Last Call for Blackford Oakes (14 page)

He paused at the dollar shop on Kozitsky Street. Dollar shops were the piquant arrangement by which the Communist regime took in foreign currency, the little silver rain that collected from tourists, diplomats, businessmen, and black-market operators, in exchange for Western cigarettes, special foods, and sundry other items not available to mere citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with access only to their own currency. It was a kind of commercial Jim Crow, separating ordinary citizens from the nomenklatura. Blackford paid for a bottle of champagne and two hundred grams of caviar with a twenty-dollar bill.

Once again Ursina was late, but she shrugged off her weariness quickly on laying eyes first on the father of the child in her womb, then on the champagne and caviar. They decided to enjoy these right away, intending a proper dinner later at the Metropol Hotel.

Soon after opening the bottle, Ursina turned serious. “Let's explore the alternatives—and please, Harry, let me get through them without interruption. Remember, my training is scientific, and therefore I am instructed by the scientific method. Yours is—what
is
your formal training, Harry?”

“Well, I went to Yale. And I am—thanks very much for assuming exclusive scientific credentials—an engineer by training. The kind who builds bridges and skyscrapers—”

“And intercontinental missiles?”

“Well, maybe. Though you're edging there into nuclear science, which leaves me out.”

“Never mind. Obviously we don't need to be scientists to know that we could abort the child.”

Blackford's face drained of color.

She looked away from him. “I am reciting alternatives, not making recommendations.

“I could bear the child in Moscow and send him or her to be raised elsewhere. I have a childless married cousin.” She turned and faced him again, but looked to one side when she resumed talking.

“Or I could bear the child and raise him myself. This is not easy to do, but our bounteous Communist society has provisions.” She paused.

“Going on with the alternatives: We could marry and raise the child.

“We could raise the child in Russia. Or we could raise the child in the United States. Harry?” Ursina's tears interrupted her. “Harry, could we just agree to think about these things, and put off trying to answer the questions?” He gave her his hand. “To spend time on those questions,” she spoke now saucily, the champagne glass in hand, “would get in the way of our love life.”

CHAPTER 25

Philby's KGB case officer checked in every day. There usually wasn't much conversation. But there was at least the single question formally put to him every day: Did he have plans to go out? If so, the KGB provided a bodyguard, walking discreetly behind him.

The Uspensky Street flat was the third assigned to Philby since his arrival in Moscow in 1963. It was very much his favorite, and in his walks about the city, he had a pleasant time of it. He knew he was never alone. He was watched wherever he walked, and when he went by cab he was followed by an unmarked car. The reason given for this—when Rufina, impatient, pressed him—was that the authorities could not take any risk of foreign assassins. “There are people,” he told her, “who, in the judgment of my handlers, want to kill me as an important enemy asset, or just to avenge themselves.”

For revenge? Yes, that would be understandable, Philby once said directly to a Soviet case officer he liked. It was infinitely annoying that the KGB changed regularly the case officers assigned to him. Even if he had come to know fairly well his incumbent case officer, he would discover that the man had been replaced only when a successor drily introduced himself. No mention was ever made of the officer relieved, and no word was ever heard from him or about him.

Rufina found this harder to take than Philby did, but then, she was younger. Though hardly accustomed to freedom of action, she was dismayed that she now had less of it than she had had before she married him. But she knew they had to live by the rules. Philby routinely cooperated with the case officer on duty, and with higher handlers in the KGB, and this morning his case officer, whom he knew only as Oleg, told him that his presence was requested by Colonel Bykov at headquarters.

Why? What did they want from him? He never turned them down, but they hadn't overtaxed him. Philby knew better than to ask Oleg if he knew the reason for the summons.

As Philby dressed to go out—boots, overcoat, hat, gloves—he thought back to his first visit to the Lubyanka, only eleven years earlier. Philby, the most celebrated secret-service officer in the world, had been in Moscow fourteen years before he was invited to set foot in the Lubyanka, the yellow citadel of the KGB. From that fortress, occupying a city block, his own life had been governed for his twenty-five years as a secret agent. He remembered reflecting, on that first visit, that here in this building were housed the men and women who gave him orders back then, and still did.

