“Poor Daddy,” I agree.
“We’re driving on sand!” Jack announces, and sure enough, when I look through the window at the blue-tinted world, that sliver of time between sunset and twilight, I see nothing but pale dunes and tall seagrass.
“You’re sure this is the place?” I ask.
“Yes,” Fox replies.
He stops the car and tells us to wait.
“Wait for what? I want to get out of here. I need some air.”
“I’m just going to scout ahead for a moment. Could you pass me the flashlight under the seat?”
Claire wriggles onto the floor of the car and finds it for him. It’s funny how the kids just trust him, this stranger who killed a man and then kidnapped them in a KGB car. I hope they didn’t see him do the deed. No doubt Fox did his best to conceal it from them.
“Thank you,” he says gravely to Claire. He opens the door and lights the flashlight, covering the bulb with his palm so it’s not so bright. Before he leaves, he ducks his head back in and says to me, “There’s a gun in the glove compartment if you need it.”
Do I need to mention that—among other things—Fox showed me how to fire a gun? It was the day before we left for Moscow. We borrowed Orlovsky’s car and drove in bizarre zigzags through the city for an hour to throw off any possible tail. (Who’s going to tail us? I asked, and Fox just shrugged and said you never know, you should always assume somebody is watching you.) At last, just as I was about to ask him to pull over so I could throw up my breakfast in the gutter, we zoomed out of the city and wound our way into the hills somewhere, until Fox decided we were far enough from any living thing and pulled over.
We used a tree for a target. I didn’t know a thing about guns, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a good eye and a steady hand. Fox showed me how to aim it and fire it, how to load more bullets if I needed to. I said I hoped I wouldn’t need to fire the thing at all, and Fox sat me down and opened up a couple of bottles of lemonade and delivered me this lecture on how guns were a last resort—they were like an admission you had failed at the finer arts of espionage. But if he failed, and I failed, then he sure as the devil didn’t want me to die for it. He said this sincerely, and I believed him. Then we packed up our little picnic and went back to Rome.
Now we sat in the gloaming on a sand dune on the Baltic coast somewhere—and yes, I could find the Baltic Sea on a map, but only because I’d spent four years poring over those charts of Europe that appeared daily in the newspapers throughout the war. I pondered whether I should reach over the seat and retrieve that gun from the glove compartment, just in case, even though I hated the cold, lethal feel of a gun in my hand, the terrible foreboding that something might go wrong and I’d end up killing somebody, possibly myself.
I hear the echo of Fox’s words in my head. If I fail and you fail, I sure as the devil don’t want you to die for it.
But I’m sitting in a carful of precious children. I can’t take that chance.
Outside the window, a light jogs toward us.
“Thank God,” I whisper.
Fox comes right up to the rear door, where I’m sitting, and opens it. “Come out,” he says.
But there’s something funny about his voice, and when I look up, I realize this man isn’t Fox at all. He holds a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, which he points at my head.
Sasha
July 1952
Near Riga, Latvia
He recognizes the woman across the table, though he can’t remember where or how. Some debriefing, perhaps, when they first arrived in the Soviet Union? Or later—some lecture or training session? Or both. She’s extremely attractive in an unremarkable way, like a woman in a magazine advertisement, each feature flawless and bland. She’s not wearing cosmetics, not even lipstick, and her dark hair sits in a tidy knot at the nape of her neck. Not the tiniest emotion manifests itself on her face—maybe that’s why it’s so forgettable. An asset in her line of work, he reminds himself, and a skill he was never able to master. He always had to get by on his other strengths.
“Mr. Dubinin,” she says in English. “Or should I say Digby? Welcome.”
“Welcome to what? What the devil’s going on?”
“It’s funny, I was going to ask the same of you. This is not what we expected of you, Comrade, when we extended the arm of friendship to you and your family four years ago. We did not expect betrayal.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’ve never once betrayed my loyalty to the Soviet Union.”
She allows a hint of inquiry to dent the space between her eyebrows. “Then why are we here? In Latvia?”
“I was kidnapped. My family and I, we were kidnapped by some kind of enemy operative, probably CIA—”
“You did not go willingly? You were not, perhaps, in the very act of returning to the protection of the US government?” She takes some documents out of the folder at her elbow and lays them out before him. “These passports, identification papers—they are not for you and your family?”
“I’ve never seen them before in my life. I don’t know where they came from, or who arranged it, but it wasn’t me. It’s someone trying to frame me, and I can’t begin to imagine why. Where’s my family? My wife and children? My wife’s just given birth, she might be ill—”
“Don’t worry about your wife and children, Comrade. Let us concentrate first on the matter at hand.”
Sasha leans against the chair, although not very much, because his hands are secured in a pair of handcuffs behind the chair’s back. “Whatever’s happened, I’m sure we can get to the bottom of it.”
“Yes, I’m sure of that,” the woman says. “Because if we don’t, I’m afraid we shall have to imprison you and your entire family as traitors to the Soviet people.”
“What? That’s nonsense!”
“I’m afraid so. You see, we have incontrovertible proof that you’ve been passing along vital and highly classified information about the KGB and its agents abroad for the past four years, in a counterspy operation named”—she looks down at some papers before her—“Honeysuckle.”
