The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “The timer will be set to release a cloud of gas in the chamber here and, at the time you designate, the small plastic bombs will go off, detonating the highly combustible cloud of fuel mixed with oxygen.”

  “Will it be powerful enough?”

  “Powerful? Sir, nobody within a hundred meters will survive.”

  “Listen very carefully: this must not fail. When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

  46

  Paris

  Stone awoke very early in the morning, dazed from jet lag and the dislocation of waking up in a strange city. His head throbbed dully, and for a moment he did not remember where he was.

  Sitting up, he allowed his eyes to focus and surveyed the hotel room, enjoying the quiet elegance, the velvet wallpaper of gray stripe, the bathroom whose walls and floor were of smooth green Venetian marble, and the view of the beautiful cathedral of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. For a dead man, he thought grimly, I’ve certainly got a decent hotel room.

  He had arrived in Paris late in the afternoon the previous day. As soon as his plane had landed at Heathrow, he had taken a taxi into London, direcfly to the French Embassy, where he obtained a “rush” visa to travel to Paris immediately, explaining that there had been a sudden change in his business plans. Tense and exhausted, he had considered catching the next flight to Paris, but stuck with his original plan—the Sealink ferry from Dover to Calais, where he could disappear into the crowds of tourists.

  He knew Paris with a passing familiarity, having visited twice, years ago. On those occasions, Paris had been an adversary of sorts, a thing to be conquered, explored, learned. Now it was a welcome refuge, a warren of potential sanctuaries. His first instinct had been to choose a tiny, anonymous hotel. Most such places are run by proprietors eager to make an extra franc, and therefore probably vulnerable to bribery. Stone needed a hotel whose management he could trust not to cooperate unquestioningly with the authorities, if and when it came to that. He needed a place with a small, discreet staff resistant to payoffs, which would fiercely protect its records.

  The hotel he had selected was a small, rather expensive place called L’Hotel, on the narrow rue des Beaux-Arts. Its rooms were small, as are most Paris hotel rooms, but furnished in exquisite taste. Oscar Wilde had lived here (well, died actually), which was hardly a recommendation, as had Maurice Chevalier, which was. Number 46 was sumptuous, and flooded with sunlight in the afternoons.

  He had registered under the name Jones and was relieved to find that the concierge did not ask for his passport. There was a time, years back, when hotels in Paris used to report the names and passport numbers of their guests to the police at the end of each day, but that was, fortunately, a thing of the past. Once or twice a year, the police may ask to inspect a hotel’s guest-registration cards, but rarely if ever do hotels submit these cards to the police otherwise. Despite all the talk in France about precautions being taken to combat terrorism, the simple fact is that one can stay under an alias indefinitely and never be caught. If the “accident” on Lake Michigan was at all successful, he would be safe here for a few days. He hoped.

  He had quickly fallen into a sleep that was so deep it felt almost drugged. Now he ordered a breakfast in the room, cafe au lait and a croissant, and began to collect his thoughts. Little time remained, and there were two people he had to find as soon as possible.

  In the years after the Russian Revolution, Paris was deluged by refugees from the Soviet Union. They formed their own subculture in the city, their own restaurants and nightclubs and social organizations, much as a later generation of emigres would in New York City. But as the emigres died off, their neighborhoods vanished, leaving only the merest traces of Russian heritage.

  One such trace is located in the Eighth Arrondissement, nestled among the high-rent jewelers and chocolate shops, just off the Champs-Elysees. There, on rue Daru, is the Cathedrale Saint-Alexandre Nevsky, a Byzantine church crowded with ancient icons, a gathering place for the few remaining “white Russians.” Stone arrived there in the late morning and found the church empt', the only person

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  in the building a young woman who sat at a small desk that held a display of postcards.

  He had only a name, Fyodor Dunayev, but there was little doubt the man lived under an alias, well concealed and well protected. Anyone who had served in Stalin’s secret service and then defected would live each day in mortal fear. But Stone realized there was a way to get to the retired agent.

