The Restoration Game (14 page)

I recoiled, taking a step backward. My arms were grabbed just above my elbows. I looked over my shoulder to see two men with heavier build and shoddier suits than Klebov's. Reflexively, I jerked away. Their thumbs dug in, painfully and expertly—there's a nerve spot there.

“What's going on?” I said. “I haven't done anything.”

“There are some irregularities,” Klebov said. “I'm sure the matter can be cleared up down at the station.”

I realised there was nothing I could do. I wasn't frightened. I had been assured by Stefan and others that as long as they didn't think I was an actual operative of a Western intelligence service, the worst I could expect physically was some roughing up. But to go without protest would have looked suspicious. I stayed in character as a haulier.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Are you the police?”

Klebov shook his head. “Ministry of State Security,” he explained.

“I demand a call to the British Consul!” I said.

“There's no need for that,” said Klebov. “Mr. Stewart, the only choice you have at the moment is to come quietly or…not. But you
will
come with us. Now, which is it to be?”

“I'll come quietly,” I said.

The two burly guys unhanded me at a nod from Klebov. I walked out of the hotel and into a small Lada parked outside, and sat jammed in the back between the two heavies. Klebov sat in the front passenger seat. I didn't see the driver's face even in the mirror.

Needless to say, I wasn't taken to the militia station. The car stopped in a deserted street in the old town. I was hustled through a rusty iron door in the front of a building that looked like it had once been a big shop, with Somebodyovksi and Sons chiselled in the Latin script of prerevolutionary Krassnia across the frontage. The door clanged behind us. After a few disorienting turns around corners I was left alone with Klebov in a room with nothing but a table and two plastic-seated chairs on opposite sides, overlooked by a flattering colour portrait of Konstantin Chernenko, a blackframed black-and-white photo of Chernenko's recent predecessor Yuri Andropov, and—incongruously enough-a picture calendar of Krassnian mountain scenery. Klebov sat with his back to the wall and motioned me to sit down.

Klebov swung his briefcase up on the table, sprang it open, and slapped down what looked like a dozen or so copies of a magazine, shrink-wrapped in transparent plastic. With his forefinger he swivelled the pack around and pushed it a little towards me. The title of the magazine was
Sadie Stern
and the cover picture was of a woman wearing an SS officer's cap, a pair of shiny black thigh-high boots, and not much else.

“How do you account for this?” Klebov said.

“I've never seen it in my life,” I said, truthfully.

“It was found concealed in the cab of your lorry,” said Klebov.

“I have no idea how it got there,” I said, mentally cursing my co-driver's small-time entrepreneurship. (Cairds, for all that he smuggles porn into some of the Bloc countries, would never have risked smuggling it into the SU. At least, not in such a trivial quantity.)

“Oh, it wasn't…” Klebov named my co-driver, and added: “We're quite sure of that.”

“Then it's a mystery,” I said, looking Klebov in the eye.

“A mystery, eh?” said Klebov. “Nazi-inspired, perverted filth! Is this the type of literature that your group brings to the supposedly deprived Soviet people?”

“Group?” I said. “What group? My employers? They have nothing to do with this.”

Klebov cocked an eyebrow. “Your employers? An interesting expression!”

“Colin Byrne Associates,” I said. “You've seen the documents.”

“Indeed I have,” said Klebov, looking amused. “That wasn't the employer I was thinking of.”

“That's the only employer I have,” I said. “I'm a lorry driver. Look, Mr. Klebov, if that stuff really was in the cab, it's possible it was some previous driver who left it there. We hired this lorry in Izmir. I can't vouch for some Turkish-”

“Oh, shut up,” Klebov said, in a bored tone. He put the packet of magazines back in his briefcase. He then rested his hands, fingers interlaced, on top of the briefcase and spoke straight at me. As far as I can recall, what he said was this:

“Mr. Ross Stewart,” he began, “your name is-and your other names are-well known to the Ministry of State Security and to the security services of our allies. We know about your activities at Edinburgh University. We know about the Five Cities Journeys. We know about your meetings with members of Charter 77, the KOS-KOR, the so-called Solidarity union, the Leipzig pastors, and all the rest.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Klebov,” I said. “I haven't a clue what you're talking about.”

