Bearpit

by Brian Freemantle

  There weren’t any. Neither was there the slightest evidence to doubt Hernandez’ commitment. And nor did the personnel records show up an internal transfer of anyone connected in the remotest way with the man’s activities or reports in Latin America. Refusing to be deflected, Myers extended the transfer period to two and then three months either side of the June date. Still there was no one who could be linked with the Nicaraguan.

  ‘It doesn’t make any fucking sense!’ erupted Myers.

  ‘It has to, somehow,’ said the more controlled Norris.

  ‘How!’

  ‘If I knew that, I would not be sitting here looking at a blank wall, would I?’

  ‘We’ve approached it the wrong way,’ realized Crookshank.

  ‘What wrong way?’ demanded Myers, whose decision it had been.

  Instead of replying, Crookshank said: ‘What’s the most positive thing we have?’

  Neither of the other two men replied at once. Then Norris said: ‘The date?’

  ‘The date,’ agreed Crookshank. ‘And the fact that there was a relocation.’ With a lawyer’s pedantry, he searched through his papers, then smiled up. ‘ “He said the move almost coincided with his transfer,” ‘ he quoted. ‘Drew’s verbatim record of Kapalet’s account. Two months and three months isn’t almost coinciding. We’ve confused ourselves, trying to involve Hernandez.’

  ‘What have we got, without him?’ demanded Myers, irked at the criticism.

  ‘What we’ve just agreed to be the most positive lead there is,’ lectured Crookshank. He went back to his papers again, coming up with a single sheet. ‘The first list,’ he said. ‘Of internal transfers one month either side of June thirtieth. Fifteen people: five seconded to overseas stations, six retired, four departmental moves.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ agreed Myers reluctantly.

  ‘We could sweat them all on a polygraph in a week,’ accepted Norris.

  ‘But no advance warning,’ agreed Crookshank.

  John Willick didn’t need it. He’d handled three of the Crisis Committee’s requests for names and biographical details of people affected by internal movements. And knew from casual gossip over coffee and two hurriedly sought-out cafeteria lunches on successive days with others in the personnel department that there had been at least five further inquiries, all for precisely the same sort of material. That by itself, after Oleg’s warning, would have been sufficient to alarm the American. But it was not by itself. The requests clearly specified movements either side of the date when the controller he knew only as Aleksandr had been moved from Washington. And came from an unspecified committee sufficiently important to qualify for a scarlet-classified, respond-this-day security designation. So it was not alarm Willick felt; it was terror.

  He used the number he had been given by Shelenkov and had reconfirmed as an emergency contact by the man’s successor, careless of the panic he heard in his own voice when he demanded an immediate meeting, refusing in even more panic to wait until the following day for the opening of any of their customary public monuments or places and agreeing at once and without thought to a bar he didn’t know in Georgetown.

  It was not where he expected it to be, on M Street, but against the river and directly beneath the skeleton of the overhead railway. Eager for omens of protection, Willick was relieved to get a seat at the bar directly abutting a corner, so that he could sit without the possibility of anyone approaching him unseen. How long would it be, before they did approach him? Try to rationalize, he told himself, striving for control. Try to assess. Couldn’t have isolated him yet: the request was general, for all the transfers. One of several then. But how many? Impossible to know, because he could not risk asking around any more than he already had. Eight, of which he knew. Probably more. Pointless attempting a possible figure. How were they being investigated? Alphabetically or …? Or how? Couldn’t think of another way. Had to be something like alphabetical, he supposed: they hadn’t got to him yet and from what he knew the first request had arrived three days before. Could have been earlier, of course. Thank God his name began with the initial letter that it did. When then? Tomorrow? The day after? No way of knowing. Jesus, where was Oleg? He gestured for a refill and when the barman came asked for a large one. Finished, he thought: he was finished. Christ, wouldn’t Eleanor laugh! Actually enjoy it. Keep cuttings of newspaper reports and go on all the breakfast TV shows. Bitch would probably write a book: My Unsuspecting Life with a Russian Spy. Make a fortune. Jesus, where was Oleg! He held the glass up, as a signal to the barman.

