Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  Olsky nodded. “I think there’s a possibility your system may have been tampered with, Minister.”

  “Unthinkable,” Tikunov said.

  “To you, perhaps. But I insist you check the status of all the radar installations in the Baltic sector.”

  Tikunov felt he had to assert himself here. This whole conversation had begun to sound like an extended personal insult to him. “I’ll be perfectly happy to check the status of my radar and investigate possible disloyalty among my officers – just as soon as you show me a written order from the General Secretary, Comrade Chairman.” Tikunov, his face growing more red, his cheeks quivering, was adamant. What he really despised about the KGB was the way they eroded one’s sphere of influence. They could strut in and take over your whole life. “I’d also like to get a grasp on the reason behind your questions, General. Do you know something I don’t know? Have you heard of an unauthorised plane intending to violate Soviet airspace?”

  Olsky moved round his office in a restless way. “I’ve received information that leads me to believe an aircraft is planning an attack on the Soviet Union.”

  “What kind of aircraft?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps you know where it might be coming from?” Tikunov asked in what he thought was the tone of voice used to humour people, but it was a clumsy effort made by a humourless man.

  Olsky shook his head.

  “By God, General, you’re an encyclopaedia of information,” Tikunov said. “Just the same you think you have enough to send your agents into my province and cause all kinds of mischief. Where did you get this so-called information from anyhow?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Olsky said. “And you know better than to ask.”

  “The only possible enemy aircraft in this region capable of delivering any kind of strike against us would be from NATO,” Tikunov said. “Are you saying that we can expect a plane from NATO to attack us? One plane? One little plane, General?”

  “I’m not saying that,” Olsky answered.

  “Then what the hell are you saying, Olsky?”

  Olsky wished he had answers to Tikunov’s questions, but all he had to go on was Volovich’s vague information, and that wasn’t enough. A plane, but what kind of plane? and from where? He picked up a pencil and tapped the surface of his desk with it, conscious of how he might have appeared to Tikunov – as a man coming apart slowly under the pressures of office.

  “I can’t take chances, Minister,” he said. “Which is why I ordered my men to search the quarters of every member of your staff in any kind of sensitive position, and not only in Moscow.”

  Tikunov spluttered and his red hands – which despite their colour suggested iciness – became welded together. “I’m goddamned appalled, General! First your thugs ransack my personnel files and tamper with my computers –”

  “Hardly thugs, Minister,” Olsky said. “They know what they’re looking for. They’re interested only in those officers whose positions might allow them to interfere with radar operations –”

  Tikunov ignored this. “Then I find they’ve been given carte blanche to rummage through the accommodations of my officers. The whole situation’s gone beyond intolerable.” He walked to the door and made a gesture of exasperation. “I’ll communicate my displeasure to the General Secretary at once, of course.”

  “Your prerogative,” Olsky said. “But I still suggest you check the status of your installations before you start making angry phonecalls, Minister.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, General,” Tikunov said. “I quite understand that the business of the KGB is other people’s business, but keep your nose as far out of mine as humanly possible.”

  Olsky watched the Deputy Minister slam the door as he rushed from the office. After a few moments, Colonel Chebrikov came into the room, carrying some papers in his hand.

  “There’s something here that will interest you, sir,” the Colonel said. “Three KGB officers were found murdered twenty miles from Tallinn.”

  “Murdered?” Olsky slumped back in his chair. It was going to be one of those days, he thought, when bad news creates a force all its own, and keeps rolling, accumulating more and more unfortunate items like some great black snowball turning to an avalanche.

  “They were apparently suspicious of an abandoned farmhouse about twenty miles from the city, and they went to investigate – acting under your general orders to locate dissidents and apprehend them. The farmhouse, it seems, was used by itinerants from time to time. When the officers didn’t re-establish contact with Tallinn HQ, a search of the area was made. All three of them were found wrapped in tarpaulin and stuffed inside an old well. They’d been shot. The farmhouse had recently been occupied – signs of food, a couple of sleeping-bags. A vehicle was left behind, an old Moskvich. The ownership hasn’t been traced.”

