“You have Pagan and the girl under surveillance?” Epishev asked.
“Constantly,” Iverson answered. “We never sleep.”
Moscow
“Tea, General?” Volovich asked, but his tongue was heavy in his mouth. He watched Stefan Olsky cross the floor to one of the armchairs, where he sat, crossing his legs and removing his cap.
“I don’t think so,” Olsky said.
“It’s no trouble –”
Olsky held one hand up, palm outward. “I said no, Dimitri.”
Volovich hovered in the doorway to the kitchen. Pain throbbed behind his eyes.
Olsky said, “I like this apartment. I imagine you’re fond of it too. Convenient location. Pleasant rooms.”
“It’s comfortable, General.”
Stefan Olsky was quiet a moment. “You were going somewhere when I arrived.”
Volovich, whose mind suddenly had the texture of an ice-skating rink, a thing of slippery surfaces and frozen depths, nodded his head imperceptibly. “A stroll, a late-night stroll,” he forced himself to say.
Olsky said nothing for a moment. “You took a call from Viktor Epishev a few minutes ago. The call was patched here through a KGB switchboard in East Berlin. It originated in the United States. My listeners are located in the basement of this building – does that surprise you?”
A tapped telephone. It was a nightmare and Volovich was hurled into it and, as in all nightmares, no immediate escape was apparent, no relief forthcoming.
Olsky said, “Viktor Epishev mentioned a threat to the plan, Dimitri. What is the nature of the plan?”
“Plan?”
“Don’t play games with me. I hate games.”
Volovich shook his head. Being stubborn would finally prove futile, but there were old loyalties and they would sustain him, if only briefly. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, General.”
“I know you and Epishev visited Greshko last Saturday. I know Epishev left the country the next day. I know you’re all involved in some kind of Baltic conspiracy – don’t waste my time or insult my intelligence, Lieutenant.”
“I have nothing to say.”
Stefan Olsky stood up and strolled around the apartment. “You have a comfortable life here, Dimitri. A good apartment, a car, a job that isn’t terribly taxing. And yet you risk throwing it all away – for what? Why do you feel you have to protect Greshko and Epishev? Do you imagine they’d protect you if the situation were reversed?”
Volovich, who saw the logic of the question, didn’t answer it. He looked down at the floor like a scolded schoolboy. He heard General Olsky move around the apartment, but he didn’t look. Once, Olsky passed just behind him, so close Volovich could feel the General’s breath on the back of his neck and smell his sweet aftershave lotion.
“I admire your loyalty, Dimitri. I understand your need to protect your superiors.”
Volovich still didn’t speak.
“But sometimes old loyalties have to give way to new ones, Dimitri. Just as old systems have to yield to new ones, if there’s going to be progress.” Olsky was quiet a moment. “I don’t approve of some of the methods used by my predecessor. I admit they got quick results, but the cellars of Lubianka are damp and they don’t feel quite right to me any more. Too medieval. Too crude. This is the late 20th century and Greshko’s barbarism is outmoded. I much prefer the idea of solving this business between us in a civilised way …”
Stefan Olsky sat down again. He looked at the darkness upon the window, the slight light cast there by a streetlamp. A faint wind rustled the thin young trees outside. He turned his eyes back to the wretched Volovich. He felt an odd little sense of pity for the man.
“Tell me the nature of this plot.”
“I don’t know,” Volovich said, raising his face to look at the General.
“Nobody told you, Dimitri? Am I to believe that?”
“Nobody told me. Correct.”
Olsky said, “I understand you have a mother, Dimitri.”
“Yes.”
“You were able to use your influence to have her admitted to a KGB-operated rest home on the Black Sea.”
“I only did what a great many people do.”
“I’m not quibbling with that. But you used your influence in the wrong way, didn’t you? Some people might construe it as misuse of privilege. Even a form of bribery.”
“Bribery?”
“In which case your mother would be obliged to move.”
