Bearpit (16 page)

‘Yes,' said Yuri.

Belov waited but the younger man did not continue. ‘Because of which some of our people will inevitably be identified.' Dolya, of course. And two others – Onukhov and Lubiako – whom it had been decided Levin was to name to substantiate his defection. There would have to be some token punishment against Dolya, because the man would have been punished if the crossing were genuine, but Belov intended to be as lenient as possible. He picked up: ‘The new head of station is Anatoli Stepanovich Granov. He has been attached to the New York mission for two years. He has already been advised what you are to do.'

‘A special function?' queried Yuri. To which faction was this man attaching himself? His father's? Or Kazin's? Important to be ultra-cautious until he was sure of the answer. If his father were to be believed he was as much a target as the old man. Why, wondered Yuri, in recurring, intrusive irritation, wouldn't his father tell him what had happened between himself and Kazin? It appeared there would always be some connection between them.

‘You are to be the courier,' declared Belov. Surely the most positive indication to the joint Chief Deputy which way he was declaring himself! To be courier was to occupy a position of great trust and responsibility.

‘I would like that explained to me,' said Yuri curiously. In ancient Rome couriers of bad news were put to death.

‘The FBI are aware how we use the United Nations,' expanded Belov. ‘They'd be fools if they didn't. They spy on us as much as they can, electronically, and we are not prepared completely to trust the diplomatic pouch. Which is why we have a courier personally to ferry the most highly classified material. It was formerly the function of Granov, before his promotion to
rezident
.'

‘Surely it's not possible for me to move in and out of America at will!' queried Yuri at once. ‘I'd be detected after the first trip.'

‘Of course you would,' agreed Belov. ‘There is an apartment block on the corner of Second Avenue and 53rd Street. Flat 415 is rented permanently in the name of a publishing company which has provable headquarters in Amsterdam. You will be provided with a bona fide British passport – an American document could be too easily checked – in which you will be described as a travel writer. Your legend name is William Bell. We issue four publications a year from the Amsterdam house and contributions under the name of William Bell will regularly appear, particularly from North America and from the Latin American countries you will visit: in your passport, of course, there are valid visas wherever necessary.'

It was superb tradecraft, thought Yuri admiringly.

‘Naturally you must expect surveillance because you
are
Russian, attached to the United Nations,' continued Belov. ‘Always take the greatest care to clear your path before undertaking any journey: this system has taken a long time to establish and must not be endangered.'

After the last few days in Moscow Yuri was determined to take the greatest care about everything. Politely he said: ‘I will do nothing to endanger it.' Was that a promise he could keep, surrounded by so much uncertainty?

‘As a supposed travel writer you've every reason to fly in and out of New York direct to Europe,' went on Belov. ‘But use that routing sparingly. On a British passport you can cross into Canada without any record being made. And from there don't always travel West to East, to reach Europe. Asia is available, from Vancouver: it's protracted, I know, but it's secure.'

Yuri tried to remember how early trail-clearing and route variation had been instilled into him, at training school: certainly one of the first sessions. He said: ‘And Latin America is to be used the same way?'

‘The Caribbean, too,' said Belov. ‘There are direct flights across the Atlantic from nearly all of the islands. But minimize the use of Colombia and Bolivia and Peru and Mexico. They're target countries for drug smuggling into America. So more attention is paid to people on incoming flights than from other parts of the region. Always travel light, if you've no alternative: no large luggage to bring yourself to any Customs attention.'

Or hammer and sickle motif on his tie or ear-flapped fur hats, thought Yuri. This really was very basic.

‘At all times, during these return trips, you will be travelling on the William Bell passport,' said Belov. ‘There must be no occasion whatsoever, no matter what the emergency or crisis, when you make contact with any Soviet embassy. We have, for instance, made extensive use in the past of the Soviet legation in Mexico City: so much so that the Americans maintain permanent surveillance upon it. We ignore it now, happy for them to waste their time and manpower. But I don't want you detected, making such a mistake.'

That he might have done so was even more unlikely than over-using Colombia or Bolivia on return trips, thought Yuri. He said: ‘I would not consider using the same entry points into Europe, either. I would always employ transfer connections, between one country and another, before routing myself back here …' He saw Belov preparing to speak, but hurried on: ‘And of course I would not always enter direct, through Moscow. There is always Leningrad, either by air or the ferry, from Finland.'

Belov nodded, smiling slightly, conscious of the other man's need to prove himself. Why not? Confidence was one of the most important requirements for an operator forced constantly to maintain a false identity in false – or alien – surroundings. He said: ‘How do you regard this posting?'

