The Devil's Alternative (16 page)

Set in the back wall of the garage is a small elevator, guarded by steel doors and two armed men. Chip Allen identified his guest, signed for him, and used a plastic card to open the elevator doors. The elevator hummed its way quietly seven floors up to the Director’s suite. Another magnetized plastic card got them both out of the elevator, into a lobby faced by three doors. Chip Allen knocked on the center one, and it was Bob Benson himself who, alerted from below, welcomed the British visitor into his suite.

Benson led him past the big desk to the lounge area in front of the beige marble fireplace. In winter Benson liked a crackling log fire to burn here, but Washington in August is no place for fires and the air conditioning was working overtime. Benson pulled the rice-paper screen across the room to separate the lounge from the office and sat back opposite his guest. Coffee was ordered, and when they were alone, Benson finally asked, “What brings you to Langley, Nigel?”

Sir Nigel sipped and sat back.

“We have,” he said undramatically, “obtained the services of a new asset.”

He spoke for almost ten minutes before the Director of Central Intelligence interrupted him. “Inside the Politburo?” he queried. “You mean, right inside?”

“Let us just say, with access to Politburo meeting transcripts,” said Sir Nigel. “Would you mind if I called Chip Allen and Ben Kahn in on this?”

“Not at all, Bob. They’ll have to know within an hour or so, anyway. Prevents repetition.”

Bob Benson rose, crossed to a telephone on a coffee table, and made a call to his private secretary. When he had finished he stared out of the picture window at the great green forest. “Jesus H. Christ,” he breathed.

Sir
Nigel Irvine was not displeased that his two old contacts in the CIA should be in on the ground floor of his briefing. All pure intelligence agencies—as opposed to intelligence-secret police forces like the KGB—have two main arms. One is Operations, covering the business of actually obtaining information; the other is Intelligence, covering the business of collating, cross- referencing, interpreting, and analyzing the great mass of raw, unprocessed information that is gathered in.

Both have to be good. If the information is faulty, the best analysis in the world will only come up with nonsense; if the analysis is inept, all the efforts of the information gatherers are wasted. Statesmen need to know what other nations, friends or potential foes, are doing and, if possible, what they intend to do. What they are doing is nowadays often observable; what they intend to do is not. Which is why all the space cameras in the world will never supplant a brilliant analyst working with material from inside another’s secret councils.

In the CIA the two men who hold sway under the Director of Central Intelligence, who may be a political appointee, are the Deputy Director (Operations), or DDO, and the Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI. It is Operations that inspires the thriller writers; Intelligence is back-room work, tedious, slow, methodical, and, paradoxically, often most valuable when most boring.

Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the DDO and the DDI have to work hand in hand and they have to trust each other. Benson, as a political appointee, was lucky. His DDO was Chip Allen, WASP and former football player; his DDI was Ben Kahn, Jewish chess master; they fitted together like a pair of gloves. In five minutes both were sitting with Benson and Irvine in the lounge area. Coffee was forgotten.

The British spymaster talked for almost an hour. He was uninterrupted. Then the three Americans read the Nightingale transcript and watched the tape recording in its polyethylene bag with something like hunger. When Irvine had finished, there was a short silence. Chip Allen broke it.

“Roll over, Penkovsky,” he said.

“You’ll want to check it all,” said Sir Nigel evenly. No one dissented. Friends are friends, but ... “It took us ten days, but we can’t fault it. The voiceprints check out, every one. We’ve already exchanged cables about the bustup in the Soviet Agriculture Ministry. And of course you have your Condor photographs. Oh, one last thing ...”

From his bag he produced a small polyethylene sack with a sprig of young wheat inside it. “One of our chaps swiped this from a field outside Leningrad.”

“I’ll have our Agriculture Department check it out as well,” said Benson. “Anything else, Nigel?”

“Oh, not really,” said Sir Nigel. “Well, perhaps a couple of small points ...” “Spit it out.”

Sir Nigel drew a breath.

“The Russian buildup in Afghanistan. We think they may be mounting a move toward Pakistan and India through the passes. That we regard as our patch. Now, if you could ask Condor to have a look ...”

