A Very Private Plot

by William F. Buckley

  It was a tidy little apartment, nicely appointed by Gloria in a lively chintz purchased and sent by her mother. A single bedroom, then the living room with a little dining room at one end and a utilitarian opening to the kitchen. The walls were lined with books and prints of prerevolutionary Moscow. There was a framed front page of the November 9, 1917, daily, then also called Pravda, announcing the formation of a government in Petrograd by Vladimir Lenin. Gloria brought out a bottle of red wine and one of white wine, and they had vodka with their caviar, and then some Virginia ham with pickles and toasted dark Russian bread. They enjoyed themselves with mounting gaiety and nostalgia and lust, and soon after sipping the cognac Serge led her into the bedroom. In the muted light she was still the cheerful, nubile sophomore who never thought to disguise her delight in every aspect of carnality. Serge recalled that in the past there had never been a moment in their protracted unions when the smile left her face. This had not changed either, and it was all just as it had been back at college, fortified by manifest experience—so to speak, Serge even whispered it to her—“experience accumulated on the road.”

  “Jerry Singleton” was glad that Dad was not sitting in the living room when he got back to their hotel and opened the door to their two-bedroom suite. But Blackford could hardly be expected to be up at three-thirty in the morning.

  CHAPTER 25

  OCTOBER 1986

  Major Vasilov finished the file. He had read every word in it. There was nothing there—nothing—to suggest that Vitaly Primakov had been a Soviet dissident, let alone that he would one day attempt to assassinate the leader of the Soviet Union. He and his sister Mariya were children of two farmers, both of them dead, who had worked in a collective in Okateyvsky. Vitaly had served honorably in Afghanistan, was discharged as a corporal. Vitaly had worked in the secondary school as a clerk-assistant to the director, who was most vigorously interrogated and could come up with not one incident in which Vitaly ever manifested any grievance against the regime. He then left Pitkin, as the administration referred to it, to take another job as a clerk, working alongside his sister. No one at the post office had any reason to suspect any subversive inclinations in Vitaly. Mariya’s record was as clean as her brother’s.

  But the cyanide business!

  “Let’s face it, Bibikov,” he addressed his assistant, “you do not find post office clerks who have handy supplies of cyanide. Mariya was not the daughter of a chemist. Her doctor advises us”—Vasilov picked up the folder and flicked it open—that “‘the patient Mariya Primakov came to me on July 2, 1985, to request an abortion. A routine examination revealed that she was in good health. She was admitted the following day to the local clinic where the procedure was successfully performed. She was discharged later the same day.’ That is her entire medical record. Our representative did not ask the doctor whether, by any chance, he had cyanide pills lying about for dissatisfied clients.”

  “It’s the pill,” Bibikov said, “that gives it away, doesn’t it?”

  “Well now hold on, Bibikov. I agree that the pill absolutely suggests that the woman was in on the assassination. But unless we have leads to someone else, just because we can’t find out how she got the cyanide doesn’t mean she couldn’t have got it on her own. We can’t assume there’s an incriminated doctor or chemist on the scene. Who knows where?… How?… Why?—No, we know why. That’s now obvious. The medical report says that the plastic sheathing enclosing the cyanide is the kind used in capsules designed to dissolve slowly, and they’re routinely available. To have got one of those and then filled it with the cyanide does not require any special skill. But getting possession of the cyanide in the first place has to mean that someone in the medical business let him, or her, have it. On the other hand, its location having been accidentally spotted, it might have been stolen.”

  Konstantin Vasilov lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Lieutenant Bibikov reached for his own pack, but before lighting up said, “May I, Major?”

  “Yes, yes.” He paused. “The pressure from the Kremlin is very great.”

  “What are you going to recommend, Major?”

  Vasilov stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, leaned back against the window, and spoke in a voice almost theatrically resolute. “I’m going to tell Krivitsky, uh, General Krivitsky, I am going to tell him, General, you have to go in one direction or in the other. You cannot achieve the effects you desire from Course B under conditions only Course A will promote. Either we let the matter go and assume Primakov and his deranged sister were lone assassins, or we publicize Vitaly Primakov.”

  “What exactly do you have in mind, Major?”

  “If we are fully to attempt to trace everyone with whom he kept company, then obviously we need to know everyone with whom he kept company. And we can do that only by putting his picture in the newspapers and in the post offices.”

  “What exactly would you put on the picture?”

  “Here is where I believe I can satisfy Krivitsky. General Krivitsky. We do not need to say that this is the picture of the man who tried to assassinate the chief of state. We can simply say that the Bureau of Missing Persons urgently desires to meet with anyone who knew this person, Vitaly Primakov. What does that let out? Merely that he is missing; not that he tried to kill Gorbachev. Of course, the people around the post office where he worked—they know, they’ve heard about it. But it isn’t likely that we’re going to find his confederates in his place of work. We will need to count on someone showing up who saw him in extra-office, extra-home situations, and see what kind of a lead we can develop there.”

  “Would it be wise to offer a reward? I mean, what incentive would there be for someone to go to the bureau otherwise?”

  Major Vasilov looked up at his assistant. “I think that is a good idea. But then the whole operation will need to be decided by Krivitsky. General Krivitsky.”

  CHAPTER 26

  OCTOBER 1986

  Blackford was up early. Systematically he explored his alternatives.

  Boris Bolgin had been frustratingly noncommittal. But one thing he ruled out at the outset of their long conversation: Bolgin would not reveal to Blackford the identity of the ringleader of the new Narodniki—the term he used, explaining to Blackford the historical reference.

  “I have betrayed enough people in my life, and have lost completely the appetite to betray any more.”

  Blackford had reminded him sharply that in his original message, advising Blackford of the small group bent on assassinating Gorbachev, Bolgin had said he would interdict the operation if the President of the United States asked him to. “Well, Boris, okay, for a year there was no such request from the President. But now there is. Aren’t you committed to abort?”

  “Blackford, Blackford, be careful with your language. I am not in a position to ‘abort’ the operation, as you put it. Yes, one of the members of the young group has taken me into his confidence, and some of the information he has given me I have relayed to you via our computer channel. But if I were to say to him that he and his confederates must abandon their enterprise, I know very well what he would say.”

  “What?”

  “He would say, ‘You are an old man, with very little in the future to look forward to. We are young people, and have not lost our idealism.’”

  “Which means?”

  “Exactly.”

  It wasn’t necessary to spell out Bolgin’s ultimate weapon, which was of course that if he failed to persuade the young Narodniki to abandon their objective, there was always the alternative of turning them in to the KGB.

  “Exactly. The one alternative I flatly reject.” He had poured another vodka and then said to Blackford, “This doesn’t mean that you must give up any hope of forestalling another attempt on Gorbachev’s life. I’m not saying that I can succeed, but I can certainly attempt to succeed in persuading my contact that the mission should be abandoned. As I say, there is no reason to believe that they will heed my counsel. But they might do so
. And in any case, they will listen to me—my contact will listen to me, and he will relay my thoughts to the others. May I remind you that it has been more than one year since I gave the President the option of interceding? Since he did not take up that option at the time, I have to reason that he decided that, between the young Narodniki and Gorbachev, it was an internal affair. Well, why does his reasoning suddenly alter? Why should I consider myself bound by your President’s revision of his position? It is not as though you had come to me with evidence that Gorbachev is in fact opposed to communism and determined to put an end to it.”

  Bolgin paused after taking another gulp from his drink.

  “What would be most useful for me, Blackford, is any confidential evidence that Mikhail Gorbachev is truly prepared to lead our country away from communism. He reiterated publicly his faith in communist ideology as recently as a month ago.”

  “Yes. But isn’t that more or less required? In fact his willingness to talk about disarmament, even if it is only incremental, does mean something. And the press is somewhat freer than it has ever been.”

  Bolgin had waved that argument aside, reminding Blackford that the history of the Soviet Union was punctuated by spasms of liberalism, in every case of brief duration—the New Economic Plan of Lenin, the “spring” of Khrushchev (“which lasted about eighteen months”). “When, after Chernenko died, Gromyko nominated Gorbachev for his present position, he said to the Politburo, ‘This man has a nice smile but he’s got iron teeth.’ I regret to tell you that he was, I think, right. Gorbachev has teeth of iron.”

  Blackford, abandoning the wine, had taken the proffered cup of tea. He acknowledged to himself that his heart was not entirely in his commission. But he also recognized that in fact he had the power to overrule Bolgin. By betraying him.

  So that when he woke that morning in the hotel and looked out of the window at the Bauhaus drabness of the big office building across the way, beyond which the eye could only barely discern the onion domes of the old churches within the Kremlin, Blackford Oakes put the question to himself: Would my failure to betray Bolgin be the equivalent of my betraying the President of the United States?

  Serge was later than usual in going out for his morning jog. Blackford stopped him at the door. “Sit down a minute, Serge.”

  Dressed in his running shorts and T-shirt, he did so.

  “Okay, here’s how it stands. I’m going to schedule another meeting with my man. He will contact me when next he sees our little notice in the post office, but the new one should include the phrase, ‘So anxious—please help.’ Post it on the bulletin board early tomorrow. That means tomorrow afternoon he will tell me where to report that evening. You are to follow me to where the meeting is. It may last a half hour, maybe three hours. You are to look for me to come out of that building. I will have prearranged where you are to wait for me, not more than one block away. We will both watch the apartment building and when my man walks out I’ll point him out—‘That’s him.’

  “You have two jobs. The first is to follow him back to his own apartment, so that we know where he lives. The next is to devise a way, if you can, to identify anyone who goes to his apartment to call on him. And to trail that person when he leaves the building, and find out where he lives. This can be a long, arduous job but it’s one we have to take on. I’ll take the flight to Washington the day after tomorrow, after meeting with my man. I have to straighten out an urgent matter. That means,” Blackford pulled out his counterfeit engagement book, “that I’ll be back on Tuesday, October 28. Meanwhile, the story is that you are staying on here, taking in the sights of Moscow and hoping to turn up a lead on your aunt. I had to go home temporarily because … because my sister has been hospitalized. If we have any luck, when I get back you will have a few names, if possible photographs, of people Bolgin is seeing. My hunch is that he sees very few people, and if that’s true, we may make it real fast to the guy we’re looking for.”

  “What do I say if some Moscow cop spots me spending a few uninterrupted hours staring at one apartment-building entrance?”

  “You’ll have to elaborate on how we have a lead that maybe that’s where your aunt is living. She may be dotty, which is why she’s not taking the initiative in identifying herself.”

  “Well, Dad. I may as well go and have a good jog. Obviously my next few days—weeks?—are going to be pretty sedentary.”

  CHAPTER 27

  OCTOBER 1986

  It was on the Friday after Bolshoi that Nikolai gave out the word that there would be another meeting of the Narodniki, usual place, usual time, the following Sunday.

  Philosophically they had prepared themselves to discount the loss of Vitaly. But they now knew that there was no way to prepare emotionally for such a loss, let alone cope with the unexpected suicide of Mariya. She had confided to no one that she would swallow the cyanide pill with which, two months ago, Nikolai had supplied each of his confederates, after Viktor’s successful operation.

  Viktor had befriended a graduate student in the department of chemistry. While being given something on the order of a guided tour, Viktor had been introduced to the cyanide bottle, among the forty or fifty chemicals on the long shelf. Late one afternoon, dressed in a technician’s smock, Viktor had brought down the bottle from the shelf and poured twelve grams out into a vial—two grams constituting, he had established, double a lethal dose. It was safer, if bent on suicide or poisoning, to take more than the single gram, though one gram, historian Viktor had ascertained, was all the cyanide that had been needed to kill that glob Goering, found dead the morning he was scheduled to hang. Twelve grams was an unnoticeable reduction in the powdery chemical level inside one of the dozens of laboratory bottles, each one holding a hundred grams of the sundry powders.

  Nikolai told the diminished company that there were matters to explore after the Bolshoi experience. The most obvious one was that security was not possible where two Narodniki lived together, let alone were brother and sister working together. “I take responsibility for it. I should have thought the matter through, the almost certain apprehension and torture of Mariya. Her survival made Vitaly’s death irrelevant. We had him executed in order to protect the rest of us, ignoring that Mariya would be left alive.”

  Andrei disagreed. He said that tragic though Mariya’s death was, there was a significant dividend that came from Pavel’s having shot Vitaly. “If we had just let Vitaly take the pill, they’d still have gone after Mariya, and she’d still have had to take the pill. But since he had to die, it was grim but good tactics that he should die from Pavel’s pistol. After all, Pavel has now been promoted to lieutenant and made a part of the Kremlin security detachment. We can’t disregard our new advantage, can we?”

  Pavel agreed that he was superbly situated to expedite the next advance on Gorbachev, whether by himself or by someone else.

  At this point Viktor said that the episode of the Bolshoi Ballet had caused him to think deeply about the philosophy of the original Narodniki. Those heroic young people had given up their lives in order to kill individual tyrants of the third echelon, he said. None of them conspired against the Czar. But it was precisely against the equivalent of the Czar that Nikolai’s band was conspiring, and the reason for this was their profound belief that an assassination of that magnitude could trigger a convulsive political uprising, counter-revolutionary in its implications. “And if that’s the case,” Viktor said, “then we’re entitled to give a little thought to our own survival. Maybe we can live to see a new Russia the old Narodniki never dreamed possible.”

  Pavel said that a change in philosophical strategy of that nature would clearly benefit him, in his present situation. “After all, I’ve become, so to speak, a part of the Imperial Guard. I don’t pretend to be close to Gorbachev every few minutes, but I laid eyes on him three times in the last couple of days. And if it were to be as simple as a dual death, Narodniki style, I probably would have the opportunity sometime soon to approach him, u
nsuspected, whip out my police revolver and pump it into his brain. Before I was through I’d be dead from Uzi fire from other guards. But if I were less than dead, I would certainly bite down on my cyanide capsule rather than face what I’d be faced with, which would almost inevitably lead to the betrayal of—you.” Pavel paused, and here his voice broke. “You, my blood brothers.”

  Nikolai acknowledged the force of these arguments and said that grave thought should be given to them. Viktor interrupted him. “Dear Nikolai, you are very scholarly in inclination, I know, since I am myself an academic. But we really don’t have to have eternal seminars on this subject, do we? Why not proceed on the revised understanding, and consider only assassination strategies that give the assassin a reasonable opportunity to escape?”

  Nikolai said nothing. Clearly the framework of his strategy had been moved to another plane. His companions respected his vision as well as his responsibilities.

  “Among other things,” Andrei contributed, “if we are going to outlaw Narodniki who live together, then you and I, Nikolai, would have to cease sharing an apartment. And since you’re the wounded veteran entitled to it,” Andrei let out a chortle, “that means I would have to move. And pray, dear Nikolai, where would I move to? I cannot afford to move in with Nina seven nights a week. Only a millionaire could afford that.”