The Devil's Alternative (44 page)

The German Chancellor was standing in his study with the strains of Beethoven drifting through the door from the sitting room where he had been enjoying a cigar and a concert on the stereo. To say that he was suspicious would be putting it mildly. So far as he was concerned, the transatlantic

line, established years before to link the NATO government heads, and checked regularly, was perfectly safe. Moreover, he reasoned, the United States had perfectly good communications with their Bonn Embassy and could send him a personal message on that route if desired. It did not occur to him that Washington would simply not trust his cabinet with a secret of this magnitude after the repeated exposure of East German agents close to the seat of power on the Rhine.

On the other hand, the President of the United States was not given to making late-night calls or crazy appeals. He had to have his reasons, Busch knew. But what he was being asked was not something he could decide without consultation.

“It is just past ten P.M. over here,” he told Matthews. “We have until dawn to decide. Nothing fresh ought to happen until then. I shall reconvene my cabinet during the night and consult with them. I cannot promise you more.”

President William Matthews had to be satisfied with that.

When the phone was replaced, Dietrich Busch stayed for long minutes in thought. There was something going on, he reasoned, and it concerned Mishkin and Lazareff, sitting in their separate cells in Tegel Jail in West Berlin. If anything happened to them, there was no way in which the Federal Republic’s government would escape a howl of censure from within Germany, by the combined media and the political opposition. And with the state elections coming up ...

His first call was to Ludwig Fischer, his Minister of Justice, also at home in the capital. None of his ministers would be weekending in the country, by prior agreement. His suggestion was met with immediate agreement by the Justice Minister. To transfer the pair from the old-fashioned prison of Tegel to the much newer and super-secure jail of Moabit was an obvious precaution. No CIA operatives would ever get at them inside Moabit. Fischer telephoned the instruction to Berlin immediately.

There are certain phrases, innocent enough, which when used by the senior cipher clerk at the British Embassy in Moscow to the man he knows to be the SIS resident on the embassy staff, mean, in effect, “Get the hell down here fast Something urgent is coming through from London.” Such was the phrase that brought Adam Munro from his bed at midnight Moscow time, ten P.M. London time, across town to Maurice Thorez Embankment.

Driving back from Downing Street to his office, Sir Nigel Irvine had realized the Prime Minister was absolutely right Compared to the destruction of the Treaty of Dublin on the one hand or the destruction of the
Freya
, her crew, and her cargo on the other, putting a Russian agent at risk of ex- posure was the lesser evil What he was going to ask Munro in Moscow to do, and the way he would have to demand it gave him no pleasure. But before he arrived at the SIS building he knew it would have to be done.

Deep in the basement the communications room was handling the usual routine traffic when he entered, and startled the night duty staff. But the scrambler telex raised Moscow in less than five minutes. No one queried the right of the Master to talk directly to his Moscow resident in the middle of the night. It was thirty minutes later that the telex from the Moscow cipher room chattered its message that Munro was there and waiting.

The operators at both ends, senior men of a lifetime’s experience, could be trusted with the whereabouts of Christ’s bones, if necessary—they had to be, they handled, as routine, messages that could bring down governments. From London the telex would send its scrambled, uninterceptible message down to a forest of aerials outside Cheltenham, better known for its horse races and woman’s college. From there the words would be converted automatically into an unbreakable one-off code and beamed out over a sleeping Europe to an aerial on the embassy roof. Four seconds after they were typed in London, they would emerge, in clear, on the telex in the

basement of the old sugar magnate’s house in Moscow.

There, the cipher clerk turned to Munro, standing by his side.

“It’s the Master himself,” he said, reading the code tag on the incoming message. “There must be a flap on.”

Sir Nigel had to tell Munro the burden of Kirov’s message to President Matthews of only three hours earlier. Without that knowledge, Munro could not ask the Nightingale for the answer to Matthews’s question: Why?

The telex rattled for several minutes. Munro read the message that spewed out, with horror.

