Tania shuddered. It was a nightmare scenario – but terrifyingly logical.
‘America is not the enemy of the Polish people,’ said Staz. ‘If the USSR and the US go to war in Europe, we should side with the Americans, and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of Moscow.’
Was he just blowing off steam, or something more? Tania said carefully: ‘Is it just you who thinks like this, Staz?’
‘Certainly not. Most officers my age feel the same. They pay lip service to Communism but, if you talk to them when they’re drunk, you’ll hear another story.’
‘In that case, you have a problem,’ she said. ‘By the time the war begins, it will be too late for you to win the trust of the Americans.’
‘This is our dilemma.’
‘The solution is obvious. You have to open a channel of communication now.’
He gave her a cool look. The thought crossed her mind that he might be an
agent provocateur
, assigned to provoke her into subversive remarks so that she could be arrested. But she could not imagine that a faker would be such a good lover.
Staz said: ‘Are we just talking, now, or are we having a serious discussion?’
Tania took a breath. ‘I’m as serious as life and death,’ she said.
‘Do you really think it could be done?’
‘I know it,’ she said emphatically. She had been engaging in clandestine subversion for two decades. ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world – but keeping it secret, and getting away with it, is more difficult. You would have to exercise the most extreme caution.’
‘Do you think I
should
do it?’
‘Yes!’ she said passionately. ‘I don’t want another generation of Soviet children – or Polish children – to grow up under this stifling tyranny.’
He nodded. ‘I can tell that you really mean it.’
‘I do.’
‘Will you help me?’
‘Of course I will.’
* * *
Cameron Dewar was not sure he would make a good spy. The undercover stuff he had done for President Nixon had been amateurish, and he was lucky not to have gone to jail with his boss, John Ehrlichman. When he joined the CIA he had been trained in the tradecraft of dead drops and brush passes, but he had never actually used such tricks. After six years at CIA headquarters in Langley, he had at last been posted to a foreign capital, but he still had not done clandestine work.
The US Embassy in Warsaw was a proud white marble building on a street called Aleje Ujazdowskie. The CIA occupied a single office near the ambassador’s suite of rooms. Off the office was a windowless storeroom that was used for developing photographic film. The staff was four spies and a secretary. It was a small operation because they had few informants.
Cam did not have much to do. He read the Warsaw newspapers, with the aid of a dictionary. He reported the graffiti he saw: ‘Long live the Pope’ and ‘We want God’. He talked to men like himself who worked for the intelligence services of other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, especially those of West Germany, France and Britain. He drove a used lime-green Polski Fiat whose battery was so undersized that it had to be recharged every night or the car would not start in the morning. He tried to find a girlfriend among the embassy secretaries, and failed.
He felt a loser. His life had once seemed full of promise. He had been a star student at school and university, and his first job had been in the White House. Then it had all gone wrong. He was determined not to let his life be blighted by Nixon. But he needed a success. He wanted to be top of the class again.
Instead he went to parties.
Embassy staff who had wives and children were happy to go home in the evenings and watch American movies on videotape, so the single men got to go to all the less important receptions. Tonight Cam was heading to the Egyptian Embassy for a gathering to welcome a new deputy ambassador.
When he started the Polski, the radio came on. He kept it tuned to the SB wavelength. Reception was often weak, but sometimes he could hear the secret police talking as they tailed people around the city.
Sometimes they were tailing him. The cars changed but it was usually the same two men, a swarthy one he called Mario and a fat guy he thought of as Ollie. There seemed to be no pattern to the surveillance, so he just assumed he was more or less always being watched. That was probably what they wanted. Maybe they deliberately randomized their surveillance precisely in order to keep him permanently on edge.
But he, too, had been trained. Surveillance should never be avoided in an obvious way, he had learned, for that is a signal, to the other side, that you are up to something. Form regular habits, he had been told: go to Restaurant A every Monday, Bar B every Tuesday. Lull them into a false sense of security. But look for gaps in their watchfulness, times when their attention lapses. That will be when you can do something unobserved.
As he drove away from the US Embassy he saw a blue Skoda 105 tuck into the traffic two cars behind him.
