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Zhilin smiled thinly.

“I doubt it. These are troubled times, Inspector, and the security of this building has to be very tight.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Have you ever seen this man before?”

Zhilin stared at the photograph for less than a second.

“Good God, Zaitsev.”

“Who?”

“Zaitsev, the old cleaner. A burglar you say? Impossible.”

“Would you tell me about Zaitsev, please.”

“Nothing to tell. Engaged about a year ago. Ex-army. Seemed reliable. Came every night, Monday to Friday, to clean the offices.”

“But not recently?”

“No, failed to show up. After two nights I had to engage a replacement. A war widow. Very thorough.”

“When would this be, when he failed to show up?”

Zhilin went to a cabinet and extracted a file. He gave the impression there was a file for everything.

“Here we are. Work sheets. He came as usual on the night of July 15. Cleaned as usual. Left as usual sometime before dawn. Failed to appear the following night, never been seen since. That witness of yours must have seen him leaving in the small hours. Quite usual. He wasn’t burgling, he was cleaning.”

“That explains it all,” said Novikov.

“Not quite,” snapped Zhilin. “You said he was a burglar.”

“Two nights after he left here he was apparently involved in a break-in at a flat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The householder identified him. A week later he was found dead.”

“Disgraceful,” said Zhilin. “This crime wave is an outrage. You people should do something about it.”

Novikov shrugged.

“We try. But they are many and we are few. We want to do the job, but we get no support from on high.”

“That will change, Inspector, that will change.” Zhilin had a messianic light in his eye. “Six months from now Mr. Komarov will be our president. Then you will see some changes made. You have read his speeches? Crackdown on crime, that is what he is always calling for. A great man. I hope we can count on your vote.”

“That goes without saying. Er, do you have a private address for this cleaner?”

Zhilin scribbled it on a scrap of paper and handed it over.

The daughter was tearful but resigned. She looked at the photo and nodded. Then she glanced at the cot along the sitting room wall. At least there would be a bit more space.

Novikov left. He would tell Volsky, but there was clearly no money here for a funeral. Better let the City of Moscow take care of it. As in the flat, the problem at the mortuary was one of space.

At least Volsky could close a file. As for Homicide, the Zaitsev murder would just pile up with the other ninety-seven percent.

Langley, September 1988

THE list of the Soviet delegation members was passed to the CIA by the State Department as a matter of routine. When the Silicon Valley conference on theoretical physics was first mooted and the notion of inviting the USSR to send a delegation was made, little chance had been given of an acceptance.

But by late 1987 the Gorbachev reforms were beginning to take effect and a distinct relaxation of official attitudes in Moscow was discernible. To the surprise of the seminar organizers, Moscow agreed to send a small participant group.

The names and details had to go to Immigration, who asked State to check them out. So secretive had the USSR been about matters scientific up to that point that the names and contributions to science of only a handful of Soviet stars were known in the West.

When the list hit Langley it went to SE Division and was given to Monk. He happened to be available. His two agents in Moscow were contributing nicely through dead drops and Colonel Turkin was in East Berlin supplying a complete breakdown of KGB activities in West Germany.

Monk ran the list of the names of the eight Soviet scientists due to attend the November conference in California through the usual checks and came up with blanks. No one on the list had even been heard of by the CIA, let alone approached or recruited.

Because he was a terrier when presented with a problem, he tried one last tack. Although relations between the CIA and its domestic counterpart, the counterintelligence wing of the FBI, had always been strained and sometimes poisonous, and since the Howard affair more the latter, he decided to approach the Bureau anyway.

It was a long shot, but he knew the Bureau had a far more comprehensive list of Soviet nationals who had sought and been granted asylum in the United States than had the CIA. The long shot was not whether the FBI would help, but whether the Soviets would ever let a scientist with a relative in America leave the USSR at all. The chances were they never would, because family in the States was considered by the KGB to be a major security flaw.

Of the eight names on the list, two appeared again on the FBI record of asylum seekers. A check revealed one name was a coincidence; the family in Baltimore had nothing whatsoever to do with the arriving Russian scientist.

