“Is there any way that funding for the Canada trip can be found?” Kiril said, equally abrupt.
Kiril’s opening salvo predictably triggered suspicion in Aleksei’s glance. Ignoring it, Kiril pulled up a chair without asking—and on closer scrutiny realized his brother’s eyes were a bit red-rimmed.
Hitting the vodka again, Aleksei? Now there’s a piece of good luck!
“Why Canada?” Aleksei snapped.
“I’m a doctor,” Kiril said tartly. “Dammit, Aleksei, we have a lot to gain from the new heart-lung machine technology being developed there.”
“It’s not up to me,” Aleksei said, sounding somewhat mollified. “And even if it were, I have more important matters to think about.”
Fishing around in a side drawer of his desk, he took out a pint bottle of vodka and a couple of small glasses. “Join me?”
“Why not?” Kiril replied.
Especially if I can manage to nudge you from mild inebriation into borderline drunk.
They raised glasses and drank.
“How’s this for an idea,” Kiril said, pushing his glass forward for a refill. “Even if you can’t bring the Canadian trip back to life, at least leave poor Dr. Yanin alone.” He grinned. “If your men keep interrupting our surgical team’s operations, we won’t be able to function with even the outdated equipment we already have!”
Aleksei cracked a smile. “Never realized you had a sense of humor, Little Brother.”
“Never realized you drank so early in the day.”
Aleksei shrugged. “I have big problems.”
He was drinking from the bottle now.
“Pressure from the top,” he mumbled, slurring his words.
“That bad?” Kiril said, feeding brotherly concern into his tone.
No answer. Kiril braced himself and plunged in. “When you were talking to Stepan yesterday about his new assignment, you mentioned something about the Americans not owning the skies.”
“Your pal told you about the Potsdam summit, did he?”
“Only in passing.”
“So he’s being discreet? He’d better be. That goes for you too,” Aleksei said, wagging a forefinger for emphasis. “There’s an old saying—a cliché now, but true enough during the Great Patriotic War. “Loose lips sink ships.” Understand? Air Force Captain Brodsky is making our VIP arrangements is all. Know what the CIA’s been up to? Photo-intelligence flights over the Soviet Union. For a long time, our MIG-19s and SU9s couldn’t touch them.”
“That high up?” Kiril said, genuinely fascinated.
“Tens of thousands of feet.”
“But photographing what?”
“Whatever those bastards want,” Aleksei muttered. “Everything from grazing cows to surface-to-air missile test sites,” he said darkly, his normally pale face flushed with anger and alcoholic overload.
Loose lips is right! If you were sober, Aleksei, you’d appreciate the irony of this conversation.
“How long has this travesty been going on?” Kiril asked in a tone of righteous indignation.
“Long, long time. Our MIG-19s and SU9s couldn’t touch them.”
“So what are we doing about it?”
“Plenty. But not to worry, it’s almost over. The CIA scheduled another flight a few days before the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit. And this time,” Aleksei said in an exaggerated whisper, “we’ll be ready.”
“For what?” Kiril said, puzzled.
“Think about it,” Aleksei said with the patience of a professor whose most promising student needs prodding from time to time. “We start the summit in a friendly spirit, eager to cooperate with the Americans and their British and French allies. Suddenly our missiles shoot down this spy plane—a perfect excuse for Chairman Khrushchev to explode and walk out with his delegation. The United States of America won’t be so united after that,” Aleksei said smugly. “Not only will the Soviet Union’s friends around the world condemn the war-mongering United States for threatening world peace, but many American citizens will follow their lead.”
“I don’t understand. What’s in it for the Soviet Union?”
“Leverage, Kiril. For now, how Berlin is to be subdivided. Later, nuclear treaty negotiations will be on the agenda.”
No more questions. Don’t press your luck.
Aloud, Kiril said, “I can see why you have more important things to think about than resurrecting the Canadian symposium.”
“Can you really?”
As Kiril held Aleksei’s glance, he was stunned at his brother’s abrupt transition from an amiable borderline drunk to a stone-cold sober intelligence officer—so sober that, without warning, Aleksei snapped forward in his chair.
“Breathe a word of this, Little Brother,” Aleksei said with knife-edge sharpness, “and you are a dead man.”
Chapter 8
Aleksei Andreyev was surely the most devious person Kiril had ever known. To deal with him was to encounter wheels within wheels, never knowing what was artifice or distraction, propaganda or disinformation. What Aleksei had just revealed despite his apparent drunkenness… was it an act? Why tell Kiril a state secret of the highest order? Did Aleksei have an ulterior motive? Was he using Kiril in some way? Would Aleksei have him followed to see if he ran to his friend Stepan with such explosive intelligence? Was Khrushchev’s Machiavellian plan even true?
So many possibilities, Kiril thought. How could he arrive at any definitive conclusions? He needed to be alone. To think.
After a lunch of black coffee and pirogi stuffed with cabbage, Kiril took a bus to the hospital. Luckily, there were no operations scheduled for the day. He had Dr. Yanin’s surgical section to himself.
He sat in his cubicle-sized office and processed the morning’s events, the questions he had just raised. He realized how important it was to preserve what he had just learned from Aleksei. But how?
His first impulse was to write an account of the entire episode in longhand. He vetoed the idea almost immediately. Such a report would be lengthy, cumbersome. Worse, if it fell into the wrong hands, it could turn into a death warrant.
Better to take advantage of his retentive memory and fall back on a number of key words to jog it, he decided.
He pulled out some note paper and wrote “April” on the chance that someone might read the note paper in English. Then “20” for the date—deliberately misleading; Kiril had been at Aleksei’s office five days earlier. He followed up with seven key words: Andreyev, U2, summit, walkout, leverage, Berlin, nuclear. It was meager fare, but enough to feed his memory, which in turn would permit him to recite almost verbatim his conversation with Aleksei.
As he stared at the notepaper he’d just used, he realized it was cheap Soviet stock. What if it were destroyed in handling? If, say, the ink ran? His eyes wandered absently around the room and came to rest on the microfilm version of a patient’s chest x-ray clipped to some medical report.
He leaped out of his chair. As small as his handwritten list of words was, he could render it much smaller with the microfilm machine that he’d used countless times. He went to work reproducing the list onto two tiny negatives, each roughly the size of half a fingernail.
One microfilm for me. The other for you, Stepan.
Next, a crucial last step. Where to hide his copy?
He sat back and lit a cigarette. He would need a place that was both secure and readily accessible. He was idly fingering his Zippo lighter when he cracked a smile.
Step one, he thought, and went about removing the lighter’s working parts—windscreen, flint-holder, flint, wheel, wick—leaving him with a metal shell from which he removed the alcohol-soaked cotton. Taking a wad of unused cotton, Kiril wrapped it around the microfilm, inserted the cotton back into the shell, and replaced the working parts.