The Moscow Club

62

Washington

The President had assembled his chief foreign-policy advisers in the Cabinet Room to make the final preparations for the Moscow summit.

Present, along with Secretary of State Donald Grant, Director of Central Intelligence Theodore Templeton, National Security Adviser Admiral Craig Mathewson, and Roger Bayliss, were sixteen staff members of the National Security Council.

Only about half of the people in the room had been invited to Moscow – a list the President had drawn up with Admiral Mathewson – and so there were, of course, some bruised egos. The hierarchy had become clear early in the administration. There were those who were going to Moscow, and those who weren’t. To Bayliss, it was that simple.

And then, about halfway through the meeting, came an unexpected remark from the President concerning the outbreak of terrorism in Moscow, a remark that instantly filled Bayliss’s stomach with acid.

“I’m told by some pretty reliable sources,” the President said casually, “that there’s more to this terrorism than meets the eye.”

Bayliss’s glance moved from the President to the Secretary of State to the Director of Central Intelligence. Oh, Christ. Was it out?

There was a beat of silence, until it became clear that the President was addressing Ted Templeton.

Bayliss felt momentarily dizzy.

Had the President somehow learned – impossible as it seemed – about the existence of the Sanctum? The possibility was always there; presidents always had their own private networks. If he did, there was little doubt he’d hit the ceiling. An intelligence operation of this magnitude kept secret from him! No matter that the result of the conspiracy would be greeted by the President – and the world – with jubilation. He’d certainly disapprove of the committee’s conspiratorial methods, and then it would all be over. Decades and decades of work, of careful preparations – obliterated.

But he couldn’t possibly know. No committee in the history of American intelligence had ever been as invisible as Sanctum.

“As you know,” the President said, “I’m hardly a coward. I’ve traveled places, taken risks that made my Secret Service people go out of their skins.”

The working group, knowing how gregarious and outgoing the President was, murmured appreciatively.

Trouble, Bayliss thought.

“Well, I got some information this morning,” the President continued, nodding toward CIA Director Templeton, “information that frankly concerns me. About the terrorism in Moscow. Ted?”

Bayliss understood at once. Templeton looked embarrassed, chastened – like a schoolboy caught by the teacher passing a note. Somehow the President had gotten information from the CIA that didn’t come from Templeton. The President must have another channel. And Templeton was no doubt embarrassed that there was information he was withholding from the President.

Yes. The President had somehow learned that the bombs in Moscow weren’t just homemade things cooked up in a couple of dissidents’ garages. They were made of American explosives, American plastique. Understandably, the President found that alarming.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Templeton said, clearing his throat and brushing back his gray hair from his large square forehead. His face was flushed. “One of our assets in Moscow managed to turn up a few fragments of two of the bombs that went off recently. Our forensics people have determined that the plastique was American in manufacture.”

Anxiously, Bayliss watched. Templeton was squirming. Sometimes Bayliss wished Sanctum had found it acceptable to inform the President of their maneuverings. Times like this, especially, when there was a risk that the President might just call the summit off. But of course that mustn’t happen. Nothing at all must be allowed to alert M-3’s Politburo colleagues. Nothing must make them suspicious.

The President nodded. He was in his silent, uncommunicative mode, which all of his aides found most baffling – did it signal anger? boredom? contentment?

“Mr. President,” Templeton continued, “I’m not concerned.”

“You’re not?”

“No, sir. It’s clear that the Russian terrorists must have gained access to American material. Maybe some of them are ex-soldiers who served in Afghanistan and managed to get their hands on American materiel captured during the war.”

The President nodded.

“If I thought there was anything of serious concern,” Templeton said, “I would certainly have brought this matter up sooner.”

“Remarks?” the President suggested to the rest of the National Security Council.

“Yes.” It was the Secretary of State. “I wouldn’t send the President into the middle of a war zone. And I certainly can’t countenance your going to Moscow at this time, Mr. President. I have the feeling Moscow is ready to explode, and I think it would be foolhardy for you to go. I think we should cancel.”

“You do?” the President said.

“I have to agree,” his national-security adviser said. “I don’t know how much protection we can offer over there. Maybe we should run it by Secret Service.”

The President nodded and cupped his chin in his fist.

For the next twelve minutes, Bayliss sat uncomfortably in his seat, watching the debate.

“If I may, Mr. President,” Templeton at last put in. “I’ve already expressed my opinion that Kremlin’s security has matters well in hand. But there’s another factor to consider: Gorbachev’s position.”

“Meaning?” the President asked.

“He needs all the support he can get right now,” Templeton explained. “If you cancel the summit meeting, I’ve no doubt his prestige within the Soviet leadership will plummet. And then – well, then we’ve got real troubles.”

“All right,” the President said abruptly. “We’re going to Moscow. Now, let’s move on.”

Templeton had won him, and the rest of the NSC, over. He’d been brilliant, Bayliss thought. It was all over now; the President’s mind had been made up.

I hope, Bayliss told himself silently as the meeting proceeded, I hope that in fact nothing does happen during the summit. Virtually unthinkable, though. M-3 had been extraordinarily careful for decades.

Yet the man would have to be even more careful. The man called M-3, together with the group that called itself the Sanctum, was about to change the world forever.

Moscow

At approximately the same time, a black Chaika limousine was pulling up before the National Hotel in Moscow. The chauffeur, a Russian, opened the door for his eminent American passenger, a dignified old man of aristocratic bearing named Winthrop Lehman.

“Welcome to Moscow, sir,” the chauffeur said.

A little over an hour later, there was a knock at the door of Winthrop Lehman’s hotel suite.

Lehman, walking stiffly, opened the door with trembling hands.

There, standing before him, was a small, frail woman of middle age, accompanied by a man in a suit of Soviet cut.

“Father,” Sonya Kunetskaya said in English.

After a long moment of standing at the threshold, she moved forward to embrace Winthrop Lehman. The guard hung back in the hallway, politely closing the suite door.

“Doch’ moya” Lehman said. My daughter. His Russian, acquired decades ago, when he was a young man, still retained some fluency.

Sonya finally released her grip on her father and, her eyes not moving from him, said, “Skoro budyet.” It will be soon.

“I won’t be around,” Lehman said, his voice cracking.

“Don’t say that,” his daughter said firmly.

“But I won’t,” he said. And then came the knock on the door.

“Soon,” Sonya said, turning to leave.

63

Stone arrived in Moscow in the early evening, shuffling into the dark Sheremetyevo Airport building in a long line of tourists, most of them German.

The airport was gloomy and ill-lit. Constructed in the late seventies by the West Germans for the influx of foreigners expected at the 1980 Summer Olympics, it was sleek and modernistic as only a German structure could be: a great, spacious expanse of black-rubber-tiled floor beneath a high vaulted ceiling made of patterned metal tubes. Had all the lights in the ceiling been turned on, the airport would have blazed; instead, the Soviets, in the interest of economy, kept most of them off.

Stone’s body was stiff with tension. He knew that if an enterprising customs inspector found the disassembled gun it was all over.

He found a restroom and brought his garment bag into a toilet stall. There he swiftly reassembled the pistol and put it in his suit pocket.

Minutes later. Stone was seated in the front seat of an old black Russian automobile, a Volga, whose windshield bore a blue Intourist-insignia decal. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was provided by Intourist free of charge, and was not optional.

The driver said nothing as they motored down a stretch of highway lined with scrubby woods and an occasional placard marked with red-and-white Cyrillic lettering. In a little over half an hour, they were on Tverskaya Street, formerly Gorky Street, one of Moscow’s main thoroughfares, and then, when the Kremlin loomed just up ahead, they turned right and pulled into a parking space in front of the National Hotel.

The hotel dated from before the Revolution, one of very few remaining pre-Revolutionary hotels in Moscow, where, Stone remembered once reading, Lenin had lived in 1918 for several months while his rooms at the Kremlin were being restored.

From the street, it was a plain-looking building of brown stone. Russians in fur hats and shapeless coats strode past briskly. The driver pulled the taxi up to the front of the hotel and shut off the motor.

“Wait,” Stone said.

The driver turned around questioningly.

“Where can I change money?” Stone asked in Russian.

“The Intourist office on the next block.”

“Is it still open tonight?”

“For another hour.”

“Take me there, please.”

The driver shrugged, started the car up, and maneuvered back around to Tverskaya Street.

When Stone had changed some of his cash into rubles, he returned to the taxi and paid him. “All right, I’m all set. I’ll walk to the hotel.”

The driver furrowed his brow. “Do what you want,” he said, pulling away from the curb.

Stone stood on Tverskaya Street for a few minutes until a gypsy cab, no doubt identifying Stone as a foreigner, came to a halt. The car was also a Volga, but this one looked at least twenty years old.

Stone got in and gave the address.

The cab drove past the Kremlin, on Marx Prospekt, and then on to Kalinin Prospekt, across the Moscow River at the Hotel Ukraine, to Kutuzov Prospekt. Stone looked out the window at the sights they passed: seeing Moscow for the first time, after hearing about it for so long, was somehow like visiting the set of a movie you have seen many times before.

The city had an air of unreality, larger than life, drabber and grayer than he had expected, the streets broader and ill-lit. They approached a massive ecru stone building. In front, a uniformed guard stood in a booth. He exchanged a few words with the driver, and then the driver turned around. “He says I’ve got to let you out here.”

Stone got out and paid the driver; then, once again checking the address he had written down, he found the right entrance number, and the apartment number.

There was no doorbell; he knocked.

She opened the door.

He was not prepared for her beauty. Certainly he had thought about her quite a bit in the last few, desperate weeks, remembering what she looked and sounded like in New York, wondering whether she would shut the door on him, just as she had hung up when he’d called from Toronto.

But he had not remembered how astonishingly alluring she was. Her blond hair shone in the dim light from the hallway; her high cheekbones were even more finely sculpted than he remembered.

“Charlotte, I need your help,” he said.

64

Washington

The Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton, was the first to speak. He looked purposefully around the black marble table, first at the younger members of the Sanctum – his deputy, Ronald Sanders, and Roger Bayliss of the National Security Council – and then, a respectful smile on his face, at the older members: Evan Reynolds and Fletcher Lansing, the legendary ones, the best and the brightest.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is what would possess him to go to Moscow. Of all places.”

Fletcher Lansing immediately raised his still-strong chin, and interrupted. Lansing’s voice was hoarse, his elocution precise and mid-Atlantic. Bayliss was reminded of movie actors of the 1930s. “Out of the frying pan–” Lansing began.

“In heaven’s name, why would this surprise you?” asked Evan Reynolds irritably. “It seems perfectly logical to me. His trail seems to lead right there – as if he intends to find the evidence that might exonerate his father and himself. That’s not worth discussing.”

“I hope it’s personal,” Lansing said. “Unless he’s really gone rogue – defected to the Russians, selling what he knows …”

“If the man is in the Soviet Union,” Reynolds said, “it’s all the more urgent – imperative, in fact – that he be found and neutralized at once.”

Bayliss found himself glancing around the chamber; he could not help thinking, even at this time of great tension, that he was overdressed. It made him feel all the more out of place. Most of these men had on the almost worn-out, fashionless blue suits of old money. Whereas Bayliss was wearing a charcoal-gray Italian sharkskin suit that looked quite as expensive as it was, a yellow-and-blue-striped silk Metropolitan Club tie, and an elegant pair of snakeskin loafers as thin as tissue paper. He was perfectly aware that he looked like a young man on the make.

And he reminded himself, as he did often, why he was there, why he’d been invited to serve on this super-secret committee: he was one of the few members of the National Security Council who received not only the NID, the top-secret National Intelligence Daily, but the far more secret PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, ten pages of the choicest intelligence – which very few in Washington were privileged to see. The committee needed a man in the White House. They also needed someone to serve as a link to Malarek, M-3’s man in Washington.

That they now had. And more: Bayliss had set things up so that the American Flag Foundation bugged the White House’s unsecured lines (to make sure no secrets had been leaked) and, more important, kept Malarek under close telephonic surveillance. Never take chances.

Now Bayliss knew what they were about to ask. Three minutes later, it came.

Fletcher Lansing glanced briefly at Bayliss, then looked away. “Mr. Bayliss will have to contact Malarek. M-3’s people can do the job.”

“No,” Bayliss said hoarsely.

There was a long, shocked silence. Bayliss reddened visibly. “You want me to order Charles Stone’s death,” he said.

“We want you to inform M-3 that Stone is in Moscow, assuming his people don’t know.” Lansing spoke softly. “That’s all.”

Bayliss could feel four pairs of eyes on him. “There’s too much I don’t know,” he said haltingly. “I know you – we – have been running a mole. Okay. But how sure can we be about this … this M-3 …?”

This was, Bayliss knew, a shocking violation of Sanctum protocol. You didn’t ask questions, call into doubt the wisdom of the elders.

The long silence was punctuated by the hum of the ventilation equipment.

“I don’t think he needs to know the details,” Sanders said, hunching his shoulders as if he were still quarterbacking his college football team.

“He’s in this with us,” Fletcher Lansing said. “A very valuable member of the team, I might add. Ted?”

“M-3 is the Agency’s greatest secret since the days of Bill Donovan,” Templeton said. “Bigger, even. Too big even to be entrusted to the Agency’s own personnel. His name is Andrei Pavlichenko.”

Bayliss’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God.”

“The Pavlichenko file is so ultrasecret,” Sanders put in, “that it’s not even referred to on the most highly secret, limited-access computers within the Agency.”

Templeton continued: “Pavlichenko was a young, rising star in the Soviet intelligence service in 1950 when he was approached by one of our people.”

“How the hell did you manage to press him into service?” Bayliss asked. “What did you get on him?”

Lansing gave Templeton a significant glance, and nodded.

Templeton nodded in return, and said: “We learned that he’d been concealing his background. His parents were deported, murdered, by Stalin’s people, and he was raised by a relative. Never would have been let within a thousand yards of the Lubyanka if anyone knew it. So this guy works his way up, I mean fast, and soon he’s the chief assistant to Beria, Stalin’s boss of the secret police. With our help, obviously.”

“That means he’s secretly a Ukrainian sympathizer,” Bayliss said. “In essence, an enemy of the state.”

The elderly Evan Reynolds replied: “It’s not the first time someone like that has made it into the upper echelons of the Soviet leadership. Don’t forget about Petro Shelest, who masqueraded as an unshakable supporter of Russian dominance over his own Ukrainian people, a dedicated member of the Politburo. Only later was he uncovered as a secret Ukrainian nationalist.”

“But, Ukrainian or not,” Lansing interjected, “the point is that he’s fiercely opposed to the whole damn Soviet system – a system that murdered his family. That’s what we can count on.”

“And you gave Pavlichenko chicken feed,” Bayliss said, using the intelligence jargon for genuine but minor secrets provided to nourish moles.

“Morsels, table scraps here and there,” Templeton said. “Not so much that it would draw suspicion to him, but enough to make him look awfully impressive. We’d tell him how a president was thinking on something, as long as it didn’t harm our interests. And, once in a while, bigger stuff, too. Advance warning on several air strikes in Vietnam. We’ve even had to blow some of our intelligence operations. Even Bay of Pigs, when we saw it was destined for failure …”

“Enough to give him a boost up the ladder,” said Fletcher Lansing, “without damaging our own interests in any serious way. Just enough to make him seem terrifically shrewd.”

“And how do you know this guy isn’t going to turn out as bad as Beria?” Bayliss asked.

Lansing interlaced his fingers and made a tent. “We don’t assume the power struggle will be bloodless, Mr. Bayliss. It’s not like electing a president, you know. But we admire his vision: we have, in the past, been in touch with him through intermediaries. In the last few years – since his elevation to the Politburo – Pavlichenko has evidently deemed it unwise to allow any communications whatsoever.”

“His vision?” Bayliss asked.

“Do you know about Kyivan Rus’?” Lansing said. “You are a Soviet specialist, are you not?”

“I was a Soviet-affairs specialist in graduate school,” Bayliss said. “Not Russian.”

Lansing shook his head in mild disapproval. “It’s hard to know anything worthwhile about the Soviet Union and not know Russian history intimately. In the eleventh century, what is now Russia was then a political entity, a nation-state, known as Kyivan Rus’, ruled by Prince Yaroslav, also known as Prince Yaroslav the Wise. It was the first Russian state. Kyiv, in those days, was the seat of Russian power – you know, of course, that Kyiv is the capital of the modern-day Ukraine.”

“That I do, sir,” Bayliss retorted.

“Well. Kyivan Rus’ maintained close and friendly ties with the heads of the European nations; it was a decentralized, loosely held federation of areas. There was much trade. It was the birthplace of the Russian enlightenment.”

“I see,” Bayliss said, as the significance of Lansing’s history lesson began to dawn on him.

“Pavlichenko,” Lansing resumed, “as a fervent Ukrainian patriot whose parents were taken away from him and murdered by Stalin’s forces, has all his life cherished a vision of tearing down the old and starting over. He sees himself as – well, I suppose, a modern Yaroslav the Wise.”

“But Gorbachev’s already making serious changes,” Bayliss objected.

Templeton spoke, sighing petulantly as if Bayliss were a tiresome child. “Gorbachev, as we’ve discussed a thousand times, is short-term. He can’t last – won’t last. And then – a matter of months, maybe weeks – his enemies do away with him, and we’ve got a right-wing, neofascist Soviet leadership that will be dangerous. We can’t take that chance. We can’t put our eggs in that basket.”

Bayliss nodded, transfixed.

“But if we give Gorbachev a chance–” Bayliss began.

The Director of Central Intelligence cleared his throat. “Roger, Gorbachev has had it. It’s time to put our man in. If we wait any longer, history will pass us by. And then we’re back to the Cold War.”

“But how, exactly, does Pavlichenko plan to seize power?” Bayliss asked.

“We don’t know, Roger, and frankly we don’t care. But all the signals are that it will happen soon, probably within six months. Sometime after the Moscow summit. Now, some of us will be going to Moscow in a matter of hours. While you’re there, get a good look around you, because things are going to be different when you return on the TWA Washington-Moscow shuttle. Next time our President goes over there, I predict, he’s going to be negotiating with a different man.”

Bayliss nodded. “I’ll contact Malarek,” he said, “the moment I leave.” He nodded again, swallowing, and smiled at the rest of the Sanctum. “Thank you. I appreciate it.” He shot his cuffs, felt his chest tighten. “Thank you.”

65

Moscow

Charlotte gasped.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered harshly, her face burning with anger. “What’s happened to you?”

“I need you, Charlotte.”

“God damn you. God damn you. What did you do? For Christ’s sake, what did you do?”

Stone tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away, glowering.

“The place looks great,” Stone said gently, looking around at her living room. The apartment was furnished in her simple but elegant taste, spare but neatly arranged, the pale-peach couch and chairs complemented by the ocher Oriental rug. “Sort of like the place where we spent our honeymoon. Only you forgot the heart-shaped bidets.”

Charlotte didn’t laugh. She looked back at him, forlornly.

“Why did you hang up on me?” he asked.

“Jesus! We can’t talk here!” She pointed a finger toward the ceiling. He watched her, taking in her fragrance, her poise.

He found himself marveling, as he so often had in the past, that he was married to this woman. He felt a spasm of guilt, too, that he could ever have hurt her.

“Where can we talk?”

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said icily.

She put on her coat, and they walked out of the building, toward the street, passing the stout uniformed guard, who nodded at Charlotte without smiling, looking closely at Stone.

She strode confidently. This was, in many ways, her city, and Stone could sense it immediately in the way she navigated purposefully, yet unthinkingly. The time apart had done good things for her. She seemed to possess an inner calm, a confidence she’d never had before. He wondered whether she had closed him out. Whether it was too late.

The streets were cold, with a few drifts of discolored snow, remains of a recent snowfall that had melted and then refrozen. Several of the buildings were festooned with long red banners proclaiming the Revolution Day ceremony that was to take place in two days.

“You must have a million things going on,” Stone said as they went down the street. “With the summit, I mean.”

She seemed relaxed to be able to talk about her work: it was safe, neutral. But at the same time, she seemed reserved. Was it resentment? Or something else? “The President’s party arrives tomorrow,” she said. “There’s really not much to say about that – we’ll shoot tape of the arrival at the airport, I’ll do a stand-up. There aren’t that many press conferences or briefings. Then, the day after tomorrow, we’ll get some footage of the whole shebang, the President standing next to Gorbachev up on Lenin’s tomb. Great photo opportunity, as the politicians say.”

Watching her, he was momentarily overcome with affection, and he slipped an arm around her. She seemed to stiffen.

“Charlotte, why did you hang up on me?”

“Come on, Charlie. They tap correspondents’ phones.”

“You were protecting me.”

She shrugged. “Least I could do.”

He told her what had happened, virtually everything – from Alfred Stone’s murder to the frenzied chase in Paris. Charlotte interrupted only to tell him about Sonya.

Stone stared. “So she is alive.” He shook his head, smiling, elated to see his hunch confirmed.

“And now I know what she was concealing,” Charlotte said. She felt alternating waves of love and anger. He had a claim on her, knew her as no one else did, and yet he seemed impossibly distant. Even in a few short weeks, he had changed: he’d become weary, scarred, cautious, constricted.

He told her about Dunayev, the NKVD defector in Paris, and the defector’s story about the Katyn Forest Massacre and the network of Old Believers. Charlie was exhausted, but the story tumbled out, urgently and even coherently.

They were at the deserted banks of the Moscow River. Charlotte had listened for twenty minutes, occasionally interposing a question.

She took his hand and gave it a quick squeeze; he held on with a strength and firmness that she found comforting. She felt something down below, a surge, a warmth and a weakness that arose, she knew, from aching to make love to him, and that confused her hopelessly.

Now she turned and faced him. “I didn’t believe you at first, you know.”

“I understand. It sounds crazy, I realize.”

She stared ahead at the Stalin Gothic hulk of the Hotel Ukraine. “It really did. First your father. And then, yesterday morning, I read a news item that came across the Associated Press wire.” She paused, not knowing how to say it, and then she blurted: “Charlie, Paula Singer is dead.”

Stone was leaning against a low concrete wall, and for a moment, Charlotte thought he hadn’t heard her, or maybe didn’t understand, but then he seemed literally to crumple, to slide to the ground, his head buried in his arms.

“No,” he said, his voice muffled. “I was so goddamned careful. I was … She must have done something to …”

And Charlotte, unable to stand there any longer, sank to the ground and put her arms around him.

Stone watched, as if through a scrim, Charlotte cross the street to a phone booth.

He felt a lump rise in his throat, a rush of love for her. Some minutes earlier, Charlotte had told him about what Paula had discovered just before her death.

