“A name. In Washington. To prove I’m for real. Of course, he can just take that and walk away, leave me here, but I’m betting he’ll want more. And there is more,” he said, as casually as putting a chip down on a table.
Simon stared at him. “A name. One of yours.”
“Well,” Frank said, unexpectedly thrown by this, embarrassed. “I don’t have much of a choice, I have to give them something.”
“So first you give the Service us. How many, by the way? Scribbling away for two years. Everybody in the Agency you ever took a piss with? And now you’re going to give us them. Your new people. Time now to cash them in too. All these years, whenever I thought about it, what you did, I’d think, well, but he believed in it. Like some religion. Like it is in the book. But it turns out—”
“I do believe in it,” Frank said quietly. “I believe it’s just, the system. And I believe it’s going to win. This doesn’t change that. But I’m almost done here. They’re going to retire me and what’s the difference when you’re retired?”
“So cut and run. And throw a bomb behind you on your way out. The way you did last time. I thought this was what you did everything for,” Simon said, spreading his hand to take in the park, Frank’s life.
“It is. But it’s a different time. Things are better now. We survived the war. And Stalin. Beria. We survived the Americans, all the loonies flying around with their bombs. We’re sending satellites into space. We’re catching up. One beat-up old agent switching sides isn’t going to bring the house crashing down. If it ever would have. Sometimes I wonder how much any of it mattered. At the time you think—but then you look back and it’s gain an inch here, an inch there, but the whole thing really just rolls along whether you’re there or not. If I hadn’t done any of it, would things be different?” He looked over. “Or maybe I’m just getting older. But I don’t think I’ll be undermining the future of Communism. Maybe give it a little bump in the road. The Service will recover. Of course, we don’t want to say that to Pirie. He thinks it all matters, he has to, that’s why he gets up every day. And now we can hand it to him on a platter, the club he’s been looking for. To beat the Service with.”
“And you’d give that to him.”
“I’d have to. None of this comes free. Immunity from prosecution. Actually, there was never any evidence against me, anything they could use, so that’s a moot point.”
“Other than turning up in Moscow.”
“But a new identity,” Frank said, not stopping. “That won’t be cheap. Expenses. The exfiltration.”
“The exfiltration,” Simon said, the word itself surreal.
“I can’t just book the next Aeroflot out. There have to be arrangements. Don’t worry, I’ve got it all worked out.”
“You.”
“You don’t think I’d leave it to Pirie, do you? Put my life in his hands.” He looked up. “This is going to be the tricky part. Getting out. You need a Houdini, somebody who knows how the locks work.”
“Like you,” Simon said, hearing the bravado in Frank’s voice, his next astonishing act.
“And you,” Frank said, looking at him. “I’d be putting myself in your hands.”
Even the air seemed to stop now, nothing moving at all.
“To get you out,” Simon said, so softly that it sounded only half-said.
“I’m very good at what I do, you know. You just take a message. That’s all. It’s no risk to you.” Looking him in the eye as he said it.
“And then what?” Simon said, still softly.
Frank shook his head. “First we put out the line. Then we take it one step at a time, in case—”
“In case it does go wrong. And somebody asks me. With the red light over the door. But no risk to me.”
“There won’t be. I’ve been planning it. It can work. Do you think I’d ask you if I thought—?”
He looked over Simon’s shoulder. The woman in high heels, circling back around the pond. She smiled at Frank, a tease, exaggerating her hip movements. The rest of the park seemed to come back to life with them, out of Frank’s vacuum, people looking up at the sun again, licking ice cream.
“What makes you think I’d do this?” Simon said, no longer in an echo chamber. “Any of it.”
Frank nodded, a question he’d been waiting for. “First you’d be doing something for your country. That always has a certain amount of appeal. Like I said, I don’t think it’ll matter very much in the scheme of things, but the Agency won’t think that. They’ll think they won the Cold War and you helped. Then there’s the book. With a brand-new last chapter. Which I promise to write. Remember when I left? How big a story that was? So think about me coming back. You do the numbers. If Keating counts that high. You’ll even be the hero of the piece, if you want to be. I’ll do it however you want. If I know the Agency, they’ll nickel-and-dime me on the pension, so I’ll need the royalties. And no sharing with Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga. Just my own account somewhere. Which I’ll help you set up.” He stopped, then put his hand on Simon’s arm. “Look, this is just talk. Why would you do it? I was hoping you’d do it for me.”
“For you.”
“It’s always been the two of us, hasn’t it? I couldn’t tell you—what I was doing. You know that. I thought it was for the best, all of it. I didn’t think things would end up this way, me walking around Patriarch’s Pond—where the hell was that anyway? But they did.” He looked up. “I don’t want to die here.”
“And what do you think it’ll be like there?”
“I know what it’ll be like. They keep me in a safe house somewhere near the Agency. And we debrief. They don’t trust me, they trust me, they don’t trust me. Months, longer. I’m not having dinner at Harvey’s, I’m not seeing anybody, I’m in jail. With guards, so nobody pops me. They hope. I hope. And when they’re finished squeezing the lemon, they send me somewhere as somebody else. Somewhere warm, by the way, would be nice. After here. And then I live there, wondering if anybody back at Langley screws up and slips where I am. Because then I’m Trotsky, waiting for the hatchet in my head. Wondering if anybody recognizes me when I go out to get the mail. Locking the door, making sure. And that’s my life. What’s left of it.”
Simon was quiet for a minute, slowing his steps, the end of the allée just ahead, Boris on a bench somewhere.
“Then why do it?” He looked around, people in the sun. “You’re better off here.”
“Maybe. But Jo isn’t.”
“Jo?”
“Why do it? I should have started there, I guess. So it makes sense to you. It’s killing her, this place. She’ll never get better here. Jesus Christ, a sanitarium in Sochi. Can you imagine what that’s like? What it would do to her? So why do it?” He looked directly at Simon. “Because I have to. You know us better than anybody. You were there. Before we were—what we are now. We got through so much—coming here, Richie, we even got through that, but now she’s coming apart and I’m just sitting here watching it happen. I can’t. She’s only here because she followed me. I have to do something. So why? The oldest reason in the book, isn’t it? It always comes down to something like this. They teach you that in the Service—look for the Achilles’ heel, the soft spot. So, mine. I don’t think the Service knows it. They’ve never tried to use it and they would, that’s what they do. Boris thinks I’m annoyed with her. He doesn’t see it’s eating me up, what’s happening. But you know her. How she used to be. And now look. You saw her at the National.” Her breath in his ear.
“Why not send her home? Without all the—?”
Frank shook his head quickly. “Even if State gave her a new passport, which they won’t, the Soviets would never let her leave. She’s my wife. She knows too much—even if she doesn’t. They think that way. They’d lose face. So they’d—deal with her.”