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by Frederick Forsyth

  ¯

  “DO you not hear her voice upon the night wind, my brothers and sisters? Do you not hear her calling to you? Can you, her children, not hear the voice of our beloved Mother Russia?

  “I can hear her, my friends. I hear her sighs through the forests, I hear her sobs across the snows. Why are you doing this to me, she asks. Have I not been betrayed enough? Have I not bled enough for you? Have I not suffered enough, that you should do this to me?

  “Why do you sell me like a whore into the hands of foreigners and strangers, who pick upon my aching body as carrion crows ... ?”

  The screen erected at the end of the huge communal lodge that formed the main conference center of the ranch was the largest available. The projector stood at the back of the hall.

  Forty pairs of eyes were riveted upon the image of the man addressing a mass rally at Tukhovo earlier that summer as the sonorous Russian oratory rose and fell, the voice of the interpreter, dubbed onto the sound track, a subdued counterpoint.

  “Yes, my brothers, yes, my sisters, we can hear her. The men of Moscow with their fur coats and their doxies cannot hear her. The foreigners and the criminal scum who feast upon her body cannot hear her. But we can hear our mother calling to us in her pain, for we are the people of the great land.”

  The young filmmaker Litvinov had done a brilliant job. Into the film he had inserted cutaways of moving pathos: a young blond mother, her baby at her breast, gazing adoringly upward toward the podium; a desperately handsome soldier with tears trickling down his cheeks; a seamed laborer from the land, his scythe across his shoulder, the years of hard toil bitten into his face.

  None could know that the cutaway shots had been filmed separately, using actors. Not that the crowd was faked; from a high elevation other shots revealed ten thousand supporters, rank upon rank, flanked by the uninformed cheerleaders of the Young Combatants.

  Igor Komarov dropped his voice from a roar to something a little above a whisper, but the microphones caught and brought it across the stadium.

  “Will no one come? Will no one step forward to say: Enough, it shall not happen. Patience, my brothers of Russia, wait a little more, daughters of the Rodina …”

  The voice rose again, moving up through the scales from a murmur to a cry.

  “For I am coming, dear Mother, yes, I, Igor your son, am coming. …”

  The final word was almost lost as the rally rose in unison to the prompted chant: “KO-MA-ROV, KO-MA-ROV.”

  The projector was switched off and the image faded. There was a pause and then a collective exhalation of breath.

  As the lights went up, Nigel Irvine moved to the head of the long rectangular refectory table of Wyoming pine.

  “I think you know what you have seen,” he said quietly. “That was Igor Alexeivich Komarov, leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces, the party most likely to win the elections in January and project Komarov into the presidency. As you will have seen, he is an orator of rare power and passion, and clearly enormous charisma.

  “You will know also that in Russia eighty percent of the real power already lies in the hands of the president. Since the time of Yeltsin the checks and curbs on that power, such as obtain in our societies, have been abolished. A Russian president today can govern more or less as he likes and bring in, by decree, any law he likes. That could well include the restoration of a one-party state.”

  “Seeing the state they are in at the moment, is that such a bad idea?” asked a former ambassador to the United Nations.

  “Perhaps not, ma’am,” said Irvine. “But I did not ask for this presentation to discuss the possible course of events after the election of Igor Komarov, but rather to present the council with what I believe to be some hard evidence as to that course, and the nature it will take. I have brought from England two reports, and here in Wyoming, using the office copier, have run off thirty-nine copies of each.”

  “I wondered why I needed to bring in so much paper,” said their host, Saul Nathanson, with a grin.

  “I am sorry to have worn out your machine, Saul. Anyway, I did not wish to carry forty copies of each document across the Atlantic. I will not ask you to read them now, but to take a copy of each and read them in privacy. Please read the report marked ‘Verification’ first, and the Black Manifesto second.

  “Finally, I should tell you that three men have died already because of what you are about to read tonight. Both documents are so deeply classified that I must ask they all be returned for destruction by fire before I leave this compound.”