Her information was vital. Now everything was beginning to make sense.

His attacker in Chicago was connected to an organization that did the dirty work the intelligence agencies were prohibited from doing.

Did that mean that the Agency had gone after him, one of their own? What else could it mean?

And then Charlotte had revealed the leak she’d gotten from a source in the KGB that the CIA was behind the bombings in Moscow.

Another piece of the pattern. But now she needed to know more from Sergei. Was there anything else her source had discovered?

She had to contact Sergei directly. A terrible risk – a quick phone call very late at night – but she’d be as careful as she could be. They had no choice.

He could see her hang up the phone and make another call, gesturing as she spoke, her motions agitated, distraught. Then she hung up again, this time with great force.

And called out to him.

“Charlie!” She was now running across the street toward him. Her voice was high and frantic. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?”

“He’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Sergei. Oh, God. My source. I called his private number at work – he works late at night. Normally I only have to say a word or two, so it’s safe – but someone else answered the phone. So I did something I’ve never done before: I called him at home. And his wife answered. I told her I was a colleague of his from Latvia, to explain my accent, and she told me he was dead. Killed in an explosion at the lab.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.” She had begun to cry. “It must have just happened. But I said I wanted to go to the funeral, you know – I didn’t know what else to say – and she said the body had already been cremated without her knowing. One day he was there; the next day she had his ashes in an urn.”

“Executed,” Stone said tightly.

Charlotte suddenly threw her arms around Stone, squeezing him tightly. He could feel her tears hot against his neck, her breathing heavy. “He was caught in it,” she said. “The same thing that killed Paula.”

Stone held her for a long time. At last he spoke. “I don’t want you involved.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you have a choice. I’m cornered; I have to fight. And, sure, I want your help, your contacts, your brain. But I don’t know what I’d do in your place.”

“Oh, hell, sure you do,” she shot back angrily. She gripped his shoulders as if to shake him, but only stared intently into his eyes. “No, Charlie. Damn it, I don’t think I do have a choice. After what happened to your father – well, that changed everything for me. Everything’s changed. What kind of person do you think I am, that I could possibly turn away from you now?”

He moved his face close to hers, and then kissed her.

“I love you,” he said.

She looked at him, startled. Then she pulled away from him and dabbed at her tears with the back of her hands. “So what are we going to do?”

He bowed his head, and then looked up at her. “Listen, Charlotte …”

“Charlie,” she said brusquely, suddenly all business, as if the moment had not passed between them. “What are we going to do?”

After a pause, he replied: “Lehman’s daughter is one of the keys. I may be able to force her to reveal more than she wants. More likely, I can use her to get to others who can help.”

She nodded.

“But the first order of business is to try to get to whoever’s the head of this Old Believer network.”

“For what?”

“Because we – I – need help. I can’t be in this alone any longer.”

“But you don’t have a name. You don’t have anything.”

“That’s why I need you.”

“But you can’t just walk around talking to Russians and asking them if they happen to know anyone who was sent up for a secret court-martial during World War II, and then, if they do, if they happen to know the name of the man who terminated the court-martial. Charlie, that’s the sort of thing that’s not public. Sure, Moscow’s admitted its guilt in the Katyn Forest Massacre – but I’d be shocked if the records aren’t locked up. This is a nation where just about everything is a state secret.”

“There has to be some way.”

“Who do you think this guy is? Some sort of dissident, maybe – someone like Andrei Sakharov was, who’s well connected? Maybe a Party leader who was once thrown out of office, now in disfavor, nursing his grudges?”

“Anything’s possible. But there have to be records. At Parnassus, they always kept us insulated from sources and methods; I wouldn’t know. But you know this city better than anyone, and if you can’t – What?”

Her eyes were wide, and she was suddenly smiling broadly. “Records,” she said under her breath. “Yes.” She reached over and kissed him briefly on the cheek. “I think there’s a way. I can try tomorrow, first thing.”

“Charlotte, if you can, that’s tremendous. But there’s just no time.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“If anyone can do it, you can.”

“Well. Tomorrow afternoon, the President’s arriving. I can ask my producer to attend the briefings for me; there’s not going to be anything big happening, anyway. It’s unusual, but she’ll do it.”

They had turned around and were heading back in the direction of Charlotte’s apartment building.

“We need to put together the pieces,” Stone said. “What do we know? That the CIA, or maybe some faction of it, is involved in backing, or initiating, a wave of terrorism in Moscow. Linked to an impending coup, in which their asset, M-3, will seize power. Yes?”

Charlotte nodded, listening intently. “Yes. And the wave of terrorism is causing the same sort of havoc that the release of the Lenin Testament might have done a few decades ago.”

Stone spoke rapidly now, his words flowing into hers. “We know this M-3 was linked to Beria and to Lehman, through Lehman’s daughter somehow. But I still don’t get it.”

“So what’s being planned? What sort of incident, if there’s going to be an incident?”

“Maybe it’s some sort of armed action, a military assault. Every indication tells us it will take place on Revolution Day, during the summit.”

“When the President of the United States is there, right?” Charlotte said. “So that, if something happens, maybe it will be seen as directed against the President? Is that possible?”

“Yes. That makes a lot of sense.”

“If there’s an attack on the Soviet leadership, it will have to be coordinated by someone who’s got the power to do so, right?”

“Of course. Someone in control of the army, maybe, or the air force. A general.”

“Like who?”

“M-3 could be any one of twenty or thirty people,” Stone said quietly. “Any of whom is in a position to coordinate a seizure of power. Could be anyone, from the Politburo to the army to … yes.”

“Huh?”

“In 1953, Beria planned to be absent on the day of his planned coup, probably to marshal his forces. If he was on the scene, he couldn’t seize the others, so he had to absent himself.”

“So?”

“Okay. What if M-3, whoever he is, really is planning a coup on Revolution Day. Wouldn’t he, too, be absent?”

“Possibly, Charlie, but by the time we see who’s absent at the ceremonies, obviously it’ll be too late.”

He smiled. “Maybe not. Listen to this. Revolution Day is the biggest state ceremony the Soviet Union has. The biggest deal by far. You don’t miss it unless you’re on your deathbed. I remember seeing footage of Leonid Brezhnev up there on Lenin’s tomb, about to totter over. People say he was out in the cold so long up there that he caught a cold and died. If you’re absent, it’s a sign that you’re out of power, so no one just happens to stay home.”

“So far I follow you.”

“Okay. If the Politburo gets wind that someone important isn’t at the ceremonies, they’ve got to be suspicious, maybe send someone to check on the man’s whereabouts. Right?”

“You’re the expert, Charlie. I just report the stuff.”

“So what would you do if you wanted to be absent on such an important day believably?”

“Get sick. Really sick.”

“Suddenly?” Stone prompted.

“Probably not. Ah, I see. God, you’re good. I’d have been sick for a while, so when I sick out, no one blinks an eye.”

“Exactly.”

“And how does this help us?”

“You’re the reporter. All I ever did was analyze the information. You tell me.”

“Medical records,” Charlotte said.

“Yes!” Stone almost shouted. “Do you remember when Yuri Andropov was dying, only the world was told he had a cold?”

“And he really had kidney failure,” Charlotte said. “But the word was out on that.”

“This is a city of rumors; rumors is how information is spread.”

“Yes, Charlie. Yes, I have a source.”

“Who?”

“One of my predecessors had a source in the Kremlin Clinic. A doctor who treated Yuri Andropov. And – because he believed that openness was the only right thing – he leaked information about the state of Andropov’s health.”

“And this source has access to the medical records of the leadership,” Stone whispered. “But how do you get to this guy?”

“Come on, Charlie. Give me credit. I’m not the best-connected journalist in Moscow for nothing. Do you think I wouldn’t get to meet the guy?”

“You’re amazing.”

“You know I want to do whatever I can to help,” she said. “For the memory of your father. And, damn it, for you, too.”

He bent toward her and kissed her, and, to his surprise, she kissed back. Then abruptly she stopped.

Stone spoke first: “Someday you’ll find it possible to forgive and forget.”

She looked at him penetratingly and did not reply. Her eyes had filled with tears.

His words were now choked and awkward. He moved his face slowly, slowly toward hers, and all the while he looked directly in her eyes. Softly and tentatively he touched his lips to hers, waiting for a response, and when one came, after a moment’s hesitation, he was instantly aroused, and his heart felt like it was being squeezed.

“Hey,” he managed to whisper, “you need a little sugar?”

The feeling of making love to her after so long! It was as if she were both a stranger and his oldest friend. Her body felt completely different, and then, just when he was forgetting how long he’d known her, he’d feel something, she’d move in a certain way, murmur something that brought it all back. Her resistance of just a few hours ago had been so erotic: she had pushed him away. Once, years ago, she had folded her arms against her breasts as if she were embarrassed by them, although they were beautiful; now she lay back on the bed, arching her back in pleasure, and her breasts were firm and erect and almost perfectly rounded, and she seemed to have lost all her inhibitions, everything. He ran his hands over her, cupping her breasts and sucking them, biting gently on her nipples, exploring her with familiarity, yet unfamiliarity: immediately he remembered all the secret places where she liked to be touched, the rhythms she liked in lovemaking.

In the early days, Charlotte thought, he made love like a boy: a quick, urgent penetration, a rapid copulation, explosive ejaculation, and it was all over. But now there was such a closeness, an understanding between them, in the way they caressed and sucked and kissed. Through a rush of blood, a roaring in her ears, she could hear Charlie moaning softly, the vibration of his deep voice rumbling against her stomach. She moved, as if intoxicated, trying not to give in, resisting, and then she felt an orgasm that started as a wide, hot wave cutting into her thighs and then widening until she gave in to it and it took her over. For the first time in years, she felt completely safe.

For a long time, they lay there together, spent. Later they got up and shared a bottle of wine. At first their conversation was awkward. Stone kissed her; she slid her hand down his chest. “I forgot what your chest feels like,” she said. With her other hand, she massaged the back of his neck. “I wish your hair weren’t so short.” She looked at him for a long while and added, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Stone kissed her. “So am I.”

“But I’m kind of confused.”

He laughed. “I know. That’s good.”

He felt her warm, soft body beneath his; she felt the hard strength of him, pressing against her. And then she felt him beginning to stir, and he was in her once again, moving agonizingly slowly, teasingly, and she was suffused, for the moment, with a delicious contentment.

In the early morning. Stone awoke from a dream – a terrible, disturbing, guilt-wracked dream about Paula Singer – and saw that the bed was empty. Charlotte was gone.

He felt a dull thud of fear, and then recalled that she had gone out to place a call to another of her sources. He rolled over and lapsed immediately back into his troubled sleep.

A short time later. Stone awoke again, and felt Charlotte climbing in bed next to him. He wrapped an arm around her waist, felt her warmth.

“Charlie,” she whispered. Her lips were practically against his ear; she spoke almost without exhaling. “I know a guy we could talk to.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“I think he’s probably a Company man. If Saul Ansbach was right that at least some of the Agency’s involved, maybe it’s worth the risk to talk to him.”

Stone, no longer sleepy, nodded, his eyes alert.

“Use him as a conduit, maybe,” she continued in the barest of a whisper. “Lay it all out before him. If he’s involved, we’ll know it at once.”

“Yes,” Stone whispered back. “Only, to be safe, we’ll lay out just enough to determine that he’s not involved.” Was the place bugged, really? he wondered. And could electronic bugs pick up whispers? He picked his watch up from the bedside table and looked at it. “We’ve got thirty, maybe thirty-two hours, I calculate. But I think …” He hesitated, not wanting to scare her. “Given the resources of the people who’ve been after me, it won’t be long at all before they track me to Moscow.”

“If they haven’t already.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “If they haven’t already.”

66

November 5

The Kremlin Clinic, a five-story classical building of red granite adorned with fake Greek columns and a cupola, sits behind a high iron fence in the center of Moscow, near the Kremlin and across the street from the Lenin Library. It is here that members of the Soviet nomenklatura, the elite, receive medical treatment. Everything is high-security here, and the doctors are carefully vetted – so carefully, in fact, that many of the most talented specialists are disqualified on the grounds of ethnic background or suspected unreliability. For this reason, the Kremlin Clinic, which is run by the Fourth Administration of the Ministry of Health, may have the best and most expensive equipment and pharmaceuticals but often doesn’t provide the best health care. Many of the physicians are in fact of mediocre talent.

But there is the occasional exception. Aleksandr Borisovich Kuznetsov, a specialist in internal medicine at the Kremlin Clinic, was in his late forties. He was skilled and quick-thinking, and that was more than the majority of his colleagues were, but at the same time he was self-effacing, so he rarely excited enmity.

A mere ten years after finishing his internship at a hospital in Leningrad, he had been chosen to serve at the Kremlin Clinic, to minister to the most powerful men in the land. He knew this was an enormous honor, and his generous salary reflected that – because privilege always went hand in hand with money in Russia. He also knew that he had been selected not for his medical expertise but for what people thought was his political reliability – his father had served in a minor position in the leadership under Stalin, and the mere fact that he had survived for so long was testimony to his father’s orthodoxy.

But Aleksandr Kuznetsov was not quite who his Party comrades thought he was.

He loved the practice of medicine, and although his friends and colleagues looked upon him as a good Communist, he had nothing but contempt for what remained of Soviet Communism. For reasons of pure science, and because he believed in doing one’s best to cure even the loathsome, he was an outstanding doctor in the clinic, really above reproach, but there were days when he would not have been unhappy if the Politburo and Central Committee oafs he looked after all perished at once.

And then there would be days when he’d joke with the frail, aging men, sitting naked on the examination table, and feel nothing but pity for them.

Kuznetsov had been in this hospital, across from the Lenin Library, for eight years, and before that he had been at the more gracious installation at Kuntsevo, where he had been among the team of doctors who took care of the dying Yuri Andropov. Through close and trusted friends in whom he had confided his dissatisfaction with things – although even with close friends he was circumspect – he had met a few Western correspondents, and when Andropov’s kidneys first began to fail, he had gotten the word out to them.

He had thereby, quietly, become one of the foreign correspondents’ “sources” in the Kremlin Clinic, though probably not the only one. He did it not because he wanted to hasten Andropov’s death, far from it, but because he deplored the secrecy that shrouded the health care of men at the very top. The Russian people, he felt, must always know what was going on with their leaders. Far too often they were kept in the dark, and this only gave rise to awful rumors. He remembered when Konstantin Chernenko died, and the Politburo – desperate to select a leader and settle the succession issue – withheld the news for three days. Secrecy was for the birds.

But, even so, Charlotte Harper’s request was a little unusual. Late last night, after midnight, she had called, pretending to be his cousin Liza from Riga. She had called him by his nickname, Sasha. This prearranged signal was intended to explain, to anyone who might be listening, the origin of her non-Russian accent. She spoke Russian excellently, almost as a native, but there was still a trace of an accent. No matter; there were dozens of accents in the Soviet Union. “So we’re going to meet tomorrow at five at the Tretyakov Gallery,” she had said. It was a signal that took him a few moments to remember: it meant they would meet at seven in the morning near the Leninsky Prospekt metro station, which was remote and safe enough.

This time, she wasn’t asking him to find out the status of some leader who was dying. She wanted him to look through the medical records of each of the members and candidate members of the Politburo, nineteen men and one woman, to see if any of them had a history of some serious medical condition that wasn’t publicly known. It was an odd request, but it would not take much time, and so he had agreed.

Yes, he said, he could do it safely, without arousing too much suspicion, if he had a good enough pretext.

He would try.

Every floor in the Kremlin Clinic has three computer terminals at each nurse’s station, which are used to retrieve laboratory values. In addition, there are two terminals in small conference rooms for the use of the physicians, but since most of the doctors dislike using computers, these terminals generally sit unused.

Kuznetsov wondered how all the other hospitals in the Soviet Union, which have no computers, were able to function. Computers, so often associated with George Orwell’s Big Brother and so on, are if anything the nemesis of the totalitarian state. They make information widely available, instead of concentrating it in the hands of the rulers. Information is power. Kuznetsov was glad that any of the clinic’s doctors could use the hospital computers freely; he wondered how long it would take for some smart hospital administrator to find a way to restrict the flow of medical information. For these computers held the private medical files on the very top leaders.

He found a vacant terminal room and entered his access code.

In a few seconds, the screen went blank and then another prompt appeared. Kuznetsov typed his hospital identification number, followed by the eight-digit number that corresponded to his date of birth.

A few seconds’ pause, and then a menu appeared. Kuznetsov selected data base survey and directed the computer to call up the charts of each member of the Politburo. Incredibly easy.

He would not be asked, but in case he was, his explanation was unimpeachable. He was examining the medical records of these very important men, auditing the quality of their care, to see who might be summoned in for a checkup, who should be paid closer attention and who didn’t need it, how often they saw their private physicians. A routine procedure; he would be commended for his thoroughness.

He began to pore over the most intimate health records of the men who ran the Soviet Union.

On Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street in the Lefortovo district of Moscow, not far from the Novodevichy Convent, the main military-historical archives of the Soviet Union were located in an off-white classical-style building. Charlotte went to the side entrance and picked up a pass, which a friend at the Foreign Ministry had arranged for her, and then went around to the front of the building. A police guard inspected the pass and admitted her. The staircase before her was large and sweeping; at the top of it was a spacious reading room. Charlotte spent forty-five minutes looking around, chatting amiably with the librarians, and locating one particular archive.

It was, as she had expected, a spetskhrana: a locked, secret collection. There was no way to gain access to it.

She smiled pleasantly, and after chatting a few minutes with the militiaman at the main entrance, she left.

Working quickly. Dr. Aleksandr Kuznetsov jotted down serious illnesses on a pad. Vadim Medvedev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Lev Zaikov each had conditions he thought worth noting, ranging from heart murmur to severe gastric ulcers.

He next came to Andrei D. Pavlichenko, and something was peculiar. The message came up:

ACCESS DENIED.

Odd, he thought. Why would one file be restricted when the others were not, not even Gorbachev’s? Perhaps it was that Pavlichenko was the chairman of the KGB, and secrecy was a way of life over at the Lubyanka. That was probably all.

He tried again, and still:

ACCESS DENIED.

Well, there had to be a back door to the data. There always was. He drummed his fingers on the desktop in front of him and thought. And then it came to him: blood. All the files were contained in a separate data base by blood type, a filing system designed to enable monitoring of the clinic’s blood supplies, to make sure there were sufficient quantities of each Politburo member’s blood type at all times.

He entered DATA BASE SURVEY/BLOOD TYPE, and drummed his fingers again.

One after another, the files came up on the screen, and he cursored down each one. Then one came up whose name had been deleted. He scanned the information, the age, the physical description, the personal history, and he saw at once that it was Pavlichenko’s chart.

SUCCESS.

Glancing at the screen, moving the cursor downward, he saw that Pavlichenko’s private physician was, naturally, the director of the clinic, Dr. Yevgenii Novikov. Of course. But the last time Pavlichenko had been in, he had seen the eminent neurologist Dr. Konstantin Belov, a man twenty years older than Kuznetsov, whom Kuznetsov respected greatly. Of course – why should the head of the KGB see anyone who wasn’t the best?

Well, well, he thought. Add the head of the KGB to the list of Politburo members with noteworthy medical conditions. But why was the head of the KGB seeing a neurologist?

The first thing that came up on the screen was Pavlichenko’s X-ray report. It was normal; no acute infiltrates.

Then, surprisingly, a carotid angiogram. Obviously Dr. Belov had suspected some sort of problem; maybe Pavlichenko had even had a stroke. Was it possible? The angiogram showed that the right-sided system was patent, fifteen percent plaque. … All right … Ah, but the left side was bad news. The left side of Pavlichenko’s blood supply to the brain was significantly obstructed – which meant a stroke on the left side could be imminent.

Someone walked by, and for a moment Kuznetsov glanced up nervously from the screen. It would be very hard to explain why he was examining Pavlichenko’s chart if he had nothing to do with the KGB chairman. But the person kept on walking, and Kuznetsov returned to the screen.

The next thing he viewed on the screen was a preliminary CAT scan, which showed just about nothing. No infarcts or mass lesions, and just a mild cortical atrophy. So Pavlichenko had not actually had a stroke. That much was clear.

But why had Pavlichenko come in in the first place?

Kuznetsov called up the patient discharge summary, which included Belov’s notes. Belov reported loss of vision in Pavlichenko’s left eye.

But how could that be? How could the vision go out or be diminished in the left side if the lesion was also on the left side? It made no sense. Something was terribly wrong.

Maybe the CAT scan was mislabeled, Kuznetsov thought. Maybe it wasn’t Pavlichenko’s CAT scan at all, but someone else’s. Mistakes like that happen all the time.

Kuznetsov had a few idle minutes, and he decided to be thorough about the whole thing. He’d go downstairs to the file room and locate the hard copy of the CAT scan, the film. Again, this was a routine matter; the hospital technical staff rarely asked questions of someone with Kuznetsov’s standing.

When he got to the file room, he found that the film jacket was empty – checked out to Dr. Belov. No, it wouldn’t do to go asking Belov. That would be the end of his career at the Kremlin Clinic. He’d be inspecting prostates in Tomsk in no time.

One more place to look.

The scanning room, where they do CAT scans in the clinic, was two flights down, in the basement: a cold white room run by a technician named Vasya Ryazansky, a young guy whom Kuznetsov knew casually. He had once given Vasya a dose of antibiotic for the clap without noting anything in his record, and it was time to get the favor returned. It was worth it to solve this mystery, which seemed more suspicious every moment.

“What is it?” Vasya asked slyly when Sasha asked him how his clap was doing. “What do you want? Yob tvoyu mat!” he said, employing the standard Russian epithet that translates: Fuck your mother. He laughed.

Kuznetsov returned the laugh. “All right, Vasya. Do me a favor, will you? I assume you have CAT-scan records on your computers here, right?”

“Where else?”

“I need to take a look at one.”

“Make it easy on yourself,” Vasya said. “Go up to the files and look at the film.”

“I did. It’s out. Do me a favor.”

“What do you want. Comrade Doctor Professor?”

When Kuznetsov told him whose scan he wanted to see, Vasya’s eyes widened. He nodded his head slowly and mock-bowed. “Well, well. Nothing but the best for you, eh?”

Let him think I’ve been assigned Pavlichenko, Kuznetsov thought, as Vasya punched out the name on his computer.

“Scan records are kept on computer about a month before they’re erased,” Vasya said. His tone had gotten much more serious. “Lack of tape and all that. Got to keep reusing it, of course. Any idea how long ago the scan was done? I don’t remember doing it; must have been someone else.”