“She’s sick, General.”
“There are hospitals.”
“If she were in a hospital, she’d be dead now.”
Volovich glanced inside the kitchen where a kettle had begun to boil. He pictured his mother, who suffered from incurable emphysema, being moved from her light, airy room in the sanitarium and taken to some dreary state hospital in a small drab suburban town, where care would be minimal and medication unavailable and nurses rude.
“Make your tea, Dimitri. You need it.”
With hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, Dimitri brewed tea, then stood inside the living-room and sipped it. He was quiet for a very long time, struggling with himself, seeing the sheer hopelessness of his situation. He said, “I don’t want her moved, General. She’s comfortable where she is.”
“I imagine she is,” Olsky said.
Volovich swallowed hard. He might have had a pebble in his throat. “I’d tell you if I knew, General. But I don’t know. They kept me in the dark.”
“You must have some knowledge.”
“I understood Romanenko was delivering a message to a contact in Britain. Then Romanenko was shot, the delivery didn’t happen and Epishev was sent to make sure nothing else would go wrong.”
Olsky felt a little flicker of fatigue go through him. All afternoon long and throughout the evening, he’d been dispatching KGB agents to the major cities in the Baltic countries, to Riga, and Vilnius, and Tallinn, hundreds of agents, under strict orders to act with stealth and the appropriate discretion in their inquiries. Dissidents, refuseniks, political deviants – these had been rounded up quietly and taken from their homes and questioned, then returned as swiftly as possible. Apartments were ransacked, files removed, documents studied. The operation brought forth a number of unexpected prizes, although none of them was related to the Baltic plot. A musician in Vilnius had an illegal mimeograph machine, a Jewish writer in Tallinn was in possession of a large amount of foreign currency, a cache of heroin had been discovered in the apartment of a physician in Riga, and in the Latvian city of Valmiera a professor of physics had a collection of several hundred precious icons. At any other time, Olsky would have been pleased with these results, but not now. They brought him no closer to the truth he really wanted.
“You must have gathered some impressions, Lieutenant.”
Greshko and Epishev, who sometimes seemed to share a common language Volovich couldn’t penetrate, had never really made him an intimate part of the plan. “A few,” Volovich said. “The truth is, I really didn’t want to know.”
“A conspiracy against your country, and you didn’t want to know?”
“I worked with Colonel Epishev for twenty years –”
“And you’re close friends –”
“Yes, we are –”
“And you couldn’t let him down –”
“Correct, General.”
Olsky sighed. “Tell me your impressions.”
Volovich put his tea-cup down. “I understood the plot’s aim was an act of terrorist aggression inside the Soviet Union.”
“But not in the Baltic republics?”
“I don’t think so, General.”
Olsky asked, “Where in the Soviet Union? And when?”
“I don’t know.”
“Moscow? Leningrad? Kiev?”
“I swear I don’t know –”
“And what kind of terrorism? Bombs? Assassinations?”
“My impression is that there’s a plane involved. The att
ack will come from the air – but I’m guessing now.”
“From the air?”
“Yes, General.”
“But that’s impossible,” Olsky said, just a little too quickly. Ever since a foolish West German teenager had contrived to fly a small aeroplane directly into Red Square two years ago – to the general humiliation of the authorities – defences had been strengthened. It was boasted now that they were impregnable, even if Olsky knew that ‘impregnable’ was one of those illusory words of which the military was so fond.
“One would have thought so,” Volovich said. “I just wish I knew more.”
Volovich lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. General Olsky walked around the room, examining books and phonograph records. He picked up a copy of Trud from the table and flipped through the pages. He believed Volovich because he understood that a minion like Dimitri would not be made privy to essential information. He’d drive cars, and carry messages, and act as liaison, and he’d pick up information here and there, but his role would never be very significant. Greshko, even more possessive in old age than he’d ever been, more like a sharp-clawed cat than before, would have seen to that.
“What happens to me, General?” Volovich asked.
