The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Earlier in the day, Stalin had been buried. Beria had given a eulogy, and throughout his speech Stalin’s son Vasili, who was drunk, had cursed at Beria, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “swine.” But Beria had been implacable. He had summoned his own forces that day, surrounded the city, and paraded his own strength, letting the rest of the leadership know who was in charge.

  Pavlichenko had been integral in organizing the security forces that day, and he remembered thinking: Beria, Stalin—they’re the same thing. The day will come when I will command these tanks and machine guns and troops.

  At dinner that night, as the young Pavlichenko almost shook with excitement, Beria had first told him about his plans for a coup d’etat. Beria wanted Pavlichenko to serve as a conduit between a Russian woman and a very rich and powerful American. There was a document Pavlichenko must get, a piece of paper that, once released, would throw the Soviet leadership into disarray, turn it inside out, pave the way for Beria. Pavlichenko listened with fascination to the details of the plan.

  Beria had failed. Pavlichenko would not.

  For no one—not Beria, not anyone now in the Soviet leadership—had endured what Pavlichenko had endured.

  His parents had been peasant farmers in the village of Plovitsy, in the Ukraine. Their farm was tiny, consisting only of a horse and a cow and a small plot of land, but it was the time of Stalin’s great collectivization campaign and his war against what he termed the “kulaks,” the rich peasants, in the course of which seven million Ukrainians—a fifth of the Ukrainian nation—starved to death.

  His parents were not rich, but they were classified as kulaks all the same.

  And very early one morning, when he was only three years old, he, his two sisters, and his parents were carted off and loaded onto a

  400 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  train, all their meager belongings confiscated by the authorities. What little was left in the house was taken by the villagers. They were to be sent to a camp in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. They were crowded into a train that teemed with other deported farmers, whose anguished cries almost deafened the young Pavlichenko.

  On the way, the train stopped at a small town in the Ukraine for provisions. And there Pavlichenko’s parents somehow, swiftly, abandoned him and his sisters in a crowd at the station.

  The train departed without them, and the authorities, who could scarcely keep track of all their adult prisoners, took no notice of the missing children. For hours, Pavlichenko and his sisters didn’t know what had happened. Scared and miserable, they walked along a roadside, not sure where to go, asking help of passersby.

  Within a few days, they found their way to a neighboring village, where an uncle took the trembling children into his house; later he adopted them.

  It was not until years later that they learned that their parents had perished in the camps at Krasnoyarsk.

  The young Andrei Dmitrovich, who nurtured a growing hatred for the system that had done this to his parents, remembered particularly one day in the hot and rainy summer of 1934. A terrible rain had eroded the topsoil from the graveyard where, just the year before, hundreds of villagers, who had died of starvation, had been buried. The flood washed the cadavers up into the streets and yards. Pavlichenko opened his uncle’s front door and saw the ghasdy corpses strewn about, seeming to reach for him, and he screamed until he lost his voice.

  He had not communicated in any way with the Sanctum in several years, not since he was named head of the First Chief Directorate. This had naturally infuriated the Americans, who quite understandably salivated at the prospect of having their own man at the very heart of Soviet intelligence, but Pavlichenko had insisted upon it. It was far too risky, he told them.

  He had been M-3, as Sanctum had dubbed him, for decades. Since 1950—which was virtually all of Andrei Pavlichenko’s adult

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 401

  life—and it made his life peculiarly shadowy, for he was always looking behind him, never knowing if he would be found out.

  It had all begun when, as a newly married graduate of the KGB’s training school, the Vysshaya Shkola, he had made a foolish mistake. He had met secretly—or so he had thought—with an anti-Soviet Ukrainian activist in Kiev, a young man whose views he privately shared, and then suddenly an American intelligence official had snapped a photograph. He was caught. His first reaction was terror, then resentment, and then he thought it over calmly and knew it was the right thing to do.

  He remembered his first meeting with his control, a man named Oliver Nyland, who was for years the chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence division. They had met in London, furtively, in a location Nyland had arranged with considerable care to attract no attention.

