The Charm School

by Nelson DeMille

  Hollis did not look toward Surikov, but he could tell by his tone of voice that Surikov, usually cool as ice, was agitated. Hollis said, “Well, that’s very good of you to stand guard over the peace. However, something leaked, and before it gets misunderstood or before it gets into the wrong hands, I want to control it. But first I have to understand it.”

  Surikov refolded his newspaper, and Hollis allowed himself a glance at the man and saw on his face a troubled expression. Hollis said, “Tell me what you know and how you know it.”

  “First tell me what you know.”

  “I know to ask the questions about the place. That’s all you have to know.”

  Surikov replied, “I have to think this over.”

  “You’ve been doing that since the first day you contacted me a year ago.”

  “Yes? You know my mind and my soul? You’re not even Russian.”

  “Neither are you, General. You’re a Muscovite, a Soviet man, and we’re both modern military men. We understand each other.”

  “All right,” Surikov said decisively. “I have thought this through. I want to get out.”

  “Then consider yourself out.” Hollis finally found a worm and threw the apple core to the sparrows. “Good luck and thanks.”

  “I want to get out of here. Russia.”

  Hollis knew what Surikov had meant. Sometimes, as with troublesome spouses, you had to begin negotiations by packing their bags for them.

  “I want to spend my last days in the West,” Surikov said.

  “Me too.”

  Surikov didn’t respond.

  “Do you think they’re on to you?” Hollis asked.

  “No, but they will be if I give you what you want. I want to go to London.”

  “Really? My wife’s in London. She didn’t like it here either.”

  “How long will it take you to get me to the West?”

  “It’s about a four-hour flight, General.” Hollis got a perverse pleasure in reminding Soviet officials of the kind of state they had created. He added, “You apply for a travel visa, and I’ll see to the Aeroflot reservation. One-way, correct?”

  “You mean to tell me you can’t get people out of here?”

  “It’s not real easy. You guys got a hell of a good police force.”

  “Don’t think that if you keep me here, I will continue to feed you secrets, my friend. If you can’t get me out, I am retiring from your service.”

  “I told you that was okay.”

  “I am going to the British.”

  Hollis wiped his hands on his napkin. Losing an agent who panicked and quit was one thing; losing him to another service was quite another. The new theory was to let a source leave anytime he wanted and not try to squeeze him as they’d done in the past. Squeezed agents inevitably got caught, and then the KGB found out everything he’d given away and took steps to fix things up. But if Surikov went to the Brits and got blown later, Hollis might never know that Surikov was singing in the Lubyanka.

  “Or the French,” the general said. “I speak passable French. I could live in Paris.”

  “If you go to the French, you might as well go right to the KGB and save time. They’re penetrated, General. Most of them hold secondary commissions in the KGB.”

  “Don’t try to frighten me. The Germans are my third choice. So now the choice is yours.”

  “Well, I’ll take it up with my people. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that it’s dangerous. For you.” Actually, Hollis thought, it was more that they didn’t want to. Some politicians loved a high-ranking defector, but for intelligence people, a defecting spy told the KGB the same thing as a captured spy, namely that everything that had come across his desk was now in enemy hands. Surikov had either to go on spying for him or just retire and shut up. But since he seemed inclined to do neither, Hollis thought a car accident was what Surikov needed. Hollis, however, didn’t like that sort of thing and hoped he could think of something more creative. “We’ll think it over. You too. The West is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Don’t joke with me, Colonel.” Surikov chain-lit his third or fourth cigarette.

  Hollis took a Pravda from his briefcase. He read modern Russian fairly well—bureaucratic Russian, journalese, communist Russian. But he had difficulty with Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and the like, and he thought he’d enjoy working on that someday if he lived long enough to sit in a rocking chair with Tolstoy.

