by Glenn Meade
He suspected that had been Alex Slanski’s fate.
Another thing—the KGB had the pick of the crop. The organization ran every state orphanage in Russia, and many of its recruits came from those same institutions. Massey always reckoned the KGB probably lost the best killer it ever could have had in Slanski.
He spoke fluent German and Russian and could kill ruthlessly. The most recent assassination had been of a senior KGB officer visiting East Berlin, which Slanski had carried out for the CIA at the request of the émigré group, NTS.
Massey removed an envelope from the file and slid out a photograph of the colonel named Grenady Kraskin. It showed a hard-faced man with thin lips and small, evil eyes. “Assassinated” was too nice a word. Kraskin had his tongue cut out for good measure. It wasn’t a calling card Slanski inflicted on his prey, but according to the file Kraskin had liked to perform that particular kind of brutal mutilation on his victims if they failed to talk during interrogation. Slanski liked to make the punishment fit the crime, ignoring orders to desist from such behavior. But Branigan and Wallace had been right: Massey could think of no one more suitable to carry out the mission.
He slid the photograph back into the envelope. He had a 7 a.m. start, and it was a long drive to Kingdom Lake in New Hampshire.
The grim sight of Max’s and Nina’s bodies lying in the morgue kept coming into his mind, and Massey knew that no matter what Branigan had said, he personally couldn’t let the matter rest there. Whoever was responsible for what had happened to Max Simon was going to pay the price, even if it meant stepping outside the bounds, something Massey rarely if ever did.
But this was personal.
It was almost an hour later when Massey looked up and heard distant bells chime in the church of the Holy Trinity. He stood and went down to the basement and selected the key from the ring in his pocket and unlocked the door.
The two loose firebricks were above the cellar door, a safe hiding place he used whenever he was working at home, rather than leave any notes lying around or in locked drawers or a safe that could be broken into. He placed the yellow pad with his notes and the manila folder inside the recess and replaced the bricks. Slanski’s file he would return to Branigan.
It was just after 5 p.m. on the afternoon of Thursday, January 22, two days after the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of the United States.
12
* * *
NEW HAMPSHIRE
JANUARY 23
The New England towns and villages with their brightly painted wooden houses looked pretty in the light dusting of snow. Jake Massey crossed the Massachusetts line into New Hampshire in the late afternoon and took the road northwest to Concord. There was hardly any traffic, and half an hour later he drove the Buick down through a thickly forested track that led to Kingdom Lake. He saw the snowcapped mountains in the distance, and a signboard at the track entrance proclaimed, TRESPASSERS KEEP OUT!
Massey switched off the engine and climbed out of the Buick. There was a narrow wooden veranda at the front of the cabin and he went up the steps. The front door was unlocked, and the room he stepped into was empty. Massey called out “Anybody home?” but there was no reply.
The room looked neat and tidy, but he thought the place could have done with a woman’s touch. It was barely furnished with a scratched pinewood table and two chairs set in the center, and several pairs of deer antlers hung on the walls. There was a tiny kitchen in the back, the utensils and plates neatly stored on the spotless wooden shelves. Massey noticed a rifle storage rack in a corner. Two of the weapons were missing.
There were some books on a shelf and a photograph in a wooden frame on the wall over the fireplace. A very old family photograph, the image cracked and worn, of a man and a woman and three small children: two boys and a blond little girl.
Massey guessed Slanski and the old man had probably gone hunting. He decided to walk down to the lake.
The water was choppy and rain clouds were gathering overhead. A razor-sharp icy wind suddenly whipped across the lake, and as Massey stood beside the boat he said aloud, “Heck, that’s cold—”
He heard the barely audible click of a weapon behind him, and the voice a split second later.
“You’ll be a darned sight colder, mister, if you don’t take those hands out of your pockets. Keep them in the air and turn around very slowly. Otherwise you’re going to be crawling around on stumps.”
Massey turned and saw the man. There was a thin, crazy smile on his unshaven face, and he looked thoroughly dangerous and unpredictable. He was of medium height, blond, and carried a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He wore a heavily padded windbreaker over his sweater, and his corduroy trousers were tucked into knee-length Russian boots. He held the butt of a Browning shotgun lightly against his waist, the barrel pointed at Massey.
The man’s face creased in a grin. “Jake Massey. For a second there I thought you were a trespasser up to no good. You almost got yourself peppered.”
“I guess I got here earlier than expected.” Massey smiled and nodded at the shotgun. “You planning on using that thing, Alex?”
The man grinned and lowered the shotgun as he stepped forward and shook Massey’s hand. “Good to see you, Jake. No problem finding us, then?”
“I saw the sign at the entrance road. Talk about wanting privacy. Who in their right mind’s going to bother coming to such an isolated place?”
Slanski smiled. “Poachers, for one. The land and water all around here belong to Vassily, and he doesn’t take warmly to strangers stealing from his traps.”
“Then one man’s meat must be another man’s poison. Me, I’d go crazy up here.”
“If you’ve got time later I’ll give you the guided tour. We’ve even got bears in the woods.”
Massey’s face showed a brief look of alarm. Slanski laughed. “Relax, Jake. It’s still a lot safer than New York.”
