The Matarese Circle (6 page)

Bray understood this and the arrangements amused him. Harry was taken out of Amsterdam the next morning in such a way that there was no chance of Scofield seeing him. Among the few at the embassy who had to be aware of the incident, Bray was treated as though nothing had taken place. He was told to take a few days off; a man was flying in from Washington to discuss a problem in Prague. That’s what the cipher said. Wasn’t Prague an old hunting ground of his?

Cover, of course. And not a very good one. Scofield knew that his every move in Amsterdam was now being watched, probably by teams of Company men. And if he had walked to the diamond exchange on the Tolstraat, he undoubtedly would have been shot.

He was admitted into the safe-house by a nondescript maid of indeterminate age, a servant convinced that the old house belonged to the retired couple who lived there and paid her. He said he had an appointment with the owner and his attorney. The maid nodded and showed him up the stairs to the second-floor sitting room.

The old gentleman was there but not the man from State. When the maid closed the door, the owner spoke.

“I’ll wait a few minutes and then go back up to my apartment. If you need anything, press the button on the telephone; it rings upstairs.”

“Thanks,” said Scofield, looking at the Dutchman, reminded of another old man on a bridge. “My associate should be along shortly. We won’t need anything.”

The man nodded and left. Bray wandered about the room, absently fingering the books on the shelves. It occurred to him that he wasn’t even trying to read the titles; actually he didn’t see them. And then it struck him that he didn’t feel anything, neither cold nor heat, not even anger or resignation. He didn’t feel
anything.
He was somewhere in a cloud of vapor, numbed, all senses dormant. He wondered
what he would say to the man who had flown thirty-five hundred miles to see him.

He did not care.

He heard footsteps on the stairs beyond the door. The maid had obviously been dismissed by a man who knew his way in this house. The door opened and the man from State walked in.

Scofield knew him. He was from Planning and Development, a strategist for covert operations. He was around Bray’s age, but thinner, a bit shorter, and given to old-school-tie exuberance which he did not feel, but which he hoped concealed his ambition. It did not.

“Bray, how
are
you, old buddy?” he said in a half-shout, extending an exuberant hand for a more exuberant grip. “My God, it must be damn near two years. Have I got a couple of stories to tell
you!
”

“Really?”

“
Have
I!” An exuberant statement, no question implied. “I went up to Cambridge for my twentieth, and naturally ran into friends of yours right and left. Well, old buddy, I got pissed and couldn’t remember what lies I told
who
about you! Christ Almighty, I had you an import analyst in Malaya, a language expert in New Guinea, an undersecretary in Canberra. It was hysterical. I mean, I couldn’t
remember
I was so pissed.”

“Why would anyone ask you about me, Charlie?”

“Well, they knew we were both at State; we were friends, everybody knew that.”

“Cut it out. We were never friends. I suspect you dislike me almost as much as I dislike you. And I’ve never seen you drunk in my life.”

The man from State stood motionless; the exuberant smile slowly disappeared from his lips. “You want to play it rough?”

“I want to play it as it is.”

“What happened?”

“Where? When? At Harvard?”

“You know what I’m talking about. The other night. What happened the other night?”

“You tell me. You set it in motion, you spun the first wheels.”

“We uncovered a dangerous security leak. A pattern of active espionage going back years that reduced the effectiveness
of space surveillance to the point where we now know it’s been a mockery. We wanted it confirmed; you confirmed it. You knew what had to be done and you walked away.”

“I walked away,” agreed Scofield.

“And when confronted with the fact by an associate, you did bodily injury to him. To your
own man!
”

“I certainly did. If I were you I’d get rid of him. Transfer him to Chile; you can’t fuck up a hell of a lot more down there.”

“
What?
”

“On the other hand, you won’t do that. He’s too much like you, Charlie. He’ll never learn. Watch out. He’ll take your job one day.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No, I’m sorry to say. I thought about it, but I’ve got a little acidity in my stomach. Of course, if I’d known they were sending you, I might have fought the good fight and tried. For old time’s sake, naturally.”

