The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  In the early days, Charlotte thought, he made love like a boy: a quick, urgent penetration, a rapid copulation, explosive ejaculation, and it was all over. But now there was such a closeness, an understanding between them, in the way they caressed and sucked and kissed. Through a rush of blood, a roaring in her ears, she could hear Charlie moaning softly, the vibration of his deep voice rumbling against her stomach. She moved, as if intoxicated, trying not to give in, resisting, and then she felt an orgasm that started as a wide, hot wave cutting

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  into her thighs and then widening until she gave in to it and it took her over. For the first time in years, she felt completely safe.

  For a long time, they lay there together, spent. Later they got up and shared a bottle of wine. At first their conversation was awkward. Stone kissed her; she slid her hand down his chest. “I forgot what your chest feels like,” she said. With her other hand, she massaged the back of his neck. “I wish your hair weren’t so short.” She looked at him for a long while and added, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Stone kissed her. “So am I.”

  “But I’m kind of confused.”

  He laughed. “I know. That’s good.”

  He felt her warm, soft body beneath his; she felt the hard strength of him, pressing against her. And then she felt him beginning to stir, and he was in her once again, moving agonizingly slowly, teasingly, and she was suffused, for the moment, with a delicious contentment.

  In the early morning. Stone awoke from a dream—a terrible, disturbing, guilt-wracked dream about Paula Singer—and saw that the bed was empty. Charlotte was gone.

  He felt a dull thud of fear, and then recalled that she had gone out to place a call to another of her sources. He rolled over and lapsed immediately back into his troubled sleep.

  A short time later. Stone awoke again, and felt Charlotte climbing in bed next to him. He wrapped an arm around her waist, felt her warmth.

  “Charlie,” she whispered. Her lips were practically against his ear; she spoke almost without exhaling. “I know a guy we could talk to.”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “I think he’s probably a Company man. If Saul Ansbach was right that at least some of the Agency’s involved, maybe it’s worth the risk to talk to him.”

  Stone, no longer sleepy, nodded, his eyes alert.

  “Use him as a conduit, maybe,” she continued in the barest of

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 443

  a whisper. “Lay it all out before him. If he’s involved, we’ll know it at once.”

  “Yes,” Stone whispered back. “Only, to be safe, we’ll lay out just enough to determine that he’s not involved.” Was the place bugged, really? he wondered. And could electronic bugs pick up whispers? He picked his watch up from the bedside table and looked at it. “We’ve got thirty, maybe thirty-two hours, I calculate. But I think …“He hesitated, not wanting to scare her. “Given the resources of the people who’ve been after me, it won’t be long at all before they track me to Moscow.”

  “If they haven’t already.”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “If they haven’t already.”

  66

  November 5

  The Kremlin Clinic, a five-story classical building of red granite adorned with fake Greek columns and a cupola, sits behind a high iron fence in the center of Moscow, near the Kremlin and across the street from the Lenin Library. It is here that members of the Soviet nomenklatura, the elite, receive medical treatment. Everything is high-security here, and the doctors are carefully vetted—so carefully, in fact, that many of the most talented specialists are disqualified on the grounds of ethnic background or suspected unreliability. For this reason, the Kremlin Clinic, which is run by the Fourth Administration of the Ministry of Health, may have the best and most expensive equipment and pharmaceuticals but often doesn’t provide the best health care. Many of the physicians are in fact of mediocre talent.

  But there is the occasional exception. Aleksandr Borisovich Kuz-netsov, a specialist in internal medicine at the Kremlin Clinic, was in his late forties. He was skilled and quick-thinking, and that was more than the majority of his colleagues were, but at the same time he was self-effacing, so he rarely excited enmity.

  A mere ten years after finishing his internship at a hospital in Leningrad, he had been chosen to serve at the Kremlin Clinic, to minister to the most powerful men in the land. He knew this was an enormous honor, and his generous salary reflected that—because privilege always went hand in hand with money in Russia. He also knew that he had been selected not for his medical expertise but for what people thought was his political reliability—his father had served in a minor position in the leadership under Stalin, and the mere fact that he had survived for so long was testimony to his father’s orthodoxy.

  But Aleksandr Kuznetsov was not quite who his Party comrades thought he was.

  He loved the practice of medicine, and although his friends and colleagues looked upon him as a good Communist, he had nothing but contempt for what remained of Soviet Communism. For reasons of pure science, and because he believed in doing one’s best to cure even the loathsome, he was an outstanding doctor in the clinic, really above reproach, but there were days when he would not have been unhappy if the Politburo and Central Committee oafs he looked after all perished at once.

  And then there would be days when he’d joke with the frail, aging men, sitting naked on the examination table, and feel nothing but pity for them.

  Kuznetsov had been in this hospital, across from the Lenin Library, for eight years, and before that he had been at the more gracious installation at Kuntsevo, where he had been among the team of doctors who took care of the dying Yuri Andropov. Through close and trusted friends in whom he had confided his dissatisfaction with things— although even with close friends he was circumspect—he had met a few Western correspondents, and when Andropov’s kidneys first began to fail, he had gotten the word out to them.

