The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Washington

  At the normally sedate headquarters of the American Flag Foundation on K Street in central Northwest Washington, there erupted a small commotion at around four in the afternoon, when one of the Foundation’s computer specialists, twenty-eight-year-old Army Reserve Corporal Glen Fisher, heard a rapid beeping on one of his terminals. He swung his swivel chair over to take a look, and when he saw what it was, he let out a whoop. “Tarnow!” he said, beckoning one of his colleagues.

  The popular belief that a phone call of less than a minute cannot be traced is no longer accurate. The computer terminal over which Glen Fisher was keeping watch was connected to a bit of electronic wizardry known as the “pen register,” a trap-and-trace system that traces the originating numbers of telephone callers instantly. The Foundation’s field personnel had placed several telephone intercepts on offices and residences throughout Washington. Whenever a call was received over these lines, the phone number of the caller appeared on the monitors in the Foundation’s offices.

  A few of the lines were given special attention, including that of the late Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage. Now a call had come in to the Armitage residence, from Chicago.

  “Plug it in, Glen,” Tarnow urged.

  “Hey, what do you think I’m doing, man?” Fisher shot back, rapidly entering the ten-digit number into another terminal, which contained a data base of several thousand contacts all known to have had an association with the former CIA analyst gone rogue, Charles Stone.

  The terminal grunted mechanically for several seconds, and then the name came up on the screen.

  “All right,^’ Fisher said, patting the monitor affectionately. “The general’s going to be one happy guy.”

  Paris

  Stone stared in shock.

  “Can’t be,” he managed to mutter. “I don’t …”

  The old man was nodding sadly. “Does this help you?” he asked. “Or does this further complicate things?”

  “No—” Stone began, and then froze.

  His nerves, his instincts, his peripheral vision—the events of the last few weeks had tuned them to an exquisite sensitivity, and now he sensed something out of the ordinary, not the slow paces of the other cemetery visitors, but a sudden movement toward them.

  “Get down,” he ordered the old man.

  Dunayev glanced in the direction Stone had been looking, and at that instant there was an explosion of gunfire. Stone dove forward, slamming Dunayev to the ground, just as a bullet cracked an old headstone only inches away. Stone felt his head spattered with fragments of stone. There wasn’t time to calculate; the shadowy gunman was perhaps a hundred feet to the right, and there was nothing between them. The next shot could be to their heads.

  Another report. Almost instantaneously a bullet cratered the earth above Sonya Kunetskaya’s grave.

  “This way!” Stone hissed. “Stay down!” He shoved the old man, whose face was bleeding, toward a tall, wide crypt.

  Yes.

  Safe cover—for the moment. No doubt the gunman could, from his vantage point, see them clearly. He would have to move, adjust the angle of firing. Dunayev now had his gun out and contorted his body awkwardly, trying to stay behind the white marble and yet establish a clear line of fire.

  There he was, silhouetted, crouching into a firing position. The gunman could hit both of them now without obstacle. Stone glanced around—was there more than one of them? No—just the play of sun against the monuments, the shadows of the ancient graveyard.

  “Back,” Dunayev ordered, releasing the safety on his gun and aiming.

  Then—another explosion! Stone flattened himself against the old man, forcing him out of the way—but this time the shot came from the left. There was another gunman, and he had struck down the first.

  The two of them, Stone and Dunayev, sat absolutely still for a moment that seemed endless. Not a sound. The firing had stopped. What had begun so suddenly had now ended. Dunayev lowered his gun, his expression shocked.

  Stone looked up, weak with tension. Dunayev looked up, too, trembling.

  “What happened?” the old Chekist asked, hushed.

  “I don’t know,” Stone said, truthfully. “We’re alive. That’s all I know.”

  The two men walked over to the crumpled body of the slain marksman. A distant commotion was growing steadily louder, the approaching voices of people no doubt alarmed by the gunfire.

  “What are you doing?” Stone cried out.

