Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield

Author:Brian Garfield [Garfield, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com / Open Road
Published: 2012-02-14T08:01:12+00:00

At some point along the drive back down from the heights to the city, I began to shake badly and I asked Timoshenko to stop the car. I felt faint and queasy; I stood by the side of the road getting a grip on myself. I’d faced up to Zandor with a cool aplomb that had taken me by surprise but now the reaction had set in and I was helpless to control it.

Timoshenko sat behind the wheel staring straight ahead. His knuckles were white on the wheel. If he looked at me it was only when my back was turned. I wondered how he sized it up.

Zandor was one of those men to whom deviousness is an entertainment. His threats had been obvious but he hadn’t said anything explicit and that could be maddening, as he knew well. I was on probation without having been told the crime of which I was accused or suspected. Now I understood the emotions of Kafka’s man on trial.

Were they onto my search for the gold? Or had they decided I was working with Bukov and his underground railway? Or did they suspect I was a CIA spy?

All my imagination needed was the knowledge that these wild things were at all possible. A year ago the Kremlin expelled a visiting American congressman* from the USSR after charging him, on the flimsiest suspicion, with spying for American secret police and planning to create subversion to incite Russians to betray their regime.

For all the talk of cultural exchange and dwindling barriers it’s still a fact that the Soviet Union is ruled by a dictatorship. Like any other tyranny it suffers from the paranoia that results from the precariousness of its leaders’ insecure positions. To maintain power they hand down arbitrary decisions from which their own citizens, let alone foreigners, have no appeal; and the mere suspicion of guilt is more than enough to lead to conviction and sentencing. Otherwise the dictators wouldn’t survive in office.

So it didn’t matter whether I’d done anything wrong; it mattered only whether I’d given them grounds for suspicion.

I didn’t think I had. If I were under serious suspicion they’d have expelled me or arrested me; they wouldn’t have turned me loose to go back to my work.

So they didn’t have anything concrete. But it was always possible an attack was shaping up; since they weren’t sure, they had to blanket all possibilities. So they warned me that I was under suspicion. It was a gesture; in specific terms meaningless. But I couldn’t know positively that it was meaningless and therefore I would be off balance, perhaps frightened into abandoning my attack—if I’d had one in mind. Or conversely the warning might provoke me into an overt act that would give them a reason to arrest me.

It took time to reason this out but finally I was satisfied.

The cold sweat had dried on my face. I noticed for the first time that it wasn’t raining. I had no idea how long it had been since the rain had stopped.

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