The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  There it was, the entrance to the theater, with the two ladies sitting on their metal folding chairs, and just as he nodded his head at them, he could hear a terrifyingly loud explosion in the theater, followed by an instant of silence and then a roar, a chorus of screams.

  He couldn’t help himself: he ran through the doors and out. Behind him he could hear a woman’s voice shouting after him, but he didn’t stop until he was in his car and had safely pulled away into the light evening traffic.

  39

  Chicago

  Warren Pogue was a contented man. He’d always feared retirement— the idea of sitting around doing nothing had terrified him—but retirement had turned out to be quite pleasant. The FBI had been good to him, and his forty-four years in the Bureau had netted him a respectable pension.

  His other friends sat around the house and watched TV and complained, but Warren Pogue kept busy. He was more active than he’d ever been in his life. His wife, Fran, had been even more terrified than he at the prospect of his retiring, but she enjoyed it now, too. He mowed the lawn and gardened and kept their small, immaculately manicured backyard on Mozart Street, in the extreme north section of Chicago known as Rogers Park. He played golf and had even taken up tennis.

  And he flew. During World War II, he’d been in the air force, and he’d fallen in love with flying. That was it for forty years, and then, a few weeks after he’d retired from the Bureau, he got together with a few friends and bought a single-engine four-seat Piper Arrow.

  So once a week, Saturday, he went flying. Today was Saturday, and he’d been up for an hour. Time to go. He talked to the air-traffic controller and requested clearance to land.

  Pogue dipped the plane to twenty-five thousand feet and dialed in the flaps to thirty percent. The throttle back, he made a sharp left, another left, another left: a full circle, watching the hands on the altimeter steadily clicking counterclockwise as he decreased altitude

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  and glided in to the final approach. Just before the wheels touched down, he pulled the nose up so the rear wheels landed first.

  A clean landing, he thought with satisfaction. He steered the plane to the parking ground, lining the nose up carefully, the wings precisely in line with the ones on either side. He shut oflPthe ignition, the fuel tanks, the battery switch, and got out. He anchored the plane to the hook embedded in the ground.

  He thought about his only daughter, Lori, who was thirty-two and still not married. She’d be coming in tonight to stay for a few days. He wondered whether he’d let it slip and tell her she ought to settle down already and get herself a husband and a family.

  Leaving the airport, he said goodbye to Jim, the mechanic, and got in his car. Half an hour later, he pulled up the driveway to his small home.

  The driveway could use another blacktopping, he thought.

  Pogue was a chain-smoker. His voice, deep and gravelly, reminded Stone of some character on the old ‘Terry Mason” show, although he couldn’t remember which one.

  The retired FBI agent looked to be in his late sixties. He was fat, with a potbelly that jutted like a shelf above the hoop of his black leather belt. His wife was a small woman with ash-blond hair who appeared long enough to say hello and then disappeared to an upstairs room to watch television. His place was tiny, a ranch-style house with perfectly rectangular hedges in front and a lawn that resembled Astro-Turf.

  Paula had tracked down Pogue’s address and phone number first thing in the morning—she had left her house long before Stone got up, probably because they both felt awkward about having made love.

  Then Stone had called Pogue, telling him he was working with the director of the FBI on a book about some of the Bureau’s greatest exploits—and Pogue was on the list. Stone counted on there not being enough time for Pogue to make phone calls—“I’ve got a plane to catch in about two hours,” Stone said, “and this will hardly take any time.” And, amazingly, Pogue had said yes.

  “I agree,” Pogue was saying, a broad smile creasing his face, as

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  he unwrapped the cellophane from a pack of Marlboros, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. “The FBI under Hoover was a bunch of fucking heroes. Not like the candy-ass losers you see around today, you know what I mean?”

