The Negotiator (11 page)

“I will see to both,” he said. “You have your budget and the down payment on your fee. Proceed with the plan without delay.”

June

Colonel Easterhouse was received by Miller in the first week of June. He had been busy in Saudi Arabia but the summons was unequivocal, so he flew from Jiddah to New York via London and connected straight to Houston. A car met him on schedule, drove him to the private William P. Hobby Airport southeast of the city, and the Learjet brought him to the ranch, which he had not seen before. His progress report was optimistic and well received.

He was able to say that his go-between in the Religious Police had been enthusiastic when approached with the notion of a change of government in Riyadh, and had made contact with the fugitive Imam of the Shi’ah Fundamentalists when the man’s secret hiding place had been revealed to him by Easterhouse. The fact that the Imam had not been betrayed proved that the Religious Police zealot was trustworthy.

The Imam had heard out the proposal—made to him on a no-name basis, since he would never have accepted that a Christian like Easterhouse should become an instrument of Allah’s will—and was reported to be equally enthusiastic.

“The point is, Mr. Miller, the Hezb’Allah fanatics have so far not attempted to seize the obvious plum of Saudi Arabia, preferring to try to defeat and annex Iraq first, in which they have failed. The reason for their patience is that they feared, rightly, that seeking to topple the House of Sa’ud would provoke a fierce reaction from the hitherto vacillating U.S.A. They have always believed Saudi Arabia would fall to them at the right moment. The Imam appears to accept that next spring—the Diamond Jubilee jamboree is now definitely slated for April—will be Allah’s choice of the right moment.”

During the jamboree, huge delegations from all the thirty-seven major tribes of the country would converge on Riyadh to pay homage to the royal house. Among these would be the tribes from the Hasa region, the oil-field workers who were mainly of the Shi’ah sect. Hidden in their midst would be the two hundred chosen assassins of the Imam, unarmed until their submachine carbines and ammunition, covertly imported in one of Scanlon’s tankers, had been distributed among them.

Easterhouse was finally able to report that a senior Egyptian officer—the Egyptian Military Adviser Group played a crucial role at all technical levels of the Saudi Army—had agreed that if his country, with its teeming millions and shortage of money, was given access to Saudi oil after the coup, he would ensure the reissue of defective ammunition to the Royal Guard, who would then be helpless to defend their masters. Miller nodded thoughtfully.

“You have done well, Colonel,” he said, then changed the subject. “Tell me, what would Soviet reaction be to this American takeover of Saudi Arabia?”

“Extreme perturbation, I would imagine,” said the colonel.

“Enough to put an end to the Nantucket Treaty, of which we now know the full terms?” asked Miller.

“I would have thought so,” said Easterhouse.

“Which group inside the Soviet Union would have most reason to dislike the treaty and all its terms, and wish to see it destroyed?”

“The General Staff,” said the colonel without hesitation. “Their position in the U.S.S.R. is like that of our Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense industry rolled into one. The treaty will cut their power, their prestige, their budget, and their numbers by forty percent. I can’t see them welcoming that.”

“Strange allies,” mused Miller. “Is there any way of getting in discreet contact?”

“I ... have certain acquaintances,” said Easterhouse carefully.

“I want you to use them,” said Miller. “Just say there are powerful interests in the U.S. A. who view the Nantucket Treaty with as little favor as they, and believe it might be aborted from the American end, and would like to confer.”

The kingdom of Jordan is not particularly pro-Soviet, but King Hussein has long had to tread a delicate path to stay on his throne in Amman, and has occasionally bought Soviet weaponry, though his Hashemite Arab Legion is mainly Western-armed. Still, there exists a thirty-man Soviet Military Advisory Team in Amman, headed by the defense attaché at the Russian embassy. Easterhouse, once attending the desert testing of some Soviet hardware east of Aqaba on behalf of his Saudi patrons, had met the man. Passing through Amman on his way back, Easterhouse stopped over.

The defense attaché, Colonel Kutuzov, whom Easterhouse was convinced was from the GRU, was still in place and they had a private dinner. The American was stunned by the speed of the reaction. Two weeks later he was contacted in Riyadh to be told that certain gentlemen would be happy to meet his “friends” in circumstances of great discretion. A fat package of travel instructions was given to him, which he couriered unopened to Houston.

