“But what about—?”
“Over. Finished. Highly classified and buried.”
“Oh.” She examined my hand as if seeing it for the first time, then a knee, then the carpet. “Oh, my.”
“These things happen.”
“Then I’ll never be questioned about that man?”
“I doubt it, but really, I wouldn’t know. If you are, I suspect that you’ll have to sign a secrecy agreement.”
“I see. Very convenient for me.”
“Yes. Isn’t it?”
“Of course, it was strictly self-defense. You and that other woman were witnesses, and he was armed. After all, he had just broken into the house to do God knows what. I didn’t do anything illegal. And I would be delighted to tell anyone about it.”
“As I said, the whole thing is classified. I suggest you not mention it to anyone or, indeed, you will be visited by the FBI.”
“I certainly don’t need to tell anyone anything. That was one of those episodes best forgotten.”
“You got that right.”
“Difficult to forget, though.”
This was my cue. She was still holding my hand, so I covered hers with my free hand and squeezed gently. “Have you had dinner?”
“Why, no. Have you?”
“I was just on my way. This place is packed. There’s no way we will get into one of these hotel restaurants without reservations.”
“I have a reservation.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m sure they held it. It’s at Gallagher’s on West Fifty-second.” I had heard of it. Gallagher’s was a classy beanery where the political honchos liked to hang out. Getting a table at this hour was probably impossible unless you knew the maître d’ or were willing to slip him two or three photos of Jackson. “Would you like to eat there?” she continued. “Or perhaps someplace more intimate?”
Uh-oh. That was an invitation if ever I heard one.
She made the decision for us, as I knew she would. “I know a little neighborhood place in the Eighties that shouldn’t be crowded,” she said. “Not too many people know of it, but the food is delicious and we can visit and talk. Let’s go there.”
Looked as if I was going to be the main course for Dorsey this evening. Too bad for Carlo.
“So,” I said as we walked out the front entrance of the hotel, “why are you in New York?”
“Haven’t you heard? The convention is going to nominate a woman for the vice presidency.”
“I didn’t know you cared about politics.”
“Tommy, I like to be where the action is, and this week that’s New York. Can’t you feel the electricity in the air? Nothing will ever be the same. No woman who could afford to be here would dare miss this.”
That evening Callie Grafton joined her husband on the porch of their beach house after dinner. Jake put down the sectional aeronautical charts he had been annotating and slipped his pencil into his pocket. Their guest, Mikhail Goncharov, had gone upstairs to lie down. He and Callie had been talking all afternoon.
“He is a very brave man,” Callie said forcefully.
“I suspect so,” Jake murmured.
“He was a Communist and got into the KGB through his uncle, who was a bigwig there. A major general, I think he said. He’d worked in the Fifth Directorate for eight years when he was picked for the archivist job. He didn’t get along with his boss, who campaigned hard to get rid of him. I think by that time he was disillusioned with the KGB and the Communists, but if he resigned from the organization he would have been unable to get other work.”
“And he would have been a security risk.”
“Yes. He was stuck and knew it. So he made the best of the archivist assignment. It was actually a very low-pressure, low-visibility job. He said that in effect he was merely the head clerk, overseeing the typists who transcribed handwritten notes, overseeing the clerks who logged the files in and out, preparing the department’s budget, supervising the guards who were on duty twenty-four hours a day, and so forth. The amazing thing is that the files for all the directorates were kept in his archives — all of them — for security purposes. Regulations forbid anyone, even the top people, from keeping files in their private safes.”
“Why did he begin making notes?”
“Disillusionment, he says. He doesn’t want to talk of that decision, but it is the key to his personality. He saw the reports and reviewed the files for completeness for every single activity the KGB engaged in — everything — from internal security to bugging foreign embassies in Moscow and overseas, running spy rings and counterintelligence operations, the campaigns against the dissidents, the show trials, covering up scandals among the party elite, all of it. And he had time to review the old files in the archives, the files from Lenin’s and Stalin’s time. Those files were sometimes incomplete, he says. In the past highly sensitive material was removed from the files. The example he gave me was of the arrest record of Stalin when he was a young man. The file was there because it was numbered and had to be accounted for, but the folder was empty.”
“You like Goncharov, don’t you?”
“I admire him, yes. The pressure he put himself under by betraying the state! Living with that day in and day out for all those years, living with the constant fear of being found out. He doesn’t say so, but I think they would have executed him if they had learned what he was doing.”
“I have no doubt they would have,” Jake agreed.
“His wife is now dead because of what he did.”
“She must have known what he was doing. At some point all that paper accumulating in their small apartment had to be explained.”
“Oh, she knew, all right. And shared his conviction that he was doing the right thing. Still, the guilt is hard to bear.” Callie fell silent, thinking about the afternoon’s conversations.
Finally she passed her hand over her face, then said, “I asked him the questions you suggested. He can’t remember anything on any of those people.”
Jake studied his toes. “Can’t or won’t?” he prompted.
“I believe he can’t. He has nothing to hide. He risked his life and his wife’s life for all those years to make notes on the files and threw their fate to the wind to bring the information to the West.”
Jake Grafton nodded.
“But Jake, if he can’t remember, perhaps those files don’t exist. Perhaps they never existed.”
“The copies are being reviewed. Quickly read, not analyzed. We’ll know more in a day or two. Perhaps three.”
“Who knew the files had been copied?”
“MI-5, of course, and probably a few senior people in the CIA. But no one else. British intelligence had secretly copied the files without permission, and the people who knew it didn’t want that fact leaking back to Goncharov. They wanted his cooperation.”
“So whoever went after him thought the files had not been copied?”
“Apparently.”
“But I don’t understand. If he can’t remember, perhaps the files they thought were there never existed at all.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then why would any of those people want him dead and nonexistent files destroyed?”
“That’s the nub of it.”
They talked on, and even went on to other subjects, but after a while Callie came back to this one. “If it had been your decision and Goncharov refused to allow the files to be copied, would you have betrayed his trust and copied them against his wishes?”
“In a heartbeat,” Jake said. “When Kelly Erlanger said he had been in Britain a week and a few days in America and there was only one copy of the files, his, I knew that couldn’t be true. No competent, responsible intelligence officer would take the chance that the most precious intelligence treasure of modern times might be lost in a plane crash or house fire. Not one. Those files were duplicated the instant they were out of his sight.”