by John Gardner
Alex and Nicki stood by the door and the lovely Nina walked between the round table and the coffee, filling cups and bringing extra toast. She did all this with dignity and no sense of servility. The fact that she was obviously on the team did not make her role as table-server demeaning.
The sterile room was in a basement carved out and cemented like a bombproof shelter. The walls, Bond noted, were lined with the thick anti-electronic material they used in embassy bubbles, the bubble that had been more or less stolen from the American practice, as it took up little space, and was one hundred per cent secure, though it caused much discomfort to those who had to use the igloo-like facilities in embassy bowels. Here, at the dacha, there was a whole large room and it was clear that no expense had been spared. Though the walls and ceiling were well-lined, there were also small electronic bafflers, grey boxes with winking red lights, fitted into the roof and at each corner of the room. The door had an extra sliding section which sealed it off from the crude wooden stairs and there was no telephone – an extra precaution lest security was somehow breached and the instrument made live.
They sat in comfortable leather chairs, arranged in a half-circle, and nobody was given a chance to take notes. No pens, pencils or paper were allowed in the room.
‘This must be absolutely secure,’ Stepakov began. ‘We have taken great pains to make it so, for I suspect we know far more about Chushi Pravosudia – what you call the Scales of Justice – than any of our visitors from France and the United Kingdom. Let me first explain my position in all this. My name, as you know, is Boris Ivanovich Stepakov and I hold the rank of General, KGB. More than that, because of our fears of internal terrorism, I do not report through normal channels. I don’t present myself to the Central Committee or the Praesidium. I don’t have to make a physical report to dva 2 Ploshchad’ Dzerzhinskogo, the postal address of KGB Moscow headquarters as I’m sure you know. I answer directly only to the Chairman, KGB, and the General Secretary, who is now also our President. You will realise why in a moment.
‘You have met my immediate staff – Alex, Nicki and Nina. They are my most trusted people, and we have others, both here and at another dacha a couple of miles away in the forest. They act in a number of ways – they are bodyguards, go-betweens, analysts and keepers of my closest data bases. We are a kind of task force, and apart from these, others work unseen – in the Kremlin itself and secretly both in and outside our borders. We make up what is commonly known over here as Stepakov’s Banda. In English, I suppose it might be translated as Stepakov’s Mafia. Many within KGB and the army do not like us at all, and I have to be exceptionally careful both with information and my personal movements, particularly in Moscow.
‘You must understand that we in the Soviet Union have not been in this business of international counterterrorism for very long. We have not yet started to share completely as you in the West share. This is, I suppose, the reason we have not altogether been forthcoming about the organisation you call the Scales of Justice.’
He coughed, clearing his throat before continuing. ‘The Scales of Justice, or Chushi Pravosudia as we call them, first came to your attention in the October of last year. I fear we have had knowledge of them for much longer than that, and our knowledge will undoubtedly alarm you.’
It was as though he had begun to soften them up for something sinister – facts which possibly had escaped the West entirely. Whatever it was, James Bond felt an old familiar stirring – the desperate need to know everything about his enemy. He also sensed something else. It was as though all his experience had brought him to this one point. He had squared off against evil many times in his long career. Larger-than-life evil. Criminal, political and military wickedness. At the time, much of it had seemed unreal. Now it felt as if he were about to come up against a kind of reality he had never faced in the past.
The Scales of Justice, Stepakov told them, had come into being within the Soviet Union and her satellites of the old Eastern Bloc as early as 1987. Primarily, they had been Russian in concept, and at first KGB had believed they were another manifestation of unrest. Early on there had been informers. They knew, by the autumn of 1987, that Chushi Pravosudia was organised much as a network of agents was organised. ‘Initially there were three rings, or cells, here within the Soviet Union. They have now amalgamated these into one.’ Stepakov’s manner was grave. His natural happy and boisterous personality seemed to have retreated as though the people of which he spoke were too dangerous to laugh at or joke about.
‘We know there was another ring in what used to be East Germany, one in Poland, one in Czechoslovakia. We were also aware of American, British and French connections. We detected this through informants. People we trusted. And this is significant – even those who informed did not know the full reality. From the autumn of 1987 until the autumn of 1988 we followed up on forty-two of these informants. They took us only to the people who made the first approach, the primary contacts. Let me tell you how it worked.
‘It started with a whispering campaign. First, simply the name, Chushi Pravosudia, repeated over and over, passing from ear to ear. It spread through Moscow in a strange, confused manner. Through the more luxurious apartments along the Nevsky Prospect, among students at the university, like wildfire in the eggbox apartments of the workers, in the factories, in the illegal markets and bargaining places, in Gum and the other department stores, inside military barracks, and so into the Kremlin itself. Within days the name was known to everyone except foreign journalists from whom people instinctively kept this strange name. So Chushi Pravosudia became a household word. It also became something tangible. Through the repetition of the name, the organisation took on a life of its own.