  He stole a glance at Surikov, who seemed actually to be reading his Pravda, The Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Reading it and believing it, in some monstrous display of triple-think. These people, Hollis decided, were hopeless. Hopeless while they were in country, childlike and bewildered when you got them out and gave them their first copy of The Washington Post or London Times. Hollis perused a piece under the headline: Afghanistan Is Fighting and Building. Hollis read: Soviet-Afghan political and economic ties, which go back to V.I. Lenin, have a long history and serve as a vivid example of good-neighbor relations.

  Hollis glanced again at Surikov. The man had been fed empty calories for the brain all his life, and it was no wonder his intellect was malnourished. Hollis realized he had to be careful how he handled this man.

  Surikov said as he rustled a page, “You understand, Colonel, that if I give you what you are asking for, neither you nor I should remain in Russia.”

  “Is that so?” Hollis recalled the first time he had met General Surikov. Surikov had approached him directly a year ago at a reception given by the Yugoslav ambassador on the occasion of Yugoslav Independence Day. Surikov had said in English, “Colonel Hollis, my name is Valentin Surikov.” Surikov was wearing the uniform of a Red Air Force general, so Hollis had replied with the required military courtesy, “Pleasure meeting you, General.”

  Surikov had continued, almost matter-of-factly, “I wish to pass sensitive documents to your government. Tell whoever it is who handles such things to meet me at the Finnish ambassador’s reception next week.” Surikov had then walked away.

  Hollis himself had shown up at the Finnish reception.

  Now, sitting here in Dzerzhinsky Square a year later, Hollis agreed with Surikov that one way or the other he and Valentin Surikov were coming to the end of their dangerous liaison.

  Surikov looked over his newspaper at a group of men leaving through the front doors of Lubyanka. Surikov said, “You asked for the information. I gave you my price.”

  Hollis too noticed the men standing in the front of the KGB headquarters. There were six of them, talking and gesturing. They seemed in a good mood, Hollis thought. But why shouldn’t they be? They were the police in a police state.

  Surikov seemed to be getting anxious. He said quickly in a voice that Hollis could barely hear, “If you know anything about the facility at Borodino, you will know that getting me out of here is a cheap price for what I can tell you.” Surikov added in one of his practiced American phrases, “It will blow your mind, Colonel.”

  Hollis smiled behind his newspaper. His eyes moved again to the Lubyanka across the square.

  It was a rather handsome Italianate building of eight stories. The first two stories were grey granite, and the upper floors were cement stucco painted that old mustard color the Russians seemed fond of. It was one of the few buildings in Moscow with clean windows, and he could see people at work under sickly pale fluorescent lighting.

  What had always struck him about the place was its location, right in the heart of Moscow, a stone’s throw from a children’s department store in a square where tens of thousands of people saw it every day. Here was a place, Hollis thought, where thousands of Soviet citizens had been tortured and shot, a place referred to by Intourist guides as the electric power authority, and Muscovites, if they referred to it at all, whispered the despised name: Lubyanka.

  Yet neither the KGB nor the Soviet government had the good grace to remove the facility, and it stood as a monument to brutality.
But perhaps they knew what they were doing. It did remind one, did it not? Hollis couldn’t help but think each time he saw the place that he ought not to be doing things that would put him in there.

  Hollis looked away, but the image of the place stayed in his mind’s eye. He asked, “Do you know a KGB colonel who calls himself Burov?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Hollis watched as the six men in front of the building split up. Four headed toward Hollis and Surikov.

  General Surikov stood. “We have been here quite long enough. I will be at Gogol’s grave next Sunday at one.”

  As usual, Surikov picked a place that would send Hollis leafing through his Michelin guide. “Tomorrow, General.”

  “Sunday, Colonel. I need time.”

  “All right. Alternate rendezvous?”

  “None. Gogol’s grave. Sunday. One P.M. And you will tell me how you are getting me to the West, and I will give you half a secret. I’ll give you the second half when I’m in London.” Surikov tucked his Pravda under his arm and picked up his attaché case. He seemed anxious to leave but stood motionless as the four KGB approached. They looked at Hollis and Surikov with that keen eye of appraisal that Hollis had come to associate with muggers looking for an easy mark. They slowed their pace, then continued on.

