Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  Orlov ambled along the pavement, checking that his own squads were in place. Two of his men were inspecting the windows of Detsky Mir, the children’s department store. Another came strolling along Prospekt Marx, the first of the group that had arrived at the Sverdlova metro station, a few blocks away. Orlov glanced at the battered steel watch on his thick wrist and continued his walk, branching off along Dzerzhinsky Street. The line had not yet begun to form in front of the KGB’s neighborhood Gastronom, which was celebrated for the quality of its food. The shelves were usually cleaned out half an hour after the doors were opened at 8:00 A.M. Orlov glanced, with no apparent interest, at two Spetsnaz troopers who were lolling outside.

  The KGB guards in the square looked relaxed. As Orlov doubled back toward the Lubyanka, he observed one of them exchanging pleasantries with a statuesque cleaning woman as she passed. The guards’ main function was to shield the Lubyanka from terrorist attack, but nobody — not the Ukrainian nationalists, or the Crimean Tatars, or the Jewish refuseniks — had ever tried to get inside the building. The closest thing to a terrorist assault that anyone could remember was when a drunken Armenian had tossed a bottle of champagne through one of the windows in 1976. The bottle landed intact on the desk of a surprised, and presumably gratified, duty officer.

  Then Orlov saw what he was waiting for. A big green army ambulance, with a red cross inside a white circle on its side, came lumbering up Kirova Street. The colonel raised his wristwatch to his ear, as if to see whether it had stopped, and the men who had been watching for this signal started moving into position.

  Orlov walked round the side of the Lubyanka to Entrance Six, one of the two reserved for the First Chief Directorate and the Border Guards. He stopped just short of one of the KGB watchmen, who stared at him but did not speak. The guards had instructions not to shoo tourists away; the Committee had its image to protect.

  ‘Smoke?’ Orlov inquired pleasantly.

  At the same instant that the guard growled his refusal, Orlov felled him with a single slicing blow along the side of the jaw, aiming for the brain stem.

  A second guard turned to see what had happened, but before he could utter a sound, one of Orlov’s men sank a knife into his throat. It was an ingenious weapon, the Spetsnaz knife. You pulled the switch and it fired its blade like an arrow, accurate over a distance of several yards. For reasons Orlov had never bothered to question, they called it a French knife. Whatever its origin, it had been fully naturalized.

  The ambulance, borrowed from the Khodinsk airfield, where Vlassov had been in charge for several hours, was already drawing up to the curb, and the first body was loaded into the back. As it continued on a slow circle of the Lubyanka, coming out through the alley that made a dogleg around the back, the other KGB guards were piled in like logs. His task complete, the driver headed back to Khodinsk; nobody was likely to challenge a military vehicle along the way.

  No one had raised the alarm. There was only the rumble of the early-morning traffic, the sounds of the city stretching and groaning as it came fully awake.

  Followed closely by two of his men, Orlov marched through the high double doors at the front of the Lubyanka as if it belonged to him. At the same time, other squads tackled the remaining entrances, all except Entrance Two, which was kept permanently shut. They found some of the doors locked, but had come prepared for that with skeleton keys.

  There was a mousetrap inside the main entrance: a space in front of a second set of doors with small glass panels through which the uniformed security men inside could squint out at anyone attempting to enter the building.

  Orlov nodded at the man behind the glass, pushed open the door, and gave a hearty ‘Good morning!’ He reached under his coat, as if to fish out his identity card. Instead he brought out his P-6 and fired point-blank through the screw-in silencer into the KGB guard’s face. The man slumped heavily across his table. There was an ugly, ragged star at the back of his head where the bullet had escaped.

  It took scarcely longer to deal with the guards who were napping in their room off the hall. One of the Spetsnaz troops set about stripping the KGB uniform from one of the corpses. The jacket was tight under the arms, but at least it did not show bloodstains. He took the place of the dead man at the table near the main doors. The pattern was repeated, without a hitch, at the other entrances.

  Orlov sent a small detachment to break through to the basement, where the KGB switchboard and communications center was located. There were only two operators on duty at that hour of the morning, and neither was allowed time to give the alarm. An army technician took charge.

