The Devil's Alternative (23 page)

“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 pre- ferred 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 her 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.

“I must speak to Comrade Secretary-General Rudin urgently,” he told the Kremlin switchboard operator. The woman knew from the line on which the call was coming that this was neither joke nor impertinence. She put it through to an aide inside the Armory Building, who held the call and spoke to Maxim Rudin on the internal phone. Rudin authorized the transfer of the call.

“Yes,” he grunted on the line, “Rudin here.”

Colonel Kukushkin had never spoken to him before, though he had seen him and heard him at close quarters many times. He knew it was Rudin. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and spoke.

At the other end, Rudin listened, asked two brief questions, rapped out a string of orders, and put the phone down. He turned to Vassili Petrov, who was with him, leaning forward, alert and worried.

“He’s dead,” said Rudin in disbelief. “Not a heart attack. Shot. Yuri Ivanenko. Someone has just assassinated the chairman of the KGB.”

Beyond the windows the clock in the tower above Savior Gate chimed midnight, and a sleeping world began to move slowly toward war.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE KGB has always ostensibly been answerable to the Soviet Council of Ministers. In practice, it answers to the Politburo.

The everyday working of the KGB, the appointment of every officer within it, every promotion, and the rigorous indoctrination of every staffer—all are supervised by the Politburo through the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee. At every stage of the career of every KGB man, he is watched, informed on, and reported on; even the watchdogs of the Soviet Union are never themselves free of watching. Thus it is unlikely that this most pervasive and powerful of control machines can ever run out of control.

In the wake of the assassination of Yuri Ivanenko, it was Vassili Petrov who took command of the cover-up operation, which Maxim Rudin directly and personally ordered.

Over the telephone Rudin had ordered Colonel Kukushkin to bring the two-car cavalcade straight back to Moscow by road, stopping neither for food, drink, nor sleep, driving through the night, refueling the Zil bearing Ivanenko’s corpse with jerry-cans, brought to the car by the Chaika and always out of sight of passersby.