The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “But I don’t—”

  “Stefan,” Yakov said, his voice suddenly sharp. “This man who gave you the explosives. This cellmate of yours at Lefortovo. Who is he?”

  Stefan looked puzzled. “A car mechanic, a petty thief of some sort.”

  “KGB,” Yakov said.

  ”Whatr

  “Stefanchik, listen to me. You were arrested by the KGB, placed in a KGB prison—”

  “Who the hell do you think arrests people in our country?” Stefan responded archly. “The World Gourt in the Hague?”

  “Damn it, listen to me! Why do you think it was that you alone of all your friends were singled out for a jail sentence? Pure coincidence?”

  “Papa, what are you talking about?”

  “Your cellmate, who happened to be an expert in terrorism. Do you think that was an accident, too? Who happened to have access to a store of explosives? And your brother, Avram. He happened to be arrested, happened to be thrown into the psikhushka? Stefan, we were set up"

  “No—”

  “There’s been no word, nothing, on Avram,” Yakov said with bitter triumph. “It’s as if they were unaffected by our attacks. As if they wanted us to keep on doing what we were doing! They knew how we would respond.” His voice cracked.

  “How is it possible?”

  “The American told me a number of things,” Yakov said wearily. “He told me that the bombs we set off used explosives supplied by the CIA.”

  Stefan listened in shock.

  “Fyodorov,” Yakov continued, “was using us, playing upon our anger, upon our ignorance. This American thinks we are pawns, just like he is a pawn. He thinks the KGB plans to seize us all, arrest us for a great act of terrorism that may take place tomorrow.”

  “During the parade?”

  484 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Yakov nodded.

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  “The American says he has an idea. I told him we will do anything to help him now. Maybe we will need the help of others, I don’t know. But we must move very quickly.”

  72

  Driving Charlotte’s Renault, Stone pulled out onto Prospekt Mira, the great broad highway, with the spire of the Exhibition of Economic Achievement looming on his right. Two cars passed him, weaving between the lanes: drunkards. The highway was ill-lit.

  A large drop of water splashed on the windshield, and then another, and then another. Shit, Stone thought: the snow has turned to rain. Bad for visibility, bad for driving conditions, and the time remaining was dwindling away. It was vital to reach the Old Believers, and with each hour, the possibility receded that he ever would.

  Charlotte had said she thought there was a way to discover the identity of the leader of the Old Believers, but now she had unaccountably disappeared.

  He hoped she was safe.

  The only possibility that remained was Winthrop Lehman himself. Sonya had finally broken down and revealed that her elderly father had indeed arrived in Moscow a few days earlier. As Stone had suspected: Lehman would be an honored guest of the Soviet state, but with an additional, secret mission of his own, to obtain the release of his adult daughter. Sonya, who had lived her entire life in Moscow.

  Stone would have to face down his old employer, the man who had betrayed his father years ago, and compel him to help—if for no other reason than to protect Sonya. He was staying, Sonya had said, at the National Hotel. The same place where Stone had originally booked a room.

  Lehman was the last hope.

  In a few minutes, he would reach the hotel, and face Winthrop Lehman.

  As Stone thought, he stared through the raindrops, mesmerized by the windshield wipers, keeping his eyes on the white divider lines on the road. Suddenly he became aware, as a message from somewhere in his subconscious crossed the barrier into the conscious, that a pair of round headlights had been following him for some distance.

  The rain got heavier, and Stone felt himself reflexively begin to accelerate. A surge of adrenaline, of fear, was forcing his foot down onto the gas pedal, and he had to force himself to lift his heavy boot a little.

  The lights got closer.

  There were three sets of headlights now coming out of the blackness. Not the militia car—these were different, two very large trucks.

  Jesus Christ! They were closing in on him.

  The two sets of headlights belonged to two large squarish trucks, and now one was in the left lane and one in the right. Stone was in the center lane.