‘With great anticipation,' said Yuri honestly. He was about to add that it was precisely what he had been trained for but realized it might indicate some criticism of the briefing, so he stopped.

‘There will be long periods when you are absolutely by yourself, without the support of any
rezidentura,'
warned Belov.

That had always been made obvious during his training. Yuri knew he would have no difficulty operating entirely alone. He said: ‘How will my absences from New York be explained?'

‘Without difficulty, if we succeed in the United Nations assignment we want.'

Which they did. Yuri's posting was into the public affairs division, from which representatives travelled freely and frequently around America, explaining to colleges and universities and contributing governmental bodies the value and necessity of the organization's existence. The travelling was not even restricted to America because the United Nations has separate establishments in Geneva and Vienna.

On the morning of his departure for New York, Yuri said to his father: ‘I think I should know what it is between you and Kazin.'

The older man hesitated, unsure, and then once more shook his head in refusal. ‘Later,' he said. ‘When this business is all over.'

‘Why not now?' said Yuri, exasperated.

‘This way it's better,' said Malik stubbornly.

John Willick was finding it difficult to hang on. He knew he had to because if he collapsed – collapsed more than he already had, that is – he would risk discovery and if he were discovered it was a trial and jail, with the key thrown into the Potomac or whatever river ran near whatever penitentiary he was sent to. All he needed was a run of luck: just six months with the market going in his favour, his stocks rising as fast as they had been falling, and the horses being on form, and he'd be out of trouble. That's all it was: bad luck. A lot of bad, cruddy luck, hitting a market slide when that bitch of a wife got her alimony settlement and the horses started running badly and he'd needed three months hospitalization after the ulcer had proven worse than they expected under the exploratory operation and some intestine had to be removed. Jesus, would anyone believe the cost of hospitalization in America! Or such bad luck!

He hadn't given a lot away to the Russians. Well, not at first anyway. Just the sort of assessments and judgements that he'd come to recognize after five years as a senior analyst on the CIA's Soviet desk were nearly always cobbled together from newspaper and magazine opinions: the sort of thing the Russians could have assembled themselves, if they'd taken the trouble. A bit more important when he'd become deeply involved, dependent upon the money, and the fucking stock market and the fucking horses had continued to lose instead of win. Spy-in-the-sky stuff, giving them the chance to realize the accuracy and the precise positioning of the satellites, but that really wasn't such a big deal either. They weren't stupid. They knew the satellites were there and they were technologically advanced enough to know the precision that was possible. He'd never disclosed anything to endanger anyone's life. Important, that. Just facts, never anything life or death.

He was certainly due a change of luck after Burrows getting the supervisor post! Burrows, whose guts he couldn't stand and who couldn't stand his guts in return and was proving it – and his power – by the transfer. It was the transfer that was worrying Willick most of all. He'd had a value on the Soviet desk: known his worth. How valuable would he be in personnel records? Fucking clerk's job, after all.

And then there'd been the switch to Paris of his control, whom he'd only ever known as Aleksandr. Another uncertainty there. He had a kind of trust in Aleksandr. Not friends, of course: more of an understanding. Willick didn't know what to expect from the new guy – didn't even know the new guy – and he felt nervous at the unknown.

Willick had it all worked out, when his luck changed. He'd be straight in six months if he could go on getting the sort of money that Aleksandr paid and the losers became winners, which the law of averages said they had to do soon. Quit then. Explain he wanted to call it a day – say he thought he was under suspicion or something like that – and end the whole episode. No problems. No problem at all, providing he got a bit of luck.

Willick obeyed Aleksandr's parting instructions and joined the perpetual queue feeding into the Washington monument – an untidy, disordered man, scuff-shoed, unpressed, yesterday's shirt fraying at the collar.

‘Is this your first visit?'

Willick twitched at the contact phrase, turning to the man beside him: plump, bespectacled, owl-like.

‘Yes,' he replied dutifully, with his own contact reply. ‘It is strange how you never sightsee in your own city.'

‘I didn't expect such a queue,' recited the man.

‘Neither did I,' said Willick, filling in his part.

‘I think I might come back another time.'

‘That would probably be a good idea,' completed Willick.

They walked away side by side in the direction of the Reflecting Pool. The Russian said: ‘You must know me as Oleg.'

‘My transfer has been confirmed.'

‘What division?'

‘Personnel,' disclosed Willick apprehensively. Essential as it was to know if his source of income were going to dry up, he said anxiously: ‘Will that still be of interest to you?'