“Within the last month, I’d say.”

“Okay, here it is,” Vasya announced. “Take a look.”

Kuznetsov was even more bewildered by what he saw.

“Vasya, I want to see each slice, one by one. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

After Kuznetsov had finished viewing each brain slice, there was no longer any doubt. There was a huge, obvious infarct on the left side of Pavlichenko’s brain.

But how could that be? The records he had looked at upstairs had said that the preliminary CAT scan was normal. Now he was seeing evidence of a massive stroke. How could anyone have missed it?

Something was definitely screwed up here.

Then he noticed the date of the CAT scan on the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

November 7.

According to the screen, the CAT scan had been performed on November 7. That was two days from now.

In a communications room at the KGB’s First Chief Directorate headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow, a computer terminal gave off a rapid beeping. The warning system was connected to an intrusion detection system designed to provide silent notification if any of several computer networks around the city was penetrated.

The monitor flashed a sequence of terse messages:

SECURITY VIOLATION CENTRAL KREMLIN CLINIC DEPARTMENT OF INTERNAL MEDICINE TERMINAL 3028

There was a pause as the mainframe’s memory collated a user access code with a list of hospital personnel, and then there was another message:

ALEKSANDR KUZNETSOV

67

The restaurant was an austere, even ugly place furnished with small tables at which people ate standing up. It was crowded, and it smelled powerfully of hot grease. The plate-glass windows were fogged with large ovals of condensation. They stood in line, neither speaking, moving past cups of sour cream and bowls of dumpling soup to the serving area, where two gray-haired women unloaded trays of crisp golden-brown pirozhki into a bin.

The dumplings, or pelmyeni, turned out to be a plate of pallid dough-covered balls of grayish meat, steamed and then garnished with sour cream. They were not as bad as they looked. The pirozhki were crisp and almost appetizing. Stone washed them down with a cup of steaming hot café au lait, which was certainly not genuine coffee at all but some sort of poor imitation liberally blended with hot milk.

“I can’t stay at your place again,” Stone said ruminatively as they ate. He took a swallow of the ersatz coffee. “For your sake as well as for mine.”

“I know.”

“Do you have any ideas? Any friends, maybe?”

“My cameraman. Randy. My producer, Gail. Both out, because they’re neighbors, and they’d be prime suspects. But I know a Russian – an artist who has a pretty big apartment, something like a loft, where he paints. He might have room.”

“Great.” They ate for a while in silence. When he’d finished his plate of pelmyeni, he said, “The Old Believers.”

“What about them?”

“We’re no closer to learning anything.”

“Give me until tonight.”

“Tonight? By then it might be too late!”

“Well, look. The place I need to get into, I can’t in a normal, straightforward way.”

She glanced at her watch. “It’s just about time. Our source usually takes an hour or so off for lunch, and the … clinic is just a block from here. Since the guy’s not only a physician but a scholar, it’s totally plausible for him to stop by the Lenin Library.”

They crossed the street, then walked up the front stairs to the columned portico of the library, left their coats at the cloakroom, and descended a flight of stairs to a lounge lined with hard stone benches. Scholars, taking a break from their work in the reading rooms, sat smoking. Charlotte and Stone sat at one end of a bench.

A few minutes later, they were joined by a man who looked to be in his forties, wearing a suit and tie under an expensive-looking sheepskin coat. He sat beside them, and shortly pulled out a pack of Belmorkanal cigarettes.

He turned to Charlotte, and spoke in Russian. “You got a match?”

She nonchalantly handed him a pack of matches. He took them, wordlessly, and lit his cigarette. When it was lit, he began speaking, rapidly and quietly.

From a distance, they appeared to be nothing more than a man and a woman who happened to strike up a conversation, the man perhaps harboring designs on the attractive blonde. No one in the lounge paid them any attention.

“I think I might have found what you wanted,” Kuznetsov said. He exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke and looked around, smiling abashedly, play-acting a spurned suitor. The act was forced; Kuznetsov was terrified. Sitting to one side, pretending to examine a copy of Sovetskaya Kultura, Stone stole a glance.

“There are only a few people who have conditions of any gravity. But there is one that I found baffling. Apparently, the chairman of the KGB is about to suffer a stroke.”

“Pavlichenko?” Charlotte asked. “About to …?”

“That’s what I said. You see, it hasn’t happened yet. If the records I looked at are accurate, on the seventh of November he plans to have a stroke.”

And at long last Stone knew, with a sudden jolt of terror, that he had found the mole known as M-3.

Washington

Roger Bayliss steered his black Saab turbo along the Beltway, periodically checking his watch. Aleksandr Malarek, Pavlichenko’s man in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, would already be waiting at their rendezvous spot.

Bayliss chewed his third Maalox tablet. It placated his sour stomach, but his nerves were still jittery; he didn’t want to take a Valium so early in the day, when Air Force One was to leave for Moscow in a matter of hours, and he wanted to stay as alert as possible. With him in it. Perhaps the highlight of his White House career.

Ever since the Sanctum meeting, he had been in a state of almost unbearable anxiety.

It was because he had become convinced, bit by bit, that Sanctum – that agglomeration of wise men – was committing a grievous error.

How was Pavlichenko planning to seize power? They did not know. Yes, it made a certain sense that the wisemen would want to remove a Soviet leader who couldn’t last, in favor of our mole. An agent-in-place as ruler of what remained of the Soviet Union. Yes, that made sense.

But Bayliss had become convinced that the coup was about to take place – during the summit. Nothing else could explain the schedule, or Malarek’s urgency. All of the preparations pointed to it. There would be bloodshed in Moscow during the summit.

And Bayliss knew that any American implicated in such an action would face untold dire consequences.

He was, in a very real sense, covering his ass.

He had to tell his superior. He had to inform the President’s national-security adviser, Admiral Mathewson, who knew nothing about Sanctum.

Without Mathewson’s support – well, if the coup failed, Bayliss’s fate was sealed. It would not be a pretty sight.

He had to tell Mathewson.

He got out of the car and walked right into the highway, the morning traffic dangerous and loud, cars slamming on their brakes, swerving to avoid him, drivers hurling abuse. There was a telephone booth there, on the other side of the road. He could not go through with this. He had made a mistake. He could fight the guerrilla war in the National Security Council, figuratively stabbing rivals in the back for the best office, for rank. He’d found himself capable of consenting to the murder of Alfred Stone. But this he could not do.

He fished a quarter out of his pants, fed the telephone, and stared at the cars passing by.

His heart was pounding, and a wave of acid washed up into his throat. He chewed another Maalox tablet.

Then he punched out the phone number of Admiral Mathewson.

Mathewson would know what to do.

68

Moscow

The young man spoke as if wrenched by emotion. He spoke directly at the camera. The unseen KGB technician had pulled in for a tight close-up.

From this close, the men watching the screen could see that the young man spoke under extreme duress.

“I furnished the terrorist groups with equipment,” the man was saying. He paused often. There was a twitch in one of his eyes.

“How did you get this equipment?” The voice came from off-camera.

“The American Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council,” the man replied. His left eye twitched uncontrollably. “They provided me with the explosives and other equipment.”

“So you were working as a pawn of American intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you agree to such a heinous crime against the peoples of the Soviet Union?”

The young man’s face was wracked with indecision, his left eye twitching madly, his eyes watering. Finally, he shouted: “It’s a lie! You made me do it! I followed your orders! I will not be party to this horror, this deceit. You will not force me to speak untruths!”

He broke down crying, bowing his head, and then looking back up at the camera, his eyes red and swollen. Now he spoke quiedy: “I am not a criminal.”

The voice came from off-camera, metallic and brusque: “Do you remember what Czar Ivan the Terrible did to the architects whom he commissioned to build Saint Basil’s Cathedral?”

The man had now turned his head and was looking at his unseen inquisitor. “I don’t–”

The voice came back sharply: “You don’t remember the history of your own country. Ivan did not want his architects ever to build anything to approach the beauty of Saint Basil’s.”

A dreadful realization came over the young man. “Oh, God, no. Please, God, no.”

“You remember.”

“No. Please, no!”

“Ivan had their eyes gouged out. You remember now.”

“Please, don’t. Please, please!”

The men watching the video screen were transfixed.

“Would you like to repeat your confession more persuasively now?” the off-camera voice said. An unseen hand gave the young Russian a tissue. The man dabbed at his eyes, and looked up, swallowing. “Yes.”

He spoke his confession again, this time with far more conviction.

“Thank you,” came the voice.

The young man began to weep. Suddenly, however, there was a loud crack and a red spot the size of a coin appeared on his forehead. The blood began to stream out: the confessor had been shot through the head, from behind. He slumped to one side, grotesquely.

And the video monitor went dark.

“Excellent,” Pavlichenko called to one of the twelve men who sat around the table in the subbasement of the Lubyanka. “I want this edited immediately. Just keep the confession.”

The head of the Fifth Chief Directorate was the first to speak. “This man, Fyodorov. Do we have footage of him meeting with the terrorists?”

“Yes,” replied another voice, that of the chief of Moscow’s police force. “He met them in a deserted garage we provided for him, where he stored the plastique and so on.”

“And the terrorists,” came another question, “which of them are alive?”

“The ones who killed my friend Sergei Borisov,” said Andrei Pavlichenko. “A decision I had to make, incidentally, to be sure I was seen as uninvolved. Who also set off the bombs in the metro and the Bolshoi. When it is all over, they will be put on trial, blamed for the final act of terrorism, which they did not commit, and then executed. We will have our scapegoats, and they will not be alive to contradict us.”

Pavlichenko did not need to explain that one of the terrorists, an old zek named Yakov Kramer, had been known to KGB for some time, ever since friends of his had, in the early 1960s, set off a bomb on Gorky Street. Ordinarily, Pavlichenko – then a ranking KGB officer – would have ordered the men rounded up. But instead he decided to do nothing, knowing that the day would come when they could be useful.

As they had been. One of the zek’s sons was arrested and put in a cell at Lefortovo with the unfortunate fellow Fyodorov. The recently deceased Fyodorov, the bomb expert who taught young Kramer all about the manufacture of bombs, and planted the idea in his head. Then the zek’s other son was placed in a psychiatric hospital. The scheme worked as Pavlichenko’s people had determined it might, based on a thorough psychological profile. The Kramers were turned into terrorists. And, of course, it was a simple matter to intercept their notes to Gorbachev.

Terrorists linked, all of them, through the daughter of the American aristocrat Winthrop Lehman. The powerful and wealthy Winthrop Lehman, desperate to have his beloved daughter released from Russia before his death. And thus driven to cooperate with American right-wing fanatics bent on destroying the leadership of the Soviet Union.

Or so Pavlichenko wanted it to appear.

“Sir?”

The men looked up and saw a KGB internal guard standing at the doorway.

“Yes?” Pavlichenko said.

“Comrade Bondarenko,” the guard announced.

“Let him in.”

Ivan Bondarenko of Department Eight, Directorate S (Illegals) of the First Chief Directorate, charged with responsibility for “direct action” or “wet affairs,” entered the room.

Without taking a seat, he said, short of breath: “I have reason to believe the American rogue agent is in Moscow.”

“What?” gasped Pavlichenko.

“The Soviet visa office in Paris checked photographs,” Bondarenko said, and stopped to catch his breath before he went on. “It seems that, incredible as it may sound, Stone has entered Moscow under a false name, using a visa he managed somehow to get quickly. The laser-optical scan of immigration documents, collated with the prints Sanctum supplied us, confirms it.”

“Probably connected in some way with the arrival of the Americans,” Pavlichenko said levelly, getting up from the table. “Now, I want all of you to call upon all of your resources to stop this man before he unravels our plan. Alive or dead, I don’t care. He’s come right into our backyard. We will find him. The fool probably doesn’t realize that he’s stepped into a bear trap.”

69

Charlotte and Stone raced into the old U.S. Embassy building’s main entrance, flashing their passports at the burly Russian guards, and then ran into the courtyard. They took the first left, into the entrance to the offices, and mounted the stairs to the press office.

Frank Paradiso, the embassy’s press attaché, was seated, speaking on the telephone, behind a desk piled high with papers. He was stout and swarthy; his balding pate was partially obscured by thin strands of hair combed over from one side.

“Well, hello, Charlotte,” he said when he’d hung up the phone. He shifted his glance toward Stone, and got up. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Charlotte put in quickly: “Frank, I realize you’re probably raked, with the President showing up in a matter of hours. But we need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”

Paradiso nodded uncomprehendingly and gestured to the chairs in front of his desk, like an expansive host welcoming long-awaited dinner guests.

“Not in here,” Charlotte said. “In the bubble. I know you have access to it.”

“Charlotte, is this supposed to be a joke?”

“I’m dead serious, Frank.”

Dr. Aleksandr B. Kuznetsov returned to the clinic immediately after meeting Charlotte and her friend, apprehensive about what he had found, wishing he hadn’t found it at all.

He walked down the corridor to his office, passing the nurses’ station. “Hey, darlings,” he called out. The nurses liked him a lot, he knew, because he was one of the few physicians who bothered to talk to them. “Why so glum? Don’t tell me your husbands are neglecting you! The fools don’t know what they’ve got, right?”

He flashed an endearing smile, and knew something was wrong. The two nurses looked at him differently, fearfully.

“Buck up, kids,” he said.

They smiled wanly.

Puzzled, he rounded the corner to his office and opened the door. When he saw the uniformed KGB guards, he suddenly understood.

The “bubble” is the safe room in the U.S. Embassy, the only place in the embassy structure believed to be secure from Soviet bugs. It consists of a Plexiglas chamber, a room within a room, taken up by a long conference table.

Paradiso led them in and switched on the air conditioning to provide the necessary ventilation. Stone, knowing that there was a serious risk that Paradiso had received a cable from Langley concerning one Charles Stone, had refused to introduce himself.

And he was carrying, concealed in his jacket pocket, the gun; by coming into the embassy through the press entrance, from the courtyard, they had bypassed the metal detectors. Paradiso would be unable legally to place Stone under arrest – assuming he identified his visitor as Stone – without requesting federal marshals from Washington. That was the law. But if Paradiso decided to break the law and attempt to detain Stone – well, then there was the gun.

“All right,” Paradiso said, sitting down at the table. Charlotte and Stone sat on either side of him. “What the hell is this?”

“Frank,” Stone said, “we need your help.”

“Go ahead.”

“Frank,” Charlotte said, “we need you to serve as a conduit to Langley.”

“We’re both Agency men, you and I,” Stone said. “That doesn’t mean you have to believe what I’m about to say. But have you heard of a group in Washington called the American Flag Foundation?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“That’s what I expected you to say.” Quickly, and as lucidly as possible, Stone explained the fragments of what they knew about the American mole M-3, about the conspiracy he had become entangled in.

Paradiso looked genuinely amazed.

“Please listen carefully,” Stone continued intently. “If I walk out that door and drive over to The New York Times office, they may or may not laugh me out of their office, but I don’t think your superiors will like the result. The U.S. government will suffer permanent damage when it’s revealed that certain groups in Washington are involved in covert action inside the U.S.S.R. Moscow will certainly break off diplomatic relations. The summit will be wrecked. I’d hate to extrapolate further, but you get my drift. It will all be on your head, all hung on you. It will be your own very personal, as well as very public, failure for allowing this to happen. And I shudder to think what might happen if this thing goes through. Do I make myself clear?”

Paradiso looked imploringly at Charlotte, his eyes wide in disbelief. “I don’t know what the hell this guy’s talking about.”

“Frank,” Charlotte said, “I just talked to someone who’s in a position to know: Andrei Pavlichenko has prepared a false CAT scan, in preparation for a ‘stroke’ he’s going to have tomorrow.”

Paradiso snorted derisively.

“It’s undeniable, Frank. He’s behind this, on the Russian end. But if our information is right, he’s not an American mole pure and simple. He’s not the Agency’s mole.”

“What the hell, Charlotte …” Paradiso said.

“There’s something more, Frank. For the last several weeks, the KGB has been investigating all the terrorist bombings in Moscow, and they’ve turned up some interesting evidence.”

“Are you telling me you have a source in the KGB as well?”

Charlotte shrugged. “Their forensics people examined the bomb fragments and deduced that the explosives used were manufactured in the United States and supplied by the CIA.”

Paradiso’s mouth dropped open. “Jesus Christ!” He looked at Stone. “So what are you two alleging? I still don’t understand where this is leading.”

“All I can put together is this,” Stone replied. “There’s likely going to be some sort of action, perhaps military, probably disguised as terrorism. Presumably tomorrow, at the Revolution Day parade.”

“Likely … probably … presumably … What am I supposed to make of all of this?”

“I want you to contact Langley. Send an emergency cable. If I’m wrong, Frank, you’ll have done the right thing by reporting it. If I’m right …”

“I know,” Paradiso said softly. “I’ll have made the biggest intelligence coup in American history.”

“Frank,” Charlotte said, “do you understand how important it is that you move immediately on this?”

“Charlotte,” he said, shaking his head slowly, dazed, a man who had been won over. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Washington

“I need to talk with you,” the voice said desperately. In the background Malarek could hear traffic sounds. “I’ll be in in about forty-five minutes. It’s urgent.”

Malarek had waited for Bayliss for ten minutes, then, deciding Bayliss must have had a good reason for missing the rendezvous, returned to the Soviet Embassy, where his aide presented him with this recording just made from an unsecured White House line. Malarek had at once recognized the voice of Roger Bayliss.

Malarek listened to the remainder of the phone conversation. Then he switched off the tape recorder, picked up a secure phone, and called a rarely used number at a small bookstore in Washington that specialized in foreign books. The phone was answered right away.

“This is a friend of yours from the Soviet Embassy,” Malarek said. “I want to order two sets of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In English, please.” Then he hung up and waited.

The man at the bookstore, who was a Soviet-born American citizen who had emigrated fifteen years earlier, was one of quite a few “blind-transfer” stations in and around Washington. He was paid a small retainer by the KGB for his services, which largely consisted of making, through an elaborate telephone system, untraceable calls. The bookstore employee did not know who had called him, nor whom he was calling. This was a method Malarek had developed to circumvent normal embassy and KGB channels.

Thirty seconds later the phone rang.

“There’s been a ChehPeh,” Malarek said, using the Center’s slang for chrezvychainoye proisshestviye, an extraordinary incident.

He furnished the specifics, then hung up.

He pulled a Balkan Sobranie from the small white metal box on his desk, and lit it. He leaned back in his chair and thought about Roger Bayliss, who would do anything to advance his standing with his President. It was fortunate – extremely fortunate, in fact – that Bayliss had been so foolish as to make the call to an open line. Bayliss had not been specific with the national-security adviser, so there had been no hemorrhaging of any secrets. There would be just enough time.

He had never liked Bayliss.

Roger Bayliss wondered whether he was being followed.

The car behind him was trailing too closely, and so Bayliss moved over to the right lane, alongside the metal railing. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that it, too, had changed lanes. It was right behind him again.

He glanced nervously at the steep incline just beyond the railing, and then he knew what was happening. He instantly remembered something Malarek had once told him, about how good his people were at making “accidents” look real.

He shouldn’t have called an unsecured line at the White House. After all, anyone could eavesdrop electronically on those lines.

He slammed on his horn, but now the car was at his bumper, and it was forcing him off the road. He could hear the squeal of metal scraping against metal.

He saw the license plate on the Ford, saw it was registered in the District of Columbia, and then he spotted the little maroon sticker on the Ford’s windshield, at first just a little glint of purple, that decal that would mean nothing to anyone who hadn’t heard of the American Flag Foundation.

No. The call … They’d bugged the call…. My own arrangements to bug the lines, Bayliss realized, aghast, knowing the irony, and then of course there was no doubt, the moment he felt the impact, about how he was going to die.

70

Moscow

The night had gotten frigid, the roads slick with ice. Stone, driving Charlotte’s Renault, had found the driving difficult. Moreover, many of the roads were blocked in preparation for the next day’s ceremony, which had taken over the city entirely, as do all state occasions in Moscow. Much of the center of the city had been cordoned off for security reasons. Banners were going up all over the city, large triumphal posters of larger-than-life socialist workers boasting of factory quotas overfulfilled.

After meeting with Paradiso, Stone and Charlotte had returned to her apartment, where together they drew up a plan. They agreed it was important that Charlotte go about her work normally, partly to avoid attracting any suspicion, which might expose Stone’s presence in the city to anyone who was looking.

Charlotte had gone over to her office to put together a story, to which she would have to add only footage of the President arriving at Vnukovo Airport. Later, as soon as she could, she would finish her search for the name of the man who was said to lead the Old Believers network. Perhaps there was a way, she said, refusing to tell Charlie exactly what that way might be. But Stone could call her later, and learn what she’d found, if anything.

Stone had spent several hours unavailingly searching Charlotte’s books on Soviet history, desperately looking for a name connected with the Katyn Forest Massacre, the name of a lone hero, but there was nothing.

He could not sit still, and soon he set off to confront Sonya Kunetskaya. Lehman’s daughter, whom Charlotte had found. The woman Alfred Stone had met once, briefly, on a subway platform in 1953.

Stone found Sonya Kunetskaya small and unprepossessing. She wore a plain dress and steel spectacles, which concealed a pretty, delicate face. When she opened the door, she looked perplexed.

“Chto takoe?” she asked: What is this?

“We must talk,” Stone replied, also in Russian. “Now.”

Her eyes widened in terror, glinting with tears. “Who are you?”

“If you won’t let me in to talk,” Stone said, “I’ll have to take measures you may not like.”

“No!”

“It’s urgent. Come on.” He forced his way past her into the apartment. This is the woman for the sake of whom my father was sacrificed, Stone thought. This is the one.

Sonya Kunetskaya followed him into the living room, where a man was sitting. Stone would later learn his name: Yakov Kramer. He was badly scarred on one side of his face, a powerful-looking middle-aged man who would, but for his deformity, have been handsome.

“You met my father,” Stone said slowly.

She seemed about to laugh. “You confuse me with someone else.”

“No, I don’t. I have the pictures to prove it. One day a long time ago – in 1953, to be exact – you met with my father on a platform in the Moscow metro. He gave you a package.”

Now suddenly her face registered alarm, and it betrayed her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she protested.

“I know who you are,” Stone said. “I know who your father is.”

“Who are you?”

“Charles Stone. You met my father, Alfred Stone.”

She gasped, her mouth open as if to scream, her eyes wild.

Then, oddly, she reached out a trembling hand and touched Stone’s arm. “No,” she said, shaking her head, choking out the words. “No. No.”

Yakov Kramer watched, astonished.

