The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Lies, all of it, she told him, but our country was in a very difficult time, and people wanted to believe that our problems could be solved just by rooting out the spies and the communists. Your father was innocent, but there was no way of proving his case, you see, and …

  Charlie replied, with the unassailable logic of a ten-year-old, “Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he fight them? Why?”

  “But did you ever ask your father?” Ansbach lifted an earthenware mug from the top of a stack of green-and-white computer printouts and took a swallow of what, Stone felt sure, had to be tepid coffee.

  “Maybe once, when I was a kid. It became immediately clear that that was none of my business. You just didn’t ask about that stuff.”

  “But as an adult … ?” Saul began.

  “No, Saul, I haven’t. And I won’t.”

  “Look, 1 feel funny even asking you. Exploiting your relationship with your father, with Winthrop Lehman, for Agency business.” Ansbach removed his black-framed glasses and polished them with a Kleenex he took from a box in one of his desk drawers. When he resumed speaking, he was still hunched over the glasses, polishing busily. “Obviously, if our agent hadn’t been killed I wouldn’t need to ask you, and I know it’s outside the realm of the pure analysis you’re hired to do. But you’re our best hope, and if it weren’t important—”

  “No, Saul,” Stone said hotly. He itched to light a cigarette, but he had quit smoking the day Charlotte had left. “Anyway, Saul, I’m no field operative, in case it slipped your mind.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 25

  “Damn it, Charlie, whatever this ‘Lenin Testament’ is all about, it’s clearly a key to why your father was thrown in jail in 1953.” Ansbach wadded up the Kleenex and replaced the glasses on his face. “If you don’t want to do this for the Agency, I should think at least you’d—”

  “I wasn’t aware you cared so deeply about the personal lives of your employees, Saul.” The appeal to family: Saul was a master manipulator, and Stone felt a surge of resentment.

  Saul hesitated for what seemed an eternity, examining the cluttered heaps atop his desk, running his fingers along the desk’s worn edges.

  When he looked at Stone again, he spoke with great deliberate-ness. His eyes. Stone noticed, were bloodshot; he looked fatigued. “I didn’t show you the last page of the transcript, Charlie. Not because I don’t trust you, obviously …“He took a single sheet of paper that had been face down on the desk in front of him and handed it to Stone.

  It was stamped “Eyes Only/Delta,” which meant the need-to-know requirements were so stringent that no more than a handful of people at the very top of the U.S. government would ever be permitted to see it. Stone glanced at it quickly, then read it again, more slowly. His jaw literally dropped in astonishment.

  “You see,” Saul said, dragging out his words as if it pained him to speak, “Gorbachev has been in trouble in the Politburo since the day he was named General Secretary. You know that; you’ve warned of that for years.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, massaging them wearily. “Then all this turmoil in Eastern Europe. He’s a man with enemies. And with the summit coming up in a matter of weeks, the President heading for Moscow, I thought it was vital—”

  Stone was nodding, his face flushed. “And if we can figure out what this reference to a ‘Lenin Testament’ means, we can determine who’s involved, what their motivations are. …” His voice trailed off; he was lost in thought.

  Ansbach was peering at Stone now with a fevered intensity. He asked, almost whispering: “You read it the way I do, too, huh?”

  “There’s no other way to read it.” Stone could hear the faint

  26 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  sound of hping from down the hall, which had somehow managed to penetrate the massive doors, and for a long moment he watched the pattern of sunlight and shadow on the wall, a neat geometric grid cast by the slats of the window blinds. “These people—whoever they are—are about to pull off the first coup in the histor' of the Soviet Union.”

  “But nothing inside the Kremlin,” Saul added, shaking his head as if he didn’t want to believe it. “Nothing like that. Something much, much worse. You with me on this?”

  “Look, Saul, if that report is accurate,” Stone said, his glance still riveted on the wall, “we’re talking about the fall of a government. Massive bloody chaos. A dangerous upheaval that could plunge the world …“He shifted his gaze back to Saul. “You know, it’s funny,” he said softly. “For 'ears we’ve wondered if this exact thing could ever happen. We’ve speculated about the terrible notion that someday the power that’s now held by the Kremlin could ever be seized by another, much more dangerous clique. We’ve talked and talked about it, so much that ou’d think we’d get used to the idea. But now—well, the thought of it scares the hell out of me.”

