The Moscow Club

PROLOGUE

Moscow

At ten minutes past midnight, the chauffeur neatly maneuvered the sleek black Chaika limousine up to the main entrance of the yellow brick residential building on Aleksei Tolstoy Street and put the car in park. Hastily he opened the door for his passenger, an extremely highly placed member of the Central Committee, who emerged with barely a grunt of acknowledgment. The chauffeur saluted, because he knew his boss enjoyed such signs of respect, returned to the driver’s seat, and prayed that the anxiety in his eyes had not been visible.

When the car was sufficiently far from the building’s front door, he popped a Bruce Springsteen tape that his wife, Vera, had bought on the black market into the tape player and turned up the volume so loud that Springsteen’s raspy voice rattled the limousine’s instrument panel, the thump thump of the bass no doubt audible even outside the heavy armored car. He needed the music’s raw power, the familiar tune, to calm his nerves.

As he drove, he thought of Verushka, who would be asleep in the warm bed when he returned, her swollen breasts tight against the silk of her nightgown, her belly already beginning to protrude because of the baby that was growing inside. She would be sleeping deeply, blissfully, as she always did, unaware of her husband’s secret disloyalty. When he slid into the bed, she’d awake, smelling faintly of the Moscow Nights perfume she always put on before bed on the evenings he worked late, and they’d make love.

Then he slowly drove down the steep incline into the underground garage, where the Chaikas and Volgas that belonged to the building’s other residents – all of them members of the Soviet ruling elite – were parked in their assigned spots. The headlights illuminated the garage’s dim interior; the chauffeur noted with some relief that no one else seemed to be there. That was good.

He backed the limousine into the reserved space and glanced around the garage again, his fingers drumming nervously on the padded steering wheel, not quite in time to the music. He switched off the engine but let the song play to the end, then turned the key and sat in absolute silence while his heart hammered with fear.

For an instant, he thought he saw a silhouette of a man against the far wall, but it was only the contorted shadow of a parked car.

He got out and opened the rear door on the driver’s side. The interior stank of cigarette smoke. A few hours earlier, it had been opaque with the smoke from the Dunhill cigarettes his boss favored. He and one of his comrades were returning together from a secret meeting on the outskirts of Moscow, and on the way they had shut the glass panel so they could talk in privacy.

The chauffeur, dutifully watching the road, had pretended to be unaware that anything peculiar was going on, but he knew that his boss was involved in something dangerous, something frightening. Something he did not want anyone else in the Central Committee or in the Kremlin to know about. Something that was, that had to be, wrong.

Several times in the last few weeks, the driver had been ordered to take his boss to a secret rendezvous with other very powerful men, late at night and always via a circuitous route. The chauffeur knew he was trusted implicitly; among all the drivers he was universally considered the most discreet, the most reliable. Not for a moment would the men in the back seat think him anything less than absolutely loyal.

He rolled down the windows and then, with a small portable device, vacuumed up the cigarette butts. The boss smoked like a fiend, but hated when his car smelled like stale cigarettes in the morning. It was relaxing to do something as safe and routine as this.

Then he glanced around the garage again to make sure he was unobserved and felt the surge of adrenaline. It was time.

He reached under the well-padded, tufted leather seat, his fingers touching the metal springs until he felt the cold metal oblong. He slid it carefully off its bracket and pulled it out.

To anyone else it would have appeared nothing more than a curious black metal object, perhaps part of the seat’s undercarriage. It was not. He depressed the tiny lever on one side, and a microcassette tape was ejected into his open palm.

Quickly he pocketed the tape and replaced the disguised West German tape recorder beneath the seat. Then he got out, closed and locked the car doors, and began to whistle softly as he walked up toward the street.

The chauffeur had scheduled the drop in the customary manner: Around noon, while his boss was at work at the Central Committee building on Staraya Square, he had strolled out to the liquor store on Cherkassky Boulevard and asked the bald salesman for a liter of vodka. If the man had handed him a bottle of pepper vodka instead of the plain stuff, that would have meant trouble. But today it was plain vodka, which signaled all clear.

Now the streets were dark and deserted, wet with the rain that had come a few hours earlier. He walked out to the Ring Road and headed south, toward Vosstaniya Square. A cluster of young women, probably students, laughing excitedly, quieted as they passed him – perhaps confusing his crisp uniform, with the blue epaulets of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, for that of a militiaman – and then burst into giggles.

After a few minutes, he came to a public restroom down a flight of concrete stairs. The acrid smell of urine got stronger and more overpowering as he descended. The granite-and-concrete facility was lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling, which cast a yellowish glare over the fetid interior, its urinals and broken porcelain sinks and splintered wooden toilet stalls.

His footsteps echoed as he entered. The restroom was empty. At half past midnight, who but drunks and vagrants would be in this vile place? He entered a stall and closed the wooden door, fastening the latch. The smell here was oppressive: the chauffeur gagged. Goddamn filthy Muscovites. He held his breath and spotted the graffiti-covered patch of wall where the bricks and mortar were especially uneven.

He grasped the edge of one of the bricks and pulled at it. Slowly it came out, the loose mortar crumbling onto the discolored concrete floor below. He hated this location more than the others – much more than the bakery or the shoe-repair place or the poster shop, for it felt so much more deserted and exposed – but he supposed there was some logic behind their choosing such a loathsome drop site.

It was there, of course; they never failed.

He drew out the small, newspaper-wrapped package and opened it quickly. Enveloped in a wad of rubles, which there was no need to count since they never cheated him, was a new, cellophane-sheathed cassette tape.

He noticed that his hands were trembling. He put the package in his front coat pocket, placed the recorded tape in the crevice, and then nudged the brick back into place.

Which was when he heard something.

Someone had walked into the restroom.

He froze for a moment and listened. The footsteps weren’t crisp, they were somehow soft, as if made by a pair of felt boots, but that was ridiculous: no one wore those anymore, except old men and peasants and vagrants.

There is nothing to worry about, he told himself. This is a public place, and ordinary people will be coming in here, and it has nothing to do with you, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s not the KGB, you’re perfectly safe.

He flushed the toilet and almost retched when he saw that it would not flush, and he stood there for a moment, listening, dizzy from fear. The footsteps had ceased.

He slowly, casually unlatched the door of the cubicle and saw who it was.

An old drunk. A pathetic old drunk, standing huddled in a corner in his felt boots and lousy worn pants and cheap nylon jacket, bearded and disheveled and desperate.

The chauffeur felt a wave of relief. In a quarter of an hour he would be in Verushka’s arms. He gradually let out his breath as he nodded brusquely at the drunk, who looked at him and spoke.

“Give me a ruble,” the drunk said, his words slurred.

“Get out of here, old man,” the chauffeur replied as he walked toward the door.

The vagrant shuffled closer, stinking of booze and sweat and tobacco, following him up the stairs and out onto the street. “Give me a ruble,” he repeated, but his eyes seemed alert, oddly out of place on his dissipated face.

The chauffeur turned to say with exasperation: “Get out–”

But before he could finish, his head exploded with ineffable pain as the unbelievably sharp wire cut into his throat – a garrote, it had to be – and he could hear the old vagrant, who was no mere drunk and was suddenly upon him, hiss, “Traitor,” as he pulled the wire tight.

The chauffeur was unaware how beet-red his face had suddenly become, how his eyes bulged and his tongue was forced outward, but in the last few seconds of his life, delirious from oxygen deprivation, he felt a wild and illogical pleasure, sure that he had made the drop undetected, that one final mission was accomplished: a false and wonderful sense, before everything darkened and then bleached to utter white, of odd and soaring victory.