The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “You have another passport, I assume.”

  “Right.”

  “What about the picture? Does it match up?”

  “That’s not how passport agents work. They look for points of similarity, just as anyone would. They’ll look at my face, then at the passport, and they’ll realize that it’s the same person, who happens to have gotten a haircut and a pair of glasses. People change glasses and haircuts all the time. They’ll be looking to confirm it’s the same person.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 311

  and the facial resemblance is there. But if they’re looking for Charlie Stone, they won’t find me by name, and the description isn’t going to help them, since I look like hundreds of thousands of other guys my age.”

  By late afternoon, Stone had made flight reservations to London on British Airways. He had rejected the notion of taking a more circuitous route to Paris—to Adanta, say, and then to London—because he thought it best to avoid any American ports of entry or exit, where a description of him might be logged in to the computers. From London, he could get to Paris by ferry, thereby leaving no paper trail.

  Before departing for the airport, he took Paula aside and handed her the Llama semi-automatic pistol that he had taken off the man he had killed in Chicago. Paula gasped as if she had never seen a gun before, and shook her head violently. “No way, man. No way am I going to touch that thing. Jesus, I don’t even know how to use one of them.”

  “Take it, Paula. It’ll make me feel safer knowing you have it.” She stared at him, and then, reluctantly, she nodded.

  When they arrived at the airport. Stone stopped at a newsstand to buy some newspapers and magazines for the flight, and he was at once struck by a front-page story in a Toronto newspaper. It was an AP story filed from Moscow about yet another terrorist bombing in central Moscow, this one inside the Bolshoi Theater. Stone bought the paper and read it numbly, alarmed.

  Was this the coup that the hedgehog report had warned about? Would it be a series of bombings, masquerading as terrorism, and then—and then a violent assault?

  He checked his watch, found a phone booth, and placed an operator-assisted long-distance call to Moscow.

  To Charlotte.

  There was the distant crackling and static roar, a sequence of mechanical noises, tones, and then a high-pitched, regular beep. The phone was ringing at Charlotte’s apartment. It was after one o’clock in the morning, too late to call, but there might not be a chance later. He had to know what she had found, if indeed she’d looked. She’d understand.

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  After ten rings, there was a thick, slurred “hello”: Charlotte’s voice.

  Stone felt his chest constrict. “It’s me.” His voice reverberated electronically, a metallic echo.

  Mustn’t say a name. Correspondents’ phones are tapped in Moscow, Stone knew. No doubt of that.

  A long pause. Charlotte’s voice, husky from sleep, sexy, thrilling. “Oh, God. Where are you?”

  “I’m—I’m safe. I need your help.”

  A long, long pause. An eternity.

  Would she agree to do one more thing for him, knowing as she surely did what a desperate situation he was in? If anyone could do it, it was Charlotte—the best-connected reporter in Moscow. But how much could he say on the phone? How to communicate it safely? Elliptically: a conversation that to whoever else was listening would sound natural if puzzling, but to Charlotte would mean something.

  “Listen,” she began, but he interrupted. There was no time. He took a deep breath and plunged ahead, spewing a disjointed, oddly emphasized bluster of words. “Got a question for you. What would you recommend an American spend most time visiting: the Kremlin Armory, the Bolshoi Theater, or the beautiful Prospekt Mira metro station? Or all three? I know they’re all architecturally fascinating; what do they have in common? They’re all certainly involving enough, aren’t they?”

  Charlotte, in bed, stared at the dark bedroom wall, gripping the phone tightly. What was he trying to say? She wondered where he was; what he was doing. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was for him to be talking to her on the phone this way? Didn’t he realize that her phone was tapped, that he was endangering both of them? She’d have to terminate the call at once.

  She felt the hot tears streaming down her cheeks, and, her heart racing, she replaced the phone in its cradle.

