When Bayliss recognized the address, his heart suddenly began beating very quickly. This was it. At last, after all these decades. This was it.
Gingerly, he placed the card into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket and, actually trembling from excitement, started the car.
6
New York
For over an hour, Stone had been staring at the luminous green computer monitor in his Parnassus office. Anyone watching, unfamiliar with Stone and the kind of work he did, might have reasonably supposed the man had gone into a catatonic trance.
He sat, immobile, in the comfortable old suit he wore to work most days. His office was considerably plainer than Ansbach’s, the furniture purely functional, the bookcases jammed with the standard reference works.
On the screen was a list of the members of the Soviet Politburo. Next to each name was a highly classified synopsis of the man’s medical record. Something was nagging at the back of his mind about the rumor circulating around Moscow, that one of the leaders was in poor health and had been recently treated for a serious heart-related illness in the Kremlin Clinic. The Agency wanted some good, informed speculation as to which one it was and had put it to the brain bank at Parnassus.
A Politburo member was ill. Okay. Which one?
He stretched his long legs, folded his arms, and leaned his head back all the way. After a moment, he sat up and accessed the CIA’s records of each man’s travels in the last three months. The screen went blank for a few seconds, and then a complex chart came up. Stone scanned it for a moment and got to his feet.
Nothing.
Sometimes he thought Kremlinology was like putting a ton of carbon under intense geological pressure: eventually you’d get a diamond, if you waited long enough.
What happens to a Soviet leader when he gets sick? Stone asked himself.
Well, sometimes nothing. He gets sick and he dies. Or he gets sick and he recovers.
But in an unstable political system – and, God knows, the Politburo was unstable these days – sometimes it wasn’t a good thing at all to get sick, to stay away from the Kremlin for very long. Sometimes when the cat’s away the mice will … usurp his power.
The brainstorm – or brain squall, as Stone self-deprecatingly called the aleatory flights of inspiration that had helped him out of many a logjam – came several hours later.
Khrushchev had been overthrown when he chose a bad time to take a vacation on the Black Sea. Gorbachev had almost been ousted in 1987 while on holiday. If you happen to have the misfortune to be one of the Kremlin’s rulers and you want to hold on to your power, the rule of thumb is: Don’t take vacations. And don’t get sick.
Whoever was ill might well have lost some modicum of power. And power in the Kremlin is measured, in part, by the number of your cronies you can drag up the hierarchy with you.
Stone keyed in a code to access a roster of recent promotions and demotions within the Soviet bureaucracy. The list, when it came, scrolled on and on: a lot of action within the Kremlin’s ranks. Not at all like the Brezhnev years, when things were static. Moscow these days was hopping, the leadership constantly in flux.
Then he accessed a program he’d designed himself specifically to spot patterns of hirings, firings, and demotions and the common thread among them. Stone called it KremWare, and regretted that it wouldn’t have much of a sale.
After another hour or so – the software was complicated, after all – he began to see a pattern.
A diamond. Yes.
In the past few weeks, there had been a marked pattern of demotions of officials whose careers had in some way crossed paths with the new head of the KGB, Andrei Pavlichenko. There it was.
A number of ambitious Moscow bureaucrats who thought that by knowing the head of the KGB they would rocket to the top of the heap, suddenly found themselves pushing paper in small, badly heated offices in Omsk or Tomsk.
Unconsciously he reached for a cigarette, remembered for the millionth time that he no longer smoked, and said, “Shit.”
Yes, Pavlichenko was almost certainly the one that was ill. Stone was quite sure of it; the pattern was there. You couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but the odds were excellent that it was Pavlichenko.
He rewarded himself by reheating a third cup of coffee in the microwave, then stuck his head out of his office door. “Sherry?”
“Yes, Charlie.”
“I’ll have a PAE ready to go out in an hour or so.”
“All right.” She’d have to get it into presentable form, hard copy – the people at Langley didn’t like working with their computers if they didn’t have to. Many of them, especially the old-line types, favored Underwood manual typewriters and Parker fountain pens. Which was of course decidedly ironic, since their daily work relied for the most part on some of the most advanced technology in the world.
“What the hell are you doing in today?” It was Saul. “I thought you’d be out. …” He glanced at Stone’s secretary and gestured toward his office. Charlie followed.
“Did you find me the holy grail?” Saul asked, shutting the door.
“I’m working on it,” Stone said, sitting on the edge of Saul’s desk. “In the meantime,” he continued, “I think I’ve got one nut cracked.” He explained his deduction.
Ansbach’s face lit up in a grin. “Jesus, you’re good.”
Stone gave a slight bow.
“Sounds right,” Saul said. “In fact, I’d be inclined to be more certain about it than you seem to be.”
“Okay, you see the connection to the – the HEDGEHOG report, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Pavlichenko’s losing his grip on power, right? So KGB suffers. Which means diminished party discipline.”
“And?”
“Just a theory, Saul. Pavlichenko is Gorbachev’s man, brought in personally by Gorby – partly so Gorbachev can get a handle on the KGB, partly to guard against any attempts to oust him, since if anyone would have their ears to the ground it’s the boys at Dzerzhinsky Square.” Stone was pacing the room now, as he usually did when he was excited. “The same folks, after all, who helped get Gorby in there in the first place–”
“Right,” Ansbach said, infected by Stone’s enthusiasm. Like most of the Agency’s old guard, he relished the delicious irony of Russia’s most progressive leader’s ever being supported by one of history’s most repressive agencies of control.
“Okay. So” – Stone whirled around and pointed a finger at Ansbach – “if Pavlichenko weren’t in failing health, maybe there wouldn’t be any conspiracy.”
“So how does that help us?” Ansbach asked, shaking his head.
“When was the last time there was a coup in the Soviet Union – after the Bolshevik Revolution, I mean?”
“Never,” Ansbach replied, good-humoredly playing the model schoolboy. “Hasn’t been one.”
“Well, not quite. Sixty-four.” In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev was ousted by a hard-line, neo-Stalinist coalition made up of Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov.
“That was hardly a coup,” Ansbach objected. “That was a good old orderly palace revolution.”
“All right. In ‘64 you had dissatisfaction with the chaos Khrushchev was wreaking.”
“Like Gorbachev.”
“So maybe it’s conservative hard-liners.”
“Maybe,” Saul said. “And maybe it’s one of the many nationalities that now openly hate Moscow – the Latvians or the Estonians or the Lithuanians. Or maybe it’s people who are pissed off with the way Gorbachev dismantled the whole fucking Warsaw Pact.”