Metcalfe’s mind was whirling. His handkerchief was by now soaking wet and useless. He reached for another but didn’t have one. “I’ll do it on one condition.”
“Excuse me?” Corky said incredulously.
“If anything happens to Lana—if she has reason to believe she’s in trouble, that she’s about to be arrested—I want you to guarantee me that you’ll smuggle her out of Moscow.” Now he wiped the stream of perspiration from his eyes with his palms. It was damned uncomfortable in here, and he didn’t know how much longer he could last.
“Stephen, you know full well we don’t do such things.”
“I know full well we do. We’ve done it in France; we’ve done it in Germany.”
“Extraordinary cases—”
“This is an extraordinary case, Corky. I won’t involve her without that guarantee.”
“We’ll certainly do whatever we can to limit her risk, Stephen, but—”
“That’s the deal,” Metcalfe said. “Non-negotiable. Take it or leave it.”
Amos Hilliard sat at a teletype terminal directly across the hall, alert for any incoming messages that might require immediate attention. The black channel had been installed only recently, and like all new technology it was not completely reliable. It was a complex, even unwieldy fusion of international connections, a chain of links each of which was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of war. There were too many things that could go wrong. The best indicator of the steadiness of the transmission was the signal strength meter, inset into the console at which he was sitting. Both needles, indicating the strength of transmission and reception, remained stable, moving little. If either needle dropped, Hilliard was ready to leap into action if need be to restore the connection.
Metcalfe was taking longer than Hilliard expected. Whatever he was talking about with Corcoran, it was obviously a matter of some delicacy and complexity. Hilliard could only guess what the young man was up to in Moscow. He would not ask; Corky’s sacred compartmentation proscribed that, but he couldn’t help but wonder. He’d heard tell of young Metcalfe, a rich playboy who didn’t seem quite serious enough to be one of Corky’s boys, and this ballerina from the Bolshoi. He’d seen the two of them go off at the party at the dacha. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was something going on between them. Then there were all these questions about von Schüssler. Obviously Metcalfe was trying to assess the German. Maybe he was using the girl to get at the Nazi. Maybe that was why Corky had sent somebody so callow. Maybe Metcalfe’s experience in the field was not as important as his experience in the bedroom.
Hilliard glanced at the gauge and started. Both needles had dropped abruptly. The signal strength had, for some reason, plummeted. He leaped from the terminal and raced into the hall, his footsteps echoing throughout the corridor. Peering into the Plexiglas porthole inset into the Keep’s steel door, he could see Metcalfe, drenched with sweat, chattering away. If he was still talking, that meant the connection hadn’t in fact gone down at all.
So what could have caused the drop in signal strength?
Suddenly he went cold. Could it be—?
He hammered on the porthole with his fist until Metcalfe turned around, looking perplexed. Wildly Hilliard signaled to him to hang up, his index finger making a slashing motion against his throat. Metcalfe appeared to say another few words, then rapidly hung up the handset.
When Hilliard finally got the door unlocked, Metcalfe was on his feet, a sweaty mess. “What the hell—?” Metcalfe blurted out.
“A breach!” said Hilliard. “The last twenty, thirty seconds—how sensitive was the conversation? It may have been tapped into, overheard.”
“Tapped? No, we’d already moved past the sensitive stuff; we were just tying things up. But how is this possible—overheard?”
Hilliard did not bother to reply. He spun around, began running down the hall, his footsteps clacking loudly on the terrazzo floor. The only other exposed nexus, Hilliard knew, was the electrical closet at the end of the hall by the entrance, where the ganglion of telephone cables was patched in, a temporary vulnerability that still hadn’t been properly sealed off. Suddenly, all the way down the corridor, he could see the door to the electrical closet fly open. A dark figure emerged and immediately disappeared through the door at the end of the hall. Hilliard recognized the man: he was a junior embassy secretary, one whose allegiances Hilliard had always wondered about. Now, however, he knew. The man had been listening in.
For whom?
Hilliard ran to the electrical closet door, flung it open. There it was: a headset discarded on the floor by the man who had just left. Confirmation that Hilliard didn’t need.
Metcalfe was now standing just outside the electrical closet. He saw; he understood what had happened.
“No more,” Hilliard said. “The circuits are dirty.”
“So much for the vaunted security of the black channel.”
“The security of the black channel was designed to protect against the outside. The Soviets. Not against those within.”
“Who was it?”
“A junior Foreign Service officer. Not important in and of himself, within the embassy hierarchy—”
“On whose instructions?”
“I don’t know. And I doubt I’ll be able to find out anytime soon. All I know is this, Metcalfe: There are a lot of players involved here. And when there are a lot of players, somebody’s getting played. Next time you try to use the black channel, you may as well be broadcasting on Radio Moscow. Do yourself—and me—a favor. Leave by the service entrance, at the back. And no more, Metcalfe. Please. No more.”
