Prisoners of Tomorrow (28 page)

Haber admired the young Israeli’s enthusiasm, but remained pessimistic. “It’s no good,” he told McCain. “There simply aren’t enough places to hide all the parts we’d need, never mind to assemble and test the finished device. Such a task could never be concealed from surveillance.”

In the background, the Marxian chant continued with no sign of abatement. “What we need is somewhere permanent to do it, free from surveillance,” Rashazzi muttered, staring down at the floor.

“Something like a workshop,” McCain said.

“Yes, that’s it exactly. We need a workshop.”

If Andreyov was a plant, it was the best piece of acting McCain had ever come across. But that in itself didn’t make him potentially useful—he was getting old, and he had a loose tongue. All the same, McCain tried making a few indirect references to subverting the system to see if he would catch the gist. Andreyov missed the point and responded typically.

“The system wasn’t always like that. The czars, oh yes, they were authoritarian all right, but then Russia has always been authoritarian. It wasn’t the same kind of thing. The arts flourished then, because artists were allowed to express what they felt. It wasn’t all political. There were Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, Borodin . . . And there were some executions, yes—a few, mainly criminals—but nothing compared to what came later. Political prisoners weren’t treated badly under the czars, you know. The jailers got reprimanded if they didn’t address them respectfully. Most of them were cultured, you see. Gentlemen. Not like the rubbish that took over later—murderers and thieves, the lot of them, no better than Hitler. Worse than Hitler.

“Do you know what lost Hitler the war? It was the Nazi racial lunacies. When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, whole nations of people that the Bolsheviks had taken over wanted to help throw the Communists out—Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians. Eager to fight they were. But Hitler thought they were subhumans and wouldn’t use them. He wanted Russia to be defeated by Germans. But it wasn’t, of course.”

“I heard a joke about Russians,” Charlie Chan said, who was listening. “Ivan and Boris meet in the square outside a railroad station in Moscow, you see. Ivan says to Boris, ‘Where are you going?’ and Boris says, ‘I’m catching the train to Minsk, to get bread.’ ‘But you can get bread right here, in Moscow.’ Boris says, ‘I know, but the line starts in Minsk.’”

Antonos Gonares, the Hungarian who shared a partitioned bay with Smovak and Vorghas, interested McCain because he often went on work details to the hub. The official plans of
Tereshkova
showed the zone behind the docking ports as housing the nuclear reactors that powered the main generating plant and provided process heat for some of the manufacturing operations. Other reports, however, held that the manufacturing was less extensive than claimed, and that most of the space in those compartments held other installations.

“What kind of work do you do in the hub?” McCain asked Gonares casually one day.

“It varies. Sometimes we move freight around in the cargo bays. Sometimes it’s cleaning out tanks or scraping down metal for repainting.”

“In the cargo bays? You mean behind the docking ports, back near the nuclear area?”

“Yes, sometimes. Why?”

“Oh, you know journalists—always curious. I was just trying to get a clear picture in my mind of the layout. Who knows?—I might end up writing about it someday. I, ah, I’m sure I could persuade my editors to cash a few points for more details . . . if they proved useful.”

“Ah, I see. . . . What kind of details?”

“Oh, nothing very demanding. What’s inside which compartment. The positions and directions of the bulkheads. What kind of security they operate there. Maybe a sketch or two?”

“How much might we be talking about?”

“What are the risks, and what would make them worthwhile?”

“Well, maybe. . . . Let me think about it.”

Oskar Smovak rubbed his bushy, Fidel Castro beard as he stood watching McCain, who was staring out across the B Block mess area. “What do you see?” he asked after a while. For once, his usually cutting voice was low and measured.

McCain turned his head. “How to you mean?”

“You watch people, and you think. You say little. What are you looking for?”

“I’m just a compulsive people-watcher.”

“Is that a common habit among journalists?”

“Probably. How can you report what you don’t see?”

“Come on, you’re no journalist, Lew. I just wanted to say that if I can, I’d like to help. Okay?”

“Help? What with?”

“Whatever you’re planning.”

“If I find myself planning something, I’ll bear it in mind.”

