“We poured all our efforts into the four suspects, and carried out an in-depth background check into all of them, a complete life history,” he continued. “We had two blue-blooded American women, Mrs. Ascot-Giles and Professor Baer. Not that we’ve never had blue-blooded spies before, and not that the Soviets and then the Russians don’t have the ability to recruit our finest sons and daughters. But when we checked out all four of the people who were at the institute, only one appeared to have a hole in his record. When it came to the lives of the two women, both from established upper-class families, we knew everything about them from the day they were born, through to the schools they attended, the colleges they went to, their family members, all well known, everyone eminent. The grandmother’s buried in the cemetery of a small church in New Hampshire, the father fought with General MacArthur’s marines in Korea, that kind of thing. We asked our German colleagues to carry out a similar check into Kurt Assenheim, the doctoral student. Waiting for those Germans to actually get moving can drive you crazy; but when they do something, they do it properly. In any event, Kurt Assenheim also checked out from day one. But when we looked into Professor Julian Hart, that’s when the bells started ringing.
“Julian Hart came to the United States in the early seventies, 1972, in fact, from New Zealand. He was twenty-two years old at the time, with a BA cum laude from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. Ancient languages and classical studies. He received a scholarship for postgraduate studies at Columbia University in New York and went on to do his doctorate there, too. He was at Brown already when he did his postdoctoral fellowship, and he stayed on there as a staff member, initially as a junior lecturer, then as a senior lecturer, and finally as a full professor. Toward the end of his studies at Columbia, he met his future and now current wife, Frances Green, who grew up in Oregon and moved to the East Coast after being accepted to college there. They have three children, two daughters and a son. The girls have already left home, while the son is a student at Brown and still lives with his parents. We made inquiries in New Zealand. A very discreet inquiry, handled personally by our station chief there, in cooperation with the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. Yes, a man by the name of Julian Hart does appear in the records in New Zealand. The records actually show several such individuals. But only one with the same date of birth as our Julian Hart. Hart was born in Auckland. His family must have emigrated from New Zealand when he was a young boy, because the Hart family stopped paying taxes there in 1953. We weren’t able to locate any relatives. According to an old and not very lucid neighbor whom the local security service managed to track down, the family may have moved to Australia, or maybe somewhere else, he couldn’t be sure. The old man, as I said, wasn’t at his best, to put it mildly. Early dementia, and plenty of alcohol in his blood. In Hart’s admissions file at the university in Christchurch we found certificates from a high school in Cape Town, letters of recommendation from two enthusiastic teachers, a photocopy of a New Zealand passport issued by the consulate in Pretoria. In a letter attached to his application for a living allowance, Hart noted that his parents had been killed in a terrible car accident a year earlier. We tried to make inquiries in South Africa. Our capabilities there are somewhat limited. The relationship with the local security service is very problematic, and we chose not to involve them in such a sensitive investigation. Our efforts to conduct the inquiries in Cape Town independently yielded only partial success. The high school Hart had attended no longer existed, and no one could tell us what had happened to all the school’s records after it was shut down, and we failed to locate the teachers who wrote the letters of recommendation. But we did manage to find a small report in the Cape Town Herald about a couple by the name of Hart who were killed in a traffic accident. The name of the man who died matched the name of Julian’s father, Jacob Hart, as it appeared in the records in New Zealand. The woman’s name was different, so we can’t be sure if she was Julian’s mother. She may have been the father’s second wife, or perhaps the reporter made a mistake. Who knows? In any event, the report noted that Jacob Hart had been a member of the Cape Town branch of the Progressive Workers Front, which we knew better at the time as the cover organization for the South African Communist Party. And that’s where we hit a dead end. We weren’t able to come up with anything else, but we didn’t like what we had found. The story of the early part of Julian Hart’s life troubled me a great deal. Too many loose ends, a biography lacking continuity and coherence. And from our perspective, the link to the South African Communist Party certainly raised an alarm or two. How were we to know if the Julian Hart who was born in Auckland, New Zealand, was really the same Julian Hart who turned up to study in Christchurch some eighteen years later? And maybe Jacob Hart, who was very conveniently killed in an accident, and can’t be asked even one fucking question, handed over his son’s personal papers to the KGB, and thus they were able to manufacture a different Julian Hart? Perhaps wandering around in some shithole in South Africa somewhere there’s another orphaned Julian Hart, completely unaware that his shadow twin has risen to greatness in the American academe, and is also a deep-cover Russian intelligence agent in his spare time?”
“Have you met with Hart since Thomas Langham’s fleeting appearance under the beautiful skies of Providence?” Aharon asked.
“Not officially. We continued to make discreet inquiries into his past. The FBI put a tap on his phone. We even sent an agent to see him under the guise of an undergraduate student with an interest in going on to do a Ph.D. on the subject of the ancient Near East. He was very welcoming, and willing to help. Meanwhile we weren’t able to come up with anything even remotely suspicious on him. And yet I know”—and at that point Bill slammed his fist down onto the small table next to his armchair, violently rattling the cubes of ice in his whisky glass—“I know there’s something fishy here! I,” he declared, “wasn’t born yesterday. When I sense there’s something amiss, I know what I’m talking about.”
“And how does the Julian Hart case tie in with the Cobra affair?” Aharon quietly asked. “You haven’t provided any proof of that.”
“You’re right. I don’t have any proof,” Bill responded. “But you said you were looking for a Russian intelligence officer with the hint of an Australian or South African accent who’s been living in the United States as a professor of the ancient Near East, and that’s exactly what I’ve found for you. A fucking Russian intelligence officer, with a background in New Zealand and South Africa, a professor at the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, where—and you can check this on any weather site—it snows in December.”
“Aharon,” Ya’ara said, “I think Mr. Pemberton is right. The circumstantial evidence is pretty impressive. And you taught us never to believe in coincidences. I think we should go to Rhode Island. The trail leads there.”
40
DIMITROVGRAD, MARCH 2013
The light military aircraft touched down at the small airport in Dimitrovgrad just as the sun was setting. The sky had taken on a dark purple hue. It was bitterly cold, and Captain Viktor Demedev tightened his coat around himself before making his way down the stairs leading from the body of the plane. He was accompanied by two additional FSB officers. Waiting there for them on the tarmac, and trying to hide the fact that his body was shivering with cold, was the commander of the FSB’s Dimitrovgrad office, Colonel Arkady Semionov. The deputy chief of the FSB himself had called Semionov a few hours earlier to inform him that Demedev and his people were on their way to see him. Keep this completely under wraps, came the instruction; look after them personally and do all they ask of you. Got it? Every single word, sir. And please allow me to wish you good health and success. It’s an honor to serve you.