The kremlin conspiracy, p.1
The Kremlin Conspiracy, page 1
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Copyright
This book is for B. & J., we had hoped for so much for them.
Saturday Night
It began late on Saturday night, the fifteenth of April as two men, one of them driving, headed toward Moscow State University in a black; Soviet-built Zil limousine.
The weather for the previous five days all across east central Russia had been filthy. Miserable even for an April. It had rained—never pouring, only misting—and the temperature had gone up and down like a roller coaster between a damp fifty degrees Fahrenheit and a damned cold two above.
That evening it was even colder. The temperature hovered around the zero mark, and patches of slick ice had formed here and there in the streets so that the big automobile coming around a corner slewed to the left and then came back on track. The passenger, a solidly built but nondescript-looking man, swore sharply in Russian.
The driver glanced his way, grim-faced, but said nothing as they continued along Kaluzhskaya Street, Lenin Park between them and the Moscow River.
Moscow, the home of the Bolshoi Ballet, proclaimed the brochures put out by the Ministry for Tourism.
Moscow, city of 125 square miles, population approaching seven million, the atlases recorded.
A town plagued with the pollution and filth of any large Western city, with few or none of their redeeming graces.
Moscow, the largest industrial center in the Soviet Union: manufacturing and trade center for steel, machinery, precision instruments, automobiles, aircraft, rolling stock, chemicals, and textiles, the trade atlases listed.
The home of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnost’i—the KGB—with its offices at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square in town and its new modern building of glass and steel just outside of Moscow on the Circumferential Highway. The new building was copied after the American Central Intelligence Agency’s new headquarters outside of Washington, D.C.
Moscow, home of dozens of universities and schools, including the Lomonosov University founded in 1775, the much newer Moscow State University, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and numerous technical institutes, the world educational almanacs recorded.
Pockets of happiness here and there in apartments and clubs despite the lack of adequate housing, the lack of consumer goods, the lack of hope in the Western sense of the word, and over all of it the low-keyed fear: the constant turning over the shoulder to see who was behind.
Past the Donskoy Museum the limousine turned east on Vorobyevskoye Road, then speeded up. There was no traffic here at that time of the night, and both men would have been surprised if they had encountered any.
Moscow was a city of darkness. Despite its size, the Soviet capital was unlike New York or Paris or Amsterdam where lights shined twenty-four hours a day, where traffic never really ceased, where the ever constant press of humanity was highly evident.
That evening the city seemed particularly dark and brooding.
Moscow first became a gathering place in 1147. By 1271 the city has been made headquarters for Daniel, the son of the Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky of Vladimir-Suzdal.
When the Dukes of Vladimir took the title of Grand Duke of Muscovy in the fourteenth century, Moscow had become a very important trade center. A short time later the city’s place in world events was assured when Ivan III made the town the capital of a new, centralized Russia.
The limousine slowed down as it approached the broad avenue that turned left into the Moscow State University complex. The passenger instinctively stiffened and sat forward in his seat as they came around the corner and halted at the gate. Across the wide avenue from them was the embassy of the People’s Republic of China, dark like the rest of the city.
A uniformed guard came out of the gatehouse, and the driver cranked the window down. Instantly the car was filled with a damp wind that drove before it the filthy, penetrating mist.
“Your papers, please,” the guard said, his AK-7 automatic slung casually over his shoulder, the barrel pointing down out of the rain.
The driver handed over his identification card, which the guard instantly recognized and handed back.
“Yes sir,” the guard snapped. He saluted, then marched smartly back to the gatehouse. A moment later the heavy iron gates, closed at night, swung open. The limousine driver cranked the window back up, and the car proceeded along the avenue toward the huge, gray, central building.
Moscow was burned twice by invading Tartars: once in 1381 and again in 1572. The Poles conquered the city and held it briefly until a volunteer army under Prince Pozharsky freed it in 1612. Two hundred years later, in September of 1812, Napoleon entered the city, but he had even less luck than the Poles. The city burned to the ground a few days after Napoleon had conquered it, forcing the French into a retreat that meant disaster for them because the Russian winter was fast approaching.
The capital city of Russia was moved to St. Petersburg in 1713 where it remained until 1922, five years after the Communist Revolution. Since that time Moscow had grown steadily not only in size but in importance. Worldwide.
The limousine pulled around to the east side of the main building, and the driver parked it in front of the glass doors of the physical sciences wing.
He and the passenger got out, pulled up their coat collars against the wind and hurried into the building.
Just inside the front entrance two uniformed guards were seated at a table, an open magazine spread out in front of them. They looked up as the two men came in, and one of them started to get up, but then sat back down saying nothing.
The two men strode purposefully down the long, deserted corridor, their heels clattering hollowly on the parquet floor.
