Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

14

General Valery Kalenin was a short, square-bodied Georgian considered unique within the Kremlin and therefore regarded by some with awe, by others with suspicion and by nearly everyone with respect. He had come unscathed through the Stalin era, even during the purges of the Intelligence departments which had followed Lavrenti Beria’s fall from favour and survived, too, the apparent liberalisation under Khrushchev, which in reality had been nothing of the sort. He had achieved this not by sycophancy, even in Stalin’s time when the attitude was considered essential, because he regarded sycophancy as the surest way to disaster. It had even come to as adept a toady as Beria.

Kalenin had survived by absolute and utter dedication to his job, thus creating an efficiency unparalleled in any other department of Soviet government, and because the majority of Soviet government is clogged by bureaucracy this increased his prestige.

That he was able to show such dedication was possible because of the unusual sort of person he was. A bachelor with a brilliant, calculating mind, he had absolutely no social ability, and because of some psychological quirk, which he accepted without regret because he didn’t know what he was missing, he had no sexual inclination, either male or female. This lack of interest was usually obvious to both sexes, heightening the regard in which he was held, because other men in Kalenin’s position invariably used their power for personal indulgences. Beria had actually created a squad of men to kidnap pubescent virgins off the streets of Moscow.

With virtually nothing to distract him apart from his absorption in the history of tank warfare, in which he was an acknowledged expert, Kalenin’s entire existence was devoted to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, and within the K.G.B. itself he was a revered figure. He worked sixteen hours a day either in their headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, a grey stone building which before the Revolution had belonged to the All-Russian Insurance Company, or in any of the capitals of the Warsaw Pact, of which he was over-all Intelligence commander, no matter what lip-service was made to the pretence of separate, national identity. Any surplus time was spent organising solitary war games with his toy tanks on the kitchen floor of his apartment in Kutuzovsky Prospekt and it was during this relaxation that he occasionally regretted the absence of friends. Even though he was scrupulously fair, never cheating with the dice, it was always difficult to perform as leader of both sides.

Normally something as minuscule as an anonymous telephone call to a foreign embassy would not have been forwarded for his personal attention, because Kalenin regarded delegation as an essential part of efficiency. But it was not normal for anonymous telephone callers to refer by name to the head of the K.G.B., for as with sex, Kalenin was entirely uninterested in fame or notoriety, actually going to extensive lengths to conceal his identity throughout the Eastern bloc and taking absolute care that it was not known in the West.

The report was made initially from the American capital by telex and within twenty-four hours Kalenin had demanded a full account. Because the call had lasted barely thirty seconds, there wasn’t much of it. The K.G.B. Resident in Washington had, however, included in addition a full report of the Romanov exhibition, even attaching some newspaper reviews of the display in New York.

Kalenin’s office in Dzerzhinsky Square reflected the man, a starkly bare, functional room, with a disregarded view of other offices and chancelleries within the Kremlin complex. Two days after Charlie Muffin’s contact, Kalenin sat there, quite alone, the completed file before him.

The time was long past when the government of Russia dismissed as bourgeois irrelevence the legacies of Tsarism: the treasures of the Armoury in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad were actually offered as tourist attractions. The official attitude was different, of course, in the case of anything that had been taken from the country in the immediate confusion after 1917. But not very different. Because his survival depended upon such awareness, Kalenin knew there would be irritation within the Praesidium if anything were to happen to the Romanov Collection: what was Russian remained Russian, wherever it was. That knowledge would have been sufficient to provoke a reaction, but the risk to a collection of stamps was not Kalenin’s predominant concern as he sat reflectively in his sterile room. He was far more interested in the identity of a call-box user in the American State of Florida who knew his name. For that reason there was one part of the Washington report upon which Kalenin had sought clarification, and he drew the addendum towards him now. An English voice, the initial report had said. The additional information was that the expression had meant to convey there was no intonation of any foreign language. Either English or American, then. But because of the location, more likely American. A C.I.A. trap, to trick him into reaction that might get Russians involved and lead to a political embarrassment? A possibility, Kalenin supposed. But it was a very clumsy effort; too clumsy to be the strongest likelihood.

What then? Kalenin posed again the question that had occupied his mind for the past forty-eight hours and again could not offer himself an answer. The burly man sighed, closing the folder. He would have to discover the solution, he knew; that was how he had existed for so long in the position he occupied.

Even though he doubted entrapment, Kalenin knew he would have to guard against it. But because the operation was in Florida, he had already determined a way to achieve that. And in such a fashion that if the C.I.A. were involved, whatever scheme they had evolved would explode in their faces. A man who constantly planned ahead, Kalenin had had flown to Moscow fifty C.I.A.-trained Cubans within twenty-four hours of their seizure after the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion during the Kennedy administration. It had only taken three months of imprisonment to turn them. Twenty would be put into Florida, to protect the exhibition. And if the C.I.A. sprang a trap, they’d find they had caught their own men; Kalenin was sure that through the news media he covertly controlled he would be able to expose the capture and the men’s history within hours of its having occurred.

The selection of the man who would attempt to discover the identity of the mystery caller, rather than protect the exhibition, was something that required deeper consideration. There was a man, an operative who had been installed with a deep cover in the California city of San Diego and allowed to establish an outwardly respectable job and life, both of which would have defied any investigation, no matter how detailed. Kalenin hesitated from activating him, unwilling to expend such an investment. But as head of the K.G.B., his identity was officially defined as a state secret. So it followed that the knowledge and use of it from an American call box could be officially described as endangering State security.