  He now knew two potentially useful facts about Dunayev. One— from Warren Pogue—was that Dunayev had been accompanied by a man named Vyshinsky. The other was a morsel of information that Anna Zinoyeva had remembered from the newspaper account of Du-nayev’s defection, a detail memorable because it was so curious. Dunayev had found shelter in Paris, decades ago, under the auspices of an emigre relief organization whose name Stone recognized from something he had once read. The organization was funded and supported by the Russian Orthodox Church in Paris. Stone had found it strange that an atheistic old Chekist would accept aid from a religious organization, but such were the paradoxes of the Russian people. Scratch a communist and you’ll find a fervent Russian Orthodox believer.

  The young woman looked up. ”Oui?’

  “Parlez-vous anglais?”

  “Yes.” She smiled pleasantly.

  Stone chatted for a few minutes about the church. He was an American tourist, he told the woman, of Russian background. The woman’s face lit up: she, too, was of Russian heritage. She spoke English with a Russian accent—obviously her parents had been emigres—and she got up from the desk to show Stone proudly around the church. They talked about Russia for a while, and about the woman’s relatives, and finally Stone casually mentioned that, since he was in Paris, he thought he might look up an old man, a Russian, a friend of a friend. Could she help?

  “What’s his name?”

  Stone hesitated momentarily, and then decided it was highly unlikely the name would mean anything to the woman. “Fyodor Dunayev.”

  328 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The woman shook her head: she had never heard of him.

  “Let me ask the Father,” she said. “He knows most of the Russian emigres. Or if he doesn’t, he may know people who do.”

  Stone followed her out of the church and into the small building next door that served as a combination office and rectory. He waited tensely in the small, bare office. Would Dunayev still be alive? Living under his own name? Maybe he’d have disappeared into anonymity forever.

  She returned a few minutes later. Now she looked at him differently, alarm registering in her face.

  “If you will wait here,” she said, “one of the people in the office may be able to help you.”

  Stone sensed danger. “Can this person get me his phone number?”

  “No,” the woman said anxiously. “But if you will wait—”

  “No,” Stone said. “Listen carefully. Your friend is right to be careful. You have no idea who I am. But let me assure you that Dunayev would be glad to hear from an old friend. I’ll give you something to give to Dunayev—will you do that for me?”

  “I suppose …” she said falteringly.

  “All right.” It was just as well; in writing he could pose convincingly as a Russian, whereas on the phone his accent would give him away at once. He asked the woman for a piece of paper and an envelope. Seated at a small, unused desk, he wrote out a brief note in Russian. “Urgent that I see you at once,” he wrote. “I am sent by your friend Vyshinsky.” It was a gamble, in some ways an enormous gamble, that Osip Vyshinsky was still alive. Perhaps out of curiosity alone—and reassured by seeing the name of an old colleague, which amounted to a species of recommendation—Dunayev would want to see the visitor.

  He sealed the envelope and handed it to the woman. “Please tell your friend to hurry,” he said.

  Stone passed the next two hours at a Russian restaurant directly across the str
eet. He had a small, late lunch of pirozhki and lingered over coffee, watching the church’s entrance tensely. A few people came and went—tourists, it seemed. No one stayed long.

  When he returned to the cathedral—certain from his observation

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 329

  that there wasn’t a trap—the young woman still seemed wary. “We have reached him. He says he will be delighted to see you,” she said. “Here is what he wants you to do.”

  Chicago

  Paula Singer disliked eating lunch at her disheveled metal government-issue desk, but she also disliked going out and braving the jostling lunchtime crowds at the coffee shops and Greek take-out places that surrounded the court building. Either choice, as far as she was concerned, was grim, but no one ever said being an assistant state’s attorney was going to be glamorous. So she sat at her desk, eating a ham-and-Swiss sandwich while browsing through the newspaper.