  He listened for her reply, not knowing how she would respond, and then he felt a jolt when he realized she had hung up. Stone stood in the booth, looking around at the airport terminal, dazed. By turns hurt, angry, unbelieving.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 313

  He had tried, to no avail.

  Damn her. Damn Charlotte.

  Paula accompanied Charlie to the British Airways desk, where he took out his wallet and paid cash for the ticket. The only seats remaining were in first class; the money was not really an issue, but Stone would have much preferred the anonymity of economy class.

  “Your passport, please,” the ticketing agent, a redheaded girl in her mid-twenties, said.

  Stone gave her the Robert Gill passport, which she inspected cursorily; then she looked up at him.

  “Could you wait here a minute, please?” she asked.

  Stone nodded and smiled pleasandy. He caught Paula’s frantic glance, and gave a small shrug, as if to say, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, either.

  The ticketing agent was now joined by an older man in a British Airways blazer, who approached and asked matter-of-factly, “Mr. Gill, do you have any other identification on you?”

  Stone’s heart began to race. “Certainly,” he said, making rapid, silent calculations. “Is there a problem?”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  Stone handed him Robert Gill’s driver’s license.

  The man stared at it for a moment, and then looked up. “Fine, sir. I’m sorry, but we’re required to confirm the ID of anyone who pays cash. Airline policy.”

  “No problem,” Stone said with false joviality. “I’d do the same thing in your place.”

  Charlie and Paula walked toward the departure gate. Stone saw the metal detectors, standard equipment in virtually every airport in the world by now, and was thankful he had decided to leave the gun behind. He embraced Paula, and he noticed there were tears in her eyes. “Hey, listen,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I just want to make sure you’re never, ever connected with me in any way. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “How am I going to know you’re okay?” she asked as she saw him to the gate.

  “Don’t try to get in touch with me, whatever you do. Don’t talk

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  to anyone about me; don’t let anyone know you saw me. Promise me that.”

  “Okay. I promise. But will you get word to me somehow?”

  “All right. I’ll use an alias; you’ll know it’s me.”

  “What alias?”

  “Haskell.”

  “Haskell?”

  “After Haskell, Michigan. The place where a fellow named Charlie Stone had a boating accident and met his untimely demise.”

  44

  Haskell, Michigan

  The Tastee Do-Nut shop on Elm Street in Haskell, Michigan, is legendary for its glazed buttermilk doughnuts. Its coffee is less than legendary, but no one ever complained about it to the Tastee’s owner, Millie Okun.

  At a little after ten in the morning, precisely half of a buttermilk doughnut sat uneaten on a plate in front of Randall Jergensen, Haskell’s chief of police and one of its two police officers. Chief Jergensen had already had three of them; besides, he was deeply involved in the Haskell Mercury’s lively report of the all-county basketball championship game last night.

  Chief Jergensen was a large-framed, large-bellied man with a round face and a chin that barely demarcated his face from the ample folds of his neck. He was forty-seven, and he had been divorced for almost three years
from his wife, Wendy. He thought about her every day and then immediately praised the Lord that he lived alone.

  “Millie,” he said from behind the Mercury, not looking up. “How ‘bout a refill?”

  “Coming right up. Randy,” Millie Okun said, sweeping the glass coffee pot from the Bunn-O-Matic and lofting it over to Chief Jer-gensen’s mug.

  At that moment. Randy Jergensen’s squawk box went off.

  “Shit,” he said, and eyed the fresh coffee longingly.

  By the time he arrived at the station house, most of the story was already in place. His deputy, Will Kuntz, had gotten a call from Freddie Capp, reporting that one of his boats had blown up on the

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  lake. With some fool in it. Freddie’s report was confirmed by the Coast Guard. Sounded an awful lot like a damn-fool accident; Freddy remembered that the guy, who’d said he just wanted the boat for an hour, was a smoker. Probably he just went and blew himself up.