“You’ve got it,” said Benson without hesitation.

“And then,” resumed Sir Nigel, “that Soviet defector you brought out of Geneva two weeks ago.

He seems to know quite a bit about Soviet assets in our trade-union movement.” “We sent you transcripts of that,” said Allen hastily.

“We’d like direct access,” said Sir Nigel. Allen looked at Kahn. Kahn shrugged.

“Okay,” said Benson. “Can we have access to the Nightingale?”

“Sorry, no,” said Sir Nigel. “That’s different. The Nightingale’s too damn delicate, right out in the cold. I don’t want to disturb the fish just yet in case of a change of heart. You’ll get everything we get, as soon as we get it. But no moving in. I’m trying to speed up the delivery and volume, but it’s going to take time and a lot of care.”

“When’s your next delivery slated for?” asked Allen.

“A week from today. At least, that’s the meet. I hope there’ll be a handover.”

Sir Nigel Irvine spent the night at a CIA safe house in the Virginia countryside, and the next day “Mr. Barrett” flew back to London with the air chief marshal.

It was three days later that Azamat Krim sailed from Pier 49 in New York harbor aboard the elderly
Queen Elizabeth 2
for Southampton. He had decided to sail rather than fly because he felt there was a better chance his main luggage would escape X-ray examination if he went by sea.

His purchases were complete. One of his pieces of luggage was a standard aluminum shoulder case such as professional photographers use to protect their cameras and lenses. As such, it could not be X-rayed but would have to be hand-examined. The molded plastic sponge inside that held the cameras and lenses from banging against each other was glued to the bottom of the case, but ended two niches short of the real bottom. In the cavity were two handguns with ammunition clips.

Another piece of luggage, deep in the heart of a small cabüi trunk full of clothes, was an aluminum tube with a screw top, containing what looked like a long, cylindrical camera lens, some four inches in diameter. He calculated that if it were examined, it would pass in the eyes of all but the most suspicious of customs officers as the sort of lens that camera freaks use for very long range photography, and a collection of books of bird photographs and wildlife pictures lying next to the lens inside the trunk was designed to corroborate the explanation.

In fact, the lens was an image intensifier, also called a night-sight, of the kind that may be commercially bought without a permit in the United States but not in Britain.

It was boiling hot that Sunday, August 8, in Moscow, and those who could not get to the beaches crowded instead to the numerous swimming pools of the city, especially the new complex built for the 1980 Olympics. But the British Embassy staff, along with those of a dozen other legations, were at the beach on the Moscow River upstream from Uspenskoye Bridge. Adam Munro was among them.

He tried to appear as carefree as the others, but it was hard. He checked his watch too many times, and finally got dressed.

“Oh, Adam, you’re not going back already? There’s ages of daylight left,” one of the secretaries called to him.

He forced a rueful grin.

“Duty calls, or rather the plans for the Manchester Chamber of Commerce visit call,” he shouted back to her.

He walked through the woods to his car, dropped his bathing things, had a covert look to see if anyone was interested, and locked the car. There were too many men in sandals, slacks, and open shirts for one extra to be of notice, and he thanked his stars the KGB never seemed to take their jackets off. There was no one looking remotely like the Opposition within sight of him. He set off through the trees to the north.

Valentina was waiting for him, standing back in the shade of the trees. His stomach was tight, knotted, for all that he was pleased to see her. She was no expert at spotting a tail and might have been followed. If she had, his diplomatic cover would save him from worse than expulsion, but the repercussions would be enormous. Even that was not his worry; it was what they would do to her if she were ever caught. Whatever the motives, the term for what she was doing was high treason.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. She kissed him back and trembled in his arms. “Are you frightened?” he asked her.

“A bit.” She nodded. “You listened to the tape recording?”

“Yes, I did. Before I handed it over. I suppose I should not have done, but I did.”

“Then you know about the famine that faces us. Adam, when I was a girl I saw the famine in this country just after the war. It was bad, but it was caused by the war, by Germans. We could take it. Our leaders were on our side, they would make things get better.”

“Perhaps they can sort things out this time,” said Munro lamely. Valentina shook her head angrily.