“Honeysuckle? I’ve never . . .”
The sentence dissolves in his mouth.
“Yes, Comrade?”
“I’ve never heard of it. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The woman puts her elbows on the table and leans forward. “Think, Comrade. Tell me about ASCOT.”
“The racecourse? I’ve been there.”
“Don’t play with me.”
“I’m not playing. I sincerely don’t know what you mean. I’ve spent the past four years tirelessly working on behalf of the Soviet people, who have welcomed me so warmly. I have never acted as a counterspy in the Soviet Union. Look at my records. Since coming here I’ve been grateful to be relieved of the burden of hiding my true loyalty. I’ve given up the booze, I’ve given up women, I’ve been a devoted husband and father. Just look at my records.”
He says the last words fiercely. Of course, he knows they’ve had him under surveillance. He’s always accepted this state of affairs philosophically, as the price one pays to hold off the ever-present threat of counterrevolution. Until now, in fact, he’s been glad of them. Let anyone doubt his true intentions in defecting! Let anyone say a word against him! In those dark and terrible days after Iris found him bleeding inside their apartment in Oakwood Court, having shot Beauchamp as an intruder, he had sworn that if Iris forgave him and offered him another chance, he would be true and loyal to the rest of his days. He would never touch another drop of alcohol! He would devote himself to Iris, as she had devoted herself to him. When she agreed to go along with him—yes, she would do it, she would defect with him, take the children and start over again with him in the Soviet Union!—he had worshipped her for it. He had loved and cared for Claire just as if she were his own child. And now this! This was how they repaid him! Just look at my records!
“Of course I have looked at your records, Comr
ade. I have examined every word, believe me. You’ve been an exemplary citizen, by all appearances. But there is also this. Discovered in the diplomatic bag of the American embassy in Moscow.”
“You opened a diplomatic bag?”
“You know this is sometimes necessary, Dubinin. Don’t play innocent.”
“I have never in my life opened the diplomatic bag of another country.”
“Then you have been derelict in your duty.” The woman picks up the slip of paper before her and lays it before him.
All right, so he’s lied to this woman. But he’s only lied because he doesn’t really know the truth, and it seems stupid to muddy the waters with speculation.
Sitting in that hospital waiting room with Ruth’s husband—Ruth was married to Sumner Fox, of all people, the Sumner Fox, he just couldn’t get his head around that—he had craved a drink very badly. He hadn’t wanted to get Iris pregnant again, God no, not after Claire’s birth—but she had begged him and he was only a man, after all, and there it was, another baby, sapping the strength from his wife and possibly sapping her life as well.
The funny thing is, he’s never loved Iris more than he has since they came to Moscow. He might almost say that he never really loved her until Moscow—had never appreciated all the beautiful qualities inside his wife because he was too busy drinking, obsessed with himself and his own agony and the guilt and secrecy that tore his guts apart. Also, in Moscow there was no Nedda. No dazzling unpredictable bitch to pour his vanity into. Just her sublime creature, Iris, to whom he was actually married—who, in this newly discovered perfection, took on all the qualities he once imagined existed only in such great works of art as they had examined in their first moments together. You might say he’d gone from one extreme to another, from hardly appreciating Iris at all to idealizing her as a goddess.
Which made it all the more bewildering when, after leaving the hospital almost with relief at three o’clock in the afternoon to retrieve the children from school, he came home to discover a world he did not understand.
He knew at once that someone had searched the apartment. Among the first things you learned as a covert operative, you figured how to detect the signs of intrusion. Sometimes it was easy, as when the searchers didn’t bother to hide their intentions and just ransacked the place. Other times they covered their tracks exquisitely well, so the subject wouldn’t know he was under suspicion.
But even after four years as a private citizen, more or less, Sasha still kept these residual instincts. His eyes still traveled to the drawers, to the doors, to the rug, and examined them—not even consciously—for disturbance. He couldn’t remember what, exactly, had told him all was not as he’d left it. He just knew. He told the children to wait in the living room as he went through the house, finishing at last in his own office, which he knew to be clean—there couldn’t possibly be anything there to interest the KGB, and yet still he felt this terror as he took out his key and opened all the drawers and felt along the horizontal panel where, in another desk in another city in another lifetime, he had once cut a small hole on a false bottom to form a cavity, and in this cavity he would keep his papers and his one-time pad for coding and his Minox camera.
Of course, this was a different desk, in a different city, in a different lifetime, and the thought of carving a hole hadn’t even crossed his mind, until now. Until his hand felt along the top of the middle drawer—right where the false bottom in his old desk drawer used to be—and encountered a square opening into a cavity that contained something peculiar.
A small electronic device he recognized as a one-way radio receiver.
Despite ransacking the entire apartment in a kind of delirious tantrum, like a child, he hadn’t found anything else. He had only this device that might have come from anywhere—he told himself—might have been left by a previous owner. Did he believe himself? He couldn’t say. He didn’t want to think about what it meant and who might have used it and for how long, and there was only one way to keep himself from thinking too much. He went to the liquor cabinet in which Iris kept a bottle of hospitable vodka in case of guests and he poured himself a glass, and when that was finished he went down to the liquor store around the corner and bought another bottle of vodka, and he had not stopped drinking until that bottle was empty and so was his head.
