The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  ALEKSANDR KUZNETSOV

  67

  The restaurant was an austere, even ugly place furnished with small tables at which people ate standing up. It was crowded, and it smelled powerfully of hot grease. The plate-glass windows were fogged with large ovals of condensation. They stood in line, neither speaking, moving past cups of sour cream and bowls of dumpling soup to the serving area, where two gray-haired women unloaded trays of crisp golden-brown pirozhki into a bin.

  The dumplings, or pelmyeni, turned out to be a plate of pallid dough-covered balls of grayish meat, steamed and then garnished with sour cream. They were not as bad as they looked. The pirozhki were crisp and almost appetizing. Stone washed them down with a cup of steaming hot cafe au lait, which was certainly not genuine coffee at all but some sort of poor imitation liberally blended with hot milk.

  “I can’t stay at your place again,” Stone said ruminatively as they ate. He took a swallow of the ersatz coffee. “For your sake as well as for mine.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you have any ideas? Any friends, maybe?”

  “My cameraman. Randy. My producer, Gail. Both out, because they’re neighbors, and they’d be prime suspects. But I know a Russian—an artist who has a pretty big apartment, something like a loft, where he paints. He might have room.”

  “Great.” They ate for a while in silence. When he’d finished his plate oipelmyeni, he said, “The Old Believers.”

  “What about them?”

  “We’re no closer to learning anything.”

  “Give me until tonight.”

  “Tonight? By then it might be too late!”

  “Well, look. The place 1 need to get into, I can’t in a normal, straightforward way.”

  She glanced at her watch. “It’s just about time. Our source usually takes an hour or so oflP for lunch, and the … clinic is just a block from here. Since the guy’s not only a physician but a scholar, it’s totally plausible for him to stop by the Lenin Library.”

  They crossed the street, then walked up the front stairs to the columned portico of the library, left their coats at the cloakroom, and descended a flight of stairs to a lounge lined with hard stone benches. Scholars, taking a break from their work in the reading rooms, sat smoking. Charlotte and Stone sat at one end of a bench.

  A few minutes later, they were joined by a man who looked to be in his forties, wearing a suit and tie under an expensive-looking sheepskin coat. He sat beside them, and shordy pulled out a pack of Belmorkanal cigarettes.

  He turned to Charlotte, and spoke in Russian. “You got a match?”

  She nonchalantly handed him a pack of matches. He took them, wordlessly, and lit his cigarette. When it was lit, he began speaking, rapidly and quietly.

  From a distance, they appeared to be nothing more than a man and a woman who happened to strike up a conversation, the man perhaps harboring designs on the attractive blonde. No one in the lounge paid them any attention.

  “I think I might have found what you wanted,” Kuznetsov said. He exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke and looked around, smiling abashedly, play-acting a spurned suitor. The act was forced; Kuznetsov was terrified. Sitting to one side, pretending to examine a copy of Sovetskaya Kultura, Stone stole a glance.

  “There are only a few people who have conditions of any gravity. But there is one that I found baffling. Apparently, the chairman of the KGB is about to suffer a stroke.”

  “Pavlichenko?” Charlotte asked. “About to … ?”

  “That’s what I said. You see, it hasn’t happened yet. If the records

  454 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  I looked at are accurate, on the seventh of November he plans to have a stroke.”

  And at long last Stone knew, with a sudden jolt of terror, that he had found the mole known as M-3.

  Washington

  Roger Bayliss steered his black Saab turbo along the Beltway, periodically checking his watch. Aleksandr Malarek, Pavlichenko’s man in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, would already be waiting at their rendezvous spot.

  Bayliss chewed his third Maalox tablet. It placated his sour stomach, but his nerves were still jittery; he didn’t want to take a Valium so early in the day, when Air Force One was to leave for Moscow in a matter of hours, and he wanted to stay as alert as possible. With him in it. Perhaps the highlight of his White House career.

  Ever since the Sanctum meeting, he had been in a state of almost unbearable anxiety.

