The Devil's Alternative (12 page)

He maintained his smile as one of the embassy secretaries came over, laughing, to ask for a cigarette. While he lit it for her, his mind was working out all the angles he could think of. A dissident wanting to pass over the underground literature? A load of trouble, that. A religious group wanting asylum in the embassy? The Americans had had that in 1978, and it had caused untold problems. A trap set by the KGB to identify the SIS man inside the embassy? Always possible. No ordinary commercial secretary would accept such an invitation, slipped into a rolled towel by someone who had evidently tailed him and watched from the surrounding woods. And yet it was too crude for the KGB. They would have set up a pretended defector in central Moscow with information to pass, arranged for secret photographs at the handover point. So who was the secret writer?

He dressed quickly, still undecided.

Finally he pulled on his shoes and made up his mind. If it was a trap, then he had received no message and was simply walking in the forest. To the disappointment of his hopeful secretary he set off alone. After a hundred yards he paused, took out his lighter and burned the card, grinding the ash into the carpet of pine needles.

The sun and his watch gave him due north, away from the riverbank, which faced south. After ten minutes he emerged on the side of a slope and saw the onion-shaped dome of a chapel two kilometers farther on across the valley. Seconds later he was back in the trees.

The forests around Moscow have dozens of such small chapels, once the worshiping places of the villagers, now mainly derelict, boarded up, deserted. The one he was approaching stood in its own clearing among the trees, beside a derelict cemetery. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and surveyed the tiny church. He could see no one. Carefully he advanced into the open. He was a few yards from the sealed front door when he saw the figure standing in deep shadow under an archway. He stopped, and for minutes on end the two stared at each other.

There was really nothing to say, so he just said her name. “Valentina.” She moved out of the shadow and replied, “Adam.”

Twenty-one years, he thought in wonderment She must be turned forty. She looked like thirty, still raven-haired, beautiful, and ineffably sad.

They sat on one of the tombstones and talked quietly of the old times. She told him she had returned from Berlin to Moscow a few months after their parting, and had continued to be a stenographer for the Party machine. At twenty-three she had married a young Army officer with good prospects. After seven years there had been a baby, and they had been happy, all three of

them. Her husband’s career had flourished, for he had an uncle high in the Red Army, and patron- age is no different in the Soviet Union from anywhere else. The boy was now ten.

Five years before, her husband, having reached the rank of colonel at a young age, had been killed in a helicopter crash while surveying Red Chinese troop deployments along the Ussuri River in the Far East. To kill the grief she had gone back to work. Her husband’s uncle had used his influence to secure her good, highly placed work, bringing with it privileges in the form of special food shops, special restaurants, a better apartment, a private car—all the things that go with high rank in the Party machine.

Finally, two years before, after special clearance, she had been offered a post in the tiny, closed group of stenographers and typists, a subsection of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, that is called the Politburo Secretariat.

Munro breathed deeply. That was high, very high, and very trusted. “Who,” he asked, “is the uncle of your late husband?”

“Kerensky,” she murmured.

“Marshal Kerensky?” he asked. She nodded. Munro exhaled slowly. Kerensky, the ultrahawk. When he looked again at her face, the eyes were wet. She was blinking rapidly, on the verge of tears. On an impulse he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. He smelled her hair, the same sweet odor that had made him feel both tender and excited two decades ago, in his youth.

“What’s the matter?” he asked gently. “Oh, Adam, I’m so unhappy.”

“In God’s name, why? In your society you have everything.”

She shook her head slowly, then pulled away from him. She avoided his eye, gazing across the clearing into the woods.

“Adam, all my life, since I was a small girl, I believed. I truly believed. Even when we loved, I believed in the goodness, the lightness, of socialism. Even in the hard times, the times of deprivation in my country, when the West had all the consumer riches and we had none, I believed in the justice of the Communist ideal that we in Russia would one day bring to the world. It was an ideal that would give us all a world without fascism, without money-lust, without exploitation, without war.