  Olsky leaned across his desk. “Could there be a connection? Could there be some kind of link between the assassins and this alleged conspiracy?”

  “Perhaps, General. On the other hand, you always find extremists in the Baltic countries. They come with the territory. Every now and then we pick somebody up because he’s been distributing anti-social documents and we find he’s got an old gun tucked away someplace. A war souvenir, usually. Maybe the occupants of the farmhouse come into that category, loonies who happened to have guns. They’re not necessarily linked with a major conspiracy.”

  Not necessarily. It was the kind of vague response Olsky didn’t want to hear. He needed definite information, hard facts. He was suddenly restless. There was an architecture to all of this, a blueprint he couldn’t read, a design he couldn’t grasp, a logic that eluded him. A plan, a widespread plan, something carefully contrived, years in the making, years of patience and the kind of singleminded determination that is the legitimate child of obsessive hatred. The Baits hated the Russians – a fact of life, something that didn’t diminish with each new generation of Baits, no matter how many Lithuanian children were pressured into joining the Komsomol or how many young Latvians were members of the Party or how many youthful Estonians learned Russian in schools. The hatred went on and on, seemingly without end. Olsky, who would gladly have found some suitable accommodation with the nationalists in the Baltic if the choice had been his to make, was depressed. Three dead officers in Estonia, a terrorist conspiracy within the Soviet Union, Viktor Epishev in the United States, Greshko cruising Moscow in the hours of darkness and spreading rumours – these things impinged upon him all at once, creating a knot in his brain.

  And then there was Dimitri Volovich.

  Poughkeepsie, New York

  The airfield had once belonged to a private flying club that had gone bankrupt, amid rumours of embezzlement and some public scandal, a few years ago. Now the hangar doors flapped in the breeze and the perimeter fence had rusted and kids sometimes played baseball on the old runway. The runway was cracked and weeds came up through the concrete here and there, irregularities that caused the single prop Cessna to bounce and shudder as it came down to land.

  Iverson, feeling a slight chill creep through the dark, drew up the collar of his lightweight overcoat and glanced at Epishev as the plane bumped and taxied toward the place where they stood.

  “Unseasonable cold,” Iverson remarked.

  Epishev said nothing. He gazed at the plane, which was smaller than he’d expected. He’d arrived first-class and now, with his work done, he was leaving through the back door, being flown from Poughkeepsie – which was God knows where – to Canada, and then back to the Soviet Union. He would have preferred to depart in more comfort, as befitted a man who had completed an important task.

  Iverson saw the little craft come shivering toward them and he reached out, touching the back of Epishev’s arm.

  “You did very well,” he said. “My people are pleased. I hear General Greshko is delighted.”

  Epishev listened to the dark wind make rustling sounds as it slithered through the broken fe
nce. A light went on in the cockpit of the Cessna and the silhouette of the pilot became visible.

  “Who flies the plane?” Epishev asked.

  “One of our own pilots,” Iverson answered.

  “Is he good?”

  “Are you nervous, Colonel?”

  “Small planes …” Epishev didn’t finish his sentence. The plane, which bore a false registration number, was moving nearer.

  “He’s a good man,” Gary Iverson said. “The best.”

  The Cessna had come to a stop now. Epishev took a step towards it, hearing the propeller turn slowly. He was unhappy with this. The small airfield, the ridiculous plane, the way he was leaving the United States. He felt he deserved better.

  “You’ll be comfortable, Colonel,” Iverson said. “I promise you that.” He took a small flask from his pocket and poured a shot into the silver cap, which he passed to Epishev. “A short toast to the friendship between our countries, Colonel. To cooperation.”

  Iverson raised the flask to his lips.

  “What are we drinking?” Epishev asked.

  “What else? Vodka.”

  Epishev tossed the shot back, returning the cap to Iverson, who immediately stuck it back on the flask.