“We must talk,” Stone said.

Sonya’s face was frozen in an expression of the sheerest terror. Tears sprang to her eyes. “No,” she whispered. She looked at him closely, then reached out both of her hands to touch his. “Oh, God, no. Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

“I know whose daughter you are. Your father is here to take you out of the country, isn’t he? But you should know that I’m prepared to interfere. Make no mistake about it. Unless you help.”

“No!” the woman shouted, her eyes fixed on Stone. “Please, go away. You mustn’t be here with me!”

“Who is this man, Sonya?” Yakov asked. “What is he saying? Get out of here!” He began to move menacingly toward Stone.

“No!” Sonya said to Yakov. “Let him be. I’ll talk to him.” Crying now, she removed her glasses and wiped at the tears with the side of her hand. “I’ll talk to him.”

At seven o’clock in the evening. Air Force One landed at Vnukovo Airport, some twenty miles southwest of Moscow. The tarmac was illuminated brightly by klieg lights and adorned by rows of Soviet and American flags, which rippled crisply in the wind.

The first to emerge from the plane were the President and his wife, then the Secretary of State and his wife, and then the rest of the American delegation.

Standing in a cluster to greet them, the moment captured on film by a Soviet camera crew, was a small group of Soviet officials, including the Politburo.

After a brief welcoming ceremony, the President was taken to a waiting American limousine, a bulletproof black Lincoln, with an American chauffeur at the wheel. The rest of the official party were put into Chaikas, and with a great roar of engines the cars took off at top speed down the middle lane of the road to Moscow.

The President’s chauffeur at first seemed nervous about driving as fast as the Soviet drivers; then he relaxed and seemed to enjoy it. “Mr. President, I’ve never driven this fast in Washington.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” the President said, looking a little queasy.

The cars in the motorcade followed one another breathtakingly closely, almost tailgating, the sirens screaming. They were moving at such a speed that the President, a cautious man, felt sure there would be an accident. Several cars, occupied by Soviet security agents, cruised on the outside of the motorcade, darting in and out deftly, dangerously.

When they had gotten into the city, the President looked out of the window with fascination.

Two cars behind, in a Chaika limousine, sat the President’s national-security adviser and a few of his aides.

Craig Mathewson was crafting a statement, to be released at the U.S. Embassy the next morning, in which the President expressed his heartfelt condolences upon the demise of one of his most loyal White House staff members, Roger Bayliss. “… And I regret that Roger cannot be with us,” the statement ended, “at this time of triumph that he did so much to bring about.”

Mathewson was deeply grieved at the loss of the young man. Bayliss had been as ambitious as anyone Mathewson had ever met in government, a touch too slick for his own good, but still fundamentally a decent person. How had the accident happened? What was Bayliss doing, driving around on the day he was to leave for Moscow? Was it excitement about the summit, perhaps, that might have caused him to be so fatally unattentive?

But why had Bayliss called him, just before the accident, going on about having “something really urgent to tell you”? What could Bayliss possibly have wanted to say that was so urgent, and – here Mathewson’s speculations grew dark – could there have been some connection between whatever Bayliss wanted to say and the accident?

Mathewson was suspicious, even a little afraid.

He watched Moscow racing by. Even at night, when so many cities look magical, this was an oddly unbeautiful place, he thought, and it was disquietingly still, devoid of people. Strange, for so populous a city, the day before its biggest holiday.

Then he saw that the streets were not quite devoid of people: every few yards stood militiamen in gray uniforms, in a line that never ended, from the airport all the way into the city. There must have been thousands of them.

It was clear that the Soviets were taking every precaution to protect the life of their honored guest.

Four cars behind Mathewson rode Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, and Gorbachev’s close friend and adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev.

Gorbachev sat silently, staring straight ahead, lost in thought, until Yakovlev interrupted: “He’s a personable fellow.”

“Hmm?”

“The President. I’ve always thought he’s a personable fellow.” Yakovlev, who had studied at Columbia University and spent years as ambassador to Canada, felt he understood the Western temperament. “Reasonable as well.”

Gorbachev nodded, his eyes unmoving, steely.

“He’s overtired,” Raisa Gorbachev said, looking at her husband.

“Well, get your rest,” Yakovlev said. “Tomorrow’s a long day.”

Then Gorbachev turned his head toward his adviser. “Do you think they know?”

“Know what?”

“Know,” Gorbachev replied hotly, “about the – about whatever or whoever the hell it is that’s trying to pull off a coup.”

“I don’t know. No doubt they’ve got some kind of intelligence on it. Which means they’ll try to exploit your weakness. The whole idea, you know, that you’re not going to last. The way Brezhnev played Nixon when Nixon was facing impeachment, you know–”

“I don’t mean that,” Gorbachev shot back, turning back to face the road. “I mean, do you think they know what we’ve learned? About CIA involvement?”

“If you mean, do the President and his people have a hand in what’s going on here, as Pavlichenko seems to think – well, it seems preposterous to me. I can’t see it.”

Gorbachev nodded again. He ran his tongue absently along the inside of his cheek and did not reply.

In the car immediately behind his sat Andrei Pavlichenko, alone except for his driver. He wore a pair of reading glasses and looked without interest through a thatch of digested intelligence reports from Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria.

Mentally, he ran through once again what was about to happen.

He knew that only a swift decapitation of the Russian leadership would be effective. It would plunge the nation into turmoil. The lawmaking bodies – the Supreme Soviet, the Congress of People’s Deputies – would be gripped with fear, unable to act decisively. They would call for emergency measures.

After the destruction in Red Square, martial law would be declared by a few survivors – ranking officers in the Red Army and in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, each of whom belonged to the Sekretariat, yet who would not be standing atop the mausoleum or even near it.

To the world, the destruction of Lenin’s mausoleum would seem the culmination of a campaign of terrorism that had so bedeviled Russia of late. When the remains of the explosion were examined, the CIA-produced plastique would reveal clear, irrefutable evidence of American involvement in the tragedy.

Why, there would be little doubt of it. Especially when Pavlichenko – once he recovered from his stroke – unveiled the evidence of attempts on the part of a small group of American conspirators that called themselves the Sanctum to eliminate the Soviet leadership from within.

But before that could happen, what remained of the uppermost Soviet leadership – that is, the Sekretariat – would charge the Americans with conspiring to destroy the Soviet Union at a time of great instability. Just when Moscow was loosening the chains, unlocking its gates, opening itself to the West.

And they would swiftly move to rectify the situation.

The Sekretariat, believing that they were about to make the Soviet empire whole again, would issue orders that the foolish and dangerous policies of Mikhail Gorbachev were to be terminated at once. That public safety required order. And then …

And then Andrei Pavlichenko would carry out his life’s dream.

He would liberate the Ukraine.

It was the one thing that would never happen under Gorbachev or any other Russian leader. The Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet empire, the wealthiest hostage republic, would at last be free. And in short order, what little remained of the Soviet empire would be ruled by a Ukrainian whose parents had been murdered by Moscow. A Ukrainian, the master of Moscow.

And the Kremlin, as history knew it, would cease to exist.

Pavlichenko turned his attention back to the sheaf of documents, but he could think of nothing other than the coup d’etat that would change the face of the world.

“You were,” Stone said, “a hostage here, weren’t you?”

She nodded, biting her lower lip. She had asked Yakov to leave the two of them to talk alone. Later she would have to tell Yakov everything. It would be terribly difficult, and she didn’t know how to begin. “Yes,” she said. “By 1930, Stalin forced my father to leave. Without his wife. And without me.”

She drew her arms around herself in a tight embrace, as if she were cold, a gesture that seemed to be warding off the outside world. “He had to return to America, where his future was. The worlds of high finance and politics. But now, the woman and the daughter he loved so much – he could not bring out with him. Do you understand? They wouldn’t let him. My father says the orders came from Stalin himself. My mother was devastated. She was a single woman with a small child. Without her husband.

“Oh, she was a beautiful woman, you know. She had worked in my father’s house as a servant – she had no education, but my father loved her for other things, her beauty and her kindness. And, you know, I think they really were in love.

“Well, he kept in touch with my mother and me through letters he sent in various secret ways. He later told me he didn’t trust the Russians, that they – he meant the GPU, which is now the KGB – would surely read his letters, and so he concealed the letters in fur coats he sent my mother with friends who were traveling to Russia. My father was a great figure to me, all the more because I saw him so seldom.”

Sonya explained that she and her mother, who was to die in the early 1970s, moved to a tiny apartment in the Krasnaya Presnya district, and her mother managed to find a job at the Moscow Underwear Factory Number 6 of the Textile Trust. She made 159 rubles a month working at an ancient Singer sewing machine. People assumed that they had been abandoned by the American, and in the mood of anti-Americanism that dominated Moscow in the 1930s, people at once felt sorry for the mother and child and feared them, as people feared anyone who had been connected in any way with foreigners.

“But you were permitted to see your father,” Stone said.

“He was never allowed to come to Moscow, but twice I was allowed to see him in Paris. Only me; never my mother. Two terribly short visits, and always under guard.”

“Yes. In 1953 and 1956. And Lehman couldn’t have you kidnapped because your mother was still alive, in Moscow.”

“Yes.”

“Have you always wanted to leave this country?”

“Oh, yes,” she cried. “Oh, God, yes. My mother desperately wanted to leave, all her life. And so did I. And then, when I met Yakov – well, I knew he wanted to emigrate.”

“Does he know about you?”

“No.”

“You kept that a secret from him?”

She bit her lip again, and looked down.

“Why?”

Her reply was anguished. “He couldn’t know. No one could know. If I ever wanted to see my father again, I had to keep silent.”

Stone considered a moment. “Stalin had something on your father, and your father had something on him.”

“How much do you know?” she asked warily.

“Your father had a very damaging document, and Stalin had you. A standoff.”

She said nothing.

“You have the document, don’t you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“That was what my father handed to you, wasn’t it? That was what your father was so concerned about getting to you, so concerned that he would do anything to get it to you, even if it meant having my father discredited, his career destroyed.”

“Please, I don’t know anything about that!”

“What is it? I want you to tell me what it is!”

“I don’t know anything,” Sonya said, in tears.

“But you do. Your father – through my father – gave you a file, didn’t he?”

She shook her head, too emphatically, unconvincingly.

Stone was nodding. He knew now. “Once I thought it was something called the Lenin Testament. But it’s more, it has to be. It has to be some kind of evidence of a secret attempt, years ago, to seize power. Names, specifics – which would blow the present plot out in the open …”

“Why are you saying all this?”

“Your contact at the Lubyanka,” Stone said. “A man named Dunayev, am I right?”

“Please. I know so much less than you think. There were so many go-betweens between me and the Lubyanka. Maybe yes. I don’t know. …”

Stone stood up, pacing, thinking aloud. “There’s about to be an exchange, isn’t there? How is it going to be done? Where?”

“I can’t–”

“Tell me! Where is the exchange going to take place?” Stone stared out the window.

“Please,” Sonya whispered. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is to get Yakov and his sons and me out of the country, and if you interfere – please! – you will end my last hope.”

“Your father is in Moscow now, isn’t he?” Stone said, turning around to face her. Things were falling into place. He was beginning to understand.

“I don’t–”

“You have no choice, my friend,” Stone said sadly, feeling for this woman’s immense unhappiness. “I need you to tell me how I can get to your father – now.”

And suddenly Sonya Kunetskaya got up from her chair, came close to Stone, and embraced him. “No,” she pleaded. “Soon everything will make sense to you. Please don’t interfere.”

Stone held her tightly, comforting her, realizing how desperately miserable she was. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We really don’t have a choice.”

The middle-aged Russian man, his face veined from a life of consuming vodka, mounted the broad marble stairs, weaving from side to side. He was visibly drunk, a bottle of Stolichnaya pertsovka, or pepper vodka, shoved in the pocket of his blue workingman’s coat. It was past midnight, and Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street was dark and empty.

“Oh,” he said, entering the building and spotting the vakhtyor, the night watchman, who sat at a desk by a telephone. The vakhtyor appeared to be absorbed in an issue of Za Rulyom, the Soviet Union’s version of Car and Driver.

“What the hell are you doing here?” the vakhtyor yelled. “Get the hell out before I throw you out.”

The drunk threaded his way across the lobby, toward the desk. “Regards from Vasya.”

“Vasya?” the vakhtyor asked suspiciously.

“Hey, is your head up your ass? Aren’t you a friend of Vasya Korolyov? Vasya the Bandit?”

Now the guard’s curiosity seemed to be piqued. “What do you want?” he asked, a shade less hostilely.

“Vasya said I should come talk to you. I lost my job today. The damned car factory booted me out on my ass. Vasya said you might be able to help me get a job here as a cleaner.” The drunk sat down clumsily on a chair near the guard. “Mind if I sit?” he asked.

“Look,” the vakhtyor said tentatively, shrugging. “I don’t know what the hell …” His eyes greedily spied the neck of the Stolichnaya bottle. “Looks like you’ve had about one liter too much, comrade.”

The drunk cast his eyes around the empty lobby, toward the deserted street, as if afraid someone might come by at any moment. He pulled out the bottle and set it on the watchman’s desk, jarring the phone slightly. He extended his hand. “Zhenya.”

The watchman, his spirits buoyed by the sight of the vodka bottle, took the man’s hand, shaking briefly. “Vadim. Where the hell you get that?”

“Stolichnaya?” The drunk grinned as he divulged his secret. “My cousin Lyuda works in a beryozka,” he said, referring to a hard-currency store. He twisted the bottle open. “Be my guest. I don’t have a glass.”

Vadim took the bottle and held it to his lips. He took a healthy swig and shoved it toward Zhenya.

Zhenya grinned again. “If I put any more in this stomach of mine,” he said, patting his ample belly, “I’ll mess up this beautiful floor. Be my guest. Ten minutes, I’ll join you.”

Vadim took the bottle again and drank deeply, then belched. “Now, how did you say you know Vasya?”

Yakov Kramer, who had returned to the apartment five minutes earlier, could not believe what he was hearing. It was turning his life inside out, altering the meaning of the last fifteen years of his life. He didn’t know what to say or how to respond or how to begin to understand it. His shock turned into anger and then sorrow.

“You poor thing,” he said, holding her shoulders.

“No,” Sonya said. “Don’t feel sorry for me. But accept my apology.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “In this life, things happen for reasons we can’t always understand.”

He felt her warm breath on his neck, felt her tears rolling down his cheek, and then he knew that they were all in terrible, terrible danger.

Everyone in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow knows the place is bugged. With the exception of the ambassador’s office, and the “bubble,” both of which are regularly swept for electronic listening devices, the embassy’s offices are not used for any significant conversations pertaining to national security. The walls were peppered with electronic radio transmitters, some buried deep in the masonry, which are monitored from a KGB station across the street.

But, unknown to the CIA station, even the bubble is not safe.

Although it, too, is swept for radio-frequency emissions, sweeping cannot pick up a species of bugs that emit no signals and yet are easily activated from hundreds of feet away. In mid-1988, despite the previous year’s uproar over a few marines’ having admitted female KGB officers to security-classified rooms in the Moscow embassy, the bubble was penetrated. Several passive transmitters were installed into the legs and under the top of the only piece of furniture in the bubble, the conference table.

As a result, Frank Paradiso’s entire conversation with Charlotte Harper and Charles Stone was transmitted and recorded at a KGB monitoring facility across Tschaikovsky Street.

The woman who monitored the transmission had received strict instructions from her superior, the head of the Second Chief Directorate, Pyotr Shalamov: the transcript was to go directly to him.

Within two hours, the transcript, typed in triplicate, had gone from the listening post across the street from the U.S. Embassy to the headquarters of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, an anonymous five-story building less than half a mile from the embassy, and then to the Lubyanka, where Shalamov presented it personally to Andrei Pavlichenko.

The head of the KGB looked up when he had finished reading the document. He looked neither pleased nor displeased.

“Find Stone,” he said simply.

Stone drove a few blocks away from Sonya and Yakov’s apartment building to what looked like an American-style bar. He hadn’t seen a legitimate bar in his entire time in Moscow – just the café where he had phoned earlier, and the dreary nightclubs that seemed to be peopled by Russian prostitutes. This bar had a plywood counter, a seedy-looking bartender. It served lousy Russian beer. Four Russian men in dark-gray, padded workingman’s jackets sat at the counter blearily drinking and at the same time talking loudly, flashing a few metal teeth.

Stone entered, and saw that there were a few others, who also looked like laborers – factory workers? – sitting at small tables. As he walked to the telephone on the back wall, every eye in the bar was on him. Everything Stone was wearing, the clothes Jacky had purchased for him in Paris – his dark wool overcoat, his jeans, his heavy Timberland boots – seemed to be an advertisement for Western manufacturers. Everyone in the bar knew that, and the stares were not altogether friendly: this was a crowd that generally feared foreigners. You get a foreigner around and then you get the cops and the Gebeshniki – the KGB – and there’s trouble.

He dropped a two-kopek piece in the phone and tried Charlotte again. He had tried from Sonya’s apartment, knowing that using her phone was a risk, but he had to hear her voice, know she was safe. She hadn’t answered at her apartment or her office. It was after midnight. Where the hell was she?

The phone rang and rang at her apartment. He hung up and dialed her office.

Nothing.

Please, God. If anything s happened to Charlotte …

A slender woman slowly climbed the marble staircase of the official-looking Soviet government building. She wore a tattered overcoat, her blond hair covered in a babushka.

Entering the building’s lobby, she saw the two men.

“Well done, Zhenya,” Charlotte said.

Zhenya was sitting with his hands folded over his stomach. The night watchman was fast asleep, snoring loudly, his face pressed into the desk blotter.

“Go home, Zhenya. I’ll be a while. And thanks.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, then walked over to the desk and pulled out a key.

She unlocked the main interior entrance and climbed the grand staircase to the reading room. The building was dark, but she made her way without lights, clutching the banister.

Zhenya was indeed a hard drinker, but he was also an unemployed actor who had once performed at the Moscow Art Theater. Charlotte had met him and his family shortly after moving to Moscow, and he, who harbored no deep affection for Soviet bureaucracy or night watchmen or the police, had easily agreed to help her.

The bottle of pepper vodka he had so generously offered the night watchman was laced with a few tablets of Halcion, or triazolam, a sleeping pill Charlotte occasionally took. She knew alcohol exacerbated its effects but wouldn’t make the drug deadly. She also knew that Halcion took effect quickly, often inside twenty minutes, and that it would wear off by the next day.

Earlier in the day, asking around, she’d learned that the watchman was excessively fond of booze, and so the spiked vodka seemed the best strategy. The guy might have an unusually deep night’s sleep, but he would be okay.

And she was in the military-historical archives.

When she reached the reading room, she opened the door and saw that it, too, was dark. It wouldn’t do to put the main lights on, which would be visible from the street, so she switched on a small table lamp behind the reference desk.

She knew exactly where to look: the microfilm records of the Soviet-Polish front, 1939–1945. Many of these records were kept in the open shelves, available to all scholars. The ones she wanted, however, were stored in a locked cabinet. During her morning visit, she had inquired where these would be. The librarian, who was unusually helpful for a Soviet archivist, had pointed at the cabinet but shook her head: you had to get special permission, she warned.

Or the key. The same key opened four of the cabinets, and Charlotte had glimpsed where it was kept.

In short order, she had opened the cabinet and pulled out an arm’s length of microfilm spools. She found a microfilm viewer and switched it on. The glow gave the entire dark reading room a grayish tinge.

The work did not go as quickly as she’d hoped. After an hour, she was still lost in a tangle of Soviet-Polish military records. She rubbed her tired eyes, took a deep breath, and pulled out another reel.

The Investigation into the Crimes in the Katyn Forest Region.

Her heart leaped. She turned the spool faster and faster, her eyes skimming over the documents, searching for one in particular. Half an hour later, nothing. A lot of records, some grisly, some dull.

At two-thirty in the morning, she found it.

Proceedings in the Court-Martial of the 19th Company of the Infantry Division of the 172nd Regiment on the Polish Front Under the Command of Major A. R. Alekseyev.

The documents, which went on for page after page, listed the accused. Captain V. I. Sushenko, commanding officer. First Sergeant M. M. Ryzkhov, squad commander. She squinted at the screen, trying to make sense of it. Eighteen men, all soldiers of the Red Army, had rebelled against the instructions of the NKVD to descend into the pit and, with their four-sided bayonets, stab anybody who had miraculously survived the massacre and appeared to be moving. It was horrible. It was inhuman, and the Russian soldiers had fought back, cursing the NKVD men.

The prosecution had taken testimony from seventy-three NKVD officers, in preparation for the court-martial of the eighteen men.

And then, on the last page, was – just as Charlie had been told in Paris – an order to terminate. It was a brief form that decreed the proceedings unnecessary, other satisfactory arrangements having been made.

She skimmed the page, her eyes moving to the signature at the bottom, and for an instant she thought her eyes had gone. It could not be. She let out a short, breathy cry that filled the dark, vacant room.

It could not be. She squinted again and moved her eyes closer to the screen.

The name at the bottom of the page was that of Valery Chavadze, one of the legends of Soviet politics. An old Georgian, now retired, who had been one of Stalin’s henchmen. A Georgian, like Beria, like Stalin himself. An elderly man by now, living in grandeur somewhere outside of Moscow. He had been a deputy commissar, later minister, of foreign affairs, a member of the Politburo, and – so Charlotte had always believed – an unswervingly loyal Stalinist.

Chavadze had stayed at the top of Russia’s leadership, serving in Khrushchev’s Presidium, Brezhnev’s Politburo, only deciding to retire in 1984. Chavadze’s was the longest-running, most successful, most illustrious political career the Soviet Union had ever seen. He was one of the country’s grand old men, a figure who – despite his reputation as one of Stalin’s men – was widely regarded with reverence, almost awe.

And – if Stone’s information was right – this hard-line Stalinist was the leader of the underground movement called the Old Believers.

Valery Chavadze was the only man who could stop the terror.

71

Stefan arrived at his father’s apartment out of breath, still wearing his ambulance technician’s uniform. He had been summoned by Yakov urgently, and his father’s expression indeed seemed grave.

“What is it?” Stefan asked.

“I am very afraid for us,” Yakov said. His voice trembled.

“We have been found out,” Stefan said, his stomach turning over.

“Worse, I think. Much worse.”

“What?”

Hunched over, Yakov smoked a Stolichnye cigarette. “I learned something today about Sonya, something that is tearing me apart. My Sonya–” He broke off and compressed his lips, trying to gain control of his emotions. After a moment he continued: “My Sonya has been living a lie. She has lied to me. She – she is not the person I thought she was.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stefan said, wondering what it was about Sonya that could possibly be so terrible.

