So they believed it was Chechulian, who had been quietly arrested midway through the hunt — or did they? Did Yuri Andropov really think that or was he pretending just as he’d had another man pretend to be him, and had Chechulian conveniently shoot the impostor? Or had the shooting been pure chance, an accident as Chechulian, he’d heard, had protested? Questions one could never ask. But whatever the reasons behind Andropov’s behaviour, whatever his real motive in arresting Chechulian, there was no doubt that Andropov, in his charade at the hunt, had been putting the pressure on him as well.
Chechulian’s arrest could have been a blind, so that he should feel himself in the clear — clear to make the one mistake which would completely convict him, which would be indisputable evidence of his guilt. And that mistake would be to run now.
Yet, on the other hand, if one took the arrest to be genuine, as it might well be, there was an inevitable progression to it: Chechulian, Flitlianov knew, was innocent; he himself was the man they wanted. And Andropov must soon discover Chechulian’s innocence: then the lamps would move brightly onto him. And then he would wish he’d run when there was the chance.
The English had a phrase for it — he could hear Andropov himself using it, happy in his sudden bizarre colloquialisms: ‘Six of one; half a dozen of the other.’ There was nothing in it. He had a few days. He had to run.
They had come to the outer suburbs of the capital now, an expanse of identical high-rise apartments that stretched away far beyond his vision. A People’s Park lay beside the roadway. And that too had been completely laid out in concrete. Yet Alexei looked now on these drab emblems of his nation’s progress with regret, and even spoke enthusiastically of the new development to his companion. He would have to go. And so this brutal urban sprawl took on a precious form. A time had come that he’d hoped would never come again, for he’d always imagined that he would have been able to see his work through without another exile like the first — his years as a KGB officer in Beirut, West Berlin, New York, London, preparing the way meticulously for his eventual return to Moscow and his present eminent position within the organisation.
It was Snakes and Ladders, and he had hit that square high up on 99 just before the end of the game that sent you tumbling right back to the beginning.
Yet not quite the beginning, he reflected. He wasn’t running away; he was running back into it all over again from the outside, fulfilling one of many contingency plans that had been arranged long before. He was leaving in order to build his group up again inside the citadel of Dzerzhinsky Square. There were men at this moment — he didn’t know their names or how many, some of them quite possibly colleagues of his, and other senior KGB officers in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia — who were members of his group, who had been recruited over the years by his various deputies overseas and at headquarters. And the only way he could make contact with these people, and re-activate the group at the centre, was to get out and contact his first deputy, and with him set the whole business in motion again. This man was his link with all the others, and thus with his whole political and personal future.
There was also the List, held in safety overseas by a person whose real name and whereabouts only he knew of, and which he might now familiarise himself with for the first time. This was a complete register of all the members in his clandestine group — their names, positions within the KGB, and elsewhere in the Soviet establishment, and all other relevant data: their ‘file’. One more reason for leaving — for this was the most crucial information of all — the identity of this person — and it was at risk now and would continue to be for as long as he remained in Russia.
There were as well more than a dozen key figures in Moscow — four in the army, two in both the navy and the air-force, three senior officers with the KGB, six on the Central Committee and two in the Politburo — with whom he had made common cause over the years. They were his ‘recruits’; and this had been his main activity during his years in Moscow — searching out these men of new government in the Union, these men of goodwill who, for the moment, were behaving just like all the others, as bureaucratic robots, who had for so long denied all the human values of Marxism. They had worked well at the mechanics of government, these people, at industrial, military, of course, and now even consumer development. But they had left Russia barren of individual spirit, of singular idiosyncrasy and choice, of all inventive and exuberant life. And these qualities, Flitlianov believed, had been among the essential purposes of the revolution. They had been consistently and intentionally betrayed by all but a very few in power over the years, and of those who had supported these ideals nearly all were now in exile or long dead — apart from Flitlianov’s contacts, the very few in government who were stall there, like cocoons buried deep in rotten wood, waiting for the spring.
But of course he could make no use of such people now. It was impossible to risk their cover simply in order to save his own skin. They would soon find out that he was gone, keep their heads down until the storm blew over, and await developments from abroad. All the more important that he should get out now, he knew, for these were names he might well disclose under torture.
How closely were they watching him, he wondered, when he got back to his apartment in the centre of the city that evening? He looked out at the dark street: a few people hurrying by, fewer cars, a thin snow falling. There was no one around, no stationary vehicles. One of his own personal security guards in the ground-floor apartment would probably have been made responsible for the surveillance. Very well, then, he would make use of him. It didn’t matter for the first part of the journey. It would only count when he made the switch. He telephoned downstairs, speaking to the duty officer of the guard.
‘My appointments in Leningrad this week — I’ll travel overnight on the sleeper. Reserve me a front compartment and whatever you need for yourself. No — tonight. Now. Yes, I’ll be going alone. Warn the Leningrad bureau. Have them pick me up first thing when I get there.’
He went through some papers on his desk, putting a few of them in a briefcase. There was nothing to destroy. There never had been. He had always kept himself ready for immediate retreat. His housekeeper, a silent Eskimo-faced woman from the north, busied herself about the place, making up a suitcase for him. There was nothing else he needed to take. Everything would be ready for him in Leningrad. There were only the photographs which he would have to leave: his mother not long before she died, so young-looking it seemed she had years of life in her, who had died so suddenly, and his father, the railway engineer, stout with moustaches in the Georgian manner, quite old, taken at a holiday camp for retired staff on the Caspian. And there were his younger brother and sister, their families, his nephews and nieces. Would they suffer? How would they suffer? Long experience of his own work so quickly led him to an actual vision of that possible suffering, the mechanics of it.
He had not married so that there should not be that tie to deal with if the occasion ever arose — as it had now. But there were all these others, suddenly frail and exposed with his leaving. He felt for a moment that he should stay in Russia — simply go to Leningrad, return and accept the consequences. But just as he had made every physical preparation for sudden departure so he had long before anticipated exactly this emotional hurdle and the attitude he would take to it: the answer, he knew, was that they might well suffer, be used as hostages to try and bring him back to Russia. And he would do nothing about it. It wasn’t selfishness. He had staked his life on his political beliefs. Once you did that there was nothing you could do about the others. You had condemned them, in a society such as his, from the first moment of deviation — a contrary thought thirty years before, a morning at the University when a professor had presented as fact something you knew to be a lie: and that sudden moment’s consciousness of truth and difference was as dangerous as a bullet, a gun pointing at you and your friends and family for ever afterwards.