Massey suddenly noticed the old man standing in the woods fifty yards away, a deer carcass slung over his shoulders. He carried a Winchester rifle, and his long black hair was tied back from a weathered face that looked as brown and deeply wrinkled as a walnut. He looked like an Indian from a distance, but Massey recognized something familiar in the features. It was a face that had the same look as those of the Russians who live north of the Arctic Circle: dark hair and features not unlike the Laplanders’.
Slanski waved over at him, the merest of gestures, and when Massey glanced back the old man had disappeared into the woods.
Suddenly it started to rain, a heavy, drenching downpour, and a squall of wind threw freezing water in their faces.
Slanski smiled. “How about we go up to the house? I’ve got a bottle of bourbon put by that’ll warm that old Russian heart of yours.”
• • •
They sat at the pinewood table and Slanski opened the bottle and poured bourbon into two shot glasses. He was lean but well built, and he moved stealthily. A strange combination of restless energy and measured control, as if he was in command of every muscle in his body. As Slanski sat, Massey noticed the man’s eyes. Deep, slate blue. There was more than a hint of torment in them, but the strange smile hardly left his face.
Slanski raised his glass. “Na zdorovye.”
“Na tvoyo zdorovye.” Massey sipped his drink, stood, and crossed to the bookshelf in the corner and picked up a book. “Dostoevsky. Last time it was Tolstoy. Whatever are we going to do with you, Alex? A scholar as well as an assassin. Quite a dangerous combination.”
Slanski smiled. “He appeals to the darker side of my Russian nature.”
“Where’s Vassily disappeared to?”
“He’s in the woods someplace. Don’t worry about him.”
Massey swallowed the bourbon and pushed forward the glass. As Slanski refilled it he said, “You want to talk?”
Massey said, “What did Branigan tell you exactly?”
“Enough to get me interested. But seeing as you’re going
to be running the show, I want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
Massey unfastened the security lock on the briefcase he had taken from the car, removed the file marked FOR PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY, and handed it across.
“Inside you’ll see two reports. One is the result of almost two years’ work. Highly secret intelligence work carried out for the CIA by the Moscow contacts of some of the anti-Stalinist émigré groups. It gives details of the old tsarist escape tunnels in the Kremlin that date back hundreds of years. One tunnel in particular is interesting. It leads from the basement of the Bolshoi Theater to the third floor of the Kremlin and comes out in a room next to Stalin’s quarters. We also learned there’s a secret underground train line that runs from the Kremlin to Stalin’s villa at Kuntsevo, just outside Moscow. Stalin’s got several villas, but that’s the one he uses most often. But the underground line is only ever used when he needs to travel in haste or in an emergency. We discovered it can be easily breached two blocks from the Kremlin and leads right under the Kuntsevo villa. Both tunnels, like all the others, are checked at weekly intervals by the Guards Directorate, visual checks and using mine detection equipment and dogs. But normally they’re not guarded, except at the entrances and exits, as you’d expect.
“But you wouldn’t be going in through a regular entrance. And a man of your abilities would find a way of getting past the guards. The Kremlin and the Kuntsevo villa are the most likely places Stalin is going to be. Those are your ways in and out of both, whichever should be necessary to use.”
It took Massey several minutes more to outline the exact details of the operation, and when he had finished Slanski looked through several pages of the file and said, “I’m impressed, Jake.” He picked up the bourbon bottle, poured a measure into the glass, and downed it in one swallow, then fixed Massey with a stare. “But I’ve got some questions.”
“Ask away. You’re the one this depends on.”
“Why wait until now to kill Stalin? It should have been done a long time ago.”
“Look at the file again. There’s a second report I told you about, at the back. It ought to explain.”
Slanski took the file and read. When he finished he looked up and smiled. “Interesting. But I don’t need a report to tell me Stalin is crazy. He should have been put in a rubber room long ago.”
“Maybe, but this time we’re in deep enough trouble to have to put the man down for the dangerous beast that he is. Do you remember Max Simon?”
“Sure. He was a friend of yours, as I recall.”
Massey explained about the deaths of Max and his daughter, and why they had been killed. A look of utter distaste crossed Slanski’s face. He lit a cigarette and stood. “There’s something I don’t like about the plan.”
“What?”
“Bloody the waters in a pool full of sharks, and it’s difficult to get out with all those teeth chomping. Assuming I do the job, the KGB and militia are going to be swarming all over Moscow afterwards, if there is an afterwards. There are five hundred Kremlin Guards behind those red walls, another three thousand a stone’s throw away. That’s a lot of angry comrades.”
“I was coming to that.”
Slanski grinned. “I kind of hoped you were.”
“You leave the Kremlin or the dacha the same way you enter. But there’ll also be alternative exits just in case you need them. As soon as I have everything organized, I’ll tell you the details. But assuming it all goes according to plan, after that you lie low in a safe house I’ll set up in Moscow. A week later, if things work the way I intend, I take you out.”
“How?”
Massey smiled. “I’m working on it. But either way you don’t go in without the safe house and exit being in place. Otherwise it’s a suicide mission.”
