Black Gambit

by Clark, Eric

  The search did not help much. Just three things gave Parker a brief feeling that he might see something of the real man. There was the opened bottle of vodka, placed where he would be sure to see it. But that spoke more of Zorin’s mood at the time he had done it — Parker, after all, had done roughly the same thing. Then, there was the photograph of Tanya. Her face itself did not interest Parker. What did was the fact that Zorin had left the picture behind. He would have been told to take nothing, of course, but the photograph was surely a favourite one. Parker himself would have taken it.

  And thirdly, there was a game that was in progress on the chessboard. It was a game he recognized, a good one to re-enact because of its twists and excitements. But it was an odd one for Zorin to choose at a time like this.

  As an avid chess player Parker knew that, notwithstanding what many people believe, luck can play a part in chess.

  This game was known as ‘Steinitz’s missed immortal,’ played back in the 1880s. Its great interest lay in the fact that the player who should theoretically have won had pursued a policy of sacrificing pieces in order to ensure his final victory — but had, in fact, lost the game because of precisely the element of bad luck.

  Mid-morning, sitting straddled across a chair facing the photograph, Parker was not sure what inference he could draw from it all. That Zorin was a hard man, a survivor? That he was conditioned to obey orders? That he was so anxious to get out that he would not risk the smallest thing?

  Parker wandered back to the chessboard, picked up a queen and took a rook.

  Did the chess game reflect Zorin’s fear? Or was Parker reading too much into too little? Perhaps it was the quiet, the isolation of the apartment. Like all old buildings this one was full of noises. Each time its brickwork contracted, or a door on another floor closed, he listened at the door: if anyone called he could only hope and bluff. He had become resigned to the waiting, but he wanted afternoon to come. At lunchtime he finished the vodka, ate the rest of the cheese, and double-checked that the radio was tuned to the right wavelength for Voice of America.

  At 2.10, as planned, the sound of Getting Sentimental Over You filled the apartment. There was a little vodka left in his glass and Parker toasted the radio set. Zorin was in Amsterdam now. It was time to go.

  Outside, in the courtyard, he kicked aside an empty bottle and noted the KGB car parked across the street. This was almost the final test. If no one stopped him here he should be safe.

  He turned right out of the courtyard and joined the thin stream of people heading towards the main streets. He saw an empty cab and wanted to take it, but that would have been out of character for Zorin. He walked.

  Throughout the afternoon — an hour’s walking, two hours in a cinema, a half hour in a cafe — he was conscious of his shadow.

  At six he walked to a bus stop, having no idea where it was going. The bus arrived; he got on, pushed his five kopecs into the machine and took a ticket.

  Two stops later he saw a Metro station. He waited until the last moment, until the bus doors had begun to close, and forced his way through the crowd.

  The doors were almost closed when he reached them; he pushed his shoulder through the gap and heaved. Behind him he heard mutters of reproach; the Russians do not like people who step out of line — and what he took to be the sound of his tail trying to elbow his way through. Then he was outside and hurrying through the crowds to the Metro. He walked quickly down the escalator, overtaking shoppers making their way home. Near the bottom he looked back. He was clear.

  Nevertheless he took the Metro three stops, came up into the open again, walked and took another Metro before making his way to his destination, the New Cherry Trees station.

  He emerged from the station to a vista of skyscraper apartment blocks, all identical. On foot, Parker found them even more impersonal and depressing than he had done from the tour bus. He remembered the Intourist guide’s proud words: ‘And only twenty years ago there was nothing here but fields and villages …’

  The buildings were surprisingly far apart and it took him over a quarter of an hour to reach the third block. By now it was dark. A taxi arrived just ahead of him and deposited a man with a briefcase. Parker waited a few seconds and followed him into the entrance.

  Although there were elevators — and only one was marked ‘Out of Order’ — the man had taken the stairs. Parker waited and then did the same; Russian lifts had a way of stopping inexplicably; he did not want to have to be rescued.

  He walked up four dark flights, and then pushed his way through a barrier door. Number 49 had no name, only a bell push. He pushed once and then again a few moments later before concluding that it did not work. He banged with his hand.

  Still there was no reply. He rapped with a coin. He began to worry. At best, no-one was at home, even though someone should have been. At worst, the occupant had been arrested. Then the door opened.

  The woman had a towel around her head. She was perhaps forty-five, small and stoutish, her round, high bosom confined in a frilly shirt.

  Two buttons were undone and Parker realized that she had been stripped to the waist. Washing her hair. Despite the situation, he felt a stir of excitement.

  ‘Well?’ said the woman.

  Parker remained silent, tongue-tied.

  ‘Well?’ This time there was a frown.

  Parker took off his beret and clutched it to his chest with both hands like a servant calling on a master, ‘I am Josef’s cousin’s friend,’ he said at last.

  ‘You’d better come in, then,’ she said, expressionless.

  As he entered, she peered down both lengths of the corridor. She followed him in and closed the door. Parker was still standing, beret clutched to his chest, feeling clumsy, a little embarrassed, like a teenager on a date.

  Then the woman reached forward and took his hand. Before he realized what was happening she had lifted it and kissed it.

