Nikolai looked up. His sense of authority had returned. “Yes, of course, there is always a reason to survive, in the hope of enjoying a better country—a better country in part because of our efforts. Perhaps you are right, Viktor, that we should vote to change our constitution to read, simply, that we are prepared to die for our cause, rather than that we plan to die for our cause.”
Viktor grinned. “As they say in parliamentary countries, ‘All in favor, say Aye!’”
Pavel’s hand went up, as did Andrei’s and, finally, Nikolai’s.
They brought out their lunch from the little individual knapsacks. Viktor produced four bottles of Pepsi-Cola. “You are aware,” he said, handing each of his companions a bottle, “that Gorbachev is sending vodka to America in exchange for making Pepsi-Cola here?”
“Perhaps,” Andrei said, “he hopes the Americans will all become alcoholics, like people who live under communism.”
“To accomplish that,” Pavel said, “he’d have to export communism along with the vodka. I don’t think there are many signs that the Americans are willing to accept communism, however drunk they are.”
After the lunch wrappings had been carefully put back in their cases, Nikolai brought the meeting to order: He had evolved a plan for the second attempt. “But after our conversation today, I can see that there is a missing part. That part has to do with arranging escape strategies. Because the plan I have in mind would certainly lead the KGB to me and to Pavel. And if they begin to look for me, they will begin also to look for you, Andrei. So—I won’t outline the plan. And we will not put it into effect until the escape strategies are formulated. And here is one very important element of those escape strategies: It is that each of us is to work out his own design and under no circumstances reveal what it is to any of the others.
“So that if one of us is caught, and for whatever reason doesn’t succeed in taking the cyanide, then he will not have the information the torturers will be working to pry out of him.”
“But,” Viktor made the qualification, “he would know our identities.”
“Yes. In the situation we envision, the prisoner, incapable of absorbing further torture, would give out our names. But ours is a very large country, and it is something else for the KGB to track us down. In making our individual arrangements to escape we must assume that the KGB will have our names and photographs—Viktor, have you been officially photographed?”
“Of course. Just like you and Andrei, by the army.”
“Right. Yes. So that anyone caught who revealed the names of the rest of us—the names would lead to photographs, which would lead to television exposure of our faces. Not easy to escape detection from that kind of a manhunt.”
“We would have to hope that before the information was given out, the captured one’s cyanide would be taken.”
“Yes,” Nikolai said.
Andrei spoke. “It is getting a little late. I take it we will not hear the plan at this session, Nikolai? We will hear it only—we are not to implement it until—until when? How long are you giving us to arrange the escape plans?”
Nikolai thought. “Unless someone here is contemplating cosmetic surgery, which,” he grinned, “would make it difficult to continue in our present jobs, any disguise we consider would have to be theatrical. That would be the first priority, to devise a convincing disguise. The second would be false papers. And the third—”
Andrei supplied the answer. “The third is money. Money is most awfully useful, as I think I mentioned to you, Nikolai, the first night we met. Back when you were a virgin.” Instantly he regretted his slip: only Andrei knew that Nikolai, their leader, had a girlfriend. Perhaps Viktor suspected it, since he’d have seen Nikolai and Tatyana lunch together so frequently before Nikolai went over to MEIE. He bit his tongue.
Nikolai ignored him. “On the matter of identification papers, we all know that superficial counterfeits are pretty widely available. The kind you can buy for twenty rubles will maybe work to get you an extra ration coupon to buy vodka. But we will want high-quality papers. Each of us has different ties in different directions. Let’s agree that one week from now we will each have got satisfactory counterfeit identifications.
“Now. On the matter of money, I have to confess that short of bank robbing, which isn’t my line of work, I have—no ideas, offhand.”
Viktor broke in. “How much money are we talking about?”
Pavel spoke. “I learned from the police academy that passports can be got for one thousand rubles from master forgers.”
“That would be the basic expense,” Nikolai said. “But if those passports are going to be used to leave the country, we’d need travel money. How much?”
Viktor again volunteered. He said that a fellow student in the History Department at the university went for a three-week academic stay in Helsinki for less than five hundred rubles. “Obviously there were people there to look after him, make things cheaper in food and lodging. But would it be safe to say that for double that—say, one thousand rubles—you could leave the country and subsist for a while?”
“Sounds about right,” Pavel said. “So that makes: two thousand rubles, half for papers, one quarter for travel, one quarter for subsistence.”
“I have twenty-five rubles,” Andrei grinned. “Granted, I could save at a faster rate if I curbed certain appetites. In … two years I might be able to save two thousand rubles.”
Pavel spoke again. “Two thousand rubles and there are four of us, which means eight thousand. I can supply that sum. I’ll hand over to each of you two thousand rubles next Sunday, if we are to meet on Sunday.”
The effect of his announcement was electric.
Nikolai broke the spell. “Dear Pavel, you are not to expose yourself to criminal activity. The Narodniki are not about robbing banks.”
“I propose only to rob from my dear mother, Nikolai.”
