Agent 6 (21 page)

Same Day

Leo had no clear sense of how long he’d been sitting on the roof of the apartment block – several hours at least. After Panin had left, he and the girls had put the room back as it should be, resembling a home, the two beds side by side. Leo had begun to make dinner but abruptly abandoned his efforts, leaving the food uncooked. The only place he could think to go was the roof.

Teenagers sometimes came here to kiss and fool around if they couldn’t find anywhere else. Tonight, in the pouring rain, it was empty. Leo did not feel cold, even with his clothes soaked through. He could see out across the city, the night lights of Moscow smudged by rainfall. He stood up, walking to the edge of the building and looked down at the drop. He remained there for many minutes, trying to reason why he should step back. He remembered his promise. Stepping away from the edge, he turned his back on the city, heading downstairs to an apartment he’d once thought of as home.

EIGHT YEARS LATER

Soviet–Finnish Border
Soviet Checkpoint
760 Kilometres North-West of Moscow
240 Kilometres North-East of Helsinki
New Year’s Day 1973

The rucksack belonged to a man shot trying to cross the border into Finland. Despite it being a savage winter with the snow in the forests lying waist deep, the man had attempted the perilous crossing perhaps hoping that the weather and near-permanent darkness would make it easier to pass undetected. To trespass into this heavily controlled area by accident or design was considered an attempt to defect to the West, an act of treason. The soldiers patrolling, many on skis through the forest, were instructed to shoot to kill. There would be wide-reaching repercussions if a traitor managed to slip through and seek asylum abroad, revealing classified information about the Soviet Union to its enemies. On a personal level, Eli Romm, in charge of this zone, would be called be witribunal and would almost certainly lose his job and possibly his freedom, accused of neglect or, worse, of wilfully allowing an act of sabotage.

Eli examined the contents of the rucksack. It contained basic provisions: water, bread and cured meats. There was a change of clothes, dark in colour, a thick wool blanket, several boxes of matches, medical supplies, a sharp hunting knife and a steel cup – standard outdoor fare and of little interest. Eli tipped the rucksack upside down. Nothing else fell out. He felt the lining, running his finger along the stitches, convinced it held further evidence. He was right. There was a lump in the material, a secret pocket. Cutting through the material, ripping off the patch, he discovered the pocket contained several thin gold coins, bound in plastic, proof that this was a serious attempt at defection. Extensive preparations had been made – gold was nearly impossible to obtain for an ordinary citizen, the inference was that a foreign country was involved and the man was a professional spy.

The secret compartment contained more than gold. Romm found two photographs. Expecting them to be classified he was surprised that they appeared to be worthless from an intelligence point of view, photographs of two women in their late twenties, taken on their wedding day. There were also a series of papers. He opened them, his puzzlement growing as he discovered that they were a mass of carefully pressed, faded Soviet newspaper clippings detailing the shooting of a man called Jesse Austin, a once popular Communist singer, murdered in New York by his lover, a woman called Raisa Demidova. The murder had taken place some years ago, the articles dated back to 1965. There were extensive handwritten notes on the articles, in small neat writing, thoughts on the case, with a list of names, people the man wanted to speak to. Evidently from these notes the ambition was to reach New York, the United States – the main adversary. The apparent motivation was so peculiar that Eli wondered if the papers were in some sort of code. He would have to report the matter directly to Moscow, to the highest authorities.

The prisoner was in a cell downstairs – shot but not killed by a soldier on guard patrol. After firing from long range with a sniper rifle, the guard had pursued but failed to find the wounded man. Somehow the man had struggled on through the snow. The guard had returned to base, bringing out reinforcements to search the area. Eventually, surrounded by dogs, the man was lucky to be apprehended alive. His injury, a single bullet wound, was not life-threatening and he had received rudimentary treatment at the barracks. The man’s tenacity, the fashion in which he’d evaded capture for several hours against overwhelming odds, and the organized, disciplined contents of his bag suggested a military background. He’d refused to speak to the guards or to give his name.

Eli entered the cell, regarding the man seated on the chair. His back was bandaged: the bullet had entered his right shoulder. There was an untouched plate of food in front of him. His face was pale from loss of blood. A blanket had been placed over his shoulders. Eli did not condone torture. His only concern was preserving the integrity of the border and in so doing, his own career. With the newspaper cuttings and the photographs he sat down in front of the man, holding the papers under the man’s line of vision. They brought him to life. Eli asked:

— What is your name?

