The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  They left the Catacombs through a different way, briefly passing through the adjoining egout elementaire and out through a manhole on a side street, rue Remy Dumoncel, in front of the large illuminated green cross of a homeopathic pharmacy. Several pedestrians, startled, watched them come out.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” Jacky shouted at them. “Mind your own business!” They turned away.

  A block away was the car that Jacky had borrowed from his friend, a gigantic black late-1950s Chevrolet with sweeping tail fins. Placed on the back seat was an old suitcase Jacky had picked up for him and packed with clothes. The Chevy roared to life, and they were headed for the airport.

  “The cops are all over,” Jacky said. It was clear he was enjoying playing the co-conspirator. “You can see them. Train stations, Metro stations. All over.”

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  “Doing what?”

  “Watching. Once in a while, they stop people.”

  “Who look like me.”

  “I guess so.” He smiled. “Your suit is a wreck.”

  “The sewers can do that. Do you have any idea where you can buy wigs around here?”

  “Wzgs?”

  They stopped at a phone booth, where jacky made a few calls and finally located a place in the Ninth Arrondissement, Les Costumes de Paris, a large and well-known store that rented clothing and accessories to film production companies. There Stone found a men’s wig, light brown with a very natural-looking sprinkling of gray. It fit perfectly. Worn over his brush cut, it altered Stone’s appearance entirely; he now appeared to be a well-groomed businessman. From a wardrobe rack he selected a dark-blue American naval uniform that was somewhat baggy but respectable. He glanced at himself in the mirror.

  Jacky stood by, watching. “Pretty good. But anyone who looks closely will know it’s you.”

  “True. But the naval uniform might gain me a few valuable seconds—they’ll be looking for anyone but a military man. In any case, it’s better than nothing. What about a mustache?”

  “Why not?”

  He added a grayish mustache to the order, and paid the rental fee and the deposit. A lot of money for a bad suit and an ugly head of hair, he thought.

  On the street, he found another phone booth and placed a call to Air France, where he inquired about the schedule of flights to Washington and, using his Charles Stone credit card, booked a flight for the following afternoon, out of Orly Airport.

  He was careful to book the flight under another, false name. If he was lucky, the ruse would work. They’d believe that he had made the mistake of an amateur—clever enough to book a reservation under a false name, but forgetting that a person could be traced by means of his credit card. And they would wrongly believe that he was returning to Washington.

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  Or perhaps they wouldn’t believe the trick at all.

  He preferred not to think about that.

  Then he called several of the airlines that had flights departing from Charles de Gaulle Airport.

  Stone had been careful not to use the name of Robert Gill in Paris. The French police would be looking for a Charles Stone, who went by any of several aliases. Not for a Robert Gill.

  At Charles de Gaulle Airport, Stone said goodbye to Jacky and, with a quick handclasp, gave his thanks. “Hold on a second,” Stone said, and withdrew a crumpled envelope from his pants pocket.

  “What?”

  It was a wad of bills, probably more money than the boy had ever seen.

  “No,” Jacky protested, refusing to take the envelope. “Your money’s no good here.” Where had he picked that up? Stone wondered, amused. Studying B-movies?

  “You risked a lot for me,” Stone said. “You probably saved my life.”

  Jacky scowled in dismissal, but he was unable to hide a slight smile of pleasure. “I think you are out of your mind.”

  “Maybe,” Stone said, pushing the envelope at him again. “Look, it’s for your mother,” Stone said. “Tell her to take a couple of nights off—tell her thanks for the help.”

  There was a beat of silence, and then Jacky said, “I hope things go good for you.”

  Stone shook his hand firmly, putting his other hand on the teenager’s shoulder. “Thanks.”

  Then, after another long moment of silence, Jacky turned wistfully and was gone.

  There were no signs of heightened security as he entered the terminal. Looking around nervously, he saw nothing more than the usual securit}’ guards.

  Odd, he thought. You’d think they’d watch the airports especially closely.

  He went up to the Air France ticket counter and bought a ticket

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  on the next flight to Bonn, which departed five minutes before the Aeroflot flight to Moscow he really wanted—and, he ascertained, from an adjacent boarding gate. He paid in cash. The sales agent affixed his seat assignment to his ticket. Then he went up to the Aeroflot counter and bought a ticket to Moscow, also paying in cash, and got his seat assignment. He found a restroom and brushed his suit off, straightened his tie, and glanced at himself in the mirror. He looked a little rumpled, but no more than a military man who’d been traveling all night.

  He took a deep breath, and returned to the terminal. Now came the worst part. He slowly approached the luggage X-ray check, hearing the last-call announcements for both flights.

  Stone watched the long line. He was amazed to realize that his heartbeat had begun to accelerate, his face and hands to break out in fine drops of perspiration. There could be no holdup here. If they discovered the disassembled gun, they would immediately seize him, take him in for questioning, arrest him—and soon enough discover that the man who had just tried to smuggle a gun through airport security was the very same one whom much of Paris’s gendarmerie were pursuing so hofly.

