The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  The animal misjudged her position and came floating in too high. Lejla was certain she could feel its body heat and smell its foul, matted coat as it came closer. When it was nearly over her, she twisted her left shoulder away and delivered a waist-high slash with the knife, striking something solid. The animal landed hard to her left and squealed once before she struck again with the knife, this time at the throat.

  For a second she stared at the steam rising from the dead animal’s fur, but the next assault came almost immediately. This time there were three dogs side by side, and only a growl by one of the attackers saved her. She stepped toward them, fired the pistol four times, aiming at their sounds, but was knocked down by a heavy blow to her right side. The dogs howled and snapped and she felt pain in her right shoulder, but she managed to roll away and get back to her feet, maintaining her crouch. An animal with glowing red eyes was beside her, looking up. She shot once at the eyes and they disappeared. She backed up and felt pain in several places, but oddly enough it seemed distant, as if it belonged to someone else. Strangest of all, she felt calm.

  Were they all down? How many more? She kept turning her head to look for movement, trying to compensate for poor night vision. What did dogs see in the darkness? Details? Heat outlines? Black and white?

  There was a new sound now from her left, the opposite direction of the initial charge. Whining. No, she corrected herself, it was whimpering. A whimpering dog. Moving? Yes, but slowly. Crawling? Did she wait or go for it? Attack the attacker, Kasi had thundered. You set the rules, reverse roles. Don’t wait; go toward it.

  She moved toward the sound, then saw a lean, light-colored cur on its belly, inching forward, its bushy tail swinging rhythmically from side to side. Submission? She relaxed and stepped toward the animal, then stopped. There were nothing but enemies in the dark, Kasi had said. How many shots were left in the automatic? Kasi’s voice again: Always count. Four the first time. Then one. Five total. Four left in the clip; a second clip in her left jacket pocket, left side. Keep spare clips in high front pockets, not low or in trousers; the higher they are, the less likely they are to be lost. Change clips now? The dog was closer now, panting, wiggling with anticipation, the movements of a young animal, but when she feinted toward it, it lifted its head suddenly, snarled and gathered itself for a leap. She calmly shot twice, killing it in place, then removed the clip, shoved a new one into the grip, chambered a round and listened for more attackers. The night was silent. She moved toward the bodies of the other animals and found one of them trying to drag itself away. She killed it with the knife, not wanting to waste bullets, then squatted to get a better view of the area.

  “To kill a beast in the darkness is easier than killing a man in daylight,” Kasi said from the shadows. “A dog has no ability to plan or to develop alternatives. The human mind is always superior to animal instinct.”

  “Is it finished?” she asked.

  “It’s never finished,” Kasi said. He sounded amused.

  Lejla collapsed. When she regained consciousness she was on a wooden table in a cold room. Her shoulder felt heavy, her left leg stiff. She looked at her left thigh and saw a line of jagged flesh pulled together with crisscrosses of black thread, the ends of the sutures snipped off and standing up like new shoots in a garden. The sheet under her was bloodsoaked and damp. Where were her clothes? She was sleepy. Had they drugged her?

  “She did well,” she heard Kasi say.

  “With dogs,” Mehmet Shehu whispered back. “What about infection?”

  “Always possible, but I cleaned her wounds thoroughly. They’re deep but clean, and there’s no muscle damage. She’s young and she’ll heal fast, but there’ll be a scar.”

  “Unimportant.”

  “A shame to ruin such young flesh.”

  Shehu ignored the comment. “How long until she can function again?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Make it ten days. You’re going to take a trip.”

  “More training?”

  “No,” Shehu said. “It’s time we began sending some signals to our enemies.”

  26 TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1961, 10:15 A.M.Moscow

  When the telephone rang, Nikita Khrushchev stared at the several telephones on the credenza behind his desk and tried to figure out which one to pick up. There were seven of the devices, but only the black one had a receiver and body that matched. One a week went on the blink and the replacement parts were always a different color. How was it that capitalist engineers could route multiple telephone lines into a single device but Russian specialists could not? When the army was reduced he would build up production of consumer goods, and telephones would have a high priority.

  “What?” He said into the receiver. There was a buzz. There was always a buzz on the line.

  “Gnedin. Your man was injected with what should have been a lethal dose of aminazine. His blood levels of the drug and of vodka were enough to mummify Amenhotep.”

  “This was the cause of death?”

  “Should have been, would have been. Who can say? The cause of death was a broken neck and massive trauma. A vehicle, I would say. Maybe he stumbled into the Chaika lane.”

  “Odd coincidence,” the General Secretary said.

  “Coincidence is a political concept,” the doctor said, “not medical. You wanted the cause of death, and now you have it.”

  Khrushchev replaced the receiver and rubbed the mole on his cheek. In the Soviet Union there was no such thing as coincidence. Trubkin had been murdered, clear and simple. The Lumbas business had been one thing but with this death it was something more, and he was sure in his gut that it was the start of something, not the end point. A wolf pack began its hunt long before its prey could detect the stalk. In his belly he knew now that he was being targeted for something, but the hunters and their game were hidden. Who? he asked himself. Who? Why was obvious; somebody else wanted power. It was always so. But there were ways to deal with such problems, he told himself. Stalin’s ways.

