“What about KGB? What about the Party? You love KGB.”
“Yes, KGB is my home.”
“But Britain is the exact opposite. How do you do it?”
“I do both.”
“What if MI5 tries to recruit you?” She was whispering with the covers pulled over their heads when she said this. KGB bugged all flats.
“Shush. I’ll recruit them instead.”
She was sleepy and dreamy. “Good.”
“Maybe we’ll never return to Russia.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
He said no more about it that night. Maybe she would grow into it, the more she came to realize they were living where the stores never ran out of food, where you could read anything you wanted, where you could publicly criticize the government.
He would wait for her to catch up. He would have to wait, for he adored his wife. But would he return to Russia if she insisted? Was his love boundless?
He rolled over and shut his eyes. Some answers would be slower to come than others. For now, remaining forever was a topic he wouldn’t broach again, not with Yulia.
She was more KGB than him.
5
News arrived from Nikolai's aunt in Leningrad. She had written two weeks before, sending the letter to KGB Moscow to find Nikolai. He opened and began reading, wondering why his mother's sister, whom he hadn't spoken to in a decade, was writing.
He found out why as he read and learned of his mother's arrest and 100 rubles fine for attending church. She had tagged along with a friend, a woman dying from cancer. While his mother hadn't changed her mind about such foolishness as religion, she had attended a service as support. Aunt Tania found the news article in the Leningrad paper since the government papers had reprinted to warn the populace that they should avoid church.
But then the letter continued. Mother had gone to Leningrad, to Aunt Tania's home, as the Party had ended Nikolai's father's KGB pension because of the arrest. Now she was penniless, without income, and relying on her sister for food and shelter. Finally, the letter swore Nikolai to secrecy but asked, in the humblest manner, whether he might send a little something now and then.
It shocked Nikolai. It was so unlike his mother. And he was confident the entire foolishness of church and religion amounted to naught in her life. But for the Party to step in and take away his father's pension? The pension that he had earned as a loyal Russian intelligence officer after working all his life? His first reaction was shock—and shame—but then he grew angry. Why hadn't the Party given her credit since Nikolai was serving in the KGB? Did his loyal service, like that of his father, mean nothing after all?
He fell into a pit of anger and lashed out inside his head at the Party members surrounding him every day, the diplomats and their Communism, and the KGB officers who blindly followed the Party and its leaders and government. His mother's predicament turned his head, especially after contacting his bank in Russia, and learning money couldn't be transferred to his mother. Her name was on a list of undesirables, and she couldn't receive charity.
He became furious, shouting and stomping around the flat at night, Yulia running after him, reminding him of the electronic ears everywhere.
He told her in a whisper he wanted his mother out of the Soviet Union. And that he wanted them out of the Soviet Union if that's how loyalty got rewarded. It shocked her when he said these things, though she made like she understood. She cradled her husband's head at night and shushed him and didn't argue as a good KGB wife should do.
Then, one night after tender lovemaking with Yulia, while he was lying and staring at the ceiling and she had drifted off, he realized he liked Britain more than he'd ever liked Russia. He had good feelings about the people he knew and the town he lived in and struggled with spying against them.
He got up, went into the kitchen, poured a small glass of vodka, and drank it off. More anger surfaced, and he made a decision. He would bring his mother to England. He would provide for her, and she would never have to return to Russia.
He set his glass down on the kitchen counter and looked out at Yulia's small strawberry garden she’d potted on their flat balcony.
He was going to be recruited.
6
Franklin Bolling was an MI5 officer who had met Nikolai at a Danish Embassy cocktail party. They had spoken briefly when, much to Nikolai’s surprise and great liking, Bolling began speaking to him in flawless Russian. Their conversation had continued another half hour and ended with a plan to meet for coffee. Nikolai found himself quite liking his new contact. Bolling was blond and intelligent, spoke English with an upper-class accent—as Nikolai had learned to recognize—and had been a top student at Oxford in Russian history and language.
Bolling toiled away in a windowless office at MI5 with just enough room for a modest desk and chair. Tacked to his west wall was a map of Greater London with red thumbtacks pinned on some of the MI5 key meeting places around the city, places like Mornington Crescent Tube Station, Tin and Stone Bridge, St James’s Park, In and Out Club, Piccadilly, 54 Broadway, Boodle’s, 28 St James’s Street, White’s, 37-38 St James’s Street— all locations monitored by MI5 photographers.
Before they met for coffee, Bolling went to work, examining every document and file inside MI5 that contained any reference to Nikolai Semenov. Most of what he found was recent since the KGB agent’s London posting was recent. He learned that Nikolai had been very active in recruiting maybe a dozen contacts from whom he purchased information regularly.
Gordy Radenko’s name came up in Nikolai’s file. He cross-checked Radenko’s file. Sure enough, Nikolai’s name popped up in the Gordy Radenko file. Radenko was a junior officer from the Polish intelligence service. He had been a Polish Olympic hopeful who had trained for a short time in Moscow. Later, he had taken a holiday in London soon after a Soviet military incursion into his homeland and vanished while away, surfacing in Soho, where he formally defected. He wanted to settle in Canada.
Bolling contacted Radenko and met him for coffee. “You want to defect and live in Canada?” he asked the young spy.
Radenko spread his unusually large hands—large because he had been a weightlifter on Poland’s Olympic team. “I do want to live in Canada. Someplace where my only neighbors are geese and bears. I no longer want much to do with people.”
“That’s honest.”
The young spy shrugged. “Four years in the service of my country and four in the military before that—it is enough. I’m ready for peace and solitude. I’m thinking of British Columbia.”
“I wanted to meet and ask about people you know who maybe I should know. For example, the names of other Polish agents? Have you been asked this yet?”
“Yes, I gave my handler a complete list a month ago.”
“Excellent. I’m sure I have that in your file. We also know you have an intimate grasp of the structures and methods of Polish intelligence, and you have been debriefed on those matters at some length. That much of your file I have read myself. Now, I’m wondering, who do you know from Russia who MI5 might like to know about?”
Radenko, wanting only to go to Canada, stared into his coffee as if thinking about how much information he’d have to provide to secure his relocation to Canada. “Let me think.”