Kalenin reopened the file before him, seeking a date. He would have liked to have briefed the man personally, but with only twelve days remaining before the end of the exhibition in Florida he did not consider he had sufficient time to summon him to Moscow and then return him to America. It would have to be a briefing by remote control.

Kalenin depressed the button on his office intercom, gave his order and then sat with his eyes focussed above the door, counting on the second hand of the clock mounted there the time it took the secretary to reply. It was a man who entered, one minute and forty-five seconds later. Kalenin preferred male to female secretaries simply because over a long period he had found them more efficient. He nodded on this occasion, impressed with the speed of the response.

Kalenin accepted the second file, opened it and stared down at the photograph of an open-faced, smiling man, his hair cropped into a college crew cut. ‘Yale’ was inscribed across the front of his sweat-shirt.

The result of a one-night union beside a park bench, twenty-eight years earlier, between a falsely hopeful factory worker and a drunken seaman in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, Anatoli Nosenko had been plucked from the orphanage at the age of four and then taken first to a special house inland at Kaunas and then, after a medical examination had proved his fitness, and his Western rather than Slavic appearance had been judged acceptable, he was taken across country to the special school in the Moscow hills. At the age of five, when most Western children enter kindergarten to scrawl with crayons, shape Plasticine and grope with their letters, Anatoli commenced daily eight-hour training to enable him to become a deep penetration agent in the United States of America. Within a week of his arrival, he was ascribed the name John Williamson and never again referred to by his Russian identity. His instructors, who themselves had been specially schooled in language laboratories, spoke to him only in American-accented English, he listened to taped American radio programmes and watched videotaped recordings of American television. He was taught baseball and allowed to favour a particular team and follow their fortunes from the league tables during the season. He ate hamburgers and knew they came from McDonald’s, preferred his Kentucky fried chicken straight and not in barbecue batter and found peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches too sweet. He thought root beer tasted like medicine and always chose Coca Cola, usually the calorie-free variety. At the age of fifteen, coupled with his continued Americanisation and education, there began the additional instruction, in radio communication and Intelligence gathering. When he was seventeen, Williamson, whose educational qualifications were at least three years ahead of any comparable American teenager because of the unremitting, concentrated tuition, underwent six months of final preparation, during which his role was made clear to him. He was to be introduced into America and allowed to create a completely normal existence, giving no thought whatsoever to the Soviet Union until the time when he received the message activating him for the work for which he had been so exhaustively prepared. That message might arrive within a year, five years, ten years or maybe – although unlikely in view of the effort and expenditure employed on him – never.

It was because of that training and expenditure that Kalenin deeply debated the utilisation of such a man. It took him a further thirty minutes, once again weighing all the alternatives, before making the commitment. The preparation of the briefing, to be sent on the coded diplomatic wire to the Washington embassy and forward from there in such a way that the sender would have no idea of the recipient or purpose of the message, took Kalenin a further seven hours and it was almost midnight before he again looked up to that clock over the door.

He leaned back, stretching, decided that the El Alamein campaign which he had intended to re-create on the floor of his apartment that night would have to be postponed.

The initial message, merely alerting Williamson that he was being activated, arrived five hours later in the bachelor apartment overlooking the port where he worked as a freight clerk to a shipping firm. Obedient to his training, his first response was to initiate the cover story to protect himself against any curiosity for what, to those who knew him, would be regarded as unusual. In preparation for such an alert, Williamson had let it be known that he had family in the east, and now he obtained a week’s leave of absence in Washington on the grounds of his father’s impending death after a long and painful illness.

By ten o’clock in the morning he had packed, cancelled all deliveries and set out for the poste restante mail-box where he knew his instructions would be awaiting him.

It was exactly nine years, eight months and nine days from the Wednesday morning when he had arrived, on a students’ ticket on the Paris-Dallas flight and then boarded the Greyhound bus for San Diego. He was very excited. The package was waiting and he immediately put it unopened into an inner pocket of his jacket and walked until he found an unoccupied park bench before unsealing it. He sat for thirty minutes, committing his instructions to memory, then found a washroom in a nearby motel where he shredded the paper and flushed it, piece by piece, down a toilet. There were some other things in the package, which he put into his pocket.

By noon he was at the airport, with a ticket secured for the three o’clock flight to Miami. There had never been a day when a part of him had not remained tense, in readiness for this moment. Many times he had tried to conjecture the sort of mission for which he would be roused, but never imagined it would be anything like this. Knowing the importance of General Valery Kalenin in the Soviet Union, Williamson recognised the degree of confidence they were placing in him.

The type of mission had not been the only surprise. The conclusion of the briefing remained with him, more indelibly than the rest. He had been trained for such an eventuality and schooled to perform the function, but had always wondered how he would react if he were told to kill a man.

And that was what the message had insisted, most explicitly. He was to discover the person who knew the K.G.B. chief’s identity, learn how it had come about and then, to prevent any further dissemination, kill whoever had that knowledge.

The flight was on time and the plane half empty, so the seat next to Williamson was unoccupied, enabling him to put his bags there and have more foot room.

He sighed. It was good to be working properly after so long. He wondered if he would be able to get the job done and return to San Diego within the week. In only one thing had he veered from the intense training he had received in Moscow. He had never been able truly to appreciate either American baseball or football, so the advent in the United States of European soccer had delighted him. He rarely missed a match of the Los Angeles Rams, and their next game, somewhat ironically, was against the Miami Rowdies. He didn’t want to miss it.