The man who might very well be the next president of the United States was an ace.
ii.
“The chairman will see you now.”
To Polyakov’s surprise the receptionist was a young woman of striking beauty, a blonde straight out of an American movie. Gone was Seregin, Andropov’s old gatekeeper, a man with the physical appearance of a hatchet—appropriately enough—and a personality to match. Seregin was perfectly capable of letting a Politburo member cool his heels for eternity in this outer office, or if necessary, physically ejecting anyone foolish enough to make an unexpected call on the chairman of the Committee for State Security, the chief of the KGB.
Polyakov imagined that this lissome woman was potentially just as lethal as Seregin; nevertheless, the whole idea struck him as ludricrous. An attempt to put a smile on the face of the tiger. Meet your new, caring Kremlin. Today’s friendly KGB!
Seregin was gone. But then, so was Andropov. And Polyakov himself was no longer welcome on the top floor … not without the chairman’s invitation.
The chairman rose from his desk to kiss him, interrupting Polyakov’s salute. “Georgy Vladimirovich, how nice to see you.” He was directed to a couch—another new addition, some kind of conversational nook in the formerly Spartan office. “You’re not often seen in these parts.” By your choice, Polyakov wanted to say.
“My duties have kept me away.”
“Of course. The rigors of fieldwork.” The chairman, who like most KGB chiefs since Stalin’s day was essentially a Party political appointee, had served the KGB as a snitch—a stukach—not an operative or analyst. In this he was the perfect leader of an organization consisting of a million stukachi. “Tell me about your visit to the Aquarium.”
Quickly to business. Another sign of the Gorbachev style. Polyakov was thorough to the point of tedium in his replay of the interrogation, with one significant omission. He counted on the chairman’s famous impatience and wasn’t disappointed.
“These operational details are all well and good, Georgy Vladimirovich, but wasted on poor bureaucrats, hmm?” A self-deprecating smile. “Did the GRU give you full and complete cooperation, as directed by the General Secretary?”
“Yes … alas,” Polyakov said, earning the chairman’s equally famous laugh.
“Do you have enough information to salvage our European operations?”
“Yes.”
“‘How will you proceed? I understand that the German networks are being rolled up. Every day Aeroflot brings our agents back to us.”
“Those not held for trial in the West, yes,” Polyakov said. “Berlin is a wasteland for us now. Most of Germany is barren and will be for years.”
“Carthage.”
“But we have other assets. Deep-cover assets that have not been utilized in years. I propose to activate one known as the Dancer.”
The chairman drew out pen and made a note to have the Dancer file brought up from the registry. He nodded. “How much time will this … recovery take, in your honest estimation?”
“At least two years.”
The chairman’s gaze drifted off. “Which brings me to a question of my own,” Polyakov persisted. “My retirement.”
“Yes, your retirement.” The chairman sighed. “I think the only course is to bring Yurchenko in on this as soon as possible, since he’ll be the one who has to finish the job.”
“Unless I postpone my retirement.” Polyakov had said the unspeakable. He watched the chairman make an unaccustomed search for an unprogrammed response.
“Well. That would be a problem, wouldn’t it? All the papers have been signed. Yurchenko’s promotion is already approved. You will be promoted to general and will receive your third Hero’s medal. We’re prepared to announce it at the plenum next month.” The chairman leaned forward. “Is it money, Georgy Vladimirovich? I shouldn’t mention this, but there is often a pension bonus for extremely … valuable service.”
It wasn’t going to work. The chairman might be a political hack, but he was not without his skills. He had been ordered to clean house at the KGB and clean house he would. Right now he feared Gorbachev more than he feared an old spy.
Polyakov sighed. “I only want to finish my job. If that is not the … desire of the Party, I will retire as agreed.”
The chairman had been anticipating a fight and was relieved to have won so quickly. “I understand the difficulty of your situation, Georgy Vladimirovich. We all know your tenacity. We don’t have enough like you. But Yurchenko is capable. After all … you trained him.”
