‘What do you think it says?’
Shit! thought Yuri. He said: ‘Facts, not supposition.’
‘The man was hit from behind by a Lada car, which from the glass fragments and paint samples is shown to have been manufactured around 1984,’ said Bogaty. ‘The initial impact broke his back. Tyre marks, in the poor bastard’s own blood, show the vehicle reversed over him, crushing the rib cage and all the organs, including the heart. Died instantly.’
Yuri swallowed at the dispassionate recital, needing fresh control. My father, he thought: that’s my father you’re talking about, like he was a piece of meat in an abbatoir. He said: ‘Run down deliberately?’
‘No question about it,’ insisted Bogaty.
‘And the proof’s there?’ said Yuri, indicating the folder between them. He was hot, flushed, and hoped it was not showing by the colour of his face. So this was why the inquiry had come under the aegis of the criminal division!
‘Of course it’s all there. I told Panchenko at the time it would be.’
‘I didn’t speak directly to him,’ risked Yuri. At the time. Did that mean Panchenko had physically been at the scene? Should he extend the risk, telling the detective who he was and openly seeking the man’s help? No, rejected Yuri, conscious of the neatness of Bogaty’s office. It was inconceivable that someone to whom order was so important would knowingly breach a different sort of order.
‘By taking so long it’s virtually useless,’ insisted Bogaty. ‘Is this how it is in the KGB?’
‘You know how things are,’ shrugged Yuri invitingly.
Bogaty gestured around his sterile office. ‘I know how things are here,’ he said. ‘And I know that if I was aware of technical evidence available I would not have waited nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes before I collected it.’
Bogaty believed him to be Panchenko’s messenger! The complete and incredible comprehension flooded in on Yuri and he fought against it mentally overwhelming him, recognizing the opportunity it represented but conscious how, by the smallest error, he could be destroyed by it. Hopefully, he said: ‘Was the way it happened obvious, at the scene?’
‘To me it was.’
He had to take the chance, Yuri decided. He said: ‘Did the comrade colonel take the same view?’
‘The comrade colonel did not express any view,’ said Bogaty stiffly.
He had it! There was still the need to proceed with one foot placed just inches in front of the other. No accident, he thought: deliberately run over – the evidence in front of him like a mockery – and Panchenko provably at the scene. More, in every respect, than he’d imagined possible. Would he be able to get out of here with that file? Reaching out, grateful there was no shake in his hand, Yuri said: ‘I’d better be getting along.’
‘I’ll need a receipt,’ announced Bogaty.
‘Of course,’ responded Yuri. Who? he wondered desperately. The name came and Yuri decided it was ironically appropriate, scrawling ‘Igor Agayans’ across the formal hand-over document that Bogaty pushed across the desk at him. He was guilty of forgery, recognized Yuri. Deception and theft, too. Positively committed from this moment on into doing something, although he still did not know what. I think I could kill someone who tried to kill me, he remembered.
‘Best of luck,’ said Bogaty. ‘You’re going to need it.’
‘I know,’ said Yuri, with feeling.
He had consciously to walk at a normal pace back through the militia building, the dossier tight against his side, ears strained for some belated challenge from behind. Incredible! he thought exultantly: incredible and unbelievable but it had happened because of the investigator’s simple assumption, from his desk officer’s introduction. And that for nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes – no, fifty-five minutes now – Bogaty had been expecting a courier from Panchenko to collect promised technical evidence. He would even perform the function of a courier, decided Yuri. But only after reading and copying everything that was here.
Which was what he did, the following morning, in a public duplicating booth in the GUM department store – actually within view of the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square – with the exception only of the photographs which he decided were too gory to risk their being accidentally seen in such a public place. The photographs had given Yuri most difficulty the previous night, when he had got back to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, each brutally taken to show up and expose rather than to minimize. He’d had to swallow against the sensation that rose in the back of his throat, lips moving in a private promise to himself. There were twelve photographs, and Yuri removed just one of the originals, the least horrific, but showing most clearly the delineated tyre tread outlined in his father’s blood. The rest he returned to the master file, which he delivered to the central document receiving desk at the First Chief Directorate headquarters, for internal distribution to the office of Colonel Lev Konstantinovich Panchenko.
From the forensic evidence he now knew in such detail, Yuri recognized the investigator’s insistence upon checking garages to be the next obvious step, but he held back from taking it, ingrained KGB professionalism overriding personal impatience. He illegally possessed a police file and he possessed a dossier illegally assembled by his father. Neither complete, perhaps, but both in terms of his training invaluable intelligence. And he’d been lectured about invaluable intelligence at the KGB training academy on Metrostroevskaya. Protect had been the dictum: protect absolutely, secure absolutely. Neither of which he could do here in Moscow, in an uncertain apartment, subject at Kazin’s or Panchenko’s whim to search. Absolutely to protect and to secure meant, almost absurdly, that he had to get both sets of records out of the Soviet Union. Which he could do, he realized, without the slightest risk of interception or detection; his return to Russia this time had been official, on compassionate grounds. So he could openly travel on United Nations documentation as the international diplomat he was supposed to be and which relieved him of any Customs or immigration check upon his re-entry into the United States.
The time difference between Russia and America meant it was still early afternoon when Yuri landed at Kennedy Airport. He took the taxi to central Manhattan and although he was sure from the journey into the city that he was unfollowed he still spent an hour on foot clearing his trail before entering the Chase Manhattan Bank on Second Avenue. He opened the safe-deposit box in the name of William Bell, using the passport for identification, and put into it everything with which he had returned from Moscow, including the unread letters between his mother and father.
He was reluctant to go immediately to the UN building, needing to unwind from the constant tension of the Moscow journey. He went to the UN Plaza Hotel directly opposite and the glittering bar to which he had taken Inya that failed night, able at that time of the afternoon to get a place at a concealing corner table.
So he had his invaluable intelligence and now it was protected and secure. But so what? There was still nothing, in any of it, positively linking Panchenko to a crime or departmental infraction: and even less positively a provable link to Kazin. Like trying to fit together an intricate jigsaw puzzle without knowing the picture it would represent, thought Yuri. No, he contradicted at once. He was sure he knew the picture: it was the necessary completing pieces that were missing. What would he do – could he do – if he found the pieces and made up his picture? Always questions, never answers, he thought. Now the most pressing unanswered question of alclass="underline" was the Kazin-ordered assignment, to try to locate the recent defector, part of the same picture? Or something altogether different? About that, at the moment, he was only certain of one thing. That unquestionably it represented a personal danger: the sort of personal danger that had destroyed his father.