The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Opposite him sat Louis B. Thurston, Director of the CIA, Yale and Justice Department. Scholarly-looking, in his mid-thirties. When most people remove spectacles they look nakedly vulnerable: Thurston looked calculating.

  Even today, Holden reflected, most people believed that the backbone of US Intelligence was the CIA. Wrong. NSA, the National Security Agency which from its HQ at Fort Meade off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway kept watch over a global and spatial empire, was in charge.

  Not that Thurston would have agreed. Animosity between him and Zec crackled across the long polished table bought for the Cabinet Room by Richard Nixon.

  On Holden’s right sat Secretary of State Howard Fliegel, a plump and affable diplomat who spent his leisure hunting game and retained his predatory instincts at the negotiating table.

  On his left, Defence Secretary Martin Duff, beaky and wary, young for the job but aged prematurely by a workload of suspicion.

  Farther down the table, next to Thurston, sat Donald Shoemaker, Holden’s Assistant for National Security Affairs. He was only thirty-eight and he was Holden’s lifeline in clandestine waters. His fair hair was slicked down and he wore an aide’s grey suit and a button-down collar but he still looked like a Californian lifeguard. Twice a week he and Holden played squash: Shoemaker always won.

  Holden unbuttoned the jacket of his navy mohair and picked up the decoded print-out relayed by satellite from Moscow to the microwave tower at NSA headquarters and transferred by teletype to the Communications Room at the White House.

  The name of a high-ranking defector was promised but it still hadn’t been decoded at Fort Meade.

  Holden began to talk. ‘I’m sure everyone present here today remembers Robert Calder.’ He glanced at Zec: the Director of the NSA probably knew already what was coming but his weatherbeaten features were expressionless. ‘He was a KGB plant in the State Department and when he was blown he defected to the Soviet Union. With what we shall never know. Luckily the media never got hold of the story. Anyway, within the past few days Calder has been in touch with our Embassy in Moscow.’

  ‘And he wants to return?’ Thurston asked, taking off his spectacles and polishing them. Perhaps he knew too.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Zec said.

  Holden went on: ‘Naturally such a request wouldn’t be considered unless Calder had something to trade. And he claims he has. The identities of six Soviet agents operating in the West. But not just any agents. According to Jessel, Calder has told him that hundreds of students were approached by KGB agents posing as knights in shining armour. The usual procedure?’ Holden looking inquiringly at Zec and Thurston.

  Zec said: ‘Were approached? Still are.’

  ‘And in this particular operation the selection was made with great care. Only students with potential in public life were chosen. Students who could be turned – Vietnam was manna from heaven for the persuaders. Some were subsequently blackmailed. A hell of a lot of these young people were turned but the Soviets struck real 22-carat gold with seven of them.’

  ‘I thought,’ Duff remarked, ‘that you said six just now.’ He crossed his legs and swung one nervously.

  ‘Seven. Calder only knows the identities of six. Claims he knows,’ Holden corrected himself.

  ‘And we’re supposed to believe him?’ Fliegel asked incredulously. ‘With respect, Mr President, when I go bargaining with a Head of State I take more persuasive weapons with me than that.’

  Shoemaker said quietly: ‘Maybe we haven’t heard it all yet.’ They should have been playing squash about now, Holden remembered.

  He said sharply: ‘I can assure you, gentlemen, that I wouldn’t have brought you here today if I hadn’t anything more concrete than a Judas promise. Calder has sent us the name of one of these agents. If he checks out then in my opinion we have to get Calder out of Russia.’

  ‘I assume,’ Fliegel said, drumming the table with his trigger finger, ‘that all this information is reaching us by satellite. Can’t the Soviets break the codes?’

  ‘No way,’ Zec told him. ‘One-time pads. Unbreakable. An old trick in a new pack of cards.’

  A jet crayonned a white line across the blue sky outside. A clock on the mantelpiece beneath Harry Truman began to chime.

  Holden said: ‘If you, Louis,’ to Thurston, ‘and you, Howard,’ to Zec, ‘find out that Calder’s levelling then a whole lot of decisions have to be taken. What has to be done to this guy, whoever he is ….’ The clock stopped chiming – 11 am. ‘What we do with Calder if we get him out.’

