“How will you be carrying it?” asked Mishkin.
“Wrapped around with sheepskin coats,” said Drake, “and stuffed in a kit bag about three feet long.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Lazareff. “Someone is coming.”
When Drake returned to the Sanadria, the customs men had changed shifts and he was frisked. He was clean. The next morning he asked Captain Thanos for an extra spell ashore on the grounds that he wanted to spend the maximum time with his fiancée. Thanos excused him from deck duties and let him go. There was a nasty moment in the customs shed when Drake was asked to turn out his pockets. Placing his kit bag on the ground, he obeyed and revealed a wad of four ten-dollar bills. The customs man, who seemed to be in a bad mood, wagged an admonishing finger at Drake and confiscated the dollars. He ignored the kit bag. Sheepskin coats, it seemed, were respectable contraband; dollars were not.
The alley was empty, save for Mishkin and Lazareff walking down from one end and Drake walking up from the other. Mishkin gazed beyond Drake to the seaward end of the alley; when they were abreast he said, “Go,” and Drake hefted the kit bag onto the shoulder of Lazareff. “Good luck,” he said as he walked on, “see you in Israel.”
Sir Nigel Irvine retained membership in three clubs in the west of London, but selected Brooks’s for his dinner with Barry Ferndale and Adam Munro. By custom the serious business of the evening was left until they had quit the dining room and retired to the subscription room, where the coffee, port, and cigars were served.
Sir Nigel had asked the chief steward, called the dispense waiter, to reserve his favorite corner, near the windows looking down into St. James’s Street, and four deep leather club chairs were waiting for them when they arrived. Munro selected brandy and water; Ferndale and Sir Nigel took a decanter of the club’s vintage port and had it set on the table between them. Silence reigned while the cigars were lit, the coffee sipped. From the walls the Dilettantes, the eighteenth-century group of men-about-town, gazed down at them.
“Now, my dear Adam, what seems to be the problem?” asked Sir Nigel at last. Munro glanced to a nearby table where two senior civil servants conversed. For keen ears, they were within eavesdropping distance. Sir Nigel noticed the look.
“Unless we shout,” he observed equably, “no one is going to hear us. Gentlemen do not listen to other gentlemen’s conversations.”
Munro thought this over.
“We do,” he said simply.
“That’s different,” said Ferndale. “It’s our job.”
“All right,” said Munro. “I want to bring the Nightingale out.”
Sir Nigel studied the tip of his cigar.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Any particular reason?”
“Partly strain,” said Munro. “The original tape recording in July had to be stolen, and a blank substituted in its place. That could be discovered, and it’s preying on the Nightingale’s mind. Secondly, the chances of discovery. Every abstraction of Politburo minutes heightens this. We now know Maxim Rudin is fighting for his political life, and the succession when he goes. If the Nightingale gets careless, or is even unlucky, he could get caught.”
“Adam, that’s one of the risks of defecting,” said Ferndale. “It goes with the job. Penkovsky was caught.”
“That’s the point,” pursued Munro. “Penkovsky had provided just about all he could. The Cuban missile crisis was over. There was nothing the Russians could do to undo the damage that Penkovsky had done to them.”
“I would have thought that was a good reason for keeping the Nightingale in place,” observed Sir Nigel. “There is still an awful lot more he can do for us.”
“Or the reverse,” said Munro. “If the Nightingale comes out, the Kremlin can never know what has been passed. If he is caught, they’ll make him talk. What he can reveal now will be enough to bring Rudin down. This would seem to be the moment the West precisely would not wish Rudin to fall.”
“Indeed it is,” said Sir Nigel. “Your point is taken. It’s a question of a balance of chances. If we bring the Nightingale out, the KGB will check back for months. The missing tape will presumably be discovered, and the supposition will be that even more was passed over before he left. If he is caught, it’s even worse; a complete record of what he has passed over will be extracted from him. Rudin could well fall as a result. Even though Vishnayev would probably be disgraced also, the Castletown talks would abort. Thirdly, we keep the Nightingale in place until the Castletown talks are over and the arms-limitation agreement is signed. By then there will be nothing the war faction in the Politburo can do. It’s a teasing choice.”
