The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “And found there was no truth to the rumors,” Abramov ventured, a little more at ease. What did the chairman want? Please, I have a wife and two daughters at home who depend on me. Why did I ever meet with that American reporter? What did I think I was doing? At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

  “And found the rumors were true.” Pavlichenko seemed a soft-spoken man, and an intelligent one, which was quite a divergence from the long line of brutal, brutish men who had always ruled Soviet state security. “I showed up at midnight, which was when Beria preferred to conduct meetings, and I was guided by one of his secretaries into a shkaf, what appeared to be a free-standing oak wardrobe closet against a wall. The secretary reached a hand into the darkness and pressed a button, and the back of the shkaf opened into the chairman’s office. Beria had a mania for privacy and protection. Well, years later, by the time I got this job, I was distressed to learn that Yuri Andropov had had the shkaf taken away and replaced with a conventional set of doors. So I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I’m not disappointed, sir,” Abramov said.

  Pavlichenko had walked to his simple mahogany desk and had seated himself. Abramov sat, discreetly glancing around. The legendary office of the chairman of the KGB was even more plush than he had imagined. It was quite big, imposingly so, and ornately decorated. The floors were covered in large, beautiful carpets from Central Asia; the walls were wainscoted in lustrous mahogany, above which was wallpaper of ivory silk and just one portrait, of the founder of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky. There were off-white brocade sofas and mahogany end tables. The room looked like the library of a baronial manor.

  Looking closer, Abramov saw that Pavlichenko was actually not a handsome man. His face was plain, with massive cheekbones and chin. Yet he cut a striking figure, with his fine English suits. It was joked around Moscow, especially among his detractors, that Andrei Pavlichenko looked like a star of the cinema—except from the front.

  The chairman was also, Abramov knew, possessed of an extraordinary mental acuity, an ability to reason at lightning speed and to see the panorama where others could see only a few trees. He was blessed with a genius for politics, a talent for making allies that had catapulted him to the top—or so the scuttlebutt had it.

  Which was not to say that the new chairman of the KGB—he had been in office less than a year—was not genuinely impressive. Everyone in the Committee had by now heard tales of Pavlichenko’s feats. Unlike most KGB chairmen before him, Pavlichenko had actually spent time in the West, having done tours of duty in London, Paris, and Washington. In the mid-fifties, he had been assigned as control for Sir Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s curator, who was also the “fourth man” in the spy ring of Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt. He had masterminded several false defections of KGB officers to the United States, operations that appeared to have successfully poisoned the CIA’s well. Abramov was awed to be chatting with him.

  “I read your report,” the chairman said.

  Abramov silently expelled a breath. Thank God, that was it. “Sir?”

  “I’m impressed you took it upon yourself to request the samples from the recent terrorist bombings. You were admirably thorough, and I wish we had more like you around here. Unfortunately, we don’t.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I want to tell you, this is not the first report I’ve gotten indicating that the CIA has been supplying the terrorists.”

  “Is that right, sir?”

  368 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “Tell me, what made you requisition the samples? Were you dissatisfied with the way things are being done in Forensics? If you are, I need to hear it.”

  Abramov could not tell the chairman the truth, that an American correspondent had asked him about it—had actually planted the idea in his head—so he said instead, “Just a theory, sir. Pure instinct.”

  Pavlichenko leaned back in his chair. He looked weary suddenly. “I’m told you’re one of the best.”

  “No, sir, I doubt it.”

  “From now on, I want you to be in charge of this matter. If Moscow is hit again, I want you to be the only forensic investigator. If you need to put together a team—and only if it is absolutely necessary—then I want you to be the sole authority. And you will answer directly to me.”

  “But, sir …”

  “Don’t worry about lines of authority. I’ve taken care of that. My friend, I know all about bureaucracy, and how governments can topple in a crisis because a single clerk chooses to oversleep one morning. Now, I can’t tell you precisely what sort of internal security investigations are going on, but let me just say that they are of enormous possible consequences. Nothing you will ever do will be of greater urgency. Is that clear?”

  Abramov swallowed, astonished. “Of course, sir.”

  “If we don’t track down the source of the terror, Tovarishch Abramov,” Pavlichenko said, getting up from his chair, “I’m afraid we’re all in grave trouble.”

  54

  Paris

  “Here, ‘ Dunayev said, laying down a pistol on the coffee table in Stone’s hotel room. “The best my friends could do was an outrageous eighteen hundred francs for this thing.”

  “Thank you,” Stone said, picking it up. It was a 9mm Austrian-made Clock 17, small and lightweight because its receiver frame was high-density plastic. He loaded the seventeen-round cartridge and heard it click in. “Good. Well made.”

  “Yes, it is. Use it in good health.”

  Stone laughed as he removed cash from his belts and bookbindings, gathering much of it in one pile, which he placed on his person. He shoved another pile toward Dunayev. “I need you to keep this for me,” he said. “Put it somewhere safe. A bank safe-deposit box, perhaps. And take some of it for yourself.”

  Dunayev scowled. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “For a man who used to kill for a living, you’re pretty moral,” Stone said genially.