“She – she has a father. A very well known man, an American. Winthrop Lehman.”

Stefan had heard the name Lehman, read about him in Soviet history books. He laughed, quite sure his father was joking, and then, seeing that he was laughing alone, stopped abruptly.

“Yes,” Yakov said. “I found it hard to believe, too.”

“But I don’t–”

“Stefan,” Yakov said, his voice suddenly sharp. “This man who gave you the explosives. This cellmate of yours at Lefortovo. Who is he?”

Stefan looked puzzled. “A car mechanic, a petty thief of some sort.”

“KGB,” Yakov said.

“What?

“Stefanchik, listen to me. You were arrested by the KGB, placed in a KGB prison–”

“Who the hell do you think arrests people in our country?” Stefan responded archly. “The World Court in the Hague?”

“Damn it, listen to me! Why do you think it was that you alone of all your friends were singled out for a jail sentence? Pure coincidence?”

“Papa, what are you talking about?”

“Your cellmate, who happened to be an expert in terrorism. Do you think that was an accident, too? Who happened to have access to a store of explosives? And your brother, Avram. He happened to be arrested, happened to be thrown into the psikhushka? Stefan, we were set up"

“No–”

“There’s been no word, nothing, on Avram,” Yakov said with bitter triumph. “It’s as if they were unaffected by our attacks. As if they wanted us to keep on doing what we were doing! They knew how we would respond.” His voice cracked.

“How is it possible?”

“The American told me a number of things,” Yakov said wearily. “He told me that the bombs we set off used explosives supplied by the CIA.”

Stefan listened in shock.

“Fyodorov,” Yakov continued, “was using us, playing upon our anger, upon our ignorance. This American thinks we are pawns, just like he is a pawn. He thinks the KGB plans to seize us all, arrest us for a great act of terrorism that may take place tomorrow.”

“During the parade?”

Yakov nodded.

“Then what are we going to do?”

“The American says he has an idea. I told him we will do anything to help him now. Maybe we will need the help of others, I don’t know. But we must move very quickly.”

72

Driving Charlotte’s Renault, Stone pulled out onto Prospekt Mira, the great broad highway, with the spire of the Exhibition of Economic Achievement looming on his right. Two cars passed him, weaving between the lanes: drunkards. The highway was ill-lit.

A large drop of water splashed on the windshield, and then another, and then another. Shit, Stone thought: the snow has turned to rain. Bad for visibility, bad for driving conditions, and the time remaining was dwindling away. It was vital to reach the Old Believers, and with each hour, the possibility receded that he ever would.

Charlotte had said she thought there was a way to discover the identity of the leader of the Old Believers, but now she had unaccountably disappeared.

He hoped she was safe.

The only possibility that remained was Winthrop Lehman himself. Sonya had finally broken down and revealed that her elderly father had indeed arrived in Moscow a few days earlier. As Stone had suspected: Lehman would be an honored guest of the Soviet state, but with an additional, secret mission of his own, to obtain the release of his adult daughter. Sonya, who had lived her entire life in Moscow.

Stone would have to face down his old employer, the man who had betrayed his father years ago, and compel him to help – if for no other reason than to protect Sonya. He was staying, Sonya had said, at the National Hotel. The same place where Stone had originally booked a room.

Lehman was the last hope.

In a few minutes, he would reach the hotel, and face Winthrop Lehman.

As Stone thought, he stared through the raindrops, mesmerized by the windshield wipers, keeping his eyes on the white divider lines on the road. Suddenly he became aware, as a message from somewhere in his subconscious crossed the barrier into the conscious, that a pair of round headlights had been following him for some distance.

The rain got heavier, and Stone felt himself reflexively begin to accelerate. A surge of adrenaline, of fear, was forcing his foot down onto the gas pedal, and he had to force himself to lift his heavy boot a little.

The lights got closer.

There were three sets of headlights now coming out of the blackness. Not the militia car – these were different, two very large trucks.

Jesus Christ! They were closing in on him.

The two sets of headlights belonged to two large squarish trucks, and now one was in the left lane and one in the right. Stone was in the center lane.

As soon as he realized what was going on, he frantically tried to swerve the car into the right lane, the shoulder, off the road, but it was too late: the truck on the right was coming up on him too fast.

One of the trucks was labeled “bread,” a solid closed-back truck, and the other was even larger but looked like the kind of thing you only saw in rural America: its sides were slatted, and beneath the slats was chicken wire, and the truck’s bed was full of live chickens.

The two trucks were now fully abreast of the Renault, and they were beginning to squeeze in.

There was a horrifying metallic crunch as the truck on the right smashed into Charlie’s car, and then a scrape from the left as the chicken truck cracked into him.

Stone was already in overdrive, and he pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, but as fast as the Renault went the trucks were able to keep up, slamming into him with increasing frequency. He knew they were trying to kill him.

Where was the tunnel? Somewhere around here, half a mile away or so, the three lanes were supposed to merge into two and go through a long tunnel. He could just make it out, up ahead maybe a mile. A mile: sixty seconds. In sixty seconds, the drivers of the trucks would be faced with a road-maneuver decision, and there was little doubt they would smash into him, decisively, before they got into the tunnel and its two lanes.

The trucks were pummeling the Renault, slamming the car back and forth, like a Ping-Pong ball. With each slam Stone was jolted, and then one crash from the chicken truck on the left cracked a deep gash into the side by the back seat.

Crack! The right rear window smashed. He felt a spray of rain hit his neck.

Stone felt his panic change into an eerily calm determination. Something within him took control, banishing terror. Forty-five seconds away from the tunnel’s opening, with one hand on the wheel, he unrolled the driver’s-side window all the way. The wind roared in, carrying with it a torrent of rain, and he reached out a few inches until he grasped a grimy slat on the side of the chicken truck. Tugging at it, he realized it was sturdy: the slats on the truck could function as a ladder.

The truck on the right slammed into the Renault with awesome force, forcing the car into the truck on the other side. Stone swung the wheel in the opposite direction. The wind whistled past his head.

Wham!

The chicken truck had crashed into him again, this time with enormous force, mangling the Renault’s left fender, its own giant fender now locked. The Renault had been jammed into the left-hand truck, wedged into it, and the two vehicles screamed along, inextricably connected.

He reached down, swiftly grabbed at the laces on his boots, and loosened them. Then, using his left boot, he eased the right boot off his foot and wedged it against the gas pedal. It stuck. The accelerator was jammed down, and the car would continue to move ahead on its own, locked into the truck’s mangled fender.

The mouth of the tunnel was just ahead. Maybe twenty seconds. Steering with his right hand, he reached over with his left and grabbed a slat. He pulled himself out of the car, supporting himself with his feet on the windowsill. His bloodstream was full of adrenaline now: his strength was enormous. He would need a tremendous surge of energy, and it came.

He swung himself upward, and the slat came off in his hand.

The only chance. The only alternative was certain death within seconds. He jumped into the air and grabbed the slat above.

Sturdy.

It was sturdy, it held, and he was on the truck now. Glancing down momentarily, he saw that his car was propelling itself ahead like a bottle rocket, and the trucks continued to pummel the Renault – was it possible they hadn’t seen him climb out?

The chickens were clucking, seeming to shriek with nervousness. Stone inched himself along the length of the truck, toward the front.

There was a deafening crash of metal below, and Stone glanced down to see Charlotte’s car veer off under the high wheels of the right-hand bread truck, its top shearing off horribly. Then, just as the tunnel came upon them, the car slammed into the concrete abutment at an angle and exploded instantly into a fiery ball.

At that moment the trucks entered the tunnel, and everything was plunged into darkness.

Now he had reached the truck’s cab, and, peering into the right side, he could just make out a bull-necked man wearing a flat cap, blissfully unaware that Stone had survived the grisly crash.

The rain made it almost impossible to get a grip on the top of the cab, but by lying flat Stone was able to slide himself over the top, and around, and–

The window was open.

Stone reached around and pulled out the Glock, wedged in his waistband. He released the safety, holding on to the top of the cab with his free hand, shivering with cold.

The driver didn’t know he was only feet away. Stone angled the gun around until it was pointed directly at the driver. The man who had tried to murder him.

“Privyet,” he said – greetings – and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the man cleanly in the forehead, with a sudden spit of blood against the windshield. The driver’s head flopped down to the wheel grotesquely, almost comically, as if he had suddenly decided to take a catnap. His blood continued to jet forward, into his lap.

Stone twisted his body around and, with a tremendous exertion, forced himself into the cab. Momentarily he faltered, then desperately he shoved the driver aside and managed to grab the steering wheel just as the streetlight at the tunnel’s end became visible. With one hand he slipped the cap off the dead man’s head and put it on: the silhouette would make the difference.

As the truck emerged from the tunnel, the light from a carbon-arc lamp illuminated the cab’s interior, turning the fresh blood a sickly green. The other truck followed behind. Stone took the old-fashioned, long-handled gearshift and eased it into a lower gear and accelerated. The other truck honked out a tattoo, signaling victory – we’ve done our job, congratulations – and Stone honked out a response. Throwing the truck into fifth, he turned off Prospekt Mira onto the streets of Moscow.

73

Podolsk, U.S.S.R.

The three Spetsnaz munitions experts stood on a vast field of dirt, watching a stone pyramid a quarter of a mile away in the darkness. It was a small building constructed of large blocks of granite. This was the fourth trial, and each had been completely successful.

“An amazing replica,” the first said.

“Yes,” the second replied. “Precisely the same exterior and interior dimensions. Even the stone has been chosen to duplicate the weight of the original.”

The field the three men stood on was about twenty-five miles directly south of Moscow, just outside of Podolsk: a military proving ground that had been taken over from the Red Army by the Spetsnaz in 1982. Once it had been a military airfield; now it was used exclusively for Spetsnaz testing of explosive devices.

All three had flown down on a GRU helicopter, and all would return to Moscow as soon as the final test was completed, in the early hours of Revolution Day. They stood in silence, watching.

Then there was a terrific, dreadful rumble, a great thunderstroke, a flash of white light, a whoosh. The stone structure was blown apart from within, and in a split-second nothing was left standing. The ground shook, but there was nothing to be seen except a pattern of grayish rubble scattered for hundreds of feet.

“Our man does good work,” the third one said, and the tiniest smile lit up his face.

74

Revolution Day. November 7. 12:36 a.m.

Bone-tired, scraped and bloodied, Stone drove the truck as far into the city as he dared, for a chicken truck in the center of the city was sure to be conspicuous. He had pulled off Prospekt Mira onto the ring road, Sadovaya-Spasskaya, and from there managed to find a telephone.

No one seemed to be around; in fact, the streets were completely deserted. No, not quite deserted: there was one militiaman patrolling.

He closed the booth’s door, inserted a coin, and dialed Charlotte’s apartment number. No answer again.

He tried the office number. It rang five, ten times.

“Yes?” A male voice.

“I’m looking for Charlotte,” Stone said. “This is a friend.”

There was a long pause.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. Her cameraman, perhaps? “Charlotte was supposed to be back here six hours ago. I have no idea where she is. Which is a bitch, because we’ve got a whole hell of a lot of work around here.”

Stone hung up and leaned against the glass side of the booth. They had gotten her; they had probably come to get him, and taken her instead.

It was half past midnight, but it was time to wake up a very old man and force him to help.

The alley gave Stone an idea. Every hotel he’d ever seen had a service entrance, and Russian hotels could be no exception: they could hardly unload sacks of potatoes and crates of eggs in the front.

At the back of the National Hotel was an alley where great dumpsters of trash were kept, stinking messes of decaying food. He saw at once that the kitchen workers in the hotel had to walk by the dumpsters on their way into what the Russians would call the chyorni khod, the back entrance. Even at this hour of the morning, the door was in use, and it banged loudly as night-shift employees came in and out.

Stone walked briskly, angrily. If you can’t look like a Russian, at least look like a foreigner so purposeful that no one would dare to question you. Wearing only one boot. Stone knew he could not help attracting attention.

Yet no one did question him; who would enter a hotel through the kitchen?

Once inside. Stone saw that the lobby was out of the question, but, like all hotels, the National had a back stairway, used mostly by the maids and the dezhurnayas, the women who keep the keys on each floor. Outside of one room, someone had left a pair of shoes to be polished overnight, and Stone, feeling a bit guilty, took them. The fit was not great, but it would do.

On the second floor, he easily found the Lenin Suite, marked with a brass plaque. In recent years, the Lenin Suite has been given to honored guests of the state not quite august enough to be housed at Lenin Hills or within the Kremlin.

There didn’t appear to be a guard in sight.

The old man, wrapped in a silk robe, had been sleeping. He opened the door after Stone had knocked for quite a while, and stared at the younger man.

He did not seem to register surprise.

Frank Paradiso, press attaché of the United States Embassy in Moscow and officer of the CIA, had recognized the man as Charles Stone. Once, during his brief affair with Charlotte Harper, he’d found a picture of Stone among a pile of things in one of her drawers, and he’d asked her about him. She’d been curt and dismissive.

He knew who Charles Stone was, knew from the moment he had gotten the coded cable from Langley. It had come, marked code word ROYAL, which signified an especially sensitive operation, known to fewer than a hundred people. The cable, which accompanied a description and biography of Stone, an Agency employee who had committed murder and was believed to be attempting to defect to the Russians, was from the office of the DCI, Ted Templeton. It was unattributable, but the marking on it clearly indicated it had originated with the DCI and thus had the highest authority.

The Director of Central Intelligence wanted Stone apprehended immediately.

Paradiso had sent an urgent cable the instant Stone and Charlotte had left his office, and the Agency had sent personnel to Moscow almost immediately. The men from internal security had accompanied the presidential party under the cover of State Department employees, and had arrived just minutes ago.

“How credible is this information, Frank?” asked the CIA operative. His name was Kirk Gifford, a blond, brawny forty-six-year-old.

“Very,” Paradiso said.

“What’s the source?”

Paradiso hesitated. “Forget the source for now. We’ve got just about–”

Paradiso sagged suddenly to the table as Gifford clipped him swiftly at the back of the neck with a heavy metal object that resembled a blackjack.

Gifford next jabbed a needle into Paradiso’s forearm: a short-acting benzodiazepine central-nervous-system depressant called Versed, more reliable than the Agency’s old standby, scopolamine. Versed, or midazolam hydrochloride, is a hypnotic as well as an amnesiac. When Paradiso came to, disoriented and foggy, he would have forgotten everything that had happened to him in the last day or two. Everything except for vague details that would seem like a dream.

The door to the bubble opened, and two men entered, bearing a stretcher. Each had the legal authority of United States federal marshal.

“I want him on the next plane out,” Gifford said. “I don’t care if you send him parcel post. Just get him out of Moscow.”

“Do you know why I came here?” Lehman said, sitting in a large wing chair. He seemed small in this big room, dwarfed by the grand piano.

“Yes. For Sonya. You hand over a piece of paper to Andrei Pavlichenko’s people – or is it a file? – and in return you get your daughter released. At long last.”

Lehman seemed not to have heard Stone’s reply. “So, you came to Moscow expecting to exonerate yourself,” he said, “is that it?”

“Something like that.”

Lehman seemed to find it very amusing. “Well, don’t interfere now, Charlie. You have interfered in things far more significant than you know.”

“You’re not really in much of a position to refuse me,” Stone said softly. “For your daughter’s sake.”

Lehman’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Please don’t resort to threats.”

“I don’t want to have to say anything to anybody that might disturb your arrangement.”

Lehman barely hesitated before saying, “I think you’re the one whose position is untenable.”

“Charlotte and I want safe passage out of Moscow. You have the connections and the visibility to make the necessary arrangements.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think you have the connections?”

“I don’t think, Charlie, that you’ll leave Moscow alive.”

Stone paused. He could not help admiring the old man’s finesse, even at such a difficult moment. “Will you?” he said, half-smiling.

Lehman returned the smile. “Very good.” His eyes were watery, and he seemed enormously amused. “You don’t like me, do you?” His voice was reedy, yet powerful, with the mellow tones of an oboe.

Stone said nothing.

“Things are seldom what they seem,” Lehman said archly.

Stone watched the old man, pensively. “Did you set my father up? In 1953, I mean.”

“I did what I could to help him.” He coughed violently, the sort of cough that can easily become a retch. “Is that why you’re here, Stone? History lesson? Is this what you wanted to know?”

“In part. He was innocent, wasn’t he?”

“Of course he was,” Lehman said derisively. “Jesus Christ, Stone, what do you think? You’re his son. A son’s got to have faith in his father.”

Stone was nodding. “You allowed his career to be destroyed, didn’t you?”

Lehman shook his head slowly. His mouth opened and closed a few times wordlessly. “I didn’t think–”

“You know, once upon a time I was proud to know you,” Stone said. He knew that the room was bugged, but it was too late now to make any difference.

Lehman, who could not stop shaking his head, was lost in some dark and private corner of his mind.

“Now, let me see,” Stone said. “They’ve had your daughter for all of her life, yes? And you have something.”

“It’s very late. …”

“A number of papers, am I right? An old woman who was once Lenin’s secretary told me about a ‘Lenin Testament’ that the world never knew about. Something that might have destabilized the Kremlin a few decades ago–”

“Very old news–”

“ – but more. Other bits of evidence. Proof that Beria tried to pull off a coup, with Western help.”

“Decades ago. Please don’t waste my time now. I don’t have much of it. And neither, I’m afraid, do you.”

“But that, too, is old news, as you put it. No, not entirely.”

Lehman’s attention seemed to be drifting.

“Not entirely,” Stone resumed, “because in those papers were names. Names of Beria’s aides. Young men who would later make illustrious careers for themselves, and who would scarcely want to have anyone know that they once conspired against the Kremlin. At least one person, yes?”

“Get out of my room–” Lehman said, but he was cut short by a rattling cough.

“So, you have proof that the new chairman of state security is an enemy of the state. Well, now, of course you have something on him.” He gave Lehman a fierce, blazing stare. “So why did you have to come to Moscow?”

“Anyone who knows …” Lehman began.

“Anyone who knows about Pavlichenko.”

“I know too much. …” Again his mind appeared to wander.

“But you just walked right into Pavlichenko’s trap!”

“No, damn you!” Lehman spoke with a sudden anger. “I’ve known the Soviets for almost all my life. Obviously I have papers in the hands of my attorneys in New York, detailing Pavlichenko’s past, our relations with him, our help in creating his career. The release of which would … If – if I should die before my Sonya was freed, I’ve left instructions that upon my death my attorneys would be required to make public certain papers unless my daughter Sonya were allowed to leave Russia.”

“And now? What about now?”

“I know Pavlichenko won’t allow me to leave. He can’t. I’m the witness. But I provided for that, too. My attorneys have received instructions from me that all my papers on Pavlichenko are to be made public on November 10 unless their release is stopped by either me or Sonya.” He had summoned up the energy to speak with great emphasis, and his expression was triumphant, though his words had become slurred. “And Pavlichenko knows this. He knows. It’s my failsafe. Only Sonya will be able to stop the release of this damaging information. So Pavlichenko will have to free my daughter. Only Sonya can stop the release of information he won’t want out.”

He doesn’t know, Stone suddenly realized. He doesn’t know the enormity of Pavlichenko’s plan. He doesn’t know that information made public by some white-shoe law firm in New York can have no effect on a man who has seized power the way Pavlichenko is about to. Lehman doesn’t know!

But Stone only said, “What do you mean, only Sonya?”

Lehman coughed again. A gut-wrenching cough.

“I’m dying, Stone.”

“But even if you only live for a few more years …”

“I’m dying now, Stone. Right now, before your very eyes.”

And so he was. His face was ghostly white; he had begun to fade. But it was strange: he spoke with such pride.

“They call this a ‘mercy cocktail.’ You’re too young to think about such things. They’ve used them in England for over a hundred years.” He smiled. “Liquid morphine and liquid codeine. Some other things – sugar and water and a bit of gin. The way my father died. Instead of subjecting us to a long decline. I packed the vial before I left. I knew this would happen.”

Stone only stared in amazement, speechless.

“I swallowed it shortly before you arrived. I knew when I came here I’d never leave. And with the legal mechanism already set up, as long as I didn’t allow them to take me hostage – they could do that, you know – and killed myself instead, I knew I could save Sonya. They have to let her go!” He was almost shouting now, and his eyes were afire with triumph. “For years, I couldn’t help my dear Sonya. And now … now …” He smiled, broadly, again.

Stone didn’t have the heart to tell the dying old man about what would happen, in a matter of hours, in Red Square. He couldn’t tell him that the materials in the safekeeping of his lawyers in New York were of little importance now to Pavlichenko. How could he tell the man that his dying gesture – the greatest, most unselfish gesture of his life – would be a failure?

“Lenin was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“All true,” Lehman repeated. “So he was. You know about Reilly, Sidney Reilly?”

Reilly, the British superspy who tried to overthrow the Soviet government in 1918. What did he have to do with anything? “Yes.”

“Then you know that a year after the Russian Revolution the Allies were furious at the Bolsheviks. For signing a separate peace with Germany. Decided they had to topple the Bolsheviks. Strangle the Bolshevik infant. Only way. They saw the beginnings of a Lenin cult, and they zeroed in on the only way to destroy the leadership. Eliminate the charismatic leader. The Brits sent in Reilly to assassinate Lenin, but the plot failed.”

“And you?” But Lehman ignored him.

“Warren Harding and Churchill and a whole lot of other people thought if Lenin was gotten out of the way the Bolsheviks would fall.”

“I don’t believe it,” Stone said aloud, to himself.

Lehman heard this. “Don’t believe it.” He laughed dryly. “Harding and Churchill thought, I said – they didn’t do. Stalin did. Sonya was born into this world a little, lovely hostage, and Stalin was able to secure the cooperation of the only foreigner Lenin trusted. Otherwise my daughter would die. That sort of thing happened often then – people would just disappear …”

“Foreigner?” Stone said, not understanding.

“Embalming didn’t take. Not in someone whose body was loaded with poison. Body was cremated. They made a wax dummy out of a life mask Lenin had had made for a sculpture. Stalin knew. He wanted Lenin out of the way as soon as possible – he saw the Soviet state paralyzed, and it was his chance to seize the throne. He knew that I was one of the very few people Lenin would see, even when he was terribly ill,” Lehman gasped. “Lenin saw me. Served me tea, both of us. Lenin – Lenin drank his tea extremely sweet. Stalin gave me lumps of sugar treated with a sophisticated, fast-acting poison. All I had to do was switch sugar lumps.”

