The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “Which one do you have?” The woman read it back; Stone thanked her and hung up.

  One more call to make, to be safe. He would need Armitage’s home address if there was no answer; if need be, he could surprise the Secretary, thereby eliminating the chance for Armitage to call anyone else.

  The telephone business office is notoriously a wary place, stingy with information, fiercely protective of the privacy of its subscribers. Lower down the hierarchy, however, things get looser. He called the telephone company’s repair office, gave his name as William Armitage, and announced with vexation that his home phone was having problems. “Look, I’m at work now so I don’t have time to talk,” he told the man who took his call. “There’s some kind of rapid beeping noise on my line.”

  “What’s the number, sir?”

  Stone gave it. “Do I get billed for this repair?” he asked with annoyance.

  “Not at all, sir. We’ll have someone check the line right away.”

  “Listen, while I’ve got you here—I didn’t get my last bill.”

  “You should probably contact the business office—”

  234 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Listen, I moved recently and I sent in a change-of-address form to you folks a while back. Now, which address do you have on your screen there?”

  “Sevent'-nine Upper Hawthorne.”

  “You got the right one,” Stone said, sounding genuinely puzzled. “Who knows. Thanks.”

  Five days earlier, two powerfully built men in their early forties had paid a visit to the telephone security department of Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone in central Washington, D.C. The men, who claimed to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and carried identification cards to confirm it, were expected; the securit' agent in charge had received a call that morning from someone who had said he was a special agent at the FBI and two of his men would be coming by for some routine court-ordered monitoring.

  The two men presented the necessary document: a court order signed by a federal judge. Although their identification was false, and the morning’s caller was not from the FBI but from an organization that called itself the American Flag Foundation, the court order was the real thing. The judge who had authorized the wiretaps was a longtime friend of the Director of Central Intelligence and a firm believer in the necessity of the occasional domestic covert operation.

  The two men were ushered into a small room, given headsets, and shown how to work a console on which they could hear all conersations on a certain seven telephone lines in the Washington area.

  “Mr. Armitage?”

  The voice that answered was that of an older man, whose clipped tones and rounded vowels indicated someone of good breeding, as well as a man used to having his orders followed.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Matt Kelley. I’m an associate of Winthrop Lehman’s.”

  “I see.” Armitage’s patrician tone had suddenly changed; now he was more cautious. “Is that how you got my number?”

  “That’s right. Winthrop wanted me to get in touch with you.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 235

  Everything depended upon Armitage’s response. Would there be that telltale pause, some evidence that he was surprised, proof that he was no longer in contact with Lehman? If not, Stone would hang up at once, safe in assuming that Armitage was poison—one of them.

  “He did?” Armitage said. “What on earth for?”

  Stone’s brain was spinning, doing hundreds of calculations. Armitage sounded sincere.

  “He didn’t tell you to expect my call?”

  “I haven’t talked to Winthrop in twelve or thirteen years.”

  “It has to do with the death of Alfred Stone. Do you know the name?”

  “Hell, yes. I knew the man, or at least met him. Grisly thing, what happened. What do you want from me?”

  Armitage had to be on the level.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You’re being very mysterious.”

  “I’m afraid I have to be.”

  “Call me at the office tomorrow afternoon. I’m kind of raked, but I’ll try to squeeze in—”

  “No. Not at the State Department.”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s too sensitive to discuss there. Can we meet somewhere else? At your home, perhaps.”

  “I’ve got some people coming over for dinner, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

  “Kelley.”

  “Kelley. Let me get back to you in a couple of minutes, and I’ll try to work something out.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “Any reason you can’t give me your number?” Armitage asked, his voice rising in suspicion.

  “No,” Stone said at once. “None at all.” He looked at the pay phone and read off the number.

  “I’ll get back to you in ten minutes.”

  Stone fished a scrap of paper from his pocket, scrawled on it “out of order,” and tucked it into the phone’s coin slot. He stood by the

  236 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  phone until a young black woman came by to use it, noticed the sign, and walked off.

  The call came five minutes later. The voice wasn’t Armitage’s.

  “Mr. Kelley? This is Morton Bloom. I’m Bill Armitage’s assistant. Bill asked me to call you w hile he talks to some of his dinner guests and tries to reschedule.”

  “Why couldn’t he call me himself? I thought I made that clear— I don’t want to involve anyone else.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I guess he thought it wouldn’t make a difference. I’m his aide-de-camp, sort of a chief factotum, bodyguard, that sort of thing.”

  “I see.”

  “The point is, he does want to meet with you, and he appreciates your desire to keep sort of a low profile.”

  “I’m glad he does. How soon can he see me?”

  “Are you free tonight?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Tonight, then. Where are you?”

  “In Washington.”

  “Bill feels prett>’ strongly that it’s best not to meet at his house. He said you’d understand.”

  “Yes,” Stone acknowledged.

  “He wants you to meet him at an out-of-the-way place we can watch, to make sure you weren’t tailed.”

  “I understand. Where does he suggest?”