“Until I decide, you’re under house arrest. You’ll answer your telephone as you usually do, and if anybody calls from your office you’ll say you’re sick with cold, whatever. Apart from having this very severe chill, you’ll sound otherwise perfectly normal.”
“And when my cold is cured?”
Olsky didn’t answer the question. He stepped out of the apartment and stood on the landing. He looked down the stairwell, seeing through pale lamps the shadow of Colonel Chebrikov waiting in the foyer. Olsky descended, nagged by the realisation that he’d been looking for the sources of this Baltic business in all the wrong places. Common dissidents, writers, dreamers, Jews, applicants for exit visas – he had reached into the predictable areas for suspects, when he should have been looking elsewhere. An aeroplane. What kind of people were in a position to help an aeroplane carry out an act of aggression, an act of terrorism, against the Soviet Union? The answer was obvious, and yet painful because it involved powerful men who were sensitive when it came to their domain, which was nothing less than the air defences of the country.
He crossed the lobby to where Chebrikov was standing. The young Colonel, who stood at attention whenever Olsky was within his line of vision, said, “There was a call for you on the car radio, General. From the Kremlin. The General Secretary wants to see you. Urgently, sir.”
Manhattan
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company, Frank,” Max Klein said when he stepped inside the hotel room and heard the sound of Kristina singing in the bathroom. He fidgeted with his bow-tie, a polka-dot affair that drooped, then sat down in one of the two easy-chairs in the place. He had a way of entering rooms, softly on sandals, that suggested the movements of a retired cat-burglar a little embarrassed by his habitual stealth. Even his feathery hair seemed stealthy on his skull, as though it would whisper secretively were a breeze to blow through it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Pagan said. He didn’t have time for explanations of Kristina. He might have told a narrative of Soviet repression, the story of a man whose family had been destroyed years ago, and how Norbert Vaska was imprisoned in Siberia, but Pagan had no real urge to familiarise Klein with all this background, nor with how Kristina Vaska had swept into his world. The sound of the shower stopped, but Kristina didn’t emerge and there was only silence from the bathroom for a long time.
Klein stared at the bathroom door a moment, then took some papers out of his jacket. Like everything else that found its way into his pockets, the papers were crumpled and creased, and he had to spread them on the table and smooth them before they were manageable. “Do you know how easy it is to set up a corporation in this country, Frank?” he asked. “It doesn’t take much, I’ll tell you. A lawyer draws up articles of incorporation, you pay the guy his fee – anything from three hundred to a thousand dollars – and you file the articles with the Corporation Commission, and that’s it. Unless you’re a known felon, you’re the President of your own company within a matter of moments. A piece of cake.”
Pagan leaned across the table to look at the papers Klein had spread out. Klein said, “These documents represent a triumph of corporate maze-making, Frank,” and he pushed some photostat sheets toward Pagan, who was hoping only to hear a bottom line, not a digression on the illusory nature of corporate structures.
“Carl Sundbach operated a company called Rikkad Inc.”
“Then he was responsible for hiring the Jaguar?”
“Not quite,” Klein said. “He turned ownership of Rikkad over to another company named Piper Industries – they make belts for vacuum cleaners – but he stayed on as Chairman of the Rikkad board. Rikkad, incidentally, supply paper products to hotels. Not only was he Chairman of Rikkad, he was also CEO of Piper, so he’d sold his company to himself. High finance baffles me, so don’t ask questions about tax strategies, because I don’t have answers.”
“Where is this going, Max?”
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there.” Klein turned over some more sheets of paper. “Look at this. Piper Industries, in turn, is a subsidiary of something called – drum rolls, please – Sundbach Enterprises, which was sold five years ago to none other than Rikkad Inc. The snake swallows its own tail and Carl was lying when he said he’d sold his company to another outfit. When you look at the names of the corporate officers in each case, only two names reappear. Carl’s, and somebody called Mikhail Kiss, who is apparently the financial VP of all three companies.”