  Once again he heard a boarding call over the public-address system.

  There was no time to spare.

  A large noisy family—four boys and two girls all under ten— joined the line now, the children quarreling and running around their beleaguered parents. Stone could hear German being spoken. He quickly got into the line behind them, grateful for the distraction they would surely provide to the security personnel.

  When the German family reached the metal-detector gate, the confusion mounted, as Stone had hoped it would. Several of the children tried to carry their luggage in through the metal detectors and had to be told by a rueful blue-uniformed security officer to place the bags on the conveyor belt so they could be X-rayed. One of the boys rapped his brother on the head with his knuckles; the younger girl started crying and tugging on her stout mother’s dress. Stone caught

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  the eye of the young man who was operating the scanner and smiled benevolently, shaking his head. The man smiled back: what a disaster, he seemed to say.

  Now it was Stone’s turn. His heart was hammering again, but he continued to smile good-naturedly. He placed his garment bag casually on the conveyor belt and stepped through the metal detector.

  The green light flashed on.

  Clear. The plastic gun frame had made it through. Thank God the magnetometer wasn’t set to pick up absolutely everything metallic.

  Then Stone saw that the man operating the scanner was peering closely at the luggage-scanner monitor. He was seized with fear.

  Watching the grayish X-ray monitor, the security officer, who was already exhausted even though five hours still remained in his day, grimaced inwardly. Something metal inside this thing. He looked closely at the X-ray image and noticed something: a profusion of opaque objects in the fellow’s garment bag.

  “Hold it,” he said.

  Stone turned to look at the X-ray operator, puzzled. “What’s up?” he asked, still good-natured.

  “I’ve got to look inside, hein?”

  “Go ahead,” Stone said, forcing his smile, feeling the tension wrack his entire body. “Whate
ver.” He felt a rivulet of sweat ooze slowly down the back of his neck into his shirt collar.

  The Frenchman lifted the bag, which had emerged from the other side of the scanner, and zipped it open. He moved aside the suit and pants and located the shaving kit, which he opened at once. Glancing inside, he saw the repellent mess of oozing soap and toothpaste, a metal comb, some razor blades, what looked like a shaver. He wrinkled his nose in distaste and closed the kit, refusing to look any closer at what was obviously nothing more than the personal accessories of a not very neat man. His fingers touched something metallic, and he lifted it out: a metal tape measure. Grazy Americans. ^‘Merde,” he exclaimed to himself. Aloud, he asked, “Vous etes americain?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m going to ha'e to put it through again, je vous en prie,” he

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  said, fastening the bag and placing it at the entrance to the scanner.

  He looked again at the image on the monitor. Just the filthy shaving bag and that damned tape measure. The only other metal that showed up opaque was the garment bag’s steel reinforcing bar at its perimeter. Nothing suspicious; the American businessman’s only crime was his slovenliness, and he let the man pass. The guy obviously was no terrorist.

  As Dunayev had predicted, the barrel-and-slide-assembly-and-magazine package, wrapped in foil and inserted in the garment bag’s seam, appeared merely a part of the bag’s construction. Airport security personnel are trained to look within the bag’s outline, and not at the outline itself. The profusion of metal objects inside the garment bag had served as distractors. Stone slowly let out his breath, and walked on.

  Passport control was a series of glassed-in booths at the entrance to the gates. If only my luck holds, he said silently, getting in the line. Just a few minutes left now.

  The ritual at passport control, as it seemed to be everywhere in the West, was perfunctory. The guard scarcely glanced at him, caring not at all that his appearance differed radically from the photograph on the passport. He stamped Stone’s passport with a French visa mark to indicate that he had left the country, and then slid it through the window, smiling briefly. “Bon voyage, monsieur.”

  As he walked away from the booth, he felt the tension ebb from his body. He had made it.

  He noticed a man in a blue blazer and tie, standing at the end of the passport-control area, glance at him for a few seconds too long. Am I being paranoid? Stone wondered frantically.

  In the next brief, sickening moment. Stone understood that the man, who seemed to be an airport-security officer, was indeed looking at him. Too closely: examining his face with more than passing interest.

  Stone had been recognized.

  He was sure of it.

  Don’t move quickly, he told himself. Nothing is out of the ordinary. Only a scared man would run at this point. Walk with the normal hurried pace of a man late for a plane.

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  The man had turned to follow him. He had left his station at the passport booths and had begun to walk behind Stone.

  Stone caught the reflection of the man in the plate-glass window of the corridor as he walked. Normally. Walk normally. Nothing is out of the ordinary.

  There it was, the gate. It was empty; the flight to Bonn had already boarded, and the airline personnel were lingering at the gate, waiting for any last-minute stragglers, laughing and talking among themselves.

  The man was still behind him. Why didn’t he catch up with him? Why didn’t the man just grab him, get it over with?

  The airline employee at the gate watched Stone’s approach, shaking her head with disapproval. “It is very late, sir,” she called out. “The plane is about to depart.”

