The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Yes. The President had somehow learned that the bombs in Moscow weren’t just homemade things cooked up in a couple of dissidents’ garages. They were made of American explosives, American plastique. Understandably, the President found that alarming.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Templeton said, clearing his throat and brushing back his gray hair from his large square forehead. His face was flushed. “One of our assets in Moscow managed to turn up a few fragments of two of the bombs that went off recently. Our forensics people have determined that the plastique was American in manufacture.”

  Anxiously, Bayliss watched. Templeton was squirming. Sometimes Bayliss wished Sanctum had found it acceptable to inform the

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 421

  President of their maneuverings. Times like this, especially, when there was a risk that the President might just call the summit off. But of course that mustn’t happen. Nothing at all must be allowed to alert M-3’s Politburo colleagues. Nothing must make them suspicious.

  The President nodded. He was in his silent, uncommunicative mode, which all of his aides found most baffling—did it signal anger? boredom? contentment?

  “Mr. President,” Templeton continued, “I’m not concerned.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No, sir. It’s clear that the Russian terrorists must have gained access to American material. Maybe some of them are ex-soldiers who served in Afghanistan and managed to get their hands on American materiel captured during the war.”

  The President nodded.

  “If I thought there was anything of serious concern,” Templeton said, “I would certainly have brought this matter up sooner.”

  “Remarks?” the President suggested to the rest of the National Security Council.

  “Yes.” It was the Secretary of State. “I wouldn’t send the President into the middle of a war zone. And I certainly can’t countenance your going to Moscow at this time, Mr. President. I have the feeling Moscow is ready to explode, and I think it would be foolhardy for you to go. I think we should cancel.”

  “You do?” the President said.

  “I have to agree,” his national-security adviser said. “I don’t know how much protection we can offer over there. Maybe we should run it by Secret Service.”

  The President nodded and cupped his chin in his fist.

  For the next twelve minutes, Bayliss sat uncomfortably in his seat, watching the debate.

  “If I may, Mr. President,” Templeton at last put in. “I’ve already expressed my opinion that Kremlin’s security has matters well in hand. But there’s another factor to consider: Gorbachev’s position.”

  “Meaning?” the President asked.

  “He needs all the support he can get right now,” Templeton

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  explained. “If you cancel the summit meeting, I’ve no doubt his prestige within the Soviet leadership will plummet. And then—well, then we’ve got real troubles.”

  “All right,” the President said abruptly. “We’re going to Moscow. Now, let’s move on.”

  Templeton had won him, and the rest of the NSC, over. He’d been brilliant, Bayliss thought. It was all over now; the President’s mind had been made up.

  I hope, Bayliss told himself silently as the meeting proceeded, I hope that in fact nothing does happen during the summit. Virtually unthinkable, though. M-3 had been extraordinarily careful for decades.

  Yet the man would have to be even more careful. The man called M-3, together with the group that called itself the Sanctum, was about to change the world forever.

  Moscow

  At approximately the same time, a black Chaika limousine was pulling up before the National Hotel in Moscow. The chauffeur, a Russian, opened the door for his eminent American passenger, a dignified old man of aristocratic bearing named Winthrop Lehman.

  “Welcome to Moscow, sir,” the chauffeur said.

  A little over an hour later, there was a knock at the door of Winthrop Lehman’s hotel suite.

  Lehman, walking stiffly, opened the door with trembling hands.

  There, standing before him, was a small, frail woman of middle age, accompanied by a man in a suit of Soviet cut.

  “Father,” Sonya Kunetskaya said in English.

  After a long moment of standing at the threshold, she moved forward to embrace Winthrop Lehman. The guard hung back in the hallway, politely closing the suite door.

  “Dock’ moya” Lehman said. My daughter. His Russian, acquired decades ago, when he was a young man, still retained some fluency.