  As soon as he realized what was going on, he frantically tried to swerve the car into the right lane, the shoulder, off the road, but it was too late: the truck on the right was coming up on him too fast.

  One of the trucks was labeled “bread,” a solid closed-back truck, and the other was even larger but looked like the kind of thing you only saw in rural America: its sides were slatted, and beneath the slats was chicken wire, and the truck’s bed was full of live chickens.

  The two trucks were now fully abreast of the Renault, and they were beginning to squeeze in.

  There was a horrifying metallic crunch as the truck on the right smashed into Charlie’s car, and then a scrape from the left as the chicken truck cracked into him.

  Stone was already in overdrive, and he pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, but as fast as the Renault went the trucks were able to keep up, slamming into him with increasing frequency. He knew they were trying to kill him.

  Where was the tunnel? Somewhere around here, half a mile away or so, the three lanes were supposed to merge into two and go through a long tunnel. He could just make it out, up ahead maybe a mile. A mile: sixty seconds. In sixty seconds, the drivers of the trucks would be faced with a road-maneuver decision, and there was little doubt they would smash into him, decisively, before they got into the tunnel and its two lanes.

  The trucks were pummeling the Renault, slamming the car back and forth, like a Ping-Pong ball. With each slam Stone was jolted, and then one crash from the chicken truck on the left cracked a deep gash into the side by the back seat.

  Crack! The right rear window smashed. He felt a spray of rain hit his neck.

  Stone felt his panic change into an eerily calm determination. Something within him took control, banishing terror. Forty-five seconds away from the tunnel’s opening, with one hand on the wheel, he unrolled the driver’s-side window all the way. The wind roared in, carrying with it a torrent of rain, and he reached out a few inches until he grasped a grimy slat on the side of the chicken truck. Tugging at it, he realized it was sturdy: the slats on the truck could function as a ladder.

  The truck on the right slammed into the Renault with awesome force, forcing the car into the truck on the other side. Stone swung the wheel in the opposite direction. The wind whistled past his head.

  Wham!

  The chicken truck had crashed into him again, this time with enormous force, mangling the Renault’s left fender, its own giant fender now locked. The Renault had been jammed into the left-hand truck, wedged into it, and the two vehicles screamed along, inextricably connected.

  He reached down, swiftly grabbed at the laces on his boots, and loosened them. Then, using his left boot, he eased the right boot off his foot and wedged it against the gas pedal. It stuck. The accelerator was jammed down, and the car would continue to move ahead on its own, locked into the truck’s mangled fender.

  The mouth of the tunnel was just ahead. Maybe twenty seconds. Steering with his right hand, he reached over with his left and grabbed a slat. He pulled himself out of the car, supporting himself with his feet on the windowsill. His bloodstream was full of adrenaline now: his strength was enormous. He would need a tremendous surge of energy, and it came.

  He swung himself upward, and the slat came off in his hand.

  The only chance. The only alternative was certain death within seconds. He jumped into the air and grabbed the slat above.

  Sturdy.

  It was sturdy, it held, and he was
on the truck now. Glancing down momentarily, he saw that his car was propelling itself ahead like a bottle rocket, and the trucks continued to pummel the Renault— was it possible they hadn’t seen him climb out?

  The chickens were clucking, seeming to shriek with nervousness. Stone inched himself along the length of the truck, toward the front.

  There was a deafening crash of metal below, and Stone glanced down to see Charlotte’s car veer off under the high wheels of the right-hand bread truck, its top shearing off horribly. Then, just as the tunnel came upon them, the car slammed into the concrete abutment at an angle and exploded instantly into a fiery ball.

  At that moment the trucks entered the tunnel, and everything was plunged into darkness.

  Now he had reached the truck’s cab, and, peering into the right side, he could just make out a bull-necked man wearing a flat cap, blissfully unaware that Stone had survived the grisly crash.

  The rain made it almost impossible to get a grip on the top of the cab, but by lying flat Stone was able to slide himself over the top, and around, and—

  The window was open.