“I’ll brief him.”
“I tell you what,” the chairman said. “Your retirement doesn’t take effect until the end of August.”
“My sixty-third birthday.”
“I see no reason why we should deprive ourselves of your talents until that date.” The chairman was writing notes to himself again. “This is highly unusual, as you well know, but why don’t you go with Yurchenko? Hmm? Where is this Dancer?”
“France, at the moment, or England.”
The chairman was pleased. “I’m sure we can think of worse places for a business trip.” He wrote another note with his pen. “I will authorize you to accompany Yurchenko … to assist in the transition. Charming bureaucratic phrase.”
“Thank you.”
“Nonsense, you’ve earned it.” The chairman got up and went to the sideboard. That, at least, had not changed. He drew out a bottle of vodka that was almost empty, pouring two glasses full, which finished it. “A forbidden toast—the end of an era!” They drank.
The chairman sat down again. “What will happen to Mólniya? No matter how badly he bungled Berlin, he’s too valuable to waste in that horrible furnace of theirs.”
“He’s teaching tactics now, here in Moscow. In time, if he’s good, they may let him return to fieldwork.”
The chairman shuddered visibly. “What a mess.” His tight smile showed a pair of steel teeth. “Having a wild card working for you! I wonder, would one ever sleep?”
Polyakov drained his glass. “I wouldn’t.”
iii.
Polyakov loved the English newspapers. The Sun … The Mirror … The Globe … with their screaming three-inch headlines about the latest royal rows and their naked women, they were bread and circus rolled into one. At the moment some M P was on trial, accused of hiring a prostitute for fifty pounds and then, in The Sun’s typically restrained words, “Not getting his money’s worth!” (“‘It was over so fast,’ tart claims!”) Which was the greater sin? Polyakov wondered.
A tiny deck on that same front page mentioned that the Aces Tour had arrived in London.
Perhaps Polyakov’s affection for the papers derived from professional appreciation. Whenever he was in the West, his legend or cover was that of a Tass correspondent, which had required him to master enough rudimentary journalistic skills to pass, though most Western reporters he met assumed he was a spy. He had never learned to write well—certainly not with the drunken eloquence of his Fleet Street colleagues—but he could hold his liquor and he could find a story.
At that level, at least, journalism and intelligence were not mutually exclusive.
Alas, Polyakov’s old haunts were unsuitable for a rendezvous with the Dancer. Recognition of either of them would be disastrous for both. They could not, in fact, use a public house of any kind.
To make matters worse, the Dancer was an uncontrolled agent—a “cooperative asset” to use Moscow Center’s increasingly bland jargon. Polyakov had not even seen him in over twenty years, and that had been an accidental encounter following even more years of separation. There were no prearranged signals, no message drops, no intermediaries, no channels to let the Dancer know that Polyakov had come to collect.
Though the Dancer’s notoriety made certain kinds of contacts impossible, it made Polyakov’s job easier in one respect. If he wanted to know how to find this particular asset—
—all he had to do was pick up a paper.
<
br /> His assistant, and future successor, Yurchenko, was busy ingratiating himself with the London rezident; both men showed only a passing interest in Polyakov’s comings and goings, joking that their soon-to-be-retired friend was spending his time with King’s Cross whores—“Just be sure you don’t wind up in the newspapers, Georgy Vladimirovich,” Yurchenko had teased. “If you do … at least get your money’s worth!”—since such behavior by Polyakov was not unprecedented. Well … he had never married. And years in Germany, particularly in Hamburg, had given him a taste for pretty young mouths at affordable prices. It was also quite true that the KGB did not trust an agent who possessed no notable weakness. One vice was tolerated, so long as it was one of the controllable ones—alcohol, money, or women—rather than, say, religion. A dinosaur such as Polyakov—who had worked for Beria, for God’s sake!—having a taste for honey … well, that was considered rakish, even charming.
