The Devil's Alternative (24 page)

On arrival at the outskirts of Moscow, the two cars were directed straight to the Politburo’s own private clinic at Kuntsevo, where the corpse with the shattered head was quietly buried amid the pine forest within the clinic perimeter, in an unmarked grave. The burial party was of Ivanenko’s own bodyguards, all of whom were then placed under house arrest at one of the Kremlin’s own villas in the forest. The guard detail on these men was drawn not from the KGB but from the Kremlin palace guard.

Only Colonel Kukushkin was not held incommunicado. He was summoned to Petrov’s private office in the Central Committee Building.

The colonel was a frightened man, and when he left Petrov’s office he was little less so. Petrov gave him one chance to save his career and his life: he was put in charge of the cover-up operation. At the Kuntsevo clinic he organized the closure of one entire ward and brought fresh KGB men from Dzerzhinsky Square to mount guard on it. Two KGB doctors were transferred to Kuntsevo and put in charge of the patient in the closed ward, a patient who was in fact an empty bed. No one else was allowed in, but the two doctors, knowing only enough to be badly frightened, ferried all the equipment and medicaments into the closed ward that would be needed for the treatment of a heart attack. Within twenty-four hours, save for the closed ward in the secret clinic off the

road from Moscow to Minsk, Yuri Ivanenko had ceased to exist.

At this early stage, only one other man was let into the secret. Among Ivanenko’s six deputies, all with their offices close to his on the third floor of KGB Center, one was his official deputy as chairman of the KGB. Petrov summoned General Konstantin Abrassov to his office and informed him of what had happened, a piece of information that shook the general as nothing in a thirty- year career in secret police work had done. Inevitably he agreed to continue the masquerade.

In the October Hospital in Kiev, the dead man’s mother was surrounded by local KGB men and continued to receive daily written messages of comfort from her son.

Finally, the three workmen on the annex to the October Hospital who had discovered a hunting rifle and night-sight when they came to work the morning after the shooting were removed with their families to one of the camps in Mordovia, and two detectives were flown in from Moscow to

investigate an act of hooliganism. Colonel Kukushkin was with them. The story they were given was that the shot had been fired at the moving car of a local Party official; it had passed through the windshield and been recovered from the upholstery. The real bullet, recovered from the KGB guard’s shoulder and well washed, was presented to them. They were told to trace and identify the hooligans in conditions of complete secrecy. Somewhat perplexed and much frustrated, they proceeded to try. Work on the annex was stopped, the half-finished building sealed off, and all the forensic equipment they could ask for supplied. The only thing they did not get was a true ex- planation.

When the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle of deception was in place, Petrov reported personally to Rudin. To the old chief fell the worst task, that of informing the Politburo of what had really happened.

The private report of Dr. Myron Fletcher of the Agriculture Department to President William Matthews two days later was all and more than the ad hoc committee formed under the personal auspices of the President could have wished for. Not only had the benign weather brought North America a bumper crop in all areas of grain and cereals; it had broken existing records. Even with probable requirements for domestic consumption taken care of, even with existing aid levels to the poor countries of the world maintained, the surplus would nudge sixty million tons for the combined harvest of the United States and Canada.

“Mr. President, you’ve got it,” said Stanislaw Poklewski. “You can buy that surplus any time you wish at July’s price. Bearing in mind the progress at the Castletown talks, the House Appropriations Committee will not stand in your way.”

“I should hope not,” said the President. “If we succeed at Castletown, the reductions in defense expenditures will more than compensate for the commercial losses on the grains. What about the Soviet crop?”

“We’re working on it,” said Bob Benson. “The Condors are sweeping right across the Soviet Union, and our analysts are working out the yields of harvested grain, region by region. We should have a report for you in a week. We can correlate that with reports from our people on the ground over there, and give a pretty accurate figure—to within five percent, anyway.”

“As soon as you can,” said President Matthews. “I need to know the exact Soviet position in every area. That includes the Politburo reaction to their own grain harvest. I need to know their strengths and their weaknesses. Please get them for me, Bob.”

No one in the Ukraine that winter would be likely to forget the sweeps by the KGB and militia against those in whom the slightest hint of nationalist sentiment could be detected.