The man did not respond. Eli pointed out:

— You face execution. It is in your interest to talk to us.

— What is the importance of this?

The prisoner reached out and grabbed hold of the papers – his fingers clamped tight around the scraps. Eli sensed that if he didn’t let go the man would rip them from his hands. Curious, he released his grip and watched the man gather the papers together in front of him, treating them with as much reverence as a treasure map.

SEVEN YEARS LATER

Greater Province of Kabul
Lake Qargha
9 Kilometres West of Kabul
22 March 1980

With his back to Kabul, Leo stepped into the lake fully clothed, plunging up to his knees and continuing to walk, his khaki trousers bleeding Saturn-rings of red dust onto the water. In front of him the snow-capped teeth of the Koh-e-Qrough mountain range bit into a pale blue sky. The spring sun was bright but not yet strong enough to temper the freezing river waters flush with mountain snowmelt. He knew the lake should feel cold as he raked his fingers through the emerald-green surface yet as the water level rose and flowed over the hip of his trousers he felt wonderfully warm. Were he to trust his body he would’ve sworn that these were tropical waters as pleasant as the sun on his cracked, tanned skin. He didn’t raise his arms, allowing them to sink into the lake, dragging behind him as he walked. Soon the water was up to his shoulders – he was on the cusp of the shallows, his feet arriving at the ledge where the depth increased sharply. Another step and he’d sink beneath the surface, the stones in his pockets weighing him down, easing him to the bottom where he’d come to rest, seated on the silt bed. At the borderline he waited, the water lapping at his top lip, close to his nose, the surface trembling with each slow breath.

The opium was thick in his blood. Until it thinned the drug would cocoon him against the cold, and everything else – the disappointment of the life he was living and the regrets of the life he’d left behind. Right now, in this moment, he was devoid of troubles, connected to the world by nothing more than a thread. He felt no emotion, just contentment, not in the form of happiness but contentment as the absence of pain, the absence of dissatisfaction – an exquisite emptiness of feeling. Opium had made him hollow, scooping out the bitterness and reproach. That he’d vowed revenge, promised justice and achieved nothing did not upset him. His failures had been banished by the drug, a temporary exile, held at bay, ready to return when the opium’s effects wore off.

The water lapping at his lips urged him to continue.

One step further.

Why settle for a simulation of emptiness dependent on narcotics when the real thing was so close? Another step and he would be at the bottom of the lake, a trail of bubbles from his lips to the emerald surface the only trace of his existence. The stones in his pockets joined the chorus of whispers, urging him to take the final step.

Leo did not heed their call, remaining motionless. No matter how many times he stood here, no matter how sure he was that today was the day he would cross over, he could not bring himself to cut the thread that joined him to the world. He could not take the final step.

The opium began to thin. His senses reconnected with reality, coming together like planets realigning. The water was cold. He was cold. He shivered, reaching into his pockets and taking out the smooth stones, allowing them to drop beside him, feeling the vibrations as they struck the bed of the lake. He turned away from the mountains, churning the water, and slowly returned to shore, wading back towards the city of Kabul.

Greater Province of Kabul
City of Kabul
Karta-i-Seh District
Darulaman Boulevard
Same Day

By the time Leo arrived at his apartment the sun had set and his clothes had dried, dripping a trail in the dust behind him as he’d cycled back from the lake. With the opium’s concentration in decline, running down like the sands of an hourglass, the feelings of failure and melancholy began to circulate in his system, a virus of the mind that had only temporarily been suppressed. He was isolated from his daughters, alone in the city; his only companion was the memories of his wife, thoughts that did not exist without the knowledge that her murderer had gone unpunished. The muscles across his back tightened at the recollection of his humiliating attempt to reach New York, the bullet scar in his shoulder stung as though the wound was raw, his brow furrowed as the details of the case surfaced in his mind. Why had Jesse Austin been shot and how was it connected to his wife? What was the truth behind that night? A dangerous restlessness began to bubble within him – he could not let the matter stand and yet he was further from the truth than ever before. Opium had become not an answer but merely a way of pushing these thoughts back for twelve or so hours.

Not bothering to change his clothes, he collapsed onto his bed, a thin mattress in the middle of the room. This apartment was unwelcoming and functional. He’d refused accommodation in government residences where officials lived safe behind guarded gates and barbed-wire fences, in newly built residential blocks where every apartment was fitted with air conditioning with back-up diesel generators should the electricity fail, which it often did. He never ate with the officers in canteens that served imported, vacuum-packed Russian food, nor did he socialize in the bars established for homesick Soviet soldiers. He existed like a distant moon, in orbit of the occupation but rarely seen, occasionally passing close enough to remind everyone of his existence before spinning into the depths of space on a lonely, elliptical trajectory.

