The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  She returned to the office and glanced at the news coming over the teletype from the Associated Press wire service. Nothing.

  Then she looked again.

  It was the name “Stone” that caught her attention. She looked again. The first words that assembled themselves were “slaying” and “Alfred Stone” and then, aghast, she leaned over the coiled teletype printout and read in disbelief.

  Alfred Stone, the Harvard historian jailed in the 1950s for allegedly spying for the Soviet Union, had been found murdered.

  She all but stopped breathing.

  Alfred Stone. That dear, sweet man. No.

  And, the story continued, the murderer was believed to be the man’s own son, Charles Stone.

  Charlie. It wasn’t possible.

  Reeling, she tore off the length of printout, staggered backward into her office, and collapsed onto the couch. She felt as if she were about to faint.

  An hour later, she was still rereading the story, still in shock.

  Charlie Stone.

  He was innocent. He had to be.

  That document he had stolen from Lehman’s archives—could this all have to do with that? Something about a code, a number. Something about Lehman and Alfred Stone and … what was it, now? He had mentioned this woman in Moscow with whom Alfred Stone had met—Sonya? Yes. Sonya Kunetskaya. Charlie had wanted her to track Sonya down. Somehow he thought Sonya would lead them to the truth about what had happened to Alfred Stone. But that had all been years and years ago.

  Hadn’t it?

  Surely this was no coincidence.

  Charlie could not have murdered his father. It was absolutely unthinkable.

  He needed her help now. There was no time to lose.

  24

  Saugus, Massachusetts

  The motel bed was littered with St>Tofoam cartons, plastic soft-drink bottles, empt' Quarter Pounder boxes. Stone awoke, rolled over, and heard the crunch of Styrofoam.

  He looked around the motel room, glimpsed the empt' vodka bottles, remembered at once where he was.

  Saugus. He was in a motel in Saugus, eight miles or so north of Boston.

  He was a wreck. His eyes were bleary; he hadn’t shaved for five days, since his father’s murder. He had left the motel room only to get food and drink.

  How had he gotten here? It amazed him that he had found the strength to get to this godforsaken motel on the main drag in Saugus, a tawdry succession of strip joints, cheap steak places, and several bad Chinese restaurants.

  He had suffered some sort of breakdown, he was quite sure, yet he had been marginally able to function, as if in suspended animation.

  He had, after all, escaped.

  He flashed back to awakening on the floor of his father’s study, discovering his father brutally murdered. Something had snapped in him. He remembered holding his father’s bloodied head, staring at it, willing the eyes to open.

  And then there had been a crash at the door, and three policemen had burst in, and, as crazed as he was, he knew what they were there for: to arrest him. He had heard them say it, and some powerful part of his brain had told him not to stand there any longer, but to run.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 195

  He had vaulted through the back door, through yard after yard. He had run out in the middle of Garden Street, narrowly avoiding being hit, and waved down a cab, and told the driver to just drive. Made no fucking difference where, he had said. Just drive! I just want to get out of the cit'. The driver had pulled over and demanded to see his money; Stone had waved his wallet at him. Stone had gotten lucky: the driver had actually driven him to Saugus, where he instructed him to stop at this cheap motel, then got out, throwing far too much money at the driver for his trouble.

  For days thereafter, while he waited for the shock to ebb, he existed on pizzas and Chinese food delivered to his room, vodka and Scotch and beer and McDonald’s burgers he picked up on the rare ventures he allowed himself. So disreputable was the motel’s usual clientele that the owner said nothing. Some guy on a bender, he told his wife one afternoon, when she was unable to get into Stone’s room to clean. They knew the oddball as Smith, but that was hardly unusual: half of their guests were named Smith.

  Now, this morning, the shock had finally worn off, leaving only grief, anger, and puzzlement. He remembered, after his mother had died, he had been overwhelmed with deep, unfathomable sadness, the sort of sadness only a young boy can feel, a belief that the world might as well end. And then something had happened: his sadness had metamorphosed into anger, a hard fist of rage—at his father, at his friends, his schoolmates. For a while, he was a holy terror, but it had gotten him through the worst of the pain. And now the unspeakable terror of seeing his father murdered had mutated into a vast reserve of fury.

