The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  Paradiso’s mouth dropped open. ^‘Jesus Christ!” He looked at

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 463

  Stone. “So what are you two alleging? I still don’t understand where this is leading.”

  “All I can put together is this,” Stone replied. “There’s likely going to be some sort of action, perhaps military, probably disguised as terrorism. Presumably tomorrow, at the Revolution Day parade.”

  “Likely … probably … presumably … What am I supposed to make of all of this?”

  “I want you to contact Langley. Send an emergency cable. If I’m wrong, Frank, you’ll have done the right thing by reporting it. If I’m right …”

  “I know,” Paradiso said softly. “I’ll have made the biggest intelligence coup in American history.”

  “Frank,” Charlotte said, “do you understand how important it is that you move immediately on this?”

  “Charlotte,” he said, shaking his head slowly, dazed, a man who had been won over. “You don’t have to tell m.e.”

  Washington

  “/ need to talk with you,” the voice said desperately. In the background Malarek could hear traffic sounds. “/’// be in in about forty-five minutes. Ifs urgent.”

  Malarek had waited for Bayliss for ten minutes, then, deciding Bayliss must have had a good reason for missing the rendezvous, returned to the Soviet Embassy, where his aide presented him with this recording just made from an unsecured White House line. Malarek had at once recognized the voice of Roger Bayliss.

  Malarek listened to the remainder of the phone conversation. Then he switched off the tape recorder, picked up a secure phone, and called a rarely used number at a small bookstore in Washington that specialized in foreign books. The phone was answered right away.

  “This is a friend of yours from the Soviet Embassy,” Malarek said. “I want to order two sets of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In English, please.” Then he hung up and waited.

  464 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The man at the bookstore, who was a Soviet-born American citizen who had emigrated fifteen years earlier, was one of quite a few “bhnd-transfer” stations in and around Washington. He was paid a small retainer by the KGB for his services, which largely consisted of making, through an elaborate telephone system, untraceable calls. The bookstore employee did not know who had called him, nor whom he was calling. This was a method Malarek had developed to circumvent normal embassy and KGB channels.

  Thirty seconds later the phone rang.

  “There’s been a ChehPeh,” Malarek said, using the Center’s slang for chrezvychainoye proisshestviye, an extraordinary incident.

  He furnished the specifics, then hung up.

  He pulled a Balkan Sobranie from the small white metal box on his desk, and lit it. He leaned back in his chair and thought about Roger Bayliss, who would do anything to advance his standing with his President. It was fortunate—extremely fortunate, in fact—that Bayliss had been so foolish as to make the call to an open line. Bayliss had not been specific with the national-security adviser, so there had been no hemorrhaging of any secrets. There would be just enough time.

  He had never liked Bayliss.

  Roger Bayliss wondered whether he was being followed.

  The car behind him was trailing too closely, and so Bayliss moved over to the right lane, alongside the metal railing. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that it, too, had changed lanes. It was right behind him again.

  He glanced nervously at the steep incline just beyond the railing, and then he knew what was happening. He instantly remembered something Malarek had once told him, about how good his people were at making “accidents” look real.

  He shouldn’t have called an unsecured line at the White House. After all, anyone could eavesdrop electronically on those lines.

  He slammed on his horn, but now the car was at his bumper, and it was forcing him off the road. He could hear the squeal of metal scraping against metal.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 465

  He saw the license plate on the Ford, saw it was registered in the District of Columbia, and then he spotted the little maroon sticker on the Ford’s windshield, at first just a little glint of purple, that decal that would mean nothing to anyone who hadn’t heard of the American Flag Foundation.

  No. The call … They’d bugged the call… . My own arrangements to bug the lines, Bayliss realized, aghast, knowing the irony, and then of course there was no doubt, the moment he felt the impact, about how he was going to die.

  70

  Moscow

  The night had gotten frigid, the roads slick with ice. Stone, driving Charlotte’s Renault, had found the driving difficult. Moreover, many of the roads were blocked in preparation for the next day’s ceremony, which had taken over the city entirely, as do all state occasions in Moscow. Much of the center of the city had been cordoned oflP for security reasons. Banners were going up all over the city, large triumphal posters of larger-than-life socialist workers boasting of factory quotas overfulfilled.

  After meeting with Paradiso, Stone and Charlotte had returned to her apartment, where together they drew up a plan. They agreed it was important that Charlotte go about her work normally, partly to avoid attracting any suspicion, which might expose Stone’s presence in the city to anyone who was looking.

  Charlotte had gone over to her office to put together a story, to which she would have to add only footage of the President arriving at Vnukovo Airport. Later, as soon as she could, she would finish her search for the name of the man who was said to lead the Old Believers network. Perhaps there was a way, she said, refusing to tell Charlie exactly what that way might be. But Stone could call her later, and learn what she’d found, if anything.

  Stone had spent several hours unavailingly searching Charlotte’s books on Soviet history, desperately looking for a name connected with the Katyn Forest Massacre, the name of a lone hero, but there was nothing.

  He could not sit still, and soon he set off to confront Sonya Kunetskaya. Lehman’s daughter, whom Charlotte had found. The woman Alfred Stone had met once, briefly, on a subway platform in 1953.