  All levity had vanished by the time the members of the Council of Lincoln took their copies and retired to their rooms. To the bewilderment of the kitchen staff, no one appeared for supper. Meals were asked for and served in the cabins.

  Langley, August 1990

  THE news from the CIA stations inside the Soviet Bloc was bad and getting worse. By July it was clear that something had happened to Orion, the hunter. The previous week Colonel Solomin had failed to show up for a routine brush pass, something he had never failed to do before.

  A brush pass is a simple device that normally compromises nobody. At a given moment, by pre-agreement, one of the parties walks down a street. He may be followed, he may not. Without warning he swings off the pavement and into the door of a café or restaurant. Any crowded place will do. Just before he enters, the other man has paid his bill, risen, and is walking toward the door. Without making any eye contact they brush against each other. A hand slips a package no larger than a matchbox into the side pocket of the other man. Both continue on their way, one in, the other out. If there is a tail, by the time the followers swing through the door there is nothing to see.

  In addition, Orion had failed to service two dead drops despite clear chalk-mark warnings that there was something for him in them. The only inference was that he had switched off, or been switched off by someone else. Again, the emergency sign-of-life procedure had not been utilized. Whatever had happened was instant, without warning. Heart attack, auto crash, or arrest.

  Moreover, from West Berlin came the news that the regular monthly letter to the East German safe house had not been received from Pegasus. Nor had anything appeared in the Russian dog breeders’ magazine.

  With Professor Blinov’s increasing ability to travel locally inside Russia away from Arzamas-16, Monk had suggested he send a completely harmless letter once a month to a safe East Berlin postbox address. It did not even need any secret writing on it, just the signature Yuri. He could drop the letter into a box anywhere outside the sealed complex, and it would never be traced back to him even if intercepted. With the Berlin Wall in pieces, the old trick of smuggling the letter through to the West was no longer necessary.

  To add to this, Blinov had been advised to purchase a mated pair of spaniels. This had been much approved of inside Arzamas-16, for what could be more harmless for the widower academic than to breed spaniels? Each month with perfect justification he could mail a small ad to the dog breeders’ weekly in Moscow notifying that there were puppies for sale, weaned, newborn, or expected. The usual monthly ad had not appeared.

  Monk was by now at his wit’s end. He complained to the highest levels that something was wrong, but was told he was panicking too soon. He should be patient; contact would no doubt be reestablished. But he could not be patient. He began to fire off memoranda to the effect that he believed there was a leak deep inside Langley.

  Two men who would have taken him seriously, Carey Jordan and Gus Hathaway, had retired. The new regime, mostly imported since the winter of 1985, were simply annoyed. In another part of the edifice the official mole hunt, dating back to the spring of 1986, crawled on.

  ¯

  “I FIND it hard to believe,” said a former U.S. Attorney General, as the plenary discussion opened after breakfast.

  “My problem is, I find it hard not to believe,” replied ex-Secretary of State James Baker. “This has gone to both our governments. ... Nigel?”


  “Yes.”

  “And they are not going to do anything?”

  The remaining thirty-nine members, grouped around the conference table, were staring at the former spymaster as if seeking some reassurance that it was just a nightmare, a figment of the dark, that would vanish in some way.

  “The received wisdom,” said Irvine, “is that officially nothing can be done. Half of what is in the Black Manifesto could well have the agreement of a good proportion of the Russian people. The West is not supposed to have it at all. Komarov would denounce it as a forgery. The effect could even be to strengthen him.”

  There was a gloomy silence.

  “May I say something?” said Saul Nathanson. “Not as your host but as an ordinary member. Years ago, I had a son. He died in the Gulf War.”

  There was a series of somber nods. Twelve of those present had played leading roles in the creation of the multinational coalition that had fought the Gulf War. From the far end of the table General Colin Powell stared intently at the financier. Because of the eminence of the father, he had personally received the news that Lieutenant Tim Nathanson, USAF, had been shot down in the closing hours of the combat.

