The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  “You’re insane,” Melko said with as much admiration as appreciation.

  “It makes life more interesting.”

  “If you live.”

  Lenya thumped his chest in mock defiance. “I’ll outlive you, comrade.”

  Which might not be such a noteworthy achievement, Ezdovo thought. The unprovoked attack in the Zone meant that the Special Operations Group had touched a raw nerve. But whose? “We’ve got to call Talia and the others.”

  As they cut through dark streets he tried to look at the papers he had taken off the two assailants. Each man had an ID card that looked normal except for a huge red X stamped across its face. He passed the cards to Melko, who handed them on to Lenya. “Wolf tickets,” Sarnov said as he led them toward a monastery.

  “KGB?” Ezdovo asked.

  “Border guards,” Lenya said. “If one of them fucks up too often or at the wrong time he gets shot. A few are spared and given wolf tickets. The X across the card means that the holder of the card is officially dead, but is being given one final off-the-record chance to redeem himself. If he fails again—” Lenya drew a finger across his throat as he led them to a small office near the entrance to the monastery. “There’s a telephone in here.”

  It occurred to Melko that Petrov and his team also had wolf tickets.

  93SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 1961, 8:00 P.M.Paris

  The first item of business after their return to Paris was to get the blank passport numbers to the embassy. The station chief agreed to notify Interpol that the holder of any of the documents was wanted for questioning in the United States and should be detained. Names were to be ignored; all that mattered were the numbers. The CIA man was happy to help but doubted that anything would come of it because most immigration officers were not likely to be attentive to passport numbers unless there was a payoff for them. “Tell them he’s suspected of killing children,” Sylvia said. “They might be a little more careful if they think they’re passing a murderer over their border.”

  “I’ll add hotels to the request,” the station chief added. “Call it a second line of defense.”

  Sylvia placed her telephone call to Barrie from a secure phone in the embassy. “The prints belong to an unidentified male whom we know only as the Major,” Barrie reported.

  “A man without a name has known prints?”

  Barrie stammered. “There’s an explanation. We believe that he’s linked to several Albanian groups, but his precise role and of course his identity are unknown. Four years ago we got the same prints at the site of a murdered informer. Subsequent information described the Major as an enforcer-courier with ties to Albanians in a score of European cities. We’ve had several descriptions of the sorts of things he’s done, or is alleged to have done, but nobody has come forward to corroborate any of it. The Albanians seemed to be afraid of him, but their fears can now be put to rest. The prints prove that he’s dead, and that’s all we require to close his file.”

  “That’s all you have?”

  “You might try your own resources,” Barrie said curtly. “You have everything from me.”

  “Did you do ballistic tests on the Paris shootings?”

  “Naturally.”

  “They matched?”

  “I believe so,” Barrie said vaguely. “The files are in a different office.”

  “We’d like copies of your ballistics photos and data sent to Washington.”

  Barrie paused to consider the implications and then became defensive. “You question our technical competence?”

  “Just send them to the embassy tonight,” Sylvia said sharply. She was tired of being nice. Frash had been close, but now he was gone again and this asshole was concerned about the honor of the Sûreté. What had happened to old-time cops who cared only about results? It was a pain in the ass to wade through evidence that might not pertain, but the only way to make sure you didn’t miss anything was to cover everything.

  “May I ask if you have talked to Mr. Li?” Barrie asked sheepishly.

  “You may ask anything you like,” she said and hung up.

  They ate dinner at a small restaurant near the hotel where waiters screamed out orders and drowned out each other and their customers’ conversations. Sylvia stared at a plate of snails. “He went to the woman for the passports,” she said as she traced the spiral of a shell with her finger.

  “Reasonable thinking on his part,” Valentine said. “The passports give him more flexibility, but the fact is that Europe’s borders are like sieves. A blind man on a donkey could make his way across without being detected.”

  “Lumbas was killed and Frash disappeared. Why didn’t he check in?”

  “Maybe he thinks the Company is part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

  Sylvia made a face at him. “Help me with this. If he thinks the Company is a threat to him, why does he stay in Europe? And if he can go virtually anywhere in Europe without a passport, why go to the trouble of getting them from the woman?”

  “Frash is crazy. You can’t use logic on a nut case.”

  “So we just give up?”

  “That’s not what I said.” Valentine sipped his coffee. Since Ermine’s death it had seemed that nothing made much sense and there had been times when he had thought that if he had just one worthwhile thing to focus on, his life would have meaning again. But all he had was an army-surplus business, which was the sort of thing that you left to a son of diminished capacity. When Arizona had approached him about Frash he had hoped that this would be what he needed, but it was not working out.

  Sylvia saw Valentine’s hangdog look but tried to ignore it. Why had Frash told the VanderLeyden woman that cockamamy story about his money being tied up in a London bank? More to the point, how was he living if he was no longer drawing a government check? “Money,” she said out loud.