  He had thereby, quiedy, become one of the foreign correspondents’ “sources” in the Kremlin Clinic, though probably not the only one. He did it not because he wanted to hasten Andropov’s death, far from it, but because he deplored the secrecy that shrouded the health care of men at the very top. The Russian people, he felt, must always know what was going on with their leaders. Far too often they were kept in the dark, and this only gave rise to awful rumors. He remembered when Konstantin Chernenko died, and the Politburo—desperate to select a leader and settle the succession issue—withheld the news for three days. Secrecy was for the birds.

  But, even so, Charlotte Harper’s request was a little unusual. Late last night, after midnight, she had called, pretending to be his cousin Liza from Riga. She had called him by his nickname, Sasha. This prearranged signal was intended to explain, to anyone who might be

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  listening, the origin of her non-Russian accent. She spoke Russian excellently, almost as a native, but there was still a trace of an accent. No matter; there were dozens of accents in the Soviet Union. “So we’re going to meet tomorrow at five at the Tretyakov Gallery,” she had said. It was a signal that took him a few moments to remember: it meant they would meet at seven in the morning near the Leninsky Prospekt metro station, which was remote and safe enough.

  This time, she wasn’t asking him to find out the status of some leader who was dying. She wanted him to look through the medical records of each of the members and candidate members of the Politburo, nineteen men and one woman, to see if any of them had a history of some serious medical condition that wasn’t publicly known. It was an odd request, but it would not take much time, and so he had agreed.

  Yes, he said, he could do it safely, without arousing too much suspicion, if he had a good enough pretext.

  He would try.

  Every floor in the Kremlin Clinic has three computer terminals at each nurse’s station, which are used to retrieve laboratory values. In addition, there are two
terminals in small conference rooms for the use of the physicians, but since most of the doctors dislike using computers, these terminals generally sit unused.

  Kuznetsov wondered how all the other hospitals in the Soviet Union, which have no computers, were able to function. Computers, so often associated with George Orwell’s Big Brother and so on, are if anything the nemesis of the totalitarian state. They make information widely available, instead of concentrating it in the hands of the rulers. Information is power. Kuznetsov was glad that any of the clinic’s doctors could use the hospital computers freely; he wondered how long it would take for some smart hospital administrator to find a way to restrict the flow of medical information. For these computers held the private medical files on the very top leaders.

  He found a vacant terminal room and entered his access code.

  In a few seconds, the screen went blank and then another prompt

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  appeared. Kuznetsov typed his hospital identification number, followed by the eight-digit number that corresponded to his date of birth.

  A few seconds’ pause, and then a menu appeared. Kuznetsov selected data base survey and directed the computer to call up the charts of each member of the Politburo. Incredibly easy.

  He would not be asked, but in case he was, his explanation was unimpeachable. He was examining the medical records of these very important men, auditing the quality of their care, to see who might be summoned in for a checkup, who should be paid closer attention and who didn’t need it, how often they saw their private physicians. A routine procedure; he would be commended for his thoroughness.

  He began to pore over the most intimate health records of the men who ran the Soviet Union.

  On Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street in the Lefortovo district of Moscow, not far from the Novodevichy Convent, the main military-historical archives of the Soviet Union were located in an off-white classical-style building. Charlotte went to the side entrance and picked up a pass, which a friend at the Foreign Ministry had arranged for her, and then went around to the front of the building. A police guard inspected the pass and admitted her. The staircase before her was large and sweeping; at the top of it was a spacious reading room. Charlotte spent forty-five minutes looking around, chatting amiably with the librarians, and locating one particular archive.

  It was, as she had expected, a spetskhrana: a locked, secret collection. There was no way to gain access to it.

  She smiled pleasantly, and after chatting a few minutes with the militiaman at the main entrance, she left.

  Working quickly. Dr. Aleksandr Kuznetsov jotted down serious illnesses on a pad. Vadim Medvedev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Lev Zaikov each had conditions he thought worth noting, ranging from heart murmur to severe gastric ulcers.

  He next came to Andrei D. Pavlichenko, and something was peculiar. The message came up:

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  ACCESS DENIED.

  Odd, he thought. Why would one file be restricted when the others were not, not even Gorbachev’s? Perhaps it was that Pavlichenko was the chairman of the KGB, and secrecy was a way of life over at the Lubyanka. That was probably all.

  He tried again, and still:

  ACCESS DENIED.

  Well, there had to be a back door to the data. There always was. He drummed his fingers on the desktop in front of him and thought. And then it came to him: blood. All the files were contained in a separate data base by blood type, a filing system designed to enable monitoring of the clinic’s blood supplies, to make sure there were sufficient quantities of each Politburo member’s blood type at all times.

  He entered data base survey/blood type, and drummed his fingers again.

  One after another, the files came up on the screen, and he cursored down each one. Then one came up whose name had been deleted. He scanned the information, the age, the physical description, the personal history, and he saw at once that it was Pavlichenko’s chart.

  Success.