  27 TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1961, 12:45 P.M.Belgrade

  They were installed in a first-floor flat in a nondescript block of apartment buildings in the northern part of the city. It was a cramped apartment with a short entry hall, a kitchen, two narrow bedrooms and a bath. The flat was poorly furnished and dimly lit with fringed red shades. There were no chain locks on the door, so they rigged a chair for security. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it might slow them down. Valentine wondered if he still had the reflexes necessary to react. It was too late to worry now; in time, he would know.

  Gabler had given them two black shaving kits containing two .32 caliber automatics with no serial numbers, several twelve-shot clips and four screw-on silencers. These were a professional’s tools, the silencers made of ordinary washers glued together, good for only a few rounds each. Sylvia explained, “After you use the silencer for a few rounds, you bash it on the wall, then scatter the washers so that there’s no evidence.” They set the weapons aside, unpacked their suitcases, opened their briefcases and reviewed what they knew.

  Frash had an interesting but unremarkable record. Born in 1929 in Boston. Attended Brampton Academy in Massachusetts and graduated from Lafferty Academy, an exclusive Manhattan prep school. A degree in Balkan history from Boston College, cum laude. Recruited into the Company in February 1951; assigned to West Germany that fall. Transferred to Cyprus in the spring of 1953, then back to Washington, D.C., that same summer. Short tour also unusual. Several assignments over the next four years: Holland, Belgium, Rome. In January 1960 moved to Paris as CIA chief of station—young for that, only thirty-one; five months later went to Belgrade as a legal resident, not station chief. Demotion? Single, apparently never married. Expert in judo and jujitsu. Fluent in French, German and Russian, with passable Italian. Parents deceased, no known siblings. Bank savings of $17,000 and four hundred shares of IBM common stock, substantial but not excessive.

  “Nothing much,” Sylvia said. “Obviously smart, well-
educated, good record, but no detail on the sorts of things he’s done for the Company. A few months in Germany and a few months in Cyprus. Doing what?” She made a note to herself. “Then a string of unremarkable assignments before the promotion to Paris, a real plum even with de Gaulle in place. But only five months there, then a transfer to Belgrade. Why? And not as chief of station. His choice or the Company’s? Did he screw up in Paris? Then after fifteen months in Belgrade, poof, he disappears.”

  Valentine frowned and tapped his pencil against his cheek. “We need more details on this guy. Who were his parents? What were his politics? Never married. Did he have girlfriends? Or boyfriends? That could be an angle.”

  “Being single is not exactly abnormal,” Sylvia said. “Single does not mean homosexual.”

  “He’s thirty-two and has never married. Okay, not abnormal but not common either, so we flag it.”

  “Maybe he likes the freedom.”

  “If it’s that simple, fine. The point is, we need to know one way or the other. Who in the Company knows him? What kind of a man is he? When I look at this”—Valentine held up the typed biography—“I get a lot more questions than answers. Our job is to find him, but we don’t even have a lousy photo. With what we know right now we couldn’t locate him if he was sitting on our crapper.”

  “I suppose I get to do the legwork?”

  Valentine laughed. Sylvia was wearing a black sweater and straight gray skirt that tended to ride high when she crossed her legs. “You said it, not me.”

  She ignored the innuendo. “Arizona can help get us more information. Given the time Frash has been missing, we have to assume he’s been taken out, but as it stands now, we don’t even know where to start looking. You can’t find a needle in a haystack until you at least find the haystack. We need to know why he was in Paris such a short time. It’s strange to promote a man, then move him so quickly.”

  “What did Arizona tell you before we left?” Valentine asked.

  “That Frash had been sent here to run a very special asset,” Sylvia said.

  “I heard the same line, but when I pressed him he clammed up.”

  “To pull him out of a station-chief position suggests it was something fairly spectacular.”

  “It would help a bunch if we had some details.”

  “Security of the asset comes first,” she said.

  “My only rule is that there ain’t no rules.”

  “It’s a different trade now. Boxes within boxes, nothing ever in focus for very long.”

  “All the more reason not to be saddled with rules,” Valentine answered. “If you have rules, you can be damned sure that the other side knows them, which puts us at a disadvantage. If Frash is so all-fired important, why send us? It would make more sense to send somebody in his chain of command, somebody already in the operational stream.”

  “Arizona sent others,” Sylvia said in his defense.

  “Fine, but why not keep them on it?”

  “Maybe they are. Maybe we’re redundant: one team within channels, one outside. There’s some logic to that, and it wouldn’t be unusual.”

  “He didn’t tell us about the others, or that there had been evidence of Frash going back and forth to Paris, or that Gabler filed his own investigation report.”

  “Maybe he already knows and our job is to verify—like a blinded experiment. It boils down to compartmentalization.”