  “How much?” Valentine asked, thinking she meant the restaurant bill.

  “Not that,” she said. “He needs money for expenses.”

  “Most of us do.”

  “Dammit, listen to me. He’s been on the run since November. What’s he living on? Arizona said that REBUS was working for money. Given the sort of information Lumbas had, the amounts could be substantial.”

  Valentine’s eyebrows crept toward each other. “In the old days we kept stashes for times like this.”

  “We need to get to his banks to freeze his accounts.” She threw a handful of wrinkled francs on the table and headed out of the restaurant with Valentine trailing behind. “Zurich,” she said.

  “Gnomes,” he said. It was the first word that came to mind.

  “Exactly,” Sylvia said.

  94TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961, 2:30 P.M.Moscow

  The candlelit church had been packed with crook-backed old women with their heads bowed reverently and chanting off-key in response to a line of priests singing Mass in an alcove filled with faded icons in gold-leaf frames. The nave smelled of incense, aged bodies and hundreds of tallow candles. Lenya wedged his companions through the worshipers and down a side corridor where they encountered a priest with a square black beard and wild eyes seated on a thronelike wooden chair at the end of the hallway. “My friends wish to pray with Brother John,” Lenya told the priest, who kept his eyes on the prayer book in his lap.

  After passing through several rooms and up a steep set of steps, Lenya stopped on a landing and did something to the underside of a handrail which caused a panel to open in the wall. When the three of them were inside, the panel closed and they were engulfed in dark, stale air.

  “Where are we?” Melko asked.

  “No talking,” Lenya answered. His voice had lost its lilt and had taken on an unexpected somberness.

  The room began to rise, stopped, shuddered, slid sideways, stopped, shook and began to descend, the downward journey taking several minutes. All the while the temperature rose, leaving the three of them sweating. When at last they stopped they crawled into a dark room and Melko immediately stumbled and sent
something clattering. “Bones,” Lenya said quickly. “Mind your step.” They walked for nearly fifteen minutes through a maze of passageways turning left and right, this way and that, moving away and doubling back—or had they? Melko had no sense of direction down here. Eventually they reached another room and were led down a long, curving stairwell dimly lit with small kerosene lanterns and so narrow that Melko’s shoulders rubbed both walls. Tunnels at the bottom led off in several directions but Lenya ignored these, turned to a wall and pointed to indentations in the stonework. “Handholds and footholds. We climb up about four meters onto a floor. Crawl away from the edge and wait. There are vertical shafts everywhere. When we move, touch the shoe of the one in front of you.”

  When they were up Lenya crawled past them. Now and then Melko felt around with his hands and located one of the shafts they had been warned about. After a while Lenya said, “Careful, there’s a hole here. There’s a ladder, but you have to lower yourself onto it. Go down feet first, rest on your forearms, stabilize, then lower yourself with your hands. When you’re fully extended, feel around with your toes for the holds, get a foot seated, then slide your hands along the edges of the stones. The footholds alternate, but it’s only a meter until you get to the ladder and it’s easy from there. It feels trickier than it is.”

  The ladder was where Lenya said it would be, but he had not said that it would take another fifteen-minute, nonstop descent to negotiate it. The bottom was bathed in darkness, and once again they traveled horizontally, this time along a tunnel with wooden timbers that Melko felt with his hands. “Fresh timber.”

  Ezdovo said from ahead, “I can smell it.”

  Eventually the tunnel veered left and ended at a metal door, which Lenya opened and locked behind them. Then he flicked on a light switch and announced, “We’re in.”

  Now they saw that they were in yet another complex of tunnels. They walked through a large recess filled with tall stacks under canvas tarps and finally reached a small room with bunk beds and other furnishings, including a sanctum with a gilt crucifix and a set of icons. Lenya shed his coat, blessed himself and knelt before the crucifix, then turned to them. “You’re safe here and welcome to stay as long as you need to.”

  “Where is here?” Ezdovo asked.

  Lenya lit a brass samovar. “Some would say we’re under the Church of St. John, though to expect anyone to find us with such vague directions would be foolish.” When the tea was brewed he poured for them. “I’m sure you’re thinking that now the debt has been paid,” he told Melko, “but it’s not. Secular debt is one thing, but here our debts are only to the Almighty. This is His refuge for all true believers, but it’s only temporary. The true refuge comes with death.”

  “I believe in nothing,” Melko said, “except preserving my carcass for as long as I can.”

  Lenya laughed. “If you believe in your own survival you believe in something. All people believe in something; they can’t help it. To wait for the bus is to believe that it will come and that it will deliver you to your destination.” The former gulag inmate seemed a different man here from the one in the streets above.