  3

  Moscow

  The word “dacha,” which means “cottage,” was a laughably modest designation for the palatial three-story stone structure tucked away behind a grove of pines in the town of Zhukovka, eighteen miles west of Moscow. Zhukovka is the enclave of some of the most powerful figures in the Soviet elite, and this particular dacha indeed belonged to one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

  He and eleven other men sat around a dining table inside, in a low-ceilinged room whose walls were covered with religious icons that gleamed in the amber light. The table was set with Lalique crystal and Limoges china, caviar and toast points, an abundance of fresh baby vegetables, chicken tabaka, and French champagne. To all appearances, it was nothing more than the table of one of Russia’s privileged.

  In fact, the room itself was swept regularly for electronic listening devices with a spectrum analyzer, which could monitor any transmissions on any frequency. Several small speakers mounted high on the walls emitted the steady, high-pitched hiss of “pink sound,” sure to foil any devices that had somehow escaped detection. Nothing said within this room would ever be overheard.

  The twelve dinner companions, each of whom occupied or had occupied extraordinarily powerful positions in the government—from the top rank of the Central Committee, to the Red Army, to the military-intelligence agency GRU—were the leaders of a small, hand-picked group that called itself by the singularly undramatic name Sekretariat. Informally, sometimes, they called themselves the Moscow Club. They shared a fierce but secret zealotry: an unshakable devotion to the Soviet empire, which was, it seemed, crumbling day by day. And so they all nurtured a hatred of the Kremlin leadership under Gorbachev, and of the fearful direction in which the nation was headed.

  At dinner, the conversation was as it always was. They spoke of the decline of the Russian empire, of the unconscionable chaos introduced into Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev. These men, ordinary Moscow bureaucrats of reasonable temperament, collectively incited one another to heights of pique and alarm. It didn’t take much.

  The Berlin Wall had been bulldozed. The Warsaw Pact was little more than a name. East Germany was gone. One by one, like a house of cards upset by a puff of breath, the Soviet-ruled, pro-Communist governments of the Soviet-bloc nations were toppling. From Prague to Budapest to Vilnius to Warsaw itself, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum. Citizens were marching, demanding the abolition of Communism. Lenin and Stalin were no doubt spinning in their graves as they witnessed how Mikhail Gorbachev had given away the shop.

  And the republics within the Soviet Union were, one after another, pulling out, raising a defiant fist at Soviet rule.

  The whole empire, once so strong, a world power forged by Stalin, was disintegrating. It was a nightmare.

  One of the Sekretariat’s leading members, an economist named Yefim S. Fomin, had been ousted from the Politburo for his outspoken views, and he was one of the most outspoken tonight. He was a member of the Central Committee in charge of industrial planning, and he spoke with some authority.

  “Gorbachev’s economic schemes are disa
strous,” he remarked. Fomin was a heavyset man with a thick shock of white hair who had a peculiar knack of speaking almost without moving his lips. “Our economy is falling apart, we can all see that. The Communist Party is no longer in control! The man is destroying our nation from within.”

  When dinner was over, the first to speak was the Sekretariat’s coordinator. Colonel Gennadi Ryazanov, a pale, thin man of forty-five in charge of the GRU’s foreign-intelligence section. Ryazanov looked weary; he had been working himself almost nonstop in the last few weeks. He had four children and a wife, all of whom kept asking when he was going to spend some time away from the office. He had a boss at the GRU who knew he wasn’t working especially long hours there and wondered what the hell could be wrong—marital problems, a sick kid? No one but the men in this room and one other—the leader of the Sekretariat, who could not be seen with them—knew what was absorbing so much of his time and nervous energy: the very plans they were discussing tonight.

  Ryazanov was a high-strung perfectionist who abhorred mistakes and miscalculations. He had awakened every morning for weeks with an acid stomach. He hadn’t touched his dinner tonight.