  Stone nodded, smiling amiably. Ten or fifteen more minutes of this, Stone told himself. You can stand it. You’re sitting here talking to the guy who went to Moscow to gather information on your own father, the guy whose trumped-up evidence sent Alfred Stone to the federal penitentiary, and you’re chatting as if you were two lifelong buddies at an Elks reunion.

  At last the opportunity came up. Stone remarked in passing that, well, didn’t Pogue have something to do with the famous Alfred Stone case?

  “Something to do with it?” Pogue shot back. “I single-handedly covered it.”

  “I’m impressed,” Stone said, grinning. Bastard. “Didn’t you catch the Stone guy in Moscow, meeting with a Russian spy?”

  Pogue bowed his head modestly, and lifted it again, exhaling evenly as he did so. “All right.” He looked around as if someone else were in the room, the prefatory gestures of a seasoned raconteur. “I’ve been involved in almost eight hundred cases. On this one, I remember every fucking detail. It’s the one that got me promoted from peon right up the ranks. I was on the Soviet espionage squad. We were on to the commie spy network—Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Alfred Stone, starting from the time we cracked some secret Soviet codes during the war. I was just out of my apprenticeship, wearing my white shirt and my snap-brim hat and all that. As soon as we got word that Lehman’s assistant was going to Moscow, I got the orders to follow him. See if he met with the same lady his boss did, you know.” He smiled, smoke escaping from his lips. Although Pogue was hardly giving away any secrets, his demeanor suggested he was breaking a number of security regulations. “You know who Winthrop Lehman is.”

  “Sure. But who’s Fyodor Dunayev?”

  Fyodor Dunayev’s name had appeared on one of the documents in Lehman’s archives, interrogated by Pogue.

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  Pogue expelled a lungful of smoke violently, with a hacking cough.

  Then he stared, and stared, his cigarette burning. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds. The gray ash of the cigarette grew steadily longer. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I told you. I’m—”

  “Who the fuck are you?” the FBI man shouted. “You aren’t writing any fucking history of the FBI.”

  “All right,” Stone said calmly, sitting perfectly still. He had a gun; was it wise to pull it out now? Pogue might well be a dangerous adversary. “You’re right. I’m not working on a history of the FBI, and I apologize for coming to you under a pretext.”

  “If you’re a goddamned federal—”

  “I’m not a federal anything. I’m Alfred Stone’s son.”

  There was a grim set to Pogue’s jaw. He crushed out his cigarette in the large star-shaped glass ashtray, then lit another.

  “Don’t try anything,” he said menacingly.

  “I’m not planning to. Believe me, I realize you were doing your job. I don’t blame you.”

  “Get the fuck out of my house.”

  “You interrogated a guy named Fyodor Dunayev. I want to know who he was. Is he a Russian? An emigre? A defector?”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Pogue bellowed.

  “Let him stay.”

  It was his wife. She stood clutching the banister on the carpeted staircase. She had been listening for quite some time. Stone now realized.

  “Fran, get upstairs,” Pogue said, pointing at her with the lit cigarette. “This is none of your business.”

  “No, Warren. You should talk to the man.”

  “Get the hell upstairs, Fran. This doesn’t concern you.”

  His wife descended the stairs slowly, still clutching the banister as she went. “No, Warren,” she repeated. “You’ve fel
t guilty about the Alfred Stone affair for years. You know he shouldn’t have been put in prison, and you didn’t say anything. For years.”

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  “Fran—” Pogue said, more softly.

  “You knew you did the wrong thing in the fifties. You put an innocent man in jail. That’s not what you stand for. You’ve felt terrible about it. Now, make up for it, Warren. The poor man’s son is here, Warren. Tell him what he wants to know!”

  “Leave us, Fran,” Pogue said.

  Pogue’s wife made her way back up the stairs, just as slowly as she had come down.