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  Sonya finally released her grip on her father and, her eyes not moving from him, said, “Skoro budyet.” It will be soon. “I won’t be around,” Lehman said, his voice cracking. “Don’t say that,” his daughter said firmly. “But I won’t,” he said. And then came the knock on the door. “Soon,” Sonya said, turning to leave.

  63

  Stone arrived in Moscow in the early evening, shuffling into the dark Sheremet>‘evo Airport building in a long line of tourists, most of them German.

  The airport was gloomy and ill-lit. Constructed in the late seventies by the West Germans for the influx of foreigners expected at the 1980 Summer Olympics, it was sleek and modernistic as only a German structure could be: a great, spacious expanse of black-rubber-tiled floor beneath a high vaulted ceiling made of patterned metal tubes. Had all the lights in the ceiling been turned on, the airport would have blazed; instead, the Soviets, in the interest of economy, kept most of them off.

  Stone’s body was stiff with tension. He knew that if an enterprising customs inspector found the disassembled gun it was all over.

  He found a restroom and brought his garment bag into a toilet stall. There he swiftly reassembled the pistol and put it in his suit pocket.

  Minutes later. Stone was seated in the front seat of an old black Russian automobile, a Volga, whose windshield bore a blue Intourist-insignia decal. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was provided by Intourist free of charge, and was not optional.

  The driver said nothing as they motored down a stretch of highway lined with scrubby woods and an occasional placard marked with red-and-white Cyrillic lettering. In a little over half an hour, they were on Tverskaya Street, formerly Gorky Street, one of Moscow’s main thoroughfares, and then, when the Kremlin loomed just up ahead, they turned right and pulled into a parking space in front of the National Hotel.

  The hotel dated from before the Revolution, one of very few remaining pre-Revolutionary hotels in Moscow, where, Stone remembered once reading, Lenin had lived in 1918 for several months while his rooms at the Kremlin were being restored.

  From the street, it was a plain-looking building of brown stone. Russians in fur hats and shapeless coats strode past briskly. The driver pulled the taxi up to the front of the hotel and shut off the motor.

  “Wait,” Stone said.

  The driver turned around questioningly.

  “Where can I change money?” Stone asked in Russian.

  “The Intourist office on the next block.”

  “Is it still open tonight?”

  “For another hour.”

  “Take me there, please.”

  The driver shrugged, started the car up, and maneuvered back around to Tverskaya Street.

  When Stone had changed some of his cash into rubles, he returned to the taxi and paid him. “All right, I’m all set. I’ll walk to the hotel.”

  The driver furrowed his brow. “Do what you want,” he said, pulling away from the curb.

  Stone stood on Tverskaya Street for a few minutes until a gypsy cab, no doubt identifying Stone as a foreigner, came to a halt. The car was also a Volga, but this one looked at least twenty years old.

  Stone got in and gave the address.

  The cab drove past the Kremlin, on Marx Prospekt, and then on to Kalinin Prospekt, across the Moscow River at the Hotel Ukraine, to Kutuzov Prospekt. Stone looked out the window at
the sights they passed: seeing Moscow for the first time, after hearing about it for so long, was somehow like visiting the set of a movie you have seen many times before.

  The city had an air of unreality, larger than life, drabber and grayer than he had expected, the streets broader and ill-lit. They approached a massive ecru stone building. In front, a uniformed guard

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  stood in a booth. He exchanged a few words with the driver, and then the driver turned around. “He says I’ve got to let you out here.”

  Stone got out and paid the driver; then, once again checking the address he had written down, he found the right entrance number, and the apartment number.

  There was no doorbell; he knocked.

  She opened the door.

  He was not prepared for her beauty. Certainly he had thought about her quite a bit in the last few, desperate weeks, remembering what she looked and sounded like in New York, wondering whether she would shut the door on him, just as she had hung up when he’d called from Toronto.

  But he had not remembered how astonishingly alluring she was. Her blond hair shone in the dim light from the hallway; her high cheekbones were even more finely sculpted than he remembered.

  “Charlotte, I need your help,” he said.