The violinist sat on a park bench facing the American embassy. The main theme to Schubert’s quartet Der Tod und das Mädchen was running pleasantly through his head. He loved the way the angry, turbulent triplets of the opening gave way to the soothing, black-velvet D-minor cadences, the way the piece modulated from major to minor, the ominousness of the sweet melody. As he watched people entering and departing the main entrance, he attempted, unsuccessfully of course, to ignore the stomach-turning odors of Moscow. He had already learned them—the rancid stench of male sweat, astringent with vodka, the unclean females, the onion-foul breath, the cheap tobacco, the omnipresent fug of boiled cabbage. He had not thought anything could be more repellent than the French, but he was wrong; the Russians were even worse. These smells had by now become background against which he would instantly recognize any foreigner, whether he be American or British. Müller, his control in the Sicherheitsdienst, had strong reason to suspect that Daniel Eigen, a member of the clandestine espionage ring operating out of Paris, had gone to Moscow. And Reinhard Heydrich himself suspected that this Eigen might be involved in a high-level scheme, which had to be investigated. Anyone could eliminate Eigen, but very few SD agents had the skill to both investigate and, when necessary, kill at a moment’s notice.
The French borders, even under German control, were porous. People could, and did, escape by any number of means. There were many English and British citizens living in Paris, many of them undocumented, unregistered, and deducing which ones might have gone missing in the last few days was simply impossible. Moscow, however, was much easier. True, a foreigner could enter here using a false passport, as was possible anywhere in the world, but it was much more difficult in Russia, where the scrutiny was greater. And the number of foreigners entering Russia was minuscule. When he got the list later on today, he was sure it would not be a long one. Which was good; that meant the list of suspects was short and thus easier to investigate.
He had placed a fellow SD agent outside the British embassy as well. Between the two of them, it was not unlikely that they would spot their target. There was, after all, an excellent chance that he would visit his country’s embassy; they all did.
A man in a tan overcoat strode out of the building. Could this be him?
Kleist stood up, crossed the avenue, and soon caught up with the man. “Pardon me,�
�� he said with a friendly look on his face. “We know each other, yes?”
But even before the man opened his mouth, the violinist knew he was not the target. Kleist could smell the particular array of animal fats that clung to the man’s garb, the pork and goose, and then the overlay of paprika. He was a Hungarian, and his accent confirmed it.
“No, I don’t think so,” the man said. “Sorry.”
“My apologies,” the violinist said. “I thought you were someone else.”
Chapter Twenty
At first, Metcalfe did not recognize the plump, dowdy woman with the babushka pulled tight over her head who was sitting on a bench in the gardens of Sverdlov Place. That was how well she had disguised herself. Obviously she had borrowed the costume from the Bolshoi, the padding strategically placed at various places around her body transforming her slender figure into a typically overweight Russian peasant woman of middle age.
Only once he had determined, at a safe distance, that it was indeed Lana did he stride past her bench. She did not seem to recognize him, did not even look at him.
There was a good possibility, he realized, that he was being observed; although he saw no signs of a tail anywhere, he had to assume that the blond NKVD agent with the pale gray eyes was concealed somewhere nearby, watching. Perhaps his every move was not being watched, but for all intents and purposes he would have to presume it was.
At their meeting at the stable he had given her detailed instructions setting up their rendezvous. Whenever they met from now on, he told her, they would have to employ the techniques of tradecraft—he had used the Russian term po vsem pravilam iskusstva, which literally meant “the rules of art.”
She had responded with both fear and relief. The furtiveness terrified her, but she was grateful for Metcalfe’s thoroughness as well, for it would protect her—and her father. And yet when Metcalfe explained the methods they would have to use, something had occurred to her, and she said, “How do you know so much about these things, Stephen? How do you know about these—these pravily iskusstva? I thought you were a businessman—but what kind of businessman knows how to act like a spy?”
He shrugged and replied, with a casualness that he hoped she found convincing, “I watch a lot of Hollywood movies, dusya; you know that.”
Now, after he’d gone several hundred feet past her bench, he slowed his pace somewhat, as if uncertain of where he was going. At that point, he was overtaken by Lana, who was transformed not only in appearance but even in gait: she walked quickly but with a slight limp, as if afflicted with a touch of gout or perhaps some hip ailment.
As she squeezed past him on the narrow lane, she spoke quietly and rapidly: “Vasiliyevsky Alley is just off Pushkin Street.” Then she moved ahead. He looked round the park uncertainly, seeming to orient himself, and then resumed walking, staying a hundred feet or so behind her at a fairly constant pace. He marveled at how different she looked, how she had mastered the walk of the impatient old lady. Leaving the park, she plunged into traffic, crossing Pushkin Street with an old woman’s irritable fearlessness.
By going through this procedure they were, in the language of Corky and his trainers, “dry-cleaning” themselves, making sure that neither one of them had “grown a tail,” or been followed. He watched her turn into the tiny Vasiliyevsky Alley; then he followed her there. She approached the wooden door of what appeared to be an apartment building, a row of doorbells on the left, next to each button a handwritten name set in a small brass frame. The building looked old and decrepit; inside, there was no lobby, just a stair landing. The building smelled of spoiled meat and makhorka tobacco. He followed her up two flights of creaky steps, covered in threadbare carpet, to an apartment door.
