Program for a Puppet

by Roland Perry

  4

  Soviet Ambassador Boris Ustinov was led into the Oval Office by a presidential aide at precisely 9:00 A.M. on Monday, September 22. Rickard moved forward to greet the Russian, a tall, bull-necked muscular man of sixty, dressed in a dark three-piece suit. Instead of offering his hand, he stood stiffly in front of the President’s desk and unzipped his attaché case.

  “President Rickard,” he began with a jerk of his head.

  “Please sit down, Ambassador,” Rickard said, as he lowered himself into his own chair behind the desk. The ambassador remained standing.

  “Mr. President, I have received a communiqué. I have been ordered to read it to you.”

  “Read it, please,” Rickard said, his forthright instruction belying the apprehension and tension that bound his stomach.

  Ambassador Ustinov put on reading spectacles, took out four yellow sheets from his attaché case, cleared his throat, and began to read the communiqué. It started with a flat denial of the breaking of any arms agreements, followed by accusations denouncing the President and saying that he had embarked on a dangerous course. In essence, Rickard thought, as the words rolled off Ustinov’s tongue in clear, exact, uncolloquial English, the communiqué was simply an emasculated version of the attacks in the Soviet press. Only the last few paragraphs stiffened Rickard’s insides.

  The U.S.S.R. is forced to take the view that it cannot effectively negotiate with the United States under your administration and the present circumstances. The peoples of the Soviet Socialist Republics will await the coming judgment of the peoples of the United States before reconsidering relations between our two nations.

  Until then, all major negotiations will cease, and all trade and diplomatic relations will be kept to a minimum.

  The ambassador’s final words hung in the room as he placed the note on the President’s desk, took a pace back and closed his attaché case.

  Rickard, who had been staring out beyond the French doors all through the reading, swiveled his chair around to face the ambassador. “Very well.” He nodded vigorously, his voice steady. “Please inform your premier I have heard his note.”

  “I shall pass the message to him, Mr. President.”

  “Thank you, Ambassador,” Rickard said.

  He got up and saw Ustinov out through the French doors. He watched the aide escort him up the colonnaded walk and out of sight. Then he went back to his desk and sat down again. His eyes fell on the stark communiqué. Now the pressure would surely be on.

  Rickard looked at the communiqué again and shook his head. It could not be Brechinov’s hand, he was sure. Perhaps only a private letter to the Soviet premier could draw a clearer picture of the Kremlin’s position.

  Two days before the meeting in the White House, an Irishwoman crossed herself and an old couple gripped their armrests as Aeroflot Flight 884 headed off from Gatwick airport, bound for Kiev, at noon on Saturday, September 20.

  Graham’s tour was made up of ninety-eight people from different countries. There were also five Ukrainian and Russian émigrés on limited visas to see relatives.

  By the time the plane had flown the three hours to Kiev, most of them had become familiar with Graham, as he wandered up and down the cabin, striking up conversations, especially with the younger women on board, and in particular with four laughing and friendly Spanish women—a deliberate effort to act out an amicable disposition.

  They arrived in clear, cool weather at Kiev airport and Graham felt the pressure mount as the group was herded through customs. He was held up by a poker-faced young woman who insisted on giving his luggage a thorough search. She asked for all his literature and took some time examining The Observer, the Guardian, a small traveler’s Russian dictionary, a novel by Patrick White, a book on anthropology, and the latest edition of Playboy.

  Finally she decided to confiscate everything except the Traveler’s Russian.

  Graham packed his gear and moved to a lounge where the rest of the tour had gathered to listen to the chief tour guide, Victor, a handsome Russian with a shock of black hair which he brushed back in early Elvis Presley style.

  The Australian could hardly believe he had made it. He half expected something dramatic to happen any moment.

  During the first days in Kiev, Graham moved around as much as possible in the hope of giving contacts a chance of approaching him. He ran each morning around the nearby state park, attended organized tours and occasionally broke away from the group.

  On Sunday afternoon he and the Spanish girls he had befriended on the flight from England went to an ancient monastery outside Kiev. In the evening he visited two art galleries alone in the city. But nothing happened.

  Thanks to MI-6’s briefing, the Australian was aware he would be watched. The tour guides had skillfully created an illusion of freedom by telling all the group that no organized tours were compulsory. They were not told that Intourist was essentially run by the KGB and that surveillance trebled on anyone who did not attend tours, or who went his own way.

  The closeness of this surveillance was driven home to Graham when an American college student on the tour was apprehended by local police for illegally changing money at six times the official rate—with a local. The whole tour was abuzz with the news that the American had been quietly interrogated for four hours and given a warning that if it happened again he would be deported immediately. The American said the police had told him that the local would be charged and given a prison sentence of ten years’ hard labor.

  Graham discreetly elicited details from the American over breakfast and was told that there must have been a twenty-four-hour surveillance on all the tour. All through the interrogation, one member of the police asked him several times if he had trouble with contact lenses. The American remembered having difficulty replacing his lenses on three occasions in Kiev. Each time it was when he had gone off on his own excursion in and outside the city.

