Edge of Eternity (105 page)

Next day he had turned up on her doorstep at six in the evening, having got her address from the SB, the Polish secret police. He had taken her to dinner at a hot new restaurant called the Duck. She quickly realized that he was as skeptical about Communism as she was. A week later she slept with him.

She still thought about Vasili, wondering how his writing was going, and whether he missed their monthly meetings. She was viscerally angry with him, though she was not sure why. He had been crass, but men
were
crass, especially the handsome ones. What she was really seething about was the years before his proposal. Somehow she felt that what she had done for him during that long time had been dishonored. Did he believe she had just been waiting, year after year, until he was ready to be her husband? That thought still infuriated her.

Staz was now spending two or three nights a week at her apartment.
They never went to his place: he said it was little better than a barracks. But they were having a great time. And all along, in the back of her mind, she had been wondering if his anti-Communism might one day lead to action.

She turned to face him. “How do you like my eyes?”

“I adore them,” he said. “They have enslaved me. Your eyes are like—”

“I mean my makeup, idiot.”

“Are you wearing makeup?”

“Men are blind. How are you going to defend your country with such poor powers of observation?”

His mood became dark again. “We make no provision for defending our own country,” he said. “The Polish army is totally subservient to the USSR. All our planning is about supporting the Red Army in an invasion of Western Europe.”

Staz often talked like this, complaining about Soviet domination of the Polish military. It was a sign of how much he trusted her. In addition, Tanya had found that Poles spoke boldly about the failings of Communist governments. They felt entitled to complain in a way that other Soviet subjects did not. Most people in the Soviet bloc treated Communism as a religion that was a sin to question. The Poles tolerated Communism as long as it served them, and protested as soon as it fell short of their expectations.

All the same, Tanya now switched on her bedside radio. She did not think her apartment was bugged—the SB had their hands full spying on Western journalists, and probably left Soviet ones alone—but caution was an ingrained habit.

“We are all traitors,” Staz finished.

Tanya frowned. He had never before called himself a traitor. This was serious. She said: “What on earth do you mean?”

“The Soviet Union has a contingency plan to invade Western Europe with a force called the Second Strategic Echelon. Most of the Red Army tanks and personnel carriers headed for West Germany, France, Holland, and Belgium will pass through Poland on their way. The United States will use nuclear bombs to try to destroy those forces before they reach the West—that is, while they are still crossing Poland. We estimate that four hundred to six hundred nuclear weapons will be
exploded in our country. There will be nothing left but a nuclear wasteland. Poland will have disappeared. If we cooperate in the planning of this event, how can we not be traitors?”

Tanya shuddered. It was a nightmare scenario—but terrifyingly logical.

“America is not the enemy of the Polish people,” said Staz. “If the USSR and the USA go to war in Europe, we should side with the Americans, and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of Moscow.”

Was he just blowing off steam, or something more? Tanya said carefully: “Is it just you who thinks like this, Staz?”

“Certainly not. Most officers my age feel the same. They pay lip service to Communism, but if you talk to them when they're drunk you'll hear another story.”

“In that case, you have a problem,” she said. “By the time the war begins, it will be too late for you to win the trust of the Americans.”

“This is our dilemma.”

“The solution is obvious. You have to open a channel of communication now.”

He gave her a cool look. The thought crossed her mind that he might be an agent provocateur, assigned to provoke her into subversive remarks so that she could be arrested. But she could not imagine that a faker would be such a good lover.

Staz said: “Are we just talking, now, or are we having a serious discussion?”

Tanya took a breath. “I'm as serious as life and death,” she said.

“Do you really think it could be done?”

“I know it,” she said emphatically. She had been engaging in clandestine subversion for two decades. “It's the easiest thing in the world—but keeping it secret, and getting away with it, is more difficult. You would have to exercise the most extreme caution.”

“Do you think I
should
do it?”

“Yes!” she said passionately. “I don't want another generation of Soviet children—or Polish children—to grow up under this stifling tyranny.”

He nodded. “I can tell that you really mean it.”

“I do.”

“Will you help me?”

“Of course I will.”

•   •   •

Cameron Dewar was not sure he would make a good spy. The undercover stuff he had done for President Nixon had been amateurish, and he was lucky not to have gone to jail with his boss, John Ehrlichman. When he joined the CIA he had been trained in the tradecraft of dead drops and brush passes, but he had never actually used such tricks. After six years at CIA headquarters in Langley he had at last been posted to a foreign capital, but he still had not done clandestine work.

The U.S. embassy in Warsaw was a proud white marble building on a street called Aleje Ujazdowskie. The CIA occupied a single office near the ambassador's suite of rooms. Off the office was a windowless storeroom that was used for developing photographic film. The staff was four spies and a secretary. It was a small operation because they had few informants.

Cam did not have much to do. He read the Warsaw newspapers, with the aid of a dictionary. He reported the graffiti he saw:
LONG LIVE THE POPE
and
WE WANT GOD
. He talked to men like himself who worked for the intelligence services of other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, especially those of West Germany, France, and Britain. He drove a used lime-green Polski Fiat whose battery was so undersize that it had to be recharged every night or the car would not start in the morning. He tried to find a girlfriend among the embassy secretaries, and failed.

He felt a loser. His life had once seemed full of promise. He had been a star student at school and university, and his first job had been in the White House. Then it had all gone wrong. He was determined not to let his life be blighted by Nixon. But he needed a success. He wanted to be top of the class again.

Instead he went to parties.

Embassy staff who had wives and children were happy to go home in the evenings and watch American movies on videotape, so the single men got to go to all the less important receptions. Tonight Cam was heading to the Egyptian embassy for a gathering to welcome a new deputy ambassador.

When he started the Polski, the radio came on. He kept it tuned to the SB wavelength. Reception was often weak, but sometimes he could hear the secret police talking as they tailed people around the city.