  “If there was any comfort in that loss,” said Nathanson, “it was to know that he died fighting against something truly evil.”

  He paused, searching for words.

  “I am old enough to believe in the concept of evil. And in the notion that evil can sometimes be embodied in a person. I was not old enough to fight in the Second World War. I was eight when it ended. I know some of you here were in that war. But of course, I learned later. I believe Adolf Hitler was evil, and what he did also.”

  There was utter silence. Statesmen, politicians, industrialists, bankers, financiers, diplomats, administrators are accustomed to address the practicalities of life. They realized they were listening to a deeply personal statement. Saul Nathanson leaned forward and tapped the Black Manifesto.

  “This document is evil. The man who wrote it is evil. I do not see how we can walk away and let it happen again.”

  Nothing broke the silence of the room. By “it” everyone realized he was referring to a second Holocaust, not only against the Jews of Russia but against many other ethnic minorities.

  The silence was broken by the former British premier. “I agree. This is no time to go wobbly.”

  Ralph Brooke, head of the giant Intercontinental Telecommunications Corporation, known in every stock exchange in the world as InTelCor, leaned forward.

  “Okay, so what could we do?” he asked.

  “Diplomatically ... apprise every NATO government and urge them to protest,” said a former diplomat.

  “Then Komarov would denounce the manifesto as a crude forgery, and much of Russia would believe him. There is nothing new about the xenophobia of the Russians,” said another.

  James Baker leaned forward to turn sideways and address Nigel Irvine.

  “You brought us this appalling document,” he said. “What do you advise?”

  “I advocate nothing,” said Irvine. “But I offer a caveat. If the council were to sanction—not to undertake but to sanction—an initiative, it would have to be something so covert that come what may nothing would or could ever attach to any reputation in this room.”

  Thirty-nine members of the council knew exactly what he was talking about. Each of them had been party to, or had witnessed, supposedly covert governmental operations fail, and then unravel right up to the top.

  A gravelly German-accented voice came down the table from a former U.S. Secretary of State.

  “Can Nigel undertake an operation that covert?”

  Two voices said “Yes” in unison. When Irvine had been Chief of British Intelligence he had served both Margaret Thatcher and her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington.

  The Council of Lincoln never passed formal, written resolutions. It reached agreements, and on the basis of these each member then used his or her influence to further the purpose of those agreements within the corridors of power in their own countries.

  In the matter of the Black Manifesto, the agreement was simply to delegate to a smaller committee the members’ desire that the committee consider what might be for the best. The full council agreed only not to sanction, nor condemn, nor ever be aware of anything that might ensue.

  Moscow, September 1990

  COLONEL Anatoli Grishin sat at his desk in his office in Lefortovo jail and surveyed the three documents he had just received. His mind was a torrent of mixed emotions.

  Topmost was triumph. Through the summer the counterintelligence people of both First and Second Chief Directorates had delivered him the three traitors in quick succession.

  First had come the diplomat, Kruglov, exposed by a combination of his First Secretaryship at the embassy in Buenos Aires and his purchase of an apartment for twenty thousand rubles shortly after his return.

  He had confessed everything without hesitation, babbling away to the panel of officers behind the table and the turning spools of the tape machine. After six weeks he had nothing left to tell and had been consigned to one of the deep cells where the temperature, even in summer, rarely rose above one degree. There he sat and shivered, awaiting his fate. That fate was contained in one of the sheets on the colonel’s desk.

  July had brought the professor of nuclear physics to the cells. There were few enough scientists of his ilk who had ever lectured in California and the list quickly came down to four. A search of Blinov’s apartment at Arzamas-16 had revealed a small vial of invisible ink poorly concealed in a pair of rolled-up socks in a closet.

  He too had confessed all and quickly, the mere sight of Grishin and his team with the tools of their trade being enough to loosen his tongue. He had even revealed the address in East Berlin to which he had written his secret letters.