“You?”

“Krupskaya wouldn’t let her husband see Stalin. I was the only way. I knew Lenin was dying anyway, after his stroke, and to hasten it would mean nothing. And Stalin would protect me – he had to, because I had his little secret: he provided the poison. So, without planning to, I facilitated the rise of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrant. He made me do it – he threatened all manner of reprisals, and I was too young to face up to him. But once you’re in with thieves, you’re in, and he always had a hold on me. Honor among thieves. For the rest of his life, and even after.”

Lehman was rambling again, his eyes almost closed. “Your father brought the papers to Sonya. The Lenin Testament and the other things. Lenin Testament … an attack on the Soviet state … by its creator … meaningless today, but probably a collector’s item … worth a lot of money. That, and a few pieces of paper that implicated Stalin … Beria … Pavlichenko, the whole lot. Folded and sealed and … dry-mounted right in behind the picture of Lenin. Then your father found out. He would have ruined everything. If I died, I wanted her to have life insurance. Had to be secret, or else Sonya would be harmed. I couldn’t let your father destroy my Sonya’s life insurance. My Sonya … Now they’ll let her go.”

“So – so you have nothing with you. No documents.”

“Sonya has them. The trade – the trade is – Sonya – for me.” Stone got to his feet, and pulled from the pocket of his coat the Nagra recorder. The thing was still working, amazingly, even after the truck nightmare. It had been recording, and he clicked it off. Lehman stared at the machine as if he didn’t understand that their entire conversation had just been taped.

But then his eyes flickered open. “Keep your machine on,” he said. “I have one more thing to tell you.”

And for the next ten minutes, Lehman spoke; and by the time Lehman had closed his eyes for the last time, Stone had sunk deep into his chair, speechless, overwhelmed by the confirmation of something he had for so long suspected. For a very long time, Stone sat, unable to cry, unable to think clearly, unable to move.

At a phone outside the National, Stone dialed Charlotte’s home number once again.

“Hello?”

“Charlotte! Oh, thank God. I’d thought–”

“Things took longer than I thought they would, but I found what you wanted. You’re not going to believe this. The head of the … network.”

The head of the Old Believers network, she meant. The tension was making her indiscreet; she was speaking on the phone too freely.

“Yes?”

“It’s Valery Chavadze.”

75

3:10 a.m.

Driving a rusty white stolen Volga, which he had hot-wired near Manezhnaya Square, Stone left Moscow’s city limits and headed southwest, in the direction of Vnukovo. He recognized the area’s name: it was where many of the Soviet elite had their dachas. He left the highway and entered a dark, densely wooded area, poorly lit, and then pulled into a narrow road that had been cut into a deep forest, a winding road beside a ravine. The Soviet elite’s dachas were in some of the most rugged, unspoiled terrain in the Soviet Union.

That Valery Chavadze was the head of an anti-government network boggled the mind. He was one of the old guard, a bulwark of the old order. Even until the 1980s, this old Stalinist holdover had still been attending Politburo meetings. There were unsubstantiated rumors that he had been influential in ousting Khrushchev.

That was what he wanted the world to think.

The world considered Valery Chavadze the very essence of the long-lived, recalcitrant Soviet leadership. But could it be that at the same time this man was a secret traitor to his own government, a dissident within the inner sanctum?

And would Chavadze have the power to block whatever it was that was surely about to happen in – what was it? – maybe eight hours?

He thought again, as he had done constantly in the last few hours, about what Lehman had told him, and he did his best to banish it.

He thought, too, of what he could not tell Lehman. The old man, dying by his own hand, would not want to hear the ultimate irony: that, after decades of careful preparation, he would not free his daughter. Pavlichenko’s final masterstroke was a cruel and devious one.

He remembered Yakov Kramer’s enormous fear.

“We need to talk, you and I,” Yakov Kramer said. “You spoke of the terrorism. The bombs – the conspiracy, you called it. I – we – must speak very openly with you. Can we trust you?”

“Yes, of course,” Stone said edgily. “What about?”

“I want to tell you about some terrorists,” Yakov began. When he had finished. Stone could barely speak, so filled was he with rage.

“Do you understand why?” Stone said, almost shouted. “Do you understand the perverted logic of this whole thing? With Sonya’s connection to Winthrop Lehman, everything is in place. It will look like an American plot orchestrated by a very powerful member of the American establishment. I must talk to Sonya. I know her father has arrived in town, and I need to talk to him. I need your help.”

Yakov sat in his armchair, cradling his scarred face in his hands.

“Now!” Stone shouted.

The night was cold and dark, illuminated faintly by a crescent moon. He downshifted, and headed along the ravine, the headlights piercing the gloom, the tall pines grotesque in relief against the dark forest to one side. He drove as fast as he dared; the unguarded ravine on his right made any real speed dangerous. But there was no time.

When the pair of headlights of the oncoming car momentarily blinded him, at first he thought nothing of it, lost in frenzied thought as he was. And then he was grabbed by fear just as the windshield exploded, shattered by a bullet from the fast-approaching car.

Stone spun the wheel, turning in the direction of the other car. He could hear the oncoming car’s brakes squeal loudly. He jabbed his fist downward at the door handle, flung it open, and dove out against the brush.

The white Volga spun wildly out of control, finally slamming into a birch tree and coming to a halt on the very edge of the ravine. The other car, Stone now recognized, was also a Volga, but a black one – an official car, he knew at once.

No. They had come for him. He had no protection, no bulletproof vest, nothing but the gun.

There was a moment’s silence, but only a moment’s, for then suddenly came a volley of shots, which slammed into the pine tree against which he had landed. He was behind it now, using the narrow tree trunk for protection, and he pulled out the Glock and fired once, twice, a third time.

Amid the staccato bursts of gunfire, Stone heard a human cry, a roar of pain cut short. One of the attackers was either dead or seriously disabled. Stone thought, his heart hammering.

His whirling mind allowed only the briefest coherent thoughts: This was a setup, his mind shouted. Chavadze – maybe even Dunayev – had set me up for a trap I just walked into like a forest animal.

There was the metallic click-click of an automatic pistol being reloaded, and then another series of shots slammed into the ground, mere inches away.

Only one of them was left now, but he was a professional. Stone was sure, and Stone didn’t stand a chance.

He had to conserve his shots. There were how many left? Thirteen? Thirteen shots to fire in the darkness against an invisible foe who was undoubtedly far more skilled than he.

Stone grew cold when he heard the powerful engine of another vehicle speeding up the narrow road from the direction Stone had come.

This was it. Reinforcements. There was simply no way he could withstand several more. He looked around wildly at the wood behind him and saw that it was impassable, the brush and trees were so dense. He would have to leap out into the road and find another exit. He would have to run.

“Viktor!” the new arrival shouted, greeting the first attacker. Only one reinforcement. Good. “Where is he?”

“Over there!” the first shouted. “Hurry!”

“I’ll take care of this,” the new arrival said.

“My orders said–”

“Your orders,” the new one said, and there was a gunshot, followed by a gagging sound. He had shot the first one, Stone saw, not comprehending.

“You!” the new arrival shouted up toward Stone. “Staroobriadets!”

Old Believer.

“Please, this way.”

The chauffeur, a gray-haired man in his early sixties with the florid complexion of a hard drinker, led Stone into the brightly lit house, which was luxuriously appointed: low, dark furniture and Oriental rugs on the floors, prayer rugs on the walls. In the entrance hall was a large grandfather clock, and seated beside it was a frail old man in a neat, dark-gray suit.

Chavadze himself.

He rose unsteadily and gave Stone a dry handclasp. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “One of my people told me you had met with the old spy in Paris, Dunayev.” He spoke in Russian, with a guttural Georgian accent, the sort of accent Stone had once heard in an old documentary film on Stalin. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, and most of all I’m sorry it took my man so long to get to you. Almost too long.”

“Your man,” Stone mused aloud. “But he was wearing a KGB uniform.”

“The KGB is not free of us,” he said. “Please, come in.”

“I apologize about the lateness of the hour, but this is an emergency.”

“Late? You forget about the hours we kept, all of us who worked and lived with Stalin. He worked throughout the night, because he preferred the night, and we did the same. At my age, it is too late to change. I always work late into the night.”

“Work?” Stone could not help asking.

“I am writing my memoirs, memoirs that will never be published, at least not in my lifetime. Oh, maybe in ten or twenty years, if things keep changing at the rate at which they are now.” The old man pursed his lips. “Gorbachev is doing good things for our country, but he is also consolidating his power, Mr. Stone. There is always a danger that we will have another Stalin. If it is not he, it will be another. And that is why we are here.”

“It was your people, I take it, in the cemetery in Paris.”

Amusement played in Chavadze’s eyes, the barest wisp of a smile animating his lips. “Yes. We had somebody waiting and watching. We heard you were meeting with Dunayev, and we knew there would be violence.”

“That was the second shot I heard.”

“It was important to protect you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Let me explain.”

“What does the password mean, ‘Staroobriadets’?”

“Will you sit down? Come this way.” They moved into a small but comfortable sitting room, furnished with low, overstuffed chairs. “You do not know who the Staroobriadtsy were? They were members of the Russian Orthodox Church who felt betrayed by the traumatic changes taking place in the church three hundred years ago. They spoke up, and they were hounded out, and they disappeared into the woods. Many burned themselves alive. But surely you know all this.”

“And some still exist,” Stone said. “But am I missing your point? You’re Old Believers. But you don’t believe in Stalinism, do you?”

“Oh, no, quite the opposite. We want to make sure Stalin never happens again.”

“And who is ‘we’?”

“We are simply the old guard. Nothing organized, nothing elaborate. An organization of dying old men who have friends still in power, a widespread network. We watch, we listen. We warn and counsel, but never directly intervene, because we have no power to do so even if we wanted. You Americans have your foreign-policy establishment, your Council on Foreign Relations; we have only the Staroobriadtsy.”

Staroobriadtsy. The word Alfred Stone had alluded to in his note. “ ‘We’ again. Who the hell is ‘we’?”

“We’re patriots. Lovers of the Soviet state. It’s imperfect, but it’s vastly better than under the czars. You Americans forget that we Russians are very different. We do not want democracy – we wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“Come on,” Stone said with a snort of derision. “You’re the old guard all right – Stalin’s old guard. You and your cohorts were responsible for administering the world’s longest-playing tyranny, were you not?”

“One of the longest-playing ones,” Chavadze agreed. “Do you know that Khrushchev was asked much the same thing once, at a Party congress? He was as guilty as any of us. There was a voice from the back of the room, asking why didn’t he speak up when he was in power, tell Stalin off? He responded, ‘Who said that?’ And there was silence. Then he said, ‘Now you understand.’ ”

“You secretly terminated the court-martial of a few heroic men who refused to participate in the massacre in the Katyn Forest.”

Chavadze was silent a moment. “Then you know. I thought that was lost deep in the Soviet archives. But, yes, I did once. You see, what happened there – the sheer brutality of the massacre – was a powerful influence on me. It completely changed my way of seeing the world, seeing my own country. I knew that true bravery in Russia means not speaking out and acting loudly but maneuvering secretly. One can do so much more.”

“Why did you agree to see me?” Stone asked abruptly. “How much do you know about what is happening?”

“That your Central Intelligence Agency has been interfering in the affairs of our state? That much is plain.”

“And M-3. You know about M-3.”

“Certainly. Our esteemed head of the KGB. We orchestrated that.”

“What? Orchestrated it? He was a source, wasn’t he? A mole? Wasn’t he – isn’t he – controlled by us?”

“The reverse, Mr. Stone. The reverse. We controlled you.”

“What?”

“That was the genius of it. We had to control the secret about Lenin, and to do that, we played upon the American government’s hopes and fears. Pavlichenko had been approached by an officer of American intelligence, and he agreed to cooperate. I don’t know why, but it was a good thing. We were thereby able to manipulate your intelligence, leach it of secrets. You wanted to believe you had a mole, we gave you a mole. You were in the midst of the reign of Senator McCarthy, and the more you tore yourself apart, ate yourselves up, the gladder we were, because we were weak. When Stalin died, we were in turmoil, so we welcomed the opportunity to use J. Edgar Hoover, use McCarthy, use Winthrop Lehman. In order to protect himself, Lehman had to convince Hoover that he was ‘running’ an agent highly placed inside Stalin’s Russia. It was all a great deception. I’m sorry your father had to be a casualty of that war, but he might have undone all our careful work. If McCarthy had known” – Chavadze gave a dry chuckle – “that he was saving the Kremlin from great devastation …”

The words echoed horribly. I’m sorry your father had to be a casualty of that war…. After what Stone had learned from Winthrop Lehman, who was also a casualty of that war …

Stone nodded slowly, dumbfounded. Everything seemed so far away for an instant, Moscow, his father’s house on Hilliard Street…

Chavadze continued speaking. “You know, it’s ironic, isn’t it?”

“Hmm?” Stone responded, a million miles away.

“That your father was caught in the spasms that began the Cold War. And you – you’re caught in the spasms that are ending it.”

“Then of course you are aware,” Stone said slowly, “that Pavlichenko is about to stage a coup, are you not?”

Chavadze shook his head. “What do you base this on?”

Stone told him, ending with the details of the CAT scan. “If Pavlichenko is following Beria’s plan, then he plans to suffer a stroke in a few hours, if he hasn’t already. Tomorrow – today – he will be absent, and then something – some sort of catastrophe – will take place.”

The old Georgian looked as if he had been struck across the face. “No,” he said. “There have been signs… the murders, the maneuvers. Things have been happening that seemed, at first, only puzzling. There was talk of reassignments that seemed to make no sense, new people brought into our embassies and consulates by Pavlichenko. Talk in our listening posts abroad of a network of émigré-killers who did not answer to the normal KGB channels – as if a separate channel were set up.”

“There’s so little time,” Stone said urgently.

Chavadze was nodding. Stone found that in his terror he was involuntarily holding his breath.

“And the deaths of people who seemed to be connected only to Pavlichenko. Lenin’s former secretary in America … Men who were present at one certain dinner at Blizhny, Stalin’s dacha. All murdered. And–”

“And what?” Stone asked, knowing from the old man’s strange expression what was to come. His stomach turned inside out.

“Your father.”

“Who killed him?” Stone asked, very quietly.

“This I know. One of our people, who serves on Pavlichenko’s house staff as a cook, managed to tap his phone line at his dacha in Vnukovo. That’s all we managed to learn. Pavlichenko ordered it.”

There was a long silence, and then Chavadze continued. “Pavlichenko was Beria’s closest, most trusted aide.”

“Yes,” Stone said. “And like Beria, like his mentor, he, too, plans a coup. But unlike Beria, Andrei Pavlichenko is extremely shrewd, extremely measured.”

Chavadze’s next words came out agonizingly slowly, as if they pained the old man. “I don’t imagine you know the method by which Beria planned to seize power.”

“Specifically, no. I don’t.”

“Oh, my Lord.”

“What?”

“I was a candidate member of the Presidium then, and so I was privy to Beria’s plans, revealed after he was executed.”

“What were they? They were the prototype, weren’t they?” Stone whispered hoarsely.

“Beria used funds that Lehman had provided him, which were therefore untraceable, to purchase a large order of high-powered explosives,” Chavadze said. “Do you know that inside Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square there exists an empty chamber that is sometimes used as an arsenal? Stalin insisted upon this when the mausoleum was designed. …”

“It can’t be …”

“In many ways it was an ingenious stroke. The explosives piled high within the small mausoleum structure, while several meters away, on top of the thing, stood all of Beria’s rivals. Sitting ducks in a sense, and all of them would be blown up.”

“Pavlichenko is using CIA plastique to accomplish the same thing,” Stone said, leaping to his feet. “A mass assassination. With not only the entire Politburo up there, but the American President as well”

Chavadze reached for a telephone next to him and dialed a number. After a moment, he spoke into the receiver: “Who is assigned to security for Lenin’s mausoleum this morning?” He began shaking his head in disbelief.

Then he cried out, slamming down the phone furiously.

“The lines have been cut! Pavlichenko must have put his people on me, his employees at the main telephone banks in downtown Moscow!”

“So they know what you’re asking about.”

“But they did not cut me off before I learned that the regular personnel have been replaced, suddenly and at the last minute, by the KGB chairman’s private guard,” he said, his eyes wide and glistening with terror.

“I need your resources now,” Stone said, “if this is to be stopped.”

“My resources!” the old man said bitterly. “I have people throughout Moscow, even in Europe. Yes, in the KGB, even in the KGB’s guards directorate, are young men who swear allegiance to the Old Believers. Family traditions are passed on to the sons and daughters. But we are powerless to fight the concentrated power of the KGB. My reach is not that great, Mr. Stone. Without my telephone, without time to summon my people, I can be of no help. Pavlichenko has contained operations so precisely that there is pitifully little we can do. My servants – my chauffeur – can take you into Moscow; maybe you and he can make the necessary connections. But now it’s a matter of sheer speed, and I’m afraid we are almost out of time.”

76

3:55 a.m.

It is extremely easy to construct a bomb. That most people are ignorant of the technique is testimony not to its difficulty but to the simple fact that few people are so inclined.

The explosives expert from the GRU had begun to make the bomb that would, he believed, avenge the murders of his parents. How strange were the twists of fate!

He labored, in the small laboratory that the Sekretariat had provided for him, late at night, for reasons of secrecy: he wanted none of his colleagues to have an inkling of what he was working on.

At this hour, much of the Aquarium was dark. He worked at a black-topped counter, without emotion.

What was peculiar was that all of the equipment with which he had been provided was American-made. The GRU’s explosives technology was every bit as sophisticated as anything made by the Americans; there was no need to use imported technology; but he did not question his orders.

Using an array of jeweler’s tools, which he took from cases on the counter, he carefully connected two lengths of wire to a small black electronic detonator, manufactured by a California company. Next he began to attach the detonator to an electrical blasting cap and a nine-volt transistor-radio battery.

Electrical blasting caps contain small charges that are detonated by means of an electrical current. Emanating from the cap were two wires, six feet long. He screwed one of the blasting cap’s wires to the detonator; the other wire he connected to one terminal of the small battery. He pushed the blasting cap into a two-and-a-half-pound block of plastic explosive. It was not critical where in the block the blasting cap went.

The explosive, he noticed, was a white C-4, manufactured in the United States. He recognized the label and the serial number: it was made by the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. He wondered idly how the Sekretariat had managed to get its hands on CIA plastique. And why.

The other wire emanating from the blasting cap he did not connect to the unused battery terminal; that would have detonated the explosion right there and then. No, this would happen when the time came, when he was ready to set the timer.

When the plastic bomb went off, the pressure in the chamber beneath Lenin’s mausoleum would instantly increase to such an extent that the three grenades he would place around the room would go off, thereby detonating the cloud of gas. He had determined that three grenades would be enough, but they would have to be a special sort of grenade that creates an explosion at an extraordinarily high temperature.

He needed white-phosphorus grenades. These, too, had been provided for him, and they were American-made. For unfathomable reasons of bureaucracy, the Soviet Army does not make them. The Sekretariat had, however, gained access to a significant supply of American M-15 grenades, smooth-bodied cylinders a bit smaller than beer cans.

He unscrewed the normal grenade fuses and then replaced them with snap-diaphragm concussion-detonation switches to which he had affixed blasting caps. These concussion switches, which are shaped like small orchestra cymbals, go off when subjected to great pressure.

Finally, he attached to the valve of the ten-kilogram cylinder of propane gas a second valve, a time-release one. Valves like these are sold through catalogues by any number of industrial-controls companies. A time-release valve may be used, for instance, to turn on a gas furnace in an office building at five o’clock in the morning, so that the place is warm by the time the employees arrive at nine.

All he would need was about two minutes in the basement of Lenin’s tomb. He would turn on the propane cylinder and set the time-release valve to begin releasing the gas at eleven in the morning on Revolution Day. Within ten minutes, the gas cloud would be big enough, rich enough with oxygen. Ten minutes, he calculated, was the proper interval. If the plastic bomb went off five minutes too soon or five minutes too late, the whole scheme would fail.

He finished making the bomb at exactly twenty minutes past four in the morning. The whole assembly fit rather neatly in the satchel, and he was quite proud of his handiwork. It would, he was certain, do the job.

77

6:32 a.m.

Slumped in the car. Stone would not allow himself to rest. Charlotte was gone. She was not in her office, not in her apartment. Stone had called repeatedly from phone booths. No answer.

And then he knew where she would be, if she had not been arrested.

During their many talks in the last few days, she’d mentioned a hiding place in Moscow, a hotel called the Red Star in the center of the city where someone she knew worked at the desk. Once, she said, she’d met there with one of her sources who needed absolute anonymity. He knew intimately how her mind worked. If she had to hide, Stone felt sure, that’s where she’d be.

Chavadze’s driver pulled the black Volga into a side street very near Dzerzhinsky Square, and Stone cautiously got out. He entered a small, dimly lit building whose peeling sign was marked with a simple red star.

A middle-aged man with gray-peppered black hair and large pouches under his eyes was working at the front desk.

“I’m looking for someone,” Stone said.

The man looked at him sternly for a moment, then smiled. “Ah, I think I may know a friend of yours,” he said.

“Charlie?” It was Charlotte’s voice. She appeared from a side room, running toward him, her arms outstretched.

“Oh, thank God,” Stone said, embracing her.

As the chauffeur drove seventy miles an hour, Charlotte sat in the back seat of the Volga, clutching Stone. “When I left my apartment to go to the office,” she explained, “I saw a paddywagon, one of the white vans that had once taken me away, and I knew it was no coincidence. So I wheeled around and ran as fast as I could. The Red Star was the only place I could think of to hide.”

Stone was sitting next to her, and he kissed her. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said. “We need you. I need you. Badly.”

“Thanks,” she said softly. “But Lehman–”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He knew he was never going to make it out of Moscow. I went to see him, asked his help. He took something.”

“Took something? What are you saying?”

“He killed himself. He died right in front of me.”

“Lehman’s dead?”

Stone took Charlotte’s hand and squeezed hard. “Once he meant a great deal to me,” he said, and stopped, but something in his voice indicated to her that there was something else.

“What is it, Charlie?”

“Later.”

Charlotte suddenly looked up at the road and addressed the driver: “I know a shortcut that’ll save us ten minutes. Ten minutes we’re going to need.”

The driver shook his head, unused to being ordered about by a woman. “You want to drive?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Just do what I tell you, okay? I know all the side streets of this goddamned city.” More quietly, she added: “I knew someday it’d come in handy.”

The limousine pulled up a deserted side street in what Stone could see was a poor neighborhood of southern Moscow.