“I can’t do that,” he told the impassive clerk over whose shoulder he was reading. When the message from London was ended, he told the clerk:

“Reply as follows: ‘Not repeat not possible obtain this sort of answer in tune scale.’ Send it.”

The interchange between Sir Nigel Irvine and Adam Munro went on for fifteen minutes. There is a method of contacting N at short notice, suggested London. Yes, but only in case of dire emergency, replied Munro. This qualifies one hundred times as emergency, chattered the machine from London. But N could not begin to inquire in less than several days, pointed out Munro. Next regular Politburo meeting not due until Thursday following. What about records of last Thursday’s meeting? asked London.
Freya
was not hijacked last Thursday, retorted Munro. Finally Sir Nigel did what he hoped he would not have to do.

“Regret,” tapped the machine, “prime ministerial order not refusable. Unless attempt made avert this disaster, operation to bring out N to West cannot proceed.”

Munro looked down at the stream of paper coming out of the telex with disbelief. For the first time he was caught in the net of his own attempts to keep his love for the agent he ran from his superiors in London. Sir Nigel Irvine thought the Nightingale was an embittered Russian turncoat called Anatoly Krivoi, right-hand man to the warmonger Vishnayev.

“Make to London,” he told the clerk dully, “the following: ‘Will try this night stop decline to accept responsibility if N refuses or is unmasked during attempt stop.’ ”

The reply from the Master was brief: “Agree. Proceed.” It was half past one in Moscow, and very cold.

Half past six in Washington, and the dusk was settling over the sweep of lawns beyond the bulletproof windows behind the President’s chair, causing the lamps to be switched on. The group in the Oval Office was wailing: waiting for Chancellor Busch, waiting for an unknown agent in Moscow, waiting for a masked terrorist of unknown origins sitting on a million-ton bomb off Europe with a detonator in his hand. Waiting for the chance of a third alternative.

The phone rang and it was for Stanislaw Poklewski. He listened, held a hand over the mouthpiece, and told the President it was from the Navy Department in answer to his query of an hour earlier.

There was one U.S. Navy vessel in the area of the
Freya
. She had been paying a courtesy visit to the Danish coastal city of Esbjerg, and was on her way back to join her squadron of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, or STANFORLANT, then cruising on patrol west of Norway. She was well off the Danish coast, steaming north by west to rejoin her NATO allies.

“Divert to
Freya’s
area,” said the President.

Poklewski passed the Commander in Chiefs order back to the Navy Department, which soon began to make signals via STANFORLANT headquarters to the American warship.

Just after one in the morning, the U.S.S.
Moran
, halfway between Denmark and the Orkney Islands, put her helm about, opened her engines to full power, and then began racing through the moonlight southward for the English Channel. She was a guided-missile ship of almost eight

thousand tons, which, although heavier than the British light cruiser
Argyll
, was classified as a destroyer, or DD. Moving at full power in a calm sea, she was making close to thirty knots to bring her to her station five miles from the
Freya
at eight A.M.

There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mojarsky Hotel, just off the roundabout at the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Those that were there were dark, uninhabited, save two.

Munro watched the lights of the other car flicker and dim, then climbed from his own vehicle and walked across to it. When he climbed into the passenger seat beside her, Valentina was alarmed and trembling.

“What is it, Adam? Why did you call me at the apartment? The call must have been recorded.” He put his arm around her, feeling the trembling through her coat.

“It was from a call box,” he said, “and only concerned Gregor’s inability to attend your dinner party. No one will suspect anything.”

“At two in the morning?” she remonstrated. “No one makes calls like that at two in the morning.

I was seen to leave the apartment compound by the night watchman. He will report it.” “Darling, I’m sorry. Listen.”

He told her of the visit by Ambassador Kirov to President Matthews the previous evening; of the news being passed to London; of the demand to him that he try to find out why the Kremlin was taking such an attitude over Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because those animals murdered Captain Rudenko, a man with a wife and children.”

“Valentina, we have listened to the Politburo these past nine months. The Treaty of Dublin is vital to your people. Why would Rudin put it in jeopardy over these two men?”

