The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Bayliss nodded, transfixed.

  “But if we give Gorbachev a chance—” Bayliss began.

  The Director of Central Intelligence cleared his throat. “Roger, Gorbachev has had it. It’s time to put our man in. If we wait any longer, history will pass us by. And then we’re back to the Cold War.”

  “But how, exactly, does Pavlichenko plan to seize power?” Bayliss asked.

  “We don’t know, Roger, and frankly we don’t care. But all the signals are that it will happen soon, probably within six months. Sometime after the Moscow summit. Now, some of us will be going to Moscow in a matter of hours. While you’re there, get a good look around you, because things are going to be different when you return on the TWA Washington-Moscow shuttle. Next time our President

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  goes over there, I predict, he’s going to be negotiating with a different man.”

  Bayhss nodded. “I’ll contact Malarek,” he said, “the moment I leave.” He nodded again, swallowing, and smiled at the rest of the Sanctum. “Thank you. I appreciate it.” He shot his cuffs, felt his chest tighten. “Thank you.”

  65

  Moscow

  Charlotte gasped.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered harshly, her face burning with anger. “What’s happened to you?”

  “I need you, Charlotte.”

  “God damn you. God damn you. What did you do? For Christ’s sake, what did you do?”

  Stone tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away, glowering.

  “The place looks great,” Stone said gently, looking around at her living room. The apartment was furnished in her simple but elegant taste, spare but neatly arranged, the pale-peach couch and chairs complemented by the ocher Oriental rug. “Sort of like the place where we spent our honeymoon. Only you forgot the heart-shaped bidets.”

  Charlotte didn’t laugh. She looked back at him, forlornly.

  “Why did you hang up on me?” he asked.

  “Jesus! We can’t talk here!” She pointed a finger toward the ceiling. He watched her, taking in her fragrance, her poise.

  He found himself marveling, as he so often had in the past, that he was married to this woman. He felt a spasm of guilt, too, that he could ever have hurt her.

  “Where can we talk?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said icily.

  She put on her coat, and they walked out of the building, toward the street, passing the stout uniformed guard, who nodded at Charlotte without smiling, looking closely at Stone.

  She strode confidently. This was, in many ways, her city, and

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  Stone could sense it immediately in the way she navigated purposefully, yet unthinkingly. The time apart had done good things for her. She seemed to possess an inner calm, a confidence she’d never had before. He wondered whether she had closed him out. Whether it was too late.

  The streets were cold, with a few drifts of discolored snow, remains of a recent snowfall that had melted and then refrozen. Several of the buildings were festooned with long red banners proclaiming the Revolution Day ceremony that was to take place in two days.

  “You must have a million things going on,” Stone said as they went down the street. “With the summit, 1 mean.”

  She seemed reliexed to be able to talk about her work: it was safe, neutral. But at the same time, she seemed reserved. Was it resentment? Or something else? “The President’s part}- arrives tomorrow,” she said. “There’s really not much to say about that—we’ll shoot tape of the arrival at the airport, I’ll do a stand-up. There aren’t that many press conferences or briefings. Then, the day after tomorrow, we’ll get some footage of the whole shebang, the President standing next to Gorbachev up on Lenin’s tomb. Great photo opportunity, as the politicians say.”

  Watching her, he was momentarily overcome with affection, and he slipped an arm around her. She seemed to stiffen.

  “Charlotte, why did you hang up on me?”

  “Come on, Charlie. They tap correspondents’ phones.”

  “You were protecting me.”

  She shrugged. “Least I could do.”

  He told her what had happened, virtually everything—from Alfred Stone’s murder to the frenzied chase in Paris. Charlotte interrupted only to tell him about Sonya.

  Stone stared. “So she is alive.” He shook his head, smiling, elated to see his hunch confirmed.

  “And now I know what she was concealing,” Charlotte said. She felt alternating waves of love and anger. He had a claim on her, knew her as no one else did, and yet he seemed impossibly distant. Even in a few short weeks, he had changed: he’d become weary, scarred, cautious, constricted.

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  He told her about Dunayev, the NKVD defector in Paris, and the defector’s story about the Katyn Forest Massacre and the network of Old Believers. Charlie was exhausted, but the story tumbled out, urgently and even coherently.

  They were at the deserted banks of the Moscow River. Charlotte had listened for twenty minutes, occasionally interposing a question.

  She took his hand and gave it a quick squeeze; he held on with a strength and firmness that she found comforting. She felt something down below, a surge, a warmth and a weakness that arose, she knew, from aching to make love to him, and that confused her hopelessly.

  Now she turned and faced him. “I didn’t believe you at first, you know.”

  “I understand. It sounds crazy, I realize.”

  She stared ahead at the Stalin Gothic hulk of the Hotel Ukraine. “It really did. First your father. And then, yesterday morning, I read a news item that came across the Associated Press wire.” She paused, not knowing how to say it, and then she blurted: “Charlie, Paula Singer is dead.”

