Black Gambit

by Clark, Eric

  The American was almost a caricature: cropped hair, rimless spectacles, a square face, button-down shirt.

  The American began talking, knowing that his voice was probably being recorded, either by a microphone concealed on the Russian, or by a parabolic microphone on one of the boats that plied Moskva. He spoke slowly and carefully. He did not want the tape to get anything wrong. He was not sure whether the Russian would have the power to make decisions on this matter alone.

  Occasionally the Russian interrupted to ask a question, but mostly he was quiet. As the story ended, they stopped and turned to face each other. The Russian crossed his arms across his chest.

  ‘And that is all?’ he asked.

  The American nodded.

  The Russian thrust out his hand and shook the American’s. Then, without a word, he turned and walked away.

  *

  As the American expected, the story invented by Cory did move upwards, to Andropov, the KGB chief, from his contact and as a memo to the Politburo from the Minister.

  Andropov dropped by during the afternoon to chat with Brezhnev in his Kremlin office next to the Politburo room. He was not in the austere room itself, but in the small room behind what appeared to be a built-in cabinet. Andropov, one of Brezhnev’s closest friends, was one of the few who saw him in this hideaway where he went to nap, rest, or watch television.

  Like everyone else involved, they agreed the story was basically untrue. Like everyone else, they agreed it was in their interests to pretend they believed it. There was much to gain, nothing as far as they could see to lose. The Americans had done something stupid; the Russians would remember, but for now the mistake worked to their benefit.

  That evening the American received a brief telephone call, the substance of which was no more than the expression of thanks. He set off for the embassy to send the cable that would signify that the Russians were prepared to accept the story.

  What the American did not know was the news coming into the KGB centre, even as he sent the cable. There had been raids in West Berlin late the previous night on the homes of members of an organization that specialized in smuggling men from East to Western Europe. Two smugglers were dead and, according to the report, there were indications that their organization had been turning its attention to Russia itself.

  *

  Zorin stayed in his room overlooking Damrak until mid-afternoon.

  At five he risked a brief excursion — no further than a pavement cafe a hundred yards from the hotel. He sipped his beer and chain-smoked Disque Bleu, which he liked better than the mild American brands.

  It was pleasant in the sunlight and he took his time, drinking slowly and enjoying the easy atmosphere of the crowds around him.

  Reluctantly, just before six, he left money for the bill, pushed his way through other tables and started back along the street.

  ‘Stop!’

  The command was in Dutch but there was no mistaking the meaning, nor the fact that it was meant for him.

  Zorin froze. His heart pounding, he turned.

  A hand was already reaching out to grasp his shoulder — a policeman.

  It was, Zorin realized, all over. Something had happened.

  Then he became aware of the policeman’s face: he was smiling. The policeman was pushing something at him with his free hand.

  The policeman spoke in the universal tourist language, English.

  ‘Your lighter,’ he said. ‘You left it on the table.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  CONSIDERING THE SPEED at which they had been made, the arrangements were elaborate. Kovalev left The Hague’s Central Station and tried, unsuccessfully it seemed, to make a telephone call from one of the boxes in Koningin Juliana Place. Leaving, he dropped a handful of change.

  The young man who helped him retrieve it was talkative. ‘One is always clumsy after a long journey.’ Kovalev’s Dutch was slow but adequate. ‘Tiredness and clumsiness are bedfellows.’

  The boy walked off, and Kovalev watched him pass a parked Daf, smoothing his hair as he went.

  Kovalev picked up his case and walked toward the Rijn Straas. It was hot and he was glad when the Daf pulled up beside him and the passenger door opened.

  The drive, conducted in silence, lasted little more than fifteen minutes. During the last few of them Kovalev, watching the interior mirror, saw a small van following. In an empty street it passed and stopped. The Daf pulled up close behind. Kovalev transferred to the back of the van. It pulled away almost immediately.