  64

  Washington

  The Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton, was the first to speak. He looked purposefully around the black marble table, first at the younger members of the Sanctum—his deputy, Ronald Sanders, and Roger Bayliss of the National Security Council—and then, a respectful smile on his face, at the older members: Evan Reynolds and Fletcher Lansing, the legendary ones, the best and the brightest.

  “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is what would possess him to go to Moscow. Of all places.”

  Fletcher Lansing immediately raised his still-strong chin, and interrupted. Lansing’s voice was hoarse, his elocution precise and mid-Atlantic. Bayliss was reminded of movie actors of the 1930s. “Out of the frying pan—” Lansing began.

  “In heaven’s name, why would this surprise you?” asked Evan Reynolds irritably. “It seems perfectly logical to me. His trail seems to lead right there—as if he intends to find the evidence that might exonerate his father and himself. That’s not worth discussing.”

  “I hope it’s personal,” Lansing said. “Unless he’s really gone rogue—defected to the Russians, selling what he knows …”

  “If the man is in the Soviet Union,” Reynolds said, “it’s all the more urgent—imperative, in fact—that he be found and neutralized at once.”

  Bayliss found himself glancing around the chamber; he could not help thinking, even at this time of great tension, that he was overdressed. It made him feel all the more out of place. Most of these men had on the almost worn-out, fashionless blue suits of old money. Whereas Bayliss was wearing a charcoal-gray Italian sharkskin suit that looked quite as expensive as it was, a yellow-and-blue-striped silk Metropolitan Club tie, and an elegant pair of snakeskin loafers as thin as tissue paper. He was perfectly aware that he looked like a young man on the make.

  And he reminded himself, as he did often, why he was there, why he’d been invited to serve on this super-secret committee: he was one of the few members of the National Security Council who received not only the NID, the top-secret National Intelligence Daily, but the far more secret PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, ten pages of the choicest intelligence—which very few in Washington were privileged to see. The committee needed a man in the White House. They also needed someone to serve as a link to Malarek, M-3’s man in Washington.

  That they now had. And more: Bayliss had set things up so that the American Flag Foundation bugged the White House’s unsecured lines (to make sure no secrets had been leaked) and, more important, kept Malarek under close telephonic surveillance. Never take chances.

  Now Bayliss knew what they were about to ask. Three minutes later, it came.

  Fletcher Lansing glanced briefly at Bayliss, then looked away. “Mr. Bayliss will have to contact Malarek. M-3’s people can do the job.”

  “No,” Bayliss said hoarsely.

  There was a long, shocked silence. Bayliss reddened visibly. “You want me to order Charles Stone’s death,” he said.

  “We want you to inform M-3 that Stone is in Moscow, assuming his people don’t know.” Lansing spoke softly. “That’s all.”

  Bayliss could feel four pairs of eyes on him. “There’s too much I don’t know,” he said haltingly. “I know you—we—have been running a mole. Okay. But how sure can we be about this … this M-3 … ?”

  This was, Bayliss knew, a shocking violation of Sanctum protocol. You didn’t ask questions, call into doubt the wisdom of the elders.

  The long silence was punctuated by the hum of the ventilation equipment.

  “I don’t think he needs to know the details,” Sanders said, hunching his shoulders as if he were still quarterbacking his college football team.

  “He’s in this with us,” Fletcher Lansing said. “A very valuable member of the team, I might add. Ted?”

  “M-3 is the Agency’s greatest secret since the days of Bill Donovan,” Templeton said. “Bigger, even. Too big even to be entrusted to the Agency’s own personnel. His name is Andrei Pavlichenko.”

  Bayliss’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God.”

  “The Pavlichenko file is so ultrasecret,” Sanders put in, “that it’s not even referred to on the most highly secret, limited-access computers within the Agency.”

  Templeton continued: “Pavlichenko was a young, rising star in the Soviet intelligence service in 1950 when he was approached by one of our people.”

  “How the hell did you manage to press him into service?” Bayliss asked. “What did you get on him?”

