The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  Sylvia said, “We’ve got nothing else.”

  “Hell of a lot of work to set up something like this. You can’t just turn a key, and we’ve got to consider the fact that her husband is a honcho. I’ve got to think about political balances here, measure how this affects everything.”

  “You know about her husband?” Valentine asked.

  Gabler looked surprised as he nodded. “Small country like this, you get to know a lot about everybody—especially the main players.”

  “You’ve got to expedite this,” Sylvia said.

  “Her husband’s on the road with Tito and she wants out,” Valentine explained.

  Gabler rubbed his cheek. “This sort of defection could fuck up operations here, knock the status out of quo big time. Right now everything’s going smoothly with the Yugos.”

  “When she gets her ticket out, we get the name of the dead Russian; that’s the deal,” Valentine said. “If this jaybird was Frash’s asset, we’ve got to find out who he is and why he was killed. We need that name.”

  “This is getting complicated.”

  “It’s our only lead, Harry,” Sylvia said in her partner’s defense.

  Gabler leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. “I probably could get her to Turkey on my own, stash her there for a while, then move her on after I make other arrangements. Would she buy an intermediate stop?”

  “We didn’t talk details, Harry, but she’s desperate. My guess is that she’ll buy anything with an exit sign.”

  “If we had to, we could probably stash her in Israel temporarily,” Gabler said to himself. “We’ve got a solid working relationship with the Mossad. If it went smoothly it would look like their operation, which would help reduce the heat here; they could help us repatriate her later on. Either way, though, there’ll have to be an intermediate stop. I can’t send her straight through to the States until they’re ready for her on the other side. Maybe I can sell it on the basis of her old man being close to Tito; she’s probably got information the Israelis and we could both use.”

  “Will you need to clear this up the line?” Valentine asked.

  “Not all the way, at least not initially. I can move her to Turkey on my own authority, but after that the deputy director for operations will have to clear the transfer to Israel or Stateside.”

  “What’s the time frame?”

  “If we get in gear now, I can be ready to move her out in seventy-two hours and I mean so thoroughly that it will look like Martians lifted her off the planet. Impress on her that there mustn’t be any change in her routine, no sloppy good-byes and no damned suitcases. We’ll pick her up between breaths, and poof, she’s gone. She tell you how to contact her?”

  “She said she’d get back to me.”

  “Don’t like that,” Gabler grumbled. “I’d rather have control at this end.”

  “Can’t be helped. We play the cards in the order they’re dealt.”

  “No shit,” Gabler said. “We’ll need a pick-up point.”

  “Name it,” Valentine said.

  Gabler described the place and circumstances of the pick-up. “Tell her that if she varies one iota from our instructions, she’s on her own.” I hate this shit, he thought. For now it would be all right, but when it was over there would be diarrhea again. That and the shakes. This time his wife would walk for sure; she had begged him to quit for years, but now the begging had turned to threats: either he quit or she would. It was his choice, she had screamed. But it was no choice at all; you did what you had to do. Twenty years eliminated choices, and the Company’s clout outweighed hers.

  43 SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 1961, 5:00 P.M.Odessa

  The day was overcast, with high humidity and no breeze; the inside of the sanatorium was sweltering but Petrov looked comfortable with a wool blanket draped across his lap. When the team came into the room they saw six black leather wallets arranged in a line on a small table. The first was open, revealing the Red Badge inside, a red circle with a silver hammer and sickle in the middle. The power afforded the holder of such a device was awesome; no Soviet citizen could deny him anything, the penalty for noncompliance being death. For the possessor of the Red Badge there was allegiance only to the individual who had bestowed it, and only the most powerful man in the federation had that power. The Red Badge had been invented by the czars and was but one of the many things the Communists had adopted from the royal regime. Under the czars badges had looked different, but the concept was identical and the power so immense that the Red Badge took on mythical proportions.

  “Time to begin work,” Petrov began. Melko, Bailov, Gnedin and Talia would go to Moscow; Ezdovo would remain with him.