  The driver talked without looking round: ‘I was told to apologize that you were not welcomed in a more dignified way, but that you would understand when you saw the embassy.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Kovalev in a tone that signified he did not welcome conversation. He lay back against the side of the van.

  Kovalev was a big man, over 220 pounds. His face seemed to be permanently on the verge of a smile. There were laughter lines around his eyes. Given a beard, he would have made an excellent Father Christmas. It was obvious that he was one of life’s jolly fat men.

  Despite the discomfort, fatigue and puzzlement about why he had been ordered to get to The Hague as quickly as possible, he genuinely found the situation amusing. He outranked most ambassadors, and here he was being delivered in an old Citroen van like a sack of groceries. But then he had never wanted the trappings of power, only the reality. Perhaps this was the reason he had outlived not only the war, but Stalin and that oaf Khrushchev and Beria and all the changes his going had meant.

  There was also something more than amusement: an excitement he had not felt for years. These days he was a manipulator, a manager, not a field operative. The previous weeks had been spent in Portugal trying to guide the April coup in the ‘right’ direction, so that the country would become Europe’s Cuba. When he had been intercepted only three hours before, he had been in Brussels on his way to a meeting with European terrorist leaders. He did not know why he had been diverted to Holland, only that it was urgent and obviously important. It felt, though, like being back in the front line again after all these years of directing others.

  His war had been full of moments like that from the time when, as a seventeen-year-old, he had fought behind the lines with the partisans. It had never ended, only changed. After 1945 he had stayed on, until he had been asked to help train foreign guerrillas at the camp at Simferopol in the Crimea. The driver interrupted his thoughts. ‘We’ll be there in about five minutes. Please lie low — there’s always a watch on the gates.’

  Kovalev had three qualities that made him attractive to the KGB.

  He had a seemingly insatiable curiosity and interest in the mechanics of death. To this end, he had always read and sought out experts in various fields from pathology to chemistry.

  He saw life as a permanent warfare. Like Mao he believed that ‘war cannot for a single moment be separated from politics, politics are bloodless war, war is the politics of bloodshed.’

  And, perhaps above all, he could not understand false sentimentality about death. Thousands of people died every hour. To kill, in peacetime, was simply an extension, on a very small scale, of what was acceptable in war; scores compared with millions.

  ‘Just two minutes,’ warned the driver.

  Kovalev wedged himself diagonally across the van, feet pushed against the rear corner, anticipating that the driver would make a sharp turn.

  ‘Get ready,’ instructed the driver. ‘Almost at the turn.’

  Kovalev braced himself and felt the van turn sharply. Lying as he was, he could see the mound of his stomach. The van stopped only a few paces from the side door of the embassy. It was not big by diplomatic standards. The building, a typical old colonial house, stood at the end of a thirty yard drive. Inside there was marble and mahogany panelling. The coolness was a relief after the heat of the van. Kovalev took several deep breaths and began to follow the driver, first up one flight of stairs and then along a corridor. There was total silence
; they could have been alone in the building.

  They made their way through two doors, one with an entry phone and the other with a peephole, into the Referentura, that area of a Soviet Embassy occupied by the KGB.

  Kovalev had experienced many of them. All were unpleasant — no daylight because windows were sealed and cemented over as protection against outside surveillance, and stale air because there either was no air-conditioning or it was inadequate.

  Here the Referentura comprised six interconnected rooms. Kovalev passed through two outer ones, manned by a half-dozen clerks and secretaries looking as bored as office workers anywhere.

  They reached the inner suite. Again the door was steel. Once through it, Kovalev was struck by two things: the hum of the coding machine which, for some reason, gave off a permanent whine, and the sickly pale faces of the clerks, who were allowed during their terms of duty to leave this confined world only under guard.