July

Of all the Communist countries, Yugoslavia is the most relaxed in the matter of tourism, so much so that entry visas may be acquired with little formality right on arrival at Belgrade airport. In mid-July five men flew into Belgrade on the same day but from different directions and on different flights. They came by scheduled airlines out of Amsterdam, Rome, Vienna, London, and Frankfurt. As all were American passport holders, none had needed visas for any of those cities either. All applied for and received visas at Belgrade for a week’s harmless tourism—one in the mid-morning, two in the lunch hour and two in the afternoon. All told the interviewing visa officers they had come to hunt boar and stag from the famous Karadjordjevo hunting lodge, a converted fortress on the Danube much favored by wealthy Westerners. Each of the five claimed, as he was issued his visa, that en route to the hunting lodge he would be spending one night at the super-luxury Hotel Petrovaradin at Novi Sad, eighty kilometers northwest of Belgrade. And each took a taxi to that hotel.

The visa officers’ shift changed in the lunch hour, so only one came under the eye of Officer Pavlic, who happened to be a covert asset in the pay of the Soviet KGB. Two hours after Pavlic checked off duty, a routine report from him arrived on the desk of the Soviet
rezident
in his office at the embassy in central Belgrade.

Pavel Kerkorian was not at his best; he had had a late night—not entirely in the course of duty but his wife was fat and constantly complaining, while he found some of these flaxen Bosnian girls irresistible—and a heavy lunch, definitely in the course of duty, with a hard-drinking member of the Yugoslav Central Committee whom he hoped to recruit. He almost put Pavlic’s report on one side. Americans were pouring into Yugoslavia nowadays—to check them all out would be impossible. But there was something about the name. Not the surname—that was common enough—but where had he seen the first name Cyrus before?

He found it again an hour later right in his office; a back number of
Forbes
magazine had carried an article on Cyrus V. Miller. By such flukes are destinies sometimes decided. It did not make sense, and the wiry Armenian KGB major liked things to make sense. Why would a man of nearly eighty, known to be pathologically anti-Communist, come hunting boar in Yugoslavia by scheduled airlines when he was rich enough to hunt anything he wanted in North America and travel by private jet? He summoned two of his staff, youngsters fresh in from Moscow, and hoped they wouldn’t make a mess of it. (As he had remarked to his CIA opposite number at a cocktail party recently, you just can’t get good help nowadays. The CIA man had agreed completely.)

Kerkorian’s young agents spoke Serbo-Croatian, but he still advised them to rely on their driver, a Yugoslav who knew his way around. They checked back that evening from a phone booth in the Petrovaradin Hotel, which made the major spit because the Yugoslavs certainly had it tapped. He told them to go somewhere else.

He was just about to go home when they checked in again, this time from a humble inn a few miles from Novi Sad. There was not one American, but five, they said. They might have met at the hotel, but seemed to know each other. Money had changed hands at the reception desk and they had copies of the first three pages of each American’s passport. The five were due to be picked up in the morning in a minibus and taken to some hunting lodge, said the gumshoes, and what should we do now?

“Stay there,” said Kerkorian. “Yes, all night. I want to know where they go and whom they see.”

Serve them right, he thought as he went home. These youngsters have it too easy nowadays. It was probably nothing, but it would give the sprogs a bit of experience.

At noon the next day they were back, tired, unshaven, but triumphant. What they had to say left Kerkorian stunned. A mini-van had duly arrived and taken the five Americans on board. The guide was in plain clothes but looked decidedly military—and Russian. Instead of heading for the hunting lodge, the bus had taken the five Americans back toward Belgrade, then ducked straight into Batajnica Air Base. They had not shown their passports at the main gate—the guide had produced five passes from his own inside pocket and got them through the barrier.

