Duel of Assassins by Dan Pollock

Author:Dan Pollock [Pollock, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tusitala Press
Published: 2014-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Taras laced together the pasteboard covers of Marcus’ dossier, replaced it on the trolley beside the desk. Across the room, droplets chased each other down the window glass in spermatic, quicksilver trails. Outside in Dzerzhinsky Square a slanting drizzle halated the headlights orbiting Iron Feliks’ bronze statue. But here and there through the shredding battle smoke of nimbostratus, Taras could see vivid patches of cerulean. At Moscow’s northern latitude—nearly the same as Copenhagen’s—the early summer twilight had a while yet to linger, though Arensky’s watch showed eight-forty. He had worked through dinner. Scattered around him on the baize blotter were the remains of his lunch—a rind of black bread on a plate, an empty bowl slivered with cucumber from the cold okroshka, a well-crumpled Pepsi can—victim of a visceral spasm during the Afghan section of his reading.

He leaned back in the chair, rubbed his eyes, let out a deep sigh of deskbound weariness. What had he gleaned? Probably nothing affecting this assignment. But in the past hours of page-turning it seemed his entire adult existence as well as Marcus’ had trooped before the reviewing stand of his mind’s eye, in all its disarray. It was a disquieting experience, witnessing—and judging—one’s life as parade rather than as cross-sectional experience, as lived. There was the added dimension of direction. Where the hell was he going? Or Marcus?

One thing at least was clear. Marcus Jolly’s erratic course was intricately interwoven with his own, crossing it again and again, always fatefully. Even eight years after their farewell in Peshawar, the mere linking of their names on a transatlantic call from the Kremlin to the White House had been sufficient to wrench Taras out of his new American life and catapult him back to Moscow.

What would it take to finally slam the door on Marcus, as he thought he had done that last night in their bungalow at Dean’s?

After slipping out through the garden, Taras had flagged a cab to the USIA office in Peshawar’s University Town district, where his new CIA contact had been pacing the vestibule. He had been asked questions all that night and far into the next day, the first of countless interrogations. They uncoiled in his recollection as an endless series of monotonous rooms, inscrutable inquisitors and unspooling cassette machines—his tunnelway to freedom. There had been more debriefings the following week at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. And they came, one after another, week after stupefying week, when he was flown to Washington. Nor had they altogether ceased even after he’d gone to work at Langley. But he’d accepted the bargain for asylum, and gave full measure.

In all those years Taras had heard nothing from Marcus. And the KGB dossier had offered few revelations. It mentioned that Marcus had been commissioned a captain in July 1985, and returned forthwith to Moscow. What the dossier did not say, but which Taras knew, was that Rodion Marchenko had also left Afghanistan around July of 1985, removed as deputy commander by the new

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