  Talia would report to Khrushchev, move into his household and assess and manage his personal security. Bailov and Gnedin would attempt to track Trubkin and Lumbas, while Melko would open an old and improbable connection to the KGB, and see to the team’s accommodations. They would work together and report to Talia, who in turn would report back to him, her position in the General Secretary’s retinue providing access to secure communications.

  “Where will you be?” Talia asked when Petrov had finished.

  “Here,” he said. “You don’t need an old man’s interference.”

  This brought glances among the old team members. Petrov had almost always been with them and at the center of their activity, but now he would stay behind. This change worried Talia.

  Each of them left the meeting carrying a Red Badge, its psychological weight greater than that of a loaded weapon. And more lethal.

  44 MONDAY, MARCH 13, 1961, 3:00 P.M.Lamoura, Franche-Comté, France

  The cabin was thirty kilometers north of Geneva, not an elaborate place, but isolated and well situated at the end of a limestone valley reachable only by foot, all of which made it ideal for what he had in mind. Frash had moved cautiously through the rocks and found a place from which he could watch. There were still large patches of crusted snow and translucent blue ice among the rocks on the northern slopes; a stream flowed below the cabin, a twisting, cascading silver rivulet of clear water filled with smooth boulders, deep pools and long stretches of riffles. Idyllic, Albert thought; for an execution ground, Ali chimed in.

  Albert had done a lot of thinking since Belgrade. Back issues of Parisian newspapers had offered as much misinformation as information; to get answers he had to read between the lines and think backward. Now he knew he had some of the pieces of the puzzle—not how they fit, but that eventually they would fit, and that the main piece was Myslim.

  A bastard product of their mother’s affair with an Italian diplomat, Myslim had been thought dead in Europe’s postwar chaos. Their mother’s indiscretion had come before the marriage to Frash’s father and was not something she discussed. Before Ali’s birth the new stepfather had adopted Myslim and given him his surname and the legitimacy that came with it. During this period the Italians had put Zog on the throne and created modern Albania in the process; that Mussolini would depose his puppet seemed certain, so the elder Frascetti took his wife and stepson to France, where Ali was born. If not for the Nazis, Myslim might have gone to America with his family, but he had true Albanian fire, meaning that vengeance overrode more reasonable values, honor and revenge being eternally linked in the Land of the Eagles.

  In America the family name was changed from Frascetti to Frash, and in keeping with this Ali was christened Albert, his Americanization complete. His parents were intellectuals; his father’s foray in Albanian politics notwithstanding, their true habitat was the university. After brief stints at CCNY and Bard College the professors Frash found positions at Boston College, and there they remained until four years ago when they died less than six months apart. Frash felt no grief over their passing. He harbored no great interest in death or a fantasy afterlife. As a boy he had explored such concepts, using various domestic animals and his mother’s hat pins. It had been these experiments that led to his sojourn at Brampton Academy, where they had pack
ed him away like a rare specimen and watched him around the clock. But he had found ways to subdue his turmoil there, learned the importance of appearances, all of this with not a single thought for Myslim, who was a presumed casualty in the war against the Nazis. Thinking back so far is unfruitful, he reminded himself; it opened pockets of memory better left sealed.

  But the gates had already been opened and the memories flooded back.

  Maine a long time ago. He remembered switchbacks up a mountain of black pine forest and a wooden shack in a meadow. A morning when the dew was heavy. A wicker basket filled with eight beagle pups, soft, wiggling, clumsy creatures not yet weaned from their mother’s teats. A revolver in his hand, too heavy for a toy and shiny as a new dime. A familiar hand stroked his neck, patiently instructing, urging him on. Then there was the smell of gunpowder in the air and eight lumps of tan and black fur, still as statues but warm. Then his mother’s voice. “Yes, that’s good for the first time but you must keep your eyes open. It will get easier,” she had promised, and it was true. Mother was never wrong. The pups were buried in a common grave without prayers.