  It was because he had become convinced, bit by bit, that Sanctum—that agglomeration of wise men—was committing a grievous error.

  How was Pavlichenko planning to seize power? They did not know. Yes, it made a certain sense that the wisemen would want to remove a Soviet leader who couldn’t last, in favor of our mole. An agent-in-place as ruler of what remained of the Soviet Union. Yes, that made sense.

  But Bayliss had become convinced that the coup was about to take place— during the summit. Nothing else could explain the schedule, or Malarek’s urgency. All of the preparations pointed to it. There would be bloodshed in Moscow during the summit.

  And Bayliss knew that any American implicated in such an action would face untold dire consequences.

  He was, in a very real sense, covering his ass.

  He had to tell his superior. He had to inform the President’s

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 455

  national-security adviser, Admiral Mathewson, who knew nothing about Sanctum.

  Without Mathewson’s support—well, if the coup failed, Bayliss’s fate was sealed. It would not be a pretty sight.

  He had to tell Mathewson.

  He got out of the car and walked right into the highway, the morning traffic dangerous and loud, cars slamming on their brakes, swerving to avoid him, drivers hurling abuse. There was a telephone booth there, on the other side of the road. He could not go through with this. He had made a mistake. He could fight the guerrilla war in the National Security Council, figuratively stabbing rivals in the back for the best office, for rank. He’d found himself capable of consenting to the murder of Alfred Stone. But this he could not do.

  He fished a quarter out of his pants, fed the telephone, and stared at the cars passing by.

  His heart was pounding, and a wave of acid washed up into his throat. He chewed another Maalox tablet.

  Then he punched out the phone number of Admiral Mathewson.

  Mathewson would know what to do.

  68

  Moscow

  The young man spoke as if wrenched by emotion. He spoke directly at the camera. The unseen KGB technician had pulled in for a tight close-up.

  From this close, the men watching the screen could see that the young man spoke under extreme duress.

  “I furnished the terrorist groups with equipment,” the man was saying. He paused often. There was a twitch in one of his eyes.

  “How did you get this equipment?” The voice came from off-camera.

  “The American Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council,” the man replied. His left eye twitched uncontrollably. “They provided me with the explosives and other equipment.”

  “So you were working as a pawn of American intelligence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you agree to such a heinous crime against the peoples of the Soviet Union?”

  The young man’s face was wracked with indecision, his left eye twitching madly, his eyes watering. Finally, he shouted: “It’s a lie! You made me do it! I followed your orders! I will not be party to this horror, this deceit. You will not force me to speak untruths!”

  He broke down crying, bowing his head, and then looking back up at the camera, his eyes red and swollen. Now he spoke quiedy: “I am not a criminal.”

  The voice came from off-camera, metallic and brusque: “Do you remember what Czar Ivan the Terrible did to the architects whom he commissioned to build Saint Basil’s Cathedral?”

  The man had now turned his head and was looking at
his unseen inquisitor. “I don’t—”

  The voice came back sharply: “You don’t remember the history of your own country. Ivan did not want his architects ever to build anything to approach the beauty of Saint Basil’s.”

  A dreadful realization came over the young man. “Oh, God, no. Please, God, no.”

  “You remember.”

  “No. Please, no!”

  “Ivan had their eyes gouged out. You remember now.”

  “Please, dont. Please, pleasel”

  The men watching the video screen were transfixed.

  “Would you like to repeat your confession more persuasively now?” the oflp-camera voice said. An unseen hand gave the young Russian a tissue. The man dabbed at his eyes, and looked up, swallowing. “Yes.”

  He spoke his confession again, this time with far more conviction.

  “Thank you,” came the voice.

  The young man began to weep. Suddenly, however, there was a loud crack and a red spot the size of a coin appeared on his forehead. The blood began to stream out: the confessor had been shot through the head, from behind. He slumped to one side, grotesquely.

  And the video monitor went dark.