  The young, ambitious Pavlichenko had been surprised at the American’s appearance: he looked like a disheveled college professor, in a poorly cut tweed suit, one button missing from his shirt. He had long shaggy gray hair that spilled over his ears, and tired hazel eyes. Not at all the image of a CIA master-spy, but, then, the reality so rarely lived up to the fantasy.

  “We’ve had our eye on you for some time,” Nyland had explained. “Ever since a relative of yours from the Ukraine emigrated and we learned the story of three children whose parents were killed by Stalin’s people during the collectivization campaign in the Ukraine. Adopted by an uncle who was so thoughtful and so careful as to change your names, so that the Russians wouldn’t come after you children later.”

  Pavlichenko had just listened, amazed at how much they had learned. Not even the KGB, which had done the standard background check before hiring him, had managed to uncover the secret of an adoption, the changing of a family name done under the table by means of a bribe. In the turmoil of the Ukraine in the early thirties, records had been lost; the KGB’s internal-security operatives had naturally found nothing suspicious.

  “We have the ability,” Nyland had told him at the safe house in Hampstead Heath, “to smooth your way to the very top of the KGB.

  402 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  To provide you with secrets that will look like brilliant insight, information that will make you seem even shrewder and more far-seeing than you are.”

  The Americans hadn’t disappointed.

  As soon as he agreed, they had given him detailed instructions, as well as the equipment he would need to stay in clandestine contact with his control. They supplied him with onetime pads, secreted in loaves of black bread that he bought from a certain assigned bakery on Gorky Street in Moscow. Each page of these onetime pads, a sophisticated type of codebook, consisted of a random five-digit sequence of numbers, which he would use to encipher messages, using a matrix that was then destroyed. The code was virtually unbreakable, since the only other copy of the onetime pad was in Washington.

  At first, he furnished the Americans with KGB payroll sheets or personnel records, which listed exer)’ employee in a particular subsection. Gradually he gave them intelligence assessments, and then larger secrets. He photographed these documents with a small German camera they had provided.

  He transmitted the material to the Americans by means of a dead drop, leaving the film cassettes behind a loose brick near a gymnasium that his oldest son attended. Or he would attend a certain showing of a movie, choosing a specified empt' seat and placing his coat over the seat in front of him; when he left the theater, his pocket would be one item lighter. There were, too, brush contacts on crowded buses. He would be notified that the transfer was successful by means of chalk marks on telephone poles, or somehmes fresh black tar smudges on white interior walls of the banya where he went to take the steam.

  He was even given a telephone number, which was routed through a private Moscow apartment and rang in the office of his case officer. This number, exclusively for Pavlichenko’s use, was for emergency purposes—a danger signal he had never had to use.

  “It is all set, sir,” the physician said. “What you will have is not a stroke per se but a TIA, a transient ischemi
c attack.” “Explain.” “When the day comes, you can’t get out of bed in the morning.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 403

  You can’t speak. You can’t move your right side. Naturally, you are brought to me, at the clinic. I do a CAT scan on you—that’s normal procedure—and it reveals, let’s say, an infarct of the left hemisphere. This is because you have a dysfunction in one of the arteries that supply your brain with blood, perhaps cerebral emboli, plaques in the vertebral or carotid arteries. You have always had this condition.”

  “Very good, ” Pavlichenko said, nodding slowly. “I shall depend upon you to make this condition known to the right people, immediately. A few words here or there; let it be known that you are treating me. Words spoken out of pride, or immodesty. I want the rumors to spread.”

  “As they have about your alleged heart trouble,” the doctor replied.

  “Exactly. But is there any way to forge the results of such an examination?”

  “Yes, sir, quite easily. In the last few years, we have treated quite a number of people who have had strokes. I can take a CAT scan of someone else we’ve treated here, who’s actually had a stroke, as well as someone else’s computer-generated NICE studies—noninvasive carotid exam, an ultrasound examination of the carotid arteries—and I can simply change the dates.”

