‘payment for essential information’ perhaps. He said: ‘So what else about him?’
‘Nothing about the man: just that he had a positive military bearing.’
Yuri felt a flare of irritation, imagining he had been tricked into parting with money upon the promise of something more, and then recognized the qualification in the reply. He said: ‘What else, if it wasn’t about the man?’
‘You sure this isn’t official?’
‘You often get paid in American dollars by the police?’
The man hesitated and then went into the cubby-hole office in one corner of the paint shop, re-emerging at once with a ledger-sized book. ‘Wouldn’t have mattered if it had been official,’ he said, offering it already opened at a page.
Double book-keeping, as a protection against any police raid! Yuri realized. He took the book eagerly but before he could study the work record, the man said: ‘Everything is properly detailed. Everything. Even the registration.’
‘Registration!’
‘On the first line.’
Yuri didn’t ask, unwilling to risk a refusal. He walked to the cubby-hole and copied MOS 56-37-42 on to a scrap of blank paper on the desk top, put it in his pocket and left the account book there. He could actually feel the throb of his own heartbeat and wondered if he were flushed with the excitement. He’d got the most positive evidence yet. And already knew how he could use it further! He was close, he decided: close enough to reach out and touch!
‘Thank you,’ he said, with more sincerity than either of them knew.
‘You ever need a car resprayed, you know where to come.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
‘Where now?’ asked Leonid, back in the car.
‘The ring road building,’ said Yuri.
When they got there Yuri handed over the additional hundred dollars and settled the meter fare, which registered a hundred and seventy-five roubles. Yuri guessed it had been tampered with, to run quicker.
‘By the time any search squad gets to where I live, there won’t be anything there,’ said Leonid.
‘You’re safe,’ said Yuri.
‘You really KGB?’
‘What do you think?’ said Yuri.
‘What I’ve always thought,’ said the man, turning the remark. ‘You can’t trust the KGB: they’re assholes. Money’s good, though.’
Yuri did not report at once to the reception area. Instead he took the elevator to the basement garage, where he’d once regarded the people who’d cleaned and looked after his father’s car – the car in which he’d lost his virginity – as allies if not friends. His luck held. The duty clerk was a man he recognized: Andrei, he thought. The smile of recognition was returned but faded at once, embarrassment at a misplaced expression. ‘Sorry about your father,’ Andrei said.
‘It’s being investigated,’ said Yuri.
‘Let’s hope they get the fucker.’
‘Let’s hope,’ said Yuri. He produced his official accreditation and said: ‘I want to know from records if a Lada numbered MOS 56-37-42 is one of our cars. And if it was booked out on fourteenth October.’
With a positive date to work from it took the clerk only minutes. ‘Colonel Panchenko,’ he said. ‘He kept it a week.’
‘Is it here now?’
The clerk consulted a chart on the wall and said: ‘Bay 38.’
The paintsprayer had not been exaggerating, acknowledged Yuri: the colour was an excellent match. Like another positive match, the provable tread of the tyres compared against those outlined in his father’s blood, at the scene of the killing: outlined in the photograph he possessed.
He had it all, thought Yuri, taking the elevator back up to the reception area. Now what was he going to do with it? He imagined the question answered when he identified himself and was told he had to report to Vladislav Belov.
The despair lumped in John Willick’s throat and he swallowed against breaking down, although there was no one in the Karacharovo apartment to witness his crying. No one anywhere. The drivers taking him to and from the debriefings appeared unable to speak English and his interrogators rotated and every one treated him with an attitude bordering on contempt anyway, so he was resigned against any possibility of acquaintanceship, let alone friendship. The system had been established for him to be paid but he had been granted no concessionary facilities. He had not yet been able to buy anything without lining up for hours and having to use sign language when he’d bought the purchase ticket and then moved into the second queue to reclaim what he wanted, against the price already paid. He found the language sessions impossible. The instructor was impatient with him and Willick knew it would take him months – years – to get even a limited mastery of Russian. He was so miserable, he thought; more miserable than he’d ever been in his entire life. He didn’t know what to do; there was nothing he could do. He choked, unable to hold on any longer, sitting at the stained table, the sobs shuddering through him.
The revelation of the CIA headquarters personnel was as devastating as Vladislav Belov had predicted during the last interview with Kazin. The identities were disclosed over a period, for maximum and sustained impact, were published throughout Europe, and from the outlets there picked up and carried on television and in newspapers across America.
Harry Myers was named as the Agency’s security chief and Edward Norris as the deputy controller of the Soviet Division in the second batch released.
‘Holy Mother of Christ!’ exploded Myers.
‘I know,’ anticipated Crookshank, uncertain if the disclosures were over and fearing his name could still come. ‘If you could, you’d kill him. I would, too.’
37
It took Yuri the time to pass through the entry formalities on the ground floor and reach Belov’s quarters on the sixth storey to evolve his approach. Where he was almost immediately off-balanced. The reception from the other man was different again from what it had been before, neither the surprising affability of their earlier meetings nor the frozen reserve of the cemetery encounter. Yuri searched for the word and decided it was weariness: Vladislav Belov appeared bowed by some sort of fatigue. The remainder of the IBM mainframe computer blueprints had once more been carried in a film cassette and as before Yuri went patiently through the hand-over ritual, waiting.
‘I am seeing you personally to inform you of changes,’ announced Belov. He had decided to do exactly as he was told; recall the man, announce some unknown reassignment and avoid getting involved from then on. That was the way to avoid any difficulties for himself: just see his time out. Fifteen years, he thought, agonized: a lifetime! What else could he do?
‘Involving me?’
‘You are being withdrawn from New York.’
‘Upon the instructions of Comrade Directorate chairman Kazin?’ anticipated Yuri.
Belov blinked at the astuteness of the question. With stiff formality, he said: ‘It is not permissible to discuss or question reassignments.’
‘I would like to show you something,’ said Yuri, going to the documentation that bulged his briefcase. He handed across the table the photograph he had taken of the defector and his son in Connecticut: the pictures were blurred and grainy but brought up under a magnifying glass it was just possible to make an identification, which Yuri knew because he had done it.
‘Who are they?’ demanded Belov, examining them first without enlargement.
‘The man is Yevgennie Pavlovich Levin. The boy is his son, Petr,’ said Yuri simply.