The Skoda trailed him across the city. He saw Mario at the wheel and Ollie in the front passenger seat.
Cam parked in Alzacka Street and saw the blue Skoda pull up a hundred yards past him.
He was sometimes tempted to talk to Mario and Ollie, as they were so much part of his life, but he had been warned never to do that, for then the SB would switch personnel and it would take him time to recognize the new people.
He entered the Egyptian Embassy and took a cocktail from a tray. It was so dilute he could hardly taste the gin. He talked to an Austrian diplomat about the difficulty of buying comfortable men’s underwear in Warsaw. When the Austrian drifted away, Cam looked around and saw a blonde woman in her twenties standing alone. She caught his eye and smiled, so he went to speak to her.
He swiftly found out that she was Polish, her name was Lidka, and she worked as a secretary in the Canadian Embassy. She was wearing a tight pink sweater and a short black skirt that showed off her long legs. She spoke good English, and listened to Cam with an intensity of concentration that he found flattering.
Then a man in a pinstriped suit summoned her peremptorily, making Cam think he must be her boss, and the conversation broke up. Almost immediately Cam was approached by another attractive woman, and he began to think it was his lucky day. This one was older, about forty, but prettier, with short pale-blonde hair and bright blue eyes enhanced by blue eye-shadow. She spoke to him in Russian. ‘I’ve met you before,’ she said. ‘Your name is Cameron Dewar. I’m Tania Dvorkin.’
‘I remember,’ he said, glad of the chance to show off his fluency in Russian. ‘You’re a reporter for
TASS
.’
‘And you’re a CIA agent.’
He certainly would not have told her that, so she must have guessed. Routinely, he denied it. ‘Nothing so glamorous,’ he said. ‘Just a humble cultural attaché.’
‘Cultural?’ she said. ‘Then you can help me. What kind of painter is Jan Matejko?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Impressionist, I think. Why?’
‘Art really not your thing?’
‘I’m more a music person,’ he said, feeling cornered.
‘You probably love Szpilman, the Polish violinist.’
‘Absolutely. Such technique with the bow!’
‘What do you think of the poet Wislawa Szymborska?’
‘I haven’t read much of his work, sadly. Is this a test?’
‘Yes, and you failed. Szymborska is a woman. Szpilman is a pianist, not a violinist. Matejko was a conventional painter of court scenes and battles, not an impressionist. And you’re no cultural attaché.’
Cam was mortified to have been found out so easily. What a hopeless undercover agent he was! He tried to brush it off with humour. ‘I might just be a very bad cultural attaché.’
She lowered her voice. ‘If a Polish army officer wanted to talk to a representative of the US, you could arrange it, I guess.’
Suddenly the conversation had taken a serious turn. Cam felt nervous. This could be some kind of trap.
Or it could be a genuine approach – in which case, it might represent a great opportunity for him.
He answered cautiously. ‘I can arrange for anyone to talk to the American government, naturally.’
‘In secret?’
What the hell was this? ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she said, and walked away.
Cam got another drink. What had that been about? Was it real, or had she been mocking him?
The party was coming to an end. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. He thought of going to the bar in the Australian Embassy, where he sometimes played darts with amiable spooks from Oz. Then he saw Lidka standing nearby, again on her own. She really was very sexy. He said to her: ‘Do you have plans for dinner?’
She looked puzzled. ‘You mean recipes?’
He smiled. She had not come across the phrase ‘plans for dinner’. He said: ‘I meant, would you like to have dinner with me?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said immediately. ‘Could we go to The Duck?’
‘Of course.’ It was an expensive restaurant, though not if you were paying in American dollars. He looked at his watch. ‘Shall we leave now?’
Lidka surveyed the room. There was no sign of the man in the pinstriped suit. ‘I’m free,’ she said.
They headed for the exit. As they were passing through the door the Soviet journalist, Tania, reappeared and spoke to Lidka in bad Polish. ‘You dropped this,’ she said, holding out a red scarf.
‘It’s not mine,’ said Lidka.
‘I saw it fall from your hand.’
