Death of a Dissident (3 page)

Mark called nearly four hours later, when it was already dark: “You may come and pick up your friend.”

The hotel was within walking distance of the embassy, but Sasha wasn’t ready to face his family yet. “Let us drive around a while,” he said, climbing into a yellow Zhiguli cab. “I need some time to pull myself together.”

“What took so long?” I could not wait to hear what happened.

“It took them a while to crack me,” said Sasha.

“What do you mean, ‘crack’?”

“Well, make me talk. There was a secure hookup with Washington. And the guy on the other side—by the way, he looked as if he was your twin brother—was quite a character. Spoke Russian without an accent. And he had a whole team standing by. First, he was checking me out. He’d ask a question and then wait for his friends to run and match it with what they had. And after they figured out what I could know, for three hours he tried to pull just one name out of me. Like ‘You know, I really want to help you, but you have to give me something to show for you. I can’t go upstairs empty-handed.’ That’s the usual technique.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I finally gave them something. I sat there and sat, and then I thought, what the hell. I have nothing to lose. He really jumped when I told him my tidbit—it was one name. ‘Right, right, that’s just what I need. Thank you very much. Write the name on a piece of paper, would you please?’”

“Have they promised you anything at all?”

“No, nothing. Go to the hotel and wait. Well, now whatever happens, let it happen.” His indifference was a poor disguise for his tension. I tried to imagine how I’d feel in his place, at the mercy of my look-alike on the screen, with so much at stake and not knowing what to do. Tell all or keep my mouth shut? And what was the name that he gave them?

Our dinner that night was a pathetic sight. Tolik was cranky, Sasha was silent, mulling something over, and Marina and I tried to keep up the conversation. Sooner or later I had to go home. In fact, my return flight to New York was booked for the next morning, but I did not dare tell this to them.

Suddenly Sasha said, “They’re here already. See the guy with a newspaper at the bar? He was in the lobby on our floor and then came down here. Let’s check it out.”

He left the table and went to the men’s room. The man turned so that he could see the men’s room door. Sasha came out and went to the lobby. The man shifted again, to keep an eye on him.

“Idiots. If I worked like that, I’d have been fired a long time ago,” Sasha said, handing me the free English-language paper he had picked up in the lobby. “What’s the news?”

I glanced at the front page of the
Turkish Times
. “Rounding Up Russians” was the headline. The article reported that there were two hundred thousand illegal Russians in Turkey who were involved with prostitution and transporting asylum seekers into Europe, and the authorities were rounding them up and deporting them to Russia. Not exactly the kind of story Sasha needed to hear. “You think he’s alone?” I asked, changing the subject back to our tail.

“Yes, he is, otherwise he wouldn’t have run after me from floor to floor. You don’t need more than one—where would we go from the hotel at night? They probably caught up with us at the embassy. We have to get out of here.”

We looked at each other and said at the same time, “Good thing we didn’t return the car.”

“Marina, take Alex’s room key, unobtrusively,” Sasha said. “Go upstairs, get packed, move everything up to Alex’s room and wait for him. If that guy is alone he will stick with me.”

Marina yawned, said, “See you tomorrow, boys,” and dragged sleepy Tolik to the elevator. Half an hour later, Sasha and I got up. The man at the bar stayed put.

Our rooms were on different floors, theirs on the seventh, mine on the eighth. As the elevator stopped, our eyes met, and I sensed the panic in him: the distance to his door he would have to walk alone—an ideal target. He stepped out.

When I entered my room, Marina was watching TV. Tolik, dressed in his street clothes, was asleep on my bed.

It took us two trips to the underground garage and a quarter hour
to get all the baggage, along with the sleepy Tolik, into the car. Finally, I called Sasha’s room: “We are ready. Go.”

Three minutes later, he jumped into the car, and we shot out of the hotel. It was 1:30 a.m. I kept peeking in the rearview mirror for pursuers, but Sasha told me not to bother: it’s impossible to know if you are being followed in city traffic. Once we were out on the highway, we would see.

“If I only knew which way to go,” I said. We didn’t have a map of Ankara.

There were several yellow taxis at the corner. A group of cabbies stood around, discussing something heatedly. I pulled up.

“Which way to Istanbul?” I asked in English. “Istanbul, Istanbul!”

A long explanation in Turkish followed. I gestured to a driver that I would follow him until he got us on the road. A half hour later we were headed in the right direction.

“Stop the car,” Sasha said after a sharp turn. “Wait ten minutes.” No one followed, and we went on in silence.

“I won’t go alive,” Sasha suddenly said. “If the Turks turn me in, I’ll kill myself.”