  Stone was leaning against a low concrete wall, and for a moment, Charlotte thought he hadn’t heard her, or maybe didn’t understand, but then he seemed literally to crumple, to slide to the ground, his head buried in his arms.

  “No,” he said, his voice muffled. “I was so goddamned . . , careful. I was … She must have done something to …”

  And Charlotte, unable to stand there any longer, sank to the ground and put her arms around him.

  Stone watched, as if through a scrim, Charlotte cross the street to a phone booth.

  He felt a lump rise in his throat, a rush of love for her. Some minutes earlier, Charlotte had told him about what Paula had discovered just before her death.

  Her information was vital. Now everything was beginning to make sense.

  His attacker in Chicago was connected to an organization that did the dirty work the intelligence agencies were prohibited from doing.

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  Did that mean that the Agency had gone after him, one of their own? What else could it mean?

  And then Charlotte had revealed the leak she’d gotten from a source in the KGB that the CIA was behind the bombings in Moscow.

  Another piece of the pattern. But now she needed to know more from Sergei. Was there anything else her source had discovered?

  She had to contact Sergei directly. A terrible risk—a quick phone call very late at night—but she’d be as careful as she could be. They had no choice.

  He could see her hang up the phone and make another call, gesturing as she spoke, her motions agitated, distraught. Then she hung up again, this time with great force.

  And called out to him.

  “Charlie!” She was now running across the street toward him. Her voice was high and frantic. “Oh, God.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Sergei. Oh, God. My source. I called his private number at work—he works late at night. Normally I only have to say a word or two, so it’s safe—but someone else answered the phone. So I did something I’ve never done before: I called him at home. And his wife answered. I told her I was a colleague of his from Latvia, to explain m
y accent, and she told me he was dead. Killed in an explosion at the lab.”

  “W/zen?”

  “I don’t know.” She had begun to cry. “It must have just happened. But I said I wanted to go to the funeral, you know—I didn’t know what else to say—and she said the body had already been cremated without her knowing. One day he was there; the next day she had his ashes in an urn.”

  “Executed,” Stone said tightly.

  Charlotte suddenly threw her arms around Stone, squeezing him tightly. He could feel her tears hot against his neck, her breathing heavy. “He was caught in it,” she said. “The same thing that killed Paula.”

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  Stone held her for a long time. At last he spoke. “I don’t want you involved.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you have a choice. I’m cornered; I have to fight. And, sure, I want your help, your contacts, your brain. But I don’t know what I’d do in your place.”

  “Oh, hell, sure you do,” she shot back angrily. She gripped his shoulders as if to shake him, but only stared intently into his eyes. “No, Charlie. Damn it, I don’t think I do have a choice. After what happened to your father—well, that changed everything for me. Everything’s changed. What kind of person do you think I am, that I could possibly turn away from you now?”

  He moved his face close to hers, and then kissed her.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She looked at him, startled. Then she pulled away from him and dabbed at her tears with the back of her hands. “So what are we going to do?”

  He bowed his head, and then looked up at her. “Listen, Charlotte …”

  “Charlie,” she said brusquely, suddenly all business, as if the moment had not passed between them. “What are we going to do?”

  After a pause, he replied: “Lehman’s daughter is one of the keys. I may be able to force her to reveal more than she wants. More likely, I can use her to get to others who can help.”

  She nodded.

  “But the first order of business is to try to get to whoever’s the head of this Old Believer network.”

  “For what?”

  “Because we—I—need help. I can’t be in this alone any longer.”

  “But you don’t have a name. You don’t have anything.”

  “That’s why I need you.”

  “But you can’t just walk around talking to Russians and asking them if they happen to know anyone who was sent up for a secret court-martial during World War II, and then, if they do, if they happen to know the name of the man who terminated the court-martial. Charlie, that’s the sort of thing that’s not public. Sure, Moscow’s

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  admitted its guilt in the Kat>‘n Forest Massacre—but I’d be shocked if the records aren’t locked up. This is a nation where just about everything is a state secret.”

  “There has to be some way.”

  “Who do you think this guy is? Some sort of dissident, maybe— someone like Andrei Sakharov was, who’s well connected? Maybe a Part' leader who was once thrown out of office, now in disfavor, nursing his grudges?”

  “Anything’s possible. But there have to be records. At Parnassus, they always kept us insulated from sources and methods; I wouldn’t know. But you know this city better than anyone, and if you can’t— What?”

  Her eyes were wide, and she was suddenly smiling broadly. “Records,” she said under her breath. “Yes.” She reached over and kissed him briefly on the cheek. “I think there’s a way. I can try tomorrow, first thing.”

  “Charlotte, if you can, that’s tremendous. But there’s just no time.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “If anyone can do it, you can.”

  “Well. Tomorrow afternoon, the President’s arriving. I can ask my producer to attend the briefings for me; there’s not going to be anything big happening, anyway. It’s unusual, but she’ll do it.”

  They had turned around and were heading back in the direction of Charlotte’s apartment building.

  “We need to put together the pieces,” Stone said. “What do we know? That the CIA, or maybe some faction of it, is involved in backing, or initiating, a wave of terrorism in Moscow. Linked to an impending coup, in which their asset, M-3, will seize power. Yes?”

