was smart enough to bury what had to be buried. My guess is that the key was timing, and the timing blew up. His secret-or secrets-were found out. He was reached; it's all through his dossier. He lived abnormally, even for an abnormal existence." "We rejected that approach," said Charlie emphatically. "He was an eccentric." Scofield stopped and stared "You rejected? An eccentric? Godamn you, you did know. You could have used that, fed him anything you liked. But no, you wanted a quick solution so the men upstairs would see how good you were. You could have used him, not killed him! But you didn't know how, so you kept quiet and called out the hangmen." "That's preposterous. There's no way you could prove he'd been reached." "Prove it? I don't have to prove it, I know it." "How?" "I saw it in his eyes, you son of a bitch." The man from State paused, then spoke softly. "You're tired, Bray. You need a rest." "With a pension," asked Scofield, "or with a casket?"
Taleniekov walked out of the restaurant into a cold blast of wind that disturbed the snow, swirling it up from the sidewalk with such force that it became a momentary haze, diffusing the light of the streetlamp above. It was going to be another freezing night. The weather report on Radio Moscow had the temperature dropping to minus eight Celsius Yet it bad stopped snowing early that morning; the runways at Sheremetyevo Airport were cleared and that was all that concerned Vasili Taleniekov at the moment. Air France, Flight 85, had left for Paris ten minutes ago. Aboard that plane was a Jew who was meant to leave two hours later on Aeroflot for Athens.
He would not have left for Athens if he had shown up at the Aeroflot terminal. Instead, he would have been asked to step into a room. Greeting him would have been a team from the Vodennaya Kontra Rozvedka, and the absurdity would have begun.
It was stupid, thought Taleniekov, as he turned right, pulling the lapels of his overcoat up around his neck and the brim of his addyel lower on his head. Stupid in the sense that the VKR would have accomplished nothing but provide a wealth of embarrassment. It would have fooled no one, least of all those it was trying to impress.
A dissident recanting his dissidency! What comic literature did the young fanatics in the VKR read? Where were the older and wiser heads when fools came up with such schemes?
When Vasili had heard of the plan, he had laughed, actually laughed. The objective was to mount a brief but strong campaign against Zionist accusations, to show people in the West that not all Jews thought alike in Soviet Russia.
The Jewish writer had become something of a minor cause in the American press-the New York press, to be specific. He had been among those who had spoken to a visiting senator in search of votes 8,000 miles away from a constituency. But race notwithstanding, he simply was not a good writer, and, in fact, something of an embarrassment to his co-religionists.
Not only was the writer the wrong choice for such an exercise, but for reasons intrinsic to another operation it was imperative that he be permitted to leave Russia. He was a blind trade-off for the senator in New York. The senator had been led to believe it was his acquaintanceship with an attach6 at the consulate that had caused Soviet immigration to issue a visa; the senator would make capital out of the incident and a small hook would exist where one had not existed before.
Enough hooks and an awkward relationship would suddenly exist between the senator and "acquaintances" within the Soviet power structure; it could be useful. The Jew had to leave Moscow tonight. In three days the senator had scheduled a welcoming news conference at Kennedy Airport.
But the young aggressive thinkers at the VKR were adamant. The writer would be detained, brought to the Lubyanka, and the process of transformation would commence. No one outside the VKR was to be told of the operation; success depended upon sudden disappearance, total secrecy.
Chemicals were to have been administered until the subject was ready for a different sort of news conference. One in which he revealed that Israeli terrorists had threatened him with reprisals against relatives in Tel Aviv if he did not follow their instructions and cry publicly to be able to leave Russia.