Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

“Yes. Any more advice?”

“Not much. If you get to Yerevan, play it straight. You met Antoyan in Paris. He’s a handsome young man. You’ve come to Armenia. Why shouldn’t you pay him a visit? It’s the most natural thing in the world. Don’t try any elliptical code words on the phone. Don’t try anything. Get in, get out. With luck you may make it.”

“Is that it?”

“One last thing. Stay away from everyone in the agency, but especially Alan Taylor.”

“Why Taylor?”

“Because he has a guilty conscience. If he finds out, he’ll never let you go.”

“It’s none of your business, but Taylor is the last person I would tell.”

“Good luck,” said Stone. He shook her hand warmly. Anna reciprocated, but there was still a wary look on her face.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

“Why not? By this time I should be an open book to you.”

“Not quite. Walking back here just now, I was sure that if I told you what I was planning to do, you would try to talk me out of it.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because if there’s one thing I have learned in working with you, it’s that you always have an angle. You don’t say or do anything that doesn’t fit into a larger scheme. I haven’t figured out what it is in this case. And to be honest, I don’t care.”

Stone smiled. “I was right about you, Anna, from the beginning. You really are a most remarkable woman. It has been a great pleasure to work with you.”

43

Anna awoke over the North Atlantic with the sensation that she was choking. She struggled toward consciousness as if she were trapped underwater, trying to reach the surface before she ran out of breath. The terror ended only when she realized that it had been a dream, one that had afflicted her several times over the past ten years. The images of this dream were drawn from the pages of Ottoman history. It was the story of a particularly cruel sultan, who became convinced that one of his concubines had been unfaithful to him and interrogated every woman in the harem. When none of them confessed, he ordered that every woman in the household—more than two hundred of them—should be drowned. They were seized, tied into sacks weighted with stones, and thrown into the Bosporus.

In the dream each time, Anna was diving off Seraglio Point. As she dove deeper in the water, she heard a ghostly chorus of women’s voices. When she reached the bottom of the Bosporus, she saw a vast underwater forest of sacks, each containing the body of a woman, swaying gently with the current. Anna swam in horror toward the surface, as the arms in the sacks reached toward her imploringly. She always made it, breaking the surface of the water just as she broke through to consciousness. But the dream was terrifying, every time. And never more so than that night on the plane, halfway to Moscow—sewn by her own hand into a heavily weighted sack and falling, with each second, toward the deepest abyss.

Anna had done everything Stone had advised. She had obtained her visa from the Soviet consulate in the necessary two weeks. She had booked the shortest available itinerary from Intourist: an eight-day trip with a brief stopover in Moscow on arrival; continuing on that night to Yerevan for three days; three days in Tbilisi; then back to Moscow for the return trip home. The schedule was tight, but not impossible. Anna left New York the afternoon of November 7. That meant that she would arrive in Moscow midday November 8, catch a flight to Yerevan that night, and have all of the next day, November 9, to track down Dr. Antoyan.

Her first clutch of fear had come at Kennedy Airport, when she checked her suitcase and realized it could be redeemed only in Moscow. Anna still had ninety minutes to kill before departure time. Act like a tourist, she told herself. A long line of people were crowding the newsstand and pharmacy, stocking up on life’s essentials. She joined the queue, buying extra deodorant, tampons, chewing gum, Kleenex, sleeping pills. She bought magazines, a half dozen of them, on the theory that if she was too nervous to concentrate on a book, she could always read a magazine. But when she sat down in the departure lounge, she had trouble getting through People. She closed her eyes and heard loud Russian voices. A group of Russian men had arrived in the departure area. They were dressed in leather jackets and tight blue jeans, smoking American cigarettes. They had a kind of rough sexuality, like blue-collar American men of the 1950s. Members of an athletic team maybe. Why shouldn’t they be boisterous? thought Anna. It may be their last chance.

Anna was fortunately seated by a window in an otherwise empty row, which meant that she didn’t have to talk to anyone. She took a sleeping pill after dinner, in the hope that she might get some rest. But all it brought her was the Bosporus nightmare. She didn’t sleep at all after that. She listened to the hum of the engine against the bulkhead and thought about Aram, and his cart-horse body, and the way he had held her at the door of her room at the Bristol Hotel in Paris. She tried to read one of her magazines; then a Graham Greene novel about a leper clinic in Africa, which did her no good at all. Eventually they served breakfast, but the coffee was weak and the roll was stale. Moscow couldn’t be far away.

She was fortunate, in a way, that she hadn’t slept much. The fatigue dulled her anxiety as she approached her first encounter with Soviet officialdom at passport control. She didn’t feel nervous until the last moment, when she moved into the booth and the KGB border guard gazed up at her with steely blue eyes.