XPD (51 page)

‘The Americans abducted Kleiber,’ said General Shumuk, his voice not revealing his attitude to this event. His hand waved impatiently in front of his face to disperse the strong-smelling Russian tobacco. ‘But London has designated Kleiber XPD. Did you know that?’

‘So where is Kleiber now?’ said Stuart. He was amazed that news of something so secret could have reached Shumuk already. The XPD directive for Kleiber had only been signed a day ago. He wondered if Shumuk’s phone call had actually been to Sir Sydney Ryden.

Shumuk stretched out his legs so that his bones creaked. His head was propped on the hand-woven cushion, his long hand caged the cigarette so that its smoke emerged between his bony fingers.

Was Brezhnev dying, wondered Boyd Stuart. Was there some new crisis with the army or trouble with the harvest? Was this a new step in the Kremlin’s endless game of musical chairs? Or was he going to bargain for Kleiber’s life? A maid brought coffee for them and the conversation stopped while she arranged the cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits.

There were sailing boats in view through the huge window. Sunday yachtsmen, four boats, one with an orange spinnaker, racing before the wind. Beyond them, blurred by the haze on the water, there was the grey shape of a patrolling warship. Boyd Stuart remembered the day he had sailed across from Rostock in East Germany. The warning had come that morning – a mumbled sentence muffled by a handkerchief. The accent was Polish, a girl’s voice; someone’s daughter, girlfriend or wife asked to take a terrible risk for the Englishman. The police cars passed him on his way to the harbour. My God, but that had been a close one. And it had been a damned long sail to the Danish coast. Never since had he ever heard Danish without offering up a prayer of thanks.

‘I have no need to tell you that my participation is unofficial,’ said Shumuk.

Forget any hopes of blackmail or bribery, thought Boyd Stuart. Such a reptile does not move before his lair is fully protected.

‘Of course,’ said Stuart. He returned the stare of this evil old man; skinny and wrinkled, with a constant sneer, like the Uncle Sams depicted in the political cartoons in
Krokodil
.

‘Kleiber will be meeting one of our embassy people at a hotel at Mount Vernon, just across the state line from Washington, on the evening of Tuesday, 21 August.’

‘That soon?’

‘You’ll have to move fast, Mr Stuart. But it gives you more than a week.’

‘Are you asking that your embassy man be protected?’

‘As far as is possible,’ said General Shumuk.

‘And Kleiber not protected at all?’

Boyd Stuart looked at the old man. There was nothing to be read in his eyes or his impassive features. He wanted Kleiber XPD, and his embassy official arrested, and Shumuk’s rank in the upper echelons of the KGB was secure enough for him not to care what accusations came his way afterwards. This was the only safe way to arrange such treachery, of course. No couriers, no messengers, no confidences; just Shumuk talking to an enemy agent with no record of what was said.

‘You’re throwing your man to the wolves, are you, General?’

Behind General Shumuk a huge abstract painting filled the white brick wall between the polished steel light fittings. Its design was like a silver blade upon which some winged shape was impaled, and the general was seated at the hilt of it.

‘The Americans will have no alternative to letting you be there,’ said the general. ‘Now that you know about it they’ll have to co-operate.’ He placed his cigarette in his mouth and inhaled with great care.

‘What has he done, this man in Washington?’ Stuart persisted. ‘And why must Kleiber die?’

‘Don’t cry for him, Mr Stuart,’ said Shumuk. He flicked his ash into the plant pot at his side. ‘No one will cry for
us.
’ He moved his hand across his face like a small child waving goodbye from a railway-carriage window, but it was just a way of dispersing the smoke.

Chapter 48

It was surprising, wrote Boyd Stuart in his report afterwards, that the CIA resisted the temptation to riddle the Rousillon Beach Motel with the customary electronics. It was the project chairman who held out against the adviser from the Technical Services Division, who had come to his office loaded with an extraordinary array of equipment from low-light cameras and parabolic microphones to a miniaturized video recorder which, although small enough to be concealed inside a light fixture, defied all the demonstrator’s attempts to make it function.

The CIA sent Kleiber to the meeting ‘naked’, apart from Kalkhoven sitting in the back office of the motel manager’s unit along with Boyd Stuart. There was no way of preventing the Brit participating: there was in fact some enthusiasm for letting him witness what no one doubted was going to be a memorable coup.