  Charlotte nodded, listening intently. “Yes. And the wave of terrorism is causing the same sort of havoc that the release of the Lenin Testament might have done a few decades ago.”

  Stone spoke rapidly now, his words flowing into hers. “We know this M-3 was linked to Beria and to Lehman, through Lehman’s daughter somehow. But I still don’t get it.”

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  “So what’s being planned? What sort oi incident, if there’s going to be an incident?”

  “Maybe it’s some sort of armed action, a military assault. Every indication tells us it will take place on Revolution Day, during the summit.”

  “When the President of the United States is there, right?” Charlotte said. “So that, if something happens, maybe it will be seen as directed against the President? Is that possible?”

  “Yes. That makes a lot of sense.”

  “If there’s an attack on the Soviet leadership, it will have to be coordinated by someone who’s got the power to do so, right?”

  “Of course. Someone in control of the army, maybe, or the air force. A general.”

  “Like who?”

  “M-3 could be any one of twenty or thirty people,” Stone said quietly. “Any of whom is in a position to coordinate a seizure of power. Could be anyone, from the Politburo to the army to … yes.”

  “Huh?”

  “In 1953, Beria planned to be absent on the day of his planned coup, probably to marshal his forces. If he was on the scene, he couldn’t seize the others, so he had to absent himself.” So?

  “Okay. What if M-3, whoever he is, really is planning a coup on Revolution Day. Wouldn’t he, too, be absent?”

  “Possibly, Charlie, but by the time we see who’s absent at the ceremonies, obviously it’ll be too late.”

  He smiled. “Maybe not. Listen to this. Revolution Day is the biggest state ceremony the Soviet Union has. The biggest deal by far. You don’t miss it unless you’re on your deathbed. I remember seeing footage of Leonid Brezhnev up there on Lenin’s tomb, about to totter over. People say he was out in the cold so long up there that he caught a cold and died. If you’re absent, it’s a sign that you’re out of power, so no one just happens to stay home.”

  “So far I follow you.”

  “Okay. If the Politburo gets wind that someone important isn’t

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  at the ceremonies, they’ve got to be suspicious, maybe send someone to check on the man’s whereabouts. Right?”

  “You’re the expert, Charhe. I just report the stuff.”

  “So what would you do if you wanted to be absent on such an important day behevably?”

  “Get sick. Really sick.”

  “Suddenly?” Stone prompted.

  “Probably not. Ah, I see. God, you’re good. I’d have been sick for a while, so when I sick out, no one blinks an eye.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And how does this help us?”

  “You’re the reporter. All I ever did was analyze the information. You tell me.”

  “Medical records,” Gharlotte said.

  “Yes!” Stone almost shouted. “Do you remember when Yuri Andropov was dying, only the world was told he had a cold?”

  “And he really had kidney failure,” Gharlotte said. “But the word was out on that.”

  “This is a cit' of rumors; rumors is how information is spread.”

  “Yes, Gharlie. Yes, I have a source.”

  “Who?”

  “One of my predecessors had a source in the Kremlin Glinic. A doctor who treated Yuri Andropov. And—because he believed that openness was the only right thing—he leaked information about
the state of Andropov’s health.”

  “And this source has access to the medical records of the leadership,” Stone whispered. “But how do you get to this guy?”

  “Gome on, Gharlie. Give me credit. I’m not the best-connected journalist in Moscow for nothing. Do you think I wouldn’t get to meet the guy?”

  “You’re amazing.”

  “You know I want to do whatever I can to help,” she said. “For the memory of your father. And, damn it, for you, too.”

  He bent toward her and kissed her, and, to his surprise, she kissed back. Then abruptly she stopped.

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  Stone spoke first: “Someday you’ll find it possible to forgive and forget.”

  She looked at him penetratingly and did not reply. Her eyes had filled with tears.

  His words were now choked and awkward. He moved his face slowly, slowly toward hers, and all the while he looked directly in her eyes. Softly and tentatively he touched his lips to hers, waiting for a response, and when one came, after a moment’s hesitation, he was instantly aroused, and his heart felt like it was being squeezed.

  “Hey,” he managed to whisper, “you need a little sugar?”

  The feeling of making love to her after so long! It was as if she were both a stranger and his oldest friend. Her body felt completely different, and then, just when he was forgetting how long he’d known her, he’d feel something, she’d move in a certain way, murmur something that brought it all back. Her resistance of just a few hours ago had been so erotic: she had pushed him away. Once, years ago, she had folded her arms against her breasts as if she were embarrassed by them, although they were beautiful; now she lay back on the bed, arching her back in pleasure, and her breasts were firm and erect and almost perfectly rounded, and she seemed to have lost all her inhibitions, everything. He ran his hands over her, cupping her breasts and sucking them, biting gently on her nipples, exploring her with familiarity, yet unfamiliarity: immediately he remembered all the secret places where she liked to be touched, the rhythms she liked in lovemaking.