BOOK I (3 page)

Curious he should think of Piotr Borisovich now. Or shortcuts.

The Potter shrugged. In his heart of hearts, he understood they were all connected: the phone call, Svetochka, Piotr Borisovich, shortcuts. For the next two days he tried to put it out of his mind. And thought he had succeeded. Then, without premeditation-he wasn't sure whom he was calling until he dialled-he picked up the phone and composed the number.

He heard the phone ring once. Then the voice with the accent he couldn't quite place said, "B, one-forty-one, twenty-one?" as if it were a question.

Almost as if he were following a script, the Potter supplied the answer.

Carroll was spitting a cherry-flavored candy into the wastepaper basket when Mrs. Cresswell poked her head in the door. "Thursday said to tell you he's almost through with it."

Francis wrung his hands in anticipation. "Tell him to bring it straight in," he instructed her.

"As it he would do anything else with it," muttered Mrs. Cresswell.

"Secretarial help," noted Francis, staring directly at her knees, "is not what it used to be."

The message had arrived that morning on a direct scrambler channel from the BND, the West German Federal Intelligence Service, encoded in a one-time cipher that had been earmarked for the operation when the Sisters had sent the go-ahead. One-time pads represent the last word in compartmentalization. Their beauty, which is to say their security, lies in the fact that only two people on earth hold the key: the person who enciphers on the originating end, and-in this particular case-Thursday, sweating away in his windowless cubbyhole just down the hall from the Sisters' bailiwick.

"I take it as a bad sign that they're filing so quickly," Carroll mused.

He scanned the box of candies for a promising shape,

"I don't know," Francis said. "If they had nothing positive to report they would have let the string run out a bit more before filing a no-show."

Carroll bit into another piece of candy, made a face and spit it into the wastepaper basket. "The Germans- our Germans-are like schoolchildren, on that tiny point we can agree, I would think," he said. "They will set up their approach with meticulous care, make one pass at the target, then phone in with juicy details of their success or failure. It is part of their sense of insecurity that comes from having lost the wrong war."

Someone knocked at the door. Carroll sprang to open it, overturning his box of candies. Thursday stood on the threshold, vibrating with excitement. "He has bitten," he giggled. And he read the plain text from his yellow legal pad: "The fish is on the line. "

Francis took possession of the page from Thursday's legal pad and the original coded message; at the close of the workday he would make sure they wound up in the office shredder. "The trick now," he remarked as if he were dealing with nothing more important than that evening's meal,

"is to play him in very slowly."

For reasons of security, the Russians were keeping their distance. It was a Cuban cutout in New Orleans who contacted the Soviet agent known by his code name, Khanda. The cutout was a prostitute who worked a back street full of bars masquerading as nightclubs, so it was the most natural thing in the world for Khanda to saunter up to her and ask how much she charged. When she told him, he said he would be willing to pay twice what she asked if she, in turn, would be willing to accept American Express traveller's checks.

The cutout recognized this as the code identifying Khanda, and led him up to her room on the fourth floor.

Khanda had the instincts of a puritan- being with a whore made him uneasy. When the cutout invited him to take off his jacket and loosen his tie, he politely refused. He was in a hurry, he explained. What was it she had for him?

She rummaged through a sewing basket for her microdot reader, and handed it to him along with a picture postcard she had received from one of her regular clients in Mexico City. The message on it, and the address, had been typed on an old typewriter that had a new ribbon and no R. ". . .

-eally g-eat time he-e . . ."it said. Khanda held the postcard under a lamp and examined it closely, but he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. "It's the i in the word 'time,' " the cutout told him, and she handed him an eyebrow tweezers so he could pry the microdot from the dot over the i and insert it in the reader.

Khanda quickly copied the message onto the back of an envelope. When he had finished, the cutout casually asked him if he would like to make love. There would be no charge, she added, since they were, after all, colleagues. Khanda thanked her profusely but said he was expected somewhere.

