A Very Private Plot (20 page)

“What?”

“He would say, ‘You are an old man, with very little in the future to look forward to. We are young people, and have not lost our idealism.'”

“Which means?”

“Exactly.”

It wasn't necessary to spell out Bolgin's ultimate weapon, which was of course that if he failed to persuade the young Narodniki to abandon their objective, there was always the alternative of turning them in to the KGB.

“Exactly. The one alternative I flatly reject.” He had poured another vodka and then said to Blackford, “This doesn't mean that you must give up any hope of forestalling another attempt on Gorbachev's life. I'm not saying that I can succeed, but I can certainly attempt to succeed in persuading my contact that the mission should be abandoned. As I say, there is no reason to believe that they will heed my counsel. But they
might
do so. And in any case, they will listen to me—my contact will listen to me, and he will relay my thoughts to the others. May I remind you that it has been more than one year since I gave the President the option of interceding? Since he did not take up that option at the time, I have to reason that he decided that, between the young Narodniki and Gorbachev, it was an internal affair. Well, why does his reasoning suddenly alter? Why should I consider myself bound by your President's revision of
his
position? It is not as though you had come to me with evidence that Gorbachev is in fact opposed to communism and determined to put an end to it.”

Bolgin paused after taking another gulp from his drink.

“What would be
most
useful for me, Blackford, is any confidential evidence that Mikhail Gorbachev is truly prepared to lead our country away from communism. He reiterated publicly his faith in communist ideology as recently as a month ago.”

“Yes. But isn't that more or less required? In fact his willingness to talk about disarmament, even if it is only incremental, does mean
something
. And the press is somewhat freer than it has ever been.”

Bolgin had waved that argument aside, reminding Blackford that the history of the Soviet Union was punctuated by spasms of liberalism, in every case of brief duration—the New Economic Plan of Lenin, the “spring” of Khrushchev (“which lasted about eighteen months”). “When, after Chernenko died, Gromyko nominated Gorbachev for his present position, he said to the Politburo, ‘This man has a nice smile but he's got iron teeth.' I regret to tell you that he was, I think, right. Gorbachev has teeth of iron.”

Blackford, abandoning the wine, had taken the proffered cup of tea. He acknowledged to himself that his heart was not entirely in his commission. But he also recognized that in fact he had the power to overrule Bolgin. By betraying him.

So that when he woke that morning in the hotel and looked out of the window at the Bauhaus drabness of the big office building across the way, beyond which the eye could only barely discern the onion domes of the old churches within the Kremlin, Blackford Oakes put the question to himself:
Would my failure to betray Bolgin be the equivalent of my betraying the President of the United States
?

Serge was later than usual in going out for his morning jog. Blackford stopped him at the door. “Sit down a minute, Serge.”

Dressed in his running shorts and T-shirt, he did so.

“Okay, here's how it stands. I'm going to schedule another meeting with my man. He will contact me when next he sees our little notice in the post office, but the new one should include the phrase, ‘So anxious—please help.' Post it on the bulletin board early tomorrow. That means tomorrow afternoon he will tell me where to report that evening. You are to follow me to where the meeting is. It may last a half hour, maybe three hours. You are to look for me to come out of that building. I will have prearranged where you are to wait for me, not more than one block away. We will both watch the apartment building and when my man walks out I'll point him out—‘
That's him
.'

“You have two jobs. The first is to follow him back to his own apartment, so that we know where he lives. The next is to devise a way, if you can, to identify anyone who goes to his apartment to call on him. And to trail that person when he leaves the building, and find out where
he
lives. This can be a long, arduous job but it's one we have to take on. I'll take the flight to Washington the day after tomorrow, after meeting with my man. I have to straighten out an urgent matter. That means,” Blackford pulled out his counterfeit engagement book, “that I'll be back on Tuesday, October 28. Meanwhile, the story is that you are staying on here, taking in the sights of Moscow and hoping to turn up a lead on your aunt. I had to go home temporarily because … because my sister has been hospitalized. If we have any luck, when I get back you will have a few names, if possible photographs, of people Bolgin is seeing. My hunch is that he sees very few people, and if that's true, we may make it real fast to the guy we're looking for.”

