A Very Private Plot (19 page)

Blackford spoke frankly, gave to Bolgin everything he wished to hear, factual details sparing only continuing intelligence operations; he was glad to talk to Bolgin about what had motivated him, Blackford, to do this, or to do the other—intimacies which he had never felt free to share with any of his own countrymen. Sally, by mutual agreement, was generally excluded from details of his operations. The code within the CIA prevented him from talking about details extraneous to the operation, including those that touched on Blackford's frame of mind. But he could share these with his archenemy, because Bolgin needed no familiarization with the tangential perspectives. They were in the same business and could talk to each other as professionals. The code that barred a CIA agent from divulging to another CIA agent who did not need to know the particulars of an engagement did not operate here. There was no code detailing what you could or could not reveal to a defector who would remain in Moscow, and work from there for what had been the enemy. And Bolgin was glad to talk about his own experiences. Blackford learned details he hadn't known, and shivered over the closeness of past escapes.

And of course there was, finally, the business at hand.

It was ten at night when Blackford went to the elevator. Boris said he would allow fifteen minutes to pass before leaving to go to his own apartment.

CHAPTER 24

OCTOBER 1986

Serge thought—why not?—he might as well walk down Tchaikovsky Street and go by the embassy; maybe Gloria was working late, might just run into her. That wouldn't mean defying Dad's orders, exactly. And anyway, he wouldn't mind seeing what the derelict embassy looked like. It had received a lot of attention in recent weeks in America. In documenting the vulnerability of the unoccupied new embassy to intrusive Soviet intelligence, the State Department did not proceed to drop its objections to the old, inadequate embassy. The decision to abandon it for a more modern building with adequate facilities had, after all, been reached in the late sixties.

Moscow's street lights flashed on as Serge approached it and discerned the two Soviet guards at parade rest outside the large iron gates. He stopped to observe one of the guards leaving his post to open the gates and let a limousine slip out. The ambassador, presumably.

Serge approached the guards and spoke in Russian. “Hello, my name is Serpei and I am visiting from Kiev. This is the U.S. Embassy, is it not?”

They did not answer him.

“Oh come on now, tovarich. I would not treat
you
that way if
you
were visiting in Kiev. Our security guards there are very friendly. It isn't as though I were a threatening character,” he laughed.

He succeeded. One of the guards said, “We are not supposed to speak except to people who seek entrance into the embassy. I will pretend that you are asking me to let you go in, so I can speak to you. Yes, it is the embassy. The hours are nine to twelve and two to five. But a Russian from Kiev—why would
he
want to visit the U.S. Embassy?”

The guard snorted, or at least that was what Serge made the sound out to be. “Maybe they would give you a tourist visa to visit America, but would our ministry give you an exit visa?” The other guard joined in the raillery.

“Well,” said Serge, “I am in Moscow for the first time, to take the art course with the curator at the Kremlin museum. I like to wander about and see this fabulous city.”

“You are allowed to come in during official hours by simply requesting to look at the U.S. Information Agency library, which has books and foreign periodicals. Many students do that. But we would then take your identification papers and put them in the registry.”

Serge chuckled good-naturedly. He did in fact have an emergency I.D., a Kiev graduate student's university pass, but not with him. The rule was that he must never simultaneously keep on his person that I.D. and also his conflicting U.S. passport. He was now carrying his U.S. passport. “Well, maybe I'll come around tomorrow and have a look at their library. I studied English also at Kiev and can read it without difficulty.” But the guard he was addressing had turned and was opening the inner gate to let someone out.

Serge caught a glimpse of her as she passed under the light over the guardhouse. He stepped back into the shadows. The young woman, wearing a light wool coat with a narrow fur collar, turned left and began to walk down Tchaikovsky Street. Serge lingered only long enough to avoid any impression that he was following her. He repeated to the guards that he would probably come in, if not tomorrow, one day soon. He said good night and sauntered off in the same direction as the girl. Once out of sight of the guardhouse, he quickened his pace until he was abreast of her.