“But who the hell leased the bloody Jaguar?” Pagan asked.
“To find the answer to that baby, we have to ask Kiss, don’t we? If he’s financial Vice President, he’s got to have some kind of information about what flows in and out. And since it costs approximately eight grand a year to lease a Jag with insurance from the company on Long Island – I checked it, Frank – it’s the kind of expense he’s not exactly going to overlook.”
Corporate mazes, funny paperwork, networks that swallowed themselves. Pagan gazed at the papers just as Kristina stepped out of the bathroom. Affected by slight awkwardness, Pagan made the introduction. Kristina, with a social charm he hadn’t noticed about her before, shook Klein’s hand and showered him with attention, as if he were suddenly the most important thing in her world – it was quite a knack and the small man looked as if he’d had an encounter with an angel. Pagan marvelled at the easy way she made small talk with Max Klein, then the grace with which she apologised for interrupting. She drifted to the window, turned her back on the two men, saying she hadn’t meant to disrupt them. Max Klein protested – her kind of interruption, hey, he could stand that any day of the week.
Pagan watched her, saw the way her shirt tapered into the narrow belt of her blue cotton pants, and how her damp hair glistened in the fading sunlight. He was struck by wonder at the way she commanded his attention, by her grace and quiet elegance, and how the sunlight made a soft outline of her at the window.
“I’ve got an address for Kiss,” Klein answered. He opened his notebook and found the page he needed. He showed it to Pagan, to whom the address meant absolutely nothing.
“He lives in Glen Cove, on the Island,” Klein said. “The phone’s unlisted. I could get it if you needed it.”
“I don’t,” Pagan said. “I’d rather go in person.”
“Now?” Klein asked.
“Why not?”
Kristina moved directly behind Pagan, one hand laid on his shoulder with a proprietary intimacy he enjoyed. She said, “I’ll wait for you here if you like, Frank.”
Pagan stood up. He looked directly into the woman’s dark eyes, seeing sympathy in them, and insight, and he realised nobody had looked at him in quite that way since Roxanne. He was moving in other dimensions here, and enjoying them, even if he wasn’t sure
where they were ultimately taking him. She kissed him lightly on the side of his face.
“Take care,” she said.
Moscow
The office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was located in the Palace of Congresses at the Kremlin. It was painted in shades of brown and lit by concealed spotlights, each of which played quietly and artfully on the man’s large desk, creating the impression that the Secretary was on a stage, the central player in an unfolding drama. The room, though vast, was stark in its furnishings. Thick brown curtains hung day and night at the window and the outer edges of the room were forever in gloomy shadow, and impenetrable. The General Secretary was middle-aged, the youngest leader of the Soviet Union since the Revolution, and wore no medals upon his chest in the fashion favoured by his bombastic predecessors. His style of governing was relaxed, at least in public, and low-key, and he enjoyed the rapport he’d established with the ordinary people. He took frequently to the streets, plunging among the workers, shaking hands until his flesh was bruised, listening to complaints and disappointments and promising to put things right. His was a new Russia, a different kind of Soviet society which, while forging ahead into unmapped regions, had to take pains not to offend and isolate the old – a difficult and rather delicate balancing-act, and a conundrum whose solution would take many years.
But the General Secretary was a determined man, and steely, and he’d been playing Party games for most of his adult life and so knew how to bend Party opinion in his direction, at least much of the time. He knew how to use patience to work the older members, those quietly sullen men who remembered Lenin and had survived the ravages of Stalin’s ways. He knew how to use charm when he encountered stubbornness, and when charm failed him he knew the best way to be rid of the ‘ideologically backward’ was to send them to distant oblasti where they assumed grand titles and exercised absolutely no power. He knew how to use persuasion when it came to slowing down those of his own followers who wanted to hurry everything, men of excess and unbounded impatience, whose qualities of dedication were needed but whose temperaments were not.
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