  Dunayev bent over and, with the agilitv’ of a Hfelong spy, inserted a thumb into the dead man’s mouth, bloodied and tu’isted in the agony of his death. With a quick motion he forced the mouth open and peered in.

  “It’s true,” he gasped. Dunayev ran his hands over the man’s torso. Nimbly, he tore at the man’s jacket until he could see the skin at the underarm. Evidently he was looking for something, and found nothing.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Stone said. He looked away from the bloody mess of the would-be assassin’s face, sickened, reminded immediately of the nightmare in Cambridge. “What’s true? Let’s go; we can’t be connected with this.”

  Dunayev rose and followed Stone down the knoll, toward the path that led out of the cemetery.

  “Who shot him?” Stone asked. “Where’d the other one go?”

  Dunayev, out of breath, seemed not to have heard him. At last he spoke, distracted.

  “The dental work is Russian; I’d recognize it anywhere. But he’s not KGB, or, for that matter, GRU.”

  “How the hell can you tell that?”

  “Two ways.” Dunayev grimaced. “One, the dental work is vastly superior to anything done by those butchers in the Lubyanka who call themselves dentists. It’s Russian, but it’s the inordinately expensive sort I always thought was reserved only for members of the Politburo.”

  “That hardly—”

  “No, that’s soft evidence. But there’s something much firmer. Every KGB or GRU clandestine operative has, sewn beneath the top layer of his skin, one or two infinitesimal metallic ampules of poison, usually cyanide. Standard KGB procedure, to make certain a captured agent escapes interrogation—by means of his own death. They usually appear in any of three places, but this man had nothing. The man who tried to kill you—and I do think they were aiming at you—was a Soviet national not affiliated with any known intelligence agency.”

  They had reached the cemetery’s exit, and Stone turned to the elderly spy. His voice was steely. “Damn it, that doesn’t surprise me. Nowhere near as much as what happened a few minutes ago. What I want to know is, who shot that man? You saw it as well as I did, but you haven’t said a word about it. Someone saved my life— our lives. Who?”

  Before long, they were at Dunayev’s flat. It was a dismal, bare place, sparsely furnished with shabby furniture. The front room had clearly been decorated by a bachelor with no regard to design; the walls were a gloomy sand color, and Russian volumes competed for space on bookshelves with odds and ends collected over a lifetime of transient living.

  The Russian had poured himself a glass of Smirnoff vodka, still visibly shaken. For a long time, he rambled on about what had happened, meaningless blather that the old Russian needed to calm himself.

  In time, Dunayev began to speak more calmly. “Most of the specifics I don’t know,” he said. “I know there is a network, run out of Moscow. People say this network for some reason protects certain defectors, certain emigres. Perhaps our man was one of those.”

  Stone paused to consider what Dunayev was saying. A network of former Chekists? He was uneasy, suddenly, about his newfound comradeship with a former Chekist; if you sleep with dogs, the saying went, you get fleas. The fleas. Stone hoped, would wash off. This man knew things, and Stone had to use him. He had supplied Dunayev with several pieces of the puzzle; now he needed the old Chekist’s memory.

  Dunayev nervously reached for a pack of Gauloises and lit one. He inhaled deeply and, as he exhaled, began to talk. �
��A few days ago, an old man named Arkady Stefanov was killed in Novosibirsk, in the Soviet Union—struck down by a car. He, too, was retired NKVD. My friends tell me Stefanov was on his way to an interview with a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, for, as it turns out, a soft feature piece on how life in Russia has changed.”

  Stone nodded. “He, too, was one of Beria’s trusted assistants, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Dunayev said. “Stefanov, I know, got involved with Beria’s attempted coup. He was in the shit up to his ears.”

  “How?”

  “One of Beria’s errand boys. He forced Beria’s personal physician to write a false report testifying that Beria had suffered a heart attack. I guess Beria planned to be absent, so he could marshal his forces. Probably wanted the absence to be believable to his colleagues, so they wouldn’t get any more suspicious than they already were.”

  “Damn it, Stefanov’s dead now.”