‘Oh yes,' assured Oleg. ‘Of very great interest.'

Willick's relief was a physical sensation. He said: ‘There was a regular understanding, between Aleksandr and me.'

‘A thousand a month,' acknowledged the Russian. ‘I know.'

‘It will stay at a thousand a month?'

‘Why shouldn't it?'

It was changing! Willick thought euphorically: at last his luck was changing. He said: ‘What will you want?'

Oleg looked sideways, briefly, as if he were surprised by the question. ‘The sort of things that are contained in personnel records,' he said, simply. ‘Names, biographical details, postings, specialities. We'll want all that, John.'

Willick swallowed in uncomfortable awareness, the excited relief seeping away. It meant he would be giving away details of people.

14

Yuri Vasilivich Malik was not prepared: despite all the defectors' lectures and all the videos and the itemizing details of the facsimile houses and streets and cities at Kuchino, he was still not properly prepared for New York. There had been no briefing on the me-first aggressiveness against ‘have a nice day', which anyway had mutated since his instruction to ‘have a nice one'. He had not anticipated the perpetual day and night noises and that fire and police sirens
did
shrill all the time, like they did in the films he'd sat through, which were not called films but movies. He had not been told about the parting-at-the-seams decay of Harlem, which he drove past on FDR Drive on his way in from Kennedy airport. Or of the holed and cracked streets, like an earthquake aftermath. Or about the permanent, barely moving traffic jam of clogged vehicles, horns wearing out before their engines. The identified-from-photographs skyscrapers (‘the Chrysler Building is the one that goes to a point, the PanAm Building straddles Park Avenue, those two together are called the Trade Towers and more people work in them than live on the entire island of Manhattan, and the UN building where you will work is green-glassed') were taller and more awesome than he'd been warned to expect. And he was awed. And excited and impressed. He thought it was wonderful. Not in any imbalanced or ridiculous way, like the defector Levin appeared to have regarded it. Although the experience was only of brief hours, to grow to brief days, Yuri knew quite positively – without the slightest doubt – it would never affect him like that. An immediate – and to become lasting – impression was that New York was going to be like a mistress, something to be enjoyed and explored to the full but never once considered as a wife.

The Moscow-designated position as courier meant Yuri had greater freedom than any other Russian – and certainly any other KGB agent – at the United Nations. Of which he was fully aware. It was still one of the first things Anatoli Granov raised at their initial encounter, conducted of course during a meandering walk around the UN corridors, away from electronic ears. Granov was a grey man – grey hair, grey suit, grey face – with an unsettling mannerism of beginning a sentence and then repeating the start before the conclusion, as if he wanted to reinforce the importance of every statement. He warned against abusing that freedom – without naming Levin – and of the danger of FBI surveillance, actually referring to the United States as the enemy, which Yuri thought overly dramatic, despite having been trained to consider America the same way. The man told Yuri it was essential he orient himself as quickly as possible against the time he had to adopt his false Western identity, but not so quickly as to risk mistakes from which he might be identified. Throughout the guided tour and lecture Yuri showed no annoyance at being so openly patronized, grateful his function would spare him more than most from the schoolmasterly man. Would Granov be any improvement over Solov, in Kabul? The reflection surprised Yuri. Kabul seemed a million miles and a million years away. And it had not been the disaster posting he'd thought it to be, realized Yuri on further reflection. Without Kabul he would not already have a commendation upon his service record. And had he been posted directly to New York his might have been one of the names identified by Levin, resulting in his recall to Moscow. Yuri was no longer sure he wanted a future in Dzerzhinsky Square. What his future would even be: despite the excitement of his new surroundings the unknowns of Moscow and whatever it was between his father and Kazin stayed as a constant nag in his mind. The brief period he'd spent this time in Moscow with his father had left him disoriented too. It had been like going into the room of a house to which he'd never been allowed access before, a locked place of secrets. It seemed for the first time he'd discovered his father to be a person – someone capable of feelings and fears and fallibilities – and not a robot-like provider of any demand, the aloof miracle-maker who could change anything bad, or imagined bad, into something good, or imagined good. Had he been a spoiled little brat, wondered Yuri. The self-recognition was such a surprise that momentarily he lost concentration upon what Granov was saying and had to stumble a half-question before picking up the caution that unless there were an immediate demand he should not attempt to use apartment 415 on 53rd Street. Yuri promised he would not think of it: he was, in fact, thinking of doing so at once, like he wanted to do every thing at once.