  ‘Thank God you made it,’ she said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  CORY WAS ASLEEP when Scott and Sunnenden reached his house. He had stayed awake until after one o’clock and had then drifted into sleep.

  At first he thought that the ringing of the door-bell was the telephone and, half awake, he fumbled for the instrument. He lifted it and muttered ‘Hello’, but the ringing continued.

  There was water in a jug on a coffee table, alongside a near empty glass of whisky and water. The ice had melted. Cory poured some on to his hand and rubbed it over his face. He drank the rest from the jug and made his way, still unsteady, to the front door.

  He watched the two men through the peephole first. Sunnenden was pacing forwards and backwards in a few square feet of space, and the other man was rubbing his hands.

  He knew at that moment that something was wrong. He took them into the kitchen and began heating coffee. He recognized Scott, but did not ask what he was doing with Sunnenden; he must be one of the ‘principals’ that Sunnenden had referred to. ‘They’ve been caught?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Sunnenden, ‘nothing like that. One’s out and as far as we know the other’s okay.’

  Cory was puzzled now. ‘So what’s wrong?’

  They told him.

  The three men talked for almost four hours, perched on stools in the kitchen, drinking countless cups of coffee, watching daylight arrive and Washington awake.

  Although Sunnenden knew what had been planned for Zorin and Parker once the switch was complete, and he had told Scott, only Cory knew all the details.

  Now sadly and carefully Cory spelled them out. Zorin was to stay in Amsterdam for just under forty-eight hours during which time he would be debriefed unofficially. That was Cory’s contribution towards repaying the CIA’s clandestine department for their help. Parker was to remain in Zorin’s apartment until he knew the geneticist was safe. He would then move to an apartment on the outskirts of the city, where he was expected, until it was time for him to present himself at the American Embassy. There
he would explain that he had got drunk, been robbed, and only wanted to return home.

  ‘The idea,’ said Cory, ‘is that even if no one believes us, it’s in everyone’s interest to get him home. Nobody gains anything by making noises.’

  Scott poured more coffee into a mug, emptying the pot. Cory took it from him and began making more. His method was simple; he made coffee the way English make tea — by spooning coffee into a pot, covering it with boiling water, then letting it stand. Scott and Sunnenden watched, pretending to be more absorbed in the process than they were.

  The coffee made, Cory refilled his own cup and Sunnenden’s.

  Scott began asking questions: when was Zorin to be approached and by whom? What was the apartment that harboured Parker? When was he to leave? Were the embassy expecting him?

  Almost imperceptibly he began to take command. If the situation were to be salvaged, he felt he had to. Sunnenden was obviously useless. And although Cory was reacting professionally, Scott doubted the man’s mind could easily come up with a scheme that would destroy his own plans.

  In the long silence that followed the questioning, his mind grasped ideas, only to reject them one by one.

  Cory was the first to speak. His voice was so low that Scott was not sure he had heard it right. He asked Cory to repeat it. This time there was no mistake.

  ‘We could always tell the Russians.’

  ‘What the hell for?’ said Sunnenden, his voice full of puzzlement.

  Cory made as though to reply, but Scott stopped him with a gesture. He understood. He had toyed with the idea.

  ‘Could you handle it?’ he asked Cory.

  Cory stared at the table, his expression blank. At least he could save Parker. He looked up, straight into Scott’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly and firmly. ‘I could do it.’

  *

  The envelope had been left at the Information desk, Just outside the Customs area at Schipol Airport. It was addressed to J. K. Zak, and inside there was a key.

  Zorin placed it carefully in his pocket and took the airport bus to the Amsterdam terminus, behind the railway station. The key, as he knew it would, opened a left-luggage compartment. Inside was a manilla envelope, containing a single sheet of paper bearing the name of a hotel — the Red Lion — a telephone number, and a new passport.

  Cory had thought that Zorin should switch to a different name at this point — just in case something went wrong in Moscow, and the KGB began looking for an Edward H. Partridge. The name in the passport was Leonard Rose.

  He took the passport and the paper, placed his old passport in the now empty envelope and closed the compartment, leaving the key inside. In a nearby lavatory, he memorized the hotel name and the telephone number, and tore the sheet into strips before flushing it down the pan.

  He left the station, weighed down with weariness, exhausted by strain and tension.

  It was the first time he’d seen Amsterdam, but the view that faced him was exactly the way he knew it would be: the boats and bridges, the trams clustered together, and the cyclists.

  There was a queue for cabs. Rather than wait, he decided to walk, notwithstanding the tiredness. He sought the haven of the hotel.

  Ahead of him lay the Damrak. He crossed the street and started up the city’s only real boulevard, with its wide pavements and terrace cafes.

  The heat was getting to him now. He wanted to stop, to drink a beer, but he forced himself to keep on until he reached the hotel.

  ‘You look,’ said the counter clerk, checking the reservation list, ‘like a man who could do with a long, cold drink.’

  It was almost eleven. Cory had been too involved making arrangements to eat dinner, but now he was so exhausted that he did not want food.

  Alone in his house, he was torn between a need for valium and the desire for a drink. He decided on the pill, made lemon tea, and settled down in the study room overlooking the street.

