Kremlin Conspiracy

by Brian Freemantle

  Pike shook his head. ‘Maybe at a Party Congress and even then unlikely. And the days of Stalin and show trials are over, too.’

  ‘Whatever the reason, it’s good news for us,’ said the older man. ‘It might be premature, but I’ve actually had bankers tell me they expect to get their money back now; some of them people who only a month or two back were talking of writing off their Polish debts as non-performing assets.’

  ‘The trades union promise was the most interesting,’ said Pike.

  His father helped himself to more brandy. ‘The word in Washington is that the President is prepared to make a gesture if there’s a positive indication of some proper type of trades unionism being allowed to operate in Poland again.’

  ‘I think it’s a forlorn hope, but it would be a useful move if it can be made politically,’ said Pike. ‘It would make it easier for the Poles to resume their suspended trading and to carry out the agreement with Moscow. Which will mean more capital and in theory greater likelihood of interest and loan repayments.’

  ‘Volger said you’d made an interesting point about Soviet loans?’

  ‘There was approximately $500,000,000 bunched up in short-term loans and interest payments on some more long-term: exactly the sort of situation in the past where Moscow has sought extensions or delays. This time they settled: to make sure I checked every commercial bank and they all reported the same. Everything came in on time.’

  ‘Maybe the gold helped?’ said his father.

  Pike shook his head. ‘Last settlement was two weeks before the gold announcement. Certainly Moscow would have known of the under-assessment by then but there was no sudden selling to raise the foreign currency.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Pike. ‘I’ve guessed at a policy change, reflecting more financial rectitude than they’ve shown in the past but that, really, is all it is – a guess.’

  The older man stubbed out his cigar, repeatedly driving it into the ashtray until it was extinguished. ‘I’m impressed, guess or not,’ he said.

  ‘I still don’t think so,’ said Pike, anticipating the fresh demands.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve told you why not.’

  ‘I don’t accept nepotism for anything more than it is, an excuse.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s right for us to work together so closely.’

  His father frowned across at him. ‘That isn’t even logical.’

  ‘I want to be alone!’

  ‘You’d be given every freedom, for God’s sake.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Then I wouldn’t be alone.’

  ‘I don’t understand you: you’re not making sense. And for an analyst, that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Let’s just leave things as they are.’

  ‘There’s no hurry to make your mind up: take all the time you want,’ said his father relentlessly.

  Jane Rosen realized objectively that she was a fraud. She postured about equality – she was embarrassed at the recollection of the evening in Washington, with the American from the Federal Reserve – and yet in her private life she endured an existence as demeaning as that of any Victorian housewife. Except that she wasn’t a housewife. Nor ever likely to be, she decided, trying to maintain the objectivity. So why go on? Why jump hopefully every time the telephone rang and accept the empty, boring weekends? Love – if that’s what it was, and she wasn’t sure – didn’t seem enough. Perhaps it was something silly: Freudian. Perhaps, for all her posturing, she wanted to be dominated and humiliated. She felt a burn of anger at the amateur psychology.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Burnham.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve been miles away, all evening.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Sure nothing’s wrong?’

  ‘Positive.’

  They’d eaten in a restaurant in Kent because Burnham said it was about to get a golden rose designation in the Michelin guide. Certainly the food had been excellent but Jane knew that wasn’t the main reason. A month before, in a restaurant in London, they’d met a couple who knew Marion. Jane had been embarrassed and felt cheapened at his stumbled, awkward attempt at an explanation, a rambling account of her employment at the Bank of England.

  ‘Wish sometimes I was a commodity broker,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some friends of mine made a lot of money in the gold scramble.’

  ‘Doesn’t happen often,’ she said.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Strange mistake, for the Russians to have made.’

  ‘There’ve been one or two strange things, lately.’

  ‘Like what?’ he said, glancing at her across the car.