“I was taught it, and I really believed it. It was more important than you, than our love, than my husband and child. It meant as much to me as this country, Russia, which is part of my soul.”

Munro knew about the patriotism of the Russians toward their country, a fierce flame that would make them endure any suffering, any privation, any sacrifice, and which, when manipulated, would make them obey their Kremlin overlords without demur.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

“They have betrayed it Are betraying it. My ideal, my people, and my country.” “They?” he asked.

She was twisting her fingers until they looked as if they would come off.

“The Party chiefs,” she said bitterly. She spat out the Russian slang word meaning “fat cats”: “The
nachalstvo
.”

Munro had twice witnessed a recantation. When a true believer loses the faith, the reversed fanaticism goes to strange extremes.

“I worshiped them, Adam. I respected them. I revered them. Now, for years, I have lived close to them all. I have lived in their shadow, taken their gifts, been showered with their privileges. I have seen them close up, in private; heard them talk about the people, whom they despise. They are rot- ten, Adam, corrupt and cruel. Everything they touch they turn to ashes.”

Munro swung one leg across the tombstone so he could face her, and took her in his arms. She was crying softly.

“I can’t go on, Adam, I can’t go on,” she murmured into his shoulder. “All right, my darling, do you want me to try to get you out?”

He knew it would cost him his career, but this time he was not going to let her go. It would be worth it; everything would be worth it.

She pulled away, her face tear-streaked.

“I cannot. I cannot leave. I have Sasha to think about.”

He held her quietly for a while longer. His mind was racing. “How did you know I was in Moscow?” he asked carefully.

She gave no hint of surprise at the question. It was in any case natural enough for him to ask it. “Last month,” she said between sniffs, “I was taken to the ballet by a colleague from the office.

We were in a box. When the lights were low, I thought I must be mistaken. But when they went up at intermission, I knew it was really you. I could not stay after that. I pleaded a headache and left quickly.”

She dabbed her eyes, the crying spell over. “Adam,” she asked eventually, “did you marry?”

“Yes,” he said. “Long after Berlin. It didn’t work. We were divorced years ago.”

She managed a little smile. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad there is no one else. That is not very logical, is it?”

He grinned back at her.

“No,” he said. “It is not. But it is nice to hear. Can we see each other? In the future?” Her smile faded; there was a hunted look in her eyes. She shook her dark head.

“No, not very often, Adam,” she said. “I am trusted, privileged, but if a foreigner came to my apartment, it would soon be noticed and reported on. The same applies to your apartment. Diplomats are watched—you know that. Hotels are watched also; no apartments are for rent here without impossible formalities. It will be difficult, Adam, very difficult.”

“Valentina, you arranged this meeting. You took the initiative. Was it just for old times’ sake? If you do not like your life here, if you do not like the men you work for ... But if you cannot leave because of Sasha, then what is it you want?”

She composed herself and thought for a while. When she spoke, it was quite calmly.

“Adam, I want to try to stop them. I want to try to stop what they are doing. I suppose I have for several years now, but since I saw you at the Bolshoi, and remembered all the freedom we had in Berlin, I began thinking about it more and more. Now I am certain. Tell me if you can—is there an intelligence officer in your embassy?”

Munro was shaken. He had handled two defectors-in-place, one from the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, the other in Vienna. One had been motivated by a conversion from respect to hatred for his own regime, like Valentina; the other by bitterness at lack of promotion. The former had been the trickier to handle.

“I suppose so,” he said slowly. “I suppose there must be.”

Valentina rummaged in the shoulder bag on the pine needles by her feet. Having made up her mind, she was apparently determined to go through with her betrayal. She withdrew a thick, padded envelope.

“I want you to give this to him, Adam. Promise me you will never tell him who it came from.

Please, Adam. I am frightened by what I am doing. I cannot trust anyone but you.”

“I promise,” he said. “But I have to see you again. I can’t Just see you walk away through the gap in the wall as I did last time.”