  “After such a stroke—is it believable that I would recover quickly?”

  Pavlichenko’s physician paused for a moment. “Yes, sir. Such a person could recover within days. It is entirely credible. The dead, sir, shall rise.”

  “Ingenious,” the chairman of the KGB murmured.

  He gazed around the dining room, at the stained-glass windows, and he knew now that his dream, and that of his people, was about to come true.

  61

  Paris

  Stone sat on the rough gravel in the Empire of the Dead, recHning against the damp, russet bones. The air was dank, the smel! acrid. He had been able to sleep for a few hours, and he awoke with a great stiffness in his back and neck.

  He was waiting for Jacky to return.

  The teenaged son of the prostitute was now imbued with a sense of adventure. This was his hideaway, late at night, the hideaway of his friends. Occasionally they would break into the Catacombs through the secret passage, and part>’ for hours: drinking and scrawling graffiti on the stone walls. They found the ossuary exciting, morbid and illicit. As they got drunker, Jacky explained, some of them could even see the ghosts. The only rule they all obserxed was that the remains were never to be defaced.

  Fortunately, none of the teenagers had decided to come in tonight and disturb Stone’s sleep. Fortunately, too, he could seek refuge here for part of the next day: the Catacombs did not open to the public until two o’clock.

  There would be just enough time. Stone would require Dunayev’s assistance, if Dunayex was willing and if he thought it was safe. He gave Jacky his soaked Robert Cill passport and the set of three extra photos in a glassine envelope that he’d slipped into the passport’s last page.

  With this, Dunayex’ could arrange to get him a isa to the Soviet Union.

  Jacky had agreed to help. He told Stone he’d spend the rest of

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 405

  the night at the apartment of an old girlfriend, call his mother and let her know everything was all right, and call Fyodor Dunayev. While he waited for Dunayev to procure the visa, Jacky had agreed to go on a shopping expedition. The list Stone had given him was a long one. It included such disparate items as a metal pocket comb, an inexpensive suit in Stone’s size, a blazer and pair of pants, a pair of American hiking boots, a men’s carry-on garment bag, a leather shaving kit, a metal tape measure, a bar of soap, a can of shaving cream, a tube of toothpaste, an assortment of toiletries, and razor blades.

  It was five in the morning. If his luck held out, the Catacombs’ guard would not return until after noon.

  He got up, walked around, his feet crunching on the gravel. He shone his flashlight around the ossuary, admiring the morbid fastidiousness with which the skeletons had been packed. The perfectly symmetrical rows of skulls glistened by the lantern light, tight rows perched atop bundles of femurs, a mournful, deathly chorus line. In places, crossed tibias had been arranged in a skull-and-crossbones formation.

  Plaques told of when the skeletons had been moved from which Paris cemetery, a process that was begun in 1786, when the Les Innocents cemetery was deemed overcrowded and unhealthy. Millions of skeletons, mainly of paupers, were transferred over the decades to the underground compact-storage burial ground, stacked neatly. OSSEMENTS DU l’eglise ST.-LAURENT, onc sigu proclaimed. Another: OSSEMENTS DU SAiNT-jACQUES-DU-HAUT-PAS. Here and there were inscribed quotations about death and eternity.

  The Catacombs, he remembered Jacky telling him, had once been the secret headquarters of the French Resistance during World War II, unbeknownst to the Nazis who swaggered about Place Denfert-Rochereau above them. Compared with the brave Resistance fighters, he felt laughably insignificant. He remembered his grandiose schemes of exposing it all, forcing powerful men to cooperate in exonerating him and his late father. Dashed—all of these hopes.

  The thought of going to Moscow was terrifying. The American fanatics would no doubt be able to get to him there as well. But he had no choice.

  406 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  He returned to his resting place, against a column of skeletons, and before long he was fast asleep.

