His father had maintained a permanent suite in the Pioneer and Forrester still kept it. The hotel was busy with a Hollywood crowd, a film crew making a Western on location in the nearby hills. They were on the sidewalk, a pack of them, half drunk and loud. Forrester stood smiling until Ronnie slid across the seat under the wheel and drove away with a casual wave.
Forrester went up to the seventh floor in the elevator and down the long wide corridor with its muffling carpet. In the suite he found the bed turned down and a cut-crystal bottle of whiskey waiting for him with an ice bucket. He had a drink and showered and when he came out of the steamed-up bath room the phone was ringing.
It was Ronnie. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”
“I’m still up. What’s the matter?”
She sounded angry. “I just had a call from Frank Shattuck’s secretary. She’s been trying to reach us all night.”
“To cancel the appointment tomorrow?”
“Three guesses why. It seems he’s been taken suddenly busy. Called away to a conference in Los Angeles or some such lie. What’ll you bet he’s out on the Country Club links big as life tomorrow morning?”
“Never mind, Ronnie. Don’t let it get your goat. I’ll get to him sometime during the week—it’s not urgent.”
“The longer you let it wait, the longer he’ll have to sew up his mind tight against you,” she said. “Shattuck Industries swings a strong lobby in Washington, Alan.”
“So do I. Thanks for your concern, Ronnie, but it’s not the end of the world.”
“I’d like to strangle the smug fool.”
“It’s all right. It’ll give me a chance to get out to the ranch for the day. You wouldn’t want to come along, would you? We’ve got some magnificent scenery up there, fine for painting”
“I know. I was there once or twice during the campaign.”
“How about it, then?”
“Well—all right. Of course. Thanks for inviting me. Shall I pick you up? It’ll save you renting a car.”
“Fine. Is seven too early?”
“I usually get away even earlier—I don’t like to waste the daylight.”
“Six-thirty, then.”
“Good,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good night, Ronnie. Sleep well.” When he cradled the phone he kept his hand on it, as if to retain the thread of contact with her.
He switched off the light and lay back and grew drowsy with a constraining ennui, the listlessness that followed a day of long travel across time zones. Somewhere in the ensuing run of time, between wakefulness and sleep, a vivid picture came into his mind—Angie in the garden, picking insects off leaves, crushing them between finger and thumb. She had loved the garden in Washington; it had been her place of retreat, her center of revitalization. He remembered the look of her sleeping face on the pillow, the weight of her breasts warm with love; when his thoughts strayed to Ronnie it was with a start of guilt that brought him awake. Oh, hell, he thought crankily, chastising himself, and then the phone rang again and it was Top Spode. “I’m at National Airport. Trumble’s taking the night plane to Tucson and he’s got the goodies in his lap. You going to be in town tomorrow?”
“I’ll be at the ranch most of the day.”
“All right, I’ll reach you when there’s something to report.”
“Wrap it up as fast as you can, Top, because I’ve got another chore for you.”
“Tucson or Washington?”
“Tucson. We’re going to test the nation’s security.” Forrester said it dryly and his smile was one-sided.
“Now that sounds like fun,” Top said, and rang off. Forrester rolled over on his shoulder and exhaustion lowered him into a warm pool of sleep.
Chapter Four
The great iron doors swung open slowly and the dark Chaika limousine rolled out of the courtyard of Lubianka Tiurma where Rykov had just completed his regular morning tour of inspection. Behind the limousine the iron doors swung closed with a solid noise that echoed the metallic clangings of the several underground levels of dungeons inside. The chauffeur was armed and a silent bodyguard shared the rear seat with Rykov; the interior curtains were half-drawn across the double thickness of bulletproof glass in the small windows. The route took them past the Bolshoi Theatre and Sverdlov Square and there was a very thin morning traffic of Moskviches, Pobedas and Volgas on the boulevard. Rykov’s limousine kept to the center lane, reserved for official vehicles only, and he encountered no delays.
In Revolution Square a girl Intourist guide was lecturing to a thick-bundled coagulation of determined foreign tourists. The pavements were crowded with pedestrians on their way to work. Many of the men wore uniforms—civil servants, most of them; every Muscovite wanted to wear a uniform.
At Arbatskaya Square Rykov climbed out to walk the rest of the way. The slow-moving Chaika accompanied him. The possibility of assassination was one which Rykov accepted without qualms, but sensible precautions were not out of order and the bodyguard car stayed close.
Rykov’s footsteps crunched the snowy cobblestones with an uneven rhythm broken by the thudding of his cane, for he had a bad leg now, the result of the unpublicized crash-landing of an Aeroflot jetliner six years before. The pronounced limp added a fine touch to his sinister appearance and by implying constant pain, enhanced his reputation for stoic fortitude. Now that he had worked his way up to a position where he gave more orders than he took it was gratifying to have members of the ruling troika inquire solicitously after his health.
He walked through the wide Arbat Boulevard past an elderly woman sweeping snow off the sidewalk. She wore a scarf over her head, not against the cold but because it was traditionally immodest for a peasant woman not to wear a scarf tied under her chin. The woman bowed with a gesture of obeisance; she did not smile, because she knew who Viktor Rykov was. So did at least ten million other Russians and several thousand foreign intelligence people.
He was a long way, not only in time and distance, from his birthplace in the Circassian mountains of Georgia.
When the October Revolution had stripped them of their lands his kulak parents had moved down to Tiflis, a city of mosques and bazaars, smugglers and vice, and Viktor Rykov had learned the devious texts of intrigue and deceit. In 1938 Beria’s secret police had recruited him to spy on international black marketeers in the Crimea; Rykov had organized a cell of informants—an underground within the underworld—and his unique achievements had brought him to Moscow as a Control in 1940.
In 1941 at Smolensk he had been attached to the Fourth Bureau and posted out to the west to infiltrate the Abwehr. At Moscow against Von Bock, and at Leningrad, he had done superb work: it had been one of his agents, in a Wehrmacht uniform, who had walked into Guderian’s Panzer headquarters and brought out the detailed plans for the siege of Moscow.
Rykov had shown a genius for training Russians to look and act and think like Germans. There had been decorations and promotions and the transfer to the Far East: in August 1945 Rykov’s deep-cover seedlings in Hirohito’s crumbling empire had paralyzed Japanese matériél transport during the brief and bitter Soviet blitzkrieg of northeast Asia. From 1946 to 1953 Rykov had controlled Soviet networks in China, both in the Kuomintang and in the People’s Republic. By 1953 he had completed the construction of the Amergrad camp at Kolkhoz Tselino and within eighteen months its graduates had begun seeding into America. Then Khrushchev had cemented his authority, Tolubchev had been retired, and Rykov had stepped into power in the Arbat.
Winter gray misted the city. A youth passed Rykov, one of the new upstart generation in peasant valenki boots and a sulky frown and a cotton-padded jacket. The young ones wanted everything given to them and it was not pleasant to speculate what would become of the world when these young nihilists took it over.