Bearpit (43 page)

Yuri was fleeing with both hands outstretched, to detect the trees, but only his right hand struck the obstruction and it wasn't wood and he stopped, frightened by the unknown, feeling out and touching the coldness with both hands. It was, absurdly, the seeking helicopter light which briefly illuminated it and even showed him the commencement of the culvert, where it opened to the stream. He groped along its length, in the darkness again, to its beginning and felt around it, trying to assess the size. Big, he determined: huge, in fact. He'd have to bend but it would be possible to walk in. Maybe even run. No, couldn't run. There was the stream. Water. What he needed to defeat the animals whose yapping and barking was very close now. The water's flowing would actually disguise any sound.

The helicopter returned, again briefly illuminating. The stream emerged from somewhere above, about a foot across, but a much wider path and a concrete receiving sluice had been built at the entrance to the pipe which ran in the open for about fifty yards. And then disappeared into the hillside. The wideness of the stream had given Yuri the clue: it was a drainage pipe to carry off the melted winter snows (‘there are lodges and good skiing all around') from a river that had been eroding the hillside through which it passed. How far was it buried, before re-emerging? Yuri definitely heard a man's voice this time; an irrelevant question, then.

He slipped out of the rucksack and, thrusting it before him like a shield, entered the total darkness of the pipe. The water came up above his ankles, soaking very quickly through his boots and numbing his feet. He scuffed along, bent double, feeling the slime underfoot. It was greasy to his touch when he reached sideways for support to the wall of the drain and he pulled his hand quickly back again, offended. He was aware of a sound above the hiss of the water, a squeaking, and recoiled when something brushed against his leg, above the waterline. The smell – wet decay and decomposing rot – was so repugnant Yuri gagged, choking back vomit. After several hundred yards he turned but was unable to see the slightly lighter circle marking the entrance so he decided at last to risk the torch.

Dozens of reflective spots of light came back at him. Eyes. He'd expected rats but not so many. They swarmed either side, unafraid, but were avoiding the water. Just rats? He couldn't see anything else. Surely the water would have prevented it being habitable to snakes! The slime virtually encircled the pipe, showing the volume of water at the height of the snow thaw. How did the rats survive then? Yuri put the rucksack back on, to free his hands, and waded on, directing the torchlight straight ahead, desperately anxious for some sign of the tunnel's end. Total blackness stretched ahead of him. A rat squeaked and made as if to jump at him and Yuri whimpered away, shuddering. And not just with revulsion. The coldness was moving up from his feet, actually making it difficult for him to walk properly and he clamped his mouth closed against the distraction of his teeth chattering. He moved the torch up again, away from his immediate path. Still total blackness but at least there were fewer rats: far fewer. He supposed it was obvious they would congregate around the beginning of the tunnel because of the need to forage outside for food.

Attuned as he was to sound after the forest manhunt it was the change in the rush of water which registered first, louder and faster, and expectantly he pointed the torch again, looking for the outlet to the river into which the stream fed, but couldn't see it. He drove himself forward, wanting to get out of the foul place, and had there been more feeling in his feet and legs he might have detected the change underfoot, because it was not abrupt but graded. It was not until he began to slip on the slime that he became aware that the pipe was curving increasingly downwards. And realized the sound wasn't a river but the fall of water and that was why there were no longer any rats. By then it was too late. Yuri clutched out but there was no purchase in the slippery walls and then he fell, awkwardly, losing the torch. The rucksack became a float beneath him and the rush of water hurried him down the now virtually perpendicular pipe. Everything was black. He was engulfed in rushing, choking water but he fought against choking because he could not breathe, either. Yuri was not conscious of hurtling out of the pipemouth. The indication was a lessening of the water's push, where it spread into a man-created waterfall and of falling differently and helplessly through space, without the hardness of the concrete tube around him. He tried to correct himself, to get as near as he could into the parachute landing position he had been taught, but the rucksack unbalanced him and he cartwheeled, out of control. It was only later, in daylight and from the bank to which he hauled himself, that Yuri realized how close – hardly more than a foot – he had come to being thrown against the sharp-ridged granite cliff face that would almost certainly have killed him. Instead, propelled from it by the thrust of the water, he landed actually in the river, but from the height from which he fell it was practically the same as striking solid ground. His left wrist twisted under him and he felt a sear of agony and what little breath he still held was knocked out of him.

It was the rucksack, still acting like a float, which prevented his drowning in those first few minutes. He groaned breath back into his body and, unable to use his left arm, paddled instead with his right, combining the rucksack's support and the river's current to get himself to the pebbled bank.

Yuri lay for a long time unmoving, recovering, at last with his right hand groping along his left arm, trying to assess the damage. The wrist was already swelling but he could just move his fingers: sprained, not broken, he decided. He tore the sleeve of the shirt away at the shoulder, soaked it further in the water, and then bound it as a cold compress around the wrist with his good hand and his teeth before pulling himself further away from the river to drier ground.

Not like Bryansk at all, he thought. Worse. But there was a comparison. For the Bryansk exercise the
spetsnaz
had been alerted to what he was attempting. Just as the helicopters and the armed men and dogs – unimaginable protection but for one obvious reason – had been forewarned, back there.

He knew, at last, what Kazin intended by the instruction to locate the defector.
I
think I could kill someone who tried to kill me
, he thought. So it hadn't ended with the death of his father: destroy or be destroyed, he accepted.

‘What was it?' demanded Levin. They were in the main room of the house, Galina nervously close by his side, Petr by the window watching the car lights of the returning searchers.

‘False alarm,' assured Proctor. ‘The observer in the helicopter thought he saw someone but it couldn't have been. We've covered every inch.'

‘What then?' asked Galina, unconvinced.

‘An animal,' insisted the FBI man. ‘We've had them trigger the sensors before. The observer is a new guy: too jumpy.'

‘You can't be sure,' argued the woman.

‘Isn't there something more important to think about?' reminded Proctor, who had brought Yuri's false message. ‘Moscow are actually thinking of letting Natalia out!'

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 Crookshånk.

‘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?'