“What do I say if some Moscow cop spots me spending a few uninterrupted hours staring at one apartment-building entrance?”

“You'll have to elaborate on how we have a lead that maybe that's where your aunt is living. She may be dotty, which is why she's not taking the initiative in identifying herself.”

“Well, Dad. I may as well go and have a good jog. Obviously my next few days—weeks?—are going to be pretty sedentary.”

CHAPTER 27

OCTOBER 1986

It was on the Friday after Bolshoi that Nikolai gave out the word that there would be another meeting of the Narodniki, usual place, usual time, the following Sunday.

Philosophically they had prepared themselves to discount the loss of Vitaly. But they now knew that there was no way to prepare emotionally for such a loss, let alone cope with the unexpected suicide of Mariya. She had confided to no one that she would swallow the cyanide pill with which, two months ago, Nikolai had supplied each of his confederates, after Viktor's successful operation.

Viktor had befriended a graduate student in the department of chemistry. While being given something on the order of a guided tour, Viktor had been introduced to the cyanide bottle, among the forty or fifty chemicals on the long shelf. Late one afternoon, dressed in a technician's smock, Viktor had brought down the bottle from the shelf and poured twelve grams out into a vial—two grams constituting, he had established, double a lethal dose. It was safer, if bent on suicide or poisoning, to take more than the single gram, though one gram, historian Viktor had ascertained, was all the cyanide that had been needed to kill that glob Goering, found dead the morning he was scheduled to hang. Twelve grams was an unnoticeable reduction in the powdery chemical level inside one of the dozens of laboratory bottles, each one holding a hundred grams of the sundry powders.

Nikolai told the diminished company that there were matters to explore after the Bolshoi experience. The most obvious one was that security was not possible where two Narodniki lived together, let alone were brother and sister working together. “I take responsibility for it. I should have thought the matter through, the almost certain apprehension and torture of Mariya. Her survival made Vitaly's death irrelevant. We had him executed in order to protect the rest of us, ignoring that Mariya would be left alive.”

Andrei disagreed. He said that tragic though Mariya's death was, there was a significant dividend that came from Pavel's having shot Vitaly. “If we had just let Vitaly take the pill, they'd still have gone after Mariya, and she'd still have had to take the pill. But since he had to die, it was grim but good tactics that he should die from Pavel's pistol. After all, Pavel has now been promoted to lieutenant and made a part of the Kremlin security detachment. We can't disregard our new advantage, can we?”

Pavel agreed that he was superbly situated to expedite the next advance on Gorbachev, whether by himself or by someone else.

At this point Viktor said that the episode of the Bolshoi Ballet had caused him to think deeply about the philosophy of the original Narodniki. Those heroic young people had given up their lives in order to kill individual tyrants of the third echelon, he said. None of them conspired against the Czar. But it was precisely against the equivalent of the Czar that Nikolai's band was conspiring, and the reason for this was their profound belief that an assassination of that magnitude could trigger a convulsive political uprising, counter-revolutionary in its implications. “And if that's the case,” Viktor said, “then we're entitled to give a little thought to our own survival. Maybe we can live to see a new Russia the old Narodniki never dreamed possible.”

Pavel said that a change in philosophical strategy of that nature would clearly benefit him, in his present situation. “After all, I've become, so to speak, a part of the Imperial Guard. I don't pretend to be close to Gorbachev every few minutes, but I laid eyes on him three times in the last couple of days. And if it were to be as simple as a dual death, Narodniki style, I probably would have the opportunity sometime soon to approach him, unsuspected, whip out my police revolver and pump it into his brain. Before I was through I'd be dead from Uzi fire from other guards. But if I were less than dead, I would certainly bite down on my cyanide capsule rather than face what I'd be faced with, which would almost inevitably lead to the betrayal of—you.” Pavel paused, and here his voice broke. “You, my blood brothers.”