  Stone found Sonya Kunetskaya small and unprepossessing. She wore a plain dress and steel spectacles, which concealed a pretty, delicate face. When she opened the door, she looked perplexed.

  “Chto takoe?” she asked: What is this?

  “We must talk,” Stone replied, also in Russian. “Now.”

  Her eyes widened in terror, glinting with tears. ”Who are you?”

  “If you won’t let me in to talk,” Stone said, “I’ll have to take measures you may not like.”

  “No!”

  “It’s urgent. Come on.” He forced his way past her into the apartment. This is the woman for the sake of whom my father was sacrificed, Stone thought. This is the one.

  Sonya Kunetskaya followed him into the living room, where a man was sitting. Stone would later learn his name: Yakov Kramer. He was badly scarred on one side of his face, a powerful-looking middle-aged man who would, but for his deformity, have been handsome.

  “You met my father,” Stone said slowly.

  She seemed about to laugh. “You confuse me with someone else.”

  “No, I don’t. I have the pictures to prove it. One day a long time ago—in 1953, to be exact—you met with my father on a platform in the Moscow metro. He gave you a package.”

  Now suddenly her face registered alarm, and it betrayed her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she protested.

  “I know who you are,” Stone said. “I know who your father is.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Charles Stone. You met my father, Alfred Stone.”

  She gasped, her mouth open as if to scream, her eyes wild.

  Then, oddly, she reached out a trembling hand and touched Stone’s arm. “No,” she said, shaking her head, choking out the words. “No. No.”

  468 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Yakov Kramer watched, astonished.r />
  “We must talk,” Stone said.

  Sonya’s face was frozen in an expression of the sheerest terror. Tears sprang to her eyes. “No,” she whispered. She looked at him closely, then reached out both of her hands to touch his. “Oh, God, no. Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

  “I know whose daughter you are. Your father is here to take you out of the country, isn’t he? But you should know that I’m prepared to interfere. Make no mistake about it. Unless you help.”

  “No!” the woman shouted, her eyes fixed on Stone. “Please, go away. You mustn’t be here with me!”

  “Who is this man, Sonya?” Yakov asked. “What is he saying? Get out of here f He began to move menacingly toward Stone.

  “No!” Sonya said to Yakov. “Let him be. I’ll talk to him.” Crying now, she removed her glasses and wiped at the tears with the side of her hand. “I’ll talk to him.”

  At seven o’clock in the evening. Air Force One landed at Vnukovo Airport, some twenty miles southwest of Moscow. The tarmac was illuminated brightly by klieg lights and adorned by rows of Soviet and American flags, which rippled crisply in the wind.

  The first to emerge from the plane were the President and his wife, then the Secretary of State and his wife, and then the rest of the American delegation.

  Standing in a cluster to greet them, the moment captured on film by a Soviet camera crew, was a small group of Soviet officials, including the Politburo.

  After a brief welcoming ceremony, the President was taken to a waiting American limousine, a bulletproof black Lincoln, with an American chauffeur at the wheel. The rest of the official party were put into Chaikas, and with a great roar of engines the cars took off at top speed down the middle lane of the road to Moscow.

  The President’s chauffeur at first seemed nervous about driving as fast as the Soviet drivers; then he relaxed and seemed to enjoy it. “Mr. President, I’ve never driven this fast in Washington.”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” the President said, looking a little queasy.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 469

  The cars in the motorcade followed one another breathtakingly closely, almost tailgating, the sirens screaming. They were moving at such a speed that the President, a cautious man, felt sure there would be an accident. Several cars, occupied by Soviet security agents, cruised on the outside of the motorcade, darting in and out deftly, dangerously.

  When they had gotten into the city, the President looked out of the window with fascination.

  Two cars behind, in a Chaika limousine, sat the President’s national-security adviser and a few of his aides.

  Craig Mathewson was crafting a statement, to be released at the U.S. Embassy the next morning, in which the President expressed his heartfelt condolences upon the demise of one of his most loyal White House staff members, Roger Bayliss. “… And I regret that Roger cannot be with us,” the statement ended, “at this time of triumph that he did so much to bring about.”

  Mathewson was deeply grieved at the loss of the young man. Bayliss had been as ambitious as anyone Mathewson had ever met in government, a touch too slick for his own good, but still fundamentally a decent person. How had the accident happened? What was Bayliss doing, driving around on the day he was to leave for Moscow? Was it excitement about the summit, perhaps, that might have caused him to be so fatally unattentive?

  But why had Bayliss called him, just before the accident, going on about having “something really urgent to tell you”? What could Bayliss possibly have wanted to say that was so urgent, and—here Mathewson’s speculations grew dark—could there have been some connection between whatever Bayliss wanted to say and the accident?

  Mathewson was suspicious, even a little afraid.

  He watched Moscow racing by. Even at night, when so many cities look magical, this was an oddly unbeautiful place, he thought, and it was disquietingly still, devoid of people. Strange, for so populous a city, the day before its biggest holiday.