  “Excellent,” Pavlichenko called to one of the twelve men who sat around the table in the subbasement of the Lubyanka. “I want this edited immediately. Just keep the confession.”

  The head of the Fifth Chief Directorate was the first to speak. “This man, Fyodorov. Do we have footage of him meeting with the terrorists?”

  “Yes,” replied another voice, that of the chief of Moscow’s police force. “He met them in a deserted garage we provided for him, where he stored the plastique and so on.”

  “And the terrorists,” came another question, “which of them are alive?”

  “The ones who killed my friend Sergei Borisov,” said Andrei Pavlichenko. “A decision I had to make, incidentally, to be sure I was seen as uninvolved. Who also set off the bombs in the metro and the Bolshoi. When it is all over, they will be put on trial, blamed for the final act of terrorism, which they did not commit, and then executed. We will have our scapegoats, and they will not be alive to contradict us.”

  Pavlichenko did not need to explain that one of the terrorists, an old zek named Yakov Kramer, had been known to KGB for some time, ever since friends of his had, in the early 1960s, set off a bomb on Gorky Street. Ordinarily, Pavlichenko—then a ranking KGB officer—would have ordered the men rounded up. But instead he decided to do nothing, knowing that the day would come when they could be useful.

  As they had been. One of the zek’s sons was arrested and put in a cell at Lefortovo with the unfortunate fellow Fyodorov. The recently deceased Fyodorov, the bomb expert who taught young Kramer all about the manufacture of bombs, and planted the idea in his head. Then the zek’s other son was placed in a psychiatric hospital. The scheme worked as Pavlichenko’s people had determined it might, based on a thorough psychological profile. The Kramers were turned into terrorists. And, of course, it was a simple matter to intercept their notes to Gorbachev.

  Terrorists linked, all of them, through the daughter of the American aristocrat Winthrop Lehman. The powerful and wealthy Win-throp Lehman, desperate to have his beloved daughter released from Russia before his death. And thus driven to cooperate with American right-wing fanatics bent on destroying the leadership of the Soviet Union.

  Or so Pavlichenko wanted it to appear.

  “Sir?”

  The men looked up and saw a KGB internal guard standing at the doorway.

  “Yes?” Pavlichenko said.

  “Gomrade Bondarenko,” the guard announced.

  “Let him in.”

  Ivan Bondarenko of Department Eight, Directorate S (Illegals) of the First Chief Directorate, charged with responsibility for “direct action” or “wet affairs,” entered the room.

  Without taking a seat, he said, short of breath: “I have reason to believe the American rogue agent is in Moscow.”

  “What?” gasped Pavlichenko.

  “The Soviet visa office in Paris checked photographs,” Bondarenko said, and stopped to catch his breath before he went on. “It seems that, incredible as it may sound. Stone has entered Moscow under a false name, using a visa he managed somehow to get quickly. The laser-optical scan of immigration documents, collated with the prints Sanctum supplied us, confirms it.”

  “Probably connected in some way with the arrival of the Americans,” Pavlichenko said levelly, getting up from the table. “Now, I want all of you to call upon all of your resources to stop this man before he unravels our plan. Alive or dead, I don’t care. He’s come right into our backyard. We will find him. The fool probably doesn’t realize that he’s stepped into a bear trap.”

  69

  Charlotte and Stone raced into the old U.S. Embassy building’s main entrance, flashing their passports at the burly Russian guards, and then ran into the courtyard. They took the first left, into the entrance to the offices, and mounted the stairs to the press office.

  Frank Paradiso, the embassy’s press attache, was seated, speaking on the telephone, behind a desk piled high with papers. He was stout and swarthy; his balding pate was partially obscured by thin strands of hair combed over from one side.

  “Well, hello, Charlotte,” he said when he’d hung up the phone. He shifted his glance toward Stone, and got up. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Charlotte put in quickly: “Frank, I realize you’re probably raked, with the President showing up in a matter of hours. But we need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”

  Paradiso nodded uncomprehendingly and gestured to the chairs in front of his desk, like an expansive host welcoming long-awaited dinner guests.