  “As I told you.” Dunayev laughed, flashing his gold teeth. “And forget about the good doctor—he was executed as soon as they found out he’d collaborated with Beria. Poor bastard.”

  “Stefanov must have known something about the identity of M-3,” Stone said. He narrowed his eyes, thinking of something. “But why would he be eliminated now over a coup attempt that happened decades ago?” And then he remembered the HEDGEHOG report that had begun this whole thing, the report from the Agency’s asset in Moscow hinting that a convulsion was about to take place in the Kremlin.

  “Do you think,” Stone continued, “that this so-called Lenin Testament in some way reveals the identity of the mole?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’ve always thought so. Yes.”

  Stone nodded. “The timing,” he said. “These things can’t be coincidental.”

  “Timing?” Dunayev asked.

  It’s about to happen, Stone realized.

  The first glimmerings of an enormous, frightening upheaval. The pattern of the past was being replicated now.

  “Yes. People are taking great risks of exposure. Something’s got to be urgent.” Stone looked around the apartment. “M-3 is about to be maneuvered into power. Imminently.” Then he added, with a sudden bolt of icy realization, “There is a deadline.”

  “You tell me, Mr. Stone. You’re the Soviet expert. I was merely an employee.”

  “The summit,” Stone said, and he sat in his chair, frozen in terror, like an insect in amber.

  50

  Moscow

  The driving rain had not let up all day; the sky was steel-gray. Charlotte had negotiated the fifteen kilometers slowly and carefully. The roads were slick, and she suspected the Renault needed a new set of brakes, but she dreaded having that kind of work done in Moscow. You could never trust the Soviet mechanics, and they never had the parts anyway.

  Directly ahead was the crumbling Krylovsky Monastery, just as Sergei had described it. It had once no doubt been a forbidding presence on the city’s outskirts, its rugged stone masonry solid and ageless; no doubt, too, the monks that had once dwelt within had imagined the place would endure forever. In the eighteenth century, the monastery had been converted to soldiers’ barracks, and then it had fallen into disrepair, and when the Revolution came, it was left to disintegrate into the surrounding hills.

  She waited in the car, listening to the engine block tick, refusing to stand out in the rain any longer than she had to.

  The rain was making her contemplative. She didn’t know whether she could trust Sergei. You could never trust official Russians anyway, and Sergei was KGB, which often meant trouble. KGB had their own veiled agenda, their own bureaucratic tangles that made the normal Soviet bureaucracy seem, by comparison, innocent.

  When the bizarre call from Charlie had come in the middle of the night, she was momentarily baffled, wondering whether he were indeed out of his mind. Then she realized he was trying to tell her something.

  352 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  He had mentioned the sites of all the most recent bombings in Moscow and said, with great emphasis, something about American and something about involvement.

  Were these not native acts of terrorism? Were these done by … American terrorists? This, added to the suspicions she had already, made her more curious than ever.

  The next day, Charlotte contacted Sergei.

  She knew he had something to do with the KGB’s Special Investigations Department, but he was hardly forthcoming about that. He was in his early forties, round, with plump dimpled hands and stubby fingers. His large head was beginning to go bald. He seemed introverted, which made her trust him more. He was not a careerist, not the smarmy outgoing type who accosted you at a banquet and then went back to the office to write a “contact report” for the files. Sergei was the first “good” KGB employee she had ever met, although “good” was still a relative term.

  But meeting in a deserted monastery? Either he had something terribly important to say—

  —or it was a setup. Was that possible? “Receiving state secrets”— would that be the charge?

  She got out of the car and found her way into the front of the ruin, pushing open a heavy wooden door that creaked on its hinges. She entered a small stone hallway, so dark she could barely see. When her eyes adjusted, she found the narrow corridor Sergei had described, and pushed open another wooden door.

  The room, illuminated irregularly by shafts of gray light from jagged holes in the ceiling, had once been the refectory. She turned around and saw the dark shape that was Sergei.

  “Privyet, Charlotte,” he said, his hushed voice echoing.