  There were spaces on the long table now and he positioned himself by one of them, setting down a notepad and a soft lead pencil and then, neatly beside them, the glass of tea.

  The valium was already beginning to work. He would be no good for anything within half an hour. He thought he had done it all but, like a man going on vacation worrying over unlocked doors and running taps, he needed to check again.

  He began to write on the pad.

  1. Cancel debriefing. Arrange delivery Zorin Amsterdam-Tel Aviv air tickets 6 June flight.

  By that he put a tick.

  2. Arrange delivery Moscow agreed story.

  3. Arrange back up diplomatic approach: Washington Amb?/Moscow Ambassador?/Hot line (S. fixing).

  He went on through the list, the words written in large, careful, almost childish writing. The plan was basically simple.

  He had arranged for the Americans to tell the Russians that the CIA had stumbled across a plan to free Zorin, but too late to do anything about it. They did, however, know where he was located. As a further mark of America’s good faith and belief in detente between the two great nations, they were passing on the information.

  The blame would be placed on a Western-based right-wing private escape organization. There was one — operating in West Berlin to bring out men from East Germany — that for some time had been an embarrassment to the Americans and to West German intelligence.

  The great strength of the plan was that it did not matter whether the Russians believed the story or not. They would pretend they did and take appropriate action. It was in their best interests.

  *

  At 2 a.m. on Wednesday June 5, Parker awoke with a convulsive shiver. He lay, sweating, taking in for a few moments the dark room, no light at all.

  It frightened him. In prison he had longed for darkness, but this blackness was too much.

  He was lying wrapped in one blanket on two chairs pushed together. His feet were drawn up, but he would have been comfortable enough without the fear.

  For a while the only sound was that of his own heart and then, finally, he heard the woman’s breathing, soft and shallow. He could not see her but he knew her bed was in the far corner, a convertible settee that, opened, half blocked the door into the only other room, the kitchen.

  Her name was Anna and she worked at one of the government offices. Beyond that he knew only that Cory had told him she was safe. He could tell her nothing, of course. She had her story, said Cory, and that was enough.

  As it was, she had asked only what she should call him. Before he could answer even that she had added, ‘No, don’t tell me, I will call you Kurt.’ Was it just a name, or did it mean something?

  Parker pinned his thoughts on her to keep away the panic. After the first, unexpected gesture of kissing his hand, she had been motherly and solicitous.

  They sat at the kitchen table, she encouraging him as he ate a plate piled with canned herring and cheese and hard-boiled egg with hunks of black bread.

  With it, she gave him Pertsovska vodka, flavoured with red peppers. He gagged on the first mouthful. ‘No,’ she said, ‘let me show you.’ She demonstrated how ‘real Russians’ drank vodka — pour a small glass, breathe out, swallow in one gulp, wait, then breathe in.

  They both began to laugh and just as Parker was thinking that she looked almost pretty, the woman’s face became stern, ‘I shall put you to bed. Tomorrow I must be out early.’

  Parker had fallen asleep immediately, his lullaby the sound of her washing dishes, and then, in his half sleep, the noise of her converting the sofa into a bed.

  He levered himself on to his elbow and tried to make out the time on the luminous dial. He thought it said 2.10. He fell back and the chair creaked.

  In the silence that followed he heard the woman move in her bed. Then there was a voice: ‘Do you want to come into bed with me?’ she asked. Her voice was a monotone.

  Parker waited for some time. It might have seemed that he was considering it. He was actually trying to draw strength to speak.
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  ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, I do.’

  *

  Two meetings between American diplomats and Russian officials took place in Moscow on Wednesday morning, June 5. The first was in the formal surroundings of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the huge yellow skyscraper a few blocks from the American embassy.

  In the short ride to Smolenskaya Square, the US Ambassador rehearsed his briefing in his mind. He had been wakened early at his Residence and told that there was an ‘Ambassador’s eyes only’ cable waiting at the embassy. He read it later with growing apprehension and anger. Ambassadors were often used as messenger boys — but to carry a message like this!

  Arranging the meeting had been easy. Often days could go by, but from the reception his call had received it was obvious that the President had already made contact with Brezhnev.

  Much though he hated the mission, the Ambassador was a professional. For nearly thirty mintues he sat in the Soviet Minister’s office, reading aloud the aide-memoire he had put together in the brief time before the meeting.

  The Minister said nothing. The American Ambassador could not tell from his eyes whether he believed the story or not.

  Finally, the reading finished, the Ambassador handed over the aide-memoire. There was a pause during which he had a sudden fear that it would be refused. Then, again without any show of emotion, it was taken from him. Moments later he was being ushered to the elevator.

  The second meeting, unknown to the Ambassador or the Minister, took place rather less formally on the banks of the Moskva River.

  The Russian arrived first and was sitting on a bench when the American came into view. They began walking immediately.

  The two men had a guarded respect for each other. Such a feeling was essential. When they did meet — and there had been only two previous occasions — it was because it was in the interests of both their Services.

  The Russian, a solid man with a strange habit of swinging both arms in the same direction as he walked, wore a dark blue suit.