The Tristan Betrayal

by Robert Ludlum

  But she had become a complete puzzle to him. What was she all about now? Why was she with the German? What did she really think of the Stalinist system? Who was she anymore?

  “Are you really here on business, Stephen?” she asked as they strolled aimlessly, their boots crunching in the icy snow. She kept a certain polite distance from him, he noticed, as if to make it clear—to him and to anyone who might be watching—that they were nothing more than friends, or acquaintances, as she’d pointedly told von Schüssler. Far off in the distance Metcalfe could see an outbuilding, presumably the stable.

  “Of course. That’s what I do. You know that.”

  “I don’t know what it is you do, Stephen. How long are you in Moscow?”

  “Just a few days. Lana—”

  “Did you come here to this party because you knew I’d be here?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “What’s past is past, Stephen. We have both grown up and moved on. We had a brief love affair a long time ago, and it is over with.”

  “Are you in love with the German?”

  “He is amusing to me. He is, how do you say, charmant.” She affected a light tone, but it was not persuasive.

  “Charmant is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of von Schüssler. Lugubrious, perhaps.”

  “Stephen,” she said warningly. “It is not your place to delve into the mysteries of the heart.”

  “No. If we’re really talking about the heart. And not something else.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” she snapped.

  “Well, mink cannot be easy to find in Moscow.”

  “I make a very good salary now. Six thousand rubles a month.”

  “All the rubles in the state treasury won’t buy you something that cannot be bought.”

  One side of her mouth turned up in a sly smile. “It is a gift. Though it is nothing compared to the gift you gave me.”

  “You’ve said that before—something about a gift I gave you. What gift, Lana?”

  “Rudi is good to me,” she said, ignoring his question. “He is a generous man. He gives me gifts, yes—what of it?”

  “It’s not like you.”

  “What is not like me?”

  “To take up with a man because he can buy you minks and jewelry.”

  But she would not be goaded. “It is how he expresses his love.”

  “Love?”

  “His infatuation, then.”

  “Yes, but somehow I don’t think you are . . . infatuated with him, are you?”

  “Stephen,” she said, exasperated. “You have no claim on me anymore.”

  “I know that. I understand. But we need to meet; we need to talk. It’s important.”

  “Talk?” she scoffed. “I know how you talk.”

  “I need your help. We have to arrange to meet. Can you meet me tomorrow afternoon—will you be back in Moscow by then?”

  “I’ll be back in Moscow,” she said, “but I see no reason to meet.”

  “Sokolniki Park. Our usual spot, the place where we—”

  “Stiva,” she interrupted. “Quiet.” Suddenly she nodded at a man who had appeared on the veranda not far from where they were walking. He turned to look, and Metcalfe recognized the face. It was the GRU man who had been sitting in the row behind him at the Bolshoi, the one who had struck up a conversation about her.

  “I’ve seen him before,” Metcalfe said in a low voice.

  “Lieutenant Kundrov of the GRU,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. “He’s my minder.”

  “Your . . . minder?”

  “I must be a plum assignment—he’s unusually senior for the job. For the past year and a half, he’s become my shadow. At first it was ridiculous. Everywhere I went, he would follow. I would meet friends at a restaurant, and there he was, at the next table. I would be shopping, and he would be in the line behind me. Every performance at the Bolshoi, he would be there, always in the same seat. Finally I invited him in for tea. I did so in front of others, prominent dignitaries at one of the private parties at the Bolshoi, so he couldn’t decline.”

  “Why?”

  “I figured I might as well get to know my jailer. Perhaps one day he will be ordered to collect me for my execution. Perhaps one day he will be my executioner. I prefer to know the one who has accepted my destiny as his personal assignment.”

  “But why? Why have they assigned you a minder?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose it goes along with my status, with my being the prima ballerina.” She added with a tone of amusement: “I have become an important personage, and therefore I am to be watched closely. One of the dancers who got too friendly with a foreigner—a capitalist stage-door Johnny—was sent to live in Siberia. We are caged birds.”