Light shone from under only one door off the corridor; the two men paused briefly by it, then went in.
An old man was seated behind a desk in the small, book-lined office. He was already dressed in a shabby topcoat and dark hat pulled low, and in front of him on the desk was a fat briefcase. When the two from the limousine came in, the old man rose.
“I am ready,” he said timorously, but he stumbled as he tried to come around the desk, so that the passenger had to take his arm and help him out into the corridor.
Then the two men, one on either side of the older man, the driver carrying the briefcase, retraced their steps down the corridor.
Again the two guards at the door said nothing, in fact did not even look up from the magazine they were reading, and the three men left the building, got into the limousine and departed.
The weather seemed to close in after that as a heavy fog began forming from the birch forests to the west. The city seemed to be a sleeping giant; fitful and restless with its nightmares past, present, and future.
I
Sunday Morning
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) … President Forsythe met today with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, capping off a three-day series of meetings concerning the tense Middle East situation.
Begin and Sadat are both scheduled to return to their respective homelands this evening.
In a brief announcement following the meeting, which was held in the Oval Office, President Forsythe confirmed that his conference on Thursday in Moscow with Soviet leaders had not been canceled.
He was aware of the downstairs door slamming and a moment later of someone climbing the rickety wooden stairs. He rolled over and looked at the clock on the small table next to the bed. It was barely 10:00 A.M.
At sixty-one, Wallace Mahoney had plenty of vices. He smoked too many cigars, drank too heavily at times, and he could not abide stupid people.
There he was, he had told himself once in a rare fit of self-analysis. At least the cigars were good ones—Cuban Gondoliers—that he bought from a tobacconist downtown.
His bourbon was, as far as he was concerned, among the best available anywhere, a nine-year-old Kentucky that came in on Fridays with the diplomatic pouch. He drank it neat. No water. No ice. None of the frills.
And stupid people. Well, stupid people were to be pitied perhaps, avoided if possible, but certainly never abided.
The only vice that he would ever admit to was his love of sleeping late on Sunday mornings. And he damned well hoped that this Sunday would not prove to be an exception.
He listened as the person on the steps passed the second floor landing, paused a moment, and then resumed his climb upward to the top floor where Mahoney’s apartment was lo cated.
It was a man, probably young, a bit overweight, Mahoney guessed. He could hear the springiness and quickness of step that denoted youth, and the harsh slap of male shoe leather on the stairs.
The second man, if there was one, would be standing by the car parked out front, the building’s Soviet policeman watching him.
Mahoney pushed the covers back and got out of bed. For the first couple of moments, as always every morning, the varicose vein in his right leg throbbed, the pain shooting up to his hip.
Mahoney’s wife Marge, a loving, devoted, and dutiful woman, rolled over in her sleep, her right arm searching for her husband. She was awake instantly.
Mahoney put his finger to his lips, and shook his head. He could hear the steps on the third floor landing now, pausing a moment, and then they came toward their back apartment.
Marge had heard the noises, too, and she looked up at her husband with a questioning expression.
Mahoney made a mental note to speak to her about the rollers in her hair. He hated it when she went to bed with the things on, which was about twice a week. But she called them their little joke.
“Without them you might think you were in bed with a strange woman,” Marge had said once in a rare joking mood.
“It’s been so long, I wouldn’t know what to do with another woman,” Mahoney had said, and they had both laughed about it.
The steps stopped at their door as Mahoney picked up the telephone on the night table. A moment later the dial tone began its low, steady, reassuring hum.
“Have the embassy standing by,” Mahoney said softly to Marge, handing her the phone.
Six months ago a junior diplomat from the American embassy whom the Russians had apparently taken a dislike to had answered his apartment door one Saturday night. A man handed him a sheaf of papers that the bewildered diplomat took. A moment later two KGB agents grabbed the man and took him to jail, as a spy. The evidence was the papers they had found on him. State secrets.
It had taken the American embassy two months to find out where the man had disappeared to, and by that time it was too late; he had been shot as a spy.
As he heard the knocking on the door, Mahoney pulled on his robe that was laying across the foot of the bed, took his military .45 automatic that was holstered and slung over a chair and went to the door.
The pounding on the door was repeated this time more heavily. In the background Mahoney could hear his wife speaking on the phone.
“Who is it?” Mahoney asked.
“Mr. Mahoney? It’s the embassy, sir.” It was a man’s voice.
Mahoney cautiously opened the door and peered out. A young, heavyset man, in a suit and impossibly colored tie, his raincoat open, stood in the dimly lit, narrow corridor. The ever present stench of cooked cabbage was particularly strong this morning.
“Who the hell are you?” Mahoney growled.