  Stone waved his boarding pass at her. “I can make it,” he said, pushing his way past her. “I’m a fast runner.”

  “Hey—sir!” the woman shouted as Stone ran past her, through the tunnel into the airplane.

  Now!

  He shoved his boarding pass into the flight attendant’s hand as he entered the jet, which was full. He ran through the length of the plane, shoving aside a man who was placing a suitcase in the overhead compartment, and to the back of the plane.

  Yes! They had not closed the rear exit yet; they were about to.

  “Sir!” One of the flight attendants, a man, gestured toward him. “What are you doing?”

  But Stone was already descending the metal stairs, clutching his suitcase, now running onto the runway. The noise of the engines was deafening. He had timed it right. The next plane on the runway was, sure enough, the white-and-blue Aeroflot, the Soviet Ilyushin 62 jet that sat there preparing for takeoff, which would be in something like two minutes. He could just make it.

  Stone had lost his pursuer, running in a direction he would not anticipate. From the terminal building, he knew he was not visible, blocked as he was by the plane’s girth. Mounting the exterior, service steps to the Aeroflot’s jetway, he saw the surprised look on the face

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  of the plump Soviet stewardess as he entered the plane and handed her his boarding pass. The surprise turned to disapproval.

  “Izvinitye,” he told the woman. “Prostitye. Ya ochen opazdi-vayu.” Forgive me; I’m running terribly late.

  He took his seat, watching tensely out the window. He was safe. The airport-security guard thought he was on the flight to Bonn, and had almost certainly called in reinforcements to delay and search the plane; by the time it was discovered that he had left it, the Aeroflot plane would be in the air.

  Stone felt the engines increase their pitch, and two minutes later the plane was moving down the runway. When, another minute and a half later, the plane lifted oflF, Stone sank back into his seat, closed his eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  PART FOUR

  LENIN’S TOMB

  To the north of this Kremlin is the Red Square, called so, as I have said, long before the days of the Bolsheviks, however appropriate it may seem now. Against its southern border, formed by the north wall of the Kremlin, stands the comparatively humble tomb of Lenin, to which nightly march the faithful, almost a thousand strong, to view his body. Already by the ordinary Russian mind he has been canonized. And I was told by many that his embalmed corpse—quite the some in looks to-day as the day he died—is enmeshed in superstition. So long as he is there, so long as he does not change. Communism is safe and the new Russia will prosper. But—whisper— if he fades or is destroyed, ah, then comes the great, sod change—the end of his kindly dream.

  —Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928)

  62

  Washington

  The President had assembled his chief foreign-poHcy advisers in the Cabinet Room to make the final preparations for the Moscow summit.

  Present, along with Secretary of State Donald Grant, Director of Central Intelligence Theodore Templeton, National Security Adviser Admiral Craig Mathewson, and Roger Bayliss, were sixteen staff members of the National Security Council.

  Only about half of the people in the room had been invited to Moscow—a list the President had drawn up with Admiral Mathewson—and so there were, of course, some bruised egos. The hierarchy had become clear early in the administration. There were those who were going to Moscow, and those who weren’t. To Bayliss, it was that simple.

  And then, about halfway through the meeting, came an unexpected remark from the President concerning the outbreak of terrorism in Moscow, a remark that instantly filled Bayliss’s stomach with acid.

  “I’m told by some pretty reliable sources,” the President said casually, “that there’s more to this terrorism than meets the eye.”

  Bayliss’s glance moved from the President to the Secretary of State to the Director of Central Intelligence. Oh, Christ. Was it out?

  There was a beat of silence, until it became clear that the President was addressing Ted Templeton.

  Bayliss felt momentarily dizzy.


  Had the President somehow learned—impossible as it seemed— about the existence of the Sanctum? The possibility was always there; presidents always had their own private networks. If he did, there was

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  little doubt he’d hit the ceiling. An intelligence operation of this magnitude kept secret from him! No matter that the result of the conspiracy would be greeted by the President—and the world—with jubilation. He’d certainly disapprove of the committee’s conspiratorial methods, and then it would all be over. Decades and decades of work, of careful preparations—obliterated.

  But he couldn’t possibly know. No committee in the history of American intelligence had ever been as invisible as Sanctum.

  “As you know,” the President said, “I’m hardly a coward. I’ve traveled places, taken risks that made my Secret Service people go out of their skins.”

  The working group, knowing how gregarious and outgoing the President was, murmured appreciatively.

  Trouble, Bayliss thought.

  “Well, I got some information this morning,” the President continued, nodding toward CIA Director Templeton, “information that frankly concerns me. About the terrorism in Moscow. Ted?”

  Bayliss understood at once. Templeton looked embarrassed, chastened—like a schoolboy caught by the teacher passing a note. Somehow the President had gotten information from the CIA that didn’t come from Templeton. The President must have another channel. And Templeton was no doubt embarrassed that there was information he was withholding from the President.