Sometimes they were tailing him. The cars changed but it was usually the same two men, a swarthy one he called Mario and a fat guy he thought of as Ollie. There seemed to be no pattern to the surveillance, so he just assumed he was more or less always being watched. That was probably what they wanted. Maybe they deliberately randomized their surveillance precisely in order to keep him permanently on edge.

But he, too, had been trained. Surveillance should never be avoided in an obvious way, he had learned, for that is a signal, to the other side, that you are up to something. Form regular habits, he had been told: go to Restaurant A every Monday, Bar B every Tuesday. Lull them into a false sense of security. But look for gaps in their watchfulness, times when their attention lapses. That will be when you can do something unobserved.

As he drove away from the U.S. embassy he saw a blue Skoda 105 tuck into the traffic two cars behind him.

The Skoda trailed him across the city. He saw Mario at the wheel and Ollie in the front passenger seat.

Cam parked in Alzacka Street and saw the blue Skoda pull up a hundred yards past him.

He was sometimes tempted to talk to Mario and Ollie, as they were so much part of his life, but he had been warned never to do that, for then the SB would switch personnel and it would take him time to recognize the new people.

He entered the Egyptian embassy and took a cocktail from a tray. It was so dilute he could hardly taste the gin. He talked to an Austrian diplomat about the difficulty of buying comfortable men's underwear in Warsaw. When the Austrian drifted away, Cam looked around and saw a blond woman in her twenties standing alone. She caught his eye and smiled, so he went to speak to her.

He swiftly found out that she was Polish, her name was Lidka, and she worked as a secretary in the Canadian embassy. She was wearing a tight pink sweater and a short black skirt that showed off her long legs. She spoke good English, and listened to Cam with an intensity of concentration that he found flattering.

Then a man in a pin-striped suit summoned her peremptorily, making Cam think he must be her boss, and the conversation broke up. Almost immediately Cam was approached by another attractive woman, and he began to think it was his lucky day. This one was older, about forty, but prettier, with short pale-blond hair and bright blue eyes enhanced by blue eye shadow. She spoke to him in Russian. “I've met you before,” she said. “Your name is Cameron Dewar. I'm Tanya Dvorkin.”

“I remember,” he said, glad of the chance to show off his fluency in Russian. “You're a reporter for TASS.”

“And you're a CIA agent.”

He certainly would not have told her that, so she must have guessed. Routinely, he denied it. “Nothing so glamorous,” he said. “Just a humble cultural attaché.”

“Cultural?” she said. “Then you can help me. What kind of painter is Jan Matejko?”

“I'm not sure,” he said. “Impressionist, I think. Why?”

“Art really not your thing?”

“I'm more a music person,” he said, feeling cornered.

“You probably love Szpilman, the Polish violinist.”

“Absolutely. Such technique with the bow!”

“What do you think of the poet Wislawa Szymborska?”

“I haven't read much of his work, sadly. Is this a test?”

“Yes, and you failed. Szymborska is a woman. Szpilman is a pianist, not a violinist. Matejko was a conventional painter of court scenes and battles, not an impressionist. And you're no cultural attaché.”

Cam was mortified to have been found out so easily. What a hopeless undercover agent he was! He tried to brush it off with humor. “I might just be a very bad cultural attaché.”

She lowered her voice. “If a Polish army officer wanted to talk to a representative of the USA, you could arrange it, I guess.”

Suddenly the conversation had taken a serious turn. Cam felt nervous. This could be some kind of trap.

Or it could be a genuine approach—in which case, it might represent a great opportunity for him.

He answered cautiously. “I can arrange for anyone to talk to the American government, naturally.”

“In secret?”

What the hell was this? “Yes.”

“Good,” she said, and walked away.

Cam got another drink. What had that been about? Was it real, or had she been mocking him?

The party was coming to an end. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. He thought of going to the bar in the Australian embassy, where he sometimes played darts with amiable spooks from Oz. Then he saw Lidka standing nearby, again on her own. She really was very sexy. He said to her: “Do you have plans for dinner?”

She looked puzzled. “You mean recipes?”

He smiled. She had not come across the phrase
plans for dinner.
He said: “I meant, would you like to have dinner with me?”

“Oh, yes,” she said immediately. “Could we go to the Duck?”

“Of course.” It was an expensive restaurant, though not if you were paying in American dollars. He looked at his watch. “Shall we leave now?”

Lidka surveyed the room. There was no sign of the man in the pin-striped suit. “I'm free,” she said.

They headed for the exit. As they were passing through the door the Soviet journalist, Tanya, reappeared and spoke to Lidka in bad Polish. “You dropped this,” she said, holding out a red scarf.

“It's not mine,” said Lidka.

“I saw it fall from your hand.”

Someone touched Cam's elbow. He turned away from the confused conversation and saw a tall, good-looking man of about forty dressed in the uniform of a colonel in the People's Army of Poland. In fluent Russian the man said: “I want to talk to you.”

Cam replied in the same language. “All right.”

“I will find a safe place.”

Cam could do nothing but say: “Okay.”

“Tanya will tell you where and when.”

“Fine.”

The man turned away.

Cameron turned his attention back to Lidka. Tanya was saying: “My mistake, how silly.” She walked quickly away. Clearly she had wanted to distract Lidka for the few moments the soldier was talking to Cam.

Lidka was puzzled. “That was a bit strange,” she said as they left the building.

Cam was excited, but he pretended to be equally mystified. “Peculiar,” he said.

Lidka persisted. “Who was that Polish officer who spoke to you?”

“No idea,” Cam said. “My car's this way.”

“Oh!” she said. “You have a car?”

“Yes.”

“Nice,” said Lidka, looking pleased.

•   •   •