  “The girl,” Epishev said. “What will you do with the girl?”

  “Our general feeling is that without Frank Pagan she’s been rendered ineffective.”

  “That’s all? You see no danger?”

  “She’ll be kept under surveillance for a while,” Iverson said. Now that the toast had been drunk, he was impatient to be gone from this dreary place. “But she’s no danger to our plan now.”

  Epishev shrugged, then walked toward the Cessna and climbed up into the cockpit. He waved at Iverson, who returned the gesture, even if Epishev couldn’t see it in the darkness. The plane made a circle, bouncing back onto the runway, and then it was racing along, up and down, wobbling, finally rising just before the runway ended. Up and up, slow and noisy, vanishing into the blackness. Iverson watched until the wing-lights were no longer visible, and then he walked to his car.

  He used the car telephone to make a connection with the house in Fredericksburg. When Galbraith came on the line, Iverson said, “He’s gone, sir.”

  “He drank the toast, I trust?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think it’s better like that, don’t you? Are you going to spend the night in New York? Or are you headed back down here?”

  “I’ll stay in the city,” Iverson said. “I’m tired.”

  “Sleep well, Gary.”

  Galbraith hung up. Iverson replaced the telephone and sat in the darkness of the abandoned airfield and thought he could still hear the distant thrumming of the small plane. He turned the key in the ignition, looked at the dashboard clock.

  Approximately thirty minutes from now the tasteless sedative in the vodka would send Epishev into a sound sleep. The pilot would parachute from the Cessna at a prearranged spot close to the town of Troy, and the craft, with the comatose Epishev on board, would crash in the Adirondacks, quite possibly in the sparsely-populated region beyond Lake Luzerne, where it might lie undiscovered for many years.

  Without a trace, Iverson thought. And he was filled with renewed admiration for Galbraith, who had seen this whole scheme in one flash in the yellow house in Virginia Beach, one blinding insight, the way a grandmaster will see checkmating possibilities twelve devious moves ahead. Use outside talent whenever you possibly can, Gary. Just make sure it never gossips about you. People who tell you a dog is man’s best friend are wrong. Man’s best friend is silence.

  19

  Glen Cove, Long Island

  The question that formed on Mikhail Kiss’s lips was one he didn’t have to voice aloud. He knew the answer anyway, because the family resemblance was too forceful, too striking. He knew who this young woman was even before she said, “Küll siis Kalev jõuab koju …” with that thin, misleadingly playful smile on her face.

  She stepped past Kiss and Pagan and entered the glass-walled room, where she stood in the middle of the floor. There was something just a little arrogant in the way she stood, Pagan thought, a quality he hadn’t seen in her before – but then she was apparently full of surprises; and one more shouldn’t have troubled him. He had a depressing sense suddenly of being caught up in a drama whose first two acts he’d missed or, at best, had seen only obliquely from the corner of his eye. He was very aware of an unresolved conflict between Kiss and Kristina, a situation he couldn’t bring into sharp perspective. He was standing outside, his face pressed against the glass, and the room into which he tried to look was out of focus.

  Mikhail Kiss said, “I used to wonder what had become of Norbert’s daughter. I tried to stop thinking about her, and sometimes I succeeded.”

  “It’s taken me a long time to find you,” Kristina said.

  Mikhail Kiss’s mouth was very dry. “I think I’ve been expecting you for years, one way or another. I had a dream about Norbert last night.”

  There was a strange crossfire here, and Pagan knew he didn’t belong in it. He’d gatecrashed. Shadows moved on the edge of his mind, and he didn’t want them to take recognisable shape, because he didn’t want to see what they really were when they emerged into the light. There was one unmistakable conclusion, and he needed to avoid it.

  Kristina moved closer to Mikhail Kiss and asked, “Do you know the last thing Norbert Vaska ever said to me?”

  Kiss shook his head slowly.