  “Privyet.” She came closer, sat down on a stone bench beside him. “Nu?”

  “Vy hyli pravy/’ You were right. He seemed tense, and he kneaded his pudgy hands together.

  Charlotte waited.

  After a time, he spoke again, still hushed. “Where did you get vour information?”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 353

  Charlotte shook her head. No.

  “Do you plan to broadcast a story?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Please don’t. Not yet. Wait.”

  Charlotte turned and looked at him sharply. His features were distinct now. He looked terrified.

  “That’s my decision to make, Sergei. You know that.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “What was I right about, Sergei?”

  “The bombs were CIA. I checked the results. They are made ft-om CIA materials. Your CIA is up to its old tricks. You should look into this. You should rip the lid off this scandal. In time. Your CIA is out of control.”

  She felt her mouth dry out suddenly, and she could not turn her head. “Why are you telling me this?” she managed to whisper.

  “Please,” he said. “You don’t know how much courage it took for me to meet with you. If I’m caught …” His voice trailed off. “Yes, things are much better in my country. But in KGB, well, things are not so much different from the old days.”

  “But why are you telling me this?”

  A long pause. “I wish I knew.”

  Sergei Abramov sat on the bench for a long while after Charlotte had left. He shivered from the cold, and from his fear of being caught. His problems with his daughter Zinaida seemed so distant now. Was he doing the right thing in leaking this shocking news to a reporter? It had seemed shrewd when he first thought of it. Terribly risky, yes, but sound. He knew that Harper would not report anything until she’d begun to dig around with her sources in the CIA. Maybe she’d uncover another CIA scandal, which would discredit the American government. That would help Abramov’s career enormously, when his role was revealed. Yes, he had used her, but if she helped expose the CIA’s involvement in trying to destabilize the already unstable Soviet government, the result would be good. He rubbed his hands together, and after twenty minutes or so he went out to brave the rain.

  354 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Charlotte didn’t believe him. Sergei was planting a story, that had to be it. The theatrics, the meetin
g in the deserted ruins of a monastery. It all smacked of melodrama, and she refused to buy into it.

  Why was he leaking this information about the CIA? True, he’d leaked before, but this was precisely the sort of thing a KGB investigator would keep secret until his higher-ups could decide how to handle it.

  Was the KGB trying to manipulate her?

  Yes. It had to be. They were trying to use her.

  That was all it was.

  51

  Paris

  At a cafe on rue de Buci, on the Left Bank, not far from L’Hotel, Stone sat drinking an espresso, taking methodical notes in a small notebook he’d just bought.

  He knew that at this moment Fyodor Dunayev was working on acquiring a gun for him. The old Russian had his sources, of course, and he recognized that it was close to impossible for an amateur to buy a gun on the black market anymore, especially in Paris. Even if Stone managed to find the right bar in the sleaziest part of town—in Pigalle, say—and managed to find someone who had the wherewithal to get him a gun, there would be no deal. No one, in this age of terrorism, would risk a sale to somebody who might later be linked back to the seller. It wasn’t worth it.

  No, Dunayev would have to get it, and fortunately he had the connections to do it easily.

  The only problem was that Dunayev’s knowledge of weaponry did not extend much beyond the mid-fifties, and automatic weapons had gone through significant changes since then. Most important, perhaps, was the development of the “plastic”—a high-impact-polymer semi-automatic pistol.

  Only the grip is plastic, actually, but these guns had one chief advantage over all-metal ones: they could be smuggled onto airplanes, even past metal detectors. Or so Stone had been told; he had only the faintest idea of how to do it himself, if it became necessary.

  If he was going to Moscow, he would probably need a gun he could slip into the country.

  But he hoped to God he wouldn’t have to use it.

  At a pay phone at the back of the cafe, he sent a telegram to Paula Singer: all well. But how to sign it? They’d agreed upon HASKELL, but for all its cleverness, that seemed too risky. If his ruse in Haskell had been uncovered by now, Haskell would be too obvious. He signed the telegram simply a friend. Paula needed to know he was all right.