  “So you’ve reached an accommodation,” Metcalfe said in English.

  “ ‘Accommodation,’ ” she repeated. “I like this word. How do you spell?”

  Reaching an accommodation with one’s jailer, Metcalfe mused: it seemed to be a Russian specialty. As he began to spell out the word, he noticed that the GRU man, Lieutenant Kundrov, was coming across the lawn toward them.

  “Svetlana Mikhailovna,” the Russian said in a strong, resonant baritone. “Good evening. It is very cold to be outside. You will get sick.”

  “Good evening, Ivan Sergeyevich,” Lana said with elaborate politeness. “Allow me to introduce a visiting businessman—”

  “Stephen Metcalfe,” said Kundrov. “Yes, I believe we met at the Bolshoi.”

  They shook hands. “You’re a ballet fan, I take it,” said Metcalfe.

  “I’m an admirer of Svetlana Mikhailovna.”

  “As am I, but I’m afraid we are only two among many.”

  “Too true,” the Russian replied. “Svetlana Mikhailovna, you are spending the evening here, yes? As guests of the ambassador?”

  Was it a flash of irritation that appeared briefly on her face? “You know everything about me,” Lana said gaily. “Yes, a little skiing and riding. And you?”

  “No, I haven’t been invited to spend the night, I’m afraid.”

  “A shame,” Lana said.

  Kundrov turned to Metcalfe. “You were able to make it out here without too much trouble? It is impossible to get a taxi these days. I assume Intourist provided you with a car and driver.”

  Clearly he knew about Metcalfe’s attempt to elude surveillance. Metcalfe decided to seize the opportunity to do some repair work. “Truth is, I didn’t want anybody to know I was coming out here. You wouldn’t believe the precautions I took.”

  “But why? This is Soviet paradise,” the GRU man said smoothly. “There are no secrets here. Not from us.”

  Metcalfe pretended to look sheepish. “That’s exactly the problem.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “You guys—GRU, NKVD, whatever—you all blab. Gossip. The word gets out, and then I’m really gonna be in for it.”

  “The word gets out . . . to whom?”

  Metcalfe rolled his eyes. “My brother, who else? I swore up and down it was going to be just business. I wasn’t going to go to any parties, I promised him. I made enough trouble last time when I . . . See, my brother, he’s the serious one in the family, and he thinks I’m reformed. He thinks I’m on the wagon—a teetotaler. Let him think that. He swears he’s gonna cut me out of the family business if he finds out I’ve gone back to my old ways.”

  “How absolutely fascinating,” Kundrov replied. His perfunctory smile indicated that he didn’t believe a word of it. He waved a hand at the dacha, as if to indicate all of the guests within. “And these people, none of them would take notice of your . . . old ways? None of them would talk?”

  “I’m not worried about them. It’s the damned chauffeur. This British guy my brother sent with me, allegedly to drive me around to meetings, act as my aide-de-camp. But in reality he’s a ball and chain. He’s the one I had to escape from.”

  “Ah. Well, you can cou
nt on my discretion,” Kundrov said.

  “Good to know,” said Metcalfe. “I knew I could.”

  Lana cleared her throat. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I must get back inside to Rudi. He’ll think I’ve abandoned him.”

  An hour later, Metcalfe clambered into a Bentley driven by a second secretary in the British embassy that was filled with other guests returning to Moscow. The mood was boisterous, the banter loud and alcohol-fueled, the laughter contagious. As the car reached the end of the long, dark dirt road and was about to turn onto the paved highway, Metcalfe suddenly spoke up.

  “Damn it, I left my briefcase back there!”

  Several groans arose. Someone cracked, “No point in going back—you can be sure the NKVD boys have already cracked it open and stolen whatever’s inside.”

  “Just pull over, if you don’t mind,” Metcalfe said.

  “You’re not walking back, are you?” a woman exclaimed.

  “I could use the fresh air,” Metcalfe said. “I’ll catch the next car.”