  It would get him through again.

  For the first time in five days, he knew he was strong and capable enough to leave the motel. He had put a few things together. Whoever had killed his father had also killed Saul Ansbach—and who else?

  But why hadn’t they killed him, too? Surely they could have. The fact that they hadn’t done so made it clear this was a grotesque setup. The logic, however, eluded him.

  Perhaps Saul really had been right. Maybe this all had something to do with a rogue operation. What if someone, or some group of people, with tremendous resources believed he was on the trail of

  196 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  secrets of great importance—and now they wanted the secrets to stay buried?

  But who could know what the truth was? James Angleton, the legendary CIA chief of counterintelligence, had once borrowed a phrase from T. S. Eliot to describe the business of espionage and counterintelligence as a “wilderness of mirrors.” That it was: the truth was often concealed behind a reflection of a reflection of a reflection… .

  A few things he knew for certain: that he was being watched, that he had somehow to establish his innocence, and that he could no longer trust anybody. He could not work within the system, because the system, down to the local police force, had been infiltrated.

  Parnassus, too, had been compromised; Lenny Wexler had made that clear. Stone could no longer trust anyone there.

  Yet he had to return to Boston.

  He needed to get to his safe-deposit box at the bank, to get his money, his passport, and the false passport, which by now had to be waiting for him at the post office.

  And the dossier. He had to get the dossier he’d left in his father’s house, the dossier and the photographs, if they were still there. If they hadn’t been taken.

  He had to return to the scene of the nightmare.

  There was only one way out, and that was to discover who was involved in this thing, this rogue operation or whatever it was. Find them and confront them, threaten to reveal their existence.

  Only with such incontrovertible data would Stone be able to defend himself, protect himself. No longer was it a question of clearing his father’s name. Now it was a matter of survival.

  Charlie Stone, however, could not return to Cambridge. He would have to return as someone else.

  He got up from the bed and walked over to the mirror. He stared at himself for the first time in days, and was shocked. He looked twenty or thirty years older. Partly it was the growth of beard, partly the large bluish circles under his red eyes.

  For an instant. Stone was quite sure he could smell smoke, sulfuric and acrid. The smell of gunshot.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 197

  He was no longer in a motel room. No. He was sitting in a marsh, on the shores of the small lake in Maine where he and his father used to go duck-hunting, twenty miles north of the lodge. His hands, his feet were numb from the cold.

  He’d been sitting in the cramped blind for hours, that camouflage structure of wire and leaves that looks, to a duck, like shrubbery. Next to him was his father, hearty and fit, whispering to him. The two of them had been sitting there so long they had begun to feel like part of the forest, the dark
of the early morning and the quiet making them oddly reflective.

  Charlie was eleven, and this was his first time hunting. He didn’t want to kill the ducks, prett>’ creatures. He didn’t want to do it.

  Sitting there, Charlie got colder and colder. It always happened that way: you sweated mightily while you set up, feeling ridiculously overdressed, and then, suddenly, having burned up so much energy, you’d shiver with the cold, sitting. Sitting and waiting.

  “Listen, Charlie,” Alfred Stone now said, gently. “Don’t even think of them as living beings. They’re targets. All right? They’re part of nature. Just like the chicken your mother makes. That’s all.”

  Shivering, Charlie shook his head and did not reply. He watched the decoys bobbing at the lake’s edge, a few feet away. Watched the steam rise from the thermos of hot coffee. Watched the sun rise in streaks of orange and red.

  “Crouch down,” Alfred Stone said, so quietly. “There. Look.”

  And then—the glorious, unforgettable sight of the birds suddenly appearing over the treetops, their wings flapping furiously, four or five of them. As Alfred Stone gave the duck call to signal them in, Charlie steeled his resolve. His hand was so cold he hesitated to touch the shotgun’s trigger guard.