  She’d been thinking nonstop about Charlie Stone since the moment he’d shocked her by showing up on her front porch. She wondered where he was, whether he was still in Paris, whether he had found the person he wanted to reach.

  And whether there was anything she could do.

  She turned to the sports pages of the Chicago Tribune, and then her eye was caught by a small obituary. Something snagged at her memory, and for an instant she paused before flipping the page to the box scores. Then she turned back, recognizing the name.

  Warren Pogue. The FBI agent Charlie had talked to in Chicago, the man whose address and phone number Charlie had asked her to get.

  Paula was suddenly oblivious of the office noise around her. She groaned softly as she read: “The victim, whom Indiana police identify as Chicago native Warren Pogue, a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was apparently killed when his small plane lost velocity. …”

  The date.

  Warren Pogue had died the same day Charlie had talked with him.

  Charlie had been right. People were being murdered.

  330 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Charlie would be next. She was sure of it. He was next, unless she did something to help.

  For a few moments, she sat there, staring straight ahead, frantic, not knowing what to do. And then she remembered the name of the influential man Charlie said he had met with in Washington, William Armitage, and she knew she had to place a call. Charlie had insisted she stay out of it, but he was only trying to protect her.

  She could protect herself, damn it.

  Paula had to make a long-distance call. She knew that phone calls could be traced if you stayed on too long. But there were ways to make it impossible to trace a call, right? She got up and walked over to her boss’s office, and found that he was out. Probably at lunch. Great; his phones were available.

  One of his telephones was a secure terminal desk set with high voice/data security, a Motorola STU-III SecTel. He almost never used it; in fact, he had gotten weeks of grief for investing government money in the thing. Probably using an untappable line would make no difference, but every little precaution helped.

  Using the Motorola, she called a friend in New York who was a partner at what she thought of as a big scary law firm: one of those people who made twice what she made.

  “Kevin,” she said when her friend answered, “I need you to do me a favor.”

  Kevin was obliging, and, best of all, he asked no questions. By means of a conference call, he patched her through to Washington, to the office of Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage. If by any chance the call was traced, they would get no farther than a number at an enormous law firm in New York. Good luck.

  She drummed her fingers nervously on the metal surface of the desk, wondering whether she’d be able to speak with Armitage directly, wondering whether he’d believe what she had to say about the death of an old FBI man in Chicago.

  Finally, a female voice came on the line and announced, “Office of the Deputy Secretary of State.”

  Paula gave her brief prepared spiel, ready to fence for a time with the secretarv.

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  And then she went cold with terror.

  “You haven’t heard?” the secretary asked soHcitously. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Armitage passed away several days ago.”

  She hung up the phone and sat at the desk, massaging her temples, sick with fear. Her eyes ached. She opened her purse and pulled out something that Charlie had given her.

  It was a blood-smudged plastic card, the size and shape of a credit card. On it was embossed a telephone number, which you could use to charge a call if you were out on the road.

  Charlie had taken it from the guy he’d killed, the guy who had attacked him in Chicago. It must be a simple matter, he’d said, to track this back to the source, to find a name to which to connect the man who was following him. Paula had grabbed it out of his hands and insisted she’d try.

  Now, her mouth dry from apprehension, she picked up the phone and started to dial.

  47

  Moscow

  The headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate is located in Yasenevo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in a new, elegantly curved building whose resemblance to the CIA’s headquarters is said to be no coincidence. In this building are the offices and laboratories of the Special Investigations Department, within which is the Soviet Union’s finest forensics laboratory. Whenever a bomb goes off in Russia, the Middle East, or anywhere else of concern to the Soviet government, samples are sent here for analysis.

  One of the senior forensic chemists was Sergei F. Abramov, a plump, balding man of forty-two with a perfectly round face, smooth skin, and dimpled pudgy hands. He was married to a librarian at a technical institute, and had two daughters.

