Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [6]
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