Last Gasp (28 page)

“What, with your qualifications?” Boris had said, amazed. Dunayev had been one of his best students and had graduated with honors.

“I ran afoul of the
nachalstvo
,” the young man confessed, referring to the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats who wielded power in the state; displease them and you soon found yourself humping bricks on a building site or cleaning railway carriages, degree or no degree. “A few friends and myself printed and circulated a magazine and it didn’t go down too well. You know how it is.”

Boris knew, though not from personal experience, how it was. He felt sorry for young Dunayev, thinking it a sad waste of a keen intelligence.

After that they kept in touch, meeting occasionally for a drink in the evenings, and it struck Boris that for someone in a badly paid job Dunayev always seemed to have plenty of money to spend. The reason became clear when Boris once complained of not being able to buy a decent pair of shoes, and the next time they met Dunayev showed up with a pair of genuine English tan brogues, spanking new. He was
na levo,
he explained—literally “on the left”—which meant that he dealt unofficially in all kinds of goods and services, from prime cuts of meat to the best seats at the Bolshoi. The system had rejected him and therefore he was out to beat the system—on his terms.

When Boris made the decision to defect, it was naturally to Andrei Dunayev that he turned for help. It had been very simple. A phone call, a meeting in the park, and everything, according to Dunayev, would be arranged. Boris and his wife were to get their hands on as much money as they could, in cash, pack two suitcases (as if they were indeed going on a short vacation), and be ready at twenty-four hours notice to leave.

The word came. They were to take the overnight train to Riga where accommodations had been booked for them. They were to travel under their own name until out of the country. False papers would be supplied. Of course he trusted Dunayev, Boris kept telling himself, yet now that they were here, had taken that crucial and dangerous first step, he was beginning to have qualms.

After a light lunch of chicken and salad he and Nina walked arm in arm along the embankment that bordered the river. The port itself was some three miles away. They could see the tangle of cranes and the funnels of ships to the west. Hereabouts the river traffic was mainly strings of coal barges, tugs, and other small craft. Boris didn’t want to be away too long in case someone tried to make contact, so after ten minutes they turned and strolled back. He couldn’t help glancing nervously at every car that passed, wondering if they were being followed, observed, reported. Even the landlady made him nervous. Her eyes had bored right through him as she took his papers, noted down the details, and handed them back with a hard gray stare.

“Where will it be?” Nina asked, holding tightly on to his arm. “Sweden? Finland?”

Towering beside her, hunched inside his overcoat, Boris shook his head morosely. “I wish I knew. Wherever they send us, it won’t be easy. We both know the risk.”

She was silent for a while. “Are we doing the right thing, Boris? There’s still time to go back before we’re missed.”

“We can’t go back. I must get to America.”

“But why—why you?” she cried suddenly, clutching his arm, and Boris looked around fearfully. Nina bent her head and lowered her voice, even though there was no one else on the wide paved embankment. “There must be others who know what’s happening. Let them do something!”

“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps there are. But somebody has to take the responsibility. I know what’s happening and I feel responsible. How could I just sit back and do nothing?”

“But what can the Americans do?”

Boris stared sullenly across the river, sparkling in the weak afternoon sunshine. She had pierced to the heart of his dilemma. He recalled how Theo had been balked in his attempt to convince his own people that something had to be done before the environment took its revenge for the damage inflicted upon it by modern industrial man. Theo had been ignored, castigated, reviled—so what chance had he? All governments were tarred with the same brush. Capitalist or Communist, it didn’t make any difference. Don’t upset the equilibrium. At all costs maintain the status quo. Ignore unpalatable facts and they’ll go away.

These facts wouldn’t go away, and still he couldn’t answer her. They waited the rest of the afternoon and that evening for contact to be made, staying in their poky room on the second floor, fearful that the landlady might suspect something—mightn’t she begin to wonder what on earth they were doing here, this elderly respectable couple who were clearly ill at ease in such impoverished surroundings?

Nobody called to see them and the few times the phone rang in the dark brown-varnished hallway the calls weren’t for them.