  Duff, the only smoker in the room, lit a cigarette, caught Holden’s eye and crushed it in a silver ashtray after one drag. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why Calder’s changed direction.’

  According to Jessel there was a contract out on Calder. There was also a girl. And Harry. Holden liked to think that the three factors had only been catalysts, that Calder now wanted to help his country.

  Thurston gave his spectacles a final polish, replaced them and said: ‘This is what I reckon happened. Calder escaped to Russia with the identities of six high-ranking KGB agents under his belt. Right? The KGB were aware of it but what the hell, why would he blow them? More than his life was worth: if these six sleepers were blown the culprit would obviously be Calder. Bang.’ Thurston put two fingers to his temple. ‘Then the leadership of the KGB changes. A real hard bastard named Kirov takes over. He doesn’t buy this theory. Once a traitor always a traitor. Why risk the whole Soviet intelligence operation in the West by keeping one miserable defector alive? At the same time the section of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate responsible for defectors steps up surveillance on Calder just as we do on Soviets granted asylum when they’re getting restless. Calder is reported to be unhappy, disillusioned, whatever. Kirov’s worst fears are realised. Calder has to be liquidated but he gets to hear about this. There’s only one option left for him – he’s got to get out.’

  Zec said: ‘My guess is that an attempt has already been made on his life.’ He had a knack of sealing Thurston’s theories with his own stamp.

  Shoemaker asked: ‘Do we know how Calder got these names in the first place?’

  Holden shook his head.

  ‘Obviously through Soviet contacts when he was spying in the State Department,’ Thurston said.

  ‘Obviously,’ Zec said.

  Holden said to Shoemaker: ‘Why don’t you go to Communications, Don? See if they’ve come up with this name yet.’

  When Shoemaker returned he handed Holden a sealed buff envelope. Holden opened it. ‘Well I’ll be a sonofabitch,’ he said.

  The one possibility that hadn’t occurred to him was that Calder had named a woman.

  Shoemaker stayed to lunch. Ham salad, sorbet and half a bottle of Sancerre in the living quarters of the executive mansion. The dining area was informal – untidy, according to indignant servants’, the morning newspapers were still piled on a marble-topped coffee table, rose petals spilled onto the bright mahogany between the serving mats on the luncheon table; the room was a capsule of imprisoned summer.

  When Helen, blonde and chic, had departed for a Third-World fund-raising rally, Holden said to Shoemaker: ‘So, what do we do?’

  ‘Wait till Calder’s first offering is checked out, I guess.’

  ‘And if it checks out?’

  ‘Figure a way to get Calder out of the Soviet Union.’ Shoemaker spooned raspberry sorbet, sunlight shivering on his hand.

  Holden, sipping white wine, was, as always, re-assured by Shoemaker, the voice of sanity in the paranoic ambience of intelligence agencies.

  He had been one of those gilded Californian young men who had inherited so many of life’s bonuses that, in the search for variety, he had joined a set with a life-style verging on the decadent. But on the campus of UCLA he had found direction and, with a formidable scholastic record behind him, moved to Washington where he had become a leading authority on national security, believing, as Holden did, that world
peace could only be preserved through strength.

  His influence in clandestine circles in Washington was often resented. So, Holden suspected, were his age, looks and popularity with society hostesses.

  Holden said: ‘And what about the woman? What shall we do if Calder’s information is correct?’

  Shoemaker leaned back in his chair so that the sunlight quivered on his fair hair. ‘Kill her,’ he said.

  At 4.30 that afternoon Marion Stacey Shannon, fifty year-old President of a multinational oil company, member of the Center for National Security Studies, a director of the Fund for Peace and frequent guest at Bilderberg conferences where, so it is often asserted, the champions of Western clout meet to devise economic strategy, received a call at her vacation home on Long Island summoning her to Milwaukee where her daughter, aged twenty-four, was said to be seriously ill.