“That’s it,” Stone said, and the car came to a halt. He kissed Charlotte quickly and got out. “Hurry,” he said, and the Volga was gone.

“Careful,” she called out.

As Stone walked closer to the garage, he saw Stefan Kramer. “What are you waiting for?” he asked the young Russian. “Let’s go in!”

“I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible.”

“What’s the matter, Stefan? What is it?”

“It wasn’t here before,” he said, leading Stone to the side door of Fyodorov’s garage. The garage in which his old cellmate had stored the explosives.

The paint on the door was peeling, and what little paint was there was dark with engine grease. Glinting against the doorjamb was a large, sophisticated steel padlock.

“This is new,” Stefan said. “They must have put it on just recently.”

Stone looked at the lock, and then back at Stefan. “I’m pretty good with locks,” he said.

78

6:57 a.m.

Shortly before seven o’clock on the morning of Revolution Day, two men from the GRU were driven to the side of Lenin’s mausoleum.

Red Square was dark and deserted, with a lone militiaman walking across the cobbled expanse, several more sentries scattered at the perimeter. The two uniformed honor guards stood unmoving in front of the entrance to Lenin’s mausoleum.

The younger man, carrying the bomb apparatus in a green military-issue gym bag, was wearing the vivid blue uniform of the Kremlin Guard. As he and his senior officer walked around to the rear entrance, the guard saluted. A security check, the guard would think. That was all.

“Good morning, sir,” the guard said.

“Good morning,” the older GRU man said. “Is the basement arsenal open?”

“No, sir. You gave orders that no one be allowed in. It is locked.”

“Who has the key?”

“Solovyov, sir.”

“He’s downstairs?”

“Yes, sir.”

They entered, and one level down came upon the next guard, who bolted to attention.

“Please give me the key to the arsenal,” the senior man ordered.

“Yes, sir,” the guard said, and removed a key from a large ring attached to his belt.

The two men entered the arsenal, closing the door behind them.

“Get to work,” said the colonel general. His voice echoed against the concrete walls. The explosives expert set down the bag and removed its contents: the plastic bricks, the canister of gas, the blasting caps and grenades and batteries, and the many yards of wires. His face betrayed no emotion as he put the canister upright on the floor in the center of the room and began placing the grenades along the periphery.

He adjusted the gas-release valves. Finally, he switched on the black electronic detonator and punched in 11:10 a.m., then made the last electrical connection.

“It’s all ready,” he announced. “Right now it’s twelve minutes after seven. The Politburo assembles atop the mausoleum at ten o’clock. At eleven, the gas will begin to be released from the tank. It will slowly fill the room with an oxygen-rich, highly combustible cloud. At ten minutes past eleven o’clock precisely, the plastic charge will be detonated, and the cloud will explode. And the structure will be destroyed.”

“Very good.” The older man walked across the room, inspected the wiring closely, glanced at the connections to the plastic explosive, a grayish brick wrapped in clear plastic, and paid particular attention to the time-release valves attached to the propane tank. At last he looked up. “Everything is perfect,” he said. He looked around the chamber for one last time. “Everything is perfect.”

It was seven-fifteen.

By seven o’clock in the morning, the chairman of the KGB had been rushed, in his Zil limousine, to the Kremlin Clinic on Granovsky Street. He could not move his right side, he complained, and he was attended to immediately by the esteemed neurologist Dr. Konstantin Belov. After a hurried examination. Dr. Belov confirmed that the chairman’s vital signs indicated a stroke, and ordered Pavlichenko transferred to the high-security clinic outside Moscow.

When the ambulance orderlies arrived to take him to Kuntsevo, two pleasant-faced young men who surely had no idea what was about to befall their country, Pavlichenko looked up from his hospital bed and smiled.

He knew that if he remained too long at the Kremlin Clinic he would be vulnerable, a sitting duck. That was why he had come up with this ruse: like a pea in a shell game, he would not remain in one place too long. At Kuntsevo he had arranged to be met by a small convoy of his forces. And in four hours or so, security precautions would be of no concern.

The orderlies lifted him gingerly from the bed and eased him onto the folding gurney they had brought in, apparently awed by the responsibility of wheeling the chairman of the KGB down the clinic’s hallway, into the elevator, and into the ambulance. They seemed nervous and, for people who did this sort of thing all the time, even awkward. Pavlichenko was always amused by the effect his eminence had on ordinary people.

He wondered whether these two men would be among the hundreds of emergency medical workers who would soon be called to Red Square, sirens screaming, to carry the burnt remains of the members of the Politburo. Would anyone survive? He thought it unlikely.

The elevator stopped at the ground floor, and Pavlichenko was wheeled out into the cold, bright morning of Revolution Day.

9:00 a.m.

Miles of red bunting lined the streets, punctuated by giant portraits of Lenin and placards with the defiant, hortatory rhetoric of official Soviet propaganda: DEMOCRACY, RESTRUCTURING, SPEED-UP! and LENIN IS MORE ALIVE THAN ALL THE LIVING! and TOWARD THE RADIANT FUTURE OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY, WIDESPREAD WELL-BEING, AND LASTING PEACE!

Preparations for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution had begun weeks in advance. Posters had gone up in all public buildings, and red flags were everywhere, even on some cars; workers had struggled with pulleys and ropes to raise giant posters pasted onto wooden frames – fifty-foot-long banners of enormous supermen and super-women exhorting Russians to fulfill the decisions of the latest party congress.

By nine o’clock in the morning, an enormous crowd had assembled near the Gorky Park metro station, the last stop on the subway, after which people had to walk toward Red Square. University groups waving red flags filed past athletes in uniforms and others pushing rubber-wheeled floats. A delegation of workers from the Red Proletariat Ball Bearing Factory marched alongside workers from Watch Factory Number 1, carrying good old-fashioned, hard-line banners that read WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE, ALL EFFORTS TO THE BATTLE FOR PEACE, and ONWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM. Outside the perimeter of Red Square were Uzbeks wearing black-and-white skullcaps, gypsy women with cloth sacks on their backs, and little girls with stiff white ribbons in their hair.

A giant map of the world hung on the Kremlin wall above Lenin’s mausoleum. Icons of Marx, Lenin, and Engels had been placed on the side of GUM, the state department store that faced the square. The red brick Victorian structure of the Historical Museum, on another side of the square, was covered with portraits of the Politburo members, and a banner that read HAIL THE LENINIST FOREIGN POLICY OF THE U.S.S.R.!

In the center of all this, of all the commotion and all the triumphal posters, stood the dark-red mausoleum, looking tiny and insignificant, a child’s toy.

Soon, Pavlichenko thought as he lay on the ambulance stretcher, the Politburo members, wearing their red ribbons, would be climbing the mausoleum. In just over two hours, the tomb would be a ball of fire, hurling chunks of porphyry and labradorite, granite and concrete into the dense crowd, killing hundreds of people.

He lay strapped in the stretcher, being hoisted toward the ambulance – play-acting, as he knew he must. He hoped he was convincing.

He remembered the ailing Konstantin Chernenko standing atop the tomb in February of 1984, presiding at Yuri Andropov’s funeral. The day was ice cold, and you could see clouds of frozen breath coming from the leaders’ mouths. Pavlichenko, not yet ascended to the Politburo, watched from the privileged guests’ section as the Spassky Tower bells chimed noon and Chernenko, not terribly bright and emphysemic on top of it all, looked around, uncertain what to do, and then Pavlichenko – and thousands of others – could hear Andrei Gromyko’s voice over the loudspeakers instructing the new leader: “Don’t take off the hat.”

What fools the Russian rulers were!

The orderlies lifted Pavlichenko into the back of the ambulance and locked the gurney and the intravenous stand into place. A minute later, the ambulance was moving, its siren wailing shrilly. The driver and his assistant looked back at him nervously, probably wondering what had happened to the KGB leader. Pavlichenko lay on the stretcher, seemingly napping.

Their destination, Kuntsevo, was fifteen miles outside Moscow, on the Minsk Highway. Once it had been Stalin’s dacha; it was where Stalin had died. But in 1953 it wasn’t a hospital and had no medical equipment whatsoever. The Great Leader had died with virtually no medical technology to sustain his life. They had even put leeches on his temples.

Kuntsevo

For a week or so, he would rule the Soviet Union from his hospital bed, just as Yuri Andropov had done for six months in 1983. For much of 1983, Kuntsevo was the Kremlin. With the rest of the world ignorant of the state of Andropov’s health, he spoke to his fellow Politburo members on the phone, seeing only the KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, using him as a messenger boy to the outside world.

This time, Pavlichenko would have the assistance of forty or so trusted assistants, poised throughout Russia, ready to do his bidding. The Sekretariat was prepared to release immediately the irrefutable evidence that would link the U.S. National Security Council with the attack.

It would all happen in a few hours.

The ambulance screamed down the middle lane of the highway and soon came to a halt.

Had they arrived so soon? The ambulance had made a turn and had stopped.

Pavlichenko strained to see the stone walls topped with barbed wire that surrounded Kuntsevo, but the windows of the ambulance were too high. All he could see were streetlights.

Streetlights.

They weren’t in Kuntsevo at all – there were no streetlights in Kuntsevo.

9:20 a.m.

The black Volga had driven around for almost an hour, searching for a way to penetrate the heavy security that surrounded central Moscow. The headquarters of the GRU, the Soviet military-intelligence branch, was inaccessible. Every ten feet there seemed to be KGB guards; the normally tight Revolution Day security had gotten even tighter, with the presence of the American President and his party.

Only those who were part of official delegations were permitted into the square, whose entry points were overseen by rows of grim-faced KGB guards in gray uniforms with the red letters “BB” on their shoulders. They were called the VV soldiers, the Vnutrenniye Voiska, or internal troops, harvested not from Moscow but from Russian villages, and they were one hundred percent Russians – not a Moslem or Mongol face among them.

There was no way to get to the commandant of the mausoleum; it was impossible. They were left with one strategy: the driver would have to negotiate with one of the guards, if they could find one who was not KGB: Red Army, perhaps, or GPU, for they were all out in force this morning. If he could persuade one of them of the urgency – persuade a soldier to talk to his superior officer, and maybe one would have the good sense to listen.

“Over there,” the driver said. He pointed at a small gaggle of Red Army soldiers.

“Go,” Charlotte said.

He accelerated, the wheels squealing, until they were abreast of the soldiers. He rolled down the window and said, “Where is your commanding officer?”

A voice replied, but it was not one of them. It came from the other side of the car: a KGB guard was fast approaching. “What is your business, comrade?”

“I need to talk to one of these fellows’ commanders,” the chauffeur replied.

The guard arched his eyebrows. “What is your business?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Charlotte said. She sat in the front seat, instinctively slumping down as the guard approached and peered into the window.

There seemed to be a spark of recognition in the guard’s eyes, and he looked even more closely. “Stop this car, officers,” he told the others. “Arrest them.”

“Now,” Charlotte whispered to the driver. “Up ahead. That group of MVD militsiya. Do it!”

With a bewilderingly swift motion, the driver slammed the car into gear and barreled ahead, knocking the KCB guard to the ground. A bullet was fired into the back windshield, but only the surface of the bulletproof glass cracked. They had made it the hundred feet or so to the next checkpoint, which did not seem to have any KGB guards in attendance. Charlotte rolled down her window and, quickly glancing at the epaulets on the men’s uniforms, knew these were indeed MVD, Ministry of Internal Affairs.

“Arrest me,” Charlotte called out.

79

9:40 a.m.

The chairman of the KGB reached for the pistol he had concealed in the large front pocket of his hospital robe. “Where are we?” he asked the driver warningly.

The orderly sitting next to the driver answered. “Outside Moscow, sir.”

“What’s going on?” He curled his forefinger around the trigger. The charade was no longer necessary, so he struggled at the straps, trying to free himself. “We’re not in Kuntsevo,” he said, drawing the gun from his robe and pointing it at Stefan, “and I suggest you take me there immediately.”

But Stefan Kramer and a close friend, Zhenya Svedov, the son of one of Yakov Kramer’s fellow prisoners, swung themselves out of their seats and were immediately joined by a third, who leaped out from beneath a stretcher behind the front seat: Charles Stone was out of the ambulance, slamming the doors behind him.

Pavlichenko sat up and fired a shot, spider-webbing the windshield.

“I don’t suggest you fire again,” Stone spoke in Russian, in a clear, strong voice. He and the two others had spread themselves out at a distance around the vehicle: Stone aiming his Glock on one side; Stefan on the other, aiming a revolver his father had kept since World War II. The chairman of the KGB could see at once that he was outnumbered, and for a moment he froze.

Stone watched Pavlichenko, who seemed relaxed and confident, his gun casually pointed, as if this whole thing were but a brief interruption that would soon be over.

Of course it had been a simple matter for Stefan to get the ambulance and the uniforms, but Stone had been stunned at how simple it had been to go right into the Kremlin Clinic with no security credentials at all, just an ambulance operator’s uniform. Even in the Soviet Union, hospital security was lax: speed in saving lives displaced the Soviet instinct for security.

Stone had picked the deadbolt on the garage with improvised tools selected from Stefan’s medical-assistance bag: a long metal curette which he bent to simulate a torsion wrench, and a long steel pin used for testing “pinprick sensation.” Quite an assortment of explosives and detonators had been left there, obviously in order to implicate the Kramers in the Red Square bombing.

Knowing that Pavlichenko had readied a room at Kuntsevo for later that day, and that the CAT scan would appear to have been done at the central Kremlin Clinic on Granovsky Street, Stefan had theorized that Pavlichenko would have put in a call for an ambulance. This was confirmed by Chavadze’s information: a bed was being readied for a Politburo member this morning at Kuntsevo.

And Stone and Stefan, joined by Stefan’s friend Zhenya Svetlov, had managed to arrive first, before the real ambulance.

“Who are you?” Pavlichenko asked tranquilly. “A foreigner, it must be; I can hear that. Let me urge you to surrender at once. Do you realize the gravity of what you’re doing? I think you may not know that you’ve abducted a member of the Soviet government. Please be thoughtful and put down your weapons.”

From the right side of the ambulance came the voice of Charlie Stone. “And not just any member. A traitor within the government.”

Pavlichenko shook his head and laughed gently. “You are dangerous, crazy people, and I am afraid you are terribly deluded. I urge you not to speak such nonsense to me.” So close, so very close to the end, and this. Who were these people? Not ordinary MVD, probably not GRU.

Pavlichenko had not fired a gun in years, even decades, not since KGB Vysshaya Shkola arms instruction. But he knew that combat drew upon not just weapons but also psychology. These men were young, and they seemed not to be professionals. If they could not be intimidated by the enormous power of Pavlichenko’s office, they could certainly be outthought, outmaneuvered. He was strong; they were weak.

“If you insist upon going through with this charade,” Pavlichenko said, shaking his head sadly, “please be my guest and do so, but I warn you that the might of the entire Soviet Union will be massed against you. You may harm one man, but you will not survive.” The three men had not shifted their positions; two guns remained leveled at him from either side, and he kept his pointed at the foreigner to his right. “Terrorism is a seductive thing, I imagine. You three no doubt think that by taking a member of the Politburo hostage you will change the world. But please understand that taking my life will make no difference in the end.”

“I know about M-3,” Stone said. “I know about how a young aide to Beria was propelled to power. With the help of some cynical Americans. Who didn’t know how naive they were being.”

“You are quite mad,” the KGB chairman said. “Who are you? CIA? Don’t make a mistake your Agency and your country will surely regret.”

“Interesting,” Stone said, “to meet you after such a long journey. A long journey for both of us, I imagine. Now, lower your gun. You’re outnumbered now. It’s that simple.”

Pavlichenko did not lower his gun. He watched, his eyes moving slowly back and forth, assessing the situation, probing for the weak spots. The idiots had to be taken seriously, talked down. One was foreign, probably American. But the others – Russians, surely? Were they CIA? Or – yes. The CIA employee Stone. Of course. “I admire your bravery,” he said gently. “But come now. Kidnapping the chairman of the KGB? I don’t know what goals your service wants to achieve, but you must understand, now that you have done it, how foolish you’re being. Brave, yes, but foolish.”

“Put down the gun,” Stone said. “We know about the mausoleum. We can get you to a telephone so you can countermand the orders – there’s still time, I believe. Or we can get you to Red Square right away, if you prefer.”

An edge of desperation had crept into the chairman’s voice, despite the gentle, confident tone he was now assuming. “I can offer you amnesty. I will allow the CIA to arrange your removal from the Soviet Union. That is a very generous offer.”

“Please don’t force me to kill you,” Stone said. “I’ve been forced to kill before, and I’m quite willing to do so once more.”

Stefan began to say something, but was silenced by Stone’s glare. Not a word, Stone had instructed him. Neither Stefan nor Svetlov was to speak. This was to be Stone’s operation entirely.

“There is an old Russian saying,” the chairman said. “ ‘A man who is buried before his time will live longer.’ ” As he talked, he slowly, slowly, turned the gun directly at the American and got the man’s head within his sights.

“All right,” Stone said. “Place your gun down on the seat in front of you. Carefully. Know that if you make any sudden moves you can only hit one of us, and then you will immediately be killed. At the same time, we will place our weapons down on the hood of the car. Agreed?”

Pavlichenko nodded. “What do you want?”

“We want to take you into Red Square,” Stone said. “As simple as that. You will issue the proper instructions, and then we will release you.”

“Fair enough.” He extended his gun on the flat of his hand, moving it slowly toward the front seat, leaning forward as he did so.

“Carefully,” Stone said. “Remember, there are two guns trained on you. You have one. We want to be fair about this.” He, too, placed his pistol on his palm and moved it toward the ambulance’s hood.

“Drop both of them,” Pavlichenko ordered. The men were not murderers, he realized with relief. They had assessed the odds, knowing that they would never escape. They were being foolish, of course, but they could not know how foolish.

“Now,” Stone said. Stefan let his revolver fall to the ground. Stone dropped the gun on to the car, and at the moment it clunked onto the metal, bouncing once, Pavlichenko dropped his on the front seat, and leaned back.

“Well, then,” the chairman said. He smiled, knowing what would soon happen to these three men, and he glanced at the American. For a moment, he thought he saw a pinpoint of red light.

He looked again: yes, a red pinpoint of light.

And then he saw what the American was holding aloft: a remote transmitter, the sort of thing one used to detonate a car bomb.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Pavlichenko asked. His composure was shot through with fear; his voice had actually begun to tremble. The American was edging his thumb over to the white button on the side of the device. “Who gave you that?” he asked. “Was it someone within my organization? That’s a KGB-issue device, isn’t it?”

“We’re all chess pieces to you, aren’t we?” Stone asked, his thumb millimeters away from the detonator. He watched Pavlichenko sitting on the edge of his stretcher in the ambulance, saw the chairman’s powerful body, his unnaturally dark hair, his pasty, coarse complexion and sturdy features. So this was the man. What did it take to claw your way to the top of Moscow’s slipperiest pole? And then to plot to bring it all down around you? “The Kramers, me, my father – we’re all part of your plan, isn’t that right? You never knew my father, did you?”

“Whoever gave you that must surely be the person who wishes to bomb Lenin’s mausoleum,” Pavlichenko said. “Do you know who he is? We can find him. I’m a sick man, but you can help me. Get me to a phone and I can call some people. We can stop this thing together.” He smiled. “No, my friend, I have no idea who your father was.”

Yes. Pavlichenko knew Alfred Stone was dead. Pavlichenko had ordered Alfred Stone s death.

Everything came together. The anger was almost kaleidoscopic, the flash of emotions hypnotic. Stone felt a sudden calm, remembering his father’s murder, remembering Paula. He remembered Lehman, feeling a newfound compassion. This man, this very ordinary man in the back of the ambulance, this madman …

Pavlichenko was now speaking directly to Stefan. “You can help your Motherland in a time of need,” he said to the Russian. He suddenly leaped forward and snatched his gun, firing at the Russian behind him, but the shots shattered the side and rear windows of the ambulance and cut through the air, harmlessly. He whirled around and grabbed the handle of the ambulance’s back door.

Locked.

“How did you know we meant a bomb in the mausoleum?” Stone said, his voice calmly inquisitive. “We said nothing about a bomb.”

Pavlichenko aimed his pistol at the American and listened for a moment, overtaken by curiosity.

Stone clutched the live transmitter and moved his thumb over toward the white button. His voice was choked with emotion. “This is for my father,” he said, and pressed the button, detonating the bundle of dynamite affixed to the underside of the ambulance’s gas tank, setting off a colossal, thundering explosion, leaving a roaring ball of fire where the car had been a moment before.

It was 9:55.

9:56 a.m.

Sonya Kunetskaya, half mad with apprehension, returned to her apartment building. She had gone out to make a call from a pay phone, a call to her father. To tell him what she’d just learned from Charlie. But there was no answer at his hotel room, and she wondered whether he had left to go to Red Square for the Revolution Day ceremony. He had said he was not going to go. Where was he?

She had to talk to her father once more; and she had to talk to Charlie, to tell him face to face what she had been afraid to tell him.

A green van was parked in front of the building, its license plates unmistakably belonging to the KGB.

Sonya knew. They had come for Yakov, Stefan – and her. No, please. Her knees felt weak; she could barely walk; but somehow she got herself to the entryway, and then stopped.

She heard voices from the stairwell. Men’s voices, echoing.

She turned and walked out of the stairwell and across the courtyard, concealed herself behind a column, and watched.

A cluster of figures emerged. A KGB soldier, and another one, and – and Yakov. Handcuffed. And another KGB soldier.

She wanted to scream. All she wanted to do was to run to him, to save them, but even in her crazed grief she knew that was impossible.

They will arrest me, she thought, and then it will all be over.

If I want to help Yakov, I must run. I must not let them get me, too.

Did they get Stefan?

No, she thought, as she edged her way along the apartment building. No, please. Protect us all.

On the two occasions a year when the Soviet Politburo reviews parades in Red Square from atop Lenin’s tomb, they normally emerge from the Kremlin through a door just behind the mausoleum and mount the porphyry steps outside. There have been times, however, when, for reasons of inclement weather or the ill health of a leader, the members have instead chosen to take the underground passageway from the basement of the Council of Ministers building. In his later years, Leonid Brezhnev favored approaching the tomb this way, because the several underground passages that lead to the mausoleum are heated, and one of them even contains a toilet, a grave necessity when one is standing in the cold for four or five hours.

This day, for reasons not of poor weather or poor health but of security, the members of the Politburo, joined by the American President and Secretary of State and their wives, assembled in the Council of Ministers building and descended to the underground passage.