“I’d like to bring him out,” said Munro. “Failing that, let him lie low, cease transmitting.”
“I’d like him to go on,” said Ferndale, “at least until the end of Castletown.”
Sir Nigel reflected on the alternative arguments.
“I spent the afternoon with the Prime Minister,” he said at length. “The P.M. made a request, a very strong request, on behalf of herself and the President of the U.S.A. I cannot at this moment turn that request down unless it could be shown the Nightingale was on the very threshold of exposure. The Americans regard it as vital to their chances of securing an all-embracing treaty at Castletown that the Nightingale keep them abreast of the Soviet negotiating position. At least until the New Year.
“So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Barry, prepare a plan to bring the Nightingale out. Something that can be activated at short notice. Adam, if the fuse begins to burn under the Nightingale’s tail, we’ll bring him out. Fast. But for the moment the Castletown talks and the frustration of the Vishnayev clique have to take first priority. Three or four more transmissions should see the Castletown talks in their final stages. The Soviets cannot delay some sort of a wheat agreement beyond February or March at the latest. After that, Adam, the Nightingale can come to the West, and I’m sure the Americans will show their gratitude in the habitual manner.”
The dinner in Maxim Rudin’s private suite in the Kremlin’s inner sanctum was far more private than that at Brooks’s in London. No confidence concerning the integrity of gentlemen where other gentlemen’s conversations are concerned has ever marred the acute caution of the men of the Kremlin. There was no one within earshot but the silent Misha when Rudin took his place in his favorite chair of the study and gestured Ivanenko and Petrov to other seats.
“What did you make of today’s meeting?” Rudin asked Petrov without preamble. The controller of the Party Organizations of the Soviet Union shrugged.
“We got away with it,” he said. “Rykov’s report was masterly. But we still have to make some pretty sweeping concessions if we want that wheat And Vishnayev is still after his war.”
Rudin grunted.
“Vishnayev is after my job,” he said bluntly. “That’s his ambition. It’s Kerensky who wants the war. He wants to use his armed forces before he’s too old.”
“Surely it amounts to the same thing,” said Ivanenko. “If Vishnayev can topple you, he will be so beholden to Kerensky he will neither be able, nor particularly wish, to oppose Kerensky’s recipe for a solution to all the Soviet Union’s problems. He will let Kerensky have his war next spring or early summer. Between them they’ll devastate everything it has taken two generations to achieve.”
“What is the news from your debriefing yesterday?” asked Rudin. He knew Ivanenko had recalled two of his most senior men from the Third World for consultations face-to-face. One was the controller of all subversive operations throughout Africa, the other his counterpart for the Middle East.
“Optimistic,” said Ivanenko. “The capitalists have screwed up their African policies for so long now, their position is virtually irrecoverable. The liberals rule still in Washington and London, at least in foreign affairs. They are so totally absorbed with South Africa, they don’t seem to notice Nigeria and Kenya at all. Both are on the verge of falling to us. The French in Senegal are proving more difficult.
In the Middle East, I think we can count on Saudi Arabia’s falling within three years. They’re almost encircled.”
“Time scale?” asked Rudin.
“Within a few years—say, by 1990 at the outside—we shall effectively control the oil and the sea routes. The euphoria campaign in Washington and London is being steadily increased, and it is working.”
Rudin exhaled his smoke and stubbed the tube of his cigarette into an ashtray proffered by Misha.
“I won’t see it,” he said, “but you two will. Inside a decade the West will die of malnutrition, and we won’t have to fire a shot. All the more reason why Vishnayev must be stopped while there is still time.”
Four kilometers southwest of the Kremlin, inside a tight loop in the Moscow River and not far from the Lenin Stadium, stands the ancient monastery of Novodevichi. Its main entrance is right across the street from the principal Beriozka shop, where the rich and privileged, or foreigners, may buy for hard currency luxuries unobtainable by the common people.