“Gloria Huddleston! It's me, Serge Windels! What do you know!”

The woman stopped under the street light. Gloria Huddleston looked up at the man she had first known as the college senior who had attracted her in sophomore year at Ames. They had dated frequently during that spring and when Serge left to do graduate work at Georgetown she missed him greatly. They had corresponded for several months. But for the last five years they had settled down to Christmas-card exchanges. It was from her last card that Serge learned that Gloria was being sent to Moscow as a librarian for USIA. He had told her that he was working for IBM and spending a great deal of time traveling.

Her delight at seeing him was authentic and effusive, sentiments reciprocated by Serge, though it slightly bothered him that Oakes had told him not to make contact with her until further notice, and then only within the embassy. But … how, really, could it matter? It was, after all, a coincidence.

They walked happily down the street, laughing and asking about friends in common, until at one point Serge asked, “Hey, where are you walking to?” She said she was going home, “to cook a dull supper. Do you want to share it?”

Serge replied that sharing was the happiest conceivable way in which he could spend this uncharted evening. “Do you have everything you need, I mean for dinner for two?” Gloria reminded him that there was never any shortage of anything when one shopped at a United States Government PX. “And you can even have all the caviar you want to eat. It costs me, like, well, like next to nothing. But it's funny,” she laughed. “When I first laid eyes on you at school I thought, Gee, this guy is a real authentic American hayseed—with your red hair and your freckles, and your Gary Cooper build. I wouldn't have guessed, that first time, that you would even know what caviar was. It wasn't till our third date that I found out you were as fluent in Russian as in English! Say, I'm getting pretty good at the language myself; you can try me out later if you want.”

It was a tidy little apartment, nicely appointed by Gloria in a lively chintz purchased and sent by her mother. A single bedroom, then the living room with a little dining room at one end and a utilitarian opening to the kitchen. The walls were lined with books and prints of prerevolutionary Moscow. There was a framed front page of the November 9, 1917, daily, then also called
Pravda
, announcing the formation of a government in Petrograd by Vladimir Lenin. Gloria brought out a bottle of red wine and one of white wine, and they had vodka with their caviar, and then some Virginia ham with pickles and toasted dark Russian bread. They enjoyed themselves with mounting gaiety and nostalgia and lust, and soon after sipping the cognac Serge led her into the bedroom. In the muted light she was still the cheerful, nubile sophomore who never thought to disguise her delight in every aspect of carnality. Serge recalled that in the past there had never been a moment in their protracted unions when the smile left her face. This had not changed either, and it was all just as it had been back at college, fortified by manifest experience—so to speak, Serge even whispered it to her—“experience accumulated on the road.”

“Jerry Singleton” was glad that Dad was not sitting in the living room when he got back to their hotel and opened the door to their two-bedroom suite. But Blackford could hardly be expected to be up at three-thirty in the morning.

CHAPTER 25

OCTOBER 1986

Major Vasilov finished the file. He had read every word in it. There was nothing there—
nothing
—to suggest that Vitaly Primakov had been a Soviet dissident, let alone that he would one day attempt to assassinate the leader of the Soviet Union. He and his sister Mariya were children of two farmers, both of them dead, who had worked in a collective in Okateyvsky. Vitaly had served honorably in Afghanistan, was discharged as a corporal. Vitaly had worked in the secondary school as a clerk-assistant to the director, who was most vigorously interrogated and could come up with not one incident in which Vitaly ever manifested any grievance against the regime. He then left Pitkin, as the administration referred to it, to take another job as a clerk, working alongside his sister. No one at the post office had any reason to suspect any subversive inclinations in Vitaly. Mariya's record was as clean as her brother's.

But the cyanide business!