  Now he spoke extemporaneously, occasionally consulting a sheaf of neatly typed notes, which he placed beside a glass of water. “It is generally accepted in the West—in fact, throughout most of the world—that the Soviet leadership is, to coin a phrase, coup-proof.” He turned up his lips in a small, tight smile. Ryazanov was not a natural speaker, and some of the men in this room, who knew him well, realized he had been working on this presentation for some time. “After all, we’ve now got some democracy here. Our Supreme Soviet routinely vetoes laws that the Kremlin demands. I think that perception will help us.”

  He looked around the table to engage everyone’s eyes, paused a moment, and continued, tapping a pencil on his sheaf of notes. There was uncomfortable stirring; he had dilated too long.

  “Your point?” the economist Fomin inserted between rigid lips.

  “My point,” Ryazanov said, casting him a dyspeptic glance, “is that the realit>’ and the perception do not coincide, and that will help us. I think we all agree that we can no longer wait. Extreme measures are called for. But there’s simply no logic in assassinations any longer. Such an act would create a backlash within the government—would make the Soviet Union even less governable. There are those who will tell us that if you cut off the head the body will die. But the head is not just Gorbachev; it’s all of his supporters within the Politburo, within the leadership. And the death of one man will not silence them. Quite the reverse.”

  His pencil rat-a-tatted on his notepad. He was clearly still lobbying the few who weren’t fully convinced. Silendy, he wished he could just go home and have supper with his family and play with his youngest, three-year-old Lyosha, who was probably asleep by now anyway. He felt a wash of stomach acid surge up toward his throat, but he continued gamely. “Our plan is difficult, but quite clever. Assassinations rarely work, and ‘accidents’ are rarely believed. But the world does believe, and believe firmly, in the presence of terrorism in all walks of life. Even in Moscow.”

  “Is everyone in this room satisfied that there is no possibility any of our intelligence organs—KGB, GRU—will learn of our plans?” The question came from Ivan M. Tsirkov, another Sekretariat plant in the GRU, who was short and round-faced, with small eyes and a high tenor voice. He looked a little like Lenin, but without the beard.

  Ryazanov’s eyes widened as he frantically tried to answer, but before he could do so, Igor Kravchenko, the head of Department Eight of the KGB First Directorate, cleared his throat. “There has been a breach of security,” Kravchenko said softly. He was tall and stocky, with an air of great complacency, his eyes calm behind his rimless glasses.

  The shocked silence was almost palpable. Ryazanov himself shuddered inwardly.

  “You, Comrade Morozov,” the KGB man said, extending a finger toward another of his colleagues, Pyotr L. Morozov of the Central Committee. “One of my people learned that the man who was serving as your driver was in the employ of the CIA.”

  “What?” breathed Morozov, a plain-faced man of about fifty. Gentle and blond-haired, Morozov was descended from generations of Russian peasantr', and boasted of it regularly. “But you assured us all the drivers were cleared!”

  “The matter has been taken care of,” Kravchenko said implacably. “The man has been executed. But did you discuss anything in front of the man that—”

  “No, of course not,” Morozov protested, his thick hands flailing, hands that had never done work more menial than shuffling papers from one desk to another. “When Yefim Semyonovich”—he indicated Fomin the economist, who in response compressed his hps involuntarily—“when we spoke in the car, we closed the compartment. We knew better than to trust anyone outside this room.”

  Colonel Ryazanov could feel his face redden with a prickly heat. He contained his anger, because he knew you never gained anything by venting anger. He gesticulated with his pencil and objected as mildly as he could: “Executed! But you can’t interrogate a dead man!”

  “Yes,” Kravchenko agreed placidly, “that was a botch.” He used a vulgar Russian expression that referred to a whorehouse. “Our people screwed up. Too eager. But I didn’t want the agent interrogated by anyone at the Lubyanka, and better he was killed than that our existence becomes known. In any case, I am quite satisfied that the Sek-retariat remains absolutely secret.”

  “And the Americans?” Tsirkov persisted, his voice almost a chirp. “If there is even one leak from the American side, we are all endangered.”