Yuriy Grechko came directly from the USSR Washington embassy. He was in a green rented Ford Fairlane at 7.30 that evening, having booked a double unit, with sitting room fronting the poolside, water bed and colour TV, using the name Lewis. He paid for the room on arrival and asked if there were any messages for him; there were none. At five minutes before eight, Grechko called the office and complained that there was no ice in his refrigerator and he would be needing more cans of Seven-up. The coffee-shop waitress who delivered this order reported that he was drinking heavily, from a bottle he’d brought with him.

Willi Kleiber arrived exactly on the dot of his appointment at ten o’clock. Kalkhoven was behind the desk. He gave him the key to unit No. 12 and told him that ‘Mr Lewis’ was already there. Kleiber phoned Kalkhoven three minutes later and was laughing so much that he could hardly speak.

‘You’d better get over here, Mr Muller,’ he said. (Muller was the cover name by which Kalkhoven was known to him.) ‘You’d better get over here.’ He was laughing hysterically. ‘You’re going to need another scenario, Mr Muller, sir. But don’t hurry yourself, there’s no hurry at all. Did you know that Yuriy Grechko calls himself “Yu-yu”?’ He howled with laughter at the thought of it.

General Stanislav Shumuk had organized his scheme with commendable skill, but his failure was at the human level. His dislike of Yuriy Grechko, and Grechko’s weakness for pretty women, had convinced Shumuk that Grechko was a notorious libertine. In fact, Grechko was foolishly, sadly and forlornly in love. He was in love with that desperation which only the unfortunate do not know. It was Grechko’s fate to fall in love with Fusako Parker, the ‘wife’ of his most important agent. For her, he regularly proclaimed, he would give his life. Now he had done just that.

It was Shumuk’s formal message – passed by an agent of Moscow’s Communications Division – telling Parker to leave his house in Chicago immediately together with his ‘wife’ that brought Grechko to his final frantic act. Parker and his ‘wife’, Fusako, were immediately moved to a safe house in Toronto. On Thursday, 16 August, the Parkers flew to Moscow. In the six days leading up to his suicide Grechko exhausted every method of communicating with Fusako Parker: all failed. On the night of Sunday, 19 August, having finally discovered that the Parkers had gone to Toronto, he had even sent a team to break into the house. It was a desperate course of action; the act was poorly planned, the men untrained and hastily briefed. They had been arrested by local police.

After arriving at the motel with slurred speech and whisky on his breath, Grechko drank a whole bottle of Cutty Sark and swallowed an unknown amount of barbiturates. (The man from the USSR embassy who claimed the body would not permit an autopsy.) In his hand when he died Grechko held tightly to a sheet of Rousillon Beach Motel notepaper bearing the message, ‘Darling Fusako, I cannot go on without you. I love you, my beloved. I will always be your darling Yu-yu.’

‘Can I talk to Mr Kleiber, Melvin?’ Boyd Stuart asked.

‘Talk to him!’ said Kalkhoven, with his eyes still on Kleiber. ‘You can take him away and feed him to the alligators as far as I’m concerned, XPD the bastard!’

‘You listen to me,’ said Kleiber. He was on his feet and his eyes were bright. ‘We have a deal …’

‘Sit down, Kleiber,’ said Kalkhoven. He took a box of matches from his pocket. ‘You’ve run out of stock to trade, the shelves are empty, man. Grechko was your dinner ticket. You talk with this nice man here, or else …’ Impassively Kalkhoven took Grechko’s suicide note by the corner and set light to it. London and Washington had agreed that all such evidence would be destroyed on the spot, and that had been the order.

‘Go to hell,’ said Kleiber, but there was no conviction in his words.

‘“I have set before you life and death,”’ said Kalkhoven, ‘“blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”’

Kleiber looked at Boyd Stuart. ‘Can you find a bottle of scotch?’

‘Probably,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Let’s go and find somewhere quiet to sit down. This place will be a madhouse when the heavy mob from Langley arrive to show us that the training manual way is the only way.’

Chapter 49

Someone had parked a large truck so that it obscured the view from the windows that faced away from the courtyard. Kleiber did not think that the truck had been parked like that by chance. All he could see of it from the kitchen window was the bottom of a gigantic K for Kleenex, or perhaps it was Kellogg’s – he could not see enough of the truck to decide, it was so close to the wall.