  Stone reached around and pulled out the Glock, wedged in his waistband. He released the safet>’, holding on to the top of the cab with his free hand, shivering with cold.

  The driver didn’t know he was only feet away. Stone angled the gun around until it was pointed directly at the driver. The man who had tried to murder him.

  ‘^Privyet,” he said—greetings—and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the man cleanly in the forehead, with a sudden spit of blood against the windshield. The driver’s head flopped down to the wheel grotesquely, almost comically, as if he had suddenly decided to take a catnap. His blood continued to jet forward, into his lap.

  Stone twisted his body around and, with a tremendous exertion, forced himself into the cab. Momentarily he faltered, then desperately he shoved the driver aside and managed to grab the steering wheel just as the streetlight at the tunnel’s end became visible. With one hand he slipped the cap off the dead man’s head and put it on: the silhouette would make the difference.

  As the truck emerged from the tunnel, the light from a carbon-arc lamp illuminated the cab’s interior, turning the fresh blood a sickly green. The other truck followed behind. Stone took the old-fashioned, long-handled gearshift and eased it into a lower gear and accelerated. The other truck honked out a tattoo, signaling victory—we’ve done our job, congratulations—and Stone honked out a response. Throwing the truck into fifth, he turned off Prospekt Mira onto the streets of Moscow.

  73

  Podolsk, U.S.S.R.

  The three Spetsnaz munitions experts stood on a vast field of dirt, watching a stone pyramid a quarter of a mile away in the darkness. It was a small building constructed of large blocks of granite. This was the fourth trial, and each had been completely successful.

  “An amazing replica,” the first said.

  “Yes,” the second replied. “Precisely the same exterior and interior dimensions. Even the stone has been chosen to duplicate the weight of the original.”

  The field the three men stood on was about twenty-five miles directly south of Moscow, just outside of Podolsk: a military proving ground that had been taken over from the Red Army by the Spetsnaz in 1982. Once it had been a military airfield; now it was used exclusively for Spetsnaz testing of explosive devices.

  All three had flown down on a GRU helicopter, and all would return to Moscow as soon as the final test was completed, in the early hours of Revolution Day. They stood in silence, watching.

  Then there was a terrific, dreadful rumble, a great thunderstroke, a flash of white light, a whoosh. The stone structure was blown apart from within, and in a split-second nothing was left standing. The ground shook, but there was nothing to be seen except a pattern of grayish rubble scattered for hundreds of feet.

  “Our man does good work,” the third one said, and the tiniest smile lit up his face.

  74

  Revolution Day. November 7. 12:36 a.m.

  Bone-tired, scraped and bloodied, Stone drove the truck as far into the city as he dared, for a chicken truck in the center of the city was sure to be conspicuous. He had pulled oflFProspekt Mira onto the ring road, Sadovaya-Spasskaya, and from there managed to find a telephone.

  No one seemed to be around; in fact, the streets were completely deserted. No, not quite deserted: there was one militiaman patrolling.

  He closed the booth’s door, inserted a coin, and dialed Charlotte’s apartment number. No answer again.

  He tried the office number. It rang five, ten times.

  “Yes?” A male voice.

  “I’m looking for Charlotte,” Stone said. “This is a friend.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. Her cameraman, perhaps? “Charlotte was supposed to be back here six hours ago. I have no idea where she is. Which is a bitch, because we’ve got a whole hell of a lot of work around here.”

  Stone hung up and leaned against the glass side of the booth. They had gotten her; they had probably come to get him, and taken her instead.

  It was half past midnight, but it was time to wake up a very old man and force him to help.

  492 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The alley gave Stone an idea. Every hotel he’d ever seen had a service entrance, and Russian hotels could be no exception: they could hardly unload sacks of potatoes and crates of eggs in the front.