  “Do you know Arlington at all?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a shopping mall right near the Metro stop where there’s a coffee shop. Mr. Armitage can be there at, say, nine o’clock, if that’s convenient.”

  Bloom described the precise booth in the coffee shop where he, Armitage, and Stone would meet. “If we’re a few minutes late, don’t panic,” Bloom added. “It’s my job to be careful, and I like to do my job well. You understand.”

  When he hung up, he tried Armitage’s number, received a busy signal, and then called State Department Personnel. Was there a

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 237

  Morton Bloom employed in the State Department? There was, he was told: in Armitage’s office.

  Relieved, Stone hung up.

  Several hours later, carrying his Smith & Wesson in the pocket of his jacket, he left the Arlington Metro station and walked to the mall. He found the coffee shop, the Panorama, easily. It was a small place, well lighted; Stone saw through the front plate-glass window that there were about eight customers. He was reassured. If this was a setup, it was a lousy place. Too public.

  Ten minutes before nine. No one was sitting in the booth, which was marked with a table tent marked “reserved.” The sign looked foolish: a reserved table in an uncrowded coffee shop. Probably Ar-mitage or Bloom had called and asked them to do that. But why would someone as dignified as Armitage want to meet in such a tacky place?

  He crossed the street and watched the entrance, standing in the doorway of a travel agency.

  Ten minutes went by. It was nine o’clock, and still no one was there. They expe
cted him to arrive first, but he would surprise them.

  Soon he looked at his watch again; it was exactly nine-fifteen, and still no sign of them. Something seemed off about the whole business.

  He left the travel-agency doorway and walked down the street toward the Metro, and then he heard the explosion.

  He jumped, terrified. It was a deep, booming noise, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass, and it came from the end of the coffee shop. The small building was now afire. Stone saw the flames shooting out of the windows and heard a fire alarm clamoring. He began to run.

  32

  Moscow

  The Prospekt Mira metro station is adorned with some of the most beautiful architecture in perhaps the world’s most beautiful subway system. The floors are granite tile; the corridors are colonnaded with rococo arches and illuminated by elegant chandeliers. The corridor into which the escalator deposits throngs of pedestrians is lined with marble benches. During rush hour—which, in Moscow, is hours long—the benches are crowded with weary travelers, babushkas with string bags, henna-haired women with squirming children, irritable factory workers resting briefcases full of tangerines on their laps.

  A tall, lanky man in an ill-fitting suit had been sitting on a bench for five minutes, attracting no attention. He looked insignificant, distracted. To a casual observer he would have seemed to be an office worker in one of Moscow’s thousands of vestigial state offices. He looked like the kind of man you always ended up sitting next to in the metro.

  No one would remember seeing Stefan Kramer, and no one would recall that he opened the cheap, scuffed briefcase on the ground before him, reached a hand in among the sheaves of papers, and did something. Of course, no one could observe that he had squeezed the chemical pencil, just as the train arrived and hundreds of people rushed on and off the train.

  Then, just as he was about to insert himself into the heaving crowd in the subway car, having left his briefcase in the station beside a crowd of Red Armv soldiers, he turned around.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 239

  The soldiers—a platoon, most likely—were slowly, cumber-somely assembling, and Stefan knew from experience that they would be there, obeying their commander’s order not to move, for five minutes more or so.

  Jesus, Stefan thought. No one was supposed to be standing around on the platform.

  The soldiers would die.

  Stefan’s head was spinning. They were soldiers of the very government that had destroyed his brother’s mind, yet they were very likely decent, innocent young men, even younger than himself.

  He glanced quickly at these soldiers, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys, gangly and ruddy-cheeked, who knew nothing of politics and gulags and torture, and thought only of the great honor of serving the state.

  Stefan could not kill them.

  He drew back from the crowded subway car just as it pulled away from the platform. Then he retrieved his briefcase, which stood abandoned near the soldiers, strolled with it to the end of the platform, and found a deserted area.

  His heart was pounding; the thing could go off at any second.

  He placed the briefcase against the marble wall, a long distance away from anyone, and opened his newspaper as if reading. No one seemed to be paying him any attention. When another train came again, he got on it, nervous but at the same time relieved, and listened for the explosion.

  A few days earlier, his father had typed a letter on an electric typewriter in the offices of Progress Publishers. The typewriter had no distinguishing features; the letter was typed on blank paper; and it had been sent to the office of President Gorbachev in care of one of Gorbachev’s assistants, whose name Yakov had selected from a photograph on the front page oi Izvestiya.

  In the letter, Yakov had demanded, simply and clearly, the release without delay of all the inmates of the Serbsky Institute being held for political reasons. If there was no response within one week, Yakov had written, the terror would continue.

  240 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  With the American President coming to Moscow, this threat would undoubtedly be quite real to the Politburo.

  Yakov and Stefan knew that the assassination of the Central Committee member Sergei Borisov had received worldwide attention. The Kremlin would not want another such incident, and the price that the Kramers were demanding was, after all, quite small.