  “Kill for a cause,” Dunayev said slowly. “In that, we are not so different. You, too, have killed.”

  “Yes.” Stone shook his head slowly. “Once, in Chicago. Maybe again.” He got up and checked the closet, making sure he had taken the vital necessities. The rest, the clothing he didn’t need and so on, he would leave with Dunayev, so as not to provide his pursuers with any more traces than they already had.

  “It’s not safe for me to stay here,” he said. “Not after what happened at Pere Lachaise.”

  370 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Dunayev sighed, wearily and almost musically. “My friend, the gendarmes are already looking for you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They are going from hotel to hotel showing a photograph of you. It is a slow process, but hotel managers will certainly cooperate. You’re not safe anywhere. If I hid you in my apartment, they might find you.”

  “I just need a few hours. There are no flights at this time. If—”

  “There is a place,” Dunayev interrupted. He beamed with triumph. “You can find shelter with the woman who met you at the cafe.”

  “That redheaded woman?”

  “Yes. For the time being, she is safe—they do not connect her with me.”

  “But what is her connection with you?”

  Dunayev shrugged and spread his hands, palms upward. “I am not a fool. Stone. If you think that when I defected from Moscow I did so without protection, you underestimate me.”

  “Whatr

  “Like most clandestine operatives, I kept records to protect myself from my employers. Encrypted messages, onetime pads, payment records. Lists of Soviet agents-in-place in French and West German ministries. Even decades later, those lists are more valuable than platinum—some of those agents have now attained quite high positions. Every time I was in Paris, I squirreled away another scrap of paper, another shred of microfilm.”

  “And this woman has them? This prostitute?”

  “Yes, she is a prostitute. And, yes, she keeps them for
me, in her flat in the Marais. My life insurance.”

  “Why the hell would she—?”

  “Loyalty. Gratitude. The reason many human beings do things for others. She was a fourteen-year-old prostitute during the Second World War when the Nazis discovered she was working with the Resistance. She was lined up on a roof with others, about to be shot. I had infiltrated the Nazis’ organization in Paris. I was one of the Nazis up on the roof that evening, and I saw this unfortunate girl,

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 371

  and I was able to spare her life. I told them I wanted her for myself. Yes, Mr. Stone, she keeps my files for me. The safest place for them. Do you know Paris?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “In the Marais, there is a small street, rue Malher.” He drew out a dog-eared map of the city and pointed with a stubby finger. “Here. For me, and for her, do not stay long. Where will you go next?”

  “Moscow.”

  “Moscow! That’s insanity. You are putting your head into the lion’s mouth!”

  “Yes, maybe. But I have no choice. If I do not go, I will certainly be killed. If I do go—well, that’s my only hope. If I can connect with this network, perhaps I can draw upon their resources, to stop this conspiracy, and at the same time to protect me. In the interests of the Soviet state, they will have to.”

  Dunayev nodded solemnly. “They will have to,” he echoed. “Yes.”

  “Who are they? What do you know about them?”

  “I hear they are called the Staroobriadtsy, the Old Believers.”

  The Old Believers … Stone had heard the term before—where?

  “I’ve heard it began in the last days of Stalin, when good, loyal people were being slaughtered indiscriminately. You hear talk about the Staroobriadtsy’s reach into the very Kremlin itself. When Nikita Khrushchev was about to be thrown out of office, he got advance warning: a phone call from a bodyguard working for one of the men conspiring against him. They say that was the work of the Old Believers, who saw Khrushchev as the Motherland’s last hope in those days.”

  The Old Believers. Now Stone remembered. It was a passing reference in Alfred Stone’s letter in the safe-deposit box back in Cambridge. Was it possible he, too, had heard—that he knew something about this network? “Any underground network like this must have a head, a leader,” Stone said. “You have to help me here. Who is it? Who are these people?”

  “Yes, there is a leader. A man whose name is secret.”

  “There must be a way …”

  Dunayev had been nodding very slowly, his face drawn in con-

  372 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  centration. “I know some,” he said. “You must have heard—you are an expert on the pohtics of my godforsaken country—of one of the worst atrocities of the Second VV^orld War, an unspeakable horror only outdone by the Nazis, a mass slaughtering perpetrated by my very own people, the NKVD. The Katyn Forest Massacre.”

  “Of course I’ve heard of it. Thousands and thousands—what was it, four thousand?—fifteen thousand?—officers of the Polish Army were killed in 1940. One of the most brutal episodes of the war.”

  “Ah, my friend, you don’t even know the half of it. For years afterward, the affair was skillfully covered up by the Soviet government. The great Winston Churchill did not want the details revealed, for fear of what it would do to the war effort. Even now you in the West know very little about it. “

  “If it’s relevant in some way …”

  “On a spring day in 1940, fifteen thousand Polish officers suddenly disappeared. Professional men, engineers, doctors, professors, and generals. The Soviet government had taken them prisoners and then, because Stalin was afraid Hider might think the Russians were trying to steal the elite of the Polish Army, Stalin had to get rid of them. These men were packed up in trucks and buses and, load after load, taken to the edge of a giant, freshly dug pit.”

  Stone nodded, unwilling to interrupt Dunayev, puzzled about what this had to do with the Old Believers.