  The Russian came bowed-headed into the bar and directly to the corner where Willick was sitting: the two adjoining bar stools were empty and Oleg sat on the furthest one, so there was a gap between them.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ demanded Willick.

  Instead of replying Oleg ordered draught beer from the returning barman and waited until it was served and the man moved away before he spoke. He said: ‘You were extremely careless. Foolish.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There is an inquiry going on at Langley?’

  ‘You know damned well there is.’

  ‘And you are suspect?’

  ‘All the transfers, around the time of Aleksandr’s recall, have been pulled from records.’

  ‘Yet you come directly here without checking in the most rudimentary way whether or not you are under surveillance and complain when I don’t immediately join you!’

  Instinctively, feeling stupid halfway through the gesture, Willick jerked around towards the door and back again.

  ‘You’re not being followed,’ assured the Russian. He took the top off his beer, making a loud sucking sound. ‘We followed you.’

  ‘They’re on to me,’ insisted Willick impatiently. ‘They’re checking transfers, around the June date.’

  Oleg drank further, nodding in calm agreement as he replaced the handled mug. ‘I think you’re probably right.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ protested the American. ‘You said you were my friend. Wouldn’t abandon me.’

  ‘And we won’t,’ said Oleg.

  ‘So what can I do?’ moaned Willick.

  ‘Cross, whenever you want.’

  ‘Cross?’ The American looked blankly at the hunched roly-poly figure beside him, genuinely confused.

  ‘To the Soviet Union,’ expanded Oleg.

  Willick continued to look blankly at the other man. Never, once, had the idea of defecting – of leaving America – occurred to him. He’d made the approach to the Russians because he was desperate for money. But naively he’d only ever regarded it as a temporary expediency, something he would be able to abandon once he straightened himself out. Jagged-voiced, unable to stop the giggle, he said: ‘Defect! To Moscow!’

  ‘Have you thought about what would happen when they arrest you?’ demanded the Russian. ‘You’re a traitor, John. The worse kind of traitor. There won’t be any rules, any kindness. They’ll stretch you anyway they feel like – lie detector, chemicals, whatever – and when they’ve got all they want they’ll put you up before a court and you’ll get life. Can you imagine that, John? Life inside some penitentiary. Fresh meat, to be passed around and raped. Or maybe you’d get lucky: find someone with power inside who’d want to keep you for himself. Still have to sleep with him of course. Be his wife. Better than being gang-banged, though. Less chance of catching a disease: lot of disease in American jails, so I believe. AIDS.’

  ‘Stop it!’ pleaded Willick. ‘Please stop it!’

  ‘You like another drink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Large?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As the fresh glasses were put before them the Russian said: ‘Not much of a choice really, is it?’

  ‘What would I have to do in Moscow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Oleg honestly. ‘I was simply told that we would accept you, if you asked.’

  ‘When?’

  �
�How much time do you think you’ve got?’ asked Oleg.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Willick despairingly.

  ‘Tomorrow might be too late,’ said the Russian. ‘What’s to stop you coming now?’

  Nothing! thought Willick, in mounting excitement. All he had here were debts and hassle and an ex-wife in two weeks’ time due alimony that he didn’t have. It would be wonderful to turn his back on it all! Actually dump on Eleanor. He said: ‘How would I do it?’

  ‘You’ve got a passport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a plane leaving here at eleven tonight, for Paris. Just go to our embassy there and you will be told the rest.’

  ‘You planned this?’ demanded Willick.

  ‘I told you before that we were your friends,’ reminded Oleg. ‘When I got your call I found out how it could be done. You’ve got a lot of time.’

  ‘I don’t have money for a ticket,’ remembered Willick.

  Oleg passed a sealed envelope across the intervening chair, his hand concealed beneath the bar top. ‘Enough for first class.’

  ‘I could do it,’ said Willick, like a child trying to encourage its own endeavours.

  ‘Of course you could do it,’ supported Oleg.

  ‘I would go to jail, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘For life,’ said the Russian positively.

