Tool of the Trade (22 page)

A formal Russian dinner is more fun than an American one, though to appreciate it fully requires more tolerance for alcohol than I have. A long trough set in the center of the table was filled with shaved ice, cooling three different kinds of vodka, two varieties of Soviet champagne, and, incongruously, many long-neck botdes of Pepsi-Cola, legacy of Armand Hammer. Most of the Russians were drinking Pepsi, and most of the Americans champagne.

Menenkov greeted me warmly and poured me a glass of champagne. “I’m afraid it’s not Mumm’s, Anson.”

“I know.” I took a small sip. Sort of like carbonated Thunderbird. “When do you expect Vardanyan?”

He spread his hands. “His plane came in three hours ago.” I knew that, of course. “He may be resting.”

“What if he rests till midnight?”

“—Hunger is the best sauce,” he said in French. I couldn’t remember whether I, as Anson Rafferty, spoke that language. I smiled noncommittally.

“In America, the guest of honor usually shows up late,” Aldrich said. “Is it that way here?”

“Sometimes,” Menenkov said softly, comically slewing his eyes from left to right. “Sometimes he doesn’t show up… at all.”

I laughed, and so did Aldrich, uncomfortably. “Your friend Ivanov is conspicuous by his absence.” The Ukrainian KGB man.

“Only so much room at the table.” He poured himself some more champagne. “I assure you he is here in spirit. So to speak.”

I raised my glass to him. “—As some of my friends must be.”

“What was that?” Aldrich asked.

“Old Russian toast,” I said. “Absent friends.”

A festive Russian meal would normally be many hours of eating and drinking. You start out with what would be considered appetizers in other countries’ culinary traditions—bits of smoked fish, small boiled potatoes in sour cream, pickled vegetables, caviar rolled in small pancakes—and you follow each tidbit with a shot of icecold vodka. The vodka’s less than seventy proof, but a lot of it goes down in the course of a couple of hours’ nibbling. Then the main course comes out, perhaps a stroganoff or baked stuffed fish or fowl, along with wine. Then a sweet and brandy. Then more brandy and whatever vodka’s left. Then you try to remember whose flat you’re in and what your own name is, just in case.

Our banquet was going to be more Western style, but they did bring out token plates of traditional appetizers. Menenkov was demonstrating to me the correct way to roll up caviar in a pancake when everyone got to their feet. Coming through the door, Vardanyan told everyone to sit and strode toward our table, trailing a quartet of bodyguards.

He greeted Menenkov by his first name and shook hands with the vice president, speaking rapid-fire Russian. “The premier welcomes you,” Menenkov translated, “and thanks you for having been able to grace us with your presence on such short notice.” Vardanyan had taken three years of English in school, according to the CIA, but didn’t speak it well. There had been periods in his life when it wouldn’t have been
safe
to speak English well.

For a long second he studied me, focusing the considerable force of his personality. He was a small man, with features invariably described as “hawk-like”: sharp beak nose, sloping forehead with a
sharply defined ridge of bone under eyebrows that looked like stiff filaments of white wire, curling. He was almost completely bald, his skin was wrinkled and spotted with age and work, but his eyes were cool, clear gray. I translated Aldrich’s polite response, and he nodded, looking abstracted for a moment Then he turned his attention back to me.

“—They tell me you used to work for the CIA.”

“—Yes. In Germany, back in 1962 and—”

“—Do you work for them now?”

“—No. Nor any other intelligence agency.” Unless you count the KGB, technically.

“—And you are independently wealthy.”

“—My wife is.”

He smiled, almost wan. “—Then can you tell me why you took General Lamberts job?”

“—He was sick, he asked me. Also, I’ve never been to Russia.” I turned on the watch. This had to be done delicately, with all these people listening who knew Vardanyan more or less well.

“What’s the premier talking about?” Aldrich asked, breaking my concentration.

“Small talk, sir. He’s asking about my… qualifications.” Menenkov whispered a translation to Vardanyan.

“—Yes, qualifications,” Vardanyan said, putting the tips of his fingers together. “—I find it remarkable that the president would choose an ex-CIA man, however skilled an interpreter he might be.”