  Kravchenko answered. “Our American friends were the ones who notified us that this chauffeur was in their bag. They, after all, have more reason than anyone,” he said solemnly, “to keep their relationship with us an inviolable secret.”

  “But what guarantee is there that the plans have not already been breached?” came an angry voice from the far side of the table. It was Morozov.

  Kravchenko’s reply was, once again, calm. “That is being taken care of. Even as we speak, it’s being handled superbly. That will not present a problem.”

  “Mokriye dela?” asked Tsirkov, using the Russian tradecraft term that means “wet affairs,” or killing.

  “Of necessity. Nothing that will be detectable in any way.”

  “Then what is the exact nature of the plan? What will happen on Revolution Day?” This came from Mikhail Timofeyev, the blustery, compactly built Red Army commander. “Our forces will be on maximum alert. But on what pretext?”

  Colonel Ryazanov sighed nervously, wishing he didn’t have to present the carefully worked-up plan in so abrupt a manner, wishing he hadn’t been interrupted by this disconcerting news, disliking to set things out so plainly, without preface. Slowly and carefully he explained, and the room was absolutely silent. Finally, one voice came from the end of the table. It belonged to the economist Fomin. “That is brilliant,” he said. “Horrifying, but brilliant.”

  4

  New York

  Everything about Stone’s apartment reminded him of his wife, Charlotte. It consisted of eight spacious rooms in a prized old cooperative building on Central Park West, a building whose potentates—a surly co-op board of three attorneys, a once-famous matinee idol, and two sisters who had inherited a fortune and lived in this building almost since time began—took pride in turning applicants away.

  Stone had never been sure why he and Charlotte had managed to get past the board’s scrutiny, except maybe that they were a nice, respectable-looking couple, he an esteemed young State Department employee (or so the board believed), she a highly regarded television correspondent, and both of them (thanks to the Parnassus Foundation, though no one knew it) quite well off.

  The place had a lot of Victorian detail, but it was obscured by hideous flocked wallpaper and kitchen appliances in Harvest Cold: the previous owner had had money but no taste. Charlotte, while looking for a job, had it ent
irely redecorated. Now it was plush and comfortable, eclectic and vaguely Edwardian. There was a paneled entrance with a floor of green Italian marble, and a pleasantly crowded sitting room where piles of books sat beside Lord Melbourne and Louis XV chairs. The bedroom was furnished with a Flemish rosewood armoire and a Queen Anne oak chest of drawers she’d spotted at a flea market in western Massachusetts. The kitchen, with its high-gloss black cabinets, bore Charlotte’s unmistakable imprint.

  The library had walls of a deep wine color, recessed bookcases that held a complete set of Nabokov first editions, an eighteenth-

  34 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  centun’ Russian traveling desk of ebony and mahogany with ormolu mounts, an immense Agra carpet, and a Regency librar' armchair with tufted leather seat that had been a gift ftom Winthrop Lehman. Lehman had been given the chair by Winston Churchill during the war, in gratitude for Lehman’s assistance in the Lend-Lease business; he had given it to Charlie on his wedding day.

  Sixteen years of marriage, and then all of a sudden—what was it? a year and a half ago already?—she’d moved out. Since then the apartment had seemed ludicrously empty.

  Sometimes, late at night, burying his face in the pillow in the bed they had shared for so long, he could smell her perfume, gardenia-scented, light and erotic, and he would remember the number of nights they had slept together—5,980 nights; he had figured it out— and for a long time he would stare up at the ceiling.

  He still dreamed of her often, which felt unhealthy and vaguely shameful.

  There was something about her, an indomitability of spirit mixed with the vulnerabilit}- of a child, that Stone had recognized when he had first met her, during senior year in college. She had been sitting at one of the long dark wooden tables in the dining hall, her elbows resting on the overwaxed, uneven surface, holding a book. Everyone around her was talking and laughing, and she was sitting alone, reading, but not with the pensiveness or detachment you often saw in someone sitting apart from a crowd. She seemed to be enjoying her solitude, lost in it.