  Surikov, quite pale, Hollis noticed, turned without a word and crossed the square.

  Hollis waited for Felix Dzerzhinsky’s spiritual kin to reappear in the square and arrest him, but nothing happened. Life went on, the criminals—Hollis and Surikov—had once again foiled the organs of state security.

  Hollis sometimes wondered if this game was worth his life. But this time he thought of Greg Fisher’s life, which was over, and Major Jack Dodson’s life, which was in the balance. And he thought of Ernie Simms and the thousand other fliers whose families and whose nation had given them up for dead. Hollis thought that maybe, if he did everything right, he might bring them home again.

  Hollis watched Surikov disappear into the throng of people who were laying siege to Detsky Mir. “I suppose,” Hollis said to himself, “that it would be the lines that caused me to defect. I hate lines.”

  No, Sam Hollis reflected, I do not like General Valentin Surikov, though I’m not sure why. But Hollis had just learned not to underestimate him. Hollis admitted that Surikov’s motives for treason were not base—Surikov had never taken a ruble, a dollar, or a banked Swiss franc. Nor had he bothered Hollis for things from the American embassy stores. But Surikov’s motives were not lofty either. He had had no ideological conversion as far as Hollis knew. And according to Surikov’s own account, he had not suffered any personal harm from the system, no one in his family had spent time in a camp or internal exile. In fact, General Surikov did not have to join the crowds at Detsky Mir to buy his grandchildren toys. He had only the inconvenience of moving through the common people on his way to the Berlin Hotel, where he was headed for a decent meal. Surikov belonged to the communist aristocracy, the nomenklatura, who had shop-at-home service and special stores, who lived a life of gross hypocrisy and privilege unknown in even the most class-stratified societies of the West.

  Then one day, Hollis thought, for reasons known only to himself, Valentin Surikov decided he didn’t like it here anymore. He wanted to live in London, though he’d never been outside the Soviet Union as far as Hollis knew. And it wasn’t a scam as Hollis had determined early on. The Surikov stuff was top grade—Red Air Force postings, unit designations, command assignments, and so forth. Stuff no spy satellite could tell you. Apparently Surikov was a—or the—personnel officer for the entire Red Air Force, though he never gave out that piece of information.

  Now General Surikov had indicated he had the airfare to London and wanted Hollis to arrange the transportation. Half on booking, half on arrival. Hollis nodded to himself as he stuffed his Pravda in his coat pocket. There was a way out, but it couldn’t be used too often. Hollis didn’t know if he wanted Surikov to live in London. Surikov deserved to live in Moscow. Served him right.

  Hollis wanted to go back to the embassy now, but the gentlemen of the KGB’s Seventh Directorate—the embassy watchers—having lost him in Red Square, would at least note his time of return to the embassy compound. Somehow Hollis felt that the longer he was gone—like some errant spouse (like his errant spouse)—the more annoyed the watchers would become. So he decided to kill an hour in the State Polytechnical Museum. Maybe it was worth a visit. He was a sucker for redheads anyway. Hollis stood, removed his Lenin pin, and threw it to the ground. He picked up his briefcase and turned toward the museum.

  He thought of his wife Katherine in London. Running Surikov was one reason he couldn’t take leave to go settle things with her there. Now Surikov might get to London before him. The ironies on this job were endless. “Endless,” he said aloud.

  Lisa Rhodes popped into his mind though he’d tried to push her out of it all day. He realized he felt responsible for her safety, which might be one of the reasons he hadn’t called her. He wanted the involvement, but since he always felt like a moving target, he didn’t know if he wanted her near him. These dilemmas hadn’t bothered Alevy, apparently, as Hollis had discovered in the Arbat antique store.

  In this business, Hollis had observed, men’s relationships with women often fell into two categories: professional/sexual or sexual/professional. Alevy, he knew, preferred the former. Hollis was comfortable with neither.

  Hollis decided that maybe he ought to ask Lisa Rhodes what she thought.