The other name was odd. A Russian-Jewish refugee who had sought asylum via the U.S. Embassy in Vienna when she was in a transit camp in Austria, and been granted it, had given birth while in America, yet registered her son under a different name.

Ms. Yevgenia Rozina, now of New York, had registered her son under the name of Ivan Ivanovitch Blinov. Monk knew that meant Ivan Son-of-Ivan. Clearly the boy had been born out of wedlock. The result of a union inside the States, in the transit camp in Austria, or earlier? One of the names on the list of Soviet scientists was Professor Doctor Ivan Y. Blinov. It was an unusual name, one Monk had never seen before. He took Amtrak to New York and sought out Ms. Rozina.

¯

INSPECTOR Novikov thought he would break the good news to his colleague Volsky over a beer after work. Again, the canteen was the place; the beer was cheap.

“Guess where I spent the morning.”

“In bed with a nymphomaniac ballerina.”

“Chance would be a fine thing. At the headquarters of the UPF.”

“What, that dunghill they keep in Fish Alley?”

“No, that’s just for show. Komarov has his real HQ in a very tasty villa up near the Boulevard Ring. By the way, the beer’s on you. I solved your case for you.”

“Which one?”

“The old boy found in the woods out by the Minsk Highway. He was the office cleaner at the UPF headquarters, until he turned to burglary to make a bit on the side. Here are the details.”

Volsky ran his eye over the single sheet Novikov had given him.

“They’re not having much luck at the UPF these days,” he said.

“How so?”

“Komarov’s personal secretary went and drowned himself last month too.”

“Suicide?”

“No. Nothing like that. Went swimming, never came out. Well, not ‘never.’ They fished him out last week downstream. We have a smart pathologist. Found a wedding ring with his name on the inside.”

“When does this smart pathologist say he went in the water?”

“About the middle of July.”

Novikov reflected. He really should have bought the beer. After all, he was due to collect a thousand sterling pounds from the Englishman. Now he could give him a bit extra. On the house.

New York, September 1988

SHE was about forty, dark, vital, and pretty. He was waiting in the lobby of her apartment house when she arrived home after picking up her son from school. The boy was a lively lad of seven.

The laughter went out of her face when he introduced himself as an officer of the Immigration Service. For any non-American-born immigrant, even with papers in perfect order, the word
Immigration
is enough to inspire worry if not fear. She had no choice but to let him in.

When her son was absorbed in his homework at the kitchen table of her small but extremely clean apartment, they talked in the living room. She was defensive and on guard.

But Monk was unlike the abrupt, unsmiling officials she had met before during her struggle to be accepted into the United States eight years earlier. He had charm and a winning smile and she began to relax.

“You know how it is with us civil servants, Ms. Rozina. Files, files, always files. If they are complete, the boss is happy. Then what happens? Nothing. They gather dust in some archive. But when they’re not, the boss gets fretful. So some small cog like me is sent out to complete the details.”

“What do you want to know?” she asked. “My papers are in order. I work as an economist and translator. I pay my way, I pay my taxes. I cost nothing to the U.S.A.”

“We know that, ma’am. There’s no question of any irregularity in your papers. You are a citizen, naturalized. Everything in order. It’s just that you registered little Ivan there under a different name. Why did you do that?”

“I gave him his father’s name.”

“Of course. Look, this is 1988. The son of a couple who did not marry is no problem to us. But files are files. Could you just give me his father’s name? Please.”

“Ivan Yevdokimovich Blinov,” she said.

Bingo. The name on the list. There could hardly be two such names in all Russia.

“You loved him very much, didn’t you?”

A faraway look came into her eyes, as of someone gazing at a memory of long ago.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Please tell me about Ivan.”

Among his several talents Jason Monk had a peculiar ability to persuade people to talk to him. Over two hours, until the boy came out with his arithmetic homework in perfect order, she told him about her son’s father.

