Page 96 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Okay. Well, as you know, your government isn’t the only one which must trust but verify.’ He smiled a little. It wasn’t Harrison’s hopeful schoolboy smile. ‘You are all clearly running for your lives. I saw KGB agents hanging around all the embassies on the drive here from the airport. But what I have to ascertain now is, are you running from a generally irradiated zone, and you’re telling stories in the hope that the whiff of nice intelligence will make us more likely to grant asylum, or do you actually know anything about City 40?’

Valery nodded.

George was watching him carefully. ‘If you need to stop, say the word.’

‘Why does everyone think I’m ill? I’m not.’

‘I don’t think anyone thinks that, comrade. I think everyone thinks you’re exhausted, and very frightened.’

Valery looked up properly.

‘I have one main question, and if you can answer it correctly, I will believe everything else you tell me, all right?’

‘Okay?’

‘What is the location of City 40?’

Valery sat away from him and had to clench both hands between his knees. ‘No, I can’t – please. If I tell you that, the Americans will bomb it, they …’

George was already holding up one hand. ‘No, no, no, I’m not making myself clear. We already know where it is. But I need to check that you know.’

‘You already know,’ Valery said slowly. ‘What?’

George nodded. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you what I know. There is a place called City 40. It produces weapons-grade plutonium. At some point, we think in early 1958, there was some kind of accident there, a nuclear accident. We know that Kurchatov, the physicist, was sent away from Moscow for about nine months – we believe to City 40, to sort out what had happened there. We know there is a biological research station there, studying the effects of the radiation on quite a large ecosystem; that isn’t a secret, they publish at international conferences. We know there is an enormous radioactive trace in the atmosphere over the site for thousands of miles. It’s not the devil’s own work to put all that together and come up with a pretty good location, which has been confirmed by satellite images.’

Valery had been in a car crash once. When the car had turned over, slinging everyone inside upside down, and there had been a crystalline millisecond where he saw the windscreen smash and the glass spray, winking, he had felt less tumbled than he did now. ‘You know … everything. Why is it still there? Why haven’t you destroyed it? They’re keeping radiation there secret from people living in it, in case anyone tells the Americans, why—’

‘Oh, heavens, no, the CIA flew over ages ago and clocked it. But why blow it up when we know exactly where it is? If we bomb it, they’ll have to build another facility elsewhere, which they might hide better. Oh dear.’ He lifted his eyebrows and smiled. ‘Or even worse, they’ll build one in Ukraine, or Poland, where an accident would mean radiation over Europe. We’re quite content with leaving City 40 where it is. Point to it on the map and I’ll believe everything you say thereafter.’ He put a map on the table, showing most of eastern Russia.

Valery marked it on.

George nodded. ‘Very good.’

Valery was still struggling. ‘Are you saying you’ve known about it all along?’

‘More or less. The Americans saw it when it was being built. I mean they drained a lake and they had about a hundred thousand prison labourers building the place. You don’t do that if it’s not top-secret.’

‘Then it’s all pointless. They’re letting kids play in an irradiated river so no one will know how bad the radiation is, they won’t ever evacuate anyone, even if people are getting radiation sickness en masse, people aren’t allowed to leave the city, call anyone outside, nothing, and it’s not … you already know.’

George laid one hand on his arm. ‘I’m afraid so.’ He smiled. ‘We haven’t let our press have it, of course. Suits us better if the Kremlin doesn’t know we know.’

Valery realised how wonderfully easy it must have been, to run an intelligence service in a country where everyone was convinced the press was omniscient and open. People believed what they saw on the news. It was genius.

‘Then what do you need us to tell you anything about it for?’

‘Well, there are details I’d like to know. Will you take me through it? The security, the labs …’

Valery had a floating kind of despair. ‘And is that enough to buy us a new life somewhere away from here?’

‘Yes. The villagers will be given asylum, and you and the four people in hospital will be put into witness protection in the United Kingdom. You’ll be rehoused, and given new names. You’ll be set up with clinical work straight away, given your field of expertise. If you cooperate, of course.’

‘That sounds far too good to be true.’

‘Pardon my saying so,’ George said, very gentle now, ‘but your idea of normal treatment is to be arrested, abused, beaten, and imprisoned for things that aren’t your fault, and which are not crimes. That doesn’t happen in England. I know that sounds like some fantastical decadence to you, but it is not. Some promised lands really are milk and honey. On the grand scale of things, milk and honey are easy to come by, and simple to provide.’

‘I don’t believe you, you know that, right?’

‘I know, but the part of my job I really enjoy is proving all my hugely suspicious Russian sources wrong about the West,’ he said, smiling his unobjectionable maths-teacher smile. ‘Our only difficulty now will be getting you out without anyone noticing. My contact in the air force has just been shot, annoyingly, so it might take me another couple of weeks to arrange something.’