The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  His escape had been close; the terrifying events of the past hour had left him still shaking, literally.

  Was Armitage one of them, as he’d begun to think of his faceless pursuers? Or, quite the reverse, were these people trying to keep him away from Armitage, having somehow obtained access to Armitage’s telephone lines? Anything was possible. There was only one way to find out.

  He had the advantage of surprise. If Armitage was one of the conspirators, he would expect that Stone had been killed in the explosion. He would not expect him at his front door. And yet …

  Suspicion had saved him a few hours ago. Was he being suspicious, careful enough now?

  The Armitage home was set on a slight knoll, and therefore it was possible to see three sides of the house from the road. The place looked completely clear.

  He shut off the ignition and walked carefully to the front door. He rang the doorbell.

  A minute later, he rang again. Two minutes after that, the door opened.

  It was Armitage; Stone recognized him from his news photos. He was wearing a crimson silk dressing gown that had been hastily thrown over white silk pajamas, and he had clearly been awakened. Even in

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  such a state, he looked dignified, his white hair set off starkly by his deep suntan.

  Armitage did not appear to recognize him; his expression was one of annoyance and distrust.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “I didn’t see you at our little rendezvous,” Stone said darkly.

  “Who are you? Do you know what time it is?”

  “We spoke earlier this evening. I’m Lehman’s assistant, Matt Kelley.”

  “I told you not to come here!”

  “Now I see why,” Stone replied.

  The white-haired man squinted in puzzlement. “I canceled my goddamn dinner plans and then I called that number you gave me,” he sputtered. “It was a goddamn pay phone! Some passerby answered it. I waited to hear from you, and nothing. You’re lucky I only canceled on my brother. What do you think this is? I resent your—”

  A woman’s voice called from the interior of the house: “Who is it, Bill?”

  “Nothing,” Armitage replied. “I’ll get rid of him. Go back to sleep, honey.”

  Was this man telling the truth? “I tried your line,” Stone said slowly, watching him carefully, “and it was busy, so I—”

  “Busy? I sat by the phone for ten minutes, waiting.”

  “Morton Bloom called me—” Stone began.

  “Morton Bloom! That’s impossible. He isn’t even in the country. He’s been assigned to Geneva. He hasn’t been in Washington for seven months!”

  Stone felt his pulse quicken. “I wanted to know about an old woman named Anna Zinoyeva,” he said levelly. “A secretary to Lenin. A frightened little woman you paid a threatening visit to in 1953.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Armitage said, stepping back to close the door. “Now, I want you out of here—”

  “Please don’t waste my time,” Stone said. He had pulled out the Smith & Wesson and pointed it, which was something he had hoped wouldn’t be necessary.

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  “Put that goddamned thing away! My wife is already calling the police. ” Armitage was frightened, and he was lying.

  “I only want to talk with you for a little while,” Stone said calmly. “That’s all. We talk, and everything will be fine.”

  “Who the hell are you?” the statesman rasped, terrified.

  Armitage listened to Stone with undisguised astonishment. They had been sitting in the large, book-lined library of Armitage’s house for a quarter of an hour while Stone talked, Armitage interrupting only to pose questions and clarify points.

  Stone kept the gun at his side, ready to pick it up if needed, but Armitage now seemed willing to cooperate, especially when he learned that Stone was an employee of Parnassus—and an employee and a friend of Armitage’s friend Saul Ansbach.

  “Saul called me, you know,” Armitage said when Stone had finished. “He mentioned your name. And he was quite agitated. He mentioned this report from the asset in Moscow and his suspicions that American renegades might be involved.” He shook his head. “Frankly, I dismissed his suspicions as alarmist.”

  Stone, listening, looked around at the floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves, the framed and signed photographs of Armitage with Lyndon Johnson, John Foster Dulles, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. Armitage’s rise to the penultimate position in the State Department had not been a matter of party loyalties; his friends were both Republicans and Democrats. He evidently had quite a few influential friends.

  “And when I heard about Saul, and then read about your father— absolutely ghastly—”

  “Yes,” Stone said hastily, cutting Armitage off, not wanting to relive the pain of his father’s death. “And Saul was right, wasn’t he?”

  “Right about what?” Armitage asked with undisguised hostility.

  “There is some kind of organization deep within the government that has been trying to overturn the Kremlin for decades—outside of Langley, outside of the CIA or the DIA or the White House. And it’s going on right now.”

  “Oh, that’s nonsense.”

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  “Nonsense? Saul Ansbach died, damn it! He was murdered to cover this up.” Stone continued in a whisper: “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  “No!” Armitage shouted with surprising vehemence.

  “Then you know—you know much more than you’re saying.”

  Armitage’s eyes roamed the room frantically. He clasped his hands tensely, then got up, retied the silk belt around his dressing gown, and walked to his desk drawer.

  Stone released the safety on the gun. “Don’t surprise me with anything,” he said.

  Armitage’s eyes widened briefly; then he shook his head, smiling uncertainly. “I wasn’t planning to. I want to get my pipe. Anyway, I have every reason to be uncertain about you, storming into my house at midnight with your crazy tales.”