Someone touched Cam’s elbow. He turned away from the confused conversation and saw a tall, good-looking man of about forty dressed in the uniform of a colonel in the People’s Army of Poland. In fluent Russian the man said: ‘I want to talk to you.’
Cam replied in the same language. ‘All right.’
‘I will find a safe place.’
Cam could do nothing but say: ‘Okay.’
‘Tania will tell you where and when.’
‘Fine.’
The man turned away.
Cameron turned his attention back to Lidka. Tania was saying: ‘My mistake, how silly.’ She walked quickly away. Clearly she had wanted to distract Lidka for the few moments the soldier was talking to Cam.
Likda was puzzled. ‘That was a bit strange,’ she said as they left the building.
Cam was excited, but he pretended to be equally mystified. ‘Peculiar,’ he said.
Lidka persisted. ‘Who was that Polish officer who spoke to you?’
‘No idea,’ Cam said. ‘My car’s this way.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You have a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nice,’ said Lidka, looking pleased.
* * *
A week later, Cam woke up in bed in Lidka’s apartment.
It was more of a studio: one room with a bed, a TV, and a kitchen sink. She shared the shower and toilet down the hall with three other people.
For Cam, it was paradise.
He sat upright. She was standing at the counter making coffee – with his beans: she could not afford real coffee. She was naked. She turned and walked to the bed carrying a cup. She had wiry brown pubic hair and small pointed breasts with mulberry-dark nipples.
At first he had been embarrassed about her walking around naked, because it made him want to stare, which was rude. When he confessed this she had said: ‘Look all you want, I like it.’ He still felt bashful, but not as much as before.
He had seen Lidka every night for a week.
He had had sex with her seven times, which was more than in his entire life up to that point, not counting hand jobs in massage parlours.
One day she had asked if he wanted to do it again in the morning.
He had said: ‘What are you, a sex maniac?’
She had been offended, but they had made it up.
While she brushed her hair, he sipped his coffee and thought about the day ahead. He had not yet heard from Tania Dvorkin. He had reported the exchanges at the Egyptian Embassy to his boss, Keith Dorset, and they had agreed there was nothing to do but wait and see.
He had a bigger issue on his mind. He knew the expression ‘honey trap’. Only a fool would fail to wonder whether Lidka had an ulterior motive in going to bed with him. He had to consider the possibility that she was working under orders from the SB. He sighed and said: ‘I have to tell my boss about you.’
‘Do you?’ She did not seem alarmed. ‘Why?’
‘American diplomats are supposed to date only nationals of NATO countries. We call it the fuck NATO rule. They don’t want us falling in love with Communists.’ He had not told her that he was a spy rather than a diplomat.
She sat on the bed beside him with a sad face. ‘Are you breaking up with me?’
‘No, no!’ The idea almost panicked him. ‘But I have to tell them, and they will check you out.’
Now she looked worried. ‘What does that mean?’
‘They’ll investigate whether you could be an agent of the Polish secret police, or something.’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, well, that’s all right. They’ll soon find out I’m nothing of the kind.’
She seemed relaxed about it. ‘I’m sorry, but it has to be done,’ Cam said. ‘One-night stands don’t matter, but we’re obliged to report it if it gets to be more than that, you know, a real loving relationship.’
‘Okay.’
‘We do have that, don’t we?’ Cam said nervously. ‘A real loving relationship?’
Lidka smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘We do.’
53
The Franck family travelled to Hungary in two Trabant cars. They were going on holiday. Hungary was a popular summer destination for East Germans who could afford the petrol.
As far as they could tell, they were not followed.
They had booked their holiday through the Tourist Office of the East German government. They had half expected to be refused visas, even though Hungary was a Soviet bloc country; but they had been pleasantly surprised. Hans Hoffmann had missed an opportunity to persecute them: perhaps he was busy.
They needed two cars because they were taking Karolin and her family. Werner and Carla were madly fond of their granddaughter, Alice, now sixteen. Lili loved Karolin, but not Karolin’s husband, Odo. He was a good man, and he had got Lili her present job, as administrator of a church orphanage; but there was something forced about his affection for Karolin and Alice, as if loving them was a good deed. Lili thought a man’s love should be a helpless passion, not a moral duty.