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“Maybe we could save a little time, Captain Cronley, if I told you I’ve given my situation a good deal of thought.”
“Including what’s very likely to happen to your family?”
Orlovsky exhaled audibly.
“There’s not much I can do about that, is there?” Orlovsky asked.
“So, right now, you see the most likely scenario for your future is that after you fail to convince whoever runs the NKGB in Berlin that you lived up to your obligations as an NKGB officer, you will be shot in the back of your head, and your family will be sent to Siberia to remind other people like you of the price their families will pay for their failures.”
“Or that you will . . . dispose . . . of me here.”
“Which would have the same effect on your family. Consider this, Konstantin. If you don’t show up, simply disappear, the NKGB won’t really know that we’ve turned you, will they? They’ll think we simply disposed of you. In that case, I submit there’s a chance—a slight one, I admit—that they’ll decide you died in the line of duty, and are a hero of the NKGB. That would work to encourage others, and if they treated your family we
ll . . . you can see where I’m going with this . . .”
The telephone on the sideboard rang.
Sonofabitch! Why did that have to go off right now?
Cronley gestured for Dunwiddie to answer it and snapped, “I’m not available.”
“No,” Orlovsky said, “I don’t see where you’re ‘going with this.’”
“Your other option is to let me arrange for you to disappear. And I don’t mean into an unmarked grave here in the monastery cemetery.”
“Twenty-third CIC, Dunwiddie.”
“Disappear? How would I disappear? And you can’t keep me in that cell forever.”
“I can arrange for you to go somewhere safe.”
“I doubt that. I’m a little surprised that you really thought you could offer me a refuge someplace in exchange for those names and I would turn them over to you.”
“What about if I got you refuge somewhere, after which you would give me the names?”
“I’m sorry, Captain Cronley is not available.”
“And once you had given me the names, and I establish they are the names of the people you’ve turned, I put Gehlen to work getting your family out of Russia. You know he’s got well-placed people in Moscow.”
“You cannot expect me to take you seriously?”
“Sir, could I have Captain Cronley call you in ten minutes?”
“I’m perfectly serious, Konstantin. I’m offering you a new life in Argentina.”
“Why would you expect me to believe something like that?”
“Aside from the fact that I’m telling you the truth, you mean? I’m not promising we can get your family out of Russia, but I’m promising I’ll make Gehlen try. If you were a man, you’d take the chance to do whatever you could for your family.”
“You sonofabitch!”
Dunwiddie carried the telephone to Cronley and extended it to him.
“I don’t give a damn who it is. Tell him I’ll call him back.”
“Mattingly,” Dunwiddie said.
Oh, shit!