  Willick shuddered and said: ‘I’ll never be able to repay you.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ said the man.

  On the credit side Yuri decided there were advantages to being assigned special duties by the head of the First Chief Directorate. Unquestioningly Granov granted him monitoring authority to the UN-channelled correspondences, but more importantly the rezident did not object to Yuri living more at the 53rd Street apartment than at Riverdale. It meant Yuri was able to spend as much time as he wanted with Caroline, which he did rarely thinking of the breach of regulations or of any inherent dangers. He was guilty of so many breaches of regulations and faced so much inherent danger that the nights they were together seemed by comparison oases of normality and safety.

  In no way, however, did he neglect the search for Yevgennie Levin because he realized that an obvious attack if he failed could be the accusation under some disciplinary code of professional incompetence in carrying out an order.

  He grew convinced that the letters were the key. He assembled the family’s to Natalia and hers to them separately by date but connected them through a central graph upon which he listed what he regarded as potential clues to Levin’s whereabouts.

  The punctuality of their replies confirmed what he regarded as the most positive indicator that Levin was on the east coast of America and not too far from New York. Because he controlled the letter flow, he was able to time precisely the handover of Natalia’s first letter after his return from Moscow, at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. The intercepted response – from Galina – was not only dated the same day but timed, at eight o’clock the same evening. There had to be subtracted, of course, some unknown time against the delivery not being initiated immediately and for the period it would have taken for the mother to have read it, even guessing that she would have done so at once. And for the possibility that it had gone from New York by air and not by road, which he doubted but for which he had to make allowances because in a letter from Levin there was reference to a helicopter journey and of having flown directly over Washington landmarks like the Capitol building and the Washington obelisk and Lincoln Memorial. On his chart, Yuri wrote ‘Five hours’ but was prepared to adjust either higher or lower. In the same letter Natalia had obediently followed his instruction to complain about the coldness of Moscow and from Petr it prompted the sort of reply for which Yuri had hoped.

  ‘It is cold here, too,’ the boy wrote. ‘We are told there are a lot of ski lodges and that the snow will be here in a week or two, a month at the outside.’

  From the date on the letter Yuri wrote ‘November, first or last week?’ recognizing it as an indicator hopefully as positive as the timing of the replies. It definitely ruled out at least twelve of the southern or mid-west states, where snow never fell. And also the mountain or western states where it did, because on such high ground the snow was permanent and not dependent upon the seasons. And to none of them, even by aeroplane, could a letter have been delivered from New York and prompted a reply in such a short time. There was winter skiing in the Catskill Mountains, Yuri knew. Throughout New England, too. Still a vast area: too vast.

  At the first reading Yuri underlined Levin’s listing of the Washington landmarks, seeking a significance but not immediately finding it. Caught suddenly by an idea, Yuri posed as the journalist he was supposed to be and telephoned the Federal Aviation Authority in Washington using his legend name of William Bell and the title of his Amsterdam cover publication to be told that no civil or commercial winged aircraft would be permitted low-level overflight of the sort he described. It would, however, be possible by helicopter, the spokesman helpfully added. Before ringing off Yuri established the average cruise speed of small, passenger-carrying helicopters and by computing speed against time came up again with a travelling period of around five hours, four at the minimum. Levin had not only described Washington from the air. He’d written of flying over New York. Which indicated an approach from the north. Marking the American capital as the extreme of one sweep of the compass Yuri halved his equation and completed the circle with Washington as that one outside marker. It created a radius that stopped just short of Boston but reached out to include huge tracts of Virginia, West Virginia, practically all of Pennsylvannia, and further daunting areas in Connecticut, New York State and Massachusetts. Too much, he thought. Too much while he possessed too little to enable him to narrow the boundaries.

  On his graph he created a box, in which to list the references he considered important but which he could not understand. What did the passage in Levin’s earliest letter mean, referring to trees that appeared from the air to be defoliated, like the Americans defoliated Vietnam? Or the phrase about apparent vantage points to the sea where there was no sea? Or even more intriguing, the paragraph that read of spies in statues and spies in history.