The monastery grounds contain three lakes and a cemetery, and access to the cemetery is available to pedestrians. The gatekeeper will seldom bother to stop those bearing bunches of flowers.
Adam Munro parked his car In the Beriozka parking lot, among others whose number plates revealed them to belong to the privileged.
“Where do you hide a tree?” his instructor used to ask the class. “In a forest. And where do you bide a pebble? On the beach. Always keep it natural.”
Munro crossed the road, traversed the cemetery with his bunch of carnations, and found Valentina waiting for him by one of the smaller lakes. Late October had brought the first bitter winds off the steppes to the east, and gray, scudding clouds across the sky. The surface of the water rippled and shivered in the wind.
“I asked them in London,” he said gently. “They told me it is too risky at the moment. Their answer was that to bring you out now would reveal the missing tape, and thus the fact of the transcripts having been passed over. They feel if that happened, the Politburo would withdraw from the talks in Ireland and revert to the Vishnayev plan.”
She shivered slightly, whether from the chill of the lakeside or from fear of her own masters he could not tell. He put an arm around her and held her to him.
“They may be right,” she said quietly. “At least the Politburo is negotiating for food and peace, not preparing for war.”
“Rudin and his group seem to be sincere in that,” he suggested.
She snorted.
“They are as bad as the others,” she said. “Without the pressure they would not be there at all.”
“Well, the pressure is on,” said Munro. “The grain is coming in. They know the alternatives now. I think the world will get its peace treaty.”
“If it does, what I have done will have been worthwhile,” said Valentina. “I don’t want Sasha to grow up among the rubble as I did, nor live with a gun in his hand. That is what they would have for him, up there in the Kremlin.”
“He won’t,” said Munro. “Believe me, my darling, he’ll grow up in freedom, in the West, with you as his mother and me as his stepfather. My principals have agreed to bring you out in the spring.”
She looked up at him with hope shining in her eyes.
“In the spring? Oh, Adam, when in the spring?”
“The talks cannot go on for too long. The Kremlin needs its grain by April at the latest, The last of the supplies and all the reserves will have run out by then. When the treaty is agreed upon, perhaps even before it is signed, you and Sasha will be brought out. Meanwhile, I want you to cut down on the risks you are taking. Only bring out the most vital material concerning the peace talks at Castletown.”
“There’s one in here,” she said, nudging the bag over her shoulder. “It’s from ten days ago. Most of it is so technical I can’t understand it. It refers to permissible reductions of mobile SS-Twenties.”
Munro nodded grimly.
“Tactical rockets with nuclear warheads, highly accurate and highly mobile, borne on the backs of tracked vehicles and parked in groves of trees and under netting all across Eastern Europe.”
Twenty-four hours later, the package was on its way to London.
Three days before the end of the month, an old lady was heading down Sverdlov Street in central Kiev toward her apartment block. Though she was entitled to a car and a chauffeur, she had been born and brought up in the country, of strong peasant stock. Even in her mid-seventies she preferred to walk rather than drive for short distances. Her visit to spend the evening with a friend two blocks away was so short she had dismissed the car and chauffeur for the night. It was just after ten when she crossed the road in the direction of her own front door.
She didn’t see the car, it came so fast. One minute she was in the middle of the road with no one about but two pedestrians a hundred yards away; the next, the vehicle was on her, lights blazing, tires squealing. She froze. The driver seemed to steer right at her, then swerved away. The wing of the vehicle crashed into her hip, bowling her over in the gutter. It failed to stop, roaring away toward Kreshchatik Boulevard at the end of the Sverdlov. She vaguely heard the crunch of feet running toward her as passersby came to her aid.
That evening, Edwin J. Campbell, the chief U.S. negotiator at the Castletown talks, arrived back, tired and frustrated, at the ambassadorial residence in Phoenix Park. It was an elegant mansion that America provided its envoy in Dublin, and fully modernized, with handsome guest suites, the finest of which Edwin Campbell had taken over. He was looking forward to a long, hot bath and a rest.