“If you’re not drunk, you’re off your trolley.”

“The track veered; those wheels you spun couldn’t take the curve.”

“Cut the horseshit!”

“What a dated phrase, Charlie. These days we say bullshit, although I prefer lizardshit—”

“That’s enough! Your action—or should I say
in
action—compromised a vital aspect of counterespionage.”

“Now,
you
cut the horseshit!” roared Bray, taking an ominous step toward the man from State. “I’ve heard all I want to hear from you! I didn’t compromise anything.
You
did! You and the rest of those bastards back there. You found an ersatz leak in your godamned sieve and so you had to plug it up with a corpse. Then you could go to the Forty Committee and tell
those
bastards how efficient you were!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The old man
was
a defector. He was reached, but he
was
a
defector.
”

“What do you mean ‘reached’?”

“I’m not sure; I wish I did. Somewhere in that Four-Zero dossier something was left out. Maybe a wife that never died, but was in hiding. Or grandchildren no one bothered to list. I don’t know, but it’s there. Hostages,
Charlie! That’s why he did what he did. And I was his
listok.
”

“What’s that mean?”

“For Christ’s sake, learn the language. You’re supposed to be an expert.”

“Don’t pull that language crap on me, I
am
an expert. There’s no evidence to support an extortion theory, no family reported or referred to by the target at any time. He was a dedicated agent for Soviet intelligence.”

“
Evidence?
Oh, come on, Charlie, even you know better than that. If he was good enough to pull off a defection, he was smart enough to bury what had to be buried. My guess is that the key was timing, and the timing blew up. His secret—or secrets—were found out. He was reached; it’s all through his dossier. He lived abnormally, even for an abnormal existence.”

“We rejected that approach,” said Charlie emphatically. “He was an eccentric.”

Scofield stopped and stared “You rejected?… An eccentric? Godamn you, you
did
know. You could have
used
that, fed him anything you liked. But no, you wanted a quick solution so the men upstairs would see how good you were. You could have
used
him, not killed him! But you didn’t know how, so you kept quiet and called out the hangmen.”

“That’s preposterous. There’s no way you could prove he’d been reached.”

“Prove it? I don’t have to prove it, I know it.”

“How?”

“I saw it in his eyes, you son of a bitch.”

The man from State paused, then spoke softly. “You’re tired, Bray. You need a rest.”

“With a pension,” asked Scofield, “or with a casket?”

Taleniekov walked out of the restaurant into a cold blast of wind that disturbed the snow, swirling it up from the sidewalk with such force that it became a momentary
haze, diffusing the light of the streetlamp above. It was going to be another freezing night. The weather report on Radio Moscow had the temperature dropping to minus eight Celsius

Yet it had stopped snowing early that morning; the runways at Sheremetyevo Airport were cleared and that was all that concerned Vasili Taleniekov at the moment. Air France, Flight 85, had left for Paris ten minutes ago. Aboard that plane was a Jew who was meant to leave two hours later on Aeroflot for Athens.

He would not have left for Athens if he had shown up at the Aeroflot terminal. Instead, he would have been asked to step into a room. Greeting him would have been a team from the Vodennaya Kontra Rozvedka, and the absurdity would have begun.

It was stupid, thought Taleniekov, as he turned right, pulling the lapels of his overcoat up around his neck and the brim of his
addyel
lower on his head. Stupid in the sense that the VKR would have accomplished nothing but provide a wealth of embarrassment. It would have fooled no one, least of all those it was trying to impress.

A dissident recanting his dissidency! What comic literature did the young fanatics in the VKR read? Where were the older and wiser heads when fools came up with such schemes?

When Vasili had heard of the plan, he had laughed, actually
laughed.
The objective was to mount a brief but strong campaign against Zionist accusations, to show people in the West that not all Jews thought alike in Soviet Russia.

The Jewish writer had become something of a minor cause in the American press—the New York press, to be specific. He had been among those who had spoken to a visiting senator in search of votes 8,000 miles away from a constituency. But race notwithstanding, he simply was not a good writer, and, in fact, something of an embarrassment to his co-religionists.