  Still too many questions against too few answers. When was it going to change, the other way? Another question, Yuri recognized.

  31

  John Willick felt like he had that special day, when he’d been a kid of fourteen. His father, who had been first mate on an oil tanker and away from home for months at a time, had returned from sea and taken him to the amusement park at Coney Island and told him he could go on as many rides as he liked; do what he liked. Willick didn’t think he’d missed one, not a single one. And he’d eaten ice cream as well and candied apples and cotton candy and then he’d been sick, violently, the man standing behind him and holding him around the waist, to stop him falling over. It had been wonderful.

  Willick was sure he was not going to be sick this time, although the chance seemed there from the moment he seated himself in the first-class section of the Air France 747, immediately to be handed champagne and then foie gras and after that a white wine and a red wine he’d never heard of, to go with the seafood and the beef prepared in a way he’d never heard of, either. Wonderful, like that day at Coney Island. Only better. He was grown up now.

  He celebrated during the flight but was careful not to get drunk, aware despite his euphoria that he’d escaped disaster (would he really have been so sexually abused, in prison?) by inches or by minutes and not wanting to endanger that escape by a mistake until he was completely safe, in Moscow. He still had a slight headache when the plane landed at Paris, at breakfast time because of the time change, and felt gritty-eyed and stubble-chinned. From Charles de Gaulle airport he took a taxi into the centre of Paris, chose a café at random actually on the Champs Elysées that he’d seen in all the movies and on television and sat over coffee that was too bitter, watching the city wake up around him. Free! he thought: I’m free. Free of
Eleanor and free of horses that don’t win and stocks that don’t rise and free of pay-or-else letters and most important of all free of fear. He knew – was absolutely certain – that Moscow was going to be terrific. A new start, with the slate wiped clean and his being treated properly, like he should be treated, with respect. No one had ever treated him properly, with respect. Not Eleanor or those bastards in the CIA. Never. Served them right, all of them. Bastards. Bitches and bastards. Good, to be free.

  Willick felt a twitch of apprehension when he came to pay but the waiter, who spoke English, accepted the American money and thanked him politely for a three-dollar tip, which was twice what it should have been, and Willick set off for the Soviet embassy buoyed by the gratitude. Being treated properly, he thought; with respect.

  He had to ask twice for directions to the street address Oleg had given him in the Washington bar (could it really have only been last night, less than twenty-four hours?) and when he located it at last Willick’s uncertainty worsened at the sight of the uniformed gendarmes on duty around the embassy, with a police truck that looked like a shed on wheels obviously drawn up in a side street.

  The American loitered on the far side of the avenue, watching the arrivals and departures, realizing with relief that there was no entry challenge from the French policemen. Stomach in turmoil, wishing now he had not eaten the seafood and the beef in that rich sauce on the aircraft, Willick forced himself to cross the road and walk as confidently as he could past the guards and into the compound, ears ringing for the demand to stop, which never came. Wet-palmed, he handed the letter that Oleg had given him to the unsmiling clerk at the vestibule desk, praying there was a lavatory nearby that he could use. Damn the seafood; shellfish had never agreed with him.

  The letter was dispatched with a guard, the response was instantaneous, and Willick’s nervousness ebbed away just as quickly. Being treated properly, just like he knew he’d be. Respectfully.

  Sergei Kapalet, who never identified himself, strode arm outstretched from somewhere at the rear of the building, retaining Willick’s hand to guide him back beyond the entrance. Willick expected an office but instead was led into a kind of apartment, with couches and easy chairs and even fresh flowers in a vase. There was not just a lavatory for Willick’s immediate need but a shower and a complete toilet kit, for him to shave, and a robe he was able to wear while his suit was pressed and his shirt laundered. In his excellent English Kapalet maintained a constant and relaxing stream of small talk, inquiring about the flight and wondering about the delay in Willick’s expected arrival at the embassy (there is nothing like the first petit déjeuner on the Champs Elysées, he agreed) and promising the American he’d chosen an excellent restaurant for lunch.