Klebov then proceeded to list my journeys over the years, from memory. There was no way he could've gotten these off my passport—I'd used different passports. For each journey, he mockingly rattled off some code phrase or password I'd used (probably—of course I'd forgotten which code was used on which journey, but they all sounded about right). He named my contacts—their code names and (he said) their real names, some of which are quite well known in the West. He listed the false names and IDs I'd used on my passports. These, I remembered all right.

I listened to all this with a fixed expression of baffled resentment, and a growing feeling of dismay. I wouldn't be surprised if I was turning pale as he spoke. I tried to conceal it by tightening my belly muscles and arse sphincter to force blood to my face. It was abundantly clear that our entire operation was compromised from within, and had been for years. And it wasn't exactly difficult for me to work out just who had compromised it—any more than it is for you, Stefan, you weaselly Polack [redacted]. But what terrified me was that Klebov was telling me this, as if it didn't matter that I knew. It seemed to mean he didn't expect me to go home any time soon, if at all. Unless of course the KGB had decided to roll up the whole thing and the culprit was already home clear, in which case my likely intended role was to star in a gloating press conference if not a show trial.

Klebov finished up by listing my visits this year to Budapest and Sofia though not, interestingly, to Zagreb. He leaned back, tipping his chair against the wall, and looked at me.

“Well?” he said.

I shook my head. “I went to Hungary and Bulgaria, sure, on deliveries for Mr. Byrne. But these others, no.”

“Ross, Ross, Ross,” Klebov said, in a patient, friendly voice. “If you will insist on wasting my time, I'll have no alternative but to turn you over to the two citizens who accompanied us here. If you don't talk to them, they will call on specialists-colleagues with recent experience in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, Iraq…” He shook his head. “Need I go on?”

I asked, as if in disbelief and indignation, if he was threatening me. He said that he was trying to spare me a great deal of needless distress. I repeated my demand to see the British Consul, and my ignorance of what the hell Klebov was talking about. At this he changed tack.

“Come on, Ross,” he said, leaning forward again with his elbows on his briefcase, hands apart. “There's no shame, no dishonour, nothing to betray. You've been betrayed already, lock, stock, and barrel. We know all the names-you've heard them. All l'm asking is that you come clean and admit what you've done. And you
will
admit it. Your only choice is to admit it now, or later.”

I knew he was right. I was still clinging to the straw that they were unlikely to torture me in the manner of their third world allies, but in all honesty I don't think I'd have stood up for long to the less gruesome but no less effective techniques of coercive interrogation used in the Bloc itself and in the West, come to that. And none of the bullshit cover stories we'd all had prepared for the old Five Cities Journeys would be of any use here. (The first-level cover was that we were innocent students who'd been offered a free driving holiday in exchange for leaving the van overnight at some agreed-upon location, and that we had no knowledge at all of the hidden compartments.)

It was as the thought of all the cover stories flashed through my mind that I came up with a plan.

I put my hands up and said: “Mr. Klebov, you're right. OK, I do admit it. But there's two things I don't understand. One is why you've told me all this, because
you
know and
I
know that what you've told me points to exactly who the agent of your side is who was basically running the Five Cities Journeys. The other is why you've chosen to bust my current employer's operation, seeing as how you must know how helpful he's being to
your
employer's operations.”

“In what way has he been helpful?” Klebov asked.

“He smuggles embargoed technology to the Warsaw Pact countries,” I said.

“So you know about that?” Klebov said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, that saves me a lot of wearisome explanation,” Klebov said.

He rocked his chair back again, and looked at me in a more respectful way than he had hitherto. “You've dropped the pretence. So will I. The answer to your two questions is the same. I don't know who the agent of the Socialist camp is in your group, but I certainly knew that you could identify him or her. The reason I told you enough to do that, and the reason I busted your current employer's current operation, as you put it, is this.” He took a deep breath. “I want you personally to have a hold over the Socialist camp's plant in the Five Cities operation, and I personally want in on your employer's operation.”