Not only was the writer the wrong choice for such an exercise, but for reasons intrinsic to another operation it was imperative that he be permitted to leave Russia. He was a blind trade-off for the senator in New York. The senator had been led to believe it was his acquaintanceship with an attaché at the consulate that had caused Soviet
immigration to issue a visa; the senator would make capital out of the incident and a small hook would exist where one had not existed before. Enough hooks and an awkward relationship would suddenly exist between the senator and “acquaintances” within the Soviet power structure; it could be useful. The Jew had to leave Moscow tonight. In three days the senator had scheduled a welcoming news conference at Kennedy Airport.

But the young aggressive thinkers at the VKR were adamant. The writer would be detained, brought to the Lubyanka, and the process of transformation would commence. No one outside the VKR was to be told of the operation; success depended upon sudden disappearance, total secrecy. Chemicals were to have been administered until the subject was ready for a different sort of news conference. One in which he revealed that Israeli terrorists had threatened him with reprisals against relatives in Tel Aviv if he did not follow their instructions and cry publicly to be able to leave Russia.

The scheme was preposterous and Vasili had said as much to his contact at the VKR, but was told confidentially that not even the extraordinary Taleniekov could interfere with Group Nine, Vodennaya Kontra Rozvedka. And what in the name of all the discredited Tzars was Group Nine?

It was the
new
Group Nine, his friend had explained. It was the successor to the infamous Section Nine, KGB. Smert Shpiononam. That division of Soviet intelligence devoted exclusively to the breaking of men’s minds and wills through extortion, torture and that most terrible of methods—killing loved ones in front of loved ones.

Killing was nothing strange to Vasili Taleniekov, but that kind of killing turned his stomach. The
threat
of such killing was often useful, but not the act itself. The State did not require it, and only sadists demanded it. If there was truly a successor to Smert Shpiononam, then he would let it know with whom it had to contend within the larger sphere of KGB. Specifically, one “extraordinary Taleniekov.” They would learn not to contradict a man who had spent twenty-five years roaming all of Europe in the cause of the State.

Twenty-five years. It had been a quarter of a century
since a twenty-one-year-old student with a gift for languages had been taken out of his classes at the Leningrad University and sent to Moscow for three years of intensive training. It was training the likes of which the son of introspective Socialist teachers could barely believe. He had been plucked out of a quiet home where books and music were the staples, and set down in a world of conspiracy and violence, where ciphers, codes, and physical abuse were the main ingredients. Where all forms of surveillance and sabotage, espionage and the taking of life—not murder; murder was a term that had no application—were the subjects studied.,

He might have failed had it not been for an incident that changed his life and gave him the motive to excel. It had been provided by animals—American animals.

He had been sent to East Berlin on a training exercise, an observer of undercover tactics at the height of the Cold War. He had formed a relationship with a young woman, a German girl who fervently believed in the cause of the Marxist state, and who had been recruited by the KGB. Her position was so minor her name was not even on a payroll; she was an unimportant organizer of demonstrations, paid with loose Reichsmarks from an expense drawer. She was quite simply a university student far more passionate in her beliefs than knowledgeable, a wild-eyed radical who considered herself a kind of Joan of Arc. But Vasili had loved her.

They had lived together for several weeks and they were glorious weeks, filled with the excitement and anticipation of young love. And then one day she was sent across Checkpoint Kasimir. It was such an unimportant thing, a street corner protest on the Kurfürstendamm. A child leading other children, mouthing words they barely understood, espousing commitments they were ill-prepared to accept. An unimportant ritual. Insignificant.

But not to the animals of the American Army of Occupation, G2 Branch, who set other animals upon her.

Her body was sent back in a hearse, her face bruised almost beyond recognition, the rest of her clawed to the point where the flesh was torn, the blood splotches of dried red dust. And the doctors had confirmed the worst. She had been repeatedly raped and sodomized.