“—I never was a CIA man, actually. I was a private citizen working in Germany, and the State Department asked me to dig up some information. I only later found out that the CIA was involved.” By pushing my wrist along the tablecloth a few inches, I could turn the gain all the way up. “—I assure you
that you can trust me completely. I’m a good American but not political. My primary allegiance is to mankind in general. You must believe this if we are to work well together.”

He rubbed one finger up and down his long nose, staring. “—For some reason I do trust you. You are a most persuasive man.” I turned the gain down. It might be suspicious if everybody at the long table went along with what anybody else said.

Vardanyan spilled some caviar on a pancake and rolled it up one-handed, John Wayne style. He smiled at Aldrich and said, “Now to the serious business of eating,” with an accent as thick as the Neva outside.

We had to go into Washington to find a store that carried Shilkov’s vile French cigarettes. He was going to have a hell of a time getting them in Indianapolis. Maybe he’d live long enough to kick the habit.

We had him sequestered under discreet but heavily armed guard in a condo in Vienna, Virginia. The Agency owned the top three floors; the doorman and the elevator operator were GS-8 muscle.

In two days, we rounded up more than forty of the agents he’d named. I was dying to interrogate him about Foley, but Leusner asked us to hold off. She had to go to Berlin for a series of meetings, and wanted us to wait so that she could be in on it. I think she also wanted at least some of the leads not to pan out, to give us some leverage on him.

So for most of a week, Jefferson and I sat in the room next to his and read, watched television, played cards for matches. Each match was worth a million
dollars, and Jefferson won not quite enough to pay off the national debt. We shouldn’t have been wasting time, though. Shilkov did know where Foley was, or rather, he guessed right, and it was no place obvious. Except now, in retrospect.

Four days. What would the world be like now if we’d traced him down and stopped him?

Leusner went straight from the plane to Langley, and straight from Langley to the Vienna condo, and walked in unannounced on our game of million-dollar whist. Her face was puffy with jet lag. She was holding the envelope of “walking-around” money, the bribe.

She slapped the heavy envelope against her palm, twice, smiling wearily. “Shall we?” We tossed down the cards, and Jefferson put on his coat.

Ironically, Shilkov was watching
The Price is Right
, peihaps in the spirit of trying to understand his newly adopted country. He was engrossed and looked up, startled, when we came in through the connecting door. Leusner turned off the television and sat stiffly on the edge of an easy chair.

“Most of the leads you gave us have been successful.’ She took a slip of paper out of her breast pocket and glanced at it. “Except two here in Washington. Can you tell us anything more about James Edward Wentworth or Suzanne Lin?”

“You didn’t find them?”

“No. Wentworth flew the coop; his apartment’s clean. Lin went out to a movie and never came back.”

He shrugged. “Washington’s a small town. When you started picking people up, the word must have spread.”

“I suppose. Have you found the look-alike?”

“None exact, of course. I narrowed it down to
three.” We’d given him some photo albums the FBI supplied. They weren’t criminals, just people with various facial characteristics, photographed from the front and side. Shilkov had
MALE CAUC BLOND
50-60,
MALE CAUC WHITE
50-60,
AND MALE CAUC BALD
50-60. All three were in the blond volume; Jefferson and I had seen them two days before.

She looked at the nondescript pictures and shrugged. “Okay. So where is he?”

He leaned back on the couch and laced his fingers together. “I thought that you would never ask. He is in Russia. Leningrad, or headed there.”

We all stiffened. “The summit,” Leusner said. That was the next day.

“You could have told us earlier,” I said.

Shilkov smiled sweetly. “As I say, you never asked. I think you made a point of not asking.”

“How do you know he’s going to the summit?” Leusner said.

“The woman. Valerie Foley. She doesn’t know she told me anything.”

“So you didn’t force it out of her,” Leusner said.

“Oh no, not in the sense of torture. In fact, I never hurt her at all—though I did threaten to; that’s part of the technique.”

“Go on.”

“We gave her only water for a couple of days. I… worked on her resistance with various psychological devices. Finally we gave her water that contained a hypnotic. When she fell asleep, I injected her with a compound the KGB’s Special Services technicians made up, called Batch Seven. It lowers one’s antagonism toward interrogation.”

