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For Grishin the news was the last blow of a miserable day. All he could do was ensure that the slave camp to which Turkin would be sent was of a kind and of a regimen that he could never survive.
In the early 1980s the camps for political prisoners had been moved from the too-accessible Mordovia further north to the region around Perm, Grishin’s own birthplace. A dozen of them were scattered round the town of Vsesvyatskoye. The best-known were the hellholes of Perm 35, Perm 36, and Perm 37.
But there was one very special camp reserved for traitors. Nizhni Tagil was a pla
ce that caused a shudder even among the KGB.
However harsh the guards were, they lived outside the camp. Their brutalities could only be sporadic and institutional: the reduction of rations, an increase of labor. To make sure the “educated” criminals lived with the real facts of life, they were mixed inside Nizhni Tagil with a cull of the most vicious and violent of all the zeks in all the camps.
Grishin ensured that Nikolai Turkin was sent to Nizhni Tagil, and under the heading “regimen” on his sentencing form he wrote Special—ultra strict.
¯
“ANYWAY,” sighed Carey Jordan, “I guess you recall the end of that unlovely saga.”
“Much of it. But remind me.” He raised a hand and to the hovering waiter said. “Two espressos, if you please.”
“Well, in the last year, 1993, the FBI finally took over the eight-year mole hunt. They claimed later they cracked it all themselves inside eighteen months, but a lot of elimination work had already been done, though too slowly.
“To give credit, the Feds did do what we should have done. They pissed on privacy and got covert court orders to examine the banking records of the few remaining suspects. They forced the banks to come clean. And it worked. On February 21, 1994—Jesus, Nigel, will I always remember that date?—they picked him up, just a few blocks from his house in Arlington. After that it all came out.”
“Did you know in advance?”
“Nope. I guess the Bureau was smart not to tell me. If I’d known then what I know now I’d have got there before them and killed him myself. I’d have gone to the chair a happy man.”
The old Deputy Director Ops stared across the restaurant, but he was actually staring at a list of names and faces, all long gone.
“Forty-five operations ruined, twenty-two men betrayed—eighteen Russians and four from the satellites. Fourteen of them executed. And all because that warped little serial killer-by-proxy wanted a big house and a Jaguar.”
Nigel Irvine did not want to intrude upon private grief, but he murmured, “You should have done it yourself, in-house.”
“I know, I know. We all know now.”
“And Monk?” asked Irvine. Carey Jordan gave a short laugh. The waiter, now wishing to clear away the last table in the empty restaurant, shimmered by waving the bill. Irvine gestured that it be placed in front of him. The waiter hovered until a credit card was placed upon it, then went off to the cash register.
“Yes, Monk, Well, he didn’t know either, That day was Presidents’ Day, a federal public holiday. So he stayed at home, I guess. There was nothing on the news until the following morning. And that was when the damn letter arrived.”
Washington, February 1994
THE letter came on the 22nd, the day after President’s Day, when mail deliveries resumed.
It was a crisp white envelope and from the frank Monk could see it was sent from the mail room at Langley and addressed to his home, not his office.
Inside it was another envelope bearing the crest of a U.S. Embassy. On the front was typed: Mr. Jason Monk, c/o Central Mail Room, CIA Headquarters Building, Langley, Virginia. And someone had scrawled “over.” Monk turned it over. On the back the same hand had written: “Delivered by hand to our embassy, Vilnius, Lithuania. Guess you know the guy?” As it bore no stamp, the inner envelope had clearly come to the States in the diplomatic pouch.
Inside this was a third envelope, of much inferior quality, with fragments of wood pulp visible in the texture. It was addressed in quaint English “Please”—underlined three times—“pass forward to Mr. Jason Monk at CIA. From a friend.”
The actual letter was inside this. It was written on paper so frail that the leaves almost fell apart at the touch Lavatory paper? The flyleaves of an old, cheap paperback book? Could have been.
The writing was in Russian, the hand shaky, written with an uncertain point in black ink. At the top it was headed:
Nizhni Tagil, September, 1993.
DEAR FRIEND JASON,
If you ever get this, and by the time you get it, I will be dead. It is the typhoid, you see. It comes with the fleas and the lice. They are closing this camp now, breaking it up, to wipe it off the face of the earth as if it had never been, which it should not. A dozen among the politicals have been granted an amnesty; there is someone called Yeltsin in Moscow now. One of those is my friend, a Lithuanian, a writer and intellectual. I think I can trust him. He promises me he will hide this and send it when he reaches his home. I will have to take another train, another cattle truck, to a new place, but I will never see it. So I send you my farewell, and some news.
The letter described what had happened after the arrest in East Berlin three and a half years earlier. Turkin told of the beatings in the cell beneath Lefortovo and how he saw no point in not telling everything he knew. He described the stinking, excrement-smeared cell with the weeping walls and the endless chill, the harsh lights, the shouted questions, the blackened eyes and broken teeth if an answer was slow in coming.