At breakfast the next morning, sitting around the large communal dining table with the other three guests—two merchant seamen and an engineer from Leningrad—Boris heard a car draw up outside and his heart was in his mouth when he saw that it was a dark green Zhiguli, the model used by low-ranking KGB officers. There was nothing they could do; useless to run (run where?) and nowhere to hide.

Feigning indifference lest one of the people at the table was a police informer—there were
stukachi,
squealers, everywhere—Boris forced himself to swallow the last of the black bread and washed it down with hot strong tea.

Nina was looking down at her plate (did she too know about the car?), and the sight of her neat gray head, the hair parted in the middle and held in place by two combs, filled him with an ache of tenderness and affection.

It seemed his worst fears were coming true when the landlady entered and curtly informed him that there was someone to see him. Well, he thought, resigned, nothing else for it but to bluff his way through as best he could. Stick to the prearranged story that he and his wife had come to Riga (Riga, for God’s sake!) for a short break. But even as this was going through his mind Boris knew that it would never be believed. It never even occurred to him to wonder how the KGB had tracked them down: He just assumed, as he walked into the hallway, that they would know precisely where to find him, night or day. His fatalism was total.

The man was wearing a brown belted trench coat, standing with his back to Boris, studying a faded sepia photograph of a family group. Through the frosted vestibule door Boris saw the blurred silhouette of a lurking figure; the man’s colleague, no doubt.

The man in the trench coat turned casually to reveal a thin young face and pale deep-set eyes. He didn’t look at Boris, but beyond his right shoulder, and said, “Is this the one?”

“That’s the one.” The landlady was standing in the doorway with her arms folded. She jerked her head at Boris. “He checked in with his wife yesterday about noon. I thought there was something a bit funny about them. Call themselves Stanovnik.” She used the name like an insult, smiling sardonically as if at some private joke.

“What is this? What’s going on?” Boris asked, trying a show of bafflement shading into righteous indignation. “My name is Stanovnik. I work for the Hydro-Meteorological Service in Moscow.”

The thin-faced young man gave a faint mocking smile. He was unshaven, Boris noticed, in fact rather unkempt generally. The KGB was becoming more and more slovenly in appearance these days.

“We already know that, Professor.” He motioned to the woman to close the door to the dining room and went on in a softer tone, “We also know why you’re here. Did you really think it would be so easy?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Are you the police? I have a right to know what you want with me.” His bones felt like water. Why in God’s name had he dragged Nina into this? Why?

“It’s pointless, Professor, keeping up this pretense.” The young man shrugged very slightly. “Dunayev told us everything. You should choose your friends more carefully.”

Boris stared at him for a full five seconds. His shoulders sagged. The strain was etched on his face. He swung around to confront the landlady but was unable to speak; his expression was eloquent enough.

“His wife’s in there,” the landlady said with a backward nod. Boris’s hatred had left her quite indifferent.

“You’ve done well,” the man in the trench coat said. “You will be rewarded.”

“I seek no reward,” said the landlady snidely. “I only wish to serve the state as best I can.”

“Damn you!” Boris ground out, his voice hoarse and shaking. “I hope you rot in hell”—raising his fist yet not knowing himself whether he really intended to stike her.

The man stepped forward and grabbed his arm. “You’re in enough trouble as it is, Professor. Don’t make it any worse for you and your wife. Are your things packed?” Boris nodded his head at the worn carpet and the man said, “Go and fetch them. Now. Hurry.”

When he returned with the two suitcases, breathing heavily, Nina was in the hallway. She didn’t utter a word as he helped her into her coat and then put his arms around her.

“No time for that,” the man snapped, opening the vestibule door and beckoning his colleague. He tapped one of the suitcases with his shoe. “In the car.” He nodded brusquely to the landlady as they all went out, and she came to the front door and stood watching, her face hard, devoid of expression.

The car pulled away. Boris and Nina were in the back, the young unshaven man in the passenger seat, his colleague driving. It was a bright sunny day with hardly a cloud, though for Boris the outside world hardly existed. He stared straight ahead, defeated in spirit, sunk fathoms deep in his own thoughts. What a farce ... they hadn’t even made it to the border.