  Then he saw that the streets were not quite devoid of people: every few yards stood militiamen in gray uniforms, in a line that never ended, from the airport all the way into the city. There must have been thousands of them.

  470 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  It was clear that the Soviets were taking every precaution to protect the hfe of their honored guest.

  Four cars behind Mathewson rode Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, and Gorbachev’s close friend and adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev.

  Gorbachev sat silendy, staring straight ahead, lost in thought, until Yakovlev interrupted: “He’s a personable fellow.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The President. I’ve always thought he’s a personable fellow.” Yakovlev, who had studied at Golumbia University and spent years as ambassador to Canada, felt he understood the Western temperament. “Reasonable as well.”

  Gorbachev nodded, his eyes unmoving, steely.

  “He’s overtired,” Raisa Gorbachev said, looking at her husband.

  “Well, get your rest,” Yakovlev said. “Tomorrow’s a long day.”

  Then Gorbachev turned his head toward his adviser. “Do you think they know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Know,” Gorbachev replied body, “about the—about whatever or whoever the hell it is that’s trying to pull off a coup.”

  “I don’t know. No doubt they’ve got some kind of intelligence on it. Which means they’ll try to exploit your weakness. The whole idea, you know, that you’re not going to last. The way Brezhnev played Nixon when Nixon was facing impeachment, you know—”

  “I don’t mean that,” Gorbachev shot back, turning back to face the road. “I mean, do you think they know what we’ve learned? About CIA involvement?”

  “If you mean, do the President and his people have a hand in what’s going on here, as Pavlichenko seems to think—well, it seems preposterous to me. I can’t see it.”

  Gorbachev nodded again. He ran his tongue absently along the inside of his cheek and did not reply.

  In the car immediately behind his sat Andrei Pavlichenko, alone except for his driver. He wore a pair of reading glasses and looked without interest through a thatch of digested intelligence reports from Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria.

  Mentally, he ran through once again what was about to happen.

  He knew that only a swift decapitation of the Russian leadership would be effective. It would plunge the nation into turmoil. The lawmaking bodies—the Supreme Soviet, the Congress of People’s Deputies—would be gripped with fear, unable to act decisively. They would call for emergency measures.

  After the destruction in Red Square, martial law would be declared by a few survivors—ranking officers in the Red Army and in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, each of whom belonged to the Sekretariat, yet who would not be standing atop the mausoleum or even near it.

  To the world, the destruction of Lenin’s mausoleum would seem the culmination of a campaign of terrorism that had so bedeviled Russia of late. When the remains of the explosion were examined, the CIA-produced plastique would reveal clear, irrefutable evidence of American involvement in the tragedy.

  Why, there would be little doubt of it. Especially when Pavlichenko—once he recovered from his stroke—unveiled the evidence of attempts on the part of a small group of American conspirators that called themselves the Sanctum to eliminate the Soviet leadership from within.

  But before that could happen, what remained of the uppermost Soviet leadership—that is, the Sekretariat—would charge the Americans with conspiring to destroy the Soviet Union at a time of great instability. Just when Moscow was loosening the chains, unlocking its gates, opening itself to the West.

  And they would swiftly move to rectify the situation.

  The Sekretariat, believing that they were about to make the Soviet empire whole again, would issue orders that the foolish and dangerous policies of Mikhail Gorbachev were to be terminated at once. That public safety required order. And then …

  And t
hen Andrei Pavlichenko would carry out his life’s dream.

  He would liberate the Ukraine.

  It was the one thing that would never happen under Gorbachev or any other Russian leader. The Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet empire, the wealthiest hostage republic, would at last be free.

  472 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  And in short order, what httle remained of the Soviet empire would be ruled by a Ukrainian whose parents had been murdered by Moscow. A Ukrainian, the master of Moscow.

  And the Kremlin, as history knew it, would cease to exist.

  Pavlichenko turned his attention back to the sheaf of documents, but he could think of nothing other than the coup d’etat that would change the face of the world.

  “You were,” Stone said, “a hostage here, weren’t you?”

  She nodded, biting her lower lip. She had asked Yakov to leave the two of them to talk alone. Later she would have to tell Yakov everything. It would be terribly difficult, and she didn’t know how to begin. “Yes,” she said. “By 1930, Stalin forced my father to leave. Without his wife. And without me.”

  She drew her arms around herself in a tight embrace, as if she were cold, a gesture that seemed to be warding oflF the outside world. “He had to return to America, where his future was. The worlds of high finance and politics. But now, the woman and the daughter he loved so much—he could not bring out with him. Do you understand? They wouldn’t let him. My father says the orders came from Stalin himself. My mother was devastated. She was a single woman with a small child. Without her husband.

  “Oh, she was a beautiful woman, you know. She had worked in my father’s house as a servant—she had no education, but my father loved her for other things, her beauty and her kindness. And, you know, I think they really were in love.

  “Well, he kept in touch with my mother and me through letters he sent in various secret ways. He later told me he didn’t trust the Russians, that they—he meant the GPU, which is now the KGB— would surely read his letters, and so he concealed the letters in fur coats he sent my mother with friends who were traveling to Russia. My father was a great figure to me, all the more because I saw him so seldom.”