  The report proved to be false, the sort of cruel hoax, Marion Shannon decided, to which a multi-millionairess in the public eye is vulnerable.

  While she was away her mansion was burgled and harmonica bugs controlled by frequency-signalling devices installed in her telephones.

  Three days after NSA and CIA operatives had studied the harmonica tapes and photographs of documents found in her safe Marion Shannon was involved in an accident while taking her afternoon dip from her private beach. She was struck by a power-boat and cut to death by its propeller.

  MIDDLE GAME

  CHAPTER 15

  In London beleaguered males escape to the pub. In New York they retire to dark bars. In Moscow they run for the bath-house.

  Calder paid his seventy kopeks at the entrance to a banya in the Arbat and, holding his towel, made his way down a flight of stairs the colour of old piano keys to the changing room, spartan and mustily decadent. A chandelier hung from the ceiling – a torch glimmering from the Czarist past; metal lockers clung to walls.

  Calder hung up his clothes and walked naked into the steam-room carrying plastic-sheathed money and ID rolled up in his towel. He sat on the lowest tier to escape the rising heat; even so the pine-scented steam scalded his nostrils and throat.

  Beside him two plump Muscovites beat each other with birch twigs for the crime of living. They were both as pink as prawns.

  Conversation expanded in the steam. Sex as crude as a ploughshare. Blat. Graft. The lottery. Chess. Horse-racing at the Hippodrome. An apartment to be exchanged on the open-air market near the banya. The Dynamos last night –‘Played like spare pricks on a honeymoon.’ The family. The babushka.

  Cameraderie and concern but no politics: the dead hand of the ideologist wasn’t welcome in this exuberant place.

  A newcomer sloshed weak beer on the hot bricks and for a while the chamber smelled like a cage in a zoo; then pine re-asserted itself.

  It was the second banya Calder had visited in two days. From the Japanese pavilion in Sokolniki Park he had cycled to Komsomolskaya metro station hoping that Jessel would follow. Ten minutes later Jessel had arrived under the same chandelier.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ he said.

  They took the escalator to ground level, turned down a side street and walked briskly towards the disciplined buildings of Lefortovo, home of the Military.

  Jessel said: ‘If that guy in the park recognised me we’re in trouble.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The Embassy.’

  ‘Isn’t he dead?’

  ‘You don’t kill people with pop-guns.’

  ‘The KGB know you used to contact me.’

  ‘That was before you were running.’

  They crossed the Yauza, a capillary of the Moscow River, and strode past the Red Barracks.

  Calder said: ‘Make sure you send that message.’

  ‘It will take them a couple of days to check out the Shannon woman. I don’t want you to contact me for three days. And don’t call my apartment.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to soil the American dream.’

  Jessel said: ‘Let’s get this straight. I’ve never liked you. Why should I? You shopped your country. I’ve kept in contact with you because it was my duty: you were one of my ears. Now it looks as though I may have to help you, again in the line of duty. But don’t think for one goddam moment that I like the idea.’

  A platoon of soldiers marched past; they looked dishevelled and exhausted.

  ‘So until we get confirmation from Washington keep your head down. I can’t get you into the Embassy because the militia will be waiting for you outside, and the same applies to all staff quarters. And don’t book into any hotels or hostels. You might be Ivan Yacob but you sure as hell look like Robert Calder.’

  Calder said: ‘And find out about Harry. Please,’ he added.

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’ Jessel consulted the calendar on his watch. ‘I’ll meet you in three days. That’s Tuesday. At the Foreigners’ Cemetery. 1600 hours. Okay?’

  Calder said it was okay.

  He spent that night in a sobering-up station after acting drunk when a van drove along a stretch of the Sadovaya Ring picking up bodies. He was hosed down and strapped onto a bed next to a black-bearded Ukrainian. The night was a heaving nest of unfettered dreams. In the morning he was given a hunk of black bread and a mug of cocoa – by tradition Russian drunks have to be protected rather than penalised – and dispatched into the new day.