“Siverson … sir. Day clerk,” the young man said, and then he looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “The O.D. sent me, sir. Said for you to come immediately.”
Mahoney nodded. He had seen the young man around the embassy at one time or another. “Tell Finch I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”
Siverson started to protest, but Mahoney cut him off. “How’s the weather out there, son?”
The young man looked confused. “Weather, sir?”
“Yes, goddammit, the weather. What’s it doing out there?”
“Ah … raining … sir.”
“A couple of hours,” Mahoney said, and he started to close the door, but Siverson moved closer so that his nose was almost sticking through the opening.
“May I come in, sir? Just for a moment?”
Mahoney hesitated. Goddammit, he thought. Not Sunday. But then he sighed and backed away from the door, admitting the young man who quickly entered the apartment and shut the door behind him.
Marge was at the bedroom door clutching her robe tightly around her neck. “It’s all right,” she said, and she looked beyond her husband to Siverson. “Shall I make some coffee?”
“Ah … not for me, ma’am,” Siverson said, and then his eyes went wide as he saw the .45 in Mahoney’s hand.
Mahoney chuckled inwardly, but he kept his face and voice stern. “What the hell has Finch got up his ass this early on a Sunday morning?”
“It wasn’t … ah … Finch, sir,” the young man said, stumbling over his words.
“Carlisle?”
Siverson nodded. “Yessir. Everyone is coming in.”
Mahoney looked sharply at the messenger. Farley Carlisle was his boss. He was a hard man, almost Oriental in his inscrutability. Carlisle’s eyes proved, so the office scuttlebutt went, that the man was really Haitian. Or at least had spent time in Haiti where some mad Voodoo doctor had turned him into a zombie, the living dead.
Mahoney had a great respect for the man, but the kind of respect one has for a cobra or a cornered lion. You never turned your back on the man.
“Fifteen minutes,” Mahoney finally said, and the young man interrupted him again, an almost apologetic look on his face.
“Mr. Carlisle said I was not to let you walk to the embassy this morning. That I was supposed to take you in the car, and if necessary—”
Mahoney started to laugh, and Siverson looked hurt. “You win,” Mahoney said, and he turned and went into his bedroom to get dressed. “Give me a couple of minutes,” he said over his shoulder, closing the door.
Marge had already begun to lay out Mahoney’s clothes, and he crossed the room to where she was bent over the bottom drawer of the dresser and patted her on the rear.
“If you’re not back by three, I’ll put your dinner in the oven,” she said without looking up.
Mahoney smiled, and a wave of love for his wife of thirty-nine years passed over him like a soft summer’s wind rippling a wheatfield. He decided not to say anything about her rollers.
Whatever Carlisle wanted this morning must be damned important, Mahoney thought as he took off his robe, threw it on the bed and began dressing. Probably had something to do with the shit the Jews and the Arabs were getting themselves into again.
The Kremlin had been totally silent about the situation, which was in itself not surprising except for the fact that the president of the Unites States would be in Moscow within five days. The last time an American president had come to Moscow, both Izvestia and Tass had made a circus out of it for the month preceeding and the month following. This time, nothing.
He went into the bathroom, ran the hot water in the sink, lathered up his face and began shaving.
Sixty-one years old, he thought. And he damned well looked it and felt it. Twenty years ago he had still been in pretty good shape. But in that time his six-foot frame had shrunk to five-ten-and-a-half. His 190 pounds had inflated to 220, and that was cheating the bathroom scale by a couple of pounds. His face and paunch had suffered the ravages of gravity yet somehow his legs had turned spindly. And his eyes at times seemed to him to be a century old.
When he finished shaving he turned around and took his shirt and tie off the door where Marge had hung them for him, and put them on. Then he brushed his thick, silvery hair.
He had not gotten a single gray hair until his fiftieth birthday, and then for the next few years it had seemed as if a veritable blizzard had enveloped his head, turning him totally silver within five years.
“Gray is beautiful,” the stateside gray liberation groups were spouting.
“When there’s snow on the roof, there’s a fire in the furnace,” his mother used to tell his father in Minnesota.
But that was all bullshit as far as Mahoney was concerned. “When the hair turns gray, the paunch begins to drop, and you’d rather sleep with a Len Deighton novel than Playboy, you’re over the goddamned hill,” he had told a friend of his in Berlin last year before he had been handed the Moscow assignment.
“We’re just as bad as the women,” his friend, who was only a couple of years younger, had replied. “When we hit forty-five we stop wearing bathing suits in public, and when he hit fifty-five we stop looking at ourselves in the mirror.”
They had laughed about it at the time, but this morning Mahoney felt a little used up around the edges. Eight and ten hours of sleep a night were becoming a necessity, not a luxury. And getting up in the morning had almost become a living hell.