He came back to the present with a start, blinking. The man in the trench coat was offering a pack of cigarettes. Boris shook his head. He felt confused. What was this? The man lit two and passed one to his colleague. He loosened his trench coat and Boris glimpsed a grimy shirt collar.

“No introductions,” the man said, smoke trailing from his nostrils. “It’s safer that way. We’re taking you to Pavilosta, a small town on the coast about two hundred kilometers west of here. At eight o’clock tonight you’ll board a fishing vessel and at midnight you’ll be transferred to a motor launch. That’s the tricky bit. Then it’s a fast run to an island called Bornholm. Ever hear of it?”

Boris shook his head dumbly.

“Belongs to Denmark. We have a contact there. She will arrange passage to the mainland.” He glanced quickly over his shoulder and smiled. “All being well you should be in Copenhagen this time tomorrow.”

Boris found his voice. It sounded strange.

“What was all that about? Back there at the boardinghouse? We thought—”

“A necessary precaution. We have to make sure about these things. Your reaction was more than convincing.”

“And the landlady?”

“Yes, she’s good, isn’t she?” The young man grinned, shaking his head. “ ‘I only wish to serve the state as best I can.’ ” He laughed out loud. “Yes, I like that.”

In a side ward of the annex that housed the Diagnostic Research Unit of the Reagan Memorial Hospital, Denver, Dr. Ruth Patton watched a ten-year-old boy die in agony. His face was a mass of suppurating sores, obscuring his eyes and turning his mouth into a fat raw blister. She felt angry, helpless, and near to tears.

The child had been admitted four days ago complaining of chest and abdominal pains, vomiting green bile, and with hard shiny growths on his arms and legs. Unlike the other, earlier patients who had had to undergo a long process of clinical investigation before their condition could be identified, the boy had been immediately tested for dioxin poisoning, and the pathology lab had confirmed it within twelve hours.

Not that rapid and accurate diagnosis made a blind bit of difference, she told herself bitterly. Once it had infiltrated the body, dioxin caused irrevocable genetic damage, primarily to the nervous system. Depending on the concentration of the dose and the length of time the patient had been exposed to it, the outcome was slow agonizing death or, at best, permanent crippling of body and brain. There was nothing she, or anyone, could do.

Leaving the ward, she took off her mask and gown and dropped them into the sterilization chute. Her eyes were dry, her face pale but composed. She smiled briefly at one of the nurses as she went back to her office.

There she wrote out her notes and closed the file.

Case number nine. The third—and youngest—to die. Two others, a man in his mid-thirties, and an elderly woman, were still on the danger list. The remaining four had been moved to another ward now that their condition had stabilized. Would there be more? An epidemic? She shied away from the dreadful possibility.

Ruth turned her eyes, as she found herself doing countless times a day, to the map of Colorado on the wall, with its nine colored pins. The pins were sprinkled in an arc to the south and west of Colorado Springs, itself a few miles south of the Martin Marietta Space Center. The prevailing wind was from the northeast.

She looked at the map and thought again of what Gavin Chase had said, that evening at the Inchcapes’. Or rather, as she reminded herself, not so much what he had said as the questions he had asked, the doubts he had raised. Those questions and doubts filled her with a sickly foreboding that grew with each passing day and every new victim. And she was powerless to do anything about it.

“Isn’t that why he gave you the dossier?” Elizabeth Lucas said, bringing the coffeepot to the table. She was wearing a quilted housecoat, her face unmade-up but her tinted brown hair neatly brushed from its center parting. She couldn’t bear to be seen with untidy hair, even in front of her husband at breakfast. “Poor Mr. Lebasse.”

“I know, Liz, but what the hell can I do?” Gene Lucas shook pepper over his scrambled eggs and picked up his fork. Gray shadows encircled his eyes. He put the fork down, squinting painfully against the reflecting laminated surfaces and the rack of glinting kitchen utensils. “If Lebasse couldn’t trust his own people in the Defense Department, how can I? Somebody somewhere must have found out what he was doing. They must have.”