Born in Leningrad in 1938, he was the son of a university teacher of physics, his mother a schoolteacher in mathematics. By a miracle the father survived waves of Stalinist purges before the war, but died during the German blockade in 1942. The mother, with five-year-old Vanya in her arms, was rescued, escaping the starving city in a convoy of trucks across the ice of Lake Ladoga in the winter of 1942. They were resettled in a small town in the Urals, where the boy grew up, his mother devoted to the idea that he would one day be as brilliant as his father.

At eighteen he went to Moscow to seek entry into the most prestigious technical establishment of higher education in the USSR, the Physics/Technological Institute. To his surprise he was accepted. Despite his humble circumstances, the father’s fame, the mother’s dedication, maybe the genes, and certainly his personal efforts had tipped the balance. Behind its modest name, the institute was the forge of the most sophisticated designers of nuclear weapons.

Six years later, still a young man, Blinov was offered a job in a scientific city so secret that it was years before the West even heard of it. Arzamas-16 became for the young prodigy at once a privileged home and a prison.

By Soviet standards, conditions were luxurious. A small apartment but all his own, better shops than anywhere in the country, a higher salary, and limitless research facilities—all were his. What he did not have was the right to leave.

Once a year there was the chance for a vacation in an approved resort, at a fraction of the usual price. Then it was back inside the barbed wire, intercepted mail, tapped phones, and monitored friendships.

Before he was thirty he met and married Valya, a young librarian and teacher of English in Arzamas-16. She taught him the language, so that he could read the harvest of technical publications pouring in from the West in the original. They were happy at first, but slowly the marriage became blighted by one flaw; they desperately wanted a child but could not have one.

In the autumn of 1977 Ivan Blinov was staying in the spa resort of Kislovodsk in the northern Caucasus when he met Zhenya Rozina. As was often the case in the gilded cage, his wife had had to take her vacation at a different time.

Zhenya was twenty-nine, ten years his junior, a divorcée from Minsk, also childless; lively, irreverent, a constant listener to the “voices”—the Voice of America and the BBC—and a reader of daring magazines like
Poland,
printed in Warsaw and much more liberal and versatile than the dreary, dogmatic Soviet publications. The shuttered scientist was entranced by her.

They agreed to correspond, but as Blinov knew his mail would be intercepted (he was a holder of secrets) he asked her to write to a friend in Arzamas-16 whose mail would not be looked at.

In 1978 they met again, by agreement, this time at the resort of Sochi on the Black Sea. Blinov’s marriage was- at an end in all but name. Their friendship became a torrid affair. They met again for the third and last time in 1979 at Yalta and realized they were still in love, but that it was a hopeless love.

He felt he could not divorce his wife. If there had been another man after her, that would have been different. But there was not; she was not beautiful. But she had been loyal to him for fifteen years and if love had died, that was the way of things. They were still friends and he would not shame her by divorce, not in the tiny community in which they lived.

Zhenya did not disagree, but for another reason. She told him something she had not told him before. If they married it would mar his career. She was Jewish; that was enough. She had already applied to OVIR, the Department of Visas and Permissions, to emigrate to Israel. Under Brezhnev there was a new dispensation. They kissed and made love and parted, and never saw each other again.

“The rest you know,” she said.

“The transit camp in Austria, the approach to our embassy?”

‘‘Yes.”

“And Ivan Ivanovitch?”

“Six weeks after the vacation in Yalta I realized I was carrying his child. Ivan was born here, he is a U.S. citizen. At least he will grow up free.”

“Did you ever correspond with him, let him know?”

“To what point?” she asked bitterly. “He is married. He lives in a gilded prison, as much a prisoner as any
zek
in the camps. What could I do? Remind him of it all? Make him yearn for what he cannot reach?”

“Have you told your son about his father?”

“Yes. That he is a great man. A kind man. But far away.”

“Things are changing,” said Monk gently. “He could probably get as far as Moscow nowadays. I have a friend. He travels often to Moscow. A businessman. You could write to the man in Arzamas-16 whose mail is not intercepted. Ask the father to come to Moscow.”