*
Keith said to Cam: ‘You’re still seeing that Polish girl.’
Cam said nothing. Of course he was still seeing her. He was as happy as a kid in a candy store. Lidka was eager to have sex with him whenever he wanted it. Until now, few girls had wanted to have sex with him at all. ‘Do you like this?’ she would say as she caressed him; and if he admitted he did, she would say: ‘But do you like it a little bit, do you like it a lot, or do you like it so much you want to die?’
Keith said: ‘I’ve told you that your request has been denied.’
‘But you haven’t said why.’
Keith looked angry. ‘I’ve made a decision.’
‘But is it the right decision?’
‘Are you challenging my authority?’
‘No, you’re challenging my girlfriend.’
Keith became angrier. ‘You think you have me over a barrel because Stanislaw won’t speak to anyone else.’
That was exactly what Cam thought, but he denied it. ‘It has nothing to do with Staz. I’m not willing to give her up for no reason.’
‘I may have to fire you.’
‘I still won’t give her up. In fact –’ Cam hesitated. The words that came into his mind were not what he had planned. But he said them anyway. ‘In fact, I’m hoping to marry her.’
Keith changed his tone. ‘Cam,’ he said, ‘she may not be an agent of the SB, but she could still have an ulterior motive for sleeping with you.’
Cam bristled. ‘If it’s nothing to do with intelligence, it’s nothing to do with you.’
Keith persisted, speaking gently, as if trying not to hurt Cam’s feelings. ‘A lot of Polish girls would like to go to America, you know that.’
Cam did know that. The thought had occurred to him long ago. He felt embarrassed and humiliated that Keith should say it. He kept his face wooden. ‘I know,’ he said.
‘Forgive me for saying it, but she could be deceiving you for that reason,’ Keith said. ‘Have you considered that possibility?’
‘Yes, I’ve considered it,’ said Cam. ‘And I don’t care.’
*
In Moscow, the big question was whether to invade Poland.
The day before the Politburo debate, Dimka and Natalya clashed with Yevgeny Filipov at a preparatory meeting in the Nina Onilova Room. Filipov said: ‘Our Polish comrades require military assistance urgently, to resist the attacks of traitors in the employ of the capitalist-imperialist powers.’
Natalya said: ‘You want an invasion, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956.’
Filipov did not deny it. ‘The Soviet Union has the right to invade any country when the interests of Communism are under threat. That’s the Brezhnev Doctrine.’
Dimka said: ‘I’m against military action.’
‘There’s a surprise,’ said Filipov sarcastically.
Dimka ignored that. ‘In both Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the counter-revolution was led by revisionist elements within the Communist Party ruling cadres,’ he said. ‘It was therefore possible to remove them, like chopping the head off a chicken. They had little popular support.’
‘Why should this crisis be different?’
‘Because in Poland the counter-revolutionaries are working-class leaders with working-class backing. Lech Wa??sa is an electrician. Anna Walentynowicz is a crane driver. And hundreds of factories are on strike. We’re dealing with a mass movement.’
‘We have to crush it all the same. Are you seriously suggesting that we abandon Polish Communism?’
‘There’s another problem,’ Natalya put in. ‘Money. Back in 1968, the Soviet bloc did not owe billions of dollars in foreign debt. Today we are totally dependent on loans from the West. You heard what President Carter said in Warsaw. Credit from the West is linked to human rights.’
‘So . . . ?’
‘If we send the tanks into Poland, they will withdraw our line of credit. So, Comrade Filipov, your invasion will ruin the economy of the entire Soviet bloc.’
There was a silence in the room.
Dimka said: ‘Does anyone have any other suggestions?’
*
To Cam it seemed an omen that a Polish officer had turned against the Red Army at the same time as Polish workers were rejecting Communist tyranny. Both events were signs of the same change. As he headed for his rendezvous with Stanislaw, he felt he might be part of a historic earthquake.