  Another team worked its way through to the inner doors that opened onto the courtyard inside the old part of the Lubyanka. The men who worked at KGB headquarters called it the Well. For countless victims of Yezhov, Yagoda, and Beria, it had been the lobby of Hell. The lone sentry at the massive iron gates leading out into the alley was swiftly dispatched.

  The honour of occupying the office of the Chairman of the Committee of State Security on the fourth floor fell to a young lieutenant, Mikhailov. The Chairman’s vast office, embellished with oriental rugs and mahogany paneling, straddled the old and new sections of the building. Mikhailov ripped the portraits of Dzerzhinsky and the General Secretary from the wall, and set about breaking open the Chairman’s personal safe.

  Two-man squads roamed the corridors of the Lubyanka, all of which were confusingly alike. The walls were painted to resemble oak, the parquet floors were sheathed in worn-out linoleum, dirty brown with traces of a yellow pattern. Light filtered down through big white globes suspended on metal rods. Most of the offices, too, were uniform, painted a harsh, surgical white above a pale blue dado, generally empty except for the standard-issue items: a writing table, a big metal safe closed up at night with a wax seal, a second long table for meetings in the rooms of the department chiefs.

  Orlov knew exactly where he was going; he had been over the floor plan with Zaytsev a dozen times. He turned left, past an elevator with a thick metal door, solid except for a tiny peephole — it had once been used for Beria’s cells — and hurried up a broad staircase, taking the steps two at a time. Zaytsev had charged him with a special mission: to secure the records of the Third Directorate, especially the lists of KGB spies inside the armed forces. He had been warned that he might encounter a chekist called Feliks Nikolsky. Under no circumstances was Nikolsky to be harmed.

  The Third Directorate, on the second floor, seemed to be awake earlier than the rest of KGB headquarters. Orlov’s party were challenged by a duty officer. They shot him on the spot. But a second KGB officer darted from a doorway at the end of the corridor and squeezed off several rounds from his pistol. Orlov threw himself back against the wall. The man behind him sucked in his breath sharply as a bullet nicked his shoulder.

  Orlov swore softly. They had been told that nobody in the building, apart from the security detail, would be armed. Before 1979 officers at KGB headquartrers had been permitted to keep personal sidearms in their safes. Then a KGB officer took his gun home with him and shot his wife and his wife’s lover. New regulations went out. But it seemed they hadn’t reached the Third Directorate.

  Orlov turned to the wounded man at his elbow.

  ‘Give me that,’ he hissed, reaching for the Malish. He gestured to the third man in the squad. ‘Around the other way,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll take them from both sides.’

  Gripping the mini machine gun like a pistol, Orlov started to zigzag along the corridor, keeping his body low. He saw a shadow at the end of the corridor, and fired a short burst. He heard a door slam shut. Then something else took place that he had no reason to expect. A woman started to scream, a sudden, piercing cry that was instantly stifled. It came from the big corner office, which Orlov knew must belong to one of the top men in the Third Directorate, perhaps the chief himself.

  He waited till the third man in his squad came loping toward him from the other end of the corridor.


  They both hovered for a moment, their backs against the wall on either side of Topchy’s door.

  Then Orlov signaled, ‘Go!’

  The Spetsnaz commando — a tough captain who had risen from the ranks and was credited with more than twenty kills in Afghanistan — leaped forward and crashed the door open with his boot. Then he was down on his belly, firing into the office a few inches above body height so as to numb resistance without killing anyone till they had taken the measure of what was going on in the room.

  Orlov lunged forward after him.

  There were four people in the office, one of them a naked man lashed to a chair. There was a second prisoner, a woman.

  The KGB man who had fired at them in the corridor didn’t seem to have the stomach for a fight. He dropped his gun and nervously raised his hands.

  Orlov’s eyes shifted to the far end of the room. At first, he could see only the top of Major Furtsev’s bulging skull, the receding hairline that came forward into a widow’s peak, as he surfaced from behind the writing table. Furtsev had a telephone receiver in one hand. Orlov could not see the other hand.