  Lansing gave Templeton a significant glance, and nodded.

  Templeton nodded in return, and said: “We learned that he’d been concealing his background. His parents were deported, murdered, by Stalin’s people, and he was raised by a relative. Never would have been let within a thousand yards of the Lubyanka if anyone knew it. So this guy works his way up, I mean fast, and soon he’s the chief assistant to Beria, Stalin’s boss of the secret police. With our help, obviously.”

  “That means he’s secretly a Ukrainian sympathizer,” Bayliss said. “In essence, an enemy of the state.”

  The elderly Evan Reynolds replied: “It’s not the first time someone like that has made it into the upper echelons of the Soviet leadership. Don’t forget about Petro Shelest, who masqueraded as an unshakable supporter of Russian dominance over his own Ukrainian people, a dedicated member of the Politburo. Only later was he uncovered as a secret Ukrainian nationalist.”

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  “But, Ukrainian or not,” Lansing interjected, “the point is that he’s fiercely opposed to the whole damn Soviet system—a system that murdered his family. That’s what we can count on.”

  “And you gave Pavlichenko chicken feed,” Bayliss said, using the intelligence jargon for genuine but minor secrets provided to nourish moles.

  “Morsels, table scraps here and there,” Templeton said. “Not so much that it would draw suspicion to him, but enough to make him look awfully impressive. We’d tell him how a president was thinking on something, as long as it didn’t harm our interests. And, once in a while, bigger stuff, too. Advance warning on several air strikes in Vietnam. We’ve even had to blow some of our intelligence operations. Even Bay of Pigs, when we saw it was destined for failure …”

  “Enough to give him a boost up the ladder,” said Fletcher Lansing, “without damaging our own interests in any serious way. Just enough to make him seem terrifically shrewd.”

  “And how do you know this guy isn’t going to turn out as bad as Beria?” Bayliss asked.

  Lansing interlaced his fingers and made a tent. “We don’t assume the power struggle will be bloodless, Mr. Bayliss. It’s not like electing a president, you know. But
we admire his vision: we have, in the past, been in touch with him through intermediaries. In the last few years— since his elevation to the Politburo—Pavlichenko has evidently deemed it unwise to allow any communications whatsoever.”

  “His vision?” Bayliss asked.

  “Do you know about Kievan Rus’?” Lansing said. “You are a Soviet specialist, are you not?”

  “I was a Soviet-affairs specialist in graduate school,” Bayliss said. “Not Russian.”

  Lansing shook his head in mild disapproval. “It’s hard to know anything worthwhile about the Soviet Union and not know Russian history intimately. In the eleventh century, what is now Russia was then a political entity, a nation-state, known as Kievan Rus’, ruled by Prince Yaroslav, also known as Prince Yaroslav the Wise. It was the first Russian state. Kiev, in those days, was the seat of Russian power—

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  you know, of course, that Kiev is the capital of the modern-day Ukraine.”

  “That I do, sir,” BayHss retorted.

  “Well. Kievan Rus’ maintained close and friendly ties with the heads of the European nations; it was a decentralized, loosely held federation of areas. There was much trade. It was the birthplace of the Russian enlightenment.”

  “I see,” Bayliss said, as the significance of Lansing’s history lesson began to dawn on him.

  “Pavlichenko,” Lansing resumed, “as a fervent Ukrainian patriot whose parents were taken away from him and murdered by Stalin’s forces, has all his life cherished a vision of tearing down the old and starting over. He sees himself as—well, I suppose, a modern Yaroslav the Wise.”

  “But Gorbachev’s already making serious changes,” Bayliss objected.

  Templeton spoke, sighing petulantly as if Bayliss were a tiresome child. “Gorbachev, as we’ve discussed a thousand times, is short-term. He can’t last— wont last. And then—a matter of months, maybe weeks—his enemies do away with him, and we’ve got a right-wing, neofascist Soviet leadership that will be dangerous. We can’t take that chance. We can’t put our eggs in that basket.”