“Let's face it, Bibikov,” he addressed his assistant, “you do not find post office clerks who have handy supplies of cyanide. Mariya was not the daughter of a chemist. Her doctor advises us”—Vasilov picked up the folder and flicked it open—that “‘the patient Mariya Primakov came to me on July 2, 1985, to request an abortion. A routine examination revealed that she was in good health. She was admitted the following day to the local clinic where the procedure was successfully performed. She was discharged later the same day.' That is her
entire
medical record. Our representative did not ask the doctor whether, by any chance, he had cyanide pills lying about for dissatisfied clients.”

“It's the pill,” Bibikov said, “that gives it away, doesn't it?”

“Well now hold on, Bibikov. I agree that the pill absolutely suggests that the woman was in on the assassination. But unless we have leads to someone else, just because we can't find out how she got the cyanide doesn't mean she couldn't have got it on her own. We can't assume there's an incriminated doctor or chemist on the scene. Who knows where?… How?… Why?—No, we know
why
. That's now obvious. The medical report says that the plastic sheathing enclosing the cyanide is the kind used in capsules designed to dissolve slowly, and they're routinely available. To have got one of those and then filled it with the cyanide does not require any special skill. But getting possession of the cyanide in the first place has to mean that someone in the medical business let him, or her, have it. On the other hand, its location having been accidentally spotted, it might have been stolen.”

Konstantin Vasilov lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Lieutenant Bibikov reached for his own pack, but before lighting up said, “May I, Major?”

“Yes, yes.” He paused. “The pressure from the Kremlin is very great.”

“What are you going to recommend, Major?”

Vasilov stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, leaned back against the window, and spoke in a voice almost theatrically resolute. “I'm going to tell Krivitsky, uh, General Krivitsky, I am going to tell him, General, you have to go in one direction or in the other. You cannot achieve the effects you desire from Course B under conditions only Course A will promote. Either we let the matter go and assume Primakov and his deranged sister were lone assassins, or we publicize Vitaly Primakov.”

“What exactly do you have in mind, Major?”

“If we are fully to attempt to trace everyone with whom he kept company, then obviously we need to know everyone with whom he kept company. And we can do that only by putting his picture in the newspapers and in the post offices.”

“What exactly would you put on the picture?”

“Here is where I believe I can satisfy Krivitsky. General Krivitsky. We do not need to say that this is the picture of
the man who tried to assassinate the chief of state
. We can simply say that the Bureau of Missing Persons urgently desires to meet with anyone who knew this person, Vitaly Primakov. What does that let out? Merely that he is missing; not that he tried to kill Gorbachev. Of course, the people around the post office where he worked—they know, they've heard about it. But it isn't likely that we're going to find his confederates in his place of work. We will need to count on someone showing up who saw him in extra-office, extra-home situations, and see what kind of a lead we can develop there.”

“Would it be wise to offer a reward? I mean, what incentive would there be for someone to go to the bureau otherwise?”

Major Vasilov looked up at his assistant. “I think that is a good idea. But then the whole operation will need to be decided by Krivitsky. General Krivitsky.”

CHAPTER 26

OCTOBER 1986

Blackford was up early. Systematically he explored his alternatives.

Boris Bolgin had been frustratingly noncommittal. But one thing he ruled out at the outset of their long conversation: Bolgin would not reveal to Blackford the identity of the ringleader of the new Narodniki—the term he used, explaining to Blackford the historical reference.

“I have betrayed enough people in my life, and have lost completely the appetite to betray any more.”

Blackford had reminded him sharply that in his original message, advising Blackford of the small group bent on assassinating Gorbachev, Bolgin had said he would interdict the operation if the President of the United States asked him to. “Well, Boris, okay, for a year there was no such request from the President. But now there is. Aren't you committed to abort?”

“Blackford, Blackford, be careful with your language. I am not in a position to ‘
abort
' the operation, as you put it. Yes, one of the members of the young group has taken me into his confidence, and some of the information he has given me I have relayed to you via our computer channel. But if I were to say to him that he and his confederates must abandon their enterprise, I know very well what he would say.”