But now he’s sober again. That’s always the trouble, isn’t it? At some point you return to sobriety and nothing’s changed, except it’s probably gotten worse because you were drunk and did drunken things. And in addition to the crashing almighty hangover he woke up with this morning, he had experienced the peculiar confusion and indignity of being urged into the trunk of a car by Sumner Fox—you couldn’t argue with Sumner Fox, he was just too strong—because Iris was in danger. In danger of what? Fox wouldn’t say. The kids just thought it was a terrific adventure, but they weren’t in the trunk of the car. Sasha vomited twice, until there was nothing left to vomit. They stopped a couple of times and Fox, with a sympathetic face under a wig and hat, gave him water. They passed through some kind of border checkpoint, during which Sasha expected any moment that a guard would open the trunk and shoot him, but for some reason the guards asked no questions and waved them right through. Afterward Fox told him it was the border to Latvia, and they were going to pick up Iris and Ruth and the baby and go somewhere safe.
This is all he knows. This is what he’s said to this KGB woman across the table from him—leaving out the part about the one-way radio—with all the conviction of truth, because he can’t say for certain who put that radio receiver there, and when it was last used, and what it was used for. Every time his mind reaches out to touch that poisoned cup, he snatches it back. No, it’s not possible. It’s unthinkable! All those thoughtless conversations with Iris about his work, all those innocent questions she asked. All those papers he brought home with him, all those secrets he shared with her because she was Iris. They were devoted to each other. Her loyalty was so essential to his existence that he didn’t even think about it—like breathing.
But the KGB woman stares at him with her cold eyes, so he looks down obediently at the piece of paper in front of him and says, “It’s in code.”
“Yes, of course the message is encoded. Unfortunately our cryptographers have been unable to decipher it. It’s the recipient who interests us. Do you see the address line, in plain English? The name Lonicera?”
“Lonicera? I don’t know him.”
“It is the name of the owner of the flat. It is also the scientific name for the genus of plants commonly known as honeysuckle.”
“Honeysuckle?”
“Yes, it’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it? I understand you and your family stayed in a house with the same name, the summer before your defection. It was owned by a man named Philip Beauchamp, whom we know to have been employed by the British intelligence service during the war.”
“Philip Beauchamp is dead. I killed him myself. It was an accident, of course—”
“Of course. These things happen. Still, it’s a peculiar coincidence.”
The woman stares at him without blinking. He stares back. He knows his gaze has some power—something to do with the particular shade of his eyes, which others find mesmerizing. It’s a power he never realized until Nedda pointed it out to him, the first time she took him to bed. He wasn’t a virgin, but he’d only slept with a couple of prostitutes, so it was a new and exquisite experience to lie among clean sheets afterward and talk and touch and kiss. She covered his eyes with her hands and said, That’s better. He asked her what she meant, and she said that he could make her do anything with those eyes of his, that ultramarine color like the purest lake in the world. She murmured in her gravelly voice that she only had to look at those beautiful eyes and she came off, like that—she snapped her fingers. Of course, she was just speaking hyperbole, bed talk, but still. The idea of his magnetic gaze gave him confidence. He would never have dared to approach Iris without it.
Now
he trains those eyes on this KGB woman—my God, he doesn’t even know her name!—as if he’s casting a spell, the old razzle-dazzle, except it doesn’t seem to have any effect on her.
She looks, in fact, a little bored.
“Let us cut to the chase, Dubinin. As you Americans say.”
“I’m not an American. I’m a Soviet citizen now, remember?”
She shrugs this away. “You have something I require—a full confession of your crimes, and a certain piece of information which we know you to be carrying to your Western handlers. I, on the other hand, have in my possession something terribly important to you—your wife, who is very sick, it seems, and your children.”
“Is that a threat? You’re threatening me with the lives of my family?”
“Of course not. The decision is yours. The power of life and death is in your hands.” The woman spreads her own large palms before him. “I merely offer you the chance for redemption from your crimes, like a good Communist.”
“I can’t confess to a crime I haven’t committed. I can’t give you information I don’t possess. You can torture me, you can do whatever you like with me, but I have nothing to say.”
“Torture?” She raises her eyebrows. “Don’t be dramatic. I don’t torture people for information. Goodness, no. It’s barbaric.”
“No, you’re exquisitely subtle, aren’t you? Bloodless.”
The woman cocks her head a few degrees. “You look as if you could use a little fresh air. Let’s take a walk, shall we?”
Outside, the night is cool and clear, a taste of salt. Sasha has no idea where they are. Some military facility, probably. He sees the shadow of barbed wire against the horizon. A ghost of a watchtower from which a bright light flares and disappears. A few squat buildings pass by, barracks by the look of them. Already dawn is approaching. A yellow, hazy glow like enemy bombardment illuminates the sky to the east. The KGB woman is tall and matches his long-legged pace. Their footsteps crunch along the gravel path. A few yards behind them, a guard follows discreetly.
Our Woman in Moscow Page 33