The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “You saw something.”

  “A mention of it, yes. I remember it catching my eye, because it seemed so peculiar. Something to do with Stalin.”

  “With Stalin? Did you ever ask Winthrop?”

  “No, and I wish you wouldn’t, either.”

  “But for you—”

  “Don’t,” he said. His face was even more flushed now; he was visibly disconcerted.

  Charlie hesitated a moment. “All right.” No, he thought: he wouldn’t have to ask Lehman a thing. There were the famous Lehman archives, in the subbasement of Lehman’s New York townhouse. Surely the answers would be there.

  “You never would have gotten a security clearance without Winthrop, you know that. Because of me—”

  “I know. “

  “Charlie, did you come to see me expressly to ask about this thing?”

  “And to see you.”

  “What’s past is past, Charlie.”

  Stone nodded contemplatively, not replying, knowing his father was wrong. The past had become the present.

  The sun was setting now, and the room had grown suddenly dark. Charlie thought of the young Alfred Stone in the photo with Truman, the excited smile, and then he looked at his father now, and he thought: Whatever’s happening in the Kremlin, I’m in this for you. You’ve always deserved the truth.

  Later, even just a few days later, he would desperately wish he had dropped the matter then and there.

  5

  Washington

  Since there weren’t any significant parties in Washington that conflicted that night, Roger Bayhss decided to put in an appearance at the Itahan Embassy’s gala. Bayliss, the chief Soviet expert on the National Security Council and an aide to the assistant to the President for national-security affairs, secretly enjoyed donning his white tie and tails and attending these affairs, bantering with the other Washington powers. Publicly he bemoaned having to drag himself there.

  Bayliss had reason to be pleased with himself. Not yet forty, he had already carved out an enviable position in the government. He’d been selected by the NSC directly from the prestigious Soviet section of the National Security Agency, the group of one thousand analysts privy to the highest-quality intelligence from the Soviet Union and around the world. A handsome, jut-jawed man, he radiated a gladiatorial self-confidence that turned a lot of people off (but turned a lot of not very bright but very ambitious Washington women on). In the last few years, he had formed alliances with some extraordinarily powerful people, from the director of the CIA to the director of his own alma mater, the NSA—alliances that, he felt sure, would soon push him to the very top.

  It was during cocktails that the peculiar incident took place. He had been chatting up a prominent Washington hostess when he happened to collide with a man he recognized as Aleksandr Malarek, the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy, who was talking with the French ambassador.

  Although they’d never met, he knew who Malarek was, just as Malarek no doubt knew who he was. Malarek was not a handsome

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 45

  man, but something about his manner—the fluidity of his movements, the well-tailored American suits—made him seem elegant, and disguised the fact that his legs were somewhat too short for his body. He was slender, with a swarthy complexion. Unlike quite a number of Soviet diplomats, Malarek had good teeth. His eyes were brown and, as more than one writer for The Washington Post Style section had observed, seemed sincere. His hair was prematurely gray, actually silver. He was smooth, a witty conversationalist, a charmer, and a favorite at Washington parties.

  “Pardon me,” Malarek said, grinning and shaking his head self-deprecatingly. “You’re Roger Bayliss, aren’t you?”

  “Aleksandr Malarek,” Bayliss returned, just as jovially, and added wryly: “Nice to bump into you.”

  There was the customary minute or two of mindless small talk, and then Malarek said something that disturbed Bayliss for the remainder of the evening.

  “I hear you bought a new car,” the Russian said.

  He was right—Bayliss had recendy invested in a turbo Saab, obsidian-black—but how did Malarek know? Later Bayliss understood.

  He left the party an hour and a half later, still faintly puzzled by the strange encounter with Aleksandr Malarek, and walked the two blocks to where his new Saab was parked. He unlocked the driver’s seat and got in, and then he saw it.

  Wedged between the passenger seat and the car door was some kind of card. It looked as if it had been slipped into the car from the top of the window.