From the Tass office near Fleet, Polyakov went alone to the Grosvenor House Hotel, riding in one of the famous English black cabs—this one actually belonged to the Embassy—down Park Lane to Knightsbridge to Kensington Road. It was early on a work day and the cab crawled through a sea of vehicles and humanity. The sun was up, burning off the morning haze. It was going to be a beautiful London spring day.
At Grosvenor House, Polyakov had to talk his way past several very obvious guards while noting the presence of several discreet ones. He was allowed as far as the concierge station, where he found, to his annoyance, another young woman in place of the usual old scout. This one even looked like the chairman’s new gatekeeper. “Will the house telephone put me through to the floors where the Aces Tour is staying?”
The concierge frowned and framed a reply. Clearly the tour’s presence here was not common knowledge, but Polyakov preempted her questions, as he had gotten past the guards, by presenting his press credentials. She examined them—they were genuine in any case—then guided him to the telephones. “They might not be answering at this hour, but these lines are direct.”
“Thank you.” He waited until she had withdrawn, then asked the operator to ring through to the room number one of the Embassy’s footmen had already provided.
“Yes?” Polyakov had not expected the voice to change, yet he was surprised that it had not.
“It’s been a long time … Dancer.”
Polyakov was not surprised by the long silence at the other end. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
He was pleased. The Dancer retained enough tradecraft to keep the telephone conversations bland. “Didn’t I promise that I would give you a visit someday?”
“What do you want?”
“To meet, what else? To see you.”
“This is hardly the place—”
“There’s a cab waiting out front. It’ll be easy to spot. It’s the only one at the moment.”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Polyakov hung up and hurried out to the cab, not forgetting to nod to the concierge again.
“Any luck?”
“Enough. Thank you.”
He slipped into the cab and closed the door. His heart was pounding. My God, he thought, I’m like a teenager waiting for a girl!
Before long the door opened. Immediately Polyakov was awash in the Dancer’s scent. He extended his hand in the Western fashion. “Dr. Tachyon, I presume.”
The driver was a young Uzbek from the Embassy whose professional specialty was economic analysis, but whose greatest virtue was his ability to keep his mouth shut. His total lack of interest in Polyakov’s activities and the challenge of navigating London’s busy streets allowed Polyakov and Tachyon some privacy.
Polyakov’s wild card had no face, so he had never been suspected of being an ace or joker. That, and the fact that he had only used his powers twice:
The first time was in the long, brutal winter of 1946–47, the winter following the release of the virus. Polyakov was a senior lieutenant then, having spent the Great Patriotic War as a zampolit, or political officer, at the munitions factories in the Urals. When the Nazis surrendered, Moscow Center assigned him to the counterinsurgency forces fighting Ukrainian nationalists—the “men from the forests” who had fought with the Nazis and had no intentions of giving up. (In fact they continued fighting until 1952.)
Polyakov’s boss there was a thug named Suvin, who confessed drunkenly one night that he had been an executioner in the Lubiyanka during the Purge. Suvin had developed a real taste for torture; Polyakov wondered if that was the only possible response to a job that daily required one to shoot a fellow Party member in the back of the neck. One evening Polyakov brought in a Ukrainian teenager, a boy, for questioning. Suvin had been drinking and began to beat a confession out of the kid, which was a waste of time: the boy had already confessed to stealing food. But Suvin wanted to link him to the rebels.
Polyakov remembered, mostly, that he had been tired. Like everyone in the Soviet Union in that year, including those at the very highest levels, he was often hungry. It was the fatigue, he thought shamefully now, not human compassion, that made him leap at Suvin and shove him aside. Suvin turned on him and they fought. From underneath the other man, Polyakov managed to get his hands on his throat. There was no chance he could choke him … yet Suvin suddenly turned red—dangerously red—and literally burst into flames.