  He got out and began walking slowly back toward the dacha until the Bentley had roared away. Then he stopped, looked around to make sure he was unobserved.

  Abruptly he bolted off the path and plunged into the thick forest. He was certain that he had not been observed. Neither the gray-eyed watcher nor Lana’s minder, Kundrov, had seen him.

  If he was wrong—if indeed he was being followed—the consequences would be enormous.

  He could not be too careful.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Branches and needles crunched underfoot. As soon as he had gone far enough into the woods that he felt sure he couldn’t be seen from the dirt path or caught by the headlights of a departing car from the path, he pulled out a flashlight and a military-issue compass. Holding the flashlight in one hand, he shone the light on the compass dial as he aligned the needle to magnetic north.

  There was, of course, no map of the area available, so Roger had instead devised a grid using compass coordinates. Metcalfe knew that Roger would bury the transmitter in the woods here and would indicate its whereabouts by means of a simple system of markers. Sweeping the flashlight’s narrow beam in an arc, he began searching for a dab of red paint on a tree trunk. The woods here were a dense collection of old birches, with peeling bark, and tall, slender pines. Outside the narrow beam of light, everything was dark, almost opaque. The night sky was overcast, a heavy canopy of clouds obscuring the moon. He glanced at his watch. The radium dial read almost two o’clock in the morning. The forest was not entirely silent; forests never were. The occasional gust of wind rustled the birch leaves and caused branches to creak; here and there small animals scurried. Metcalfe walked slowly, keeping his tread light, but there was no disguising his footfalls. At the same time, he remained alert for any sound out of the ordinary, any noise that protruded. Since he was in the vicinity of a dacha that belonged to the American embassy, it was reasonable to assume that the woods would be patrolled with some regularity by the guards directorate of the NKVD. Not in the middle of the night, presumably, but one could never be sure.

  Where was the marked tree? It was possible, of course, that Roger had somehow failed to establish the markers, that he’d been intercepted. A more likely explanation was the inaccuracy of either man’s magnetic compass. Unless the instrument was calibrated with great care, a set of compass coordinates could be off by as much as several hundred feet. The compass was simply not meant to be as precise in a small plot of land as it was over a larger area.

  At last he came upon a birch tree with a daub of red paint that had been freshly applied; it was still tacky. This was the outermost boundary marker that Roger had established, the first of a series of three such marked trees that would point toward the site at which he had concealed the bulky radio transmitter. Metcalfe checked the compass reading, recalibrated it, and then set out sixty degrees west until he came to the next red marker.

  A crack echoed from a good distance away, perhaps a few hundred feet. He froze, switched off his flashlight, and listened. After a minute he reassured himself that it had been nothing out of the ordinary, nothing human. He turned the torch back on, moved it slowly from left to right until he struck another glistening patch of red paint on a tree trunk twenty-five feet north-northwest.

  That was it. The final marker.

  Metcalfe and Roger had arranged in advance how the transceiver unit would be concealed. The problem was that Roger could not know, until he’d reached the site, how he’d be able to do it. You never knew until you got there; improvisation was always paramount. Would there be hollow sections of trees? Or some sort of outbuilding, a shed or shack?

  The answer had been scrawled in an alphanumeric code, which Roger had carved with a penknife at the base of the third marked tree. Metcalfe found the characters inscribed in small, crude block letters: C/8/N. That told him that the unit was located precisely eight feet due north from the tree. The letter c indicated the third of six possible arrangements: it was buried in ground and concealed with whatever natural objects were at hand. Metcalfe paced out eight feet and immediately spied the large, flat stone, mostly obscured by the underbrush. The casual observer would notice nothing. Metcalfe knelt and brushed away the pine needles, twigs, and dead leaves, then pried loose the rock. Directly underneath it was green canvas, the tarpaulin Roger had wrapped over the small leather suitcase, set into a hollow that he’d obviously dug out earlier in the day. Metcalfe pulled it out with great effort—it had been firmly wedged in place—and then, after dusting off the dirt and debris, opened the case. He was able to operate in the dark, for he knew the workings of the transceiver well.