Smovak sighed. “Yes, I know, it’s difficult knowing who to trust, isn’t it. But for what it’s worth, I’ve managed to get some information for you about the American woman that you came here with.” McCain looked round at him sharply. Smovak went on, “She was in a close-confinement cell in D Block up to about a week ago, but she got sick and was taken to the infirmary. She hasn’t come back since.”

“Who told you that?”

“A nameless friend in another billet who screws an East German wench from the cell she was in. It sounded as if the others gave her a hard time.”

“I see. . . . Okay, thanks, Oskar. And I’ll let you know if I need a hand.”

Borowski, the Pole, had warned McCain minutes before the incident with Maiskevik. “How did you know?” McCain asked him one day as they talked in the compound.

“I just had the feeling they were setting somebody up that night. I figured it had to be you.”

“So how come I was left alone afterward?” McCain asked.

“You would have exposed Luchenko’s sidelines. He probably bribed someone higher up not to pursue the matter.”

“Wouldn’t that someone have guessed already?”

“Probably. But why go looking under shitty stones when you can be paid not to?”

Which was pretty much what Andreyov had said. But McCain had never been fully satisfied with that explanation. If the authorities already knew about the graft systems that were operating around the place, Luchenko wouldn’t have stood to lose much from exposure. So he could have continued with his taxation racket
and
have kept face by having McCain put through the mill. Something didn’t add up—but McCain wasn’t about to get to the bottom of it just then, and there would be no point in pursuing the matter. “Why’d you do it?” he asked instead. “Did you have something personal against Maiskevik?”

“We all had something personal against Maiskevik. But on top of that, I’m Polish. I’ve heard you talk; you know our history—how Stalin carved Poland up with Hitler and stabbed us in the back in 1939, and Katyn, and what happened to the Warsaw resistance army. The Russians have always dreaded the thought of a strong Poland. We’ve never had any reason to feel exactly charitable toward the Russians.”

“’Tis very sociable you’re becoming all of a sudden, I can’t help noticing,” Scanlon said over lunch. “Little tête-a-têtes going on all the time wherever I turn my head. I take it you’re recruiting.”

“As you said, just being sociable.”

“Oh, come on now, I thought we were supposed to be partners. Don’t I even get to know who it is I’m likely to find meself working with?”

“If there’s a need.”

“Aha, always the cautious one, eh?”

“You know the rules. It avoids risking embarrassing complications.”

“You went to a good school, I see. Purely out of curiosity, what part of Western intelligence were you with?”

“SIS—the Brits. They infiltrated me in here specially to keep an eye on you. You got yourself such a reputation in London.”

“Oh, it’s like that, is it? Very well, Mr. Earnshaw, journalist, then here’s me with a little tip for ye that’ll make your life a whole lot easier. Talk to Koh. He’ll put you in touch with the escape committee. They’re the people with information of the kind ye could be using.”

McCain stared incredulously. “Escape committee? You’re joking!”

Scanlon gave a satisfied nod of his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face. “Yes indeed, now, that’s put a different tune in your fiddle, hasn’t it? I hope ye’ve a conscience in you, Earnshaw, because it’s shame ye should be feelin’.”

“Who’s on this committee?”

“Ah, come on, now. You know the rules. I’ve given you my tip. It’s Koh that you need to be talking to.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Soviet embassy in Kensington was an eleven-story gray stone building of solid, uncluttered lines, built in the last ten years, standing in a walled enclosure of well-tended lawns and shrubbery behind a thick screen of trees. Inside the same compound, an adjacent apartment building of similar size housed most of the Soviet diplomatic personnel stationed in London. Despite such comforts as the swimming pool, sauna, gymnasium, and tennis courts that life within the compound offered, Anita Dorkas was more than grateful to live outside, a privilege that a
Novoye Vermya
correspondent enjoyed.