  He took the trolleybus to Serebriani Bor river beach, stripped off his shirt and lay in the sun. White steamers pushed their way along the river rocking the row-boats; the voices of sun-worshippers around him picked up the slow eddies and currents of the water; ping-pong balls on the sagging tables at the rear of the beach tapped out SLEEP.

  Calder was awoken by two uniformed militia. They looked as tall as trees. They asked for his papers.

  One of them prodded him in the chest with his foot. ‘You don’t say much, comrade.’

  ‘You haven’t asked me anything.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Irkutsk.’

  ‘A long way, comrade. What brings you here?’

  ‘Work,’ Calder said. ‘There’s a shortage of computer specialists in Moscow.’

  ‘Irkutsk … that accounts for his accent,’ the second militiaman said.

  His colleague was still studying Calder’s forged ID. ‘The number of your propiska?’

  Calder sat up. Sweat trickled down his stomach. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course. You should know that. In any case the number giving you the right to live in Moscow should be printed on your heart.’

  Calder’s saviour was a thin youth running through the sprawling bodies carrying a cassette recorder. Behind him, streaming with water and wearing black trunks that sagged alarmingly at the crotch, was twenty stones of enraged Muscovite. ‘Stop thief!’ he shouted.

  ‘Shit,’ said one of the militamen dropping Calder’s papers beside him. And ‘Enjoy Moscow,’ as they gave chase. Near the table-tennis tables the militiaman drew his pistol and shouted: ‘Stop it right there,’ but the youth continued to run until the militiamen aimed his gun at the sky and fired.

  As the militiamen drove away with the youth Calder put on his shirt and made his way to the refreshment hut. He ordered blinis, bread, hard-boiled eggs and sardines and drank beer from a fluted brown bottle.

  He slept that night in the Silver Wood behind the beach. The following morning he went to a bath-house near the zoo and then to another beach at Rublevo, spending the night in the pine forest there.

  Six hours before he was due to meet Jessel he was sitting on the bottom rung of the banya in the Arbat.

  As he shed ounces he shed years. He felt liberated. He had purpose. He had a positive enemy who wanted to kill him. And when you had an enemy you had a cause. Calder wanted to save the West. He might even have been happy if it hadn’t been for Harry.

  A small naked man with a monk’s fringe nudged him with his elbow. ‘I am a happy man,’ he said. ‘Are you happy, comrade?’

  ‘Conten
t.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s not the same. Contentment implies the passive state. Happiness is an active experience.’ He began to thrash his back with birch twigs. ‘It is the development of contentment. You see I, too, have contentment. I get a fair wage, my rent and food are cheap, I have cheap holidays, I go to work when I feel like it. Today I should be at work but I thought what the hell, I won’t get fired, why not go to the banya? And then perhaps a visit to the apartment of a girl who works in my office. A lively one that.’ He stood up and flailed his stomach. ‘Knows a trick or two. And when I get home my wife will have my dinner waiting for me. That, comrade, is happiness. Do you play chess?’ And when Calder said he did. ‘Come, my friend, let us play.’ He led the way into an ante-room where men wearing towels as skirts or mantles were drinking beer and chewing salted fish, gherkins and black bread and playing chess or cards.

  With a mug of beer in one hand and the dried skeletal body of a fish in the other, Calder summoned the spirit of Bobby Fischer. US v. USSR. They played two games. He won one, lost the other.

  ‘Not passive as I expected,’ commented the little man pouring beer down his throat. ‘Quite the opposite. And now the decider.’

  But Calder declined: in one hour he had to meet Jessel. Invigorated, he walked into a summer heat which, after the banya, was as cool as mountain air. He walked with purpose and caught a bus to Lefortovo.

  Jessel was waiting for him beside a gravestone honouring a French airman who died in the Great Patriotic War in the cemetery where the dead of 1812 were also buried.

  Jessel had a plan.

  Katerina walked down Gorky Street singing silently. She had defied Spandarian, she had won a thousand roubles on the Russian Republic lottery and she intended to take Calder, absent from the Institute for a couple of days with, according to Lev Koslov, a summer cold, to dinner in the Aragvi Restaurant. After that they would make love in his apartment: that would cure his cold.