He entered a dark, close, and musty flat and closed the door behind himself. Immediately she threw her arms around him. Her padded shape felt strange and unfamiliar to his hands, but her face was as ravishingly beautiful as ever, her mouth warm and inviting, instantly arousing him.
She broke the embrace, pulled away. “We should be safe here, my darling.”
“Who lives here?”
“A dancer. I should say, a former dancer. She rejected the advances of the rehearsal coach, and now she works as a cleaner at TASS, where her mother also works. Masha’s fortunate to have a job at all.”
“She and her mother are both at work?”
Lana nodded. “I told her I had . . . met someone. She knows I’d do the same for her, if she needed a private place, a—”
“A love nest, I think it’s called.”
“Yes, Stiva,” she teased. “You would know what it’s called.”
He smiled uncomfortably. “Have you ever come here with von Schüssler?”
“Oh, no, of course not! He would never come to such a place! He takes me to his apartment in Moscow, and only there.”
“He has another place?”
“In the country he has a grand house that the Russians seized from some rich merchant. The Germans are being treated very well these days. Stalin must be very concerned that Hitler see how serious he is about good relations.”
“Have you ever been there? To von Schüssler’s country house, I mean?”
“Stiva, I’ve told you already—he means nothing to me! I despise him!”
“This is not about jealousy, Lana. I need to know where you two meet.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why do you need to know this?”
“For planning purposes. I’ll explain.”
“He takes me only to his Moscow flat. The house in Kuntsevo is off-limits.”
“Why?”
“It’s a large and grand place, with staff, people who know his wife. He prefers to be discreet.” She added with distaste, “He is a married man, you know. With a wife and children back in Berlin. Apparently I am to be hidden like a shameful secret. There he spends his weekends writing his memoirs, as if he had anything to say, as if he was anything more than a cockroach! But why are you asking me all these questions, Stiva? Enough about that beast! I have to see him tonight, and I’d rather not have to think about him until I have to.”
“Because I have an idea, Lana. A way to help you.” Hearing himself speak the words aloud sickened him. He was lying to her, using her. Manipulating her, more accurately. But it was killing him. “Does he ask about your father?”
“Very little. Only enough to remind me of what he knows about Father. The power he has. As if he needs to remind me! Does he think I can possibly forget? Does he think I don’t remember this every second I’m with him?” She almost spit out: “Does he think I forget, that I’m swept away by his charms?”
“So, it would not seem strange to him if you happened to mention that your father has recently been assigned to a new, important job at the Commissariat—a job that gives him access to a wide range of documents concerning the Red Army?”
“Why in the world would I want to say this?”
“To put an idea in his head.”
“Ah, yes,” Lana said with heavy sarcasm. “So he will ask me to steal documents from my father, is that it?”
“Exactly.”
“And then . . . and then I shall give him these state secrets, is that your idea, Stiva?”
“Correct. Documents that reveal top-secret Soviet military plans.”
She cupped Metcalfe’s face with her hands as one would a silly child, and then she laughed. “Brilliant idea, my Stiva. And then shall I stand in the middle of Red Square with a megaphone and tell all of Moscow what I think of Stalin? Would you care to join me?”
Metcalfe continued, undeterred by her sarcasm. “The documents will be counterfeit, of course.”
“Oh, and where shall I get these counterfeit documents?”
“From me. I’ll supply them.”
She pulled back, her eyes fixed steadily on his. “And he will discredit himself,” she said slowly, no longer sarcastic, “by passing these documents to Berlin.”
“Eventually, yes, he will discredit him
self,” Metcalfe conceded.
“And then he will be recalled to Berlin, and I will be free of him.”
“In time. But before then, you’ll be using him to save your country.”
“Save Russia? How is this possible?”
Metcalfe realized that he was playing a dangerous, dishonest game with her, and he despised having to do it. By telling her only part of what he wanted her to do he was in effect leading her on, playing on her hatred of Nazism and her love of Russia, her hatred of von Schüssler—and her love of Metcalfe.
“You know there’s no agreement, no piece of paper, that Hitler can sign that will stop him from doing whatever he thinks is best for the Nazis. He is determined to take over the world—he’s never stopped saying that from his earliest days. It’s in Mein Kampf; it’s in all his speeches, all his remarks. He makes no secret of it. Any country that threatens him, he’ll attack—and attack first. Including the Soviet Union.”
“That’s insane! Stalin would never threaten Nazi Germany!”
“I’m sure you’re right. But the only way to make sure that Hitler believes that is to feed him information, intelligence, that assures him of that. Nothing else would he believe. Do you see? You will pass documents to Hitler, using von Schüssler, that assure Hitler that the Soviet Union is no threat to him, no risk to Germany. If Hitler does not feel threatened, he’s less likely to act aggressively.”
“Stiva, I’ve always wondered how much you tell me is true. You say you’re a businessman, you speak Russian so well, you say your mother is Russian—”
“And she is. That much is true. And I am a businessman—sort of. Well, my family’s in business—that’s what brought me here in the first place.”
“But not this time.”
“Not entirely, no. I’m here to help out some friends.”
“Some friends in intelligence.”
The Tristan Betrayal Page 25