I’d accused Karl Ritter of basing assumptions on assumptions; now I was doing that. They went like this:
Assumption: Ritter was not lying when he said the KGB suspected I was involved with the illegal Jewish emigration underground. There were too many ways he could have been right. First there was the fact that Andrei Bizenkev* had opposed my visit from the beginning; naturally Bizenkev would have ordered a full-scale investigation of my background and affiliations and therefore the KGB could have been aware of my close association with Nikki, my extended sojourn in Israel and possibly my connection with Haim Tippelskirch, a known spy. Second there was my prior visit to Bukov. Putting that together with my known contacts with Israeli agents, the KGB had to be “onto me” even if it was for thoroughly erroneous reasons.
Assumption: Zandor had put a third man and a car on me immediately after he’d extended my visa. That had the earmarks of giving a man enough rope to strangle himself: they’d given me a longer tether but they’d strengthened it.
Assumption: When I had dropped out of sight for nearly four hours yesterday Zandor would not accept it as an innocent lapse. He might assume I had slipped my leash in order to make contact with Zionist agents. Whatever he took it to mean, it could only increase his suspicions.
Up to that point I was on firm ground. Those assumptions were sensible and conformed with the facts. The next assumptions were far more shaky since they were based on nothing more substantial than guesswork, intuition, knowledge of espionage history and practice, and odds. All these assumptions could be challenged easily; but standing together they made an imposing whole.
Assumption: Zandor knew who Karl Ritter was.
I had no idea what cover Ritter was using; he hadn’t told me. From his look and his background I thought possibly he was in the Crimea in the guise of an East German minor official. From what Ritter himself had told me I knew he hadn’t operated behind the Iron Curtain very often, and not at all in the past six or seven years; nevertheless he was a ranking CIA agent and I could not safely take it for granted that he was unknown to the KGB. Obviously he thought his cover was secure or he wouldn’t have been in Sebastopol, but I didn’t put much faith in Ritter’s feelings; he had illustrated his ineptitude more than once in his clumsy attempts to make contact with me-and if an amateur like me could see the weaknesses in his game-plan then it was a fairly good bet the professionals of the KGB had tumbled to him by now, or would do so in short order. That being the case I couldn’t count on the fact that the KGB wouldn’t trace Ritter back to that safe-house apartment in the suburbs, and find witnesses who’d seen us enter or leave the place together, or who’d seen me in Ritter’s car. There had been people who’d seen us in the tavern near the archives, and Zandor’s own agents had seen Ritter trying to fit his key into the door lock of the Moskvitch beside me; perhaps up to now those agents didn’t realize what they had seen but if Zandor showed them a photograph of Ritter and asked them if they had seen this man with me, they’d remember it: they were trained to.
It was a shaky assumption-that Ritter’s cover was blown-and there was a good chance I was wrong. But Ritter was a fool and I couldn’t count on his competence. If I acted on the assumption that he had not been blown, and it then turned out I was wrong.… It was safer to assume the worst.
Assumption: Ritter was right when he said the KGB would soon discover my interest in Kolchak’s gold. It is not true that the CIA and the KGB are riddled with each other’s agents but it is true that there are leaks, which each organization makes constant attempts to caulk, never with complete success. In my opinion there are advantages to these rifts in secrecy because they provide safety valves and often they prevent either side from springing unpleasant surprises on the other. But they also lead to a situation in which wherever Mary goes, her Lamb cannot be far behind her. The speed with which Zandor got word of my search for the gold would depend largely on how much importance the CIA attached to it; the fact that MacIver-a functionary of high rank-had been assigned to the case made it clear enough that The Firm took my search seriously indeed. (Evidently they had been taking it more seriously than I had, at first.)
I therefore had to accept the probability that the KGB would learn of my interest in the treasure. The moment that happened, I was locked in; there was no chance they would let me out of the country before they squeezed me like a lemon. And the operative factor here was my total inability to put a time limit on it. If I could be sure it would be two weeks before the KGB caught up with this business then I still might be safe in applying for an early exit. But I couldn’t be sure of anything of the kind. For all I knew the word was already on the wire from Moscow to Zandor. There simply was no way to guess; and therefore I had to assume the worst and act accordingly.
Finally, although this was perhaps of lesser importance, there was the fact that I couldn’t go to Zandor with a request for early exit without further arousing his suspicions. Two days after my visa is extended? He wouldn’t buy it unless I had an ironclad reason, and there was no excuse I could think of that would convince him. At the very least, such a request from me would only persuade Zandor to redouble his efforts to find out what chicanery I’d been up to. If he did that he might find the real answer-and once again the result would be my incarceration and interrogation.
I went endlessly up one side and down the other and the answer usually came out the same. There were too many ways for them to nail me, too many risks in staying put and waiting for the bureaucratic machinery to convey me legally out of the country. If nothing else, I wasn’t sure I could stand the constant terror of never knowing when they would reach out for me.
The alternative was to escape illegally-a breakout-and while the risks here were as great as the other, at least I had the spiritual advantage of having made the decision myself, having taken the initiative and having been able to weigh known risks.
Also there was a bleak satisfaction in using Nikki’s organization to get me out of this mess: in some emotional way which I deliberately avoided analyzing, I blamed Nikki for having got me into this.
There was snow. I moved back and forth like a caged animal taking exercise-aimlessly, looking at my watch, waiting; I drank a beer from Bukov’s cupboard, moved an ashtray on the desk, stood at the window growing sick with tenseness.
Then I saw him coming across the square in the snowfall and I tensed like a runner in the starting chocks because he wasn’t alone.
An older man walked with him, in step; they were deep in conversation. An argument, from the gestures. A local friend-or one of Zandor’s people? It was a feeling like ice across the back of my neck.
I watched them come toward the downstairs door to the building; suddenly I broke out of my paralysis. I couldn’t take the chance. I backed away from the window, picked up my things and strode across the room: in the darkness I barked a shin on something-made a small racket and whispered sibilant invective through my teeth, and wheeled out into the corridor. I pulled the door silently shut and crept quickly to the ascending stairs and went up to the next landing, the top floor. I heard the main door open, heard their voices and shrank back against the wall opposite the balustrade. They wouldn’t see me unless they came partway up the top flight of stairs and if they did that I had no escape anyway unless I chose to burst into someone’s flat.
They came up the stairs two flights below and I tried to listen to their conversation-to identify the man with Bukov-but I only understood about one word in five because they were speaking in a Crimean Tatar dialect but then I heard Bukov pronounce my name. I couldn’t make out the context and in my present condition I was not prepared to make fine distinctions among tones of voice. I froze; I felt an insistent hammering behind my eyes.