“He has not done so,” answered Valentina. “It is possible for the West to control the oil slick if the ship blows up. The costs can be met. The West is rich.”

“Darling, there are twenty-rune seamen aboard that ship. They, too, have wives and children. Twenty-nine men’s lives against the imprisonment of two. There has to be another and more serious reason.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It has not been mentioned in Politburo meetings. You know that also.”

Munro stared miserably through the windshield. He had hoped against hope she might have an answer for Washington, something she had heard inside the Central Committee building. Finally he decided he had to tell her.

When he had finished, she stared through the darkness with round eyes. He caught a hint of tears in the dying light of the moon.

“They promised,” she whispered. “They promised they would bring me and Sasha out, in a fortnight, from Rumania.”

“They’ve gone back on their word,” he confessed. “They want this last favor.” She placed her forehead on her gloved hands, supported by the steering wheel. “They will catch me,” she mumbled. “I am so frightened.”

“They won’t catch you.” He tried to reassure her. “The KGB acts much more slowly than people think, and the higher their suspect is placed, the more slowly they have to act. If you can get this piece of information for President Matthews, I think I can persuade them to get you out in a few days, you and Sasha, instead of two weeks. Please try, my love. It’s our only chance left of ever being together.”

Valentina stared through the glass.

“There was a Politburo meeting this evening,” she said finally. “I was not there. It was a special

meeting, out of sequence. Normally on Friday evenings they are all going to the country. Transcription begins tomorrow—that is, today—at ten in the morning. The staff have to give up their weekend to get it ready for Monday. Perhaps they mentioned the matter.”

“Could you get in to see the notes, listen to the tapes?” he asked.” “In the middle of the night? There would be questions asked.”

“Make an excuse, darling. Any excuse. You want to start and finish your work early, so as to get away.”

“I will try,” she said eventually. “I will try—for you, Adam, not for those men in London.”

“I know those men in London,” said Adam Munro. “They will bring you and Sasha out if you help them now. This will be the last risk, truly the last.”

She seemed not to have heard him, and to have overcome, for a while, her fear of the KGB, exposure as a spy, the awful consequences of capture unless she could escape in time. When she spoke, her voice was quite level.

“You know Detsky Mir? The soft-toys counter. At ten o’clock this morning.”

He stood on the black tarmac and watched her taillights vanish. It was done. They had asked him to do it, demanded that he do it, and he had done it. He had diplomatic protection to keep him out of Lubyanka. The worst that could happen would be his Ambassador’s summons to the Foreign Ministry on Monday morning to receive Dmitri Rykov’s icy protest and demand for his removal. But Valentina was walking right into the secret archives, without even the disguise of normal, accustomed, justified behavior to protect her. He looked at his watch. Seven hours, seven hours to go, seven hours of knotted stomach muscles and ragged nerve ends. He walked back to his car.

Ludwig Jahn stood in the open gateway of Tegel Jail and watched the taillights of the armored van bearing Mishkin and Lazareff disappear down the street.

For him, unlike for Munro, there would be no more waiting, no tension stretching through the dawn and into the morning. For him the waiting was over.

He walked carefully to his office on the first floor and closed the door. For a few moments he stood by the open window, then drew back one hand and hurled the first of the cyanide pistols far into the night. He was fat, overweight, unfit. A heart attack would be accepted as possible, provided no evidence was found.

Leaning far out of the window, he thought of his nieces over the Wall in the East, their laughing faces when Uncle Ludo had brought the presents four months ago at Christmas. He closed his eyes, held the other tube beneath his nostrils, and pressed the trigger button.

The pain slammed across his chest like a giant hammer. The loosened fingers dropped the tube, which fell with a tinkle to the street below. Jahn slumped, hit the windowsill, and caved backward into his office, already dead. When they found him, they would assume he had opened the window for air when the first pain came. Kukushkin would not have his triumph. The chimes of midnight were drowned by the roar of a truck that crushed the tube in the gutter to fragments.