  The main contact promised Graham in Kiev was via George Revel. The Australian had been told that the contact would come to him, if it was safe.

  After breakfast on Monday, Graham strolled down to the lobby of the Hotel Dnieper, where the tour group was staying.

  Throngs of tourists were either buying souvenirs or exchanging money. Graham bought twenty postcards and decorative stamps and found an empty couch in the lounge. He had written a couple of cards when he was joined by a couple.

  “Be careful what you write,” the man said. He was a skeletal-thin American of about sixty.

  Graham smiled politely. “I am,” he said. The man could be one of Revel’s contacts. But he could not be sure. The American squinted through his glasses.

  “You English?” he asked.

  “No, Australian.”

  “We’re from Florida,” the woman said. She was also about sixty with bottle-blond hair and fancy framed sunglasses. She wore a turquoise dress that accentuated her years and plumpness.

  “On vacation?”

  “Sort of,” the man answered. “I’m a Ukrainian-American. My wife and I are visiting relatives, as best we can.”

  “Is it difficult?”

  “We’re always being tagged.”

  “Why?”

  “I used to work with the New York police department as chief of security for visiting foreigners. I used to look after Khrushchev whenever he toured America.”

  It was one of the contacts that Revel had promised.

  Graham said casually, “Can we talk here?”

  “Yes. Just be careful. If anyone sits near us, change the subject.” The glass wall of the lobby looked out over a square. “It’s people you want to watch here. They’ll tag you for sure.” He pointed to several parked cars. “See that man smoking and the woman with him? That’s our tail. They’re hopeless. About the worst in the world. Last time I came here three years ago, I told the local chief of security—I’ve known him for fifteen years—that the tails they put on me were useless. I told him every move they’d made since I arri
ved. I told him always to tag with a couple because it was less obvious. Well, this time they have. And they’re still useless!”

  “Our friend told you what I was after?” Graham asked.

  The American nodded. Keeping his voice at a normal level and smiling occasionally as he spoke, he said, “There is currently going on a massive computer network build-up in Kiev. I think it’s the same in Leningrad and Moscow.”

  “For what?” Graham asked. Taking the cue from the American, the Australian smiled broadly. “The military? The police?”

  “We don’t know yet.” The American looked casually around the lobby before he went on. “We do know the administration is gathering information for the system.”

  “What sort of information?”

  “Everything from routine stuff about income, pensions and work to details on friends, where people have their vacations, whether they have relatives outside the republic they live in…. Not to mention every scrap of data possible on a person’s politics. You think of it and it’s apparently going into the network.…”

  Graham stood up, stretched and moved over to a mailbox on the lobby counter and placed a card in it. When he returned to his seat he asked, again smiling broadly, “Where’s the information coming from?”

  “Everywhere. Sometimes police or government officials go directly to an apartment without warning. Things are collected at the office, in the factory, on the farm, in the universities. Even children at schools are asked to disclose information about their parents and their homes.”

  “How is this computer bank being built?” Graham had picked up another card and was writing on it.

  “By three shifts of workers, twenty-four hours a day.…”

  “Are they all Soviet scientists?”

  “No, but most are. Each shift carries about eight hundred workers, all qualified computer people, programmers and so on. Nearly all are local. Each shift has about twenty ‘supervisors.’ Some Russian, some German, some American….”

  Graham looked intently at the contact for the first time and then quickly resumed a casual air. “Where are the Americans from?”

  The American shook his head and went on. “These workers go to the network center and sit down at desks or man computers at four-hour shifts, twice daily. The person is checked coming and going at each shift. He or she then goes on with the work of the previous shift.

  “It is a continuous process, but randomly jumped. It means no one except possibly the supervisors knows the development of the total design.”

  The American paused. Suddenly the tenseness showed as his gnarled hands gripped the side of the couch.

  “Nobody is allowed to enter or leave with any documents. This makes it difficult for my informants here to build a composite of what is actually being designed.…”

  “Have you any idea …?”

  Graham broke off as a sullen-faced young female Intourist guide in uniform sat down near them.

  “Yeah, I used to work for Mr. K.,” the American said.

  “What was he like?”

  “Rough as hell, and tough. Not all that bright, but he knew what he wanted and how to get it. I remember once in the United Nations when he was telling America off, he finished a tirade in Russian with, ‘If America tries that, they’ll get it in the ass!’ He used the well-known middle-finger sweep to make his point. But the interpreter was discreet. His translation in English was, ‘If America tries that, they’ll get it in the end.’”

  Graham laughed and the American woman showed some animation for the first time. The Intourist girl, who had not been looking at them, got up and went out of the hotel’s front doors.

  “We’ll have to stop. It’s a little hot. Don’t look around, just act normally,” the American said. Then he grinned, but just with his mouth.

  “Yeah,” he said, getting up and facing Graham squarely, “check out the Hotel Lenin bar for ‘supervisors’ and police HQ just up the road.…”

  “I run past it every morning,” Graham said, acting casually.

  “Okay, take care,” the American said, gripping Graham’s hand. He took his wife by the arm and escorted her to a staircase which led to the hotel dining room.