  Bayliss reached over to retrieve it. The card was a postcard of the tacky variety you often see for sale on spinning racks at tourist sites. This one was of Miami Beach, Florida, and it bore no message on it at all, just an address in Washington, D.C.

  When Bayliss recognized the address, his heart suddenly began beating very quickly. This was it. At last, after all these decades. This was it.

  Gingerly, he placed the card into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket and, actually trembling from excitement, started the car.

  6

  New York

  For over an hour, Stone had been staring at the luminous green computer monitor in his Parnassus office. Anyone watching, unfamiliar with Stone and the kind of work he did, might have reasonably supposed the man had gone into a catatonic trance.

  He sat, immobile, in the comfortable old suit he wore to work most days. His office was considerably plainer than Ansbach’s, the furniture purely functional, the bookcases jammed with the standard reference works.

  On the screen was a list of the members of the Soviet Politburo. Next to each name was a highly classified synopsis of the man’s medical record. Something was nagging at the back of his mind about the rumor circulating around Moscow, that one of the leaders was in poor health and had been recently treated for a serious heart-related illness in the Kremlin Clinic. The Agency wanted some good, informed speculation as to which one it was and had put it to the brain bank at Parnassus.

  A Politburo member was ill. Okay. Which one?

  He stretched his long legs, folded his arms, and leaned his head back all the way. After a moment, he sat up and accessed the CIA’s records of each man’s travels in the last three months. The screen went blank for a few seconds, and then a complex chart came up. Stone scanned it for a moment and got to his feet.

  Nothing.

  Sometimes he thought Kremlinology was like putting a ton of

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 47

  carbon under intense geological pressure: eventually you’d get a diamond, if you waited long enough.

  What happens to a Soviet leader when he gets sick? Stone asked himself.

  Well, sometimes nothing. He gets sick and he dies. Or he gets sick and he recovers.

  But in an unstable political system—and, God knows, the Politburo was unstable these days—sometimes it wasn’t a good thing at all to get sick, to stay away from the Kremlin for very long. Sometimes when the cat’s away the mice will … usurp his power.

  The brainstorm—or brain squall, as Stone self-deprecatingly called the aleatory flights of inspiration that had helped him out of many a logjam—came several hours later.

  Khrushchev had been overthrown when he chose a bad time to take a vacation on the Black Sea. Gorbachev had almost been ousted in 1987 while on holiday. If you happen to have the misfortune to be one of the Kremlin’s rulers and you want to hold on to your power, the rule of thumb is: Don’t take vacations. And don’t get sick.

  Whoever was ill might well have lost some modicum of power. And power in the Kremlin is measured, in part, by the number of your cronies you can drag up the hierarchy with you.

  Stone keyed in a code to access a roster of recent promotions and demotions within the Soviet bureaucracy. The list, when it came, scrolled on and on: a lot of action within the Kremlin’s ranks. Not at all like the Brezhnev years, when things were static. Moscow these days was hopping, the leadership constantly in flux. />
  Then he accessed a program he’d designed himself specifically to spot patterns of hirings, firings, and demotions and the common thread among them. Stone called it KremWare, and regretted that it wouldn’t have much of a sale.

  After another hour or so—the software was complicated, after all—he began to see a pattern.

  A diamond. Yes.

  In the past few weeks, there had been a marked pattern of demotions of officials whose careers had in some way crossed paths with the new head of the KGB, Andrei Pavlichenko. There it was.

  48 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  A number of ambitious Moscow bureaucrats who thought that by knowing the head of the KGB they would rocket to the top of the heap, suddenly found themselves pushing paper in small, badly heated offices in Omsk or Tomsk.

  Unconsciously he reached for a cigarette, remembered for the millionth time that he no longer smoked, and said, “Shit.”

  Yes, Pavlichenko was almost certainly the one that was ill. Stone was quite sure of it; the pattern was there. You couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but the odds were excellent that it was Pavlichenko.

  He rewarded himself by reheating a third cup of coffee in the microwave, then stuck his head out of his office door. “Sherry?”