I looked in the rearview mirror. Marina and Tolik were asleep.

A few minutes later he said, “I’ll go turn myself in to the Russians. Plead guilty, do my time. That’s still better than rotting in Turkey.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Marina said without opening her eyes.

“So, what’s your plan?” Sasha asked me.

“Get to Istanbul, check into a hotel, and get some sleep—it’s the fourth night I have not slept well,” I said. “And then think about a plan.”

“Want me to drive?”

“No, I don’t. If we’re stopped, you have one name on your driver’s license and another on your passport. We’ll be sunk right away.”

Night driving loosens lips. Especially if you’ve just burned your bridges, your wife and kid are asleep in the backseat, and your listener is the only friendly soul in the unknown new world. Within three hours I knew Sasha’s whole story, except, perhaps, for the secret that had created such a furor at the CIA.

A heavy fog descended at daybreak. Judging from the odometer, we should have been approaching Istanbul, but all that lay ahead was a thick, milky wall. What if the cab driver had played a trick on us, sending us in the wrong direction? We were running out of gas. I drove on, thinking that my Washington pal had been right: I was heading into the mist toward the unforeseen. Who knows where we would be an hour from now if we ran out of gas on the empty highway and the police pulled up and checked our papers.

Suddenly, out of the fog, came a green sign: Kemal Ataturk Airport—Istanbul. Another fifty yards farther lay the long-wished-for gas station.

Using our new navigational method, we hired a cab to lead us to the Hilton Istanbul. Making full use of Berezovsky’s expense account, we took a king’s suite, with a view of the Bosporus. We crawled to our beds, leaving a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

I woke up at 4 p.m. and turned on my mobile—it had been off ever since we left Ankara because I was afraid that we could be tracked somehow. A dozen new messages registered on the screen. Mark from the U.S. Embassy had called every half hour, and with every message his voice sounded more anxious: Where were we? Why did we disappear? He had important news for us.

“Sorry, Mark, we were catching some sleep,” I said.

“Thank God,” he said. “You were not in the hotel and we were worried. Good news, pal: we’re taking them. Twenty minutes, we’ll pick them up.”

“The problem is we are in Istanbul.”

“Istanbul? Why in the world did you go there?”

“Someone was watching at the hotel, so we ran.”

“I see. Well, that’s a complication. Is anyone watching you now?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, keep your phone on. I’ll get back to you.”

When he called again his voice sounded different: “Bad news, pal, they’ve changed their mind. We are not taking them.”

“What do you mean ‘changed their mind’?” I did not grasp the full consequences at first. The dimensions of the catastrophe dawned on me only slowly, gradually burning a hole in the tranquil scene around me: a cozy hotel room, Sasha on the balcony observing the Bosporus, Tolik watching cartoons on TV, Marina unpacking. What would I do with them now?

“Don’t you get it? They changed their mind at HQ,” Mark repeated in a subdued voice. “You’re on your own, we cannot help you.”

“Is it because we went to Istanbul?” I said the first thing that came to mind, just to keep the line open.

“No, of course not. I can’t tell you why … I am really sorry. Good luck,” he said, and hung up.

That is why I could never work for the government. I could never communicate news like that. Being an avid reader of John le Carré, I harbored no illusions about the spy business, but this still took me by surprise. To drop a man after he’s given them what they needed! I had to tell them what I thought of them.

I dialed Mark’s number. A recording said something in Turkish, the only discernible words being “Türkish Telekom.” Probably the account didn’t exist anymore, now that the operation was aborted. There was no point in calling the embassy landline. Surely there was no Mark on the staff.

I went to the lobby and called Boris, away from Sasha’s and Marina’s hearing.

“Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling all day,” he asked.

“There are complications, I will tell you later. In short, we were at the embassy, but the Americans are not taking them.”

Boris never gives up. While we were driving through Turkey, he had already developed Plan B: a yacht had been chartered in Greece to pick us up and sail into neutral waters.

“And then what?” I asked. “Sail forever, like the Flying Dutchman? You can get lost in a big city, but you can’t hide on a yacht. Sooner or later they’ll have to come ashore and show their papers.”

“But this will at least give us some time to put our thoughts together.”

“I have a different plan,” I said, “but I can’t talk about it on the phone.”

Sasha needed to be inside a country in order to claim asylum. Yet he could not board a flight bound for any desirable country without a visa, which was impossible to obtain with his passport. My plan was to purchase tickets back to Moscow, with a plane change in a Western European airport. He could ask for asylum during his layover. Flight connections did not require a visa as long as you stayed within the transit zone at the airport. I went online to check plane schedules.