“I figured it was that already. Who else knows about the plan?”
“Only Branigan and the brass who approved it, but the exact details are up to me. And that’s the way it stays. The fewer people who know the better.”
“Branigan said there’s going to be a woman?”
“She’ll be with you as far as Moscow, then we take her out of the picture.”
Slanski shook his head. “You know I always operate alone, Jake. Taking a woman along will only slow things up.”
“Not this time. It’s for your own good. Traveling alone to Moscow might make you a target for suspicion. Besides, she’s part of the plan. She’ll accompany you acting as your wife but for the obvious security reasons, she won’t know the target.”
Slanski crushed his cigarette in an ashtray on the table. “You’d better tell me about her.”
“You know the rules, Alex. Whenever we drop two or more people onto Soviet territory we don’t reveal their backgrounds to one another. No real names, no real identities. That way there’s less trouble for either of you if one gets caught.”
Slanski shook his head firmly. “The rules don’t apply. If I’m going into the lions’ den I want to know who I’m going in with. Especially if it’s with a woman I know nothing about.”
Massey spread his hands on the table and sighed. “Okay. I’ll give you the basics. Her name’s Anna Khorev. Age twenty-six. She escaped from a Soviet Gulag near the Finnish border three months ago, and we gave her asylum.”
Massey saw the look on Slanski’s face as he put down his glass. “Jake, you must be crazy picking someone with that background. How can you trust her?”
“She wasn’t my choice. And if I had my way I’d leave her out of it. But not for the reasons you might think. She can definitely be trusted, Alex, take it from me. And she’s the best we’re going to get at short notice. It would take months to train another woman, even just so that she wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb on a Moscow street or turn white with fear every time she was asked for her papers by a militiaman.”
“Can she handle herself?”
“She can use a gun, if that’s what you mean. But all she’s really got to do is play the part of being your wife and make your cover seem plausible until you reach Moscow. We can use Popov for a week or so to put you both through your paces. But I’ll be relying on you to look after her. The woman’s already had some basic military training with the Red Army.”
There was a flash of anger or doubt on Slanski’s face, Massey couldn’t tell which.
“Branigan never said she was Red Army.”
“She was a conscript during the war. She didn’t volunteer out of ideology. And I would think her military background, however brief, is an advantage.”
“What about the rest of her background?”
Massey explained briefly about her parents but said nothing about Anna Khorev’s personal experience before her imprisonment in the Gulag.
Slanski shook his head in disbelief. “This gets crazier by the minute.”
“What does?”
“Her father a Red Army officer.”
“Past tense, and hardly in the Red Army mold. And it doesn’t taint the woman. I told you, you can trust her.”
“Then why was she in a Gulag?”
“You know the way the system works. There doesn’t have to be a reason. She was an innocent victim. She did nothing wrong.”
Slanski frowned. “So why has she agreed to go back into Russia?”
“She hasn’t agreed to anything yet, because I haven’t told her. But her reasons will be personal and nothing to do with you.”
Slanski crossed to the window and looked out. “Another question: Why did your people come to me?”
Massey glanced over toward the photograph on the wall before looking back. “You know the reasons. I don’t have to tell you.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
Massey pushed away his empty glass. “You were the best man OSS ever trained. You speak fluent Russian. You’ve been behind the Curtain before. And the best two reasons of all: I figure you want to kill him and you’re bold enough to try.”
Slanski smiled. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.
You really have it all worked out, don’t you, Jake?”
“You’re just about perfect for the part. You’ve got no family ties, no wife and children. No emotional baggage to tie you down.”
“Getting into Moscow is going to be difficult enough despite the plan. It’s probably going to be a close hit, not one done with a rifle from a safe distance. And going in with a woman I don’t know from Judas doesn’t help.”
“I never said it would be easy. That’s a risk you take. But you stick to the plan and you both stand some chance of getting out of this alive. But trust the woman, Alex. Me, I’d stake my life on her.”
“This is going to be no ordinary walk in the woods, Jake. You think it’s fair that she doesn’t know how deep and dangerous she’s getting in?”
“I don’t have any choice. That’s the way Branigan wants it. And maybe it’s best. If she knew she probably wouldn’t go.”
Slanski thought for a moment. “Where have you got in mind for training?”
Massey shook his head. “Not the regular base we use in Maryland. It’s too much of a security risk.” He smiled and nodded over toward the window. “I kind of thought about here. The terrain is pretty similar to what you’ll be crossing. If that’s okay with you.”
“I guess Vassily won’t object. I’ll tell him we need to do some training. He won’t ask why and he’ll keep out of the way.”
“There’s another reason why I’d like to use the woman that maybe you ought to know about. After Anna Khorev escaped, the Russians wanted her sent back. They claimed she was a common criminal. I figure that’s a load of bull, but she did kill a camp guard and a border guard during her escape. Maybe I’m wrong, but I figure the KGB just might try to find her and take her back illegally. Heaven knows, they’ve done it before with other escapees and defectors. Up here I’m pretty sure she’ll be safely out of harm’s way. And if and when she makes it back after the mission, I’ll make sure she’ll have deep enough cover so that she’ll never be found.”