  And Warren Pogue, with a crestfallen expression, spoke without looking at Stone. “Fyodor Dunayev was a defector from Stalin’s secret service who lives in Paris,” he said. He spoke in a sort of monotone, as if the very process of remembering, reaching back into a buried vault of recollection, was painful. He exhaled, the smoke seeping out of his mouth and nostrils. “I suppose it doesn’t make a goddamned difference what I tell you now.”

  An hour later, Stone walked through Rogers Park, numb from shock. He reached into his jacket pocket to reassure himself that the miniature cassette tape recorder was still there. The Nagra he had found in a Washington electronics-specialty shop was capable of recording conversations across a large room for up to six hours on a single cassette—and that machine had secretly recorded the testimony of William Armitage and Warren Pogue.

  He would have to go to Paris.

  There, Pogue had said, lived a Russian emigre who knew more than anyone else about the Beria coup. Ancient history that would reveal the present. He would have names of the people involved, either on the American side or the Russian side—people who were now, years later, about to throw the world into upheaval.

  Fyodor Dunayev had served in Stalin’s secret police, the forerunner of the KGB. He had been one of Beria’s trusted agents, so much so that he had been sent on a mission in 1953 to terrorize an old woman in Chicago. Anna Zinoyeva. To try to obtain a document.

  There were three of them, Pogue had said, among the fiercest of Beria’s agents. One was Dunayev. Another had died in a purge im-

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  mediately after Stalin’s death. The third one, Osip Vyshinsky, was still believed to live in the Soviet Union. After Beria’s execution, Dunayev had defected, knowing his days were numbered.

  He had to see Dunayev.

  A dense fog now blanketed the city; figures at a distance seemed shrouded and mysterious. As he walked past a movie theater and a delicatessen, he felt something. Saw something, more accurately— something in his peripheral vision, a figure that the fog made unrecognizable. Almost unrecognizable, but the cues remained, silhouettes, gaits. Suddenly he knew he was being followed again.

  They had tracked him to Chicago.

  No, dear God. It couldn’t be.

  No.

  Stone stepped up his pace, and the man on the opposite side of the street, still not quite visible, walked faster, too. Stone turned a corner, and now the man crossed the street, following at a distance of just a hundred yards. There was something familiar about the man, something eerily familiar. A bulky man in a black leather jacket, a goatee. Stone had seen him before. He was quite sure of it.

  Now Stone turned another corner, sharply, and immediately spotted an alley. He ducked in and flattened himself against the brick. The follower would catch up to him in seconds.

  A discarded table leg on the ground caught Stone’s attention, its metal glinting. Quickly he retrieved it with his good, right hand. It was the heavy iron leg of an old-fashioned kitchen table.

  Now!

  He swung the iron rod at the follower, catching him by surprise. The rod cracked into his shoulder, and then Stone immediately lunged at the man and pummeled him to the ground, and at that instant he suddenly knew where he had seen him.

  In Cambridge.

  This was the man who, along with accomplices, had killed his father. He was the murderer.

  The man rose from the ground, a bit sluggish, and as he did so, he slipped a hand swiftly into his jacket pocket.

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  A tremendous rage suddenly gripped Stone, and with a force that was scarcely human, he slammed his body into his attacker’s. But the man had recovered now, and Stone felt a fist crack into his face.

  Stone tried at the last second to protect himself, but he was too late. Instantly, swinging his fists back, he could taste, smell, blood, and he moved with an insane fury, cracking the iron rod against the attacker’s shoulders, then—though the man tried in vain to knock Stone off balance—against the top of his head, swinging with enormous force.

  This is for my father! he thought, crazed, feeling a warmth ooze over his lips and chin.

  The man was dead.

  The attacker’s body lay sprawled on the ground in the alley, hidden by the dumpster from the view of passersby. His face was bloodied.

  Stone stared for a long moment in disbelief. He had killed a man.