For one thing it meant she and Enriko could usually manage to skip the dreary weekly Party meetings that were obligatory for everyone else, and live their private lives away from the stultifying cloistered existence led by those within—most of whom knew no more about the world outside than they were permitted to see on supervised tours made in groups. But more important, it enabled them to escape the omnipresent web of informants competing to discover anything derogatory. The wives were notorious for courting mutual confidences in order to curry favor with the chiefs by disclosing what they had learned, while two men would spend the night drinking together and then race to file reports on each other the next morning. The privilege existed to allow Enriko, in his capacity as a KGB case officer responsible for recruiting sources among British nationals and foreign residents, to operate more freely, since the embassy itself was under constant surveillance by the British; the irony of it was that the same convenience made it easier for Anita to conduct her own extramural dissident activities, too.

As was her habit on days when she was on duty, she took the tube to Holland Park station and walked from there. Enriko was using the car that day, anyway, to go to Hatfield for a luncheon interview with the chairman of a British industrial association. The Englishman prided himself on his political astuteness and was flattered at the suggestion of being quoted in a restricted-circulation newsletter that Enriko had assured him was read daily by the top Soviet leaders. Enriko would insist on making a small payment, of course, because “. . . our accounting procedures require it.” In time, as what had ostensibly begun as a friendship based on common business interests deepened, Enriko would ask for gradually more demanding favors and the payments would get bigger, until one day the victim would wake up to find himself way out of his depth. Then the high-pressure business would begin. There were four basic vulnerabilities that led people into being recruited, Enriko sometimes said, quoting an American acronym that the CIA taught their people. “MICE”—Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. In the case of the soon-to-be- recruited British industrialist, clearly it was Ego.

The gate attendant waved her on through, and she entered the marble foyer of the embassy building through the main entrance. An elevator took her up past nine floors of regular embassy rooms and offices to the tenth, where she emerged into the windowless anteroom of the London Residency of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which handled all operations abroad. As with its counterparts in Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome, Brasilia, Bangkok, New Delhi, and elsewhere, it existed solely for the purpose of subversion and information gathering. Anita’s special key opened the outer steel door. The security officer on duty checked her ID via a remote viewpanel and opened the second door, three feet beyond the first, from inside. She entered, nodding a good morning to him in his guardpost as she passed, and went through into the central corridor of the lower level.

The thing that most people noticed immediately upon entering the Residency for the first time was the sepulchral quiet pervading the place. It was because the outer walls, floors, and ceilings of the building’s entire top two floors were all double to ensure soundproofing, with electronic noise beamed through the spaces between to frustrate listening devices. The few windows were formed from a one-way opaque glass that was also soundproof and impervious to all known types of eavesdropping equipment. A whole social order based on treachery, deceit, mistrust, and paranoia, Anita thought to herself. How was it possible to avoid becoming embroiled in it along with everyone else?

She passed the large General Programs room, with twenty-odd work booths at which a number of case officers were already busy drafting reports, translating documents, and formulating operational plans. The important work of the case officers was considered to be not the obtaining of restricted information and documents—although this was valuable enough—but the discovering, cultivating, and eventual recruiting of “agents of influence”: politicians, government officials, journalists, academicians, and the like—persons able to influence policy-making and public opinion. For the mission of the KGB was still what it had always been: to preserve and expand the power of the Soviet Communist Party oligarchy throughout the world by essentially clandestine means.

Across the corridor, on the far side of a wood-paneled outer room furnished with antique cabinets, a sofa, leather-backed chairs, and a conference table, was the office of the Resident, Major General Dimitri Turenov. Beyond that were two more offices. The first was shared by two of the line chiefs: the chief of Line X—the KGB field term for Directorate T, which collected foreign scientific and technological data—and the chief of Line N (Directorate S), which was responsible for supporting “illegals”—Soviet-bloc nationals infiltrated into other countries under various identities. The next office belonged to both the chief of Line KR (Directorate K), whose task was countering British counterintelligence, and the internal-security officer, who looked after the embassy’s protection, the guarding of important Soviet visitors to the country, and recapturing defectors. Opposite these was the larger office shared by the chief of the American Group, who compiled dossiers on resident American businesspeople, scientists, technicians, servicemen, and others who had come to their attention as potentially useful; the chief of a similar group that watched West Europeans; and the active-measures officer, who handled covert operations and orchestrated disinformation and propaganda campaigns among the British news media.