  ‘Moscow’s been paying its debts,’ she said. ‘Every one of the Big Four banks have filed returns showing that they’ve been settling on time.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘No one’s sure, at the moment.’ Ahead Jane saw the lights of a bridge, the Albert she guessed, and realized they would be home soon. ‘Staying tonight?’ she asked. Why was it always she who suggested it?

  ‘Not tonight,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ she said. In the beginning he’d averaged two nights out of the seven, sometimes three. It had only been once in the last fortnight.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ she said again. Except that it wasn’t. If she was prepared to be a whore, why didn’t she do it properly and charge for it?

  ‘And definitely Friday,’ he said, reaching across and squeezing her hand. ‘Marion’s going down to Winchester to get Rupert for an exeat: she’s going to stay overnight with some friends.’

  ‘I’m going away on Friday.’ She spoke without thought or consideration, uttering the words as they came into her mind. Until that moment she hadn’t the slightest intention of going anywhere.

  ‘What!’ He looked across the car at her, long enough for it to swerve slightly from its course.

  She hated him for his surprise at the fact that she should actually be thinking of doing something without consulting him. ‘I’m going to see my sister in Cambridge,’ she said. ‘I bought a present for her son in Washington, and I haven’t given it to him yet.’

  ‘Why not go on Saturday?’

  ‘It’s fixed now.’

  ‘Couldn’t you unfix it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her hands tight together in her lap, her gaze fixed intently in front of her.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I would have thought you’d go down to collect Rupert as well,’ she said.

  ‘Now I will.’

  Damn! He’d made an arrangement to be with her and she’d ruined it! She could still back down, she realized.

  ‘That is, if you’re sure you can’t rearrange Cambridge?’ he added, expecting her to concede.

  She was squeezing so tight that her fingers were hurting, and ahead of her the bridge lights blurred as her eyes misted. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘They’ve made plans. They’re expecting me.’

  Chapter 11

  Of all the intended Soviet victims, Anatoli Karelin was the best known in the West – a contemporary of Stalin and for years deferred to as a hard-line Party theoretician – and so he was the first to be purged. It was a traditional attack, because it was important that it should be properly recognized not only by the public commentators but by foreign ministries as well. There was the initial, unidentified criticism and then Karelin was named. Predictably, there was media speculation in the West about changes in Soviet leadership: leading articles in the London and New York Times, a commentary in Le Monde, and an actual forecast of Karelin’s dismissal in Bild Zeitung. This was confirmed in a terse statement from the Tass news agency, where there was a departure from normal practice. At such an age – he was seventy-eight – it would have been usual to say that he was retiring because of declining health. But the announcement made no mention of ill
health, thus endorsing the man’s disgrace and continuing to provoke comment in the West, as intended. Because Karelin’s titular responsibility had been for the country’s overall economic planning, his dismissal was tentatively linked with a change in Russia’s economic policies.

  Boris Medvedev was the next to go. The initial announcements of a poor grain harvest were immediately connected with the Argentinian trade deal and then there were leading articles in both Pravda and Izvestia critical of the continued crop failures and of the men responsible for organizing agriculture within the Soviet Union.

  The replacement of Mikhail Paramov was announced without any preliminary indication, the statement issued from Tass again within an hour of the public naming and sacking of Medvedev. Western commentaries intensified, in magazines and on television and radio broadcasts, all three men brought together in the conjecture about the reason for the apparent upheaval. The final sacking, that of Arkady Chebotarev from the post of deputy Finance Minister, provided the necessary confirmation that the cause was economic, a natural – and again intended – conclusion from Karelin being the first to go.

  Chebotarev’s firing brought Lydia Kirov from the obscurity in which she had worked for ten years: she was named as his successor.

