There was silence as the car glided along towards the slopes of the Moscow hills, approaching an exclusive suburb, a parkway with villas along either side and a guard post at one end of it.
‘You’re putting a lot of strain on my surveillance here,’ Sakharovsky thought aloud. ‘And most of it overseas. A small mistake by one of my men — a one-way street he doesn’t know about, a metro system which Alexei knows backwards — and you’ve lost him as well as all your leads. Why not just take Alexei in Moscow — and screw it out of him here. Keep it simple. Shouldn’t that be the essence of it all?’
Yuri Andropov leant across and put his hand on Sakharovsky’s knee. ‘Yes, Alexander, but remember something else: we’re almost certain it’s Flitlianov. Not absolutely. We could still be wrong. If he runs we’ll have conclusive proof. And we still need that. Look — what’s the use of cutting the wrong man’s leg off? Of course we could get a confession out of him — to anything we wanted. But what would be the point? This isn’t a show trial. We want the truth. And therefore we have to have the right man to begin with before we can think of extracting confessions. We can’t put every senior KGB officer who might be guilty into the wind-tunnel. No, if Alexei runs, then we’ll know who it is. And that’s half the battle. We can take him overseas and interrogate him there if necessary — or wait and see what contacts he makes. We can do any number of things. But we get nowhere by leaving things as they stand. We must make the running, induce the action — that is of the essence.’
‘Very well then. I’ll make the arrangements. Increase his surveillance. But remember, I’m stretched on that — using my own men in Moscow who are normally overseas operators. I can’t of course use anybody from Alexei’s own directorate.’
‘I know. But there won’t be long to wait, I think, before he goes over to your side of the fence. Not long.’
It was nearly midnight when he dropped Sakharovsky at his villa. Andropov wondered if his daughter, Yelena, might still be up when he got home himself. He hoped she would be. He wanted to see as much of her as possible before she went back to Leningrad after the weekend.
Yelena was in the kitchen, dressed for bed, making a hot drink, when Yuri Andropov arrived home at his villa further up the parkway.
‘For you, Tata?’ she asked. ‘It’s English cocoa from the dollar shop. Shall I make you a cup?’
‘Please. A half cup. I don’t know if I like it.’
He didn’t like it at all. But he wanted an excuse to be with her, any reason: to talk with her, just gossip — to look at her, this tall daughter of his with a round soft face like her mother’s, but with sharper eyes, blackberry dark and quick, and a mind far sharper still; her thin hair severely flat now over her head, and tied up at the back ready for the pillow — the single bed next the other in the spare room. Did she bring them close together for the night, he wondered, closer to that dull husband of hers? Did she make that kind of gesture with him? What sort of relationship did they have that way? How did they manage in bed?
He thought about these things now. For now he knew that she shared these things about and inside her body with another man, that she had not given herself up for good to the worthy jailer who lay upstairs. She lived in other secret ways. It had started a month before with a rumour which he had checked on, arranging for one of his personal assistants to carry out the surveillance. A report confirming it had been given to him that morning: for more than a year his daughter had been having an affair with Alexei Flitlianov
They had met ten years before, when Yelena had been at University in Moscow, almost a child. But the liaison had only begun recently, had flourished in Leningrad where Flitlianov, with his interest in painting, had gone to see exhibitions at the Hermitage Museum where she worked, and had continued intermittently and discreetly whenever she had come down to Moscow to see her old friends and family. He should, he knew, have been shocked by her behaviour, and vastly alarmed by the threat their association presented to him in the current circumstances. But he was not; rather the risks they had run, and his vision of those risks, appealed to him in a strange way, just as Arkadi Raikin’s many disguises had done.
Yuri Andropov had various official appointments in the Kremlin the next morning, a Saturday. But one in the late morning before he left was unofficial, unknown and unseen.
Andrei Suslov, First Deputy Premier, Senior Politburo member and intellectual conscience of all the hard-liners and Stalinists in the Party, met him in the empty conference room next to his office. He was a tall, emaciated figure, bald patches in his wispy, plucked-out hair, and a jaw that narrowed fearfully into a foreshortened chin in an egg-like skull.
He had the air of a mystic, of some old anchorite on a hill, bird-like above the storms, observing the turmoil which his teachings had brought out beneath him with distant relish.
‘Sakharovsky will take it,’ Andropov said as soon as they were alone. ‘But he’s no fool as you well know. He’ll report my plan for Flitlianov to your security committee. You can only try and ride it out with them.’
‘Leave that to me. To us. Your plans for rounding up Flitlianov’s aides can be made to seem perfectly appropriate to the Politburo. The important thing is that Flitlianov should be made to run. Is that going ahead?’
‘Halfway. There’s more to come. But I think he’ll run.’
‘He’d better. Because unless he does we really can’t move at all. We’ve no hard evidence. But once he’s out of the country — known to be in the clear — then we can hit all the soft-liners here, in the Politburo and Central Committee, crack down on the new men, put them through the hoop one by one. Kosygin will not be able to prevent it: the security of the State will be in obvious jeopardy.’
Suslov lit another cigarette, chain-smoking. ‘Remember, we want some real conspiracy to show its head clearly: that would be the supreme justification for the new regime. We need some real opposition to make a proper change, an end to the Ostpolitik and the US detente. Flitlianov must run; that is the first thing. We can’t take him here. Any confession extracted from him by us would be mistrusted completely: our faction would be at a disadvantage from the outset. We must, when we move, be seen to be working quite naturally in response to a genuine threat to the State, which this is. We shall have ample grounds for starting our operation by the very fact of his escape. After that, of course, you must make every effort to get the names of the others in his group. But the crux of our whole plan is that Flitlianov should get safely out of the country and that his escape should be confirmed without question. What will he do, do you think? Where will he go? How will he do it?’
‘London perhaps. Where the telephone call originated. But how? I’ve no idea. He’ll have thought up something pretty good. He’s had the time, the position, the contacts. We may lose him from the very beginning.’
But as he said this Andropov felt the nervous reaction of a lie that had moved deep within him. For he thought he knew how Flitlianov would leave the country: he would leave it with or through his daughter. And he felt completely paralysed by this intuition — unable to prevent it or even investigate it. For this was precisely his and Suslov’s intention: as long as Flitlianov left the country, it didn’t matter how he did it. And Yuri Andropov saw his daughter for a moment floating away in the air, as in a fairy tale, escaping to a happy kingdom in the arms of another man — who was himself.