XPD

48

It was surprising, wrote Boyd Stuart in his report afterwards, that the CIA resisted the temptation to riddle the Rousillon Beach Motel with the customary electronics. It was the project chairman who held out against the adviser from the Technical Services Division, who had come to his office loaded with an extraordinary array of equipment from low-light cameras and parabolic microphones to a miniaturized video recorder which, although small enough to be concealed inside a light fixture, defied all the demonstrator’s attempts to make it function.

The CIA sent Kleiber to the meeting ‘naked’, apart from Kalkhoven sitting in the back office of the motel manager’s unit along with Boyd Stuart. There was no way of preventing the Brit participating: there was in fact some enthusiasm for letting him witness what no one doubted was going to be a memorable coup.

Yuriy Grechko came directly from the USSR Washington embassy. He was in a green rented Ford Fairlane at 7.30 that evening, having booked a double unit, with sitting room fronting the poolside, water bed and colour TV, using the name Lewis. He paid for the room on arrival and asked if there were any messages for him; there were none. At five minutes before eight, Grechko called the office and complained that there was no ice in his refrigerator and he would be needing more cans of Seven-up. The coffee-shop waitress who delivered this order reported that he was drinking heavily, from a bottle he’d brought with him.

Willi Kleiber arrived exactly on the dot of his appointment at ten o’clock. Kalkhoven was behind the desk. He gave him the key to unit No. 12 and told him that ‘Mr Lewis’ was already there. Kleiber phoned Kalkhoven three minutes later and was laughing so much that he could hardly speak.

‘You’d better get over here, Mr Muller,’ he said. (Muller was the cover name by which Kalkhoven was known to him.) ‘You’d better get over here.’ He was laughing hysterically. ‘You’re going to need another scenario, Mr Muller, sir. But don’t hurry yourself, there’s no hurry at all. Did you know that Yuriy Grechko calls himself “Yu-yu”?’ He howled with laughter at the thought of it.

General Stanislav Shumuk had organized his scheme with commendable skill, but his failure was at the human level. His dislike of Yuriy Grechko, and Grechko’s weakness for pretty women, had convinced Shumuk that Grechko was a notorious libertine. In fact, Grechko was foolishly, sadly and forlornly in love. He was in love with that desperation which only the unfortunate do not know. It was Grechko’s fate to fall in love with Fusako Parker, the ‘wife’ of his most important agent. For her, he regularly proclaimed, he would give his life. Now he had done just that.

It was Shumuk’s formal message-passed by an agent of Moscow’s Communications Division-telling Parker to leave his house in Chicago immediately together with his ‘wife’ that brought Grechko to his final frantic act. Parker and his ‘wife’, Fusako, were immediately moved to a safe house in Toronto. On Thursday, August 16, the Parkers flew to Moscow. In the six days leading up to his suicide Grechko exhausted every method of communicating with Fusako Parker: all failed. On the night of Sunday, August 19, having finally discovered that the Parkers had gone to Toronto, he had even sent a team to break into the house. It was a desperate course of action; the act was poorly planned, the men untrained and hastily briefed. They had been arrested by local police. After arriving at the motel with slurred speech and whisky on his breath, Grechko drank a whole bottle of Cutty Sark and swallowed an unknown amount of barbiturates. (The man from the USSR embassy who claimed the body would not permit an autopsy.) In his hand when he died Grechko held tightly to a sheet of Rousillon Beach Motel notepaper bearing the message, ‘Darling Fusako, I cannot go on without you. I love you, my beloved. I will always be your darling Yu-yu.’

‘Can I talk to Mr Kleiber, Melvin?’ Boyd Stuart asked.

‘Talk to him!’ said Kalkhoven, with his eyes still on Kleiber. ‘You can take him away and feed him to the alligators as far as I’m concerned. XPD the bastard!’

‘You listen to me,’ said Kleiber. He was on his feet and his eyes were bright. ‘We have a deal… ’

‘Sit down, Kleiber,’ said Kalkhoven. He took a box of matches from his pocket. ‘You’ve run out of stock to trade, the shelves are empty, man. Grechko was your dinner ticket. You talk with this nice man here, or else… ’ Impassively Kalkhoven took Grechko’s suicide note by the corner and set light to it. London and Washington had agreed that all such evidence would be destroyed on the spot, and that had been the order.

‘Go to hell,’ said Kleiber, but there was no conviction in his words.

‘ “I have set before you life and death,” ’ said Kalkhoven, ‘ “blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” ’

Kleiber looked at Boyd Stuart. ‘Can you find a bottle of scotch?’

‘Probably,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Let’s go and find somewhere quiet to sit down. This place will be a madhouse when the heavy mob from Langley arrive to show us that the training manual way is the only way.’