The Defection of A.J. Lewinter by Robert Littell

Author:Robert Littell [LITTELL, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC031000/FIC006000
ISBN: 9781590209080
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2011-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

FOUR-LANE HIGHWAYS are a fairly new phenomenon in the Soviet Union. As such, they generally have all the modern conveniences—one of which is road signs. Every bump or curve or crossroad is marked a half-mile or so in advance to warn that a particular bump or curve or crossroad is dead ahead. A second sign is planted like an X to mark the spot. But there was no sign of any kind where this particular single lane, well-paved road met the main Moscow-Smolensk highway—a clear hint to anybody who turned off that he had better know where he was going or he had no business being there.

Shortly before 10 A.M. a black Zil with a dented fender and rusted chrome swerved off onto the side road. “They’ll be checking I.D.’s just ahead, Comrade,” the chauffeur told the passenger in the back seat. Pogodin took his identification out of his wallet and looked at the photograph. It showed him in the full uniform of a lieutenant colonel of the KGB. He tried to peer through the eyes in the photograph to see what he had been thinking when the picture was taken, but he got no further than the expressionless stare that is the trademark of all official photographs.

Pogodin toyed with the I.D. card and stared out the window. He was sorry now that he had spent the night at Zaitsev’s dacha. The party and the post-mortems had done little to prepare him for the interview with Avksentiev; a good night’s sleep would have been more in order. And Pogodin was tired, there was no doubt about that. He had been under an enormous strain in the nineteen days since returning to the Soviet Union with what he thought was a big catch—perhaps the biggest intelligence catch since the end of the war. Somewhere along the way Pogodin’s career had become inexorably intertwined with Lewinter’s fate. Pogodin had discovered Lewinter (no matter it was by sheer accident) and brought him home; ergo he was responsible.

The responsibility had weighed heavily on Pogodin during the debriefing at Obninsk. He had sat in on the nightly roundup sessions listening attentively as the experts went over Lewinter’s story with a fine-tooth comb. Everything had gone smoothly until the inquiries started to come in from Moscow. Then, suddenly, Lewinter was no longer a trophy for the intelligence community to flaunt; he was political. It was at that point that Avksentiev had come into the picture.

And Avksentiev was someone to reckon with. Pogodin knew Avksentiev, or at least he used to know him. Avksentiev had been his section chief in Prague some years back. Since then he had gone on to bigger and better things, as everyone knew he one day would. Pogodin wondered if Avksentiev had changed any since Prague. In those days he was a meticulous planner, a man who did his homework and then confronted problems the way he crossed bridges—one at a time. He was especially good in dealing with sensitive matters; he spoke in metaphors and never stepped on toes and he generally got his way.

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