“What?” I said. It must have come out as a yelp.

Klebov told me to keep my voice down, and explained, somewhat as follows:

“Ross,” he said, “the only organisation better informed than people like yourself about the state of our country is the Ministry that employs me. We know how dire it is. The ascent to power of Brezhnev' s mineral-water-bottle-opener is the last wheezy gasp of the old guard. That geriatric dodderer is not long for this world. A change at the top is imminent. From that, greater changes will follow. I have every intention of being well placed to survive these changes. And that means getting in on the ground floor in such operations as those of”-it was like he paused to consult a mental note-“Colin Byrne Associates. The possibilities are vast-far vaster, indeed, than you realise. You and I, my friend, could become rich.”

I said that it was just as likely that a new hardliner like Andropov could come to power after Chernenko shuffled off-and then where would we be? Klebov just laughed at that.

“I happen to know,” he said, “that there are no new hardliners with anything like Andropov's ability, but plenty of reformers with ability. Besides, I know personally that the entire Soviet system is based on a gigantic lie-not a lie about Lenin, or Stalin, or the production statistics, but something far more fundamental than that.”

I asked him what it was.

“Materialism,” he said, to my surprise. “I know-I
know that
there is, if not a God, then an order of things higher than the order the scientists talk about. Don't ask me how I know.”

I didn't. I assume he was talking about some spiritual or mystical experience, albeit one that has clearly not made him in any way saintly. Instead, I asked him why the Eastern bloc security service whose initials I knew but avoided mentioning had been running the Five Cities Journeys all along, and why that hadn't resulted in the arrests of the dissident contacts.

Klebov shrugged and said he had no inside information on the thinking of the top levels of the Ministry, let alone those of its allied services, but assumed that it was considered desirable to have the operations continue monitored so that the internal networks could be tracked, and presumably further infiltrated and suborned. He then explained exactly how I could make use of the agent concerned—which you, you little scumbag, are about to find out. He also explained how he-Klebov-and I could cooperate to our mutual profit.

Which, Stefan, you are not about to find out.

But there was one condition. One thing I had to do for him, first, right now.

“I need a name,” he said. “Just one name, to take to my superiors. The name of your contact.”

“How come,” I asked, “you don't have it already?”

“Presumably,” Klebov said, “even the agent knows the contact only by a pseudonym.”

“If I name someone,” I said, “what will happen to…that person?”

“I can give no guarantees,” Klebov said. “But I would quite seriously expect no more than a maximum sentence of five years. More likely, two. No psychiatric hospital, no prosecution for espionage, terrorism, or any such nonsense.”

I gave him a name: Yuri Gusayevich.

We shook on the deal, and I walked out and made my way back to the hotel.

3.

[Note by Lucy: I'll give my own reactions to the above later For now, I'll just say that some parts of it made me actually gasp. The next two pieces are from PDFs of typed English translations from handwritten Russian originals which are also reproduced as PDFs (from photocopies) in the dossier. The note that immediately follows this is from a PDF of a page typed on a word processor, printed off, and scanned in.]

Note: These two documents are from the archives of the Krassnian NKVD, and were posted to me by Y. G. from Moscow in 1992. I have never asked how he obtained them but I have no reason to doubt their authenticity. R. S.

Personal Confession of A. ARBATOV

2 November 1937

In this confession I wish to lay bare the political basis of the views that led to my errors and subsequently to my crimes. As is known I joined the party of SocialistsRevolutionaries in 1912. It can be said that I was strongly infected by that party's peasant-populist orientation and likewise by their glorification of terrorism, which together make up the notorious theory of “heroes” and “masses.” At different times in my political life one or other of these only superficially opposed orientations—viz., peasant-populism and terrorism—rose to prominence in my mind and it is evident that they obtained their final so-to-speak synthesis in my criminal participation in the counterrevolutionary Right-Trotskyite bloc.