He left the embassy and got into his car. As he hoped, Mario and Ollie followed him. It was important that they had him under surveillance while he met with Stanislaw. If the interaction went as planned, Mario and Ollie would faithfully report that nothing suspicious had taken place.
Cam hoped Stanislaw had received and understood his instructions.
Cam parked in the Old Town Square. Carrying a copy of today’s Trybuna Ludu, the official government newspaper, he strolled across the square. Mario got out of his car and walked after him. Half a minute later, Ollie followed at a distance.
Cam headed down a side street with the two secret policemen in train.
He went into a bar, sat near the window, and asked for a beer. He could see his shadows loitering nearby. He paid for his drink as soon as it came, so that he would be able to leave quickly.
He checked his watch frequently while he drank his beer.
At one minute to three he went out.
He had practised this manoeuvre over and over at Camp Peary, the CIA’s training centre near Williamsburg, Virginia. He had been able to do it perfectly there. But this would be the first time he did it for real.
He quickened his pace a little as he approached the end of the block. Turning the corner, he glanced back and saw that Mario was about thirty yards behind.
Just around the corner was a shop selling cigarettes and tobacco. Stanislaw was exactly where Cam expected him to be, standing outside the shop, looking in the window. Cam had about thirty seconds before Mario turned the corner – plenty of time to execute a simple brush pass.
All he had to do was exchange the newspaper he was carrying for the one in Stanislaw’s hand, which was identical except that – all being well – it should contain the photocopies Stanislaw had made of documents in his safe at army headquarters.
There was only one snag.
Stanislaw was not carrying a newspaper.
Instead he had a large buff-coloured envelope.
He had not followed his instructions to the letter. Either he had misunderstood, or he had imagined that the exact details did not matter.
Whatever the reason, things had gone wrong.
Panic froze Cam’s brain. His step faltered. He did not know what to do. He wanted to scream abuse at Staz.
Then he controlled himself. He forced himself to be calm. He made a split-second decision. He would not abort the exchange. He would go through with it.
He walked straight towards Stanislaw.
As they brushed past one another, they exchanged the newspaper for the envelope.
Immediately, Stanislaw walked into the shop, carrying the newspaper, and disappeared from sight.
Cam walked on, carrying the envelope, which was an inch thick with the documents inside.
At the next corner, he again glanced back and got a glimpse of Mario. The secret policeman was about twenty yards behind, apparently relaxed and confident. He had no notion of what had just happened. He had not even seen Stanislaw.
Would he notice that Cam was no longer carrying a newspaper, but held an envelope instead? If he did, he might arrest Cam and confiscate the envelope. That would be the end of Cam’s triumph – and the end of Stanislaw’s life.
It was summer. Cam had no coat under which to conceal the envelope. Besides, hiding it could be worse: Mario might be more likely to notice if Cam was suddenly empty-handed.
He passed a street news-stand, but realized he could not stop and buy a newspaper within Mario’s sight, for that would draw attention to the fact that he no longer had his original paper.
He realized he had made a foolish mistake. He had been so mesmerized by the brush-past routine that he had not thought of the simplest way out. He should have taken the envelope and kept the newspaper.
Too late now.
He felt trapped. It was so frustrating he wanted to scream. Everything had gone perfectly but for one small detail!
He could step into a store and buy another newspaper. He looked for a newsagent’s shop. But this was Poland, not America, and there was not a store on every block.
He turned another corner and sighted a rubbish bin. Hallelujah! He quickened his pace and looked inside. His luck was out: there were no newspapers. He spotted a magazine with a colourful cover. He snatched it up and walked on. As he walked, he surreptitiously folded the magazine so that the cover was inside and a page of plain black-and-white print was on the outside. He wrinkled his nose: there had been something disgusting in the bin, and the smell clung to the magazine. He tried not to breathe deeply as he slid the envelope between the pages.
He felt better. He now looked almost the same as he had before.