A car was waiting to drive him the thirty blocks to Dzerzhinsky Square 1. Comrade Feliks Dzerzhinsky was a blooded Polish revolutionary who had survived six arrests before the day came when he would actually have a hand in helping Vladimir Ilyich Lenin achieve his goal. On December 20, 1917, two months after Lenin achieved power, Dzerzhinsky interrupted his ongoing execution of disagreeable people to found an organization well adapted to further the security interests of the state, and to fend off hostile foreign interventions. That organization was the Cheka, which succeeded the czar's Okhrana and, over the years, evolved into Stalin's powerful and terrifying NKVD. Post-Stalin, it became the KGB, the initials deriving from Komitet Gosudarstvenno Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security.

Dzerzhinsky died young (age forty-nine), in 1926, just two years after Lenin, but Stalin already had the power he needed, not only to chart the future of the USSR, but to elevate Dzerzhinsky to the national pantheon.

Kim Philby once remarked about his colleague in subversion, Guy Burgess, that he was incapable of dissolving into a crowd. Intelligence agents are trained to be inconspicuous, but Philby did not have that skill in dissimulation when among Russians. In almost every situation he stood out. He was tall, his gray hair moderately long, his cheekbones high, his attitude at once compliant and independent. The most he could do was dress other than as a British don or banker. He wore a Western-style suit, and a fedora like Khrushchev's.

The effort to disguise his singularity was, in one respect, simply abandoned. In 1963 the KGB had assigned him the Russian name Andrei Fyodorovich Fyodorov. But this quickly proved an impossible impediment to workaday life. The first time he used his new name was at a dentist's.

“What's your name?” the nurse asked.

Philby attempted to pronounce “Fyodorov” athwart his conventional stutter.

What emerged brought merriment. The nurse remarked with some impatience, “Who would take
you
for a Russian?”

His handler quietly noted the episode, and the next day Andrei Fyodorovich was invited to select a new surname. He chose “Martins,” more appropriate, more pronounceable. A new passport was issued.
Andrei Fyodorovich Martins
. It recorded that Martins was Latvian, born in New York, December 20, 1917. Comrade Martins was left with the problem of answering a question directed at him in Latvian when he found himself at a hotel in Riga. He knew not one word of the language identified in his passport as his native tongue. That was a problem. But there were always problems, Kim Philby had reminded himself.

On that first visit to the Lubyanka he was greeted by a uniformed officer who had been waiting in the ground-floor hallway. He was taken to the third floor and led into an office with three desks, occupied by two women and a man. And through that, to what he took to be the head office.

His host, almost bald but with the face of a forty-year-old clerk, arose and extended his hand. “You may call me Colonel Bykov.” He spoke using basic English, here and there egged on by an interpreter. Bykov came quickly to the point. The KGB wished Comrade Andrei Fyodorovich to deliver a lecture to three hundred top KGB agents.

Philby replied in English, speaking slowly. He had never denied a request by his superiors in the KGB, he said. What especially did the colonel wish him to speak about?

“We have given that some thought. There is no one more experienced than you in our great profession, in the service of so great a cause. We would expect you to give time to recounting your own experiences. I read your book—in English.” Philby was tempted to ask the colonel why the authorities had taken so long to bring out a Russian-language edition of that book. But that would have been special pleading; to be avoided. “You became interested in Communist doctrine at age seventeen, resolved at age nineteen to lead an active life on behalf of the Party. You began your long and remarkable career.”

Philby nodded, managing something of an appreciative smile. “You would not expect me to talk about any matters I believe to be still confidential, surely?”

“You would certainly be free to mention any subject already treated in your book. We detected no … serious … indiscretions there, and no security lapses. I think it would be interesting to our agents to hear your personal experiences. What is the best conduct for an apprehended, or suspected, agent? We of course have lectures on the subject, but it would be more refreshing if it came from you.”

