The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Could Larissa andYury even count on real gravestones? Or would you need coded language on them too, for security reasons?
    ‘Here lies Comrade X and his dear wife Y,’ said Larissa.
    Yury didn’t answer. His dear wife might have something of a point there. And now Larissa delivered the knockout blow:
    ‘So why not spy for a few years together with your friend here, and then we’ll be helped to flee to New York and once there we can go to the Metropolitan every evening. We’ll get a life, dear Yury, just before we die.’
    While Yury looked as if he was giving in, Allan went on to explain in more detail how this had come about. He had by a rather roundabout route met a Mr Hutton in Paris, and this Hutton was a man who seemed to be close to ex-President Johnson and also to have a high position within the CIA.
    When Hutton heard that Allan knew Yury Borisovich from long ago, and that Yury possibly owed Allan a favour, then Hutton had worked out a plan.
    Allan hadn’t listened very carefully to the global political aspects of the plan, because when people started talking politics then he stopped listening. It sort of happened by itself.
    The Soviet nuclear physicist had come to his senses, and now he nodded in recognition. Politics wasn’t Yury’s favourite subject, not in any way. He was of course a socialist heart and soul, but if anybody asked him to elaborate, he’d run into problems.
    Allan attempted to summarize what Secret Agent Hutton had said. It had something to do with the fact that the Soviet Union would either attack the USA with nuclear weapons, or it wouldn’t.
    Yury agreed that such was the situation. Either/or, those were the alternatives.
    Furthermore, the CIA man Hutton, as far as Allan could remember, had expressed concern as to the consequences a Soviet attack would have for the USA.
    Because even if the Soviet nuclear arsenal was only big enough to wipe out America once, Hutton thought that was bad enough.
    Yury Borisovich nodded a third time, and said that without a doubt it would be pretty bad for the American people if the USA was wiped out.
    But how Hutton tied all the ends together, that Allan couldn’t really say. For some reason, he wanted to know what the Soviet arsenal consisted of. When he had found out, he could recommend that President Johnson start negotiations with the Soviet Union over atomic disarmament. Although now, of course, Johnson wasn’t the president any longer, so… no, Allan didn’t know. Politics was often not only unnecessary, but sometimes also unnecessarily complicated.
     
    Yury was the technical boss of the entire Soviet nuclear weapons programme, and he knew everything about the programme’s strategy, geography and force. But during his twenty-three years in the service of the Soviet nuclear programme, he hadn’t thought – and hadn’t needed to think – a single political thought. That suited Yury and his health exceptionally well. He had over the course of the years survived three different leaders as well as Marshal Beria. To live so long and stay in a high position was not the fate of many powerful men in the Soviet Union.
    Yury knew what sacrifices Larissa had had to make. And now, when they really deserved a pension and a dacha by the Black Sea, the extent of her self-sacrifice was greater than ever. But she had never complained. Never ever. So now Yury listened all the more closely when she said:
    ‘Beloved, dear Yury. Let us, together with Allan Emmanuel, contribute a little to peace in this world, and let us then move to New York. You can give the medals back and Brezhnev can stuff them up his backside.’
    Yury gave up and said ‘yes’ to the whole deal (except for the bit about Brezhnev’s backside) and soon afterwards, Yury and Allan agreed that President Nixon probably didn’t need to hear the entire truth, but rather something that would make him happy. Because a happy Nixon would please Brezhnev, and if they were both happy then there surely couldn’t be a war, could there?
    Allan had just recruited a spy by holding up a poster in a public place, in the country with the world’s most effective secret police apparatus. Both a military GRU captain and a civilian KGB director were also at the Bolshoi Theatre the evening in question, together with their wives. Both of them, like everybody else, had seen the man with the poster on the bottom step. And both of them had been in the business far too long to sound the alarm to some