“No, I cannot do that again, either. But do not try to contact me at my apartment. It is in a walled compound for senior functionaries, with a single gate in the wall and a policeman at it. Do not try to telephone me. The calls are monitored. And I will never meet anyone else from your embassy, not even the intelligence chief.”

“I agree,” said Munro. “But when can we meet again?”

She considered for a moment. “It is not always easy for me to get away. Sasha takes up most of my spare time. But I have my own car and I am not followed. Tomorrow I must go away for two weeks, but we can meet here, four Sundays from today.” She looked at her watch. “I must go, Adam. I am one of a house party at a dacha a few miles from here.”

He kissed her on the lips, the way it used to be. And it was as sweet as it had ever been. She rose and walked away across the clearing. When she reached the fringe of the trees, he called after her.

“Valentina, what is in this?” He held up the package. She paused and turned.

“My job,” she said, “is to prepare the verbatim transcripts of the Politburo meetings, one for each member. And the digests for the candidate members. From the tape recordings. That is a copy of the recording of the meeting of June tenth.”

Then she was gone into the trees. Munro sat on the tombstone and looked down at the package. “Bloody hell,” he said.

CHAPTER FOUR

ADAM MUNRO sat in a locked room in the main building of the British Embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment and listened to the last sentences of the tape recording on the machine in front of him. The room was safe from any chance of electronic surveillance by the Russians, which was why he had borrowed it for a few hours from the head of Chancery.

“... goes without saying that this news does not pass outside those present in this room. Our next meeting will be a week from today.”

The voice of Maxim Rudin died away, and the tape hissed on the machine, then stopped. Munro switched it off. He leaned back and let out a long, low whistle.

If it was true, it was bigger than anything Oleg Penkovsky had brought over, twenty years before. The story of Penkovsky was folklore in the SIS, the CIA, and, most of all, in the bitterest memories of the KGB. He was a brigadier general in the GRU, with access to the highest information, who, disenchanted with the Kremlin hierarchy, had approached first the Americans and then the British with an offer to provide information.

The Americans had turned him down, suspecting a trap. The British had accepted him, and for two and a half years “run” him until he was trapped by the KGB, exposed, tried, and shot. In his time he had brought over a golden harvest of secret information, but most of all at the time of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In that month the world had applauded the exceptionally skillful handling by President John F. Kennedy of the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev over the matter of the planting of Soviet missiles in Cuba. What the world had not known was that the exact strengths and weaknesses of the Russian leader were already in the Americans’ hands, thanks to Penkovsky.

When it was finally over, the Soviet missiles were out of Cuba, Khrushchev was humbled, Kennedy was a hero, and Penkovsky was under suspicion. He was arrested in November. Within a year, after a show trial, he was dead. That same winter of 1963 Kennedy, too, died, just thirteen months after his triumph. And within two years Khrushchev had fallen, toppled by his own colleagues, ostensibly because of his failure in the grain policy, in fact because his adventurism had scared the daylights out of them. The democrat, the despot, and the spy had all left the stage. But even Penkovsky had never got right inside the Politburo.

Munro took the spool off the machine and carefully rewrapped it. The voice of Professor Yakovlev was, of course, unknown to him, and most of the tape was of him reading his report. But in the discussion following the professor, there were ten voices, and three at least were identifiable. The low growl of Rudin was well enough known; the high tones of Vishnayev, Munro had heard before, watching televised speeches by the man to Party congresses; and the bark of Marshal Kerensky he had heard at May Day celebrations, as well as on film and tape.

His problem, when he took the tape back to London for voiceprint analysis, as he knew he must, was how to cover his source. He knew if he admitted to the secret rendezvous in the forest, following the typed note in the bathing towel, the question would be asked: “Why you, Munro? How did she know you?” It would be impossible to avoid that question, and equally impossible to answer it. The only solution was to devise an alternative source, credible and uncheckable.