Back in his own apartment, Khanda studied the message on the back of the envelope. His first reaction was to feel extremely flattered. They obviously had a great deal of esteem for him if they were assigning this mission to him. His second sensation was one of exhilaration. If he could pull it off, he would become what, in his wildest dreams, he had always wanted to be: important; a hero, even, in certain circles. He closed his eyes and imagined the blind man fumbling with the Order of Lenin, truing to pin it onto his lapel. He wondered if he would have to put up with a kiss on each cheek, or whether, in deference to his being a foreigner, they would agree to skip that part.

Khanda didn't like being kissed by men.

There were four people ahead of the Potter in the queue. Two empty taxis, their checkered doors splattered with dried mud, raced past in quick succession. Moscow was struggling under the heel of an unseasonal cold snap; temperatures had plunged during the night. The Potter pulled down the earflaps of his oushanka and stamped his feet, which were already beginning to feel numb inside his galoshes. A third taxi flashed by at breakneck speed.

"Bastards!" complained a heavyset man in front of the Potter. "They're warm as hell with their heaters going full blast. They don't give a damn for us stranded out here in the cold."

A fourth taxi wormed its way toward the corner along Zubovsky Boulevard, coming from the Krimsky Bridge. The skin on the back of the Potter's neck crawled; his body knew this one was it before he did. The cab pulled up before the queue. The driver, a squirrellike man with a worker's cap pulled low over his eyes and a scarf wrapped around his lower jaw, leaned across and rolled down the passenger window the width of a fist. The man in front of the Potter elbowed his way between the two women at the head of the queue and shouted out his destination. "The Exhibition of Economic Achievements, off Mistra Avenue, comrade." The exhibition was on the other side of the city, normally a profitable run for a taxi driver, because while the meter was running, he could pick up several passengers heading in the same direction and pocket their fares.

"Nyet, nyet," harked the driver, waving his hand in irritation.

The women who had been shoved aside smiled smugly. Each offered an address; each was refused in turn.

"And what about you, comrade fur cap?" the driver called when the Potter failed to come forward with an address. "Where are you heading on this arctic day?"

"Anywhere," the Potter replied, a sardonic grimace deforming his chapped lips.

The driver appeared startled. The Potter jumped to the conclusion that he had guessed wrong. And suddenly a sense of relief-of having gotten off a hook- flooded through his nervous system. He started to turn away; he would rethink this whole business.

Just then, to everyone's astonishment, the driver jerked his head toward the back seat. "Get in," he ordered.

The Potter hesitated. The heavyset man, the two women, stared at him, straining to place his face. If the driver agreed to take him

"anywhere," he must be someone important. A member of the Central Committee perhaps. Or a manager of one of those new hard-currency stores that carried Western products.

Sensing the Potter's indecision, the driver reached back and pushed open the rear door. The Potter shrugged-it suddenly seemed easier to go with the current-and ducked into the back seat.

"Where are you taking me?" the Potter asked as the driver spun his taxi through a maze of side streets behind the Church of St. Nicholas of the Weavers. Ignoring the question, the driver turned into Pirogovskaya Street, then pulled up abruptly. He studied the rearview mirror; the Potter glanced over his shoulder. No one came out of the side street after them. Satisfied, the driver slipped the taxi into gear and headed toward the Novodevichy Monastery. Ahead, the Potter could make out the five gilded bulb-shaped domes of the Virgin of Smolensk Church.

An image of Piotr Borisovich leapt to his mind. He had been standing next to an open hotel window staring out at Moscow his last night in the country. He had gotten roaring drunk on French champagne, and had started to sing snatches of Mussorgsky's, Khovanshchina, an opera that recounted the story of Czar Peter's revolt against the Regent Sophia; Peter banished her to the Novodevichy Monastery, lynched three hundred of her streltsy under the windows of her cell and nailed the hand of Prince Khovansky, her principal ally, to her door. Piotr Borisovich's voice had been pitched low and surprisingly on-key. Then, suddenly sober, he had stopped singing and cocked his head and smiled the way he always smiled-with his eyes, not his mouth. Little wrinkles had formed at the corners of his eyes, making him appear older than he was.