The young prisoner was unconscious and knew nothing. Since fatalities in the war zone were routinely ascribed to enemy action, the bully Suvin was officially reported to have died “heroically” of “extreme thoracic trauma” and “burns,” euphemisms for being fried to a cinder. The incident terrified Polyakov. At first he didn’t even realize what had happened; information on the wild card virus was restricted. But eventually he realized that he had a power … that he was an ace. And he swore never to use the power again.
He had only broken that promise once.
By the autumn of 1955, Georgy Vladimirovich Polyakov, now a captain in the “organs,” was using the legend of a junior Tass reporter in West Berlin. Aces and jokers were much in the news in those days. The Tass men monitored the Washington hearings with horror—it reminded some of them of the Purge—and delight. The mighty American aces were being neutralized by their own countrymen!
It was known that some aces and their Takisian puppet master (as Pravda described him) had fled the U.S. following the first HUAC hearings. They became high-priority targets for the Eighth Directorate, the KGB department responsible for Western Europe. Tachyon in particular was a personal target for Polyakov. Perhaps the Takisian held some clue to the secret of the wild card virus … something to explain it … something to make it go away. When he heard that the Takisian was on the skids in Hamburg, he was off.
Since Polyakov had made prior “research” trips to Hamburg’s red-light district, he knew which brothels were likely to cater to an unusual client such as Tachyon. He found the alien in the third establishment he tried. It was near dawn; the Takisian was drunk, passed out, and out of money. Tachyon should have been grateful: the Germans as a race had little liking for drunken indigents; masters of Hamburg whorehouses had even less. Tachyon would have been lucky to have been dumped in the canal … alive.
Polyakov had him taken to a safe house in East Berlin, where, after a prolonged argument among the rezidenti, he was supplied with controlled amounts of alcohol and women while he slowly regained his health … and while Polyakov and at least a dozen others questioned him. Even Shelepin himself took time out from his plotting back in Moscow to visit.
Within three weeks it was clear that Tachyon had nothing left to give. More likely, Polyakov suspected, the Takisian had regained sufficient strength to withstand any further interrogation. Nevertheless, he had supplied them with so much data on the American aces, on Takisian history and science, and on the wild card virus itself, that Polyakov half-expected his superiors to give the alien a medal and a pension.
They did almost as much. Like the German rocket engineers captur
ed after the war, Tachyon’s ultimate fate was to be quietly repatriated … in this case to West Berlin. They transferred Polyakov to the illegals residence there at the same time, hoping for residual contacts, and allowing both men a simultaneous introduction to the city. Because of East Berlin, they would never be friends. Because of their time in the western sector, they could never be total enemies.
“In forty years on this world I’ve learned to alter my expectations every day,” Tachyon told him. “I honestly thought you were dead.”
“Soon enough I will be,” Polyakov said. “But you look better now than you did in Berlin. The years truly pass slowly for your kind.”
“Too slowly at times.” They rode in silence for a while, each pretending to enjoy the scenery while each ordered his memories of the other.
“Why are you here?” Tachyon asked.
“To collect on a debt.”
Tachyon nodded slightly, a gesture that showed how thoroughly assimilated he had become. “That’s what I thought.”
“You knew it would happen one day.”
“Of course! Please don’t misunderstand! My people honor their commitments. You saved my life. You have a right to anything I can give you.” Then he smiled tightly. “This one time.”
“How close are you to Senator Gregg Hartmann?”
“He’s a senior member of this tour, so I’ve had some contact with him. Obviously not much lately, following that terrible business in Berlin.”
“What do you think of him … as a man?”
“I don’t know him well enough to judge. He’s a politician, and as a rule I despise politicians. In that sense he strikes me as the best of a bad lot. He seems to be genuine in his support for jokers, for example. This is probably not an issue in your country, but it’s a very emotional one in America, comparable to abortion rights.” He paused. “I doubt very much he would be susceptible to any kind of … arrangement, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Wild Cards IV Page 60