  Then he saw the birds freeze, setting their wings, locking rigid, and zooming in from downwind, like miniature 747s coming in for a landing.

  “Come on, now, Charlie,” his father whispered.

  Charlie stiffened his shoulders and clicked off the safet', just as he’d been taught to do, and then, just as the birds flared their wings to land, he did it. He fired.

  198 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The first shot missed.

  But the second: a dream shot. The feathers flew. The bird dropped Hke a bag of pennies, and it was over. A matter of seconds.

  Charhe looked up, beaming, and caught the pride in his father’s eyes.

  Now, looking at himself in the smudged motel mirror, thinking of the guns and the death, Charlie thought of Alfred Stone, dead, his eyes staring, and he shuddered.

  It was time to re-enter the world. Stone opened the motel-room door, momentarily stunned by the bracing fresh air. It was morning, surprisingly bright and warm, a perfect October day. At the discount drugstore across Route 1, he found what he wanted: shaving cream, some disposable razors, some shampoo, a tube of tanning lotion. At the cash register he saw a stack of Boston Globes.

  His picture was on the front page.

  PORTRAIT OF A KILLER, the headline read. There it was, a photograph, taken from his CIA file, its coat-and-tie respectability clashing with the luridness of the headline. No one was in line; Stone picked up the newspaper and scanned the story. The whole article had been faked up, supplied by someone intent on portraying him as dangerous and crazed, a brilliant and unbalanced employee of the Central Intelligence Agency who had suddenly and without reason lost his grip on sanity. The reporter had seized upon the information supplied both by the Boston police and unnamed “government sources” and created out of it a persuasive mosaic that was the stuflF of tabloids. A large quantity of heroin and PCP, “angel dust,” had been found in Stone’s bedroom at the house, the article said, which indicated to police that the son might well have been in a violent altered state. There was a reference to the grotesque murder of Saul Ansbach, and an allegation that Stone might be a suspect in that case as well. There were baffled remarks from several of Stone’s former colleagues at Georgetown and M.I.T., then a recitation of Alfred Stone’s tortured past, which gave the story an even more peculiar twist.

  “Can I help you?”

  The clerk was a teenage girl, chewing bubble gum.

  Stone looked at the shampoo and the shaving supplies. “Just—

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 199

  just the paper, the tanning stuff, and the shampoo, please,” he said. “I’ll put this other stuff back.” He had an idea: better not to shave. “And where do you have hair products?”

  Haifa mile away, at a Salvation Army store, he found a grotesque yellowish-brown woolen overcoat that was too long, tattered pants, a pair of old leather boots that almost fit, and a few other bedraggled changes of clothing. A black-and-orange display in a toy-and-novelty store down the block gave him an idea. It was mid-October, almost Halloween. He bought some spirit gum and a bag of black stage-makeup hair.

  When he got back to the motel, he settled his bill, then returned to the room. He shampooed his hair and applied the black hair dye, which, according to the instructions, would disappear after six washings. Half an hour later, he toweled his hair dry and saw, to his satisfaction, that his hair was now several shades darker than his usual brown. Then he doused his hair with a quantity of Vitalis. It looked as if he had not washed it in months. Slowly and carefully he daubed the instant-tanning lotion on his face, neck, and hands, and worked it in carefully. Within a few hours, his skin had taken on the deep color of someone who has spent a great deal of time in the sun.

  He applied the spirit gum to his beard and carefully worked on the costume hair. After ten minutes of steady labor, he inspected the results in the mirror. His beard was a long, wispy, dreadful-looking thing. But the overall result was dramatic.

  With his filthy, ragged clothes, his beard, and his stringy hair— added to his sunburned, dissolute face—he looked like a vagrant, a mendicant Rasputin. A close inspection would give him away. But from ten feet he looked like an entirely different person, the sort of person that most people don’t look at very closely at all.