‘Then the informers began to pass information which was routed into my relatively new counterterrorist department. They used the MVD and special units of the police, following up on each reported case. But it led to nothing. Dead ends littered the filing cabinets and in-trays of my Banda.
‘It was an exceptionally clever and ingenious ploy, when they ran traces back to those who had contacted the informants they came up against a frustrating wall. For the recruiters had been chosen by the Scales of Justice because of their own innocence. These recruiters fell into several distinct types: they were often people who lived alone, sometimes simpletons with only enough intelligence to carry out easy tasks, sometimes old women whose lives had become barren and useless, people who yearned for some task to keep themselves occupied. The call came to these innocent folk from strangers in a meat line or a bar, even in a group waiting at a bus stop. Those with telephones were contacted quietly, often early in the day, and always there was a promise. This is good work, they were told. Easy work. Work for the State. Nothing criminal. Each was given a name – usually it was someone they knew, even slightly. They had to ask this one person a number of questions: do you wish to serve your country so that life will become better? Are you willing to undertake some special job, for which we believe you are well-suited? Always there were the mystic words, Chushi Pravosudia. Always there was a special promise – a few roubles, a new television set, a food parcel.
‘These simple, mainly good folk were lured into recruiting like men and women in Britain or the United States are offered lucrative work from home – addressing envelopes, canvassing over the telephone. We all know how that works,’ Stepakov said. ‘And the hell of it was that these people received their rewards, the few roubles, the television set, in one case a week’s vacation. These were truly unwitting agents. They had no idea that they were canvassing for an illegal terrorist group. When they had the answers to their set of questions, they would pass them on. They would be told to await a messenger or a telephone call. The messengers were often children they had never seen before or even someone in the very place they had first been approached. All insubstantial. Traces which led nowhere.’
The main worry, during this period – autumn ’87 to autumn ’88 – was that the informers, reporting ba
ck to Stepakov’s Banda were obviously only a fraction of those who had been approached.
‘We knew,’ he told them, ‘that the Chushi Pravosudia was now a reality, and we were also aware they had started to spread out of the Soviet Union into the satellite countries of the old Eastern Bloc, even into other Western countries. Our agents caught traces of similar recruiting techniques, and from these we made calculated guesses about the locations and the number of cells. The Scales of Justice was exactly what Winston Churchill once said of the Soviet Union – a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But Churchill also predicted that there might be a key, and there was a key, but one which, initially, took us only a short way. It led us into the ante-room of the Chushi Pravosudia, and what we heard there made our blood run cold.’
It had happened almost by accident. The interrogation section of an MVD unit had hauled in a language professor who taught at Moscow University. He was suspected of what the authorities loosely termed ‘Black Market Activities’, which meant anything from dealing in illegal currency, to luxury items, right on up to straight and unadulterated espionage.
In the case of Vladimir Lyko, a senior professor of English, it was several illegal currency transactions amounting to some $100,000. There were no doubts, the evidence was there, the money had been traced, and one of the professor’s pupils had informed.
‘It was January 1989.’ Stepakov placed his large rear end against the back of a chair, as if settling to tell a good tale. ‘They got me out of bed at one in the morning, and I went straight to Lefortovo. The MVD had a direct instruction to contact me if they ever came across any evidence leading us to Chushi Pravosudia. The officer in charge of the interrogation told me that Lyko had things he would talk about. He wanted to do a deal, and, as you must know, this is strictly against our operational practice.’ He gave a big smile. ‘We never do deals. Except when we will gain much. From tiny acorns . . . Well, Lyko was a very small acorn and he has grown into a very large tree.’
At the airport Bond had considered that the Russian would be a good story-teller. Now, with his mobile clown’s face and a knack of graphic description, Stepakov told them about his first meeting with the professor. Bond had been right. He did all the voices.
Lefortovo is a grim, haunted place at the best of times. In winter it is truly bleak. They had Vladimir Lyko in a small interrogation room. Bare and unfriendly, with a table and two chairs bolted to a hard stone floor. The prisoner sat with his back to a wall, and directly behind him, high in the stone, was a small circular opening. In the old days victims had been shot from that tiny aperture, usually just as the interrogating officer took their signed statement from the table and moved to one side.
Stepakov wore his heavy greatcoat for there was ice on the walls. Lyko looked, rightly, terrified. He was a typical academic from the university. A fussy little man, about forty years of age, with dusty short hair and the thin face of a zealot, in which the once fervent eyes now reflected his terror. His hands shook as Stepakov offered him a cigarette and the KGB man had to hold his wrist to steady him as he lit the smoke for him.
‘Well, Vladi, you’re in a fine pickle now. They tell me over one hundred thousand dollars cash. This is a great deal of money. Enough money to give you one year for every ten dollars. One year for ten in the Gulag. You think this is cold? Wait till you get to one of the camps. This’ll feel like a summer vacation.’ He paused, looking at the dismal, cringing figure who saw himself, at best, as one of the living dead.
‘The boys here will be back. They’ll take your statement, your confession, and you’ll sign it. Then you’ll be up in front of a tribunal, and away you’ll go. Someone who’s had it soft, like yourself, feels bad about that, and the shame will stretch into the very heart of your family.’