  “They’ve betrayed me,” Kristina said. Her voice trembled. “The Brotherhood betrayed me.”

  “Betrayal’s an easy word,” Kiss said. “It’s too simple.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I would call it sacrifice.”

  “Sacrificed by his old comrades. His friends. His own Brotherhood.”

  Kiss ran the palm of his hand across his eyes. “You have to understand the circumstances,” he said quietly.

  “Why? Would they justify everything?”

  “They may help you understand, Kristina.”

  “I doubt it,” and she was fierce, unrelenting, her expression more intense than Pagan had ever seen it. She was talking to Kiss as if Pagan – having served his purpose in leading the way to the heart of the Brotherhood, a feat she apparently couldn’t achieve on her own, a goal obscured by the passage of time and the pseudonyms the Brotherhood had assumed, old trails that had faded, old pathways too weatherbeaten to follow – had ceased to exist. Gone. Shoved aside. Used. Just like that. He didn’t know whether to be outraged or bewildered by his own negligent heart. He didn’t know whether to admire this woman’s tenacity of pursuit. This talk of betrayal and sacrifice – was it vengeance she wanted? He moved his hand very slightly, letting it hover behind him, concealed from view but close to the location of his gun.

  “Briefly, it comes down to the fact that Romanenko was in serious difficulties some years ago,” Kiss said. “He occupied, as you may know, a position that created problems for him. He led two lives. And sometimes they came in conflict with each other. You understand this much, of course.”

  Kiss paused. Was the story worth telling now? It was fading, because that was how he wanted it, a threadbare memory, something whose shame was no longer so bright and blinding. He glanced at Pagan, aware of the inglane’s look of confusion, and what was apparent to Kiss was that Pagan and Kristina had enjoyed some kind of relationship, perhaps they’d even been lovers – but Pagan hadn’t expected the woman to turn up here in this house, of all places. And there was a shadow of hurt on Pagan’s face, an imprint of anxiety on those features that were so used to concealment.

  “I’m listening,” Kristina Vaska said. Now she did look at Pagan, and offered him a brief smile, nothing of consequence. Frank Pagan wondered if he was going to be fobbed off with this trifle. He put out a hand towards her, laying the palm on her arm, but she appeared not to feel his touch. She was concentrating on Kiss.

  Kiss went on
, “There was a time, when our plan was in its earliest stages, when Aleksis realised he was coming under suspicion from certain factions in the Party. And the KGB had begun a particularly tough campaign in Tallinn. Aleksis’s loyalties were in question. There were rumours about his life. Questions he couldn’t afford, Kristina. A man in his position had to be above any kind of suspicion, because he was important to the cause.”

  Kiss paused. This was the tough part. This was the part he didn’t want to utter aloud. But ghosts were pressing against him, forcing him to speak. “It was decided that he had to prove his loyalty to the Party. He had to stop the questions, the whispers. What good would he be if he were arrested and imprisoned? How could he contribute to the cause from a jail cell? Therefore, whatever he was going to do would have to be drastic.”

  “I can guess the rest,” Kristina said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Romanenko and I had a meeting in 1971 in Helsinki. Our meetings, you understand, were difficult to arrange and often held hurriedly in strange places. This particular meeting – and I don’t remember it with any pleasure, believe me – took place on the ferry to Suomenlinna. I remember the day – it was cold and rainy. Fitting weather for what we had to do. Aleksis outlined a plan to protect his reputation and I agreed to it. Between us, we decided to give Norbert Vaska to the KGB. Everything. His participation in a democratic society. His part in running an underground newspaper. Aleksis gave the information to a certain Colonel Epishev, who then arrested your father.”

  There was silence in the room for a long time.

  “You did a terrific job,” Kristina said eventually. “You must have been very proud of yourselves.”

  “We did what we had to do to save the plan. You must try to understand that, Kristina. It was a matter of survival. It was either your father or the death of everything we had ever hoped for and worked for.”

  “You made the wrong choice,” Kristina said.