  25

  Silver Spring, Maryland

  The man from the Soviet Embassy and his friend from the White House met for breakfast at a small diner in Silver Spring. They both agreed that, though it was impossible realistically for them to meet in absolute secrecy, it was nevertheless a good idea to attract as little attention as possible. Anyone who observed them—and in this place it was unlikely anyone would—would think they were social acquaintances of the sort Washington seems to breed.

  The diner was an old-fashioned place with Formica tables and booths with jukeboxes. A large sign in front said simply eat, a throwback touch that had attracted Bayliss’s attention on his morning drive to work one day several weeks earlier.

  Each of them ordered coffee, which was served in sturdy white ceramic mugs, and Malarek had two eggs over easy, a rasher of bacon, and wheat toast. Bayliss was impressed with Malarek’s familiarity with American greasy-spoon menus.

  The tension was palpable. “It was goddamned foolproof,” Bayliss told his Soviet friend. “Everything, down to the arrest, the charges brought against him. Damn it! So what the hell happened?”

  “Apparently our people administered an insufficient dose of the chemical. Stone awoke too early. They wanted to be cautious about administering the dosage. I can’t entirely fault them for it.” His English, Bayliss noticed, was just about perfect, his accent minimal. “But had your people arrived sooner than they did—”

  “It was far too complex, too elaborate,” Bayliss said, shaking his head.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 201

  “The plan was a good one, I have no doubt of that,” Malarek answered, with what struck BayHss as defensiveness. “I’m sure you reahze the advantages of this approach: as soon as the interrogation was completed, he’d have been found to have killed himself in prison, deeply contrite over his wasted life, and so forth and so on.”

  Bayliss looked up sharply. He had lost his appetite now. He bowed his head, then covered his eyes with one hand. “I’d never have imagined,” he said in a low voice, “that I’d ever be involved in sanctioning a murder.”

  “We’re doing the right thing,” Malarek told him soothingly.

  Bayliss rubbed his eyes. “This is difficult for me.” He raised his head and resumed thickly: “All right. Nothing is lost. The local police forces are using the NCIC, the National Crime Information Computer, out of the fugitive bureau at FBI headquarters here in Washington. The Massachusetts State Police fugitiv
e squad have unmarked cars throughout the state; security on public transit has been notified. The guy’s name’s been posted everywhere. He’s not going to be able to go anywhere. We’ve got court orders, fugitive-flight warrants, search warrants, you name it. They’ve gone through his phone bills, address books, his Rolodex—the works. Every place he turns will be covered. He’s bound to realize that he’s got no choice but to turn himself in. And then we’ve got him.”

  “If you know where he is,” Malarek pointed out, spreading butter on a slice of wheat toast. “Otherwise …” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.

  “He’s wanted not only for murder but for a rather serious, though unspecified, violation of U.S. treason laws. After all, he is an employee of the CIA. He’s a wanted man. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Malarek shrugged again, his expression unreadable.

  “But there has to be a way to talk the guy down,” Bayliss insisted. “Lure him in, keep him alive. Alive he’d be more useful to us, help plug the leaks.”

  “I think this plan will prove quite adequate,” Malarek said, knowing that it would not do at all, that more, much more, would have to be done.

  76

  Saugus, Massachusetts

  Stone found a pay phone a few blocks away from the motel. It was open to the elements, and with the traffic noise it was hard to hear.

  Who could he call?

  He wondered whether he could rely on his old friend from his Boston das. Chip Rosen, now a metropolitan reporter for the Boston Globe. Perhaps.

  Then he remembered Peter Sawyer, the private detective in Boston who’d taught him how to pick locks. He had lived upstairs from the apartment Charlotte and Stone had shared when Stone was teaching at M.I.T. They’d gotten to be good friends, and although they barely kept in touch, Stone trusted Sawyer implicidy.

  He dialed Sawyer’s number, got an answering machine, and was leaving a brief message without giving a name, knowing that Sawyer would recognize the voice, when all of a sudden Sawyer himself picked up the phone.