Ignoring protocol, he’d found this apartment himself, agreeing the rent directly with the landlord rather than using the official Soviet channels. He had one criterion – it should be impossible to be mistaken for, or resemble in any way, the home he once shared with his wife and daughters. For this reason he liked the fact that he was near speakers erected outside a tea room that broadcast the muezzin’s call to prayer, a sound that filled his apartment, a sound that he’d never shared with his family. His intention was to crowd his life with things that didn’t remind him of Raisa – to make his existence so foreign there was nothing that flashbacked to the life he’d lost. The large windows opened to views of the city ntialthe surrounding mountains, a view that could not have been more different from Moscow. Even the layout of the apartment was peculiar: a single room large enough to serve as a bedroom, living area and kitchen. It was imperative there not be separate rooms. Closed doors played havoc with his imagination. His first apartment in Bala Hissar, the centre of old Kabul, had been designed for a traditional Islamic family with a back room intended for a wife and daughters. While living there Leo often heard the muffled sound of Raisa’s voice. He’d run to the door and throw it open only to reveal an empty room. Another night he’d heard the sound of Elena’s voice, then Zoya, both voices bringing him running. No matter how far-fetched the notion that his family might be together again and living with him, the imagined sound of their voices would bring him checking on empty rooms, sometimes three or four times a night. Insanity was not far away. His temporary solution had been to unscrew the doors, set up mirrors in the hallways so that he could see the empty space at all times. He’d begun looking for a more suitable apartment.

Leo retrieved his pipe: a thin wood tube with a small steel pot roughly two-thirds of the way down from the mouthpiece. There were crude carvings around the rim, a blackened interior where the opium burned. Though it had never been mentioned directly, his addiction was no secret to his superiors. A system of tacit consent allowed soldiers and officials any pleasures accessible to them, a form of compensation to supplement wages that could never be high enough to offset the dangers of Afghanistan. For Leo, opium had nothing to do with pleasure, it was a continuation of the logic he applied to his apartment, making his body foreign and quite unlike the body that had slept beside Raisa nearly every night of his life for fifteen years – an addiction, certainly, but also a strategy to cope with his grief.

He hastened to his stash, breaking off a pea-sized amount, his fingers fumbling, the opium falling to the dusty floor. On his knees, he picked it up, regarding the dust-covered lump. He blew it. The dust remained: the opium was sticky. It didn’t matter. He placed it in the cup of the steel holder and lit a candle, impatiently waiting for the flame to take. Opium did not burn easily like tobacco and required a constant source of heat. Lying on the bed, on his stomach, he positioned the steel pot over the candle, eyes on the opium, hungry for it to melt in the flame and the smoke to travel up the pipe. The opium began to burn, the shape of the lump changing. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs, the smoke slowly dissipating the sense of restlessness, re-dissolving the frustrations and failings.

Sedating his emotions in the way that a surgeon’s team anaesthetizes a patient before operating, Leo was able to return to the memories of Raisa, examining them with opium-induced distance as if they belonged to another man from a far-away world. In Moscow he’d been surrounded by the life he’d created with her, from their apartment to the city itself, the parks, the river; even the sound of the tramcars rattling past caused him to stop mid-sentence, his chest gripped by a physical pain. The bitter winters, the hot summers – there was nothing that her memory wasn’t stamped upon. In the months immediately after her murder the desire to investigate blazed in his mind as bright as the surface of sun, consuming all other concerns. He had no other thoughts from the moment he woke to collapsing on his bed, catching only a few hours of fretful, disturbed sleep. He petitioned officials, wrote letters, begged for the chance to go to New York only to be told time and time again that what he asked was impossible.