He returned to his car and took out his keys. This perhaps would be the moment they stopped him. He imagined Mario saying: ‘Just a minute, let me see that envelope you’re trying to hide.’ As quickly as he could, he unlocked the door.
He saw Mario a few paces away.
Cam got into his car and placed the magazine in the footwell on the passenger side.
Glancing up, he saw Mario and Ollie getting into their car.
It looked like he had got away with it.
For a moment, he felt too weak to move.
Then he started his engine and drove back to the embassy.
*
Cam Dewar sat in Lidka’s bedsitting room, waiting for her to come home.
She had a photograph of him on her dressing table. Cam found that so pleasing that it almost made him cry. No girl had ever wanted a photo of him, let alone framed it and kept it by her mirror.
The room expressed her personality. Her favourite colour was bright pink, and that was the shade of the bed covers and the tablecloth and the cushions. The closet held few clothes, but they all flattered her: short skirts, V-necked dresses, pretty costume jewellery, prints with small flowers and bows and butterflies. Her bookshelf held all of Jane Austen in English and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in Polish. In a box under the bed, like a secret stash of pornography, she had a collection of American magazines about home decoration, full of photographs of sunlit kitchens painted in bright colours.
Today Lidka had begun the tedious process of being vetted by the CIA as a potential wife. This was much more thorough than the investigation of a mere girlfriend. She had to write her life story, undergo days of interrogation, and take an extended lie-detector test. All this had been going on somewhere else in the embassy while Cam did his normal day’s work. He was not allowed to see her until she came home.
It was going to be difficult for Keith Dorset to fire Cam now. The information Staz was producing was solid gold.
Cam had given Staz a compact 35mm camera, a Zorki, which was a Soviet-made copy of a Leica, so that he could photograph documents in his office with the door shut instead of feeding them through the photocopying machine in the secretaries’ bullpen. He could pass Cam hundreds of pages of documents in a handful of rolls of film.
The latest question the Warsaw CIA station had asked Staz was: What would trigger a westward attack by the Red Army’s Second Strategic Echelon? The files he had provided in answer had been so comprehensive that Keith Dorset had received a rare written compliment from Langley.
And still Mario and Ollie had never seen Staz.
So Cam was confident that he would not be fired, and his marriage would not be forbidden, unless Lidka turned out to be an actual agent of the KGB.
Meanwhile, Poland was lurching towards freedom. Ten million people had joined the first free trade union, called Solidarity. That was one in every three Polish workers. Poland’s biggest problem now was not the Soviet Union but money. The strikes, and the consequent paralysis of Communist Party leadership, had crippled an already weak economy. The result was a shortage of everything. The government rationed meat, butter and flour. Workers who had won generous pay rises found they could not buy anything with their money. The black market exchange rate for the dollar more than doubled, from 120 zlotys to 250. First Secretary Gierek was succeeded by Kania who was then replaced by General Jaruzelski, which made no difference.
Tantalizingly, Lech Wa??sa and Solidarity hesitated on the brink of overthrowing Communism. A general strike was prepared then called off at the last minute, on the advice of the Pope and the new American President, Ronald Reagan, both of whom feared bloodshed. Cam was disappointed by Reagan’s timidity.
He got off the bed and laid the table with cutlery and plates. He had brought home two steaks. Naturally, diplomats were not subject to the shortages that afflicted the Poles. They were paying in desperately needed dollars: they could have anything they wanted. Likda was probably eating better than even the Communist Party elite.
Cam wondered whether to make love to her before or after eating the steaks. Sometimes it was good to savour the anticipation. Other times he was in too much of a hurry. Lidka never minded either way.
At last she arrived home. She kissed his cheek, put down her bag, took off her coat, and went along the hall to the bathroom.
When she came back he showed her the steaks. ‘Very nice,’ she said. Still she did not look at him.
‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ Cam said. He had never known her to be ill-tempered. This was unique.
‘I don’t think I can be a CIA wife,’ she said.