He put it under the microscope again, and then dissolved the solid in an organic solvent and cleaned it up to run some more tests.
There wasn’t a lot of organic high explosive left. A tiny amount, really, probably measurable only in picograms. That meant he’d have to use the TEA, or thermal energy analyzer, an extremely sensitive gas-phase chemiluminescence device. It used a heated chamber at low pressure and a cryogenic trap to produce electronically excited nitrogen dioxide, which gives off precisely recorded wavelengths of light when it undergoes radioactive decay.
THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 335
He worked slowly and painstakingly, and by the early afternoon he recognized the sample’s molecular structure.
Now something was really peculiar.
He checked his figures twice, comparing them with the library of spectra. When he checked a third time, he knew what was so eerily familiar.
He’d tested this particular explosive hundreds of times before.
This was no mere American plastique.
The formulation was unmistakable. Every sample of plastic explosive that had been used in the recent Moscow bombs had been manufactured at a company in Kingsport, Tennessee, called the Hol-ston Army Ammunition Plant. This was the only place anywhere in the United States that manufactured C-4.
But there was something more.
It matched exactly the unique formulation of a special batch of C-4 that was manufactured exclusively for the Central Intelligence Agency.
He was one hundred percent certain.
He took another sip of his third cup of tea and began to dictate a report.
48
Paris
Stone waited for Dunayev at a cafe called A la Bonne Franquette, on rue de la Roquette, near the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. Five, then ten minutes went by, and no sign of the emigre.
Stone checked his watch, irritated, and ordered a pastis. It tasted a little like Nyquil.
As he sat, he glanced around the bar for anyone who might resemble Dunayev. No one. A woman at the bar, clearly a prostitute, caught his glance and smiled. She was in her early sixties, with badly dyed long red hair and too much face powder, which did a poor job of concealing her wrinkles. Stone gave a neutral smile and turned away: thanks, but no thanks.
Twenty minutes had gone by, and still no Dunayev. The instructions from the woman at the cathedral had been quite specific. She stressed that Stone be punctual. And now Dunayev was twenty-five minutes late.
Had something happened to him, too? Had they gotten to him— just like all the others? He looked warily around the cafe for anyone faintly out of place, any indication that Dunayev had set him up. There seemed to be none.
The prostitute smiled at him again, and walked over, her walk an exaggerated sway, a lascivious swiveling of the hips. “Do you have a light?” she asked in a deep, guttural smoker’s voice. She spoke English; she obviously pegged him as an American.
“No, I’m sorry.”
She smiled, her teeth badly discolored, shrugged, and got some
matches from the bartender. A few minutes later, she approached again. “Are you waiting for anyone?” she asked, bringing her cigarette up to her mouth with a highly stylized flourish, her head tilted to one side. It was as if she had learned to smoke by studying old movies.
“Yes, I am.”
The prostitute exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke. “May I join you?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Maybe I can help you find whoever you are looking for,” she said, flashing a sepia-toned smile.
Stone nodded, understanding now.
“I think,” the woman said, “we may have a mutual friend.”
So that was it. Dunayev, obviously an extremely cautious old agent, wanted a go-between to insulate him.
“Please, come with me,” she said. Stone rose from the table, left a few francs to cover the bill, and followed her out of the cafe.
“Mr. Dunayev apologizes for being so careful,” she said as they walked along rue de la Roquette. “He says you may understand.”
“It’s perfectly understandable.”
“He is very excited to see a friend of an old friend.” She continued to chatter, guiding him along a small side street, then stopping at a boxy maroon-and-black car that Stone recognized as a DCV, the cheap, ubiquitous, not very safe vehicle that originally had only three wheels, before the French government mandated a change to four. “Please,” she said, walking around to the driver’s side. “I’ll take you to him.”
The door was unlocked. Stone got into the front seat next to her and knew at once that something was wrong. He froze in terror, then turned his head slowly and saw the glint of a pistol, pointed at him from the back seat.
He sat stiffly as the woman reached over and frisked him with a skill that seemed professional. Turning his head ever so slowly, the blood roaring in his ears, he saw more clearly the figure in the back seat. A man who must have been crouching there, waiting.
He had been set up—but why? Dunayev was a defector, a killer who had turned his back on the Soviet state not out of ideology but
out of fear for his life. Was it possible he, too, was involved with the fanatics in the West who were running M-3?
“Please don’t try anything,” came the voice from behind. A Frenchman, his English heavily accented. The DCV had pulled away from the curb into traffic. “Look in the rearview mirror. Do you see the car behind us?”
Stone nodded slowly. The Citroen behind them seemed to be following closely. Dunayev was thorough; Stone would give him that.
“Do you plan to tell me where you’re taking me?” Stone asked.
There was no reply.
They drove for sexeral minutes in silence, the red-haired woman constantly glancing at the Citroen in the mirror. As she drove with one hand, she smoked with the other. Stone watched in silence, calculating, waiting for the right instant.