There had been too many incidents of terrorism in Moscow, and the Politburo was determined to see that nothing whatsoever happened today. The summit had officially begun, and the meetings would begin in earnest tomorrow. The Politburo wanted everything to go off without a hitch.

The twelve Politburo members, the ten candidate members, and the four Americans were accompanied by five security officers from the MVD, dressed, like the others, in heavy woolen coats and karakul or sable hats, with large red ribbons pinned to their left breasts.

It was nine-fifty-seven.

There is no elevator in the mausoleum itself; the group climbed the interior staircase, which led to the outside parapet of the tomb. They filed up the stairs and around to the front. Gorbachev and the President of the United States, the foreign minister and the Secretary of State took their assigned positions in the center of the line, before the five microphones.

At ten o’clock exactly, the Spassky Tower bells rang, followed immediately by a loud, metallic, recorded voice that proclaimed: “Glory to the great Lenin! Glory! Glory! Glory!”

And with a chorus of cheers from the thousands of assembled spectators, the ceremony had begun.

10:25 a.m.

For a moment, the MVD guard almost laughed. He saw a small, bespectacled middle-aged woman running toward him, waving her hands, shouting something. The militsiyoner stood with nine of his comrades at the entrance to Red Square by the red brick Historical Museum.

Now he could make out what she was shouting: “You must stop this! There is going to be a bomb! You must help!”

The man grabbed the middle-aged woman just as she tried to break through the barricade. “How did you get this far?” he asked her roughly, shoving her away. “Get out of here before you get killed.”

“No!” Sonya said. “I need to talk to someone in charge. It’s important – you have to listen!”

The militsiyoner was tapped on the shoulder by one of the KGB guards. “What is it, comrade?”

“This crazy woman keeps shouting something.”

“Let me talk to her.” He approached the woman. “Tell me what the problem is.”

“There’s a bomb in the mausoleum. It might go off any minute. I’m not crazy. Listen to me!”

“Come with me,” the guard said. “I want you to talk to my commander.” He pulled her by the elbow toward the far side of the Historical Museum, signaling to his comrades that it was all right, and brought her to the narrow passageway between two buildings. “Now, tell me what you’ve heard.”

“Oh, thank God,” Sonya said, and then she saw that the KGB guard had drawn his revolver and was pointing it at her chest. “No, please–”

She looked plaintively at him, then felt a flash of anger. Please, God, save me, she thought. Save me, save Yakov, save Stefan.

Please don’t shoot.

She stared, unable to speak, shaking her head slowly.

And the guard fired, once, into her heart. The noise of the shot was drowned out by a momentary crescendo of the marching music that came from Red Square.

At exactly eleven o’clock, the valve timer on the small tank of propane that sat in the center of the arsenal beneath Lenin’s mausoleum clicked, and the gas began to jet forth with a hiss that filled the room.

80

11:02

Ilya M. Rozanov, a Kremlin Guard, would have greatly preferred to be out there, in front of the mausoleum, taking part in the changing of the guard. But he had done his time a few months ago, changing the guard in the dark of night, marching in the bitter cold and standing ramrod-straight before the tomb’s entrance for almost an hour and not flinching.

It was too bad he could not have had that proud assignment today. It was the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the biggest holiday of the year, when all of Russia – all of Stavropol, his home town – would be watching Lenin’s mausoleum on their TV sets. And the world, too: for the first time ever, the news said, the President of the United States of America would join the Politburo atop the tomb to pay honor to the Revolution.

But there were worse assignments than patrolling the back of the mausoleum.

It even had its thrills. He was able to see the members of the Politburo emerge from the bowels of the mausoleum and march around to the front to take their places on the reviewing stand. He even thought he might have glimpsed the American President!

True, he had hoped to see them walk right by him, through the door in the Kremlin wall, past all the graves, but for some reason they had chosen to take the underground route. Still, he was able to make out some of the dignitaries standing in the Important Persons area on either side of the tomb.

The Kremlin Guard, of which this man was a member, was sometimes known straight-facedly as the Palace Guard, the Okhrana. In their smart, well-pressed blue uniforms and karakul hats, they were the cream of the crop, the guards in the position of highest trust in the nation’s capital.

It was bitter cold, and Rozanov would have liked to warm up in the basement arsenal of the mausoleum when his shift ended, but for some curious reason the arsenal had been off-limits for the last few days.

There had been a lot of talk about it, and his superior officer, the Kremlin commandant, who was a KGB man, was furious. Why in hell had Pavlichenko gone and done such a thing as ordering the arsenal closed? Security precautions, Pavlichenko had said! But his boss, the Kremlin commandant, had lasted through four KGB chiefs and far more general secretaries, and he resented this intrusion into what he considered his domain. The arsenal was always in use on these state occasions – for gathering and giving orders, for storing ammunition, all that sort of thing. And now the guards had to gather to receive their orders outdoors, next to the Kremlin wall. It was unheard of.

But the guard cared for one reason: it meant that the only place he could warm his hands was in the bathroom several levels below ground, under the mausoleum. An inconvenience. The politics of it he couldn’t care less about.

He waved at another guard to signal that the next shift was up, and he walked to the back door of the mausoleum. He could hear the endless speech of whoever was talking, followed by the unison cheers, echoing in the square.

And then, as he entered the mausoleum and walked toward the staircase that went down to the bathroom, he noticed something peculiar. The odor of gas: an overpowering stench. The farther down the stairs, the stronger the smell got. It seemed to be coming from the arsenal, and he wondered if anyone else had sensed it. It smelled like the sort of gas that was highly flammable.

In front of the arsenal’s closed doors stood a guard brought over from the KGB, not one of the Palace Guard.

“Hey,” Rozanov called to the KGB mannequin. “You smell that?”

The guard turned, took note of Rozanov’s uniform, and ventured: “You think it’s poisonous? I’ve smelled it for the last ten minutes or so.”

“Gas,” Rozanov said, coming closer. “It’s coming from inside there.” He pointed.

“Stay back,” the guard said, suddenly menacing.

“It’s probably poisonous,” Rozanov said. “Could kill you. Let’s take a look.” He came closer still.

“Back,” the guard said. “My orders are not to let anyone in.”

“Look, comrade,” Rozanov said more stiffly. “Your orders are not to stand there like a moron if there’s a gas leak.”

The guard seemed to consider this.

“Let’s take a look. Who knows, you find a gas leak, you get a commendation. Maybe a promotion, right? Pavlichenko admires a little initiative in times of crisis.”

The guard relented. “All right, but quick. Someone else could come by, and I’m dead. Our orders are to shoot anyone who enters the room on sight.” He turned around and slowly unlocked the double metal doors. “Shoot first, ask questions later,” he elaborated unnecessarily.

The arsenal was dark, illuminated partially by the light from the outside corridor. The stench of gas was overpowering, and the air in the room was hazy. Rozanov could hear a distinct, loud hiss.

“Don’t touch that!” Rozanov shouted when the KGB guard reached for the light switch. “This place is full of gas! A spark from the light could set this off.”

And then he noticed the tank, in the center of the room, from which the hiss was coming. And then the wires that ran throughout the room, and the blocks of plastic explosive, and the grenades. A bomb? Here?

“What the fuck–?” was all he had time to say as he wheeled around and was bayoneted in the throat by a second KGB guard, whose form was suddenly framed in the arsenal’s doors.

So much seemed to happen in unison at the Revolution Day ceremonies in Red Square, Admiral Mathewson noticed.

Squeezed into the dignitaries’ section, he had an unrivaled view of the mausoleum, maybe ten yards away.

Everything was synchronized. A man in a gray suit, a parade marshal, stood on one of the lower balustrades of the mausoleum, directing the crowd, instructing it when to cheer. Two open limousines careered through the square, one carrying the commander of the Moscow district, the other carrying the minister of defense, and as they passed, the serried ranks of soldiers chanted Ooorah! Ooorahl The troops, thousands of them, turned as a man, mechanical as robots.

Then the tanks moved in, the missile launchers with their thick rubber tires, the machine-gun carriages, drawn by four horses – a homage to the old days, surely – all rattled across the cobbled square, which was filled with blue-gray exhaust fumes.

The crowd, chanting agitatedly but joylessly, red ribbons pinned to their breasts, were unaware of the extensive security precautions, Mathewson knew: the squads of soldiers with automatic rifles gathered in the underground passageways outside the square, the plainclothes-men standing in the bleachers astride the mausoleum, wearing earplugs and bulging guns beneath their coats. Security for the summit was tight.

Mathewson watched his President up there, waving and smiling broadly, and felt a flush of pride. For the first time, a president was paying respects to the Russian Revolution. The Cold War was definitely over.

At shortly after eleven, several little girls with bows in their hair climbed the mausoleum steps to hand cellophane-wrapped bouquets of red carnations to the members of the Politburo, bouquets supplied by Gorbachev’s office staff.

Mathewson watched the Politburo members, looking bored atop the tomb, their right hands extended in a weary salute. A nearby mother – clearly the wife of an important official – was holding up her child and whispering excitedly, “Can you see Gorbachev? That’s Gorbachev! And there’s the President of the United States!”

Colonel Nikita Vlasik of the MVD watched Charlotte Harper with sad gray eyes and decided that maybe he believed her extraordinary story.

This was the man who had once – it seemed long ago, though it was mere weeks – arrested her. The man who had given her advice on how to stay out of trouble. Charlotte felt a strange kinship with him.

He nodded without smiling. “You know,” he said, as he gestured to his chief lieutenant, “you remind me even more of my daughter. Only you and she would do something as foolhardy as you’ve just done, breaking through a KGB barricade.

“Vanya,” he said to his lieutenant, “we have not a second to waste.”

It was 11:03.

By 11:05, the KGB guard had locked the arsenal door once again, leaving the dead body crumpled inside. He had orders to follow. Everything smelled like gas, the arsenal and everything outside it, and as the guard stood watch to make sure no one else intruded, he thought he was going to be sick.

Inside the arsenal, the digital numbers on the electronic detonator indicated that six minutes remained.

The propane continued to hiss loudly out of the cylinder.

At 11:07, a team of MVD militiamen, bearing axes, chemical fire-extinguishers, and the assorted other equipment of the bomb squad, emerged from the door in the Kremlin wall directly behind the mausoleum. In order to avoid attracting too much attention, they had swung around into the Kremlin and entered from this side, but even so their presence caused a stir in the reviewing stands on either side of the tomb. There was a line of them – nine militiamen, to be exact – and they ran toward the mausoleum.

When they reached it, they split up to search.

But they were not diverted for long. The smell was overpowering now. All of the mausoleum stank of propane, and within forty-five seconds, seven of the militiamen had located the source.

The KGB guard saw the militiamen running toward him, and he raised his pistol and fired, but he was overwhelmed by gunfire.

The electronic detonator read 11:09.

With the aid of an ax they were able to sever the lock and force the arsenal doors open. The place stank.

The militiamen, experts in their work, at once saw the bomb apparatus and trod over the bodies in their haste to find some way to disconnect it.

The men coughed, overcome by the fumes.

There was no time!

Several of the men collapsed on the floor from inhaling the propane; they hadn’t all brought masks – who could have known? There were seconds remaining, literally seconds, and the wiring was such a mess, such a tangle, that even tearing at it as they did seemed to do nothing to stop the maddening, terrifying, hypnotic reddish flashing of the digital readout, the numbers that rushed toward 11:10. They could see the target time on a separate readout, the precise time at which the small black detonator would click the circuit open, and the plastic explosives–

Tear the wires out of it! Pull the plastique away from the electrical current! But there were too many blocks of explosive.

It couldn’t possibly be done in eight seconds. The whole thing would detonate and they and the mausoleum and the world leaders who stood unawares, mere yards above, would be incinerated….

At 11:09:55, one of the militiamen spotted the connector and dove for the wiring, wrenched the leads apart, end from end.

Would it …?

“Stand back!” a voice shouted.

The clock’s digits froze. Lying on the floor, surrounded by a tangle of wires, the militiaman gave a deep sigh. The bomb had been dismantled.

And it was over.

One of the militiamen spotted a face he recognized, and the two men drew close for an instant. They shook hands, and the first one said under his breath one word: “Staroobriadets.”

Atop the mausoleum, the President of the Soviet Union and the President of the United States waved at the crowd. On either side of them stood members of the Soviet and the American leadership. Most of the Americans, cold and uncomfortable, their legs weary, wondered how much longer they’d be able to stand it up there. Their Soviet counterparts, more accustomed to very long public ceremonies, gave stiff little waves and stood still to conserve body heat.

Unnoticeable to observers in Red Square, a small slip of paper was passed from a military guard standing next to the mausoleum, to a civilian security officer, and eventually to the Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, who handed it to Gorbachev.

Gorbachev glanced at it briefly, then looked back to the crowd.

The President turned to him. “Urgent business?” he asked genially.

“No,” Gorbachev said. “A little problem, but we’ve taken care of it.”

Charlotte stood, protected by two guards from the MVD, behind a checkpoint near the Historical Museum, just outside Red Square. The cheers and martial music of the parade were overwhelmingly loud. At last the car pulled up, a rusty Lada, looking like a squashed bug. She’d hoped the MVD would be able to find them, and they had.

The first face she saw was Stefan’s, then Svetlov’s. She craned her neck, terrified, trying to read their expressions. Was he–?

And then Charlie got out of the car, crawled out, really, from the back seat, a wounded, very sick-looking man. What happened? his anxious face asked.

She wanted to jump across the iron railing, hug him, tell him everything was all right. She found herself swelling with emotion, relieved tension, love, fear – a hundred different feelings – and then what little remained of her poise dissolved and she was crying.

Charlie Stone struggled to cross the cobblestones toward Charlotte, and then he saw the answer, her smile, the yes, and he began to see concentric circles around everything, doubles and triples, everything getting lighter and brighter, everything becoming wonderfully, comfortingly, white.

EPILOGUE

New York: Six Months Later

Only afterward did things come full circle.

The first thing Stone became aware of, as he slowly awakened, was the warmth and velvety softness of Charlotte’s naked back, nestled tightly against him. Then: the morning light from the strong May sun, flooding the bedroom.

Her nearness aroused him, and he slowly reached a hand around to the warmth between her legs. With spread fingers he massaged her downy pubic hair gently and slowly, then closed his fingers and increased the pressure. She was, though not awake, moist. His other hand stroked her breasts; the nipples were erect now. He kissed her neck, nuzzled her shoulder. She stirred and gave a throaty moan.

Even months later, the mysteries remained.

They knew that Sonya had died on Revolution Day, and that Yakov and his sons had been permitted – by direct order from the Politburo – to emigrate to the United States.

Avram Kramer’s mental health remained tenuous; for him, things would never be normal again.

They knew that the U.S.–Soviet summit had ended with more promise than substance, as is often the case with summits, and that neither the American leaders nor the Russian leaders, with one great exception, were harmed. The vast majority of American press reports called the summit “bland and uneventful” – the sole exception being the unfortunately timed death, by stroke, of the chairman of the KGB. But the reports, of course, were decidedly wrong.

Frank Paradiso had been reassigned to the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. The Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton, and his deputy, Ronald Sanders, both announced their resignations shortly after the summit, each for various family reasons, each announcing that he had wanted to wait until the Moscow summit was over.

Each of them also found lucrative employment in the private sector. Of course, the two officials had little choice but to resign, faced with the possibility that their role in the illegal covert operation might someday be revealed, the most damaging evidence being contained in a package that was found in Andrei Pavlichenko’s office safe after his death.

Unbeknownst to Stone, the extraordinarily secret group that called itself the Sanctum disbanded itself, a mere memory in the minds of its prominent members, who of course said not a word when they ran into one another at parties in Georgetown or panel discussions at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He was unaware, too, that at this very moment a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow was, as she’d been ordered, injecting one of her latest patients with a solution of haloperidol and a colloidal suspension of sublimed sulfur, which she’d done for several weeks’ running. This solution, the nurse knew, causes the patient to run an extremely high fever and to suffer unbearable discomfort in whatever position he assumes. The nurse knew only that the patient was afflicted with criminal schizophrenia, having been arrested, by Politburo order, in the Soviet Embassy in Washington on November 7 and flown at once to Moscow.

The patient, a former high-ranking diplomat named Aleksandr Malarek, once an aide to the late chairman of the KGB, was being administered a little lesson designed to impress anyone so foolish as to attempt what Malarek had done. Malarek now suffered a side effect of the medication: he had little more intellectual capacity than a parsnip.

Charlie refilled their coffee cups and sat down next to Charlotte at the breakfast table.

Both of them were enjoying the energizing glow of having just made love. Charlotte, who was rapt in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, looked up after a few moments. “Charlie, we need to talk.”

He groaned. No one ever “needed to talk” about happy, pleasant things.

“How committed are you to teaching at Columbia?” she asked.

Immediately after Stone returned to New York, Columbia University had offered him a tenured professorship in Soviet studies, at a respectable academic salary – which wasn’t much. But Stone had plenty sacked away from his days at Parnassus and from the money his father had left in his safe-deposit box, and besides, the apartment and his mountain-climbing equipment were already paid for. And then there would be the Lehman inheritance …

He was about to publish another book, on the future of the Soviet empire, and was teaching a class on the Soviet empire, or what little was left of it.

“Committed?” Stone asked, getting up to retrieve the toast, which had just popped up. “Now what are you talking about?”

“I mean, do you like it? Would you ever consider leaving?”

“Do I like it?” Quite a bit, he thought. He’d turned away requests from several intelligence agencies, the NSA, and the DIA for his expertise. Intelligence, he’d come to believe, was a little like a snake: slimy, though deceptively dry and inoffensive, even agreeable, to the touch. He said: “Teaching in a university would be wonderful – without the backbiting colleagues and the undermotivated students. And the academic politics – which are so fierce because the stakes are so small, as someone once said. Charlotte, what are you after?”

“The network’s offered me a job in Washington I can’t pass up.”

“Really?”

“Covering the White House.”

“Seriously?” Stone stepped forward to throw his arms around her, and then stopped. “Oh, no. Washington.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be thrilled about going back there.”

He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “The land of the white sky in the summer. The land of pedestrian malls. The city that teems with lawyers and congressional interns.”

“Charlie–”

“But, then, I suppose I could manage to get a job at Georgetown.”

“Charlie, they’d hire you in a second.”

He turned to face her. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I could do it. Why not?”

There was a sadness in both of them, but especially in Stone. In some sense, he had found two parents and lost them both. He had learned to kill and knew that he had within him the ability to take a human life, just as so many had been taken from him.

On the anniversary of his father’s death, he made a pilgrimage to Boston and placed flowers on the grave, in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The epitaph was the verse from Boris Pasternak, bleak and yet at the same time hopeful, that Alfred Stone had liked so much:

YOU ARE ETERNITY’S HOSTAGE A CAPTIVE OF TIME.

And it had always meant little to Stone, until things came full circle. It was the key to the final mystery, the astonishing revelation that Winthrop Lehman had made in the last ten minutes of his life.

Keep your machine on, Winthrop Lehman had said, gesturing weakly at the tape recorder. I have one more thing to tell you. And then Stone had known.

“You saw the gravestone I had put up in Père Lachaise to conceal the fact that Sonya was alive,” Lehman said. “She was allowed to come to Paris twice, in 1956 and in 1953. You see, your father was always grateful to me for selecting him to serve in the White House. He looked upon me as a surrogate father of sorts, and so he went to Moscow for me uncomplainingly. And when he was photographed by FBI agents in Moscow, he knew he had to go to prison rather than reveal the truth.”

Stone, watching Lehman struggle to keep his eyes open, nodded. His head whirled; he could barely speak. “I know,” he said. “I think on some level I’ve always known, although Dad never said anything. My father wanted to protect my childhood. He didn’t want to take from me the one immutable thing. I could never understand why he felt so close to you, so loyal, against all reason. But I think I always had an inkling.”

Lehman, who was almost dead, could not contain a small, pleased smile. “My daughter was a beautiful woman. I shouldn’t – shouldn’t have been surprised when your father fell in love with her. He would do anything – he was even willing to suffer a great indignity in silence – to get Sonya out – Sonya, who was now pregnant with his child. But he didn’t know that Sonya could never be let out, that she was a hostage. And Sonya – poor Sonya – refused to let her child grow up in a land of oppression. This was 1953, remember, and the terror was at its peak. She made the greatest sacrifice of her life. She said – she said she didn’t want her child to be a slave.”

“You couldn’t get her out,” Stone said tonelessly. “But you were able to get me out. That was why my father went to Paris in late 1953. To see Sonya one last time, and to take his newborn child. But why–”

“I had to lie to him. I had to tell him that Sonya had remarried. Otherwise he couldn’t have faced it. A few years later, I told him she had died. But I did everything I could for him.”

“Yes.”

“I got a forged birth certificate for him – for you. I helped him, with money, whenever he’d allow me to do so–”

“I know. I’m – grateful.”

“When I saw you in my archives, I was terrified you’d find out, and I didn’t know what you’d do, how you might disturb the delicate arrangement – as much as you had the right. …”

“Before he died, my father wanted to tell me, but he never got the chance. But I knew.” Somehow Stone had suspected something like this all his life, in the way children can sense things that have no logical explanation: that Margaret Stone was not his real mother. What was it that Alfred Stone had said in a moment of rage, years ago? “You’re the only mother he has!” Yes. The cry of someone who feels at once angry and guilty: I need you to be his mother, since his real mother …

“Some of us – some of us – we’re caught in traps that aren’t of our own making,” Lehman whispered. “In the Cold War between two superpowers. I was, my Sonya was. At least you are not, Charlie.”

And the old man closed his eyes.

Traps. Hostages.

“You are eternity’s hostage,” Alfred Stone liked to quote. “A captive of time.”

Charlie had misunderstood. His father hadn’t been referring to his very public tragedy. He’d been referring to his own, private tragedy. To Sonya. To the mother of his son.

Washington

Almost a full year after that Revolution Day, Stone received in the mail a registered and insured letter from Yakov Kramer, who was by now living in the Brighton Beach section of New York. He found a comfortable chair and opened the package. Charlotte, her hair tied back with a paint-spattered bandana – their new apartment in Georgetown was a disheveled maze of paint cans, spackling, ladders, and drop cloths – stood over him and gasped.

The package contained several yellowed sheets of paper.

Stone pulled them out carefully and, with a peculiar mingling of elation, puzzlement, and shock, examined the documents. They seemed, after all this time, after such a long search, oddly familiar.

On top was a letter. “To the Politburo of the Central Committee,” it began. It was signed “V. I. Lenin.”