Bearpit by Brian Freemantle

thirty. If you’re not there by then I’ll know there’s a problem.’
    â€˜It wouldn’t automatically mean I’ve been stopped.’
    â€˜I realize that,’ said Proctor. ‘If you’ve got to cry off for any reason, just let yourself be seen around the UN the following day: we’ll be watching. And waiting in exactly the same way, that night. And the following night, if necessary.’
    â€˜It’ll work, won’t it?’ said Levin in sudden urgency.
    â€˜We’ll make it work,’ assured Proctor. ‘Everything’s going to be all right, Yevgennie. Believe me.’
    â€˜I want to,’ said Levin. Then he said: ‘Petr is sixteen.’
    â€˜Yes?’ said the American curiously.
    â€˜You’ll make everything possible for him, won’t you? High school, college. Things like that? I’ve earned it, after all.’
    â€˜It’ll all be taken care of,’ promised Proctor in further reassurance. ‘There’ll be a safe house. New identities. Money.’
    â€˜I’ll cooperate,’ said Levin, making a promise of his own.
    â€˜I know you will.’
    â€˜And Natalia?’
    â€˜What about her?’
    â€˜Will you – your people – try to help me there, too? Through the State Department, maybe?’
    â€˜We’ll do what we can: I’ll personally ask Washington for advice, to work out the best way.’
    â€˜Just three days?’ queried Levin, as if he found it difficult to believe.
    â€˜At the outside.’
    â€˜Thank you, David. For everything. You’re a good friend.’
    â€˜There won’t be any problems.’
    â€˜It’s difficult to imagine that right now,’ said Levin. ‘All I can think of right now is that I’ve made a terrible mistake.’
    On the other side of the World, Yuri Vasilivich Malik was also reflecting upon mistakes, trying to assess their potential – and personal – danger. At his inferior, first-posting level it would be a mistake to interfere in what he knew was being planned but of which he was officially supposed to know nothing. Yet the retribution operation that Ilena had disclosed to him was madness. And could only result in the sort of disaster that had so very recently engulfed the GRU; maybe even a worse disaster. By which, therefore, he could be destroyed. So either way he lost. The decision, then, had to be one of degrees, between the greater and the lesser.
    One of his instructors at the Metrostroevskaya Street training school – into the idiosyncracies of the American language and its slang – had been a pale-skinned, pale-haired American trapped by his homosexuality into passing over US defence secrets from Silicon Valley who’d chosen defection when his FBI arrest became inevitable. Yuri had particularly liked the expression encompassing indecision: either shit or get off the pot. He’d never expected it to become personally applicable.
    It took only three hours for Yuri to complete the confirmatory round journey to the military section of Kabul airport – aware it might also provide some minimal protection against any later punishment of Ilena, if there were an inquiry into his source – and return to the embassy by noon. He bypassed his own cramped, junior office in the rezidentura – and Ilena’s separate accommodation, because he did not want to frighten her – to make his way directly to the comparatively expansive quarters of Georgi Petrovich Solov.
    â€˜Yes?’ inquired the duty clerk.
    â€˜I have to see the Comrade Rezident,’ said Yuri. He added: ‘Upon a matter of the utmost urgency and importance.’

6
    Protocol within the KGB is more strictly regimented and observed than it ever was in the court of the Tsars and the Kabul controller considered himself in an impossible position having the son of someone now a First Deputy dumped upon him. More so because