  ‘Get up!’ Orlov yelled at him. ‘Hands behind your neck!’

  Major Furtsev moved slowly as if to comply, sliding around the side of the table.

  The naked prisoner shouted a warning, and made as if to drag himself and the heavy chair across the room.

  Orlov fired as soon as he saw the pistol, but not before Furtsev got off a single shot, aiming not at the Spetsnaz soldiers but at the male prisoner. The burst from Orlov’s Malish stitched a ragged diagonal pattern across the major’s chest, as if he had been flung against barbed wire. He died with the sound of water being sucked down a drain.

  Orlov rushed to the prisoner, who had toppled sideways still bound to the chair. A mulberry-dark stain was spreading across the floor from an open wound the size of a fist. Orlov had seen stomach wounds like that before, and he knew that you didn’t get over them.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, pressing his lips close to the dying man’s ear. He seemed to be beyond speech. Orlov took out his knife and gingerly cut the bonds so he could lay the prisoner flat on his back.

  ‘Who are you?’ he repeated his question to the girl, who gave a foreign name in heavily accented Russian.

  ‘American?’ Orlov asked.

  She nodded, waiting for him to release her too.

  ‘What about him?’ Orlov jabbed his shoulder toward the man on the floor.

  ‘I heard them call him Feliks. His clothes must be in the next room.’

  One of Orlov’s men went out and came back with Nikolsky’s KGB identity pass.

  ‘He was trying to help me,’ Elaine said in a murmur.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  She groaned and said, ‘Could you please do something about this?’ twisting her ankles and wrists inside the ropes.

  When Orlov had cut her loose she tried to stand, but her legs buckled. She felt stabbing pains as the circulation returned. Orlov took her arm to support her. For a moment, she thought it was Nikolsky. Faces blurred into a continuum.

  Orlov let the girl stagger over to the table. She bent over the dying man, stroking his hair. Colonel Orlov had no instructions about an American girl. But she was somehow connected to Nikolsky, and he had precise orders to protect Nikolsky. He would have to hold the girl until Zaytsev arrived. The general would decide.

  There was a shuddering sound from the man on the floor, like the banging of a clapped-out old refrigerator against a wall.

  ‘Can you get a doctor?’ the girl asked.

  It’s too late,’ Orlov said. He was thinking, It would be kinder to shoot the poor bastard.

  ‘You could try,’ the girl said accusingly. ‘You can’t begin to imagine what he has been through.’ A tear rolled down her cheek over Nikoisky’s forehead. ‘I just pray that he’s beyond feeling anything.’

  *

  Nikolsky did not hear this exchange. He had been drifting for a long time. At one point, he felt an exquisite, searing pain, but then it seemed to him that he was floating on his back down a broad river — the Dnieper, perhaps — toward a sunlit sea. The banks of the river resembled the walls of Topchy’s office, but they stretched outward and backward into the far distance as the stream widened. Then it was no longer the current that carried him but waves of music and the distant riverbanks were the walls of a magnificent concert hall, in which the Moscow Symphony Orchestra was tuning its instruments, preparing to play.

  Nikolsky watched the conductor raise his baton. Then the conductor paused and turned to look at Nikolsky, who was sitting there in the very first row, and for some reason the conductor was no longer a man with white hair and a black tie but a ravishing gypsy singer. He felt that he knew her. Of course. She wasn’t a gypsy at all. She was Maya, Maya Askyerova. She leaned over him, smiling, and her raven hair flowed down, brushing his face, enclosing him like a tent. The orchestra struck up a wild gypsy melody, and the girl was singing her heart out. Her voice soared and swooped like a hawk, carrying him with it. Then the girl was bowing and backing away from the stage, and he wanted to rise and go with her. But there was somebody behind him who kept tapping on his shoulder, tapping and tapping, until, not wanting to, he was compelled to turn around in his seat and look into the mild, china-blue eyes of his grandmother.

  He knew that she had no place being there in the concert hall, because surely she had died years before.

  Nikolsky’s grandmother was kind but insistent. ‘Feliks,’ she said, ‘they’re all waiting for us. Hurry. We can’t stay here any longer.’