  Glancing at the screen, moving the cursor downward, he saw that Pavlichenko’s private physician was, naturally, the director of the clinic, Dr. Yevgenii Novikov. Of course. But the last time Pavlichenko had been in, he had seen the eminent neurologist Dr. Konstantin Belov, a man tuent}’ years older than Kuznetsov, whom Kuznetsov respected greatly. Of course—why should the head of the KGB see anyone who wasn’t the best?

  Well, well, he thought. Add the head of the KGB to the list of Politburo members with noteworthy medical conditions. But why was the head of the KGB seeing a neurologist?

  The first thing that came up on the screen was Pavlichenko’s X-ray report. It was normal; no acute infiltrates.

  Then, surprisingly, a carotid angiogram. Obviously Dr. Belov had suspected some sort of problem; maybe Pavlichenko had even had a stroke. Was it possible? The angiogram showed that the right-sided system was patent, fifteen percent plaque. … All right … Ah, but

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  the left side was bad news. The left side of Pavlichenko’s blood supply to the brain was significantly obstructed—which meant a stroke on the left side could be imminent.

  Someone walked by, and for a moment Kuznetsov glanced up nervously from the screen. It would be very hard to explain why he was examining Pavlichenko’s chart if he had nothing to do with the KGB chairman. But the person kept on walking, and Kuznetsov returned to the screen.

  The next thing he viewed on the screen was a preliminary CAT scan, which showed just about nothing. No infarcts or mass lesions, and just a mild cortical atrophy. So Pavlichenko had not actually had a stroke. That much was clear.

  But why had Pavlichenko come in in the first place?

  Kuznetsov called up the patient discharge summary, which included Belov’s notes. Belov reported loss of vision in Pavlichenko’s left eye.

  But how could that be? How could the vision go out or be diminished in the left side if the lesion was also on the left side? It made no sense. Something was terribly wrong.

  Maybe the CAT scan was mislabeled, Kuznetsov thought. Maybe it wasn’t Pavlichenko’s CAT scan at all, but someone else’s. Mistakes like that happen all the time.

  Kuznetsov had a few idle minutes, and he decided to be thorough about the whole thing. He’d go downstairs to the file room and locate the hard copy of the CAT scan, the film. Again, this was a routine matter; the hospital technical staff rarely asked questions of someone with Kuznetsov’s standing.

  When he got to the file room, he found that the film jacket was empty—checked out to Dr. Belov. No, it wouldn’t do to go asking Belov. That would be the end of his career at the Kremlin Clinic. He’d be inspecting prostates in Tomsk in no time.

  One more place to look.

  The scanning room, where they do CAT scans in the clinic, was hvo flights down, in the basement: a cold white room run by a technician named Vasya Ryazansky, a young guy whom Kuznetsov knew casually. He had once given Vasya a dose of antibiotic for the clap

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  without noting anything in his record, and it was time to get the favor returned. It was worth it to solve this mystery, which seemed more suspicious every moment.

  “What is it?” Vasya asked slyly when Sasha asked him how his clap was doing. “What do you want? Yob tvoyu matT he said, employing the standard Russian epithet that translates: Fuck your mother. He laughed.

  Kuznetsov returned the laugh. “All right, Vasya. Do me a favor, will you? I assume you have CAT-scan records on your computers here, right?”

  “Where else?”

  “I need to take a look at one.”

  “Make it easy on yourself,” Vasya said. “Go up to the files and look at the film.”

  “I did. It’s out. Do me a favor.”

  “What do you want. Comrade Doctor Professor?”

  When Kuznetsov told him whose scan he wanted to see, Vasya’s eyes widened. He nodded his head slowly and mock-bowed. “Well, well. Nothing but the best for you, eh?”

 
Let him think I’ve been assigned Pavlichenko, Kuznetsov thought, as Vasya punched out the name on his computer.

  “Scan records are kept on computer about a month before they’re erased,” Vasya said. His tone had gotten much more serious. “Lack of tape and all that. Got to keep reusing it, of course. Any idea how long ago the scan was done? I don’t remember doing it; must have been someone else.”

  “Within the last month, I’d say.”

  “Okay, here it is,” Vasya announced. “Take a look.”

  Kuznetsov was even more bewildered by what he saw.

  “Vasya, I want to see each slice, one by one. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.”

  After Kuznetsov had finished viewing each brain slice, there was no longer any doubt. There was a huge, obvious infarct on the left side of Pavlichenko’s brain.

  But how could that be? The records he had looked at upstairs had said that the preliminary CAT scan was normal. Now he was

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  seeing evidence of a massive stroke. How could anyone have missed it?

  Something was definitely screwed up here.

  Then he noticed the date of the CAT scan on the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

  November 7.

  According to the screen, the CAT scan had been performed on November 7. That was two days from now.

  In a communications room at the KGB’s First Chief Directorate headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow, a computer terminal gave off a rapid beeping. The warning system was connected to an intrusion detection system designed to provide silent notification if any of several computer networks around the city was penetrated.

  The monitor flashed a sequence of terse messages:

  SECURITY VIOLATION CENTRAL KREMLIN CLINIC DEPARTMENT OF INTERNAL MEDICINE TERMINAL 3028

  There was a pause as the mainframe’s memory collated a user access code with a list of hospital personnel, and then there was another message: