Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [7]
I dialed Mark’s number. A recording said something in Turkish, the only discernible words being “Türkish Telekom.” Probably the account didn’t exist anymore, now that the operation was aborted. There was no point in calling the embassy landline. Surely there was no Mark on the staff.
I went to the lobby and called Boris, away from Sasha’s and Marina’s hearing.
“Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling all day,” he asked.
“There are complications, I will tell you later. In short, we were at the embassy, but the Americans are not taking them.”
Boris never gives up. While we were driving through Turkey, he had already developed Plan B: a yacht had been chartered in Greece to pick us up and sail into neutral waters.
“And then what?” I asked. “Sail forever, like the Flying Dutchman? You can get lost in a big city, but you can’t hide on a yacht. Sooner or later they’ll have to come ashore and show their papers.”
“But this will at least give us some time to put our thoughts together.”
“I have a different plan,” I said, “but I can’t talk about it on the phone.”
Sasha needed to be inside a country in order to claim asylum. Yet he could not board a flight bound for any desirable country without a visa, which was impossible to obtain with his passport. My plan was to purchase tickets back to Moscow, with a plane change in a Western European airport. He could ask for asylum during his layover. Flight connections did not require a visa as long as you stayed within the transit zone at the airport. I went online to check plane schedules.
“Where do you want to go? France, Germany, or England?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” Sasha said, “just as long as we get out of here as soon as possible.”
“I don’t care, either,” said Tolik.
“I want to go to France,” said Marina.
“I think that England would be better,” I said. “At least I’ll be able to explain over there who the heck you are.”
The next morning, an odd group appeared at the registration counter of Turkish Airlines: a bearded American who spoke Russian, with no baggage but with a passport nearly filled up with Russian entry stamps; a beautiful Russian woman with a nervous child and five suitcases; and an athletic man claiming to be a citizen of an insignificant nation, who was wearing sunglasses despite the cloudy weather. The glasses allowed him to professionally scan the airport crowds. I caught the eye of a Turkish policeman observing us. He must have decided that Sasha was my bodyguard.
We checked in for a flight to London, with a change at Heathrow to an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. The registration went smoothly, but the border guard at passport control took an inordinate interest in Sasha’s passport. The rest of us had passed through without incident, and we stood and watched while he turned Sasha’s passport around, examining it from all sides, and looking at it under ultraviolet light, for a good few minutes. At last he stamped it and waved him on. Made it, I thought.
We had only a few minutes left and we raced through the nearly empty airport to the gate.
“Is that it? That’s it?” Marina asked, glowing.
And then I saw them. Two Turks of a certain type were following us at a distance. It was impossible to miss them: they were the only ones moving at our speed, as if we were all one team.
“See them?” I asked.
Sasha nodded.
“They latched onto us at passport control.”
“Yes, I noticed.”
We ran up to the gate. The flight was closing; we were the last to board. Our escorts sat down at the gate and stared at us. A young woman in a Turkish Airlines uniform took our boarding cards and passports.
“You are all right,” she said to me. Turning to Sasha and Marina, she said, “But you don’t have a British visa.” She looked at them inquiringly.
“We have a direct connection to Moscow,” I said. “Here are the tickets.”
“And where are the London–Moscow boarding passes?”
“We have to change airlines, we’ll get them in London.”
“Strange,” she said. “Why are you going through London when there’s a direct Istanbul–Moscow