  ‘But babushka,’ he was protesting, ‘I have to talk to that girl.’

  ‘It’s too late, my child. We must go now. Look, here’s nice Mister Krupchenko.’ And there, sure enough, was Krupchenko’s little beaming round face. Where on earth had he come from?

  ‘There are some irregularities,’ Krupchenko said rather apologetically.

  And his grandmother was plucking at her sleeve and drawing him along after her in a strong, fluid movement, like an irresistible undertow. The walls of the concert hall were lost in an infinite distance. The music was sucked away. The figure of the gypsy singer became tinier and tinier until she and the orchestra and the whole concert hall were compressed into a single, failing point of light.

  *

  Colonel Orlov put his hands on Elaine’s shoulders and gently drew her away from the table.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Orlov said.

  ‘Who are you?’ Elaine whispered.

  ‘Orlov,’ he said, slightly inclining his head.

  ‘You’re not KGB?’

  ‘I am a colonel of the Russian army,’ Orlov said with pride.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything. Don’t worry, it will be clear soon enough.’

  She wanted to ask him about Sasha, but she did not know how far she could trust this grim, taciturn soldier in civilian clothes who had invaded KGB headquarters with a gun in his hand, for reasons she could not begin to comprehend.

  The phone rang, not the ordinary line via the KGB switchboard, but a special circuit.

  Orlov stared at the instrument with its flashing light as if it were an unidentified animal.

  Elaine said, ‘Topchy.’

  Orlov turned the same stare on her.

  ‘Colonel Topchy,’ she specified. ‘It’s his goddam office.’ Then she was sobbing again, reliving the horrors of the night, seeing Topchy’s face as he shoved at his desk drawer. Her sensation was like vertigo.

  She felt she was toppling over a precipice.

  She was pulled back by the stinging sensation where Orlov had slapped her cheek.

  ‘Will you be quiet?’ the colonel said.

  She nodded.

  The phone was still ringing. Orlov picked up the receiver. ‘Duty officer,’ he said.

  ‘Let me speak to Colonel Topchy.’ The voice on the other end of the line was rounded, a
lmost fruity, and familiar. Orlov was reminded of a speech that had been telecast only a few days before.

  He cleared his throat and reported, ‘Colonel Topchy is away from the office on an operational matter. May I take a message?’

  ‘No message,’ said the caller, and hung up.

  Orlov looked at the American girl and wondered why Prime Minister Askyerov would be calling a KGB colonel on his direct line at 6:30 A.M.

  *

  From Kavrov to the center of Moscow was a drive of four hours, more or less, under good conditions. Just after 1:00 A.M., Zaytsev had left the base with half of the Spetsnaz brigade — five hundred men — squeezed into a dozen Ural personnel carriers. The moon, when it showed through the clouds, was almost full, mantling the sandy patches among the pines with powdery white, as if the first snows were falling. Zaytsev rode in a jeep at the head of the convoy with his radio operator and the lieutenant who had helped to dispose of Suchko’s body. They drove right through the town, past the Victorian bulk of the motorbike plant and the machine gun factory; night maneuvers by army units were nothing unusual in the closed city of Kavrov.

  Three and a half hours later, they crossed the Moscow Ring Road on Volokolamskiy Chaussee, avoiding the outposts of the traffic police. Zaytsev, no Muscovite, had to check his street map before they found the right turning off Leningrad Prospekt. But as they neared the Khodinsk airfield, he recognized familiar landmarks.

  The entrance to GRU headquarters and the airport was heavily defended and, for the first time, Zaytsev’s convoy was forced to stop. The officer at the checkpoint was not satisfied with Zaytsev’s written orders, issued above the signature of the Chief of Staff, and they were made to wait while he went to telephone. One of the guards strolled around the back of the jeep, peering curiously at the radio transmitter and the heavy machine gun that was inadequately concealed under its waterproof cover. Zaytsev could sense that his men were jumpy. He saw the lieutenant reach down instinctively and grip the barrel of his kalashnikov. Zaytsev patted his forearm.