  “Not in here,” Charlotte said. “In the bubble. I know you have access to it.”

  “Charlotte, is this supposed to be a joke?”

  “I’m dead serious, Frank.”

  Dr. Aleksandr B. Kuznetsov returned to the clinic immediately after meeting Charlotte and her friend, apprehensive about what he had found, wishing he hadn’t found it at all.

  He walked down the corridor to his office, passing the nurses’ station. “Hey, darHngs,” he called out. The nurses liked him a lot, he knew, because he was one of the few physicians who bothered to talk to them. “Why so glum? Don’t tell me your husbands are neglecting you! The fools don’t know what they’ve got, right?”

  He flashed an endearing smile, and knew something was wrong. The two nurses looked at him diflFerently, fearfully.

  “Buck up, kids,” he said.

  They smiled wanly.

  Puzzled, he rounded the corner to his office and opened the door. When he saw the uniformed KGB guards, he suddenly understood.

  The “bubble” is the safe room in the U.S. Embassy, the only place in the embassy structure believed to be secure from Soviet bugs. It consists of a Plexiglas chamber, a room within a room, taken up by a long conference table.

  Paradiso led them in and switched on the air conditioning to provide the necessary ventilation. Stone, knowing that there was a serious risk that Paradiso had received a cable from Langley concerning one Charles Stone, had refused to introduce himself.

  And he was carrying, concealed in his jacket pocket, the gun; by coming into the embassy through the press entrance, from the courtyard, they had bypassed the metal detectors. Paradiso would be unable legally to place Stone under arrest—assuming he identified his visitor as Stone—without requesting federal marshals from Washington. That was the law. But if Paradiso decided to break the law and attempt to detain Stone—well, then there was the gun.

  “All right,” Paradiso said, sitting down at the table. Charlotte and Stone sat on either side of him. “What the hell is this?”

  “Frank,” Stone said, “we need your help.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Frank,” Charlotte said, “we need you to serve as a conduit to Langley.”

  “We’re both Agency men, you and I,” Stone sa
id. “That doesn’t mean you have to believe what I’m about to say. But have you heard of a group in Washington called the American Flag Foundation?”

  462 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s what I expected you to say.” Quickly, and as lucidly as possible, Stone explained the fragments of what they knew about the American mole M-3, about the conspiracy he had become entangled in.

  Paradiso looked genuinely amazed.

  “Please listen carefully,” Stone continued intently. “If I walk out that door and drive over to the New York Times office, they may or may not laugh me out of their office, but I don’t think your superiors will like the result. The U.S. government will suffer permanent damage when it’s revealed that certain groups in Washington are involved in covert action inside the U.S.S.R. Moscow will certainly break off diplomatic relations. The summit will be wrecked. I’d hate to extrapolate further, but you get my drift. It will all be on your head, all hung on you. It will be your own very personal, as well as very public, failure for allowing this to happen. And I shudder to think what might happen if this thing goes through. Do I make myself clear?”

  Paradiso looked imploringly at Charlotte, his eyes wide in disbelief. “I don’t know what the hell this guy’s talking about.”

  “Frank,” Charlotte said, “I just talked to someone who’s in a position to know: Andrei Pavlichenko has prepared a false CAT scan, in preparation for a ‘stroke’ he’s going to have tomorrow.”

  Paradiso snorted derisively.

  “It’s undeniable, Frank. He’s behind this, on the Russian end. But if our information is right, he’s not an American mole pure and simple. He’s not the Agency’s mole.”

  “What the hell, Charlotte …” Paradiso said.

  “There’s something more, Frank. For the last several weeks, the KGB has been investigating all the terrorist bombings in Moscow, and they’ve turned up some interesting evidence.”

  “Are you telling me you have a source in the KGB as well?”

  Charlotte shrugged. “Their forensics people examined the bomb fragments and deduced that the explosives used were manufactured in the United States and supplied by the CIA.”