Petr turned away from the window, back into the room. His decision would be the same, if his sister were allowed to come. It wasn’t a melodramtic exaggeration that he hated his father. That genuinely was his feeling for what the man had done. Betrayal for betrayal, he decided. God, how he hated the man.
The rucksack had admitted some water, at which Yuri was not surprised, but the clothes inside were damp, not soaked. Yuri changed into them and let them dry on him as he followed the river bank at first light, locating the lake and from it picking up the avenue that bordered its western side. It was still early, not yet six, when he got to Thomaston, which was deserted, still sleeping. He recovered the car and got to New York by ten. He telephoned Caroline’s apartment, not to speak to her but to ensure she was not there and likely to see him in the condition he was. Having ensured she had already left for Madison Avenue, Yuri illegally parked the car against a fire hydrant very close to 53rd Street, knowing the vehicle would be towed back to Hertz and the penalty automatically charged to his William Bell credit card. In the apartment he stripped himself naked, searching for the damage in the full-length bathroom mirror. His face was scratched but not as much as he had feared and the swelling in his wrist was diminishing. Far better than he had expected.
‘What happened?’ asked Granov the moment he encountered the rezident at the United Nations.
‘An accident,’ said Yuri.
‘You’ve got to go to Moscow,’ announced the man.
‘Orders from there!’
‘Courier from here: the function you are supposed to be fulfilling,’ said Granov, who resented not being officially informed of the mission to which Yuri had been assigned by the Kazin message. ‘I’ve already advised them.’
So Kazin had not instigated the recall. There would have to be an acceptable excuse to be away from the UN. Time enough then to go to the safe-deposit box at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Destroy or be destroyed, he thought. Which would he be?
35
‘So there has to be another one, buried deep?’
It was Myers who voiced the inevitable conclusion, on the day the Crisis Committee agreed from the review of the final computer analysis that neither Latin America nor the Caribbean had featured in any assignment with which John Willick had ever been associated from the time of his recruitment into the Agency.
‘Inevitably,’ said Crookshank.
‘We can’t reassign every bloody agent in the two regions!’ protested Norris. ‘It would come to hundreds.’ Another twenty people disclosed to the KGB by Willick had been recalled from Finland and England after being identified as CIA operatives in left-wing publications. At least there had been no further attacks, as there had been in Bonn.
‘We’ll have to do exactly that, over a period. We can’t do anything else,’ said Myers.
‘And every analyst working out of here on raw material coming from anywhere in the area will have to be moved, as well,’ insisted Crookshank.
‘You know what you’re saying, don’t you?’ asked Norris. ‘You’re saying that the Agency has got to undergo the biggest agent turnover it’s had in its entire history. And it’s not just a question of moving people around. Some of these guys have been specifically trained for nothing else: cultivated for a lifetime’s career. Most speak Spanish better than English.’
‘Then a lot more are going to have to be specifically trained,’ said Crookshank, unimpressed.
‘I know Ramon Hernandez appears to check out but I think he should be isolated, too, until we’re one hundred per cent sure,’ said Myers.
The other two men nodded in agreement, effectively closing off from the CIA its best and most loyal source in Nicaragua.
‘And we mustn’t lose Kapalet, just because he’s being withdrawn to Moscow,’ said Crookshank.
‘I don’t intend to,’ said Myers. ‘I’m recommending to the Director that because of their special relationship Wilson Drew should be shifted there from Paris to continue as control.’
‘It’s not going to be easy for Kapalet, is it?’ said Norris, recalling the warning that had come from France after Drew’s last meeting with the Russian.
‘Nothing’s easy about this whole fucking mess,’ said Myers. ‘We can’t judge until we know the department or division to which he’s being posted but he could be even more important there at headquarters than he was in France.’
‘What about Levin?’ asked Crookshank.
‘Vital,’ replied Myers at once. ‘There isn’t anyone more important. I still think we might shortcut the search for the Latin American source through him.’
‘How?’ asked Norris.
‘He’s Russian so let’s use his knowledge of the way they operate and react,’ proposed the security chief. ‘Let’s get as much and as many electronic intercepts of Soviet traffic as we can, from the National Security Agency. Use our own stuff, too. And put him to work on them. Working from source backwards, we might be able to find the spy without all the turmoil we’ve been talking about.’
‘It’s an idea,’ agreed Norris doubtfully. ‘But it would mean disclosing all our sources. And those of the NSA as well.’
‘That’s a minimal consideration,’ argued Myers. ‘Levin’s on our side now. He’s proved that, unquestionably.’
‘If it’s a shortcut to discovering who our second spy is, then I’ll go for it,’ endorsed the lawyer.
‘It would require taking him on,’ pointed out Norris.
‘We’ve made consultants out of defectors before,’ reminded Myers. ‘Yuri Nosenko was appointed when he came across and told us the KGB had no part in Kennedy’s assassination.’
‘Not as quickly as this,’ said Norris.
‘Time we don’t have,’ said Myers.
‘I don’t think we can bring Levin properly aboard soon enough,’ said Crookshank.
Yuri made more than one trip to the Chase Manhattan Bank. On the first, by himself, he retrieved and recopied both sets of files, including this time the tyre-mark photograph. The originals he sealed and addressed in an envelope. The copies he put in the briefcase he intended taking with him, back to Moscow.
Caroline accompanied him on the second visit, frowning with curiosity as they went through the formality of signatory and withdrawing authority being extended to her, and then looking more puzzled in the vault itself, when she saw the envelope addressed to the New York Times.
‘I thought you worked for an Amsterdam magazine?’
‘I do,’ said Yuri. This was a very special assignment.’
‘Special enough to be kept in a bank vault!’
That special,’ assured Yuri. ‘You understand completely what I want you to do?’
‘Not exactly the intelligence test of the decade, is it?’ she said. ‘You’re going away on an assignment tomorrow and if you’re not back within a week I’m to collect the package from here and post it to the Times.’
‘Right,’ said Yuri. It was incomplete and bewildering and he had no idea if the newspaper would make any use of it arriving anonymously. But if anything happened to him this time in Moscow and they did publish, it might just conceivably cause Kazin and Panchenko harm.
‘Why not just give it to them now?’
‘It would be too soon.’
‘Remember what I said, that first night?’
‘What?’ he asked.
That you were mysterious,’ she reminded him. ‘And you are. I still don’t know a damned thing about you, with one important exception: how I feel about you.’
The safe-deposit box also contained the still unread letters between his father and mother, Yuri realized. It was preposterous – insanity – to go on with Caroline like this. He would end it shortly, he promised himself. But not quite yet. He needed her now.
Kazin was surprised that Vladislav Belov had not volunteered the open commitment he had once shown, particularly now that the control of the First Chief Directorate was undisputed and beyond challenge. The man was a fool, like Panchenko was a fool although for different reasons. Kazin decided he didn’t need supporters or sycophants any more. His position was beyond dispute: he was unassailable.