  They met, father and son, once more at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Sonya had gone out again. Stefan often thought about her, wondering why his father was so adamant that she not be told. Surely she would disapprove of so dangerous an action. But was there something else, some other reason Yakov wanted to protect his lover?

  “I don’t want innocent people killed if we can avoid it,” Yakov had said. His face registered a deep sadness.

  Stefan nodded his head in agreement. “The thought of it makes me sick. I still can’t think about Borisov. As horrible a man as he was, I can’t do such things.”

  “All right,” Yakov said. “If you select the metro, make sure you are careful not to hurt innocent people.”

  “I will.”

  “The bomb—how powerful will this one be?”

  “A wad of plastic explosive of this size will create a very large explosion.”

  “And what’s this?” Yakov asked, holding up a section of brass tube five inches long that resembled a pen but had a screw-and-nut assembly at one end. “Is it dangerous?” He set it down gently.

  “No,” Stefan laughed, “not by itself. It’s a mechanical firing device. Very simple, actually.”

  After a moment, Yakov looked up from the bomb components. “For Avram,” he said.

  The device did its work in a few minutes, by which time Stefan was long gone.

  The platform was suddenly illuminated by a blinding, bluish light; then, a fraction of a second later, it was rocked by an immense explosion, thunderous and ear-splitting. No one was nearby, and so no one was badly hurt, but people who had just entered the platform

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 241

  began screaming in terror as rubble from the detonation showered hundreds of feet away.

  The explosion was the subject of rumors that spread throughout Moscow at lightning speed: another attack by the terrorists. People gossiping at their offices the next day had any number of theories; none of them might have suspected that the perpetrators were a few very ordinary men, acting out of love for a brother and son.

  Had Andrew Langen not happened to be walking down Kalinin Prospekt when Sergei Borisov’s car blew up, the CIA would have had no idea that the explosion had involved KGB technology. Had the CIA not learned that, it wouldn’t have instructed Langen as a matter of highest priority to follow all similar all acts of terrorism very closely.

  So it was that, as soon as word of the metro incident got around— and it got around quickly—Langen was at pains to obtain evidence of the quality he had quite fortuitously found just a few weeks earlier. As soon as the bomb went oflF, killing no one but injuring more than twenty bystanders, the area was sealed by the combined forces of the Soviet militia and the KGB. There seemed no way to procure shrapnel from the explosion this time.

  Until, as it happened, the old Russian muzhik who did repair and maintenance work in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy chanced to mention to Langen that, yes, he had heard all about the terrible thing that happened in the metro: he had a friend, a custodial worker in the employ of the militsiya, who was called in to clean, repair, and restore the site.

  The muzhik was cleared by the KGB—all Soviet nationals who worked in the embassy were—but he was no Chekist, and for a healthy bribe he agreed to see what he could do. The next morning he produced a chocolate box full of oddments taken from the damaged portion of the Prospekt Mira corridor. He had wrapped each fragment of detritus for Langen in tissue paper and fondled them as if they were moon rocks. Which, in a sense, they were.

  33

  Arlington, Virginia

  Stone ran up the
street toward the Arlington Metro entrance, then stopped when he spotted a gas station whose parking lot held a half-dozen or so cars.

  The station was closed and dark. He took out his Swiss Army knife and, with the screwdriver blade, pried open the front-vent window of a rusty yellow 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. When he reached his hand in, he managed to crank down the larger side window and open the door. Inside, he slid the front seat back and twisted himself around so he could peer under the dashboard. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the dark, the only light a streetlamp down the block.

  He located the ignition switch on the dashboard, reached behind to the tangle of four wires that came out of it, and yanked them out of the switch. One of them, the red wire, touched the metal of the dashboard and gave off a spark of electricity. It was the “hot” lead. He bent it away from the others.

  Ah, he thought. Being a “gearhead,” a car buff, had to come in handy someday.

  Now he had to find the right sequence of two connections. He raised himself up off the floor of the car and sat. With the largest blade he stripped the remaining three wires, and then connected the green wire to the hot wire. Nothing happened.

  “Shit.” Since he’d found the Beetle in a gas-station lot, it was entirely possible that the car was defunct. Next he tried the blue wire, and the starter motor cranked, a short cough, before it died. Victory,

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 243

  phase one. Then he touched the white wire to the connection, and the starter motor cranked again, but again the car wouldn’t start.

  The wiring was wrong. He disconnected the green wire, connected the blue to the red, and let out a whoop as the radio came on, along with the speedometer lights.

  “Got it,” he said as he touched the white wire briefly to the connection and the car roared to life.

  An hour later, he had arrived in Falls Church; after asking street directions of a cabbie cruising for a fare, he found Armitage’s house.

  Estate, more properly: it was an immense colonial structure of red brick on hundreds of acres of wooded land. All the lights in the house were out, which was not surprising, since it was almost midnight. Stone parked the VW on the street, within view of the house, and kept the car running while he thought.