Nikolai acknowledged the force of these arguments and said that grave thought should be given to them. Viktor interrupted him. “Dear Nikolai, you are very scholarly in inclination, I know, since I am myself an academic. But we really don't have to have eternal seminars on this subject, do we? Why not proceed on the revised understanding, and consider only assassination strategies that give the assassin a reasonable opportunity to escape?”

Nikolai said nothing. Clearly the framework of his strategy had been moved to another plane. His companions respected his vision as well as his responsibilities.

“Among other things,” Andrei contributed, “if we are going to outlaw Narodniki who live together, then you and I, Nikolai, would have to cease sharing an apartment. And since you're the wounded veteran entitled to it,” Andrei let out a chortle, “that means I would have to move. And pray, dear Nikolai, where would I move to? I cannot afford to move in with Nina seven nights a week. Only a millionaire could afford that.”

Nikolai looked up. His sense of authority had returned. “Yes, of course, there is always a reason to survive, in the hope of enjoying a better country—a better country in part because of our efforts. Perhaps you are right, Viktor, that we should vote to change our constitution to read, simply, that we are prepared to die for our cause, rather than that we plan to die for our cause.”

Viktor grinned. “As they say in parliamentary countries, ‘All in favor, say Aye!'”

Pavel's hand went up, as did Andrei's and, finally, Nikolai's.

They brought out their lunch from the little individual knapsacks. Viktor produced four bottles of Pepsi-Cola. “You are aware,” he said, handing each of his companions a bottle, “that Gorbachev is sending vodka to America in exchange for making Pepsi-Cola here?”

“Perhaps,” Andrei said, “he hopes the Americans will all become alcoholics, like people who live under communism.”

“To accomplish that,” Pavel said, “he'd have to export communism along with the vodka. I don't think there are many signs that the Americans are willing to accept communism, however drunk they are.”

After the lunch wrappings had been carefully put back in their cases, Nikolai brought the meeting to order: He had evolved a plan for the second attempt. “But after our conversation today, I can see that there is a missing part. That part has to do with arranging escape strategies. Because the plan I have in mind would certainly lead the KGB to me and to Pavel. And if they begin to look for me, they will begin also to look for you, Andrei. So—I won't outline the plan. And we will not put it into effect until the escape strategies are formulated. And here is one very important element of those escape strategies: It is that each of us is to work out his own design and under no circumstances reveal what it is to any of the others.

“So that if one of us is caught, and for whatever reason doesn't succeed in taking the cyanide, then he will not have the information the torturers will be working to pry out of him.”

“But,” Viktor made the qualification, “he would know our identities.”

“Yes. In the situation we envision, the prisoner, incapable of absorbing further torture, would give out our names. But ours is a very large country, and it is something else for the KGB to track us down. In making our individual arrangements to escape we must assume that the KGB will have our names and photographs—Viktor, have you been officially photographed?”

“Of course. Just like you and Andrei, by the army.”

“Right. Yes. So that anyone caught who revealed the names of the rest of us—the names would lead to photographs, which would lead to television exposure of our faces. Not easy to escape detection from that kind of a manhunt.”

“We would have to hope that before the information was given out, the captured one's cyanide would be taken.”

“Yes,” Nikolai said.

Andrei spoke. “It is getting a little late. I take it we will not hear the plan at this session, Nikolai? We will hear it only—we are not to implement it until—until when? How long are you giving us to arrange the escape plans?”

Nikolai thought. “Unless someone here is contemplating cosmetic surgery, which,” he grinned, “would make it difficult to continue in our present jobs, any disguise we consider would have to be theatrical. That would be the first priority, to devise a convincing disguise. The second would be false papers. And the third—”