A Very Private Plot (11 page)

“Very well, Viktor. Sit down. A cup of tea?”

“Yes. And,” he struggled with the package, “I have something for you, a little gift to thank you for the trouble you took.” He took from the bag six bananas and a box of dried figs.

“You didn't have to do that, Viktor, but thank you. Sit down.”

“Nikolai, I discovered quite by accident that you … deceived me. You had already seen the book last week. Your name was on the card.” Viktor continued talking without pause. He did not want to prolong the humiliation. “My purpose is to tell you that I was enormously moved by the information you brought me about the Narodniki. And to tell you something more, Nikolai, which is that I flatly disbelieve what you say, that you are not interested in the political cauldron we live in. I know you are some sort of an academic star, that you have mastered several languages and electrical engineering, and that you fought bravely in Afghanistan. But I know also that our country needs help and I believe that in your heart you know that it needs help and that in reading the book by Chambers you were reaching to feel the purity of the experience of a liberated man.

“I could
feel
it in the paragraphs you gave me, the way you set down the words, not the translation of an engineer unmoved by what the words said. Even with my poor English, I shall now return to the library and read more in that book, even as I read all of
Witness
, although it took me almost one month. I am here, Nikolai, to plead with you to join me and two other young people devoted to a freer Russia, a man and a woman, brother and sister. Our goal is the liberation of our motherland—I say it dramatically, and although I know that you are very circumspect, I know also that you know I am not an agent, attempting to snare you. I know that you trust me.”

Nikolai was rescued by the hissing teapot. He needed desperately to think. To talk with Andrei. To his surprise, he was not in the least frightened. He absolutely believed in the sincerity of Viktor, who sat there, his brown hair falling over one of his eyes, both of which were half closed, staring at the moldy carpet on the floor, waiting for a reaction.

He was not scared but neither was he prepared to induct Viktor on the spot into the New Narodniki, in which only he and Andrei were members, sworn to give their lives to advance liberty. He poured the tea. He had to say something. What he said was, “What do you propose to do?”

Viktor was enormously heartened. With that simple statement, Nikolai had dropped his pose. He had jettisoned the unbecoming masquerade that he was indifferent to the atrocities of the world they lived in and unwilling to speak of them. Viktor felt that he needed to reward Nikolai's act of faith in him. He would do so by communicating his most sacred, most incriminating secret.

“You should know,” he said, “I am in touch with American intelligence.”

Nikolai responded quickly: “I am not sure it is wise for you to give me the details.”

“I won't. Those are the basic rules of my business. But what I am telling you is that any information I—we—wish to pass on to Washington, to the CIA—I can do that. In fact I have already tested it out.”

“What on earth could you know, teaching history and studying at the graduate school, that Washington would want to know?”

“There are always,
always
, opportunities. I will be concrete. On March 8th, Aaron Sablin—you know Sablin? He teaches physics at Pitkin, and attends, like us, the graduate school—he invited me to his house for dinner. I went and the food was very good. His father lives well. He is a widower and a medical doctor. He had several vodkas, and I had several. The subject came up of the health of Chernenko. All of Moscow was talking about the health of Chernenko after his public appearance in January, you remember. No, you were away, in the army.

“Anyway, I said, quite matter-of-factly, that from all appearances one would not suppose that Chernenko would last out the year—this was early in March. Dr. Sablin turned to me and said, ‘Viktor, he will not last out the month.' Aaron looked in my direction and, when his father was not noticing, gave me a wink. Later we went to a bar and he confided to me that his father was a specialist who had been called in to the Kremlin and regularly treated Chernenko.”

“What did you do with that information?”

“I gave it the very next day to my contact.”

“You know that it got to Washington?”

“I know the ma—person I deal with. If he had been an agent he'd have turned me in long ago.”

“How many people do you suppose your contact has reporting to him?”

“I haven't the least idea. And maybe the information about Chernenko is entirely trivial compared to the information he comes up with himself, or gets from other sources. He is very well placed. And he has been secure for many years. In the post-Beria purge he was sent to Gulag, but after a few months he was released and given back his old job. A few years before that he was sent on a six-month mission to Indonesia. When he returned he could find no trace of his brother or of his aged mother.”

“Stalin—”

“Yes, it was in the last days of Stalin. Perhaps one million—no, more—disappeared in the same way. Just no trace of them.”

“Does your friend have any … more ambitious plans?”

“If he does, he wouldn't tell me. He wants to live to see our country free.”

“I fear he will have to live a very long time.”

“My friend is already old, but he is healthy.”

Nikolai stood up and walked the two or three paces one could move in the room without having to turn around. “What, other than to communicate anything to your contact that would be useful to the other side, do you plan to do?”

“I don't know. I must do something. And it is less fruitful to work alone. I told you, there are three of us who meet with great caution. Again, you do not need to know who they are. But they trust me, and I trust them. Consider just a little thing: I shall make out of the passages you just finished giving me—Chambers on the Narodniki—a
samizdat