Again Philby nodded. “Yes, comrade, yes.” He had resolved to be entirely compliant, but he decided against suppressing one question obviously on his mind. “Colonel Bykov, you will perhaps understand my next question, under the circumstances. I have been here fourteen years without being asked to address so distinguished an assembly. Is it contemplated that this should be an annual assignment?”

The colonel looked up and, in Russian, spoke to the interpreter, who quickly gave the colonel's reply. “An annual lecture, meaning the same text as you will use this time at Yasenevo, you are asking?”

“I simply wondered whether this lecture represents a new regimen in my services for you.”

“That is a question we would wish to weigh after hearing your lecture.” Colonel Bykov was speaking rapidly now, in Russian immediately interpreted. “To which we very much look forward. If you are left wondering why you were not called upon before, I can only answer that it is always possible that one director of our agency is better than another at taking advantage of unique opportunities.” He smiled. And stood up.

“Your case officer will keep you informed. Meanwhile, if there is anything you are … wishing for … which we can provide, you have only to advise us.”

Philby stood, shook hands again, nodded at the interpreter, and followed his guide out of the office.

His case officer was waiting for him in front of the building. The sun was very bright. As if to shield his eyes from it, Kim Philby turned to stare up at the great stone building and its prominent front entrance. Those who entered by the other great door, around the corner from Dzerzhinsky Square, were mostly never seen again. Philby wondered whether any of his case officers of the past few years had been led through that door. What might have been their offense? Some omission in overseeing Andrei Fyodorovich Martins?

Well, that was life. He was certainly not going to let himself get tied up on any such question, not at this stage in his career.

CHAPTER 26

The telephone rang before 8
A.M.
It was Gus. He spoke in general terms about the cultural-exchange program in Gorky and managed to pass on the code that specified where they would meet and when. Café Atelier, nine fifteen.

Gus was already there in the booth. He told the story of his meeting with Ivan Pletnev. “I thought of going back to Galina and telling her Pletnev was a little wacko and she should forget the whole thing—just forget him, forget the general, forget the plot, forget everything.

“But I was just plain too tired. It was after two. Meanwhile—hear this—a bulletin from Party headquarters I saw before coming here: General Leonid Baranov has been removed as Commander, Warsaw Pact Forces, to become superintendent of the Frunze Military Academy—their West Point. That's better than going to Gulag, but it's a demotion, pure and simple. Gorbachev is on to something, or else he pried something out of Dmitriev.”

Blackford took a pen from his pocket and made little nicks on the table napkin.

“Okay, here's what we've got, Gus. What exactly the Kremlin is up to, we can't say. We know Pletnev wants revenge, but we don't know whether there was a high-level overthrow plot that went any further than a hypothesis. We do know that the main players in the plot that came to our attention have been pulled out: Dmitriev and Baranov. If the demotion of General Baranov is going to touch off a general revolt by the military loyal to him, it will probably happen quickly. Whatever happens, there is no reason for any suspicion of U.S. involvement.”

“But listen, Black.” Gus's blue Ukrainian/Iowan eyes were wide with curiosity and suspicion. “There are links floating around. General Baranov
did
talk to Ivan Pletnev. He
did
tell Pletnev what he knew about ‘Singleton,' the name Boris had disclosed to both him and Viktor. Security records, patiently pursued, will reveal that Mr. Harry Singleton—you—and his son Jerry—me—arrived in Moscow three days before the bomb went off in Gorbachev's desk. The records will reveal that one of those Singletons was in bed with an American girl—”

“You.”

“Yeah, okay, me. And that they pulled him in on suspicion of dope. The U.S. ambassador fired a lot of volleys and they let the kid out, and he and his father left the country.

“Now. Maybe they want to de-ball Dmitriev and Baranov just over intramural disputes. But maybe they're
suspected of plotting
. And since Baranov was a member of the commission that investigated the October plot, maybe they're wondering what ever happened to those Americans, the Singletons, who flew into Moscow and out, at either end of the attempted assassination.”