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“Mrs. White, you lied to me,” he hissed. “You hid the truth and you made me believe that Paul was going with you today to see your family. How can I ever trust you?” His eyes were glittering: tears or rage? “And you could have thought about me. How am I supposed to explain a missing student? I should have forbidden your trip to Tula, but I was too soft-hearted. I didn’t like to prevent you from seeing family members. But we would have got to the bottom of this yesterday in time to go to the Canadian Embassy in Moscow.”
“Again, I’m humbly sorry that I tricked you…”
“No, we tricked you,” interjected Maria loyally. “We knew too.”
Chopyk whirled to look at her with sad eyes. “I’m disappointed in you, Maria. Not you Lona. I know you didn’t know about it.” Lona opened her mouth as if to speak but closed it again, clearly baffled.
At risk of starting a new outburst, Jennifer had to ask another question. “What could the Canadian Embassy have done?” She was puzzled.
“What could they have done?” his voice soared into the higher registers and he almost squeaked. “They could have stopped him, persuaded him—they know the territory here—maybe taken his passport away from him. He’s probably not the first young Canadian to be taken in by a Soviet under some ruse of marrying in order to leave the country.”
But Jennifer had stopped listening at the word passport—it was clear he did not know about the second half of the plan, the part in which the “missing” student would be smuggled out of the country. She could see Maria squirming on the vinyl seat and she knew that within minutes, seconds even, Hank and Volodya would appear beside them. Should she tell Chopyk or not? She hesitated, experiencing a strong sense of falling over the brink. Things couldn’t get much worse.
Taking a deep breath, she placed her hand on the man’s arm. It was the closest they had ever been. “Professor Chopyk, there’s something more I want to tell you,” she said. Over his shoulder, she could see the man she loved moving toward them and she knew she must speak quickly.
Tour guide Natasha Kuchkov was fuming. She had entered the airport security office at 1400 hours precisely (she knew because she checked her watch before being allowed to step through the secured door and her watch was always accurate), and then she had been kept waiting for 28 minutes while a junior functionary in a uniform noted her particulars on an excessively complicated yellow form.
Libros Libertad 