  Goddamned tourist, up from Chicago. With a great sigh of annoyance, Chief Jergensen got in the cruiser and paid a call on Freddie Capp. Freddie had the guy’s name, from the driver’s-license data he’d copied down. Then Jergensen took a spin down the shore until he found the site of the accident, a great big mess of charred wood and metal floating on the surface of the water and poking up out of it. Fire just goddamn burned itself out before the fire trucks got there. The man, whose name was Charles Stone, had evidently ignited the gas tank. Deserved it, jergensen thought, spitting into the water.

  Shortly after noon, Jergensen had talked to Ruth and Henry Cow-ell at the Haskell Inn and gotten this Charles Stone’s credit-card imprint. He had enough now to notify the next of kin. This was the part of his job he disliked most.

  He picked up the phone to call New York, and then put it down, dreading the task.

  Oh, yes. He hadn’t completed standard operating procedure yet, he remembered with some relief, thankful that he could put off the call a little longer.

  “Willy,” he called out to his deputy. “Run this one up on the NCIC computer, will you?” He was referring to the National Crime Information Center’s computerized listing of all persons with arrest warrants outstanding. Nothing ever came of it, at least this far from the crime centers, but you had to do it anyway.

  Jergensen settled back to enjoy a grape soda and a crossword puzzle. He thought he had the three-letter word for “Oriental sash” figured out, when his deputy called something out.

  “Huh?”

  “Bingo, Randy. Jesus, the FBI’s got a fugitive-flight warrant out on him. Whoa— treason laws! The guy was wanted by just about every federal agency.”

  “Well, we just found him, Will. In about twenty thousand pieces

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  at the bottom of the lake. Obviously he was trying to escape to Canada. Probably afraid he’d get nabbed at the border. Instead, he blew himself right up to the sky.” He snorted. “Send that over the wire.”

  Jergensen returned to the puzzle and remembered that the Oriental sash was “obi,” and he wrote it down with a dull stub of a pencil.

  PART THREE

  THE EMPIRE

  OF THE DEAD

  It is symbolic that the massed multitudes see their leaders atop the Lenin Mausoleum on November 7 and May 1 and special occasions. They stand on him. Inside the pyramidal tomb made of red-block, gleaming granite brought fmm Vinnitsa in the Ukraine lies the lifelike dead man.

  —Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (1964)

  45

  Moscow

  The black Chaika zoomed down October 25th Street at top speed, black Volga escorts in front and behind, through Spassky Gate, and into the Kremlin.

  Inside was the first deputy chief of the GRU and the leading munitions expert of the GRU’s elite Spetsnaz troops. As they passed through Red Square, they could see the long line of people waiting to get into Lenin’s tomb in the distance. At the Spassky Gate checkpoint the car paused only momentarily, then proceeded through an iron gate into the section of the Kremlin that is closed to tourists.

  The Chaika pulled up alongside the Council of Ministers building, and the bodyguard got out of the front seat to hold the door open for the two men.

  The aristocratic, white-haired colonel-general and his young Spetsnaz explosives specialist were entering the seat of Soviet government. They passed several sets of blue-uniformed Kremlin Guards, who asked for their documents cursorily. The older man moved quickly, and the younger one just barely managed to keep up as they moved toward a green-painted elevator down a corridor that appeared to be used only for official business.

  The elevator had a plain metal floor, and although it might have been constructed decades ago, the electronics were apparently up-to-date, and it descended smoothly. The name on the elevator was “Otis,” an American elevator company.

  It opened on another corridor, tiled in a mustard color. The GRU officer led the young man past several more sets of guards. The corridor gradually narrowed, and it was clear that they were below ground level. The only light came from buzzing fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling not far above their heads.

  At last, when they had been walking for almost five minutes, during which neither man had spoken, they arrived at another entrance. In front of it stood a pair of uniformed guards, who demanded their documents once again and then saluted.