“They’re not even trying,” she burst out. “I sit there listening to their voices, typing the transcripts. They are just bickering, trying to save their own skins.”

“And your uncle, Marshal Kerensky?” he asked gently.

“He’s as bad as the rest. When I married my husband, Uncle Nikolai was at the wedding. I thought he was so jolly, so kindly. Of course, that was his private life. Now I listen to him in his public life; he’s like all of them, ruthless and cynical. They just jockey for advantage over each other, for power, and to hell with the people. I suppose I should be one of them, but I can’t be. Not now, not anymore.”

Munro looked across the clearing at the pines but saw olive trees and heard a boy in uniform shouting. “You don’t own me!” Strange, he mused, how establishments with all their power sometimes went too far and lost control of their own servants through sheer excess. Not always, not often, but sometimes.

“I could get you out of here, Valentina,” he said. “It would mean my leaving the diplomatic corps, but it’s been done before. Sasha is young enough to grow up somewhere else.”

“No, Adam, no, it’s tempting but I can’t. Whatever the outcome, I am part of Russia, I have to stay. Perhaps, one day ... I don’t know.”

They sat in silence for a while, holding hands. She broke the quiet at last. “Did your ... intelligence people pass the tape recording on to London?”

“I think so. I handed it to the man I believe represents the Secret Service in the embassy. He asked me if there would be another one.”

She nodded at her shoulder bag.

“It’s just the transcript. I can’t get the tape recordings anymore. They’re kept in a safe after the transcriptions, and I don’t have the key. The papers in there are of the following Politburo meeting.”

“How do you get them out, Valentina?” he asked.

“After the meetings,” she told him, “the tapes and the stenographic notes are brought under guard to the Central Committee building. There is a locked department there where we work, five other women and I. With one man in charge. When the transcripts are finished, the tapes are locked away.”

“Then how did you get the first one?” She shrugged.

“The man in charge is new, since last month. The other one, before him, was more lax. There is a tape studio next door where the tapes are copied once before being locked in the safe. I was alone in there last month, long enough to steal the second tape and substitute a dummy.”

“A dummy?” exclaimed Munro. “They’ll spot the substitution if ever they play them back.”

“It’s unlikely,” she said. “The transcripts form the archives once they have been checked against the tapes for accuracy. I was lucky with that tape; I brought it out in a shopping bag under the groceries I had bought in the Central Committee commissary.”

“Aren’t you searched?”

“Hardly ever. We are trusted, Adam, the elite of the New Russia. The papers are easier. At work I wear an old-fashioned girdle. I copied the last meeting of June on the machine, but ran off one extra copy, then switched the number control back by one figure. The extra copy I stuck inside my

girdle. It made no noticeable bulge.” Munro’s stomach turned at the risk she was taking. “What do they talk about in this meeting?” he asked, gesturing toward the shoulder bag.

“The consequences,” she said. “What will happen when the famine breaks. What the people of Russia will do to them. But Adam ... there’s been one since. Early in July. I couldn’t copy it; I was on leave. I couldn’t refuse my leave; it would have been too obvious. But when I got back, I met one of the girls who had transcribed it. She was white-faced and wouldn’t describe it.”

“Can you get it?” asked Munro.

“I can try. I’ll have to wait until the office is empty and use the copying machine. I can reset it afterward so it will not show it has been used. But not until early next month; I shall not be on the late shift when I can work alone until then.”

“We shouldn’t meet here again,” Munro told her. “Patterns are dangerous.”

He spent another hour describing the sort of tradecraft she would need to know if they were to go on meeting. Finally he gave her a pad of closely typed sheets he had tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.

“It’s all in there, my darling. Memorize it and burn it. Flush the ashes down the can.”

Five minutes later she gave him a wad of flimsy paper sheets covered with neat, typed Cyrillic script from her bag and slipped away through the forest to her car on a sandy track half a mile away.

Munro retreated into the darkness of the main arch above the church’s recessed side door. He produced a roll of tape from his pocket, slipped his pants to his knees, and taped the batch of sheets to his thigh. With the trousers back up again and belted, he could feel the paper snug against his thigh as he walked, but under the baggy, Russian-made trousers, they did not show.