Bill Granger
The Man Who Heard Too Much
For Lori, who was the woman of all these places
EPIGRAPH
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know, who made thee?
I’m very, very good
And be it understood—
I command a right good crew.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is concerned with the questions of Soviet Jewish emigration and the political fate of Lithuania. The book is set in the period before the open Lithuanian Republic push for total independence but after the first glimmers of what is called “glasnost.” It reflects both political and religious entanglements true at the time. This book, like others in the November chronicles, also brings up the continuing and real problem of computer security versus computer virus programs.
The first book in this series, which is a sort of history of cold war politics and the bureaucracies that direct them, was The November Man [now published under the title Code Name November] and concerned a plot by IRA terrorists to assassinate a cousin of the British Queen while on his boat off the Irish coast. The book appeared a few weeks before Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by terrorists off the Irish coast. The prescience was unintended; it was my attempt to turn reporting observation into a study of future logic. It appears this book, written in 1988, also focused on aspects of an international story before the story actually began to unfold.
1
The fog from the Baltic Sea came in waves across the city of islands. The spires of the palace and the national cathedral and all the other churches and temples of man and God were detached from the earth and held in the clouds, where they disappeared. Silence came down on the narrow, crooked streets of the Old Town section and extended into the harbor. It was October, and the air was damp with expectation of winter. The sun had not set, but the fog made everything beneath the city spires full of gloom and foreboding.
Viktor Rusinov, twenty-four, seaman aboard the Soviet cargo ship Leo Tolstoy, slipped along the outside passage on two deck toward the radio room. The cargo — Swedish machine parts from the factory at Göteborg — had been loaded, and the Leo Tolstoy would sail in the morning for Gdansk, on the Polish north coast.
Viktor Rusinov paused on the passageway and sensed his fear. He stood very still to make his fear subside. He smelled the sea and the city beyond. He heard a church bell toll. He blessed himself with the Orthodox sign of the cross because he was a religious man. The fear was suppressed in that ritual.
There were two political officers assigned to the Leo Tolstoy. They were both ashore now, probably gorging themselves at the smorgasbord served at the Opera. The political officers — who were, in fact, members of the Committee for State Security, the KGB — were totally privileged men.
Viktor Rusinov had nourished his rudimentary communist hatred for the upper classes during five years at sea. He hated the KGB men and he hated the captain. He hated every superior officer. He hated people with money, and those who could buy goods in the special stores set aside for foreigners. He hated with the fine, certain passion of the committed Christian. He knew God would destroy his superiors in time (and in a particularly cruel way). He was certain hell awaited them for their sins of having more than Viktor Rusinov. Development of this hatred had not been enough for Viktor; he had decided, in the end, to enjoy the benefits of his superiors in the only way left open to him. But there was risk to it, and that made him afraid.
Viktor came from a small village a hundred miles south of Moscow. He had dreamed always of the sea. He loved the life of it. He loved the company of his fellow seamen. He loved to drink and to fornicate, and he saw nothing in those activities that compromised his religious beliefs. The women he had were not important and did not figure in his complex scheme of good and evil and envy and retribution. He was strong and tall and his eyes were blue. He could have been Swedish or Polish because of his fair complexion.
He was going to slip over the side in a few minutes and disappear into the fog of neutral Stockholm. He had only waited for his father to die, and his father had obliged him two months earlier in a cancer ward. He had no one left and no obligation to return. He saw it that way, in those correct, legal terms.
He would have preferred to defect in New York, but Stockholm was here and now. He had been in New York harbor once but had not been allowed to leave the freighter. The immensity of that city thrilled him as well as the constant rumble — the city noises conspired to create a constant sound like that of a train passing in the distance — and he knew it was his destiny to return there sometime. Stockholm was the first step. Besides, in the last few days the KGB men had spent a lot of time watching him. Now was the time. He knew the location of the American embassy—101 Strandvägen, which was the broad street on the harbor in Norrmalm, the northern sector of the city.
The red flag was limp on the standard at the stem of the ship. The ship was silent, full of a thousand tiny noises that were as comforting as lullabies. The ship rode the slight swell of the harbor, the bulkheads rubbing against the pilings, making soft, purring sounds against the ropes.
He opened the door of the radio room.
Yazimoff was there as he should have been. Yazimoff looked up at Viktor.
“So, it’s now?” But not really a question. Yazimoff almost smirked. It was very annoying, and it made the tense knot in Viktor’s stomach that much more painful.
Viktor inclined his head without a word. He reached into the pocket of his coat and extracted the wad of rubles, deutsche marks, francs, dollars, and pounds. A lot of money, some of it quite valuable. All he had saved from the liquor trade. Viktor Rusinov, when not counting his resentments and nursing his jealousies, was both a maker and seller of illegal vodka. Nothing had helped his business more than the crackdown on vodka by the Gorbachev government.
Yazimoff stared at the money with reverence. It was quite a lot, more than he had ever seen in his life.
“This,” Yazimoff said.
Viktor stared at the handwriting on the paper. It was Yazimoff’s. He did not understand the message, but he understood clearly it was in code.
“What is this?”
“Oleg? You know, the fat one? He took the message and he decoded it right away. And he used this.”
Viktor took the second sheet of paper. The key. It was covered with numbers arranged in sets of four. Viktor didn’t really understand how it worked — but so what? That was someone else’s problem. Viktor wanted to defect to the Americans. The coded message and its key would be a gift, to show his good intentions and to make certain the Americans would not send him back.
“Is it worth this?” Viktor asked, holding up the bills.
Yazimoff made a little shrug but held out his hand. He took the roll of bills and put it in his pocket without counting.
Viktor folded the two sheets of paper carefully into a waterproof envelope attached to a chain around his neck. He rebuttoned his shirt.
“The water is cold,” Yazimoff said.
“I’ve swum in colder water,” Viktor Rusinov said. He had a tendency to brag about his abilities, including his prowess with women and his gargantuan need for drink. No one on the Leo Tolstoy much liked him, but as a bootlegger, he was tolerated.