  The raiding of that address had been given to a colonel of Directorate K in East Berlin, but unaccountably the tenant of the address had escaped, walking through the newly open city into the West an hour before the raid.

  Last, in late July, had come the Siberian soldier, finally nailed by his rank in the GRU, his posting inside the Defense Ministry, his service in Aden, and intensive surveillance during which a raid had been made on his flat to discover that one of his children, hunting for Christmas presents, had once discovered Daddy’s little camera.

  Pyotr Solomin had been different, resisting amazing pain and snarling defiance through the agony. Grishin had broken him eventually; he always did. It was the threat to send the wife and children to the hardest of strict-regime camps that did it.

  Each of them had described how he had been approached by the smiling American, so eager to listen to their problems, so reasonable with his proposals. That caused the other emotion in Grishin’s mind, sheer rage at the elusive man he now knew to be called Jason Monk.

  Not once, not twice, but three times this impudent bastard had simply walked into the USSR, talked to his spies, and walked out again. Right under the KGB’s noses. The more he knew about the man, the more he hated him.

  Checks had been made, of course. The passenger list of the Armenia for that cruise had been gone through, but no pseudonym sprang to mind. The crew vaguely remembered an American from Texas who wore Texan clothes of the type described by Solomin from their meeting at the Botanical Gardens. It was probable Monk was Norman Kelson, but not proved.

  In Moscow the detectives had had more luck. Every American tourist in the capital on that day had been checked via the records of visa applications and Intourist group tours. Eventually they had homed in on the Metropol and the man who had had the so-convenient stomach upset that made him miss the Zagorsk Monastery tour the same day that Monk had met Professor Blinov in Vladimir Cathedral. Dr. Philip Peters. Grishin would remember the name.

  When the three traitors had confessed to the panel of interrogators the full volume of what this one American had persuaded them to hand over, the KGB officers were pale with shock.

&nb
sp; Grishin shuffled the three papers together and made a call on his office phone. He always appreciated the final penance.

  General Vladimir Kryuchkov had been elevated from head of the First Chief Directorate to chairman of the whole KGB. It was he who had placed the three death warrants on the desk of Mikhail Gorbachev that morning in the president’s office on the top floor of the Central Committee building in Novaya Ploshad for signature, and he who had sent them, duly signed, to Lefortovo jail, marked “immediate.”

  The colonel allowed the condemned men thirty minutes in the rear courtyard to appreciate what was going to happen. Too sudden, and there was not time for anticipation, as he had often told his pupils. When he descended the three men were on their knees in the gravel of the high-walled yard where the sun never shone.

  The diplomat went first. He seemed traumatized, mumbling, “Nyet, nyet,” as the master-sergeant placed the 9mm Makarov to the back of his head. On a nod from Grishin, the man squeezed the trigger. There was a flash, a spray of blood and bone, and Valeri Yureyvitch Kruglov slammed forward onto the gravel.

  The scientist, raised a committed atheist, was praying, asking Almighty God to take his soul into safekeeping. He hardly seemed to notice what had happened two yards from him, and went facedown like the diplomat.

  Colonel Pyotr Solomin was last. He stared up at the sky, perhaps seeing for the last time the forests and waters, rich in game and fish, of his homeland. When he felt the cold steel at the back of his head, he pulled his left hand across his body and held it up toward Colonel Grishin by the wall. The middle finger was raised rigid.

  “Fire!” shouted Grishin, and then it was over. He ordered burial that night, in unmarked graves, in the forests outside Moscow. Even in death there must be no mercy. The families would never have a spot upon which to place their flowers.

  Colonel Grishin walked over to the body of the Siberian soldier, bent over it for several seconds, then straightened up and strode away.

  When he returned to his office to compile his report, the red light on his phone was flashing. The caller was a colleague he knew in the Investigation Group of the Second Chief Directorate.