  Lydia had known it was going to happen, but she did not enjoy it. Aware of the Western journalistic tendency always to personalize coverage, particularly if a woman was involved, a week was set aside for photographs, sessions in which she had to sit under over-hot lights and twist and turn and pose and posture. She was reassured only by the knowledge that the effort was worthwhile when the requests were made. Through the overseas embassies the pictures and biographical details were made readily available and the outcome was surprising: the West is accustomed to ageing, grey-faced Russian officials, yet here was a thirty-two-year-old woman – a full-lipped, dark-eyed woman with auburn hair feathered Western style around a perfect oval face. Within days of being identified she was remembered by the Western bankers with whom she had come into contact during the preceding years and there were fresh stories of the quality of her clothes and the style of her dress. The London Daily Mirror published a full-length picture under the designation ‘Luscious Lydia’. The New York Daily News christened her ‘Red’s Ruble Reckoner’.

  ‘Preposterous!’ protested Lydia, when she and Malik met to consider the full effect of the government dismissals and her appointment. ‘Preposterous and infantile!’

  Malik was aware of the amount of time she had spent looking at the photographs in some of the Western newspapers and wondered how outraged she really was. ‘Sometimes personality cults can be useful,’ he said. ‘I think everything has worked extremely well.’

  ‘They’ve made me out to be like some Western film starlet, all bosom and no brains,’ she said. ‘A joke.’

  Her breasts really were most attractive, thought Malik, round and full. He said, ‘They’ll learn about your brains, soon enough. And the object wasn’t to impress newspaper readers. What next?’

  ‘Czechoslovakia,’ said Lydia. ‘Then Hungary. Finally Romania.’

  ‘And the trap snaps shut,’ said the Finance Minister.

  ‘And then the trap snaps shut,’ she agreed.

  It was a conference convened with one objective, and therefore limited strictly to the people intimately involved. Richard Volger sat at the head of the table as chairman of the Federal Reserve, with his two deputies, Archie Bellow and Raymond Funtle, on either side. Apart from Pike, who had been positioned to the left, James Strange and Peter Snape attended as analysts. Then came the bank’s eastern trade experts, Paul Byrne and Edward Reconzi.

  The penthouse room – actually overlooking Wall Street – and its fittings were designed for larger meetings and there was an emptiness about the gathering. Pike thought that his colleagues looked like the occupants of a once full shipwrecked lifeboat gradually disappearing to provide a chance for the remainder, which he recognized as being as inappropriate as it was illogical. He wondered if Janet, with whom he was spending at least three nights a week now, was infecting him with her irreverence. He hadn’t meant the relationship to develop as it had.

  ‘Shall we start?’ said Volger. He was a red-faced, beetle-browed man whose suits always appeared to be too tight. Around the table there was a gradual quietening and Volger continued: ‘We’ve been asked to provide an opinion on the developments in the Soviet Union. Others have, too, of course: CIA, Treasury, State. I want you to know the spread to understand the importance that Washington is attaching to it. It’s got to be right.’

  ‘Do we know sufficient to respond to a request like that?’ said Bellow. He was a thin, crabbed man whom Pike suspected found difficulty with global economics.

  ‘We’re not required to furnish the definitive opinion, although I’d dearly like ours to be the one that’s right,’ said Volger. ‘The results of this meeting are to be considered alongside the views of every other Agency.’

  ‘Who’s going to collate the information?’ said Pike.

  ‘Treasury, I suppose,’ said Volger.

  ‘Who’ll impose their own view before any others,’ predicted Funtle, the other deputy director.

  ‘The conclusion is to be returned to us for consideration before being submitted to the White House,’ assured Volger. ‘If it is at variance with our opinion, we can dissent in footnotes.’

  ‘Can there be anything other than the opinion we’ve already formed?’ asked Snape. The New Englander had been the last of the analysts to propose that the Soviet Union was entering a period of responsible economic planning and felt left behind: he was eager to catch up.

  ‘That’s precisely the purpose of this meeting,’ said Volger unhelpfully.

  Anxious to distance himself from the rebuke to the other analyst, Strange said, ‘I don’t see how we can make any sort of intelligent assessment without considering the information and views of CIA, Treasury and State.’