  Sakulkin was waiting. He stood when Kovalev entered. His face was deeply tanned and he looked in good condition. When they shook hands Kovalev was conscious of the softness of his skin. Without doubt, he was one of the new breed of men recruited by the KGB since the late 1950s in order to present a better image abroad. Sakulkin’s welcome was warm, yet formal. Despite his youthful confidence, the overweight, crumpled visitor with his folds of chin and perspiring face made him uncomfortable.

  Kovalev launched straight into business. ‘Do you know what all this is about?’

  The younger man handed him a sheet of paper. Still standing Kovalev read it quickly. ‘This arrived when?’

  ‘Just under four hours ago.’

  The sheet contained a coded message from Moscow ordering Sakulkin to place an American staying at the Red Lion Hotel under immediate surveillance. It described the man and notified Sakulkin that Kovalev was on his way by train. Arrangements to meet him and bring him to the embassy were to be made with the greatest secrecy possible.

  The last line emphasized that Kovalev was to be given all help short of jeopardizing Soviet intelligence operations in the country. Kovalev smiled inwardly at the phrasing; it was to ensure that if Sakulkin made a decision that proved wrong, it was the younger man’s head that would fall.

  Kovalev handed the sheet back to Sakulkin. ‘There’s more?’

  ‘This.’ Sakulkin handed over a second sheet still in cipher. Only Kovalev could decipher it.

  ‘I’ll need a room,’ he said.

  Sakulkin led him into the soundproof conference room. ‘I’ll be outside,’ he said and left Kovalev alone. Kovalev pulled back a chair, slid over paper and pencil. Then he took a packet of cigars from his breast pocket, removed one and carefully peeled away the outer layers of leaf until a slim band of white paper emerged. It contained letters in groups of five digits. It was a onetime pad, the system of ciphering and deciphering in which each letter is represented by a new symbol every time it appears — unbreakable by anyone other than the sender and the man with the pad.

  Using the pad, Kovalev decoded the message. His face betrayed no feelings, but his fingers began to tingle the way they did when a storm was brewing. The message told him the ‘American’s’ identity, informed him that files on Zorin were on the way from Moscow, and gave him details of the man’s flight plans for the following day. The rest of the message was couched in the same officialese, but it was what made Kovalev’s fingers tingle: ‘Action: terminate. Method/time/place, operative full control.’

  Kovalev looked at his watch. Just after six o’clock in the evening. He had eighteen hours before Zorin flew out of Schipol airport.

  Kovalev held a match to the sheet of the one-time pad. Made from cellulose nitrate, it flared immediately and became powder. To cipher or decipher other messages Kovalev would use another, different sheet, taken from another cigar.

  He lit another match and set light to the message itself.

  There was a knock on the door. Kovalev barked, ‘Enter.’ It was Sakulkin. ‘There’s a special pouch delivery for you,’ he said.

  Kovalev followed him out and through two rooms until they reached a small photographic darkroom. The package, delivered by diplomatic courier, would be the file on Zorin.

  Kovalev nodded appreciatively. At the Center they knew that he would want detailed copies of reports together with photographs — not just radioed information. And they had despatched the material as soon as he was diverted to The Hague. Kovalev watched the package being opened. Inside the bag was a black canister, about nine inches in diameter. The top was screwed on, and, ostensibly, needed only to be turned to be removed. The clerk placed over it a paper disc with markings around the rim and turned the top of the canister backwards and forwards so that a solitary mark on it coincided with a sequence of numbers on the disc. It was, Kovalev knew, operating exactly like the combination of a safe. Unless the exact sequence was carried out before the lid was removed, a capsule of acid would break, destroying the contents.

  Finally the lid was removed and rolls of film were lifted out.

  Kovalev stood in the miniscule darkroom as they were developed. The processor’s face was red in the darkroom light, and Kovalev found himself wondering how anyone could live as these men did, like caged animals, eating, sleeping, relaxing, talking, for months on end in these confined and cheerless quarters. Even prison allowed a man more dignity.