Raisa’s body had been returned to Moscow. L had demanded a second autopsy. To his surprise this had been agreed to, perhaps in the hope that it would allow him to grieve and drop his incessant requests. The Soviet doctors confirmed the American verdict that she’d been shot from a distance of about ten metres: killed by a single bullet from a powerful handgun, a wound to her torso, entering just underneath her rib. Reading the report, he insisted that he be allowed to see her body. His wife had been laid out on a steel table covered with a thin white sheet. He’d taken hold of the sheet, pulling it back to her waist – a reunion of the most awful kind. Her skin, always pale, was now watery white with trace-lines of blue. He ignored instructions not to touch her, opened her eyes. They’d been so full of intelligence, shrewd and playful at the same time, careful and mischievous, yet there was nothing in these eyes staring at the ceiling. He was so startled by the change that he’d momentarily wondered if this could even be the same woman, as if her life and intelligence were forces too powerful to ever be fully extinguished and some residual vestige would surely remain.

He’d recovered his composure, begun a dispassionate examination as a police officer. He’d taken out a small notebook. He’d picked up a pen. When he looked down at first page of the notebook he saw a scribbled line, involuntarily formed as his hand had trembled across the page. He’d steadied himself, ripping the front page off and noting down several observations, checking them with the doctor beside him. She’d died from loss of blood. A former soldier, he knew vividly from the sight of the wound that such a death would not have been instantaneous but painful and slow. He asked the doctor for an estimate of the time it would have taken from the bullet entering her body to her death. She’d been in Manhattan when the shooting occurred, only minutes from some of the best hospitals in the world. The doctor had been unable to fix a time, saying it varied enormously from person to person and there was no formula. Pressed by Leo, he guessed between twenty and thirty minutes – which surely meant the official version of events was a fiction. Raisa could have been saved. With this fact, his desire hardened – he had to reach New York with or without the State’s permission.

Blind as he was to other matters, it was Zoya who forced him to confront the repercussions of his obsessive investigative efforts. In the months after their return Elena’s academic work had suffered greatly, she’d lost weight – she’d become reclusive, fearful of making friends and suspicious of friends she’d known for years. She felt it her duty not to leave Leo alone in his tormented state and yet his anguish was painful to witness. Zoya pointed out that this way of living was not living at all. They had to move on as a family. Her determination and intelligence reminded him of Raisa. Though he did not abandon his investigation, he realized that the chances of an imminent breakthrough were slim and he agreed to refocus his energies, pushing the matter of New York into the background, keeping his preoccupation invisible. In this manner of compromise they lived together for seven years. During these years there were many times when Leo was happy, only for that happiness to melt away suddenly when his thoughts returned to Raisa, as they always did. He learned to mask his emotions from his daughters better. He learned to lie, to pretend. Elena recovered. She finished her studies. Zoya became a doctor. They both found love. Elena married first, at twenty-one, throwing herself into a romance, love once again the answer. Zoya waited a little longer before marrying. With both daughters living in their own apartments, Leo considered his promise fulfilled. He was alone and his mind returned to the task he’d never abandoned.

For years he’d considered the case and yet it baffled him. He did not know what lay beneath the plan to murder Jesse Austin. He’d decided that his first objective must be to track down the propaganda officer Mikael Ivanov, the man who’d tricked his daughter. His search stemmed not out of a desire for revenge but because Ivanov would have important information regarding the events of that night. It was logical to find him before attempting to reach New York.

Ivanov was no longer living in Moscow and it took a great deal of effort and bribery to find out that he’d been relocated to the city of Perm, in the central region of Russia. Arriving in Perm, travelling without authorization, Leo discovered that Ivanov had been sent there after returning from New York, working in local government, with a fondness for drink. Several winters ago he’d become drunk and walked out into the centre of a lake, falling through the ice and dying of pneumonia. Some believed it was an accident: others believed it was suicide. Leo had visited the cemetery. The seven-year delay had made it far harder to unearth the truth. Evidence, memories and witnesses faded like the ink in the newspaper articles he’d collected.

No more time could be wasted. He began to devise a way to reach New York, saving up his modest salary to buy gold on the black market, necessary once he crossed the border, carefully plotting a route to the United States. These preparations offered the glimmer of a resolution – no matter how difficult it might be to achieve.

*

Christmas, 1973, he’d eaten dinner with his family, his daughters and their husbands. He’d given them presents. He’d kissed them goodbye. He’d told them nothing of his plans. The next day he began his journey, making his way towards the Finnish border. He’d come close, only metres away before he was shot and caught. The failure of his attempt and his subsequent capture could have resulted in his execution. Once again Frol Panin intervened. Now frail and ill, the old man warned him:

I cannot save you again.

They were words that Leo had once uttered to his own protégé. Interpreting his attempt to cross the border as grief rather than treachery, the State gave Leo an ultimatum – life in prison, or a job so dangerous that no one would ever volunteer for it.