  Abramov was grumpy this morning. His curiosity had been aroused by a peculiar message he’d gotten from an American television reporter he had met with once in a while, always with the utmost secrecy. She knew him only as Sergei. Charlotte Harper seemed smart and on the level, and she’d wanted to know whether he could confirm a rumor she’d heard that the wave of bombings that had recently struck Moscow really had something to do with the United States.

  It wasn’t possible.

  And why hadn’t he been consulted on the examination of the bomb samples? He walked into the lab, short-tempered and out of sorts, and hung his coat up on the hook on the wall.

  The department secretary, Dusya, laughed raucously when he came in. He usually found her vaguely annoying, a dyed blonde whose dark roots always showed, with a double chin and too much blue eye makeup. Also, she always tried to flirt with him, which was repulsive.

  “So now you’re trying to grow a mustache!” she called out.

  “All right, Dusya,” Abramov said. “Do me a favor and requisition for me some samples. And the ones before that. You know.”

  “Fine,” Dusya said, pouting. “So what’s with the mustache? Are you going to tell me or not?”

  The Kremlin Armory bomb was the easiest of all to check, since not much of it had combusted. He saw at once that it was Composition C-4, the whitish American-made stuff. He didn’t even have to do anything more than a gross morphological exam, but just to make sure, he dissolved a portion of it and spun it down in a centrifuge. The residue results were clear: there was motor oil in it. It was definitely C-4.

  He massaged his neck and thought momentarily about his kids, who had turned into giant pains in the ass. Well, the younger one, Maria, was doing well. It was the older one, Zinaida, who was giving him such trouble. She was a teenager already, beginning to look like a woman, and she was spending too much time with some thug four years older than she was, a long-haired guy of eighteen. He was sure they were sleeping together, but what could you do about that anymore? Zinaida skulked around the apartment, stayed out late, quarreled with anyone who crossed her path. Abramov shook his head and turned back to the matter at hand.

  So it was C-4. Abramov knew C-4 like the back of his hand. C-4 contained the e
xplosive hexahydro-l,3,5-trinitro-S-triazine, or RDX, the most powerful explosive in the world. And a lot of other gunk, like plasticizers and rubber binders. Every so often—more and more often, it seemed—he’d get a chunk of C-4 to analyze, using infrared spectrophotometry, on the AnalectFX-62 50 Fourier transform. Sometimes gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. You could tell a lot—whether it was British PE-4, which has a different binder from

  334 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  American C-4, or Czech NP-10, the black explosive material with a PETN base, or whether it was good old home-grown Soviet-made stuff.

  He remembered running the battery of tests on a bunch of samples taken from a wave of bombings that had struck an anti-Qaddafi Libyan communit}’ in Manchester, England. He discovered that the plastic explosive used in the bombs—surely set by Qaddafi’s people—was American-madel Which meant that some American elements were supporting Qaddafi, or at least selling it to him. This was a startling finding, and it led to an intensive KGB investigation.

  The other samples were a little trickier.

  He made a fresh pot of tea, poured himself a cup, and stirred in two spoons of sugar. Usually the tests he ran were dull as hell, revealing nothing. But these samples—he was intrigued.

  The reporter was right, but there had to be more to it. This was fun—a little like a detective novel. Time like this, he loved his job. Buoyed by his discovery, he made a mental note to take Zinaida aside and tell her about the facts of life, but gently—God knows he didn’t want to provoke the little firebrand.

  He took a sip of tea, added another spoon of sugar, and sat down to look under the microscope. The Prospekt Mira bomb was plastique as well. No surprise.

  So he did a purge-and-trap, a vapor absorption, gently heating the sample in a vacuum in a closed container. This drew the organic material into a tube of activated charcoal, a trap connected to a vacuum line. After the vapor was trapped, Abramov removed the explosive compounds from the charcoal with dichloromethane.