  At the back of the National Hotel was an alley where great dump-sters of trash were kept, stinking messes of decaying food. He saw at once that the kitchen workers in the hotel had to walk by the dumpsters on their way into what the Russians would call the chyorni khod, the back entrance. Even at this hour of the morning, the door was in use, and it banged loudly as night-shift employees came in and out.

  Stone walked briskly, angrily. If you can’t look like a Russian, at least look like a foreigner so purposeful that no one would dare to question you. Wearing only one boot. Stone knew he could not help attracting attention.

  Yet no one did question him; who would enter a hotel through the kitchen?

  Once inside. Stone saw that the lobby was out of the question, but, like all hotels, the National had a back stairway, used mostly by the maids and the dezhurnayas, the women who keep the keys on each floor. Outside of one room, someone had left a pair of shoes to be polished overnight, and Stone, feeling a bit guilty, took them. The fit was not great, but it would do.

  On the second floor, he easily found the Lenin Suite, marked with a brass plaque. In recent years, the Lenin Suite has been given to honored guests of the state not quite august enough to be housed at Lenin Hills or within the Kremlin.

  There didn’t appear to be a guard in sight.

  The old man, wrapped in a silk robe, had been sleeping. He opened the door after Stone had knocked for quite a while, and stared at the younger man.

  He did not seem to register surprise.

  Frank Paradiso, press attache of the United States Embassy in Moscow and officer of the CIA, had recognized the man as Charles Stone. Once, during his brief affair with Charlotte Harper, he’d found a picture of Stone among a pile of things in one of her drawers, and he’d asked her about him. She’d been curt and dismissive.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 493

  He knew who Charles Stone was, knew from the moment he had gotten the coded cable from Langley. It had come, marked code word ROYAL, which signified an especially sensitive operation, known to fewer than a hundred people. The cable, which accompanied a description and biography of Stone, an Agency employee who had committed murder and was believed to be attempting to defect to the Russians, was from the office of the DCI, Ted Templeton. It was unattributable, but the marking on it clearly indicated it had originated with the DCI and thus had the highest authority.

  The Director of Central Intelligence wanted Stone apprehended immediately.

  Paradiso had sent an urgent cable the instant Stone and Ch
arlotte had left his office, and the Agency had sent personnel to Moscow almost immediately. The men from internal security had accompanied the presidential party under the cover of State Department employees, and had arrived just minutes ago.

  “How credible is this information, Frank?” asked the CIA operative. His name was Kirk Gifford, a blond, brawny forty-six-year-old.

  “Very,” Paradiso said.

  “What’s the source?”

  Paradiso hesitated. “Forget the source for now. We’ve got just about—”

  Paradiso sagged suddenly to the table as Gifford clipped him swiftly at the back of the neck with a heavy metal object that resembled a blackjack.

  GiflFord next jabbed a needle into Paradiso’s forearm: a short-acting benzodiazepine central-nervous-system depressant called Versed, more reliable than the Agency’s old standby, scopolamine. Versed, or midazolam hydrochloride, is a hypnotic as well as an amnesiac. When Paradiso came to, disoriented and foggy, he would have forgotten everything that had happened to him in the last day or two. Everything except for vague details that would seem like a dream.

  The door to the bubble opened, and two men entered, bearing a stretcher. Each had the legal authority of United States federal marshal.

  494 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “I want him on the next plane out,” Gifford said. “I don’t care if you send him parcel post. Just get him out of Moscow.”

  “Do you know why I came here?” Lehman said, sitting in a large wing chair. He seemed small in this big room, dwarfed by the grand piano.

  “Yes. For Sonya. You hand over a piece of paper to Andrei Pavlichenko’s people—or is it a file?—and in return you get your daughter released. At long last.”

  Lehman seemed not to have heard Stone’s reply. “So, you came to Moscow expecting to exonerate yourself,” he said, “is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  Lehman seemed to find it very amusing. “Well, don’t interfere now, Charlie. You have interfered in things far more significant than you know. “