  Valentine opened his last pack of cigarettes. “You a big believer in logic?” he asked Sylvia.

  She nodded. “Aren’t you?”

  “Hardly ever.”

  28 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1961, 9:30 P.M.Moscow

  For two years the monthly journey from Vinnitsa to Moscow had been a drudgery that Colonel Bailov accepted as part of the job. During most of this time he resented the trips because they took him away from his troops, but that was B.R. Before Raya. As commanding officer of the First Independent Spetsnaz Brigade, Bailov had landed the dream job of a professional soldier. With the exception of his monthly journeys to Moscow to confer with his superiors in the Fifth Directorate of the GRU, his time belonged to himself and his regiment, and what a regiment it was! Before Raya. Not that the regiment had lost importance since she came into his life, but he now understood that a life that was only work left a lot to be desired. Raya provided something that had been missing for too long.

  In 1947 Bailov had been recruited by the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (military intelligence), and three years later he was sent to the Military Diplomatic Academy in Moscow. There the “elephants,” as the instructors were called by their students, imparted the basic education needed by those who would divest the enemies of the Soviet Union of their military secrets. Much of what he learned in the program was new and interesting, but from time to time he was reminded of what he had been through with Petrov. In 1952 he graduated, and after another year of special GRU training, he was posted to Spetsnaz, a new organization.

  The First Brigade was an experiment. Ordinarily such units were attached as companies or battalions to regular Red Army divisions or embassies, but various wars of liberation in the world had persuaded Soviet military leaders that elite, independent brigades might one day prove useful in foreign interventions. In his new career, Bailov had acquitted himself with confidence, enthusiasm and intelligence, and under his leadership the First Brigade was quickly molded into a hard-bitten elite unit, envied by other Spetsnaz groups and loathed by the regular army.

  As commanding officer of the First Brigade, Bailov was required to be in Moscow one week of every month. Usually he departed on a Sunday, worked at GRU headquarters in Moscow Monday through Wednesday and caught a return flight on Thursday or Friday. For two years these monthly trips had been without incident, but seven months ago fate had intervened.

  It had been a Thursday in a week without rain; the parks were filled with scantily dressed Muscovites soaking up the rare sun, and elderly members of fishing clubs were on their wooden perches in the Moscow River. Bailov even remembered the time: 10:00 A.M. He had planned to return to Vinnitsa on an afternoon flight, but some idiot in the Fifth Directorate had convinced the GRU hierarchy that Spetsnaz training should include a specially developed survival course, and parts of the study had been given to several officers, including Bailov. Rather than wait for his next trip to Moscow to begin the assignment, he delayed his departure till Friday night. He had learned long ago to finish promptly all tasks from Moscow Center; many of them never panned out, at least not into anything he could detect, but he always got his job done in less than the assigned time. It had occurred to him that some of the tasks might be tests of his dependability, so he took them seriously; those at the top were always looking downward, suspicious of ambitious subordinates. It was not that he hoped for a higher position; all he wanted to do was hold on to what he had, which was more than most Russians could dream of.

  It was pure chance that he had met Raya at all; normally she worked at the library on Tuesday mornings and all day Wednesdays. But someone was ill, or claimed to be ill, which was more likely, and she was at the library at a time when she normally wouldn’t have been. His task was to compile a list of all the edible birds in southern Russia. He guessed that a dozen men in his brigade could give him the information, but why take a chance even with a half-witted assignment?

  Bailov’s first impression of Raya Yermolaevna Orlava was nothing dramatic. She stood behind an oak counter. Short brown hair, unbecoming glasses with heavy, dark frames. A sleeveless black dress of lightweight cloth, no jewelry, no cosmetics, her fingernails trimmed straight across like a man’s. He was wearing a summer-weight uniform, his tunic covered with ribbons, and above these his paratroop wings. When she looked up at him he had the feeling that her mind was still partly on the journal she had been reading. “The military section is in another building,” she said. Her voice was strong, accustomed to exercising authority.

  “Birds,” he said.

  “Birds?” Her e
yebrows lifted almost imperceptibly.

  “I’m interested in birds indigenous to southern Russia.”

  She pursed her lips and stood, her chair creaking as she rose. “A field guide?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Something comprehensive. I’m assigned to make a report on edible species.”

  She grimaced. “Very few ornithological studies address the edibility of species.”

  “There must be something”—he lifted his hands in a sweeping gesture—“among all this.”

  “Size is not an indication of quality,” she said flatly as she moved around the desk. “How much time do you have?”

  “I leave Moscow tomorrow night.”

  “I have my own time constraints,” the woman announced. “I’m not a librarian.”

  “But you were behind the desk.”

  “I am the curator of the ornithological collection, comrade, and a professor.”

  He apologized. If she would point him to a librarian, he would take no more of her time.

  “There is no one else,” she said. “I’m alone. If you wish to be helped, it will have to be me.” She eyed his epaulets. “Colonel, isn’t it?”

  “Bailov,” he said. “Communications.”

  “A colonel of communications with parachute wings who has an interest in edible birds?”