At four they drove out of the airfield and down toward the town. The American guards on the gate merely saluted, and halfway down the mountain they stopped for Kuznetsky to change clothes. Kotikov’s wife left him waiting at the station, sitting on his suitcase, leaning against the wall of the depot. The train was late, only an hour the clerk said, but Kuznetsky doubted it. He took out the copy of The Grapes of Wrath that he’d found and pocketed in the plane from Fairbanks. He’d never heard of the writer, but he’d just seen the film in Moscow and been grudgingly impressed.
A car turned into the station yard and two men got out. One pointed in his direction, and they walked slowly across until they were standing looking down at him. “What’s your name?” one barked out in Russian.
“Uh?” Kuznetsky said, shielding his eyes against the sun as he looked up at them. “I don’t get your drift, fella.”
They looked at each other. The dapper-looking one smiled at him. “You’re not a Russian, then?” he asked innocently.
“You a coupla smart guys? What’s the game?”
The bulky one intervened. “Maybe we’ve made a mistake, mister. Do you have any means of identification?”
“No. Yes. Driver’s license.” He pulled the card from his inside pocket.
“Jack Tillotson. St. Cloud, Minnesota. Is that where you’re heading?”
Kuznetsky showed him the ticket. “Who are you?” he asked. “Cops?”
“Something like that.”
He snatched the ticket back. “Hey, this is a free country. Who the hell are you?”
The bulky one showed him a card. Military Intelligence.
“Okay. Why pick on me?”
The dapper one smiled again. “Because you left Gore Field with the Russian chief’s wife, that’s why, Mr. Tillotson. Or is it Tillotsky?”
“You’re crazy. I’m as American as you are.”
“So how come you seem so cozy with the Russians?”
“She gave me a lift, that’s all. I didn’t know she was Russian till I got in the car. They’re our allies, aren’t they?”
“Sure. How did you come to be up there?”
“I got a lift from Edmonton on a plane. One of the pilots is a friend of mine.”
“Name?”
“Bob Simpson.” Kuznetsky hoped that Simpson was on his way back to Fairbanks by this time. “Check at the airfield.”
“What were you doing in Edmonton?”
“Visiting my sister. She married an oilman — they’re prospecting up there.”
“Close family, eh.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“No. Would you mind if we checked your suitcase?”
“Would it make any difference if I did?”
“Nope.”
They rummaged through the clothes, found nothing, and asked him to turn out his pockets. Kuznetsky blessed the inspiration that had told him to destroy Kolikova’s note.
The bulky one looked relieved, the dapper one chagrined. “Okay, Mr. Tillotson, sorry to have troubled you. There’s been a lot of Russians slipping into the U.S. of A. with trouble in mind. We have to be careful.”
“Okay,” Kuznetsky said, “sorry I got a bit ticked.”
They started to walk away, then the dapper one said “Good-bye” over his shoulder in Russian. Nice try, Kuznetsky thought to himself. They’d obviously seen the same movie.
When Kuznetsky woke the next morning the mountains were gone, the sun was rising, and the train was clanking into Minot, North Dakota. He was supposed to make a connection here for Fargo and St. Cloud, but after the business of the evening before with the American counterintelligence agents he had decided to wait for the through train from Moose Jaw to Minneapolis. If Simpson hadn’t left, someone might be waiting for him in St. Cloud.
It was a slower train, and for most of the day it chugged across the plains passing through no towns of any size. On either side of the tracks the yellow-green, treeless country stretched toward a flat horizon, and every twenty miles or so a road would cross the tracks and arrow away into the distance. Occasional farms and occasional stations, dwarfed by grain silos, were all that broke the monotony.
It was hypnotic, and something more. For the first time Kuznetsky understood why so many Russians had preferred the labour camps to exile. Home was like a magnet, the more powerful the nearer you came. But you could step beyond the magnetic field, as he had, and cut yourself loose. It wasn’t that they would miss Russia; what they dreaded was that they wouldn’t, and that in some sense they’d then be forever homeless. Bravery and cowardice, hand in hand. They knew they could never go back, and Kuznetsky knew, even as he looked out on the Minnesota plains, as he came within the magnetic field, that neither could he. He longed to get off, to catch a ride to St. Cloud, see his mother and father if either was still alive, but he knew he wouldn’t. It wasn’t just a matter of duty; it was the way things were, the way the cards had been dealt. Regrets were the price of any choice. They couldn’t be cashed in.
He changed again in Minneapolis, remembering the day in this station twenty-six years before. They’d taken the train west, forty men, boys really, all full of nervous bravado and curiosity. On to crisp uniforms and rifles that would feel strange in their hands.
Now he took the train east for Chicago, a forty-three-year-old NKVD colonel, immune to nerves, immune to bravado, not yet immune to curiosity. He lay back in his seat, drifting to and fro between sleep and wakefulness, between darkness and images of a young girl walking before him through a moonlit forest.
“Amy looks as if she’s got something on her mind,” Harry Brandon whispered to his wife.
Bertha Brandon looked across the room at her niece. “She’s always been like that,” she replied. “It’s just one of her moods. She might make more of an effort for James’s sake.”
Her husband laughed. “James isn’t here.”
“No, but that’s not his fault, and we are celebrating his twenty-first birthday.”
“James always adored Amy when he was a kid.”
“What a romancer you are!” She patted him affectionately on the knee. “Amy, dear,” she called across the room, “have you heard from James lately?”
“Not since he crossed to France, Aunt Bertha,” she answered automatically. She couldn’t seem to get Richard off her mind, though there didn’t seem any real reason for concern. She hadn’t seen him since the Sunday before, though on the next day he had sent her a huge bouquet of flowers with the message “Sorry about last night.” Now he was halfway to New Hampshire to take part in a conference at Bretton Woods. He’d be gone all week.
Perhaps she was just getting tense about the operation and using him as a focus for her anxiety. The Russian — no, the American from Russia — would be arriving any day, might even be in Washington already. He was probably as anxious about her as she was about him. But he had to be good or they wouldn’t be sending him.
Her aunt and uncle were now discussing, of all things, the recent spate of spy trials that had just ended in New York, and her uncle, noticing that she was listening, asked her, “What do you think, Amy?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it’s the motive that matters. If someone sells secrets for money, then they deserve all they get. But someone who does it because they believe in it… I think that’s different.”
“How could anyone believe in the Nazis?” her aunt asked sharply.
“Ah, but that’s not the point,” her husband said. “We’re talking about morality. If it’s wrong to spy, then why do we do it? Would you condemn a German who spied for us against the Nazis?”
“That’s different, dear. This is a democracy.”