for a lifetime’s career. Most speak Spanish better than English.’
‘Then a lot more are going to have to be specifically trained,’ said Crookshank, unimpressed.
‘I know Ramon Hernandez appears to check out but I think he should be isolated, too, until we’re one hundred per cent sure,’ said Myers.
The other two men nodded in agreement, effectively closing off from the CIA its best and most loyal source in Nicaragua.
‘And we mustn’t lose Kapalet, just because he’s being withdrawn to Moscow,’ said Crookshank.
‘I don’t intend to,’ said Myers. ‘I’m recommending to the Director that because of their special relationship Wilson Drew should be shifted there from Paris to continue as control.’
‘It’s not going to be easy for Kapalet, is it?’ said Norris, recalling the warning that had come from France after Drew’s last meeting with the Russian.
‘Nothing’s easy about this whole fucking mess,’ said Myers. ‘We can’t judge until we know the department or division to which he’s being posted but he could be even more important there at headquarters than he was in France.’
‘What about Levin?’ asked Crookshank.
‘Vital,’ replied Myers at once. ‘There isn’t anyone more important. I still think we might shortcut the search for the Latin American source through him.’
‘How?’ asked Norris.
‘He’s Russian so let’s use his knowledge of the way they operate and react,’ proposed the security chief. ‘Let’s get as much and as many electronic intercepts of Soviet traffic as we can, from the National Security Agency. Use our own stuff, too. And put him to work on them. Working from source backwards, we might be able to find the spy without all the turmoil we’ve been talking about.’
‘It’s an idea,’ agreed Norris doubtfully. ‘But it would mean disclosing all our sources. And those of the NSA as well.’
‘That’s a minimal consideration,’ argued Myers. ‘Levin’s on our side now. He’s proved that, unquestionably.’
‘If it’s a shortcut to discovering who our second spy is, then I’ll go for it,’ endorsed the lawyer.
‘It would require taking him on,’ pointed out Norris.
‘We’ve made consultants out of defectors before,’ reminded Myers. ‘Yuri Nosenko was appointed when he came across and told us the KGB had no part in Kennedy’s assassination.’
