Chapter 11

• No, I don't want to. They'll stop us, and you have one name on your license and another in your passport. They'll notice immediately.

With dawn, a thick fog appeared. Judging by the mileage, we should have already entered Istanbul, but ahead was only a thick milky wall. Perhaps the Turkish taxi driver played a mean trick on us and sent us in the opposite direction? Besides, we were running out of gas. I drove and thought about how my Washington friend was right—I was being carried into the unknown by a foggy stream called "unforeseen development of events," and who knows where we would find ourselves an hour after we stalled on an empty highway without gas, and the police drove up to us and checked our documents.

For the first time in the five days since Boris's late-night call, I had time to think about my wife's question, which I had brushed off in New York: why on earth was I rushing off to Turkey? It wasn't just a thirst for adventure. Rather, it was nostalgia for the past, an opportunity to go back 25 years to when, under different circumstances, I myself had to experience what Sasha must be feeling now—an intoxicating mixture of inner freedom and the boundless vulnerability of a person who has challenged a repressive system, and here he is—not crushed, alive, and maybe even about to leave the monster looking like a fool! This feeling of victory over one's own fear, forgotten during the years of American prosperity, had been slumbering in the back of my mind for a quarter of a century, since the time in gloomy Moscow of the 70s when I distributed Solzhenitsyn's books and passed information about political prisoners to Western correspondents. Boris is right—soon dissidents will again start running to the American embassy, and desperate boys will be retyping samizdat. The KGB monster did not die and is gaining strength again, having sucked blood in two Chechen wars. How could I miss the chance to measure my strength against it once more?!

Suddenly, a green banner floated out of the fog: "Kemal Atatürk Airport - Istanbul," and two hundred meters later, the long-awaited gas station appeared.

Following a proven method, we took a taxi driver who brought us to the Istanbul Hilton hotel. Having taken a room with two bedrooms, we barely crawled to the beds and collapsed into sleep, hanging a sign on the door: "Please do not disturb."

By five o'clock in the evening, having slept and tasted the delights of the Turkish bath in the Hilton hotel's sports club, we gathered for a council. By this time, I had managed to call the State Department and hear in response: "Mr. N. is away, he will be back tomorrow, what should I tell him?" I also called Berezovsky, going out into the foyer so that Sasha and Marina would not hear the conversation.

• Do you think your acquaintance will help get the "parole"? - Boris asked.

• To be honest, I doubt it, - I replied. - N. is a formal person and will not go against the rules, although he treats me with sympathy. If something happens to me, then he will, of course, help, since I am a US citizen. As for Sasha, it is necessary to clearly document the "public significance" of his entry, and I see only one possibility—he says he knows Tatum's killers. But the bureaucracy works slowly; we are talking about weeks. We could try to arrange an interview for Sasha in the "New York Times"; this would certainly facilitate getting the "parole." But if we go public, Russia will immediately demand his extradition, and we will have to explain ourselves to the Turks. Especially since Sasha is breaking Turkish law by being here with a fake passport. By the way, it's unclear which passport the Americans will put a visa in, even if we get the "parole." In the fake one, or what? There's a different last name there.

• And do you think they were really following you in Ankara?