  Now down a set of steps made of polished black stone, and into the chamber. It was dark and cool and smelled vaguely of chlorine, like a swimming pool. The older man at once located the light switch and turned the lights on.

  The room was a large smooth rectangle, apparently used to store armaments. There were crates of rifles and ammunition and assorted equipment piled along the walls.

  “Well, you’ve studied the blueprints,” the older man said quietly. “You insisted upon seeing the structure at first hand. Here it is.” He did not have to add that the trip entailed some risk, but it would, most likely, seem simply a routine inspection by the GRU’s chief of security.

  The explosives expert looked around and did a quick estimation. “Ten meters,” he said, “by ten meters, by five meters high,” he announced.

  “Correct.”

  “That’s five hundred cubic meters.” His confident voice echoed against the concrete walls. “From ground level, the structure is 12.25 meters high by 24. 5 meters long. Add another five meters in height for this chamber and ten for the room above, which is also below ground level. That makes, ah, 37.25 meters high. Now, tell me, sir: what is this room customarily used for?”

  “It’s an arsenal.”

  “The building is made of granite, though, isn’t it? Heavy stuff.”

  “Much of it is granite, yes. Some labradorite, some marble. This room, and most of the inside walls, are made of reinforced concrete.”

  The younger man spoke very quietly now, but even his whisper seemed loud as it reverberated in the chamber. “I imagine that … that our superior has considered the possibility of a nuclear device. A small one.”

  “He has ruled it out.”

  “Why?”

  His superior smiled. “Any number of reasons. Nuclear materials are guarded so closely that to remove a bomb, even upon orders from the very top, would attract immediate and widespread attention. Secrecy is of paramount importance. Furthermore, we don’t need the Red Army immediately jumping to the conclusion that the Americans did it, which might set oflPa global thermonuclear exchange.”

  The younger man nodded thoughtfully.

  “Of course, there is another, more convincing reason why a nuclear device cannot be used. Keep in mind the level of our Soviet defense preparedness.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Too much time in the laboratory, and not enough time keeping your ears open. The Defense Ministry, many years ago, placed in certain checkpoints in Red Square, in buildings and beneath the ground and even in vehicles that perpetually patrol Moscow, neutron detectors and gamma detecto
rs. Expressly, you can imagine, in order to detect the presence of a nuclear device. To protect the Kremlin from a nuclear bomb being smuggled in. The Americans have a similar system to protect Washington. Nuclear weapons are out of the question. Certainly a nuclear device would be a mistake on the simple grounds that it’s difficult to believe a terrorist in this country could gain access to one.”

  “Will all these guards be here on Revolution Day?”

  “Of course. And more.”

  “Then I would rule out plastic explosives as well. They are a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Plastic explosives are quite powerful, but it would take a huge quantity to do the job. Hundreds of kilos. Crates of it. If there weren’t a problem of guards, I would say plastic explosives would do quite well.”

  “Then what’s the answer?”

  The expert smiled. “An FAE bomb—a fuel-air-explosive.”

  “Explain.”

  “The FAE bomb is one of the most sophisticated explosives weapons in any arsenal. It was developed by the Americans only recently, at the end of the Vietnam War. It’s enormously powerful; an FAE bomb is capable of leveling great buildings, even whole city blocks. And besides, for size it’s incomparable. The whole apparatus can fit in a small bag. All you need is a tank of fuel, propane, some grenades, some blasting caps, a little bit of plastique, and a timing device. A couple of other things. I’d suggest a simple digital timer device.”

  “Why? It’s quite easy to detonate bombs using radio transmitters, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. But these conditions are different. A remote signal for detonation, especially through walls as thick as these, must go over a radio UHF band. That means that, if anyone happens to be monitoring the radio bands—which cannot be ruled out, given the safety precautions our own people will be taking that day—there is a chance that the signal could be jammed. No, we don’t even need to use a remote.”

  “All right, then. But how will it work? What will be timed, exactly?”