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.