  The Director arrived at Kennedy airport from Paris and had no trouble moving through customs. Officials did not even bother to look inside his case and only skimmed through his papers.

  Within two hours he was in Washington knocking on the front door of a four-story old brownstone boardinghouse, Folgar Arms, 2127 South Street, S.W., about a half-mile from Capitol Hill. A short, plump Chilean woman unlocked two doors. She looked the stranger up and down with eyes which had an exophthalmic bulge, as he explained that he only wanted a room for about a week. She showed him in and led him up one flight of rickety stairs to a single room.

  The Director surveyed the sparse furnishings—a single bed, a simple wooden table and three chairs, a shower recess and toilet, and a pint-sized refrigerator. He walked to the only window in the room and peered out through bars at a dilapidated building across the road.

  Turning to the woman, the Director took out his wallet and paid her twice the tariff for the week. A minute later she helped him with the metallic case and a suitcase.

  Rodriguez and his companion, the Director mused, had chosen well. The boardinghouse would be difficult to trace despite its central position, and the woman had neither asked him to sign a register nor taken his passport.

  An hour later he answered a sharp knock at the door and let two men in. He stared in disbelief at one of the men before embracing him warmly. The Director had not seen Rodriguez for several weeks.

  He knew the Argentinian had undergone plastic surgery, but was not prepared for the extent of the transformation. Gone were Rodriguez’s chubby cheeks. They seemed to have been hollowed out to give him a gaunt appearance. The chin and nose were different. Rodriguez’s own acquired skills of disguise had added to the change. The hair and eyebrows were fair rather than dark, the eyes green now instead of black.

  Without a word, the Director unscrewed a bottle of Scotch he had picked up on the way, and poured a drink for Rodriguez and his companion, known as Martinez, also an Argentinian, of twenty-eight. He was dark and swarthy, his physique slight. Not the frame of a killer with a victim for about every year he had lived.

  Martinez had first met Rodriguez when they were both drifting around South America giving physical support to revolution. Unlike Rodriguez, he had no ideological bent. He was a killer in instinct rather than training and had joined forces with Rodriguez on several occasions, the last two with the Director in Europe and North Africa.

  “You have completed the research?” the Director asked.

  “Everything is ready,” Rodriguez said, his newly shaped but still aquiline nose bending noticeably as he spoke. That bend was perhaps the one feature, the Director thought, that the surgeons would not be able to change short of shearing his nose right off.

  “Then we are ready for a strike?”

  Both the Argentinians nodded.

  “When?”

  “In two days,” Rodriguez replied, as he spread a big map of Washington on the table.

  For the next two hours he described in detail the strategy for a kill. The Director occasionally asked questions. Finally he shook his head. “It seems almost too simple to get into the building,” he said. “Are you absolutely sure about it?”

  “I have gone over the same route six times. The only difference when you go in, will be the extra security guards.”

  The Director frowned. “It’s amazing,” he said incredulously.

  Rodriguez nodded. “I agree. Never have I been involved in such an easy hit with such a high person. I think one of the target’s aides summed it up very well when I commented how easy it was to get up to the office, considering whose it was. She said indignantly, ‘It is a democracy, you know….’”

  The Director smiled and said, “Where you are free to kill whom you choose…

  Grah
am waited until Tuesday night before acting on the tip from the American about the computer network supervisors at the Hotel Lenin.

  Just before midnight he slipped out of the Hotel Dnieper and began to walk in the opposite direction to the Hotel Lenin, ten blocks away. He immediately noticed a tall, gaunt man following him through the crowds of strollers and workers making their way home. It was the same person the Australian had noticed tailing him during the day on three other excursions from the hotel. Finding steps to a subway, Graham moved down on the double and hurried through the bustling masses for about five minutes. When he was sure he had thrown off the tail, he made his way aboveground to the Lenin. As he went to enter the glass doors, he was blocked by a large, gruff attendant.

  “Nyet! Pass!” he bellowed. It was patrons only at that hour, and he was having trouble turning away drunks who hovered around the doors in the hope of a last vodka for the night.

  When the attendant was momentarily distracted, Graham brushed past. The man grabbed Graham by the arm, but soon let go when the Australian let go a barrage in English that made it quite clear he intended to go to the hotel’s bar. Graham began to walk toward the winding flight of stairs to the bar, and the attendant gave up when a couple of drunks staggered through the front doors.

  The room was dark, noisy and crowded. There was a long bar with a row of mirrors behind it. A great variety of Western liquor and cigarettes was displayed. Most of the signs behind the bar were in English. On the right were several tables, all occupied. As Graham moved a few paces into the room, the conversation near him stopped. The barman and several women examined the stranger. He walked to a couple of empty stools and swung himself onto one.

  Three women soon appeared a few paces from him. The clothes—light blue cotton jacket, light trousers, open-neck shirt—and a large wad of American dollars protruding from his Gucci wallet, made it certain he was a Westerner. As Graham asked for a screwdriver, a hard-faced slant-eyed Tatar, with dress slit to the hip, sat at the only other bar stool near him. She took a long time lighting her cigarette, then smiled. He nodded back.