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “I’ll have a PAE ready to go out in an hour or so.”

  “All right.” She’d have to get it into presentable form, hard copy— the people at Langley didn’t like working with their computers if they didn’t have to. Many of them, especially the old-line types, favored Underwood manual typewriters and Parker fountain pens. Which was of course decidedly ironic, since their daily work relied for the most part on some of the most advanced technology in the world.

  “What the hell are you doing in today?” It was Saul. “I thought you’d be out. …” He glanced at Stone’s secretary and gestured toward his office. Charlie followed.

  “Did you find me the holy grail?” Saul asked, shutting the door.

  “I’m working on it,” Stone said, sitting on the edge of Saul’s desk. “In the meantime,” he continued, “I think I’ve got one nut cracked.” He explained his deduction.

  Ansbach’s face lit up in a grin. “Jesus, you’re good.”

  Stone gave a slight bow.

  “Sounds right,” Saul said. “In fact, I’d be inclined to be more certain about it than you seem to be.”

  “Okay, you see the connection to the—the hedgehog report, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pavlichenko’s losing his grip on power, right? So KGB suffers. Which means diminished party discipline.”

  “And?”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 49

  “Just a theory, Saul. Pavlichenko is Gorbachev’s man, brought in personally by Gorby—partly so Gorbachev can get a handle on the KGB, partly to guard against any attempts to oust him, since if anyone would have their ears to the ground it’s the boys at Dzerzhinsky Square.” Stone was pacing the room now, as he usually did when he was excited. “The same folks, after all, who helped get Gorby in there in the first place—”

  “Right,” Ansbach said, infected by Stone’s enthusiasm. Like most of the Agency’s old guard, he relished the delicious irony of Russia’s most progressive leader’s ever being supported by one of history’s most repressive agencies of control.

  “Okay. So”—Stone whirled around and pointed a finger at Ansbach—“if Pavlichenko weren’t in failing health, maybe there wouldn’t be any conspiracy.”

  “So how does that help us?” Ansbach asked, shaking his head.

  “When was the last time there was a coup in the Soviet Union— after the Bolshevik Revolution, I mean?”

  “Never,” Ansbach replied, good-humoredly playing the model schoolboy. “Hasn’t been one.”

  “Well, not quite. Sixty-four.” In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev was ousted by a hard-line, neo-Stalinist coalition made up of Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov.

  “That was hardly a coup,” Ansbach objected. “That was a good old orderly palace revolution.”

  “All right. In ‘64 you had dissatisfaction with the chaos Khrushchev was wreaking.”

  “Like Gorbachev.”

  “So maybe it’s conservative hard-liners.”

  “Maybe,” Saul said. “And maybe it’s one of the many nationalities that now openly hate Moscow—the Latvians or the Estonians or the Lithuanians. Or maybe it’s people who are pissed oflF with the way Gorbachev dismantled the whole fucking Warsaw Pact.”

  “Possible.”

  “Possible?” Saul shot back, but he was interrupted by the buzz of one of his telephones. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then said, “Jesus Ghrist. All right, thanks.”

  50 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  When he put down the receiver, he gave Stone an ominous look. “A bomb went off in Moscow a few minutes ago.” “A bomb? Where?” “In the Kremhn, Charhe. Right inside the fucking Kremlin.”

  The Nite & Day Restaurant was a small place below street level on East 89th Street, with dark wooden booths and Formica tables, steel napkin-holders, bottles of Heinz ketchup. It had been “discovered” when New York magazine called it the best “retro diner” in the cit', an “unpretentious little spot.” Stone, who had been having lunch there for years, considered it a little more akin to a dive, which was why he liked it.

  He was haing lunch with Lenny Wexler, one of his Parnassus colleagues who worked on Japan, especially the Japanese intelligence serxices. Wexler was small and bearded, with wire-rim glasses, a hold-oer from the sixties who often took time off from the Foundation to drive to Grateful Dead concerts in his an. He was quiet and reflective, ‘mdoubtedly brilliant, and had a weakness for endless obscene shaggy-dog jokes, one of which he was just now finishing.