  Built into the suitcase, which weighed some thirty pounds, was a twelve-volt automobile battery and power supply pack, a headphone and antenna, and then the transceiver itself, a steel box about a foot square with a black wrinkle finish. This was a BP-3, the most sophisticated clandestine communications unit ever built. It had been constructed by a group of Polish refugees working, in complete secrecy, at Letchworth, thirty miles north of London. These Poles, a remarkable assemblage of telecommunications experts who had been trained by the Germans before escaping their country just ahead of the Nazi invasion, were civilian technicians who’d been hired to work for the British secret service. Charged with improving upon the unwieldy old Mark XV transceiver, which was so bulky that it took up two suitcases, they came up with a compact yet powerful two-way communicator constructed of miniaturized components. Its receiver was excellent; it had an output of thirty watts. Its enormous power permitted intercontinental communications. The workmanship was unexcelled. When Corky had handed the suitcase to Metcalfe in a church in Pigalle, in Paris, he had taken no small pleasure in the fact that he’d been able to obtain several of the first advance prototypes even before the British MI-6 had been able to get their hands on them. This makes everything else obsolete, Corky had crowed. All those other machines are now museum relics. But please, do guard it with your life. You can be replaced, but I’m afraid this device cannot.

  The instructions for operating the unit had been pasted under the lid of the black steel box, but Metcalfe had the procedure memorized. He paused for a moment to take in the sounds of the forest. He heard the faint rustle of the trees, a distant call of a nocturnal bird. But nothing else. His knees were now quite damp from the snow, and his legs were beginning to feel numb. This whole arrangement was uncomfortable—it would have been far easier if he’d been able to work somewhere indoors, but that was not an option—but there was no reason to make it more uncomfortable than necessary. He unfolded the green canvas tarpaulin in which the suitcase had been wrapped and spread it out on the ground. At least he’d be able to sit on a dry spot. He was hardly dressed properly for this errand into the woods: over his evening clothes he wore a black cashmere greatcoat. Not only was his clothing already soiled and torn from making his way through the dense foliage, but his very appearance limited his escape options, if escape ever b
ecame necessary. He was clearly a well-dressed foreigner skulking through the forests outside Moscow, which would be immediate cause for suspicion if he was caught; he would be unable to pretend to be, say, a local man, a hunter, a sportsman. He spoke Russian with an accent, but so did many citizens of the Soviet Union who came from any of the far-flung areas, so his accent would not necessarily attract scrutiny. It was the clothes that didn’t fit.

  In the back of his mind, Metcalfe began rehearsing a possible cover story, in case one became necessary. He looked like a visiting American, so he would be one. He was a weekend guest at the embassy dacha—Lana had said she and von Schüssler were spending the evening there, after all, so it wasn’t implausible—and he’d simply gotten lost on a late-night stroll. Or perhaps he was coming from an assignation in the woods, he would say. There was a woman—a married woman, the wife of an embassy attaché. They wanted privacy, so they’d gone into the woods, and she’d already returned to the dacha. . . . His fevered mind spun version after version, trying each one out for the soundness of logic.

  And simultaneously he worked at the urgent task at hand. From his front pants pocket he took a small black oblong with two prongs at one end: the crystal, which had been cleverly concealed in his suitcase back at the hotel room so that it appeared to be part of the locking mechanism. This crystal contained the encoded frequencies on which he would transmit and receive. It was dangerous to keep together with the radio unit, for if the suitcase had been discovered, the operational security would have been seriously compromised. You did not keep the key and the lock in the same place. He plugged the crystal into the Q socket on the lower part of the unit, then plugged in the headset and put it on.

  Now he switched on the flashlight and set it down so that it illuminated the immediate area. He would have to work fast: he was sitting in an island of bright light in the middle of a black forest; he could now be seen for hundreds of yards or more. And if he was to be spotted, the circumstances could not be more incriminating. Arrest would be swift, execution in the basement of the Lubyanka a certainty.