While Colonel Kukushkin’s two detectives carefully interviewed the pedestrians in Sverdlov Street the night Ivanenko’s mother had been run down, meticulously took to pieces the stolen car that had performed the hit-and-run job on the old lady, and pored over the rifle, the image intensifier, and the area surrounding the hospital annex, General Abrassov went for the nationalists.

Hundreds were detained in Kiev, Ternopol, Lvov, Kanev, Rovno, Zhitomir, and Vinnitsa. The local KGB, supported by teams from Moscow, carried out the interrogations, ostensibly concerned with sporadic outbreaks of hooliganism such as the mugging of the KGB plainclothes man in August in Ternopol. Some of the senior interrogators were permitted to know their inquiries also concerned the firing of a shot in Kiev in late October, but no more.

In the seedy Lvov working-class district of Levandivka that November, David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin strolled through the snowy streets during one of their rare meetings. Because the fathers of both had been taken away to the camps, they knew time would run out for them eventually

also. The word
Jew
was stamped on the identity card of each, as on those of every one of the Soviet Union’s three million Jews. Sooner or later, the spotlight of the KGB must swing away from the na- tionalists to the Jews. Nothing ever changes that much in the Soviet Union.

“I posted the card to Andriy Drach yesterday, confirming the success of the first objective,” said Mishkin. “How are things with you?”

“So far, so good,” said Lazareff. “Perhaps things will ease off soon.”

“Not this time, I think,” said Mishkin. “We have to make our break soon if we are going to at all. The ports are out. It has to be by air. Same place next week. I’ll see what I can discover about the airport.”

Far away to the north of them an S.A.S. jumbo jet thundered on its polar route from Stockholm to Tokyo. Among its first-class passengers it bore Captain Thor Larsen toward his new command.

Maxim Rudin’s report to the Politburo was delivered in his gravelly voice, without frills. But no histrionics in the world could have kept his audience more absorbed, nor their reaction more stunned. Since an Army officer had emptied a handgun at the limousine of Leonid Brezhnev as he passed through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate a decade before, the specter of the lone man with a gun penetrating the walls of security around the hierarchs had persisted. Now it had come out of conjecture to sit and stare at them from their own green baize table.

This time, the room was empty of secretaries. No tape recorders turned on the corner table. No aides, no stenographers were present. When he had finished, Rudin handed the floor to Petrov, who described the elaborate measures taken to mask the outrage, and the secret steps then in progress to identify and eliminate the killers after they had revealed all their accomplices.

“But you have not found them yet?” snapped Stepanov.

“It is only five days since the attack,” said Petrov evenly. “No, not yet. They will be caught, of course. They cannot escape, whoever they are. When they are caught, they will reveal every last one of those who helped them. General Abrassov will see to that. Then every last person who knows what happened that night on Rosa Luxemburg Street, wherever they may be hiding, will be eliminated. There will be no trace left.”

“And in the meantime?” asked Komarov.

“In the meantime,” said Rudin, “it must be maintained with unbreakable solidarity that Comrade Yuri Ivanenko has sustained a massive heart attack and is under intensive care. Let us be clear on one thing. The Soviet Union cannot and will not tolerate the public humiliation of the world’s ever being allowed to know what happened on Rosa Luxemburg Street. There are no Lee Harvey Oswald’s in Russia, and never will be.”

There was a murmur of assent. No one was prepared to disagree with Rudin’s assessment. “With respect, Comrade Secretary-General,” Petrov cut in, “while the catastrophe of such news

leaking abroad cannot be overestimated, there is another aspect, equally serious. If this news leaked out, the rumors would begin among our own population. Before long they would be more than rumors. The effect internally I leave to your imagination.”

They all knew how closely the maintenance of public order was linked to a belief in the impregnability and invincibility of the KGB.

“If this news leaked out,” said Chavadze the Georgian slowly, “and even more so if the perpetrators escaped, the effect would be as bad as that of the grain famine.”

“They cannot escape,” said Petrov sharply. “They must not. They shall not.” “Then who are they?” growled Kerensky.

“We do not yet know, Comrade Marshal,” replied Petrov, “but we will.”