  “And then each one was shot in the back of the neck. Day after day, and it took weeks, there were so many of them. Bodies were piled on top of bodies, thrown in the pit. It was grotesque—a nightmare so unbelievable that even a few of the NKVD men, hardened and ruthless killers, later went out of their minds. As the days went on and the pit became a rotting, decomposing mess, the prisoners would look down into it just before they were to be executed and bellow in terror, struggling, wild. Mostly the work was done by NKVD, as I have said, but they were assisted by some infantrymen from the Red Army, a special detachment of troops who did not know what they had come there for. And on the sixth day, when the stench had become unbearable, some of the troops—vomiting, dazed—finally had had enough. They carried out a mutiny: their regiment commander led

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 373

  them in the rebeUion against the NKVD sadists. They were arrested at once and sent back to Moscow for a court-martial.” Dunayev paused and closed his eyes.

  “And?”

  “And, my friend, the court-martial never happened. Suddenly the trial was terminated.”

  “Stalin would not allow it?”

  Dunayev laughed bitterly. “Stalin never got word of it. It was the work of one very brave, unknown man, someone powerful but most of all brave, who risked his career to save a few good soldiers.”

  “And he’s the head of the network? Who was it?”

  “I don’t know his name. Somehow he managed to survive. But, yes, he was the founder of this network of Party faithful who could no longer take what Stalin had done to a good nation.”

  “He is alive?”

  “So they say.”

  “How can I get to him?”

  “I wish I knew that. I wish I could help you.”

  Stone was silent for a long moment. “Can you help me to get to Moscow?”

  “If you’re so foolish as to go to Moscow,” Dunayev said, shaking his head, “I may be able to help. I hope you don’t plan to enter the Soviet Union illegally.”

  “Only a fool—or a professional field operative—would try that. No, I need to get there legally, and to do that I need a visa to enter. But there’s no time. These things can take weeks.”

  “Not always. When a great and powerful German industrialist decides on the spur of the moment to go to Moscow, the Soviet Embassy is always happy to arrange the paperwork for him.”

  “But do you know of any way / can …”

  “There is a man in the Soviet Embassy in Paris. A good, decent man—one of the network. He can arrange it.”

  “That’s—that’s terrific. But I can’t wait even a few days.”

  “I can probably get it for you in a few hours. If I can convey the urgency, he will do it at once.”

  374 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The squat, gray-haired Russian in the black leather coat came down the stairs that wound around the center atrium of the hotel, watching above and below. As he descended, however, he saw something that unnerved him.

  Two French policemen were talking to the night concierge. It was too late at night for a casual chat; these policemen wanted something. Dunayev knew at once what it was. Their body language gave it away: they were showing a photograph, demanding the room number of a man they said was wanted for murder.

  They were here, and they were seeking Charles Stone.

  He turned and walked deliberately back in the direction of Stone’s room. Now he understood. Everything was out in the open. The French police had been drawn into the search for a fugitive American who had violated U.S. treason laws.

  Dunayev knocked rapidly on the door. “Otkroi, tovarishch,” he said in a low voice. “Eto ya.”

  Stone opened the door, bewildered, and saw the alarm on Du-nayev’s face.

  “Get out!” the Russian hissed.

  55

  Within a minute, Stone had finished gathering all the essentials, his passports, money, tape cassettes, checking to make sure that he was leaving behind nothin
g that could positively identify him.

  “I’ll find a way to contact you, my fi^iend, and get the visa,” he said, clasping the old Chekist’s hand as he left the room and headed for the back stairs. There was, he knew, a cave in the hotel, a cellar in which were a bar and various hotel utility rooms. He had inspected the hotel shortly after arriving in Paris; increasingly, he understood the importance of knowing one’s surroundings completely. This was the best, least-observed, way out.

  He made it to the cave, glanced around swiftly, and found the laundry room. Its door was, as it had been earlier in the day, open. At the far end of the small chamber was a short set of steps leading to a door, which, he calculated, opened onto the tiny rue Visconti, behind the hotel.

  Stone unlatched the lock and pulled the wooden door open to the dark, narrow street, which was barely more than an alley. A baby was crying somewhere nearby. He ran as quietly as he could, past a building marked ville de Paris creche municipale, then past several small art galleries, in the direction of rue de Seine.

  “Au voleur!”

  The cry came from a policeman who had suddenly spotted him. Now the Frenchman was running toward him. Stone put on a burst of speed. The policeman was shouting as he ran, calling out to others to join him. They had him ludicrously outnumbered.

  He made it to rue de Seine, rounding the corner at great speed. The late-night street was almost deserted.

  He saw it at once: a red Peugeot motorbike leaning up against a wall, a delivery vehicle with a yellow metal strongbox marked allo POSTEXPRESS affixed behind its seat. Its owner, who had evidently just gotten off, had crossed the street. He yelled when he saw Stone jump on it.

  “Sorry,” Stone said, turning the key and starting it up. “Right now I need it a hell of a lot more than you do.”

  The bike emitted a fearsome roar as Stone took off down rue de Seine, leaving the enraged deliveryboy running after him, the two policemen not far behind.