  “You’re right,” Stone said, still pointing the gun.

  Armitage shrugged again and pulled from the desk drawer a pipe and a tobacco pouch.

  “Sorry.”

  “Quite all right,” Armitage said as he filled the pipe’s bowl and tamped it down. “I suppose I’d do the same thing if I were in your position. Assume you can’t trust anyone, catch them by surprise as you did me.” When he had the pipe going, he returned to his chair.

  “If you’re not one of these people, then answer me this,” Stone said. “Let’s go back to 1953. You knew Beria’s people had strong-armed this woman, Anna Zinoyeva, looking for a document—the Lenin Testament—which would throw Russia into such turmoil that, in the confusion, a coup could take place.”

  Armitage nodded.

  “And you were sent to make sure she kept her silence,” Stone resumed. “Contain things. See if she had this document and make sure it only fell into the right hands.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then who sent you to see her?”

  Armitage now shook his head slowly. “My reputation—” he began.

  Stone lifted the gun again. “I want to tell you something,” he

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  said with a terrible intensity. “My father was murdered. I have been set up for the crime of murdering my own father. And I’m prepared to do anything now to survive. If that includes committing murder myself, please understand that I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

  Tears welled up in Armitage’s eyes. When he spoke, it was after a silence that seemed endless. “Winthrop.”

  “Lehman? But why was Lehman—”

  “Oh, God.” He put down his pipe and then began to speak. “During … You see, during the war I was lucky enough to secure a position with army intelligence. I got involved in the War Department’s investigation of military intelligence during Pea
rl Harbor. My boss was none other than the chief of staff of the army. General George C. Marshall. So I was in the right place in the right time.” He waved his hand tremulously around the room, indicating the antiques, the rugs, the books. “Obviously my family’s wealth and connections didn’t hurt. After the war, I moved to State, and at some social affair or other, I don’t remember when exactly, I met the famous Winthrop Lehman, the President’s national-security assistant. We got to be friends, Winthrop and I. The sort of friends endemic to Washington, I mean—more a partnership of mutual respect for achievement, coupled with a ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ sort of thing.”

  “How were you able to scratch his back?”

  “I wondered the same thing at the time, since Lehman knew most of official Washington. But it turned out that he needed a good, reliable contact at State—a Fifth Columnist, as it were—in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.”

  “To do what?”

  “Keep watch. Keep things in line. Little of any substance.”

  “Be specific.”

  Armitage sighed. “He was concerned about the hemorrhaging of classified information in those days. With McCarthy on the rampage, secrets were being spilled everywhere. That’s the irony. McCarthy, ostensibly the great enemy of communism, was helping the communists more than anyone else ever could. So Winthrop wanted me to keep watch for any revelation that had to do with a top-secret designation, M-3, which I was only told referred to a mole.”

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  “And what did you get in return for helping Lehman?”

  “In return, Mr. Stone, I got something very valuable. Those were difficult days for the State Department. Tail gunner Joe McCarthy, that bastard, called us ‘the striped-pants boys,’ and he was gunning for quite a few of us. Lehman saw to it that I was left alone. But one day a good piece of intelligence came our way, the result of a black-bag job, the sort of thing that was a lot more common then than now. One of our contract agents managed to gain access to the Soviet diplomatic pouch. In those days, it actually was a large leather pouch, filled with coded documents and memoranda and letters and whatnot. Among the many rather useful things we microfilmed was a cream-colored envelope addressed to my friend Winthrop Lehman on blank stationery. No letterhead, no signature, and the message was so banal it was obviously encoded.”

  “From whom?”

  “We got the answer from the paper. It was private-stock paper used exclusively by the MGB, as the KGB was then called.”

  “And?”

  “And then I knew I had something rather important, that my friend Winthrop was in secret contact with the Soviet secret police. And so I was inxoKed, though not by choice, you see. Once I knew that, and Lehman knew I knew, I was part of his game.”

  “But why were you involved? Why you?”

  “They needed me. They needed the rather considerable resources of the State Department. Lehman was coordinating a scheme to fund a coup by Lavrentii Beria. And I used my connections within the State Department to channel money that Winthrop Lehman provided, three-quarters of a million dollars, to the Swiss bank account that Beria had set up for himself.”

  “Lehman! Lehman personally funded the coup attempt?”

  Armitage nodded pensively. “I believed in the cause, too.”

  “Putting that craz' man Beria into power?”

  “No. Destabilizing the Soviet government. Now, of course, I realize that instabilit' in the Kremlin is the most dangerous thing of all.”

  “What was the name of Beria’s assistant, this ‘M-3’ I mentioned?”

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  “I never knew it. Believe me, I was kept in the dark. I never knew who else was involved.”

  “But there are ways to find out. You must have files, records of this operation. Some way to prove, establish beyond doubt, what was being done.”

  “None.”

  “But records on Lehman?” Stone suggested. “There must be records you can get access to.”