  She was forever talking about Albania and Zog, the jackal and dog, pseudoelitist, betrayer of their people. Thrones belong only to the strong, she often said, but the getting is less difficult than the keeping. Your father had the stomach for neither, Zog only for the easy part and then only because the Italians backed him. “Your father wanted to join Zog—to fight them from the inside was his rationale, but you can’t fight from the inside and still be a man. Your father failed, Ali. We fled. Will you?” Mother’s dream, ill drawn, fuzzy but full of promise and carefully inculcated in her son, her stories repeated over and over until they were his, as real as his own memories, the vicarious indistinguishable from that which he had lived. Even at Brampton she had been there whispering, reinforcing the dream in him, trying to will him to freedom. When the CIA opportunity came she pressed him to take it, and later gave him the names of men in Paris who could be relied upon.

  Think, he urged himself, play it all back, dissect it. Still no sign of Myslim at the cabin. Would he just walk in or approach cautiously? Myslim was a professional and a survivor; he would come like a stalking cat, he guessed, sniffing the wind, watching everything; if not, he would know that Myslim was an instrument. But in whose orchestra?

  Like all people, Venema and Arizona had seen only what they had wanted to see. Professionals were human and therefore weak. Mother had taught this: give them what they want, then take what’s yours. He had met Arizona at BC, introduced by a Jesuit septuagenarian who saw government service as a calling nearly as sacred as his own. Crown and Church, hand in hand, as it had always been, Loyola’s Soldiers of God. A week spent in Atlanta with Venema taking test after test and then the results: high intelligence, independence, strong self-image, self-reliance, language competency, focused thought, analytical skills; he had passed them all, knew he had beaten their system even as he neatly scratched marks on paper with a No. 2 pencil. It had been more thorough than he had anticipated for a preliminary psychological screen. Only later did he learn why; it was not a preliminary but a final exam, and soon thereafter intensive one-on-one instruction at the Farm in Virginia, a whore brought in every Saturday night at nine, a Tex-Mex puta with no name, a mustache and a tattoo of a coiled red-and-blue rattlesnake on her left breast. I suck but I don’t swallow, she said.

  Mother said there was no need to fear background checks; his bona fides would hold up, had been seen to, false birth certificate and all, with no possible link to France or Albania. But tell them about Brampton; that, too, had been covered. She gave him a name to use. Ours, she explained, and loyal. So easy because it was what they wanted and needed. He guessed that he was some kind of experiment, but exactly what and the reasons for it were not clear to him. Once among them he had risen, learned his lessons, angled for Paris with a goal rather than a plan. Ali Frascetti, Albert Frash, Ali and Albert, the two, the one, rising together to fulfill a mother’s dream.

  Then Myslim had appeared. Unexpectedly, illogically, suddenly.

  Still no life around the cabin. Mother’s words: “Leave your mark on our enemies. Keep both eyes open. Those who die deserve it. Do what your father could not. If only Myslim had lived; together the two of you would be unstoppable.” Now Albert knew she was wrong about that, and he wondered what else she had been wrong about.

  Zog no longer mattered; Hoxha and the Communists ruled now; they were the enemy, and his people were awaiting their deliverance. The Kennedys had looked through his mother, made her into nothing, just as Hoxha had turned their country into a nonentity. A man needed to remember such things if he was indeed a man. Mother understood this.

  How would Myslim come to him? Still too early. It would not happen until dark.

  45 MONDAY, MARCH 13, 1961, 7:02 P.M.Belgrade

  Vicki Peresic had given Valentine the addresses of six public telephones. He was to be at the first one at 7:00 A.M. on Monday, wait three minutes, and leave if there was no call from her. If a phone rang he was to answer it only after the second ring. He was to repeat the same procedure with a different phone two hours later and so on until all six locations had been covered, and after that there was another cycle of six in the same order as the first. If there was no contact after two full cycles, he would know she was no longer interested. Or worse.