  “I mean I don’t believe in God or an afterlife or any of that,” Melko persisted.

  “There’s no good reason to believe now.” Lenya smiled. “At the moment of death all doubt will be mercifully removed.”

  Ezdovo wondered what this fellow Sarnov had led them into. He had the air of a priest, but in the darkness he had moved with the confidence and surefootedness of a veteran scout. Ezdovo had tried to telephone Talia, Gnedin and Bailov outside the monastery, but had not reached any of them. He had been on the verge of panic but had not let on to Melko. In the Zone the former zek had hovered in the window as the attack began, and only later did Ezdovo see the gesture for what it was; Melko had covered for him, and in that simple act had declared his commitment to the team. But real trust required time, so he kept his concerns to himself and refused to let his worries about Talia’s well-being undercut his ability to think clearly. The lack of contact with the others suggested that the entire unit had been assaulted, but he knew that imagination could be worse than reality. When he had been unable to reach the others Lenya had offered them refuge, but Ezdovo was uneasy about hunkering down for too long. The best tactic against a surprise assault was immediate counterattack. When he had called the hospital and inquired about the condition of the patient in Room 301, he had been told with no hesitation that no such room existed, which left no choice but to lie low. By now they had been underground for twenty-four hours and he felt a growing anxiety about Talia and their comrades.

  For much of the night Lenya had left them alone and they had slept fitfully. From time to time they heard muffled voices in the larger anteroom, and once the crying of a child that went on for what seemed like hours.

  Now it was early afternoon and they were anxious to move on, but Lenya had not returned, and without him there was no way to get out.

  Melko went into the larger room, found a pile with a tear in the canvas, peeled back the flap and saw stacks of Bibles.

  “We call this our armory,” Lenya said from behind him. Melko turned to find him in a brown cassock with a belt of wooden beads attached to a small cross.

  “You’re a priest?”

  Lenya smiled. “That’s a hotly debated question in certain circles.”

  “Bibles,” Melko said, looking back at the stacks around them.

  “The basic ammunition of our revolution.”

  Melko was not sure what to say. “The Revolution is long over, and those who won have a different view on the question of God.”

  “You can dictate policy and declare whoever you want persona non grata, but you can’t expunge the love of God from the human heart.”

  “You fight to preserve the Church?”

  Lenya smiled. “Russian generals think in terms of defense and preservation; the lessons of the Khans, Napoleon and Hitler are their precedents. We fight to win, which requires risk. This is the fortress of the Brotherhood of John the Avenger. In the world above we are known by other names and bound by the rules of the Party; down here we live by more enduring principles and by what the Party can never give—genuine hope. We are one million declared believers: Orthodox, Roman, Jew, Baptist, a dozen denominations. In the end we will prevail.”

  “A million is nothing. Hitler sent twice that and they were consumed.” Not to mention that they were armed with more than Bibles.

  “Our numbers are increasing. We are like a persistent disease that spreads slowly but eventually kills the organism. Khrushchev is the beginning of the end.”

  This was a crazy man’s rambling, nonsensical, without logical reference points. Melko was at a loss for words.

  “Listen to me,” Lenya said. “The Communists will pass, the Party will evaporate and the statues of Lenin will be toppled and smashed, just as the statues of Stalin now lie on their backs. Khrushchev has opened the door.”

  “Khrushchev?” This made even less sense. “He’s part of your revolution?”

  “He’s a peasant with a peasant’s instincts. Stalin was one of the czars, concerned only with himself; Khrushchev is opening us to the West. His vision is glasnost, openness. He’s denounced Stalin and the purges, and now he looks west toward capitalism. The world is smaller now and isolation is impossible. How long can the old ways continue when more and more of us know what exists beyond our borders? Missiles,” Lenya said, “these will be the instruments of our resurrection.”

  Melko could no longer look at his old gulag friend. Bibles as ammunition in a war that would lead to resurrection through missiles? Was Lenya in the opium trade and sampling his own wares?

  “It’s like this,” Lenya continued. “How many centuries did it take to replace the club with the spear and the spear with the bow and arrow?”

  “Don’t know,” Melko said.

  “A missile built today will be obsolete tomorrow, which means more money has to go into resear
ch and production, an overlapping of obsolescence driven by paranoia. To build the first missile puts us in a cycle that will eventually choke us. Khrushchev whets our appetite for Western goods but wants his missiles as well. In the long run the sheer cost of trying to do both will create an economic implosion, the house of cards trying to support an anvil will fall flat, and it will have been Khrushchev who started us down the road. If he were to fall now, all this might be reversed, but if he retains power for three or four more years the way back will be impossible. Eisenhower and other Western leaders have pushed us into an arms race, which we can’t win. Can a cobbler outproduce a factory?”