  Moscow

  Charlotte had been pacing back and forth in the corridor next to the telet'pes, thinking about the dispatch she’d been working on, thinking about Charlie, thinking about the upcoming summit. Thinking about dozens of things, which meant she couldn’t concentrate on anything.

  For want of anything better to do, she tore ojff the telex printout from the Associated Press wire, and scanned it.

  A name caught her eye.

  Paula Singer.

  A Chicago resident found dead in a fire in her apartment … apparently a cigarette fire …

  She gasped and gave a shriek. The others in the office—the cameraman, the producer, the Russian employees—looked up, and the Russian woman, Zinaida, dashed over to see what was wrong.

  Paula Singer, Charlotte knew, had never smoked.

  Paris

  A light was shining on Stone’s face. He opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and, to his relief, saw that it was Jacky.

  “What time is it?” Stone asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “About noon. We’d better get out of here soon.”

  “Well?”

  “Got it. The Soviet Embassy doesn’t open until ten, and he was able to get a visa by ten-thirty. Whoever this guy Dunayev is, he’s got—how you say?—clout.”

  “That he does.”

  “I bought you Timberland boots,” Jacky said uncertainly. “Good, yes? I hear they’re very good.”

  “Just fine.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 407

  Jacky had managed to get everything on the list. All of the smaller items he had stashed in the garment bag.

  There was very little time now, and Stone worked quickly. First he would have to field-strip the gun, disassemble it entirely. He moved the slide release at the rear of the trigger guard and slipped out the magazine.

  Always better to be thorough. He checked to see that there were no rounds left in it. There weren’t. He decocked the gun by pulling the trigger, dry-firing it; grasping the gun by the barrel, he pushed the slide assembly back until he heard a slight click. The square breech block had dropped.

  Good; Dunayev’s brief tutorial had been useful.

  Without releasing his pressure on the slide assembly, he gripped the slide lock, two inset pins on either side of the barrel, and pulled it down. The whole top of the gun now slid right off. He liked the feel of the Glock; it was well engineered and extremely lightweight. The whole thing was not much more than seven inches long.

  In a matter of seconds, he had the gun apart. He laid t
he components carefully on the ground in front of him: the steel oblong that constituted the barrel, slide, and spring; the magazine, which was mostly plastic with some metal in it; and the dense-plastic receiver frame.

  He picked up the plastic frame and examined it. He knew it wasn’t one hundred percent plastic; the manufacturer had in recent years begun to impregnate the polymer with some steel, as a precaution against terrorism. But the metal content was so slight it would register on metal detectors as nothing more than a ring of keys. Probably, in fact, less than one key.

  If it were placed in the garment bag, it would show up on the airport scanners, however, as a gun frame. Stone slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit. They didn’t X-ray the passengers, of course— just the luggage.

  The steel components of the gun were a much greater challenge, but the old Russian spy had provided Stone with some ideas. He placed the barrel-and-slide assembly end to end next to the magazine, which he knew held seventeen rounds and two extra 9mm Parabellum car-

  408 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  tridges. Getting the cartridges had been much easier for Dunayev than getting the gun, since most European small arms—from handguns to machine guns—take 9mm Parabellum cartridges, and have done so since before the Second World War.

  He wrapped the line of metal objects several times with aluminum foil until the package looked like a long, flat bar. This he inserted into a seam at the bottom edge of the garment bag, which he had opened by means of the razor blade. He slipped the metal tape measure between the suit and the blazer.

  Next he took the bar of soap and unwrapped it. Against one of the catacomb walls he had earlier noticed a small puddle of water, which had probably seeped in from the surrounding earth. He carried the bar over and floated it in the water for a few minutes, while he uncapped the toothpaste, squeezed some of its contents out, and placed it into the shaving kit, along with the metal can of shaving cream, the razor blades, the steel cordless shaver, the metal comb, and the toiletries. When he picked up the slippery, now soft bar of soap and added it to the bag, he mushed the soap around the toiletries and the toothpaste. He inspected the goopy, unsighfly mess with a proud smile, and zipped it up.