He looked around the table to engage everyone’s eyes, paused a moment, and continued, tapping a pencil on his sheaf of notes. There was uncomfortable stirring; he had dilated too long.
“Your point?” the economist Fomin inserted between rigid lips.
“My point,” Ryazanov said, casting him a dyspeptic glance, “is that the reality and the perception do not coincide, and that will help us. I think we all agree that we can no longer wait. Extreme measures are called for. But there’s simply no logic in assassinations any longer. Such an act would create a backlash within the government – would make the Soviet Union even less governable. There are those who will tell us that if you cut off the head the body will die. But the head is not just Gorbachev; it’s all of his supporters within the Politburo, within the leadership. And the death of one man will not silence them. Quite the reverse.”
His pencil rat-a-tatted on his notepad. He was clearly still lobbying the few who weren’t fully convinced. Silently, he wished he could just go home and have supper with his family and play with his youngest, three-year-old Lyosha, who was probably asleep by now anyway. He felt a wash of stomach acid surge up toward his throat, but he continued gamely. “Our plan is difficult, but quite clever. Assassinations rarely work, and ‘accidents’ are rarely believed. But the world does believe, and believe firmly, in the presence of terrorism in all walks of life. Even in Moscow.”
“Is everyone in this room satisfied that there is no possibility any of our intelligence organs – KGB, GRU – will learn of our plans?” The question came from Ivan M. Tsirkov, another Sekretariat plant in the GRU, who was short and round-faced, with small eyes and a high tenor voice. He looked a little like Lenin, but without the beard.
Ryazanov’s eyes widened as he frantically tried to answer, but before he could do so, Igor Kravchenko, the head of Department Eight of the KGB First Directorate, cleared his throat. “There has been a breach of security,” Kravchenko said softly. He was tall and stocky, with an air of great complacency, his eyes calm behind his rimless glasses.
The shocked silence was almost palpable. Ryazanov himself shuddered inwardly.
“You, Comrade Morozov,” the KGB man said, extending a finger toward another of his colleagues, Pyotr L. Morozov of the Central Committee. “One of my people learned that the man who was serving as your driver was in the employ of the CIA.”
“What?” breathed Morozov, a plain-faced man of about fifty. Gentle and blond-haired, Morozov was descended from generations of Russian peasantry, and boasted of it regularly. “But you assured us all the drivers were cleared!”
“The matter has been taken care of,” Kravchenko said implacably. “The man has been executed. But did you discuss anything in front of the man that–”
“No, of course not,” Morozov protested, his thick hands flailing, hands that had never done work more menial than shuffling papers from one desk to another. “When Yefim Semyonovich” – he indicated Fomin the economist, who in response compressed his lips involuntarily – “when we spoke in the car, we closed the compartment. We knew better than to trust anyone outside this room.”
Colonel Ryazanov could feel his face redden with a prickly heat. He contained his anger, because he knew you never gained anything by venting anger. He gesticulated with his pencil and objected as mildly as he could: “Executed! But you can’t interrogate a dead man!”
“Yes,” Kravchenko agreed placidly, “that was a botch.” He used a vulgar Russian expression that referred to a whorehouse. “Our people screwed up. Too eager. But I didn’t want the agent interrogated by anyone at the Lubyanka, and better he was killed than that our existence becomes known. In any case, I am quite satisfied that the Sekretariat remains absolutely secret.”
“And the Americans?” Tsirkov persisted, his voice almost a chirp. “If there is even one leak from the American side, we are all endangered.”
Kravchenko answered. “Our American friends were the ones who notified us that this chauffeur was in their bag. They, after all, have more reason than anyone,” he said solemnly, “to keep their relationship with us an inviolable secret.”
“But what guarantee is there that the plans have not already been breached?” came an angry voice from the far side of the table. It was Morozov.
Kravchenko’s reply was, once again, calm. “That is being taken care of. Even as we speak, it’s being handled superbly. That will not present a problem.”
“Mokriye dela?” asked Tsirkov, using the Russian tradecraft term that means “wet affairs,” or killing.
“Of necessity. Nothing that will be detectable in any way.”
“Then what is the exact nature of the plan? What will happen on Revolution Day?” This came from Mikhail Timofeyev, the blustery, compactly built Red Army commander. “Our forces will be on maximum alert. But on what pretext?”
Colonel Ryazanov sighed nervously, wishing he didn’t have to present the carefully worked-up plan in so abrupt a manner, wishing he hadn’t been interrupted by this disconcerting news, disliking to set things out so plainly, without preface. Slowly and carefully he explained, and the room was absolutely silent. Finally, one voice came from the end of the table. It belonged to the economist Fomin. “That is brilliant,” he said. “Horrifying, but brilliant.”
4
New York
Everything about Stone’s apartment reminded him of his wife, Charlotte. It consisted of eight spacious rooms in a prized old cooperative building on Central Park West, a building whose potentates – a surly co-op board of three attorneys, a once-famous matinee idol, and two sisters who had inherited a fortune and lived in this building almost since time began – took pride in turning applicants away.
Stone had never been sure why he and Charlotte had managed to get past the board’s scrutiny, except maybe that they were a nice, respectable-looking couple, he an esteemed young State Department employee (or so the board believed), she a highly regarded television correspondent, and both of them (thanks to the Parnassus Foundation, though no one knew it) quite well off.
The place had a lot of Victorian detail, but it was obscured by hideous flocked wallpaper and kitchen appliances in Harvest Cold: the previous owner had had money but no taste. Charlotte, while looking for a job, had it entirely redecorated. Now it was plush and comfortable, eclectic and vaguely Edwardian. There was a paneled entrance with a floor of green Italian marble, and a pleasantly crowded sitting room where piles of books sat beside Lord Melbourne and Louis XV chairs. The bedroom was furnished with a Flemish rosewood armoire and a Queen Anne oak chest of drawers she’d spotted at a flea market in western Massachusetts. The kitchen, with its high-gloss black cabinets, bore Charlotte’s unmistakable imprint.
The library had walls of a deep wine color, recessed bookcases that held a complete set of Nabokov first editions, an eighteenth-century Russian traveling desk of ebony and mahogany with ormolu mounts, an immense Agra carpet, and a Regency library armchair with tufted leather seat that had been a gift from Winthrop Lehman. Lehman had been given the chair by Winston Churchill during the war, in gratitude for Lehman’s assistance in the Lend-Lease business; he had given it to Charlie on his wedding day.
Sixteen years of marriage, and then all of a sudden – what was it? a year and a half ago already? – she’d moved out. Since then the apartment had seemed ludicrously empty.
Sometimes, late at night, burying his face in the pillow in the bed they had shared for so long, he could smell her perfume, gardenia-scented, light and erotic, and he would remember the number of nights they had slept together – 5,980 nights; he had figured it out – and for a long time he would stare up at the ceiling.