  The processing was swift. Using high activity developer at a high temperature the films took less than a minute to develop. They were then projected through the enlarger on to special paper that contained the microscopic capsules of developer needed to produce a print. The paper was passed through hot rollers, bursting the capsules and liberating the solution.

  Kovalev collected the dry prints as they emerged and waited to watch the negatives destroyed. He returned to his table.

  The information on Zorin was divided neatly into sections under headings such as Family and Physical and Contacts. In addition there were notes, fairly crude despite the medical jargon, by a psychiatrist who had, it seemed, witnessed parts of an interrogation. Kovalev read the details quickly and then again slowly, pausing frequently.

  He needed to know his man. He believed that just as men live according to patterns, so do they die in ways that make their relatives and friends and workmates nod as though they knew all along that this was the way young Boris or old Josef would go. The drinker falls downstairs, the heavy smoker has cancer or suffers a heart attack, the perpetual dreamer steps under a bus …

  He read for a third time, skimming frequently. Time was his greatest problem.

  The message from Center left him free to determine how and when the killing should take place, but he had no doubt they would prefer Zorin’s death to seem either accidental or natural.

  His mind raced through possibilities: a street accident, an overdose in a hotel room, a fall from a window …

  Zorin was due to leave the following day on the 11.30 flight to Tel Aviv.

  The airport gave him the great advantage of the maximum time in which to make arrangements. From experience he also knew that airports were good places to arrange accidents. The assassin is hidden by the crowds of people; rush and strain frequently bring on heart attacks; and airport staff are geared to hushing up unpleasant incidents as quickly as possible. Corpses are bad publicity.

  The airport then, but where and how?

  The idea came to him swiftly. He went outside the room and found Sakulkin. ‘Flights from Schipol to Tel Aviv,’ he said. ‘You have files?’

  ‘I’ll bring them.’ At least, thought Kovalev, the younger man was efficient.

  He began reading as soon as the files arrived. He quickly noted the parts that interested him.

  All Tel Aviv flights from Schipol left from the end of C pier, so that before every flight the area could be completely sealed off and searched. Passengers were then let in and checked one by one before being allowed onto the bridge and into the plane.

  There were two different police forc
es at the airport. The Marechaussee conducted immigration checks and patrolled the runways. And the State police, Kovalev’s immediate concern. These men, under the Minister of Justice, supervised the checks on the passengers.

  He finished reading. Difficult, he thought, but it could be done. He checked his watch again — just seven o’clock — and reviewed his idea quickly, looking for flaws. He could see none, only the problems of time.

  Having got this far, he knew Center would expect him to give directions to Sakulkin and then stay in the background, monitoring.

  He found himself envying the man who would put the plan into operation. But what had his instructions said? ‘Operative, full control’.

  What if he decided to handle things himself?

  He imagined the excitement of being back in action, of personally manipulating things move by move. That would show the soft newcomers like Sakulkin and his equivalents back home!

  Why not! Who, after all, was better equipped? Who had his background? He wasn’t past it despite the things he knew some of the newcomers whispered.

  He made his decision.

  Quickly unpeeling another one-time pad, he sent a terse message to Moscow. The reply came less than an hour later. He tried to doze while he waited, knowing he would have little or no sleep until this was over.

  The reply was in two parts. The first confirmed that a non-metallic bomb was on the way from the Soviet mission in Dublin, the nearest KGB ‘store’.

  The second said simply, ‘Van Louden, H-154321. Michael’s brother Petri’. It was too secret a message for anyone else to see, even the Resident.

  154321 was a Hague telephone number. ‘Michael’s brother Petri’ was how Kovalev should introduce himself. Van Louden was the name of the Soviet spy who headed Russia’s illegal network in the Netherlands, planted so deep that even the resident’s agents at the embassy had no knowledge of his identity.

  Van Louden would supply an assassin.

  It was 9.27 when Kovalev turned out of the railway station and walked in the direction of the houseboats. The address he had been given was a fifteen-minute rail journey from The Hague. The short trip had given him a chance to think calmly.