For the first time, Lyko spoke, ‘I can provide information.’
‘Good. Provide it. If the information is fact, then you could get fifty years knocked off your sentence.’
‘I am one of the . . .’ he stopped, as though making a huge effort. ‘One of the Chushi Pravosudia.’
‘Really?’ Stepakov evinced surprise. ‘Who are these Chushi Pravosudia? Can’t say I know them.’
‘You know very well what I’m talking about. I can give you a lot of help. Details.’ For a second, Lyko seemed to have tapped a source of inner strength. That was good. This pitiful apology for a human being had found some self-respect.
‘You can give me names?’
‘Names are difficult. But I can give operational procedures; organisation; methods and, best of all, what Chushi Pravosudia is really doing.’
‘Go on then. Talk.’
Little dusty-haired Lyko shook his head. The moment of courage seemed to have put new life into him. ‘I’ll talk to you, even work with you, only if charges are dropped.’
Stepakov slowly got up and began to walk towards the door. Then he turned back. ‘If you have good information about Chushi Pravosudia, you’ll give it to the interrogators here and they will pass it on to me. They’re very good at that kind of thing.’
Lyko lifted his head. He actually smiled. ‘I know,’ he said quietly, his voice shaking, fear just below the surface. ‘The problem is that the kind of information I have is useless without me. Information by itself cannot help you. For instance, do you know what Chushi Pravosudia really is?’
Stepakov stood, just looking at him for a moment. Then, quietly, he said, ‘Tell me.’
Vladimir Lyko smiled and motioned for another cigarette. ‘Now tell me,’ Stepakov repeated after he had sat down again and lighted cigarettes for both of them.
The professor gave a little mirthless laugh. ‘Chushi Pravosudia is an organisation up for hire. They are terrorist mercenaries, with no political aims, no morals, no set ideology. If the Islamic Jihad require assistance, then they will provide it, for money; if the German Red Army Faction ask for help with a particular target, Chushi Pravosudia will use its people in Germany, strictly for cash; any terrorist organisation in the entire world can look for logistic support, sometimes active field support, from Chushi Pravosudia. The Scales of Justice is their joke. There is no justice from them. They’re in the game for the money, and what better place to use as a base than the USSR? The cradle of Communism. They have made it into a cradle of capitalist horror.’
Back in the present, in the hygienic room below the dacha, Boris Ivanovich Stepakov looked at Bond, Natkowitz, Stephanie Adoré, Henri Rampart and the three assistants. He arched his eyebrows, shrugged, and said – ‘The terrible thing is, he was telling the truth. That is exactly what Chushi Pravosudia were doing, are doing, and will go on doing if we don’t stop them.’
The Russian continued to talk, filling in the gaps, putting things into perspective. Names and locations were difficult because the Scales of Justice were, by this time, expert in the art of concealment. Their work was always done through numerous cut-outs. The main cells merely planned. The plans were put into operation by paid couriers, or men who worked like agent handlers. One subject possibly led to another, but, as you went down the line, so the chain of command split into fragments, tributaries, dead ends. Just as they had done their initial recruiting, so they ran operations, terrorist strikes, disruption, assassination and every conceivable kind of attack by covering tracks.
‘Even the funds generated by their work come back to them in ways so complex that I have asked for, but not yet received, an entire department of accountants who are familiar with the global movement of money. Often the payments are made in cash, which is broken up into relatively small allotments, and passed hither and thither, until it seems to disappear. My friend Lyko’s original $100,000 was payment for help in the murder of an Italian politician.’ He said the name aloud. Then, ‘Chushi Pravosudia actually did the whole of that job.’
Bond could not be silent any longer. ‘Bory, if what you’re telling us is true, then these people must have access, must have a way into all kinds and conditions of organisations
. Can you name any worldwide terrorist operations in which you know they have had a hand?’
Slowly, Stepakov nodded. Then he began to reel off a list of horrors and atrocities, from car bombs and fire bombs to shootings and kidnappings which crossed every continent and infiltrated every border.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Bond said finally. ‘The terrorist organisations we know about, scattered through Europe and the rest of the world, are well documented. We know names, places, operations. None of them leaves room for outside help, particularly help from some crackpot secret plotters within the borders of the Soviet Union.’
‘There you’re so wrong, James.’ Stepakov had not moved. He remained leaning against the chair back, unsmiling. His voice was steady, almost hypnotic. ‘What should concern us is that Chushi Pravosudia has been able to provide arms, explosives and support to hundreds of incidents. Your normal counterterrorist experts take for granted that should the Hezbollah or the Red Army Faction or any one of the established terrorist groups claim a particular “event”, as we so callously call them nowadays, we tend to believe them. There are clues, the well-known code words to the media, the kind of explosives, the handwriting. You think these cannot be copied, cannot be forged? Of course they can. They are forged by this group within the Soviet Union. It is a new kind of private enterprise, Captain Bond. You had better believe me.’