From the front window there was a view of the pool, artificially blue, lit by underwater floodlights, and the other three sides of the units which made up the motel. Behind the low, sloping roofs there were a few dusty palm trees and a high chimney which at night was lighted by a red warning light. Kleiber wondered whether that meant they were near an airfield, but there was little sound of aircraft. He knew they must be near Washington.

It had been like this ever since leaving Geneva. The Americans hauled him round the country like freight, never divulging where they were, where they had been or where they were going. They did not trust him; he could hardly blame them. Would they eventually kill him, he wondered. Was this process just a way of ensuring that there was no paperwork, no trace, no witnesses to his having arrived in the USA?

‘You say the Hitler Minutes never existed?’ he asked the Englishman. He did not wait for him to reply. ‘Well, I know they did exist.’

‘Really,’ said Stuart, without displaying too much interest. ‘How could you know?’

‘I was at the Merkers mine when Wever and Breslow delivered them there.’

‘So you were the mysterious Reichsbank Director Frank?’ Kleiber nodded and smiled. ‘Is that why Dr Böttger and the others selected you to get them back?’

‘Can I have a drink?’ said Kleiber. Stuart broke the sealed cap of the whisky bottle and poured some into the clear plastic beakers the motel provided. He had watched Kleiber fidgeting but now, with the drink in his possession, he was calm and made no haste to consume it. ‘No, it was the other way round. I selected
them.
’ He put the whisky to his mouth and drank some. ‘I selected
them
. I went to them and told them that someone named Lustig was collecting material to make a film. I told them he was digging deeply into the story of the Kaiseroda mine. I told them he’d already found an officer named MacIver who was spilling his guts out and that the story of the Hitler Minutes was sure to surface. I’d had money from Böttger before for such missions; I knew he’d buy this project.’

‘Well, you won’t get any more cash from him, Kleiber. He knows now that you were working for Moscow.’

Kleiber’s mouth tightened but he managed to force a strained smile. ‘What did he say?’

‘I wasn’t there,’ said Stuart. ‘But they’re returning a hundred million dollars to the bank in Geneva. Their official explanation is that there was a computer error. The name of Friedman is not mentioned.’

‘Young Stein will benefit,’ said Kleiber. ‘He’ll take the money and get married to Mary Breslow … that’s the final joke, eh?’

‘A lot of people will benefit,’ said Stuart, who knew that the final horrible joke was yet to come. ‘There’s Delaney, the nightclub owner, an ex-gangster named Petrucci, Pitman’s nephew in Arkansas … They’ll all benefit but the real beneficiaries are the clients of the bank, they’re the people you swindled, Kleiber.’

‘Put away your violin,’ said Kleiber.

‘How did you hear that Lustig was making a film?’

‘I was having dinner with Max Breslow one evening in Frankfurt. He mentioned the film quite casually. He asked me if I thought it could prove dangerous to us. I told him it wouldn’t be dangerous if the production was in our hands. I told him I might be able to raise enough money to buy Lustig out.’

‘Did Breslow know the money came from Böttger?’

Kleiber settled back in his chair and sat in silence for a moment before replying. ‘Max Breslow was a war casualty. When he was a young soldier he had guts. Once, long ago, he was tough, Mr Stuart, in the way that you and I are tough.’

‘Do we have something in common?’

‘You don’t fool me with your soft voice and your fancy accent, your old school tie and your vague smiles and deferential manner; I recognize the killer in you, Mr Stuart. I’ve had too many like you on my payroll to make a mistake.’

‘And Max Breslow?’

‘He believed that propaganda shit that the Nazis fed us all. He couldn’t see that the penpushers writing all that stuff about Aryans, the historical destiny of the Fatherland and ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, were writing it because it paid better than doing translations of Karl Marx.’

‘But there came a time when doing translations of Karl Marx paid better?’

‘You play the music; I’ll sing the words, Mr Stuart. But poor old Max wasn’t so adaptable. When he realized that the Nazis were just another set of crooked politicians, it broke his spirit. He was never the same again. Now what is he? – a nothing!’

‘But he took over the Lustig film when you asked him.’

Kleiber laughed. ‘You think he might have turned me down, eh? Max is finished; nearly bankrupt. Who’d invest money in one of Breslow’s shoddy little films? His house is mortgaged to the very limit, he’s got no money saved, and only put his daughter through college by selling off his wife’s jewellery piece by piece. Sure, he jumped at the chance of taking over the Lusting film with the finance guaranteed, and a standard producer’s fee. He couldn’t afford to do otherwise.’