  He reached into the man’s jacket and found the gun in the holster, a Llama M-87 with a full magazine, which he removed and shoved in his front pocket. The man’s wallet was in his breast pocket. He flipped it open and saw the usual false identification papers, credit cards, and licenses under various names. Digging farther, Stone found a concealed compartment, which he forced open. In it was a small plastic telephone-company card, on which was embossed a calling-card number. A phone number the attacker had no doubt used to place telephone calls to a central office, whose area code was Washington, D.C.

  With bloodied hands. Stone pocketed the plastic card, and then he began to run.

  40

  When Stone had left, Pogue removed a handkerchief from his front pocket and mopped his forehead.

  Oh, Jesus, he thought. Oh, Jesus. What’s this fellow stumbled onto?

  He picked up the phone and called Jim at the airport, asking him to fuel the Piper all the way up, check on the weather conditions, make sure it was clear to land in Indiana. He had to move fast. He had to get to Indianapolis, Indiana, immediately.

  He picked up the phone again and called Justice Bidwell’s private number. Justice Harold Bidwell, the retired associate justice of the Supreme Court. Still one of the most powerful men in the country and, even five years after his retirement, still intimately connected to everyone in Washington who counted. Justice Hal Bidwell, whose nomination to the Supreme Court had been assured thirty-five years ago when a young, ambitious FBI agent named Warren Pogue had managed to dig up compromising material on all of Bidwell’s rivals.

  The phone rang, once, twice, three times.

  Bidwell would know instantly what it was about. Pogue realized how unorthodox it was for him to call Bidwell directly, but the matter was urgent.

  “Your Honor,” Pogue said when Bidwell answered. “I must see you right away. I’ll be arriving at Indianapolis in”—he checked his watch—“about two hours.”

  “What are you—”

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  “The channel,” Pogue said tensely. “It’s been corrupted! We— all of us—we’re in danger!”

  “I’ll have my man pick you up,” Bidwell replied, a slight quaver in his rich baritone.

  The methodical preciseness of flying calmed Pogue. You had to go through a litany—A and then B and then C. The law said you had to consult a printed checklist, even if you knew the procedure by heart. It always relaxed him, and his heart was going so fast, he needed a little relaxation. Needed a clear head.

  He looked the Piper Arrow over carefully, as he always did before he went up: looked in the engine cowling, the spark plugs, the fan belt. The oil level, the distributor caps. He checked the wings for any cracks, checked the pressure of the tires, the gas caps under both wings, even shook the tail. Everything was fine.

  The battery and the auxiliary battery were both charged. Pogue got into the plane and fastened the seat belt. He tried the mechanical steering equip
ment, turned the wheels, tested the pedals, pushed on the steering wheel. He got in and revved it up to four thousand rpm, kept his foot on the brake, felt the plane rattle. The pressure gauges were fine. Tired of the shaking, he let the plane idle. One, two, three: there was a pleasing order to it. He switched from the fuel tank to the reserve tank, felt the engine falter for an instant, but that was normal. The wheel flaps were fine, too, and he kept them in neutral for takeoflP.

  Using the radio navigation equipment, he called the tower to ask for the barometer reading, and set the altimeter. Then he checked his flight plan, the Loran navigation aids, and dialed in his wavelength. And then he requested permission for taxiing to takeoff.

  He dialed the pitch of the propeller to the maximum, pushed the throttle lever, revved up again, and with the throttle all the way forward removed his foot from the brake and felt the plane lurch ahead. The plane bounced down the runway and felt pleasantly light, running along at seventy-five miles an hour. He eased back on the nose, and the plane lifted off the ground.

  He was on his way.

  When the plane had reached three thousand feet, he throttled

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  the engine back to three thousand rpm as he gradually climbed up to five thousand feet.

  The secret was out. How, Pogue didn’t know. But it was out. He wondered if his visitor knew what sort of danger he was uncovering.

  But suddenly Pogue’s thoughts were interrupted by a signal from his nose: a peculiar smell. The smell of overheating, of oil burning. That made no sense; he’d checked everything out carefully. How could that be?