When he had dropped his coat and responded to his host’s greeting, one of the messengers from the embassy handed him a fat manila envelope. As a result his sleep was curtailed that night, but it was worth it.
The next day, he took his place in the Long Gallery at Castletown and gazed impassively across the table at Professor Ivan I. Sokolov.
All right, Professor, he thought, I know what you can concede and what you cannot. So let’s get on with it.
It took forty-eight hours for the Soviet delegate to agree to cut the Warsaw Pact presence of tracked tactical nuclear rockets in Eastern Europe by half. Six hours later, in the dining room, a protocol was agreed whereby the United States would sell the USSR $200 million worth of oil-drilling and -extraction technology at bargain-basement prices.
The old lady was unconscious when the ambulance brought her to the general hospital of Kiev, the October Hospital at 39 Karl Liebknecht Street. She remained so until the following morning. When she was able to explain who she was, panicked officials had her wheeled out of the general ward and into a private room, which rapidly filled with flowers. During that day the finest orthopedic surgeon in Kiev operated to set her broken femur.
In Moscow, Ivanenko took a call from his personal aide and listened intently.
“I understand,” he said without hesitation. “Inform the authorities that I shall come at once. What? Well, then, when she has come out of the anesthetic. Tomorrow night? Very well, arrange it.”
It was bitter cold on the evening of the last night of October. There was no one moving in Rosa Luxemburg Street, onto which the October Hospital backs. The two long black limousines stood unobserved at the curb by this back entrance which the KGB chief had chosen to use rather than the grand portico at the front.
The whole area stands on a slight rise of ground, amid trees, and farther down the street, on the opposite side, an annex to the hospital was under construction, its unfinished upper levels jutting above the greenery. The watchers among the frozen cement sacks rubbed their hands to keep the circulation going, and stared at the two cars by the door, dimly illuminated by a single bulb above the archway.
When he came down the stairs, the man with seven seconds to live was wearing a long, fur-collared overcoat and thick gloves, even for the short walk across the pavement to the warmth of the waiting car. He had spent two hours with his mother, comforting her and assuring he
r the culprits would be found, as the abandoned car had been found.
He was preceded by an aide, who ran ahead and flicked off the doorway light. The door and the pavement were plunged into darkness. Only then did Ivanenko advance to the door, held open by one of his six bodyguards, and pass through it. The knot of four others outside parted as his fur-coated figure emerged, merely a shadow among shadows.
He advanced quickly to the Zil, engine running, across the pavement. He paused for a second as the passenger door was swung open, and died, the bullet from the hunting rifle skewering through his forehead, splintering the parietal bone and exiting through the rear of the cranium to lodge in an aide’s shoulder.
The crack of the rifle, the whack of the impacting bullet, and the first cry from Colonel Yevgeni Kukushkin, his senior bodyguard, took less than a second. Before the slumping man had hit the pavement, the plainclothes colonel had him under the armpits, dragging him into the recesses- of the rear seat of the Zil. Before the door was closed, the colonel was screaming, “Drive! Drive!” to the shocked driver.
Colonel Kukushkin pillowed the bleeding head in his lap as the Zil screeched away from the curb. He thought fast. It was not merely a question of a hospital, but of which hospital for a man like this. As the Zil cleared the end of Rosa Luxemburg Street, the colonel flicked on the interior light. What he saw—and he had seen much in his career—was enough to tell him his master was beyond hospitals. His second reaction was programmed into his mind and his job : no one must know. The unthinkable had happened, and no one must know, save only those entitled to know. He had secured his promotion and his job by his presence of mind. Watching the second limousine, the bodyguards’ Chaika, swing out of Rosa Luxemburg Street behind them, he ordered the driver to choose a quiet and darkened street not less than two miles away, and park.
Leaving the curtained and motionless Zil at the curb, with the bodyguards scattered in a screen around it, he took off his blood-soaked coat and set off on foot. He finally made his phone call from a militia barracks, where his I.D. card and rank secured him instant access to the commandant’s private office and phone. It also secured him a direct line. He was patched through in fifteen minutes.