Now they were entering a neighborhood that seemed markedly rougher than the one they had just left. Many of the buildings were crumbling; those that were not seemed deserted. There was a hardware store whose windows were punctuated with bullet holes, a grocery store that was open but seemed to have no customers. Finally, they pulled into a driveway that gave onto a courtyard. The Citroen continued down the street.
“All right,” the man said from the back seat. “Go.”
Stone opened the car door and stepped out into the courtyard. Directly in front of him stood an older man in a short black leather coat, still muscular despite his age. He appeared to be in his seventies, with a long fringe of gray hair around a large bald spot. His pale face was dotted with wens. His right arm was extended, as if in greeting. But he was holding a pistol, trained at Stone’s head. The gun was old, Stone saw at once, the sort of reliable companion that a retired spy would be reluctant to part with. Not the familiar, standard-issue Soviet Army 9mm Makarov. Probably a Tokarev automatic, which the Red Army hadn’t issued in some thirty years.
Was this Dunayev?
Stone lifted his eyes from the pistol and smiled. “What sort of welcome is this?” he said in Russian.
“So you are sent by Vyshinsky,” the man said at length.
Stone nodded.
The man spat on the ground, his gun still trained on Stone. “Then I would like to send Vyshinsky a return message,” he said coldly, quietly. “Your head.”
Oh, God. What had this ruse turned into? “Are you Dunayev?”
“I am Dunayev,” the man replied. Stone could hear the steady, quiet scuff of feet on gravel behind him. The man and the woman who had brought him here. Slowly he was being surrounded. Dunayev spoke louder now. “If Vyshinsky, that goddamned son of a bitch, thinks he will be clever with me, try to find me, then he can rot in hell. I have been waiting for years for this.”
With a sickening realization, Stone saw what had happened. He had used the name not of a friend, a compatriot, but of an avowed enemy. Vyshinsky, who had remained behind in Russia—of cou
rse. He would consider Dunayev a traitor.
“I want you to listen to me carefully,” Stone said, his heart hammering. He felt a rush of air as the two behind him moved closer. “You know I am not a Russian, Gospodin Dunayev.”
Dunayev blinked, his gun steady.
“You recognize my accent, do you not?”
No reply.
“It’s an American accent. You know that; you’re quite experienced at dealing with Americans. You were posted to the United States in 1953, assigned to locate a document that Beria wanted.”
Dunayev seemed to waver for an instant.
“You threatened a defenseless woman who had once been a personal secretary to Lenin. She gave me your name. Not Vyshinsky. I want you to understand that.”
“Your explanation isn’t sufficient.”
“Vyshinsky was the name of the other person who went with you to visit this woman. I knew you wouldn’t agree to see me unless I came with—with some bona fides. That was the best I could do. Obviously I miscalculated.”
Dunayev nodded now, almost smiling. “You are American. I can hear that. Yes.” He raised his voice again, suddenly. “Then who are you?”
Stone began to explain, carefully if not completely, leaving out no detail that would arouse the emigre’s deep-seated suspicion. He told him about being a man on the run who had been framed, was wanted by certain renegade American authorities because of what he had found out. Stone had an instinctual understanding of Dunayev’s character, and he used it with dexterity. Dunayev was not only a Russian who had known the terrors of a government out of control, but he was also a defector who had lived for years in Europe. Many Europeans who have lived through the years of World War II—the Resistance, the underground movements, the refugees—are naturally sympathetic to the plight of the fugitive who is fleeing the law.
When Stone had finished, Dunayev slowly lowered the gun. “Dostatochno,” he told the others: Enough, it’s okay. Stone turned and saw the red-haired prostitute and her friend walking casually to the car. He heard their car start, then pull out of the court'ard.
“Accept my apologies for this,” Dunayev said.
Stone let his breath out slowly, relief seeping into his body. “I need your help now, very badly,” he said. “I think you can provide the key to something that’s going on right now in Washington and Moscow.”
“Now? But I’m—”
“Years ago, you were sent by Lavrentii Beria to find something that he needed to pull oflF a coup—”
“How do you —.””
“You were protecting someone, isn’t that right?” Stone shifted his feet on the ground, his brain spinning. “A contact between Beria and certain Americans, whose name remains a secret even today.”
Dunayev’s nod was so subtle it was barely noticeable.
“And one of the links in that chain was a woman named Sonya Kunetskaya,” Stone said, as an explanation crossed his mind with great clarity.
Yes. The explanation of the present did lie in the past. It was the only way in; CIA data banks would do no good.
The chief of Stalin’s secret police, Beria, surely trusted very few with the details of his plan, and he trusted no one more than the mole code-named M-3. Dunayev, who had been allowed to live, had to have been kept on the periphery. He knew not the most sensitive state secrets but …
“You know something about her. You must,” Stone said.
The Russian smiled crookedly. “I was the contact man between Beria and Sonya Kunetskaya,” he said. “You guess correcdy.”
Stone could barely contain his astonishment.
“I am rather proud of this,” the retired Soviet agent continued. “Beria would not have assigned just anyone to carry his messages to the daughter of the American millionaire Winthrop Lehman.”
49
The horrifying thing was, it made absolute sense.