“Like Pentothal?” I asked.

“Somewhat. People don’t babble so with it. It’s almost like normal conversation.”

“Makes torture obsolete,” Jefferson said. As usual, Shilkov ignored him.

“But wait. She wasn’t in contact with him until the Cabin John thing, right? Your people in Boston had her.”

“That’s correct.”

“Then she couldn’t know where he was going. She couldn’t know about Leningrad.”

“Ah. This is where you have to trust my expertise. My knowledge of human nature. Especially when it comes to people lying, or telling the truth.”

“Go on.”

“I found that she knew nothing more about Foley’s power than we did. As I told you a few days ago. But I went a little further, and told her what we suspected: that Foley had somehow discovered or invented a technique or substance or device that completely subverted a person’s free will. That it would make him do exactly what Foley asked, even kill himself.

“She said she had suspected that for some time, from various questions we had asked. But it wasn’t anything she had any knowledge of.”

He took out a yellow cigarette and tapped it on his thumbnail, inspected the end, and lit it carefully with a wooden match. “And so I asked her about herself. What would
she
have him do with this power?” He watched the match burn almost to his fingers, then dropped it in the ashtray.

“Go to Leningrad?” Leusner said. “Disrupt the summit?”

“Not exactly. I’m only inferring that. What she said specifically was that he could get into government, wind up next to the president, talk him into making peace. She thought about it some more and said that he wouldn’t have to limit it to the president of the
United States. He speaks so many languages so well, and so forth. She had a high opinion of him.

“She even mentioned Russian specifically, and Vardanyan. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since there was obviously no way Foley could get within ten kilometers of the premier without permission. Later, after Cabin John, I thought about the summit.”

“That’s fantastic,” I said.

He smiled, a baby’s plump lips. “Consider it. How many people go along with the president? A planeload? Two planeloads?”

“It’s just possible,” Leusner said. “According to her profile, she was very passionate, even fanatical, about peace, and I think he may be, too.”

“That’s all over his MIT dossier,” I said. “He jokes with his students about marrying a hippie, about neither of them ever recovering from the sixties.”

“Worth checking. Jefferson, you get in touch with the Secret Service and get all you can about everybody going to the summit with Fitzpatrick. Better ID all the press, too; I suppose they’ll have a separate plane. Use my name freely, but don’t tell anybody what you need the information for.” Jefferson nodded and headed for the phone in our room.

“Bailey, you go through State and try to get us diplomatic clearance into Leningrad. We get into the visa red tape and the Soviets will hold us up till Labor Day, on principle, if they smell the Agency.”

She stood up and dropped the envelope into Shilkov’s lap. “If we do find Foley, you’re free to go. Eric Langer, the quiet, tall fellow from our Technical Services section, will bring your tickets and instructions.” Shilkov started to say something, but she turned away abruptly. “I’m bushed. Is there
an unoccupied bed around here?”

“Sure; follow me.” I led her into the bedroom. Jefferson’s bed was made up with military precision; you could bounce a quarter off it. I was obscurely gratified that she chose my rumpled one.

It gave me an odd feeling to be in a room with six KGB men and six of their American counterparts, CIA and Secret Service. It was the room where the “confidential” part of the summit talks would be held. All twelve were presumably electronic entomologists. Menenkov and I had been invited to watch the proceedings, as nontechnical witnesses. He seemed amused but alert.

The Russians had proposed a fine old nineteenth-century drawing room in the private part of the Hermitage, which the Americans instantly vetoed. Full of nooks and crannies and doubtless already wired for sound with fifth-generation Japanese smart bugs. The Americans suggested an unornamented Finnish-modern meeting room at the Leningrad, overlooking the Neva, but the Russians said “no windows.” They said the Americans could bounce a laser off the glass from orbit; pick up the speech vibrations. The CIA
men laughed and said they wished they could. (I would have assumed that particular trick to be physically impossible, if they hadn’t laughed.)

The two teams finally reached uneasy agreement, settling on a modest interior meeting room in the Leningrad. All the rooms on its floor and the floors above and below were emptied, mutually inspected, and sealed off, which meant that half of our protocol team was sent grumbling to the Metropole downtown.