  The Secretary looked shaken as he replied. “When I heard about Saul, I got scared. I thought I might be next, and I went about collecting what I could, in order to have some kind of protection. But they’re missing! The FBI files on Lehman are missing—and so are State Department consular records in Suidand, Maryland, decimal files at the National Archives. Everything on Lehman is gone!”

  “There must be records of who removed them.”

  “Nothing. They’re stolen, all of them.”

  “Stolen? Well, what solid, irrefutable proof do you have?”

  “Proof? Absolutely none.”

  Stone was pensive a moment. “Even without it … Perhaps, with your reputation, your connections, you can speak the right word to the right people.”

  “And say what? Without any sort of proof whatsoever? I’d be a laughingstock. No one would believe me. You don’t understand—a lot of people are frightened. Files are being combed. Something is going on today, some kind of power struggle.”

  “Yes,” Stone said. How much did this man know? “You mean a power struggle in American intelligence? Be specific.”

  “I can’t. It’s just—intuition. The way a very good internal-medicine specialist just knows when something is wrong with the body. After all these years in government, I know. There’s talk. Talk in the corridors, whispered things, casual asides.”

  “Who’s involved in it?”

  “Renegades, perhaps. Ollie North types. I don’t know. I’m sorry; I can’t be more substantive than that.”

  “I need specifics—someone who knows for certain and is willing to go public.” He thought: My father knew someone on the NSC, a

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  former student of his. I could contact him. And there was that FBI agent who interviewed Gushing—Warren Pogue, wasn’t that his name?

  “Do you understand,” Stone said, “that the CIA itself has been penetrated? That it’s rotten?” “Rotten”—that was the term Saul had used. “That what’s about to happen in Moscow may well be worse than a return of Stalinism? It may be the beginning of a world war.”

  “W/2(3f?” Armitage whispered.

  “How can you afford,” Stone asked, ”not to do anything?”

  At six o’clock in the morning, after a fitful four hours of sleep, Deput}’ Secretary of State William Armitage awoke, put on a pot of coffee, and then made a telephone call to his aide Paul Rigazio. He directed Rigazio to conduct a thorough search of all records on State Department premises that contained any reference to Winthrop Lehman and a certain decades-old conspiracy.

  As was his custom, in the morning he worked at home, doing paperwork and making calls. At nine o’clock, his wife, Catherine, kissed him goodbye and left the house for her unpaid volunteer job at the Audubon Society in Washington, at which she worked in fund-raising from ten until one in the afternoon.

  At nine-tvvent>’, the doorbell rang, and Armitage went to an-sw^er it.

  He smiled in recognition. It was one of the State Department’s messenger boys. He wasn’t expecting any delivery, but sometimes they failed to notif>’ him.

  “Morning, Larry,” he said.

  At four-thirty that afternoon, Catherine Armitage returned to their Falls Church home.

  In the closet off the bedroom she found her husband, completely nude, hanging by a length of electrical cord that had been wrapped in a soft cotton dishrag, apparendy to ensure that the wire did not cut into his neck. The cord hung from a fixture on the closet’s ceiling. On the floor beside the stool that her husband had evidently been standing on when it slipped was a pornographic magazine, open to its centerfold.

  The death was ascribed, by the county coroner, to something

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  called “autoerotic asphyxia,” an unintentional hanging that results from a bizarre practice whereby the victim masturbates and intensifies the orgasm by cutting off the supply of oxygen to the brain, almost— but not quite—hanging
himself. It is a deviant practice far more common among teenagers than distinguished elder statesmen.

  In keeping with the discretion that many families of social standing require at such times, Secretary Armitage’s death was kept strictly quiet. The public announcement mentioned a heart condition. Only the immediate familv knew better.

  34

  Moscow

  Far more secretive than the KGB, and far less well known, is the Glavnoye Razed'atelnoye Upravleniye, the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Union, or the GRU. This agency, which is entirely independent of—and has a long history of fierce rivalry with—the KGB, is located in a nine-story glass tower outside Moscow known as the Aquarium. It is surrounded on three sides by the Khodinka military airfield, and on the other side by a building simply labeled institute of cosmic biology; the entire compound is protected by electrified barbed wire and patrol dogs.

  Early in the morning, a young man was entering the office of his superior, the first deput' chief of the GRU. His face was epicene, with high arching eyebrows, a small nose, large ears, and freckles everywhere. Yet in his eyes were traces of a spirit prematurely aged, a cynicism too deep for his thirty-some years. He had served in Afghanistan, where he had directed the blowing up of bridges and certain buildings in Kabul.

  He wore the uniform of the GRU’s Third Department, or Spets-naz. The Spetsnaz are the GRU’s elite espionage-and-terrorist brigade, trained to infiltrate behind enemy lines in wartime, to locate and destroy nuclear facilities, lines of communication, and other strategic targets, and to assassinate enemy leaders. They also provide support, training, and equipment for numerous terrorist groups. In general, the Spetsnaz troops are the Soviet Union’s most skilled saboteurs.

  This young man was the Spetsnaz’s leading specialist in explosive and incendiary devices. He saluted as his superior nodded hello from