  15

  Sam Hollis entered the bowling alley in the basement of the eight-story embassy chancery building. There were three games in progress. The place was stuffy, and Hollis bought a Heineken at the bar, then took a seat at an empty lane. He noticed four female FSPs—Foreign Service Personnel—on the adjoining alley laughing and drinking. He recognized three as secretaries and one as a nurse. They all wore jeans and T-shirts. The nurse, a petite blonde, looked at him. Her T-shirt read: Gee, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

  Hollis smiled. The woman winked at him and turned back to her game. Hollis sipped on his beer. He watched them bowl. There was something oddly frenetic in the way they bowled, drank, and laughed, he thought, as though their mainsprings were wound too tight. He half expected them to fall to the floor in five minutes.

  On the lane to his right were a married couple, Bill and Joan Horgan. He was in the FAS—Foreign Agricultural Service; she taught at the Anglo-American School. With them were their two teenaged daughters. Bill and Joan gave him a cheery wave. The girls looked bored senseless. One of them, Hollis recalled, was prone to hysteria and weeping.

  Two lanes farther down, four Marines in civilian clothing were rolling balls. The Marine watchstanders, as they were called, numbered about twenty. They were handpicked for their height, bearing, intelligence, and quite possibly their looks, Hollis thought. As per Marine regulations, they were unmarried. These facts had caused some problems, most notably the sex-for-secrets scandal at the old embassy.

  Russia, Hollis thought, more than any country he’d ever served in, changed you. You went in as one person and came out another. An American, whether a tourist, business person, or embassy staffer, was the center of attention and under constant scrutiny, from the locals and from the state. You woke up with tension, lived with tension, and went to bed with tension. Some people, such as Katherine, fled. Some cracked up, some became mildly idiosyncratic, some betrayed their country, and some, such as Lisa, embraced the Russian bear and danced with it, which, Hollis reflected, might be the only way to get out with most of your marbles.

  The bowling lanes and the adjoining spaces doubled as a bomb shelter, and Hollis sometimes wondered if the day would ever come when he would be watching the automatic pinsetters while waiting for an American nuclear strike to obliterate central Moscow above.

  Seth Alevy walked over and sat on the bench beside Hollis. Alevy swirled his scotch and ice cubes as he regarded the four women. “Right
,” Alevy said at last, “we are not in Kansas. We are below the Emerald City.”

  One of the secretaries threw a strike, did a little victory jig, and slapped palms with her teammate. Hollis said to Alevy, “You want to roll a few sets?”

  “‘Frames.’ No.”

  The ambient noise cover down here was good, Hollis knew, and any bugs planted during construction were ineffective, as were the KGB directional microphones in the surrounding buildings. Which was one reason, Hollis understood, that Alevy liked to meet here. But the other reason that Alevy had not requisitioned one of the safe rooms in the chancery was that Alevy suspected those rooms were bugged by State Department Intelligence. As the CIA station chief in Moscow, responsible ultimately for all American intelligence in the Soviet Union, Seth Alevy had no intention of being bugged by a minor league bunch such as State Department Intelligence. Alevy was only slightly less disdainful of Hollis’ Defense Intelligence Agency. Alevy had a better psychic relationship with the KGB, Hollis thought, because they didn’t pretend to be his friends.

  Alevy asked, “Did Ace show?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he help us with this?”

  “I think so.”

  Alevy nodded. “Why did you think he could, Sam?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “You didn’t expose one of our best assets in the Soviet Union to a personal meeting with you on a hunch.”

  “Ace is Red Air Force. Dodson is—or was—U.S. Air Force. I went with that.”

  “That’s pretty thin. Now that we’re alone, why don’t you tell me everything the French couple told you, then tell me what you did and saw on the way to Mozhaisk. Then tell me what Ace told you tonight. And while you’re at it, tell me things I haven’t even thought to ask you about this case.”

  “I’m really into interservice rivalry, Seth. I’m protecting my own petty little fiefdom. It gives me a sense of worth and importance.”