  ” ‘I’m keeping an eye out for you, too,’ ” Wexler concluded, and laughed uproariously. Stone, who normally enjoyed Wexler’s jokes but now found himself distracted, laughed politely.

  Wexler tucked into his bacon cheeseburger with a side order of macaroni and cheese. He was watching his cholesterol, he had announced as he blithely ordered; three oat-bran muffins ever' morning, he explained, allowed him to eat whatever he wanted during the day.

  “Did 1 tell you Helen and I have been trving to get pregnant for the last six months?” Wexler asked.

  “Tough job,” Stone said, and took a bite of his burger.

  “Yeah, well, it takes the fun out of it.”

  “I imagine. Go out there and win one for the Gipper,” Stone said as he put down his half-eaten hamburger. He was thinking of Charlotte again, and Wexler sensed that.

  “Oh, sorry. Well, you’re better off without her. Anyway, I’ve got a girl for you. She works with my sister.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 51

  Stone smiled tightly. He had always liked Lenny. During the difficult period after Charlotte had moved out, he’d been a steadfast friend, a rock.

  “What the hell,” Wexler asked with alarm, “you still thinking you two’re going to get back together, is that it?”

  “Possibly. I’d like that.”

  “Yeah, well”—Wexler swallowed a large forkful of Day-Glo-yellow macaroni and cheese—“lot of fish in the sea. Guy like you with money and looks,” he managed to say through the macaroni, his words muffled, “don’t sell yourself short.”

  “I don’t.”

  “So what do you make of this thing about the bomb in the Kremlin?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” They usually didn’t talk about work, almost never in public places.

  Wexler nodded slowly and went back to the macaroni and cheese. “Did I tell you one of our assets in Tokyo was caught?” he said sotto voce.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, yeah. They arrested him, interrogated him. Solitary confinement for three days. They probably got him to spill everything.”

  Stone suddenly stopped eating, holding his burger in midair.

  HED
GEHOG. The KGB hadn’t arrested hedgehog, or interrogated him, or anything of the sort. They’d killed him.

  Why?

  Why was hedgehog simply killed?

  “Something wrong?” Wexler asked.

  “Nothing,” Stone said, his mind spinning. “Hey, how’s the old cholesterol count doing there?”

  Wexler looked up, his eyes wide, his mouth full. “Goob.”

  “That’s nice. Ever try their Boston cream pie here?” Stone asked silkily, a wide grin on his face. “I hear it’s excellent.”

  “Really?” Wexler said, glancing over toward the dessert case.

  Saul Ansbach leaned back in his chair, waiting for the secure connection to Langley to be completed. Absently, he cleaned his

  52 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  fingernails with an orange stick, thinking. After a minute, his secretary’s voice crackled on the intercom.

  “Okay, Mr. Ansbach.”

  “Thanks, Lynn.”

  He leaned forward, picked up the phone, and listened for the voice of Ted Templeton, the Director of Central Intelligence. The secure connections were free of the usual noise or static, and as a result Templeton sounded eerily close. The DCI’s voice was always confident, a resonant baritone; over the phone it was even more so, almost operatic.

  “Saul, good morning.” His What’s up? voice.

  “Morning, Ted. Say, what do ve have on this bomb in the Kremlin?”

  “Not much, unfortunately. The Russians cleaned it up before anyone could get anything. A terrorist, evidently a Soviet citizen, tossed a pipe bomb in the Kremlin Armory. Really did a lot of damage. American girl killed. Some Faberge eggs got scrambled.”

  Ansbach gave the half-smile he wore whenever life began to approximate a Kremlinologist’s wildest madcap imaginings. The Kremlin Armory was where the Soviets stored, in proud disdain, all the czarist treasures, crown jewels and whatnot. “The Russians get the guy?”

  “The shmucks shot the alleged perp dead,” Templeton said, his ungainly imitation of cop-speak. “Good old Kremlin guards. What’s up, Saul?”