Violence is in our blood, he had said, looking out at Moscow but thinking of America. Violence and a passion for plotting. You and I, the Potter had agreed, are the last practitioners of a dying art.

The way he said the sentence had made it seem as if they were on a holy crusade.

End of the line, comrade fur cap. The driver braked to a stop in front of the gate leading to the Novodevichy Cemetery.

The Potter noticed the meter wasn't running, so he nodded and let himself out of the taxi. It roared oft. The Potter stood a moment on the sidewalk savoring the cold-the taxi had been overheated, but in Moscow no one ever complained of being subjected to too much heat-then turned and made his way into the heart of the cemetery, past rows of eroded tombstones. The paths, as far as he could tell, were deserted. In matters like this, the Potter knew from experience, no one hurried. When they were absolutely sure he wasn't being followed, they would come for him. He wandered past a stand of graves-Gogols, Chekhov's, Mayakovsky's, Esenin's (the last two were suicides; the violence, the plotting had been too much for them). His feet were beginning to feel numb again; if the cold snap kept up he would have to start wearing his wool-lined slippers inside his galoshes, as he did at the height of winter. He paused before the glistening white marble bust of Stalin's beautiful young wife. She had stormed out of a Kremlin dinner party one night in I932, gone home, put a pistol to her head and, as Piotr Borisovich once quipped, introduced a foreign object into her brain. Another suicide!

More violence! "To Nadezhda Alliluyeva," the inscription on the bust read, "from a member of the Communist Party, J. Stalin."

"Pssssssst!"

The Potter turned to see a little man with shirred skin squinting at him from several meters away. He must have stepped from behind a tombstone, because he hadn't been there a moment before. The man beckoned with an emaciated finger. The Potter approached. The man removed his hat, an unexpected sign of deference considering who they were and what they were up to. "I have confirmed," he announced, nodding a very bald head,

"that you are alone. Down that path, through that gate, you will discover another taxi waiting for you."

"Where will it take me?" the Potter asked, knowing the question would never be answered.

"Anywhere!" replied the little bald man with a mischievous wink, and planting his hat squarely on his head, he darted with unexpected sprightliness between two tombstones and disappeared.

Atop the great baroque belfry in the center of the monastery grounds, two men dressed in ankle-length mink coats and mink hats stood with their backs to the wind. Because they were vaguely related (one's mother's brother had been the other's uncle by marriage}, because they directed Department 13 of the First Chief. Directorate, the sabotage and assassination unit of the Komitet Gosudarsrvennoy Bezopasnosti, better known by its initials KGB. their subordinates referred to them as the Cousins- The younger of the two, in his early forties, stared down at the cemetery through binoculars. The other, who was blind, the result of being tortured by the Gestapo during the Great Patriotic War, asked, "Is the bald man one of ours or theirs?"

"Theirs. Oskar must have pulled him out of a hat for this operation,"

the younger man answered.

"We should remember to log him," the blind man said.

"Small fish, big pond," the man with the binoculars replied. "Oskar will make us a present of him if we ask. In any case, we must be careful not to frighten any of them off before this whole thing becomes history."

The man with the binoculars watched the Potter enter the second taxi. "I will tell you the truth," he admitted. "I didn't think he would go for it."

"Did you know him personally?" inquired the blind man. He used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone dead and buried.

"I met him years ago just after he came back from New York," the younger man replied. "He was a great hero to us all then." He fitted his binoculars back into their leather case. "He had served Mother Russia well. We looked up to him."

Below, the driver gunned his motor and the taxi lurched away from the curb. The blind man bent an ear toward the sound, then tapped his long, thin white baton several times on the ground in satisfaction. "He is still serving Mother Russia," he said thoughtfully, and he pressed his lips into what, on his scarred features, passed for a smile.

The yafka (Russian for "safe house") turned out to be on Volodarskaya Street, down the block from the Church of the Dormition of the Potters.

When he discovered Feliks' hobby was throwing pots, Piotr Borisovich, sporting an ancient fedora that had seen one too many rainstorms, had hauled him off, one sparkling Sunday before he graduated to the "field,"