“But it was a Western gun,” insisted Shushkin. “Could the West be behind this?”

“I think it almost impossible,” said Rykov. “No Western government, no Third World government, would be crazy enough to support such an outrage, in the same way as we had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. Émigrés, possibly. Anti-Soviet fanatics, possibly. But not governments.”

“Émigré groups abroad are also being investigated,” said Petrov. “But discreetly. We have most of them penetrated. So far, nothing has come in. The rifle, ammunition, and night-sight are all of Western make. They are all commercially purchasable in the West. That they were smuggled in is beyond doubt. Which means either the users brought them in, or they had outside help. General Abrassov agrees with me that the primary requirement is to find the users, who will reveal their suppliers. Department V will take over from there.”

Yefrem Vishnayev watched the proceedings with keen interest but took little part. Kerensky expressed the dissatisfaction of the dissident group instead. Neither sought a further vote on the choice of the Castletown talks or a war in 1983. Both knew that in the event of a tie, the Chairman’s vote would prevail. Rudin had come one step nearer to falling but was not finished yet.

The meeting agreed that the announcement should be made, only within the KGB and the upper echelons of the Party machine, that Yuri Ivanenko had suffered a heart attack and been hospitalized. When the killers had been identified and they and their aides had been eliminated, Ivanenko would quietly expire from his illness.

Rudin was about to summon the secretaries to the chamber for the resumption of the usual Politburo meeting when Stepanov, who had originally voted for Rudin and negotiations with the United States, raised his hand.

“Comrades, I would regard it as a major defeat for our country if the killers of Yuri Ivanenko were to escape and publish their action to the world. Should that happen, I would not be able to continue my support for the policy of negotiation and further concession in the matter of our armaments levels in exchange for American grain. I would switch my support to the proposal of Party theoretician Vishnayev.”

There was dead silence.

“So would I,” said Shushkin.

Eight against four, thought Rudin as he gazed impassively down the table. Eight against four if these two shits change sides now.

“Your point is taken, Comrades,” said Rudin without a flicker of emotion. “There will be no publication of this deed. None at all.”

Ten minutes later, the meeting reopened with a unanimous expression of regret at the sudden illness of Comrade Ivanenko. The subject then turned to the newly arrived figures of wheat and grain yields.

The Zil limousine of Yefrem Vishnayev erupted from the mouth of the Borovitsky Gate at the Kremlin’s southwestern corner and straight across Manège Square. The policeman on duty in the square, forewarned by his bleeper that the Politburo cavalcade was leaving the Kremlin, had stopped all traffic. Within seconds the long, black, hand-tooled cars were scorching up Frunze Street, past the Defense Ministry, toward the homes of the privileged on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

Marshal Kerensky sat beside Vishnayev in the latter’s car, having accepted his invitation to drive together. The partition between the spacious rear area and the driver was closed and soundproof. The curtains shut out the gaze of the pedestrians.

“He’s near to falling,” growled Kerensky.

“No,” said Vishnayev, “he’s one step nearer and a lot weaker without Ivanenko, but he’s not near to falling yet. Don’t underestimate Maxim Rudin. He’ll fight like a cornered bear on the taiga

before he goes, but go he will because go he must.” “Well, there’s not much time,” said Kerensky.

“Less than you think,” said Vishnayev. “There were food riots in Vilnius last week. Our friend Vitautas, who voted for our proposal in July, is getting nervous. He was on the verge of switching sides despite the very attractive villa I have offered him next to my own at Sochi. Now he is back in the fold, and Shushkin and Stepanov may change sides in our favor.”

“But only if the killers escape, or the truth is published abroad,” said Kerensky. “Precisely. And that is what must happen.”

Kerensky turned in the back seat, his florid face turning brick-red beneath his shock of white hair.

“Reveal the truth? To the whole world? We can’t do that,” he exploded.

“No, we can’t There are far too few people who know the truth, and mere rumors cannot succeed. They can be too easily discounted. An actor looking precisely like Ivanenko could be found, rehearsed, seen in public. So others must do it for us. With absolute proof. The guards who were present that night are
in
the hands of the Kremlin elite. That leaves only the killers themselves.”