  ‘Difficult though it is – and I don’t argue that it is a difficulty – we’ve got to make the judgment upon what we know already,’ insisted Volger.

  ‘The Argentinian deal could be interpreted to show some sort of increased responsibility,’ said Byrne, on behalf of the trade department.

  ‘It could also be interpreted as immature negotiation,’ argued Pike immediately. ‘And Argentina isn’t a new trading partner. Nor is it the first time that Moscow have advanced Argentina generous aid.’

  ‘I thought you were the initial proponent of financial responsibility?’ demanded Bellow, anxious to get his figures into the right window.

  ‘I advanced it as a speculation,’ qualified Pike. He looked to the other deputy. ‘I agree with what Strange said: we don’t know enough.’

  ‘Why should the Soviet Union suddenly emerge as the world’s lender?’ said Funtle.

  It was a careless question and Pike knew he wouldn’t make himself a friend by his reply. ‘It isn’t a sudden emergence,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union is a creditor nation to a great many countries.’

  Funtle flushed at his mistake. ‘Developing countries,’ he said, making his own qualification.

  ‘For obvious reasons,’ said Snape. ‘To gain influence through money.’

  ‘Which could be the reasoning here.’

  ‘The scenario isn’t quite right,’ argued Reconzi. ‘As Pike said, the association with Argentina isn’t a new one, so there’s no reason for attempting increased influence there. And with Poland I would have thought they had sufficient.’

  ‘Argentina is a particular case,’ said Pike. ‘Russia needs the wheat. I’ve made a calculation that in addition to the 23,000,000 tonnes they’re getting from us, the Russians will still have a shortfall this year of something like 5,000,000 tonnes. And that doesn’t take into account what they’ll want for animal foodstuff.’

  ‘What recent information is there about their internal economy?’ asked the chairman. It was a question for all the analysts but he addressed it to Pike. The
other two deferred to him, as much for the need to avoid error as to accede to Volger’s choice.

  ‘Theoretically, the Soviet Union should be the world’s dominant industrial and financial power,’ said Pike. ‘They hold 58 per cent of the world’s coal deposits, nearly 59 per cent of its oil, 41 per cent of its iron ore, nearly 77 per cent of the known reserves of apatite, 25 per cent of the timber, nearly 9 per cent of the recognized deposits of manganese, 54 per cent of the potassium salts and one third of the world’s phosphates.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Bellow.

  ‘The irony is that under capitalist enterprise, it probably would be,’ continued Pike. ‘The reality is that mismanagement and improper capitalization has stultified the growth for years. Their agriculture is in a mess and although they’ve got all that mineral capacity, the climate creates enormous problems for its development, even if it were properly managed.’

  ‘You’re giving us traditional thinking and analysis,’ said Funtle.

  Pike hadn’t expected the man to respond so quickly to the earlier disagreement. ‘Purposely,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we can properly assess what’s happening now without considering the country’s potential or its problems in the past.’

  The deputy flushed. ‘What else should be considered?’ he demanded.

  ‘Extensive nuclear power at Obninsk, Beloyarskiy, Novovoronezhskiy, Kursk and Chernobyl,’ recited Pike. ‘Oil at Samarska Luka, Tuimazy, Ishimbay and Perm, also at Tyumen in West Siberia. And the natural gas which has allowed the construction of the pipeline into Europe.’

  ‘What about recent information?’ persisted Funtle, anxious to recover.

  ‘There isn’t any,’ said Pike. ‘Or insufficient, anyway. The apparent gold production mistake gives them a higher reserve than anyone previously calculated, but as a single fact it’s difficult to draw any conclusion apart from it indicating the bad management I spoke about earlier. And we’ve no accurate independent estimate of those reserves anyway: they could be lying.’

  ‘We haven’t talked about the governmental changes,’ reminded Volger.