Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [8]
“We always go through London, to shop duty-free at Heathrow,” I said, pleased with my quick thinking.
“I need to get permission,” she said, and spoke in Turkish into her radio. “My colleague will take their documents to the office for the boss to take a look. Don’t worry, we’ll hold the plane.”
Sasha was as white as a sheet. One of our escorts followed the airline staffer. The other continued watching us, unperturbed. I took Tolik by the hand and went to buy him some candy at the nearest stand. Ten minutes or so went by. Two figures appeared at the end of the hallway: the young woman and our Turk.
“Everything’s in order,” she said, handing Sasha the documents. “Have a good flight!”
We ran into the Jetway. Before takeoff I managed to call a friend in London and asked him to find an asylum lawyer to meet us at Heathrow.
“Did you get what’s happened?” Sasha asked.
“Yes, the Turks escorted us to the plane and made sure we got on.”
“They had my false name in their computer. It means that the Americans tipped them off. No one else knew the name,” he concluded.
For the five days I spent in Turkey I kept expecting fate to materialize in the form of a ferocious Turkish policeman. Instead, fate’s messenger turned out to be a British immigration officer, whose marked politeness did not bode well.
“What you have done,” he said to me, as he looked over Sasha’s false passport, “bears stiff penalties in the United Kingdom. Do you understand that I can arrest you for illegally bringing in asylum seekers?”
I knew that they couldn’t do anything to Sasha, whose new lawyer was waiting for us in arrivals with a copy of a fax sent to the home office; we had communicated with him by phone before presenting ourselves to the border control. As for me, my fate was in the hands of the immigration official. And he apparently did not share my romantic nostalgia for the days of heroic defections from behind the Iron Curtain.
“With due respect, sir,” I said, “there are exceptional circumstances in this case. Mr. Litvinenko and his family were in danger. It was a question of life and death.”
“Russia, as far as I know, has a democratic government,” he parried. “Why didn’t you take him to your own country? Your embassy refused to accept him and you decided to solve your problem at our expense, isn’t that so? Were you paid by Litvinenko for this?”
“No, I did it out of humanitarian concern, knowing the British tradition of giving asylum to fugitives from tyranny.”
“Out of humanitarian concern, I will not arrest you, but I am banning you from entry into the United Kingdom. We are releasing Litvinenko into his solicitor’s custody, and you are taking the first flight back to Turkey.”
He stamped my passport with the border control imprint, then crossed it out with relish and added a notation.
“But I don’t need to go to Turkey,” I protested. “I need to go to New York.”
“You’re being deported to Turkey! And a new passport won’t help,” he said, guessing my thought. “I’m entering you in the computer as a smuggler of asylum seekers. You’ll have to apply to our embassy for advance clearance in case you want to come here. And I doubt that you will get it.”
Sasha and Marina stared at me in disbelief when I explained what was happening. I had to use all my powers of persuasion to calm them: notwithstanding the official’s apparent fury, I said, they were perfectly safe now. They were on British soil and they had nothing to fear.
The immigration official kept his word. From the British computer, his notation traveled into the American network and apparently will linger there forever. Even though the Brits removed the ban a few months later, I am still stopped occasionally by U.S. Border Control and asked to explain what happened in Heathrow on November 1, 2000. But that night, I could not care less about getting a permanent stain on my electronic reputation; it was well worth the satisfaction of seeing Sasha, Marina, and Tolik being led away by two solemn policemen into the safety of a brightly lit terminal.
When I got back to