Even half an hour later, Stone could barely concentrate. Stalin’s “control” over Lehman—that was it.
Of course. So simple.
“This sort of thing happens from time to time,” Dunayev explained, unaware of the effect the revelation was having on his listener. “Many times, you know, Americans or Europeans have gone to the Soviet Union to live, and then they fall in love with a Russian man or woman, and they have a child. Then, when the time comes to go, they suddenly find that the Soviet authorities will not grant the child an exit visa.”
They were walking up the long path into Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. For the dead, Pere-Lachaise is the place to be in Paris: it holds the graves of Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde and hundreds, thousands, of others. It is built vertically, its cramped paths winding their way up hills, crisscrossing with other paths, an overgrown mossy maze.
“A number of American men who could not find work during the Depression went to Russia,” Dunayev said. “Some of them went for political reasons, because they preferred communism, until they saw the real thing—the real monster—close at hand. Some of them genuinely went for the work. And then they had children, and they found that the children, who were Soviet citizens, were not welcome to leave. Oh, very often this happened. During the Second World War, several American news reporters assigned to Moscow fell in love with Russian women, and then their wives and young children were kept as prisoners. Hostages. Perhaps you know that the great American industriaHst Armand Hammer spent ten years in Moscow, during the 1920s, and he and his brother both fathered children by Russian women. One child was allowed to leave; one was not.”
“That explains Lehman’s ‘cooperation,’ ” Stone thought aloud. They stood now before the grave of Frederic Chopin, a small white monument topped with a statue of a weeping girl. In her lap had been placed several red roses.
The emigre nodded.
“They had his daughter, and they wouldn’t let her go,” Stone said. “He must have used various people to communicate with her. Including my father.”
Dunayev continued walking. He seemed not to comprehend what Stone had said.
“When you say you were the contact between Beria and Lehman’s daughter, what do you mean, precisely?”
“Beria had learned somehow, from Stalin, that Lehman had a document of tremendous power. A document, or documents.”
Stone nodded. How much did this ex-spy know of the Lenin Testament? How did he know?
“And he sent you to get it from Lehman?”
“From Lehman’s daughter.”
“Because Lehman could never have had direct contact with officials in the Soviet intelligence services,” Stone concluded. “It would have destroyed his government career.”
“Exactly. And Beria knew that.”
“And he never saw his daughter after he left Moscow?”
“No. Once she was allowed to visit Paris, where she saw her father, although she was closely guarded.”
“When was that?”
“In 1953, I think.”
“So why didn’t Lehman free her then?” Stone demanded. “If Sonya was in the West, surely he could have arranged for a kidnapping—”
“Oh, no,” Dunayev said, and laughed. “The young woman wouldn’t have wanted that at all. You see, her mother was still alive in Russia, and I’m sure she would have wanted to ensure her safety.”
“A chain of hostages,” Stone mused aloud. “What do you know about this document that Lehman had?”
“Nothing. Only that he had it.”
“And did Beria ever get it?”
“No. He tried.”
“How?”
“He offered to release Sonya in exchange for this document. It meant a great deal to him. It was extremely important, for some reason.”
The cemetery was peaceful, quiet; Stone did not feel as if he were in Paris but, rather, in some pastoral, wooded area, the ruined graves like natural outcroppings of stone. Some of the wreaths had turned brown. Here and there was a mausoleum that had fallen into disrepair, its windows shattered, its interior defiled with beer bottles.
“Oh, but he did agree. He wanted his own daughter back very badly.”
“He did? But—”
“But Beria was shot before the deal could go through.”
“Ah, yes,” Stone said. “Yes. And did you deal with Beria directly? Or with one of his aides?”
“With Beria directly. He wanted absolute privacy.”
“Have you heard the designation M-3 before?”
“M-3?” Dunayev repeated slowly.
“A mole in Beria’s organization, and also someone he trusted implicitly.”
They passed the grave of Simone Signoret and entered the columbarium. Each marble plaque was engraved with gold letters and decorated with artificial flowers. “I don’t know of a mole,” Dunayev said. “But, then, I wouldn’t know, would I? If I knew, then Beria would have known, and then there would have been no mole.” For the first time, the emigre laughed.
“But you know about Beria’s attempt to seize power?”
“Of course. Everyone heard—after the fact. After he was shot, we were all told.” He now seemed to be leading the way somewhere, walking with purposiveness.
“You heard nothing of an attempt by private citizens in the West to help bring about the coup that Beria wanted?”
The emigre was already walking quickly, and Stone had to jog to keep up with the old man. Before them was a sleek black granite gravestone, highly polished, as reflective as a mirror. On its left side was an oval photograph, set into the granite.
Dunayev was silent, looking directly at the gravestone.
“You recognize this photograph, perhaps?” he asked.
Stone recognized it at once. The face was hardly older at all than the face in the photographs that Saul Ansbach had located for him, The spare gold inlaid lettering read:
Sonya KUNETSKAYA
18 Janvier 1929-12 Avril 195S
“You see, Winthrop Lehman has been free now for many years,” Dunayev said grimly. “His daughter is dead.”
The Moscow Club Page 34