Kerkorian knew Batajnica; it was a big Yugoslav air base twenty kilometers northwest of Belgrade, definitely not on the sightseeing schedule of American tourists. Among other things it hosted a constant stream of Soviet military transports bringing in resupplies for the enormous Soviet Military Adviser Group in Yugoslavia. That meant there was a team of Russian engineers inside the base, and one of them worked for him. The man was in cargo control. Ten hours later Kerkorian sent a “blitz” report to Yazenevo, headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the external espionage arm. It went directly to the desk of the Deputy Head of the FCD, General Vadim Kirpichenko, who made a number of inquiries internal to the U.S.S.R. and sent an expanded report right up to his chairman, General Kryuchkov.

What Kerkorian had reported was that the five Americans had all been escorted straight from the minibus into an Antonov 42 jet transport which had just arrived with cargo from Odessa and at once headed back there. A later report from the Belgrade
rezident
announced that the Americans had returned the same way twenty-four hours later, spent a second night at the Petrovaradin Hotel, and then left Yugoslavia altogether, without hunting a single boar. Kerkorian was commended for his vigilance.

August

The heat hung over the Costa del Sol like a blanket. Down on the beaches the million tourists were turning themselves over and over like steaks on a griddle, oiling and basting courageously as they tried to acquire a deep mahogany tan in their two precious weeks and too often simply achieving lobster-red. The sky was such a pale blue it was almost white, and even the usual breeze off the sea had sagged to a zephyr.

To the west the great molar of the Rock of Gibraltar jutted into the heat haze, shimmering at its range of fifteen miles; the pale slopes of the concrete rain-catchment system built by the Royal Engineers to feed the underground cisterns stuck out like a leprous scar on the flank of the rock.

In the hills behind Casares beach the air was a mite cooler but not much; relief really came only at dawn and just before sunset, so the vineyard workers of Alcántara del Rio were rising at four in the morning to put in six hours before the sun drove them into the shade. After lunch they would snooze through the traditional Spanish siesta behind their thick, cool, lime-washed walls until five, then put in more labor till the light faded around eight.

Under the sun the grapes ripened and became fat. The harvest would not come yet, but it would be good this year. In his bar Antonio brought the carafe of wine to the foreigner as usual and beamed.

“¿
Sera bien, la cosecha
?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the tall man with a smile. “This year the harvest will be very good. We shall all be able to pay our bar bills.”

Antonio roared with laughter. Everyone knew the foreigner owned his own land outright and always paid cash on the spot.

Two weeks later Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was in no mood to joke. Though often a genial man, with a reputation for a good sense of humor and a light touch with subordinates, he could also show a hair-trigger temper, as when preached at by Westerners over civil rights issues or when he felt badly let down by a subordinate. He sat at his desk on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee Building in Novaya Ploshchad and stared angrily at the reports spread all over the table.

It’s a long narrow room, sixty feet by twenty, with the General Secretary’s desk at the end opposite the door. He sits with his back to the wall, all the windows onto the square being ranged to his left behind their net curtains and buff velour drapes. Running down the center of the room is the habitual conference table, of which the desk formed the head of the letter
T
.

Unlike many of his predecessors, he had preferred a light and airy decor; the table is of pale beech, like his desk, and surrounded by upright but comfortable chairs, eight on each side. It was on this table he had spread the reports collected by his friend and colleague, the Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, whose plea had brought him unwillingly back from his seaside holiday at Yalta in the Crimea. He would, he thought savagely, have preferred to be splashing in the sea with his granddaughter Aksaina than sitting in Moscow reading this sort of trash.

It had been more than six years since that freezing March day in 1985 when Chernenko had finally dropped off his perch and he had been raised with almost bewildering speed—even though he had schemed and prepared for it—into the top slot. Six years he had sought to take the country he loved by the scruff of the neck and hurl it into the last decade of the twentieth century in a state fit to face, match, and triumph on equal terms over the capitalist West.

Like all devoted Russians he was half admiring and wholly resentful of the West; of her prosperity, her financial power, her almost contemptuous self-assurance. Unlike most Russians he had for years not been prepared to accept that things could never change in his homeland, that corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, and lethargy were part of the system, always had been and always would be. Even as a young man he had known he had the energy and the dynamism to change things, given the chance. That had been his mainspring, his driving force, through all those years of study and party work in Stavropol, the conviction that one day he would get his chance.