  This was the first station of the second cycle; there had been no contact in the first cycle, which came as no surprise. Gabler had told Valentine she would probably call in the evening when the streets were filled with crowds of home-bound government workers. Now he was in a decrepit train station next to a public toilet that stank and the sound of the phone was so feeble that he nearly missed it. He picked up after the second ring and said, “It’s on.”

  “When?” Peresic asked. Her voice was hard to hear.

  “Seventy-two hours after delivery.”

  “Not fast enough,” she said, and he heard fear in her voice. “I have an unexpected guest coming.”

  Her husband. “When?”

  “Thursday morning.”

  “I’m not sure we can accelerate that much.”

  “There’s no choice,” she answered sharply, but she did not beg and he admired that.

  “Is this line secure?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. “How do I get details to you?”

  “Shorten the sequence to one-hour intervals and I’ll keep calling,” she said; then the line went dead.

  Sylvia did not like the suddenness; there was too much room for error. When he asked, “What’s the alternative?” she had no answer.

  46 MONDAY, MARCH 13, 1961, 9:20 P.M.Lamoura, Franche-Comté, France

  He could not see the crows but he could hear them in the distance, their lookouts yapping at a main group, their sharp eyes recording details their tiny brains couldn’t process; anything they saw that didn’t fit their meager memories or suspicious natures would be assumed foreign and therefore dangerous. Or interesting. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Mother said Kennedy’s campaign office had been guarded by young men in dark suits. His crows. Frash felt no kinship to the crows; he had been in control, with everything going smoothly, and then Villam had been murdered and in that instant everything was rendered suspect. Since then anything that didn’t fit what he knew with certainty was dangerous, and Myslim was the epitome of something that no longer fit. His mother had had the same experience in the Bellevue Hotel. His brother had trudged purposefully up the valley floor before sundown, neither circling nor being circumspect but going straight on, shoulders squared with resolve, or resignation perhaps. The fact that he walked openly in the light was enough; it told Frash what he needed to know. Actions speak louder than words, Mother’s voice warned from the memory bank; your father is proof of this. A half brother was no brother at all, an insight proven correct once again. Villam was dead, and it had been Myslim who had delivered Villam to h
im. A brother’s gift, he had said, and Albert had taken it at face value, seen what he wanted like a common mortal. Kill the bastard, Ali growled menacingly, but for the moment Albert had more strength. No killing until we get what we need. There is duty to be done even in a containment operation.

  At the time Myslim had come to him, it had seemed like fate, though Frash had never believed in such a force: one made one’s own fate. An informer on the fringe had come to him with the story of a Russian named Ivanov said to be six months out of the Motherland via Helsinki and now officially cloaked in asylum, a French bestowal, the Frogs well known for not being picky about who they let in. Ivanov had royal blood, French kin and self-touted knowledge of certain classified tidbits about improvements in Soviet air defense radar. He was skeptical; only the rare Russian émigré had anything of value to offer, and most of them were unabashed bullshit artists, but you never knew until you checked them out. The Communists had done a thorough job of convincing their subjects that capitalism was a process that allowed bullshit and fantasy to be traded at even par for hard currency.

  The meeting was set for a room above an obscure bookshop in the Latin Quarter. The simple arrangements demanded by the Russian both encouraged Frash and inflamed his more suspicious nature; amateurs preferred to make things hopelessly complex. Frash was to ask the clerk if he had any of Chekhov’s journals; if the meeting was on, the answer would be “In the special section above.” Any other response meant it was off, a simple-enough plan that suggested a professional hand. Perhaps Ivanov would be the rare find, or else something entirely different. The KGB made an art of using émigrés to entrap and compromise Western agents; as the CIA’s chief of station in Paris he had no doubt that the Soviets had made him. No fear, of course, but he had been professionally cautious in approaching the rendezvous, and more curious than usual. The bookstore clerk was male, young, balding, effeminate. French culture embraced extremes; so, too, did America’s, but the difference was that the French knew themselves while the Americans did not. Except for the Kennedys, who gave thumbs up or down.