Pavel took a few minutes to tell them the story of his mother’s grand hallucination. “But when I was six years old and she told it to me, she led me upstairs to her bedroom, where there is a safe. A quite large safe. She opened it and brought out a truly remarkable jewel case. I am relying on my memory, but I was so fascinated by it I fondled the bracelets and the necklaces and the rings and earrings one by one. I asked her where she got them. She whispered to me that they had been given to her by the Czarevitch as a wedding gift a year or so before I—the Czarevitch’s son—was born.”
“Where did she in fact get them?”
“An old family retainer, who was my nurse for a while, told me when I was growing up that my mother’s family had left her some jewelry. Also the general she was briefly married to.”
“How is it that she hasn’t disposed of them?” Nikolai asked.
“Because,” Pavel smiled eagerly, caught up in the romance of his youth, “she has sworn not to wear them until the Restoration takes place. As she put it, ‘When I step out with my jewels on, the people will look at me and say, “How appropriate that the Czarena had such magnificent jewels.”’”
Andrei asked, “Have you any idea how much her collection is worth?”
“Well, no, actually. I don’t know what jewels go for in the black market. But it is not in the least a problem to find out. My offhand guess is that they are worth much, much more than we need. I’d be surprised if they fetched less than one hundred thousand. On the other hand, I needn’t sell them all. Though probably it would be good if we each had three thousand instead of two thousand rubles. A little money for bribes would prove useful.”
No one of the Narodniki was so indelicate as to dispute that point. Nikolai said that given the press of events, they would meet again the following Sunday. But that he and Pavel, who had been cooperating on the plan, would not waste any time in the interval in moving forward, to the extent they could do so.
“Let me ask you this,” Viktor wanted to know. “If you disclose the plan next Sunday, is it likely that it would go into effect within a week
? Because in coming up with an escape strategy it would help us all to know whether we are talking about the immediate future or … or next spring, or whatever.”
Nikolai said that if the plan could be effected at all, it would be effected in the following week, or fortnight.
CHAPTER 28
OCTOBER 1986
Serge decided after the first day of his reconnaissance activity that perhaps on day two he should take a few precautions and come up with successive disguises. Tomorrow a hat, a mustache, a pipe, and some utterly forgettable clothes.
On the first day he had done as much as he could to make himself inconspicuous and at the same time to keep his eyes relentlessly on the entrance to 1005 Dimitrova Street, into which, the night before, he had tracked Boris Bolgin (finally, Dad had confided his name to him) returning from his engagement with Blackford. In the relative dark—there are no street lights on Dimitrova—he quickly cased the street opposite the building and was glad to find that it harbored several little state-run enterprises: a fish store, a cafeteria, a shoe store, a barber shop, and a post office. He could reasonably spend a certain amount of time at each of these while keeping an eye on the building opposite.
And indeed he did, especially trying the patience of the shoe store clerk who, to begin with, didn’t care whether Serge bought a pair of shoes or not, but became impatient when he rejected one pair after another, having tried on about twenty. But the shoe testing was good for using up a whole hour, Serge’s eye on the target across the street as he sat trying on the shoes. And he was able three times to patronize the cafeteria, always seated so that he could see across the street.
It was prudent of him to think to wear a disguise, but the difficulty was that his decision to do so came too late.
On his second visit to the restaurant, on day one, two men were seated at a table in a corner, one of them facing away from Bolgin’s apartment building. Diagonally, he faced Serge Windels.
Yegor Bolsky was short and squat and kept his fedora on mostly to cover a head very nearly bald. After several discreet stares at Serge Windels, he whispered to his companion, “Supov. Keep talking to me. I am reaching in my pocket for my Minox. I want to take a picture of a man; for heaven’s sake keep your eyes looking at your plate or at me. Don’t turn around. I am quite certain I remember him from Berlin. If I am right, he is an American agent. Right, keep mumbling to me. My fingers are on the camera and in a second I will draw it out and cover it with my left hand. When I do that, take a match—there—” he pointed with his nose, “and lean toward me as if you were going to light my cigarette. I will quickly remove my hand from the lens and snap a picture. I am not certain whether, during the Berlin operation, he ever actually saw me. But since you were not in Berlin, he would not recognize you. So when he leaves I will nudge you, and you leave a few seconds later—I’ll take care of the bill. Keep your eyes on him, follow him wherever he goes.”
The photography completed, Bolsky returned the camera to his pocket. “I will take this over to the lab and go then to the Berlin file—I am talking about an operation in … 1983. Yes, February and March 1983.”
Serge felt that for so long as other diners still sat in the cafeteria, he could safely continue to kill time by sitting there, reading his newspaper and monitoring the building across the street.
But Bolgin did not once leave his apartment building. At the end of the day, Serge would know whether there had been any inbound traffic—assuming the hall porter at the building was diligent in logging visitors to Bolgin’s apartment. Serge had told the porter that he was with the Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs and needed to verify whether Bolgin had any relatives who might look after him, as the veterans’ retirement homes were terribly overcrowded, and although Bolgin had applied for a veteran’s apartment and claimed not to have relatives, his record listed several. The Ministry was investigating, and to do this required confidentially logging those visitors who came and went.
For almost one-half hour, only the two men at the corner table were left in the cafeteria. Meanwhile, the imperious, buxom waitress, who had taken away his sugar bowl after Serge had got from it only a single teaspoonful, was talking, ostensibly to herself, about customers who are so thoughtless as to treat the cafeteria as a waiting room.
So he got up and left. And was followed.
Yegor Bolsky got his picture developed. He took it to archives at KGB Research and told the captain he had reason to believe there was an American agent in Moscow, and if this picture—he put it down in front of the captain—corresponded with a picture that would be found in the Berlin repository under Operation Halmstrasse, then Yegor Bolsky was indeed onto something. “Meanwhile,” he said in a tone detectably self-satisfied, “I am having the suspect followed.”
The Operations file came up with a photograph. There was a marked likeness between the lanky American pictured slipping the envelope to the Russian defector in Berlin on February 10, 1983, and the lanky American who had been reading the paper at the cafeteria on Dimitrova Street only two hours earlier. The brass upstairs showed interest. A deputy to General Krivitsky, no less, came down to take charge.
“Very unusual,” he nodded his head solemnly. “But does the Halmstrasse file tell us who the American agent was—is? Or do we know only that this was the man who slipped the money to the traitor, Wallensky?”
“I have not personally examined the entire file,” Bolsky said. “Do you wish me to do so?”
“Well, you’re the logical person to do so, Bolsky. After all, you snapped the picture back then.”
But the search was fruitless.
Which meant that all the KGB had to go on was a plausible conviction: that the American spy who had been caught feeding a Russian defector in Berlin an envelope, later established as containing five thousand marks, was currently in Moscow, presumably up to no good.
It was with some eagerness that they awaited the return of Bolsky’s assistant, Supov, who would tell them where the American spy had gone. The deputy instructed Bolsky to call him at his office when Supov showed up; if the deputy had left his office, he would leave word with the duty officer, and Bolsky could reach him wherever he was.
It was after eight when the fatigued Supov, an elderly man, almost professionally unnoticeable, with a colorless face, clad in his colorless suit, sat down in Bolsky’s office. He didn’t even think to ask whether the photograph had validated Bolsky’s suspicion. He launched right into his report, reading from a notepad.
“The suspect left the restaurant and went to the shoe store two doors down,” he read in a monotone. “He was there for almost an hour. He went then to the fish store, which is two doors down, and was there for over a half hour. He did not come out with a package in his hand, so we assume that he did not buy any fish. He went to the post office at the corner. He was there until the post office closed at five-thirty. He returned to the cafeteria and ordered a cup of tea. At six-fifteen he crossed the street and entered 1005 Dimitrova. He reappeared ten minutes later and stopped a taxi. I succeeded in getting a second taxi, gave the driver my credentials, and instructed him to follow the cab ahead at a distance that would not alert the occupant, and told him when the cab we were following stopped to discharge its passenger, he was to continue driving for fifty meters, stopping at the opposite side of the street to discharge me.
“All of this was done. The suspect left his cab at Krasina Street. I stopped one block further. Walking at a good clip I could soon see the suspect in the apartment building vestibule of number 68 Krasina, and I could actually note which of the buttons he was depressing. After he went up the elevator, I walked in and wrote down the name corresponding to the button he pushed. It is, first ‘G.’ Then I will spell the last name: ‘H-u-d-d-l-e-s-t-o-n.’ I decided to come back home. It is most probable that the suspect is still in that apartment. Indeed, it is possible that he occupies that apartment.”
Bolsky wondered at first whether the information elicited was dramatic enough to
warrant rousing the deputy, who, it being after 9 p.m., was almost certainly at home or at some function or other. He would decide based on what the duty officer told him. If he was at a ballet, or at a meeting of high commissioners, Bolsky would wait until tomorrow. If, on the other hand, he was at home, Bolsky would go ahead and ring him.
The deputy was home, and Bolsky did ring him. The deputy reacted immediately.
An agent was to be sent immediately to the apartment where the suspect was last seen. Supov must stay with that agent until the American left the building, in order to identify him. The suspect must then be followed in order to establish where he was living—his address in Moscow, so to speak, if different from the current address. The deputy was to be informed the following morning where the suspect had spent the night. The deputy would then decide how to proceed.
All this was set in motion. It proved a most fearfully long watch for Supov, whose instructions were to stay with the new agent until the suspect reappeared; because at six in the morning, daylight imminent, the suspect still had not left the building. Supov had been up now twenty-four hours and was ready to collapse. He told his replacement, finally, that he was going to go home, and that the agent should, at eight promptly, report to Bolsky that obviously the suspect was living right there, at 68 Krasina, under the name “G. Huddleston.”
All this information was dutifully communicated to the deputy, and 68 Krasina was put under permanent surveillance, the KGB detail, armed with the photograph taken the preceding day, assigned the responsibility of trailing the suspect when he finally appeared.
The man of the photograph never did come out of the apartment building. One agent was placed inside the building, where he could survey the occupants’ panel, carefully monitoring anyone who rang the bell for G. Huddleston. A second agent discreetly patrolled the hallway into which apartment 803 emptied.
A Very Private Plot Page 16