But by late 1987 the Gorbachev reforms were beginning to take effect and a distinct relaxation of official attitudes in Moscow was discernible. To the surprise of the seminar organizers, Moscow agreed to send a small participant group.
The names and details had to go to Immigration, who asked State to check them out. So secretive had the USSR been about matters scientific up to that point that the names and contributions to science of only a handful of Soviet stars were known in the West.
When the list hit Langley it went to SE Division and was given to Monk. He happened to be available. His two agents in Moscow were contributing nicely through dead drops and Colonel Turkin was in East Berlin supplying a complete breakdown of KGB activities in West Germany.
Monk ran the list of the names of the eight Soviet scientists due to attend the November conference in California through the usual checks and came up with blanks. No one on the list had even been heard of by the CIA, let alone approached or recruited.
Because he was a terrier when presented with a problem, he tried one last tack. Although relations between the CIA and its domestic counterpart, the counterintelligence wing of the FBI, had always been strained and sometimes poisonous, and since the Howard affair more the latter, he decided to approach the Bureau anyway.
It was a long shot, but he knew the Bureau had a far more comprehensive list of Soviet nationals who had sought and been granted asylum in the United States than had the CIA. The long shot was not whether the FBI would help, but whether the Soviets would ever let a scientist with a relative in America leave the USSR at all. The chances were they never would, because family in the States was considered by the KGB to be a major security flaw.
Of the eight names on the list, two appeared again on the FBI record of asylum seekers. A check revealed one name was a coincidence; the family in Baltimore had nothing whatsoever to do with the arriving Russian scientist.
The other name was odd. A Russian-Jewish refugee who had sought asylum via the U.S. Embassy in Vienna when she was in a transit camp in Austria, and been granted it, had given birth while in America, yet registered her son under a different name.
Ms. Yevgenia Rozina, now of New York, had registered her son under the name of Ivan Ivanovitch Blinov. Monk knew that meant Ivan Son-of-Ivan. Clearly the boy had been born out of wedlock. The result of a union inside the States, in the transit camp in Austria, or earlier? One of the names on the list of Soviet scientists was Professor Doctor Ivan Y. Blinov. It was an unusual name, one Monk had never seen before. He took Amtrak to New York and sought out Ms. Rozina.
¯
INSPECTOR Novikov thought he would break the good news to his colleague Volsky over a beer after work. Again, the canteen was the place; the beer was cheap.
“Guess where I spent the morning.”
“In bed with a nymphomaniac ballerina.”
“Chance would be a fine thing. At the headquarters of the UPF.”
“What, that dunghill they keep in Fish Alley?”
“No, that’s just for show. Komarov has his real HQ in a very tasty villa up near the Boulevard Ring. By the way, the beer’s on you. I solved your case for you.”
“Which one?”
“The old boy found in the woods out by the Minsk Highway. He was the office cleaner at the UPF headquarters, until he turned to burglary to make a bit on the side. Here are the details.”
Volsky ran his eye over the single sheet Novikov had given him.
“They’re not having much luck at the UPF these days,” he said.
“How so?”
“Komarov’s personal secretary went and drowned himself last month too.”
“Suicide?”
“No. Nothing like that. Went swimming, never came out. Well, not ‘never.’ They fished him out last week downstream. We have a smart pathologist. Found a wedding ring with his name on the inside.”
“When does this smart pathologist say he went in the water?”
“About the middle of July.”
Novikov reflected. He really should have bought the beer. After all, he was due to collect a thousand sterling pounds from the Englishman. Now he could give him a bit extra. On the house.
New York, September 1988
SHE was about forty, dark, vital, and pretty. He was waiting in the lobby of her apartment house when she arrived home after picking up her son from school. The boy was a lively lad of seven.
The laughter went out of her face when he introduced himself as an officer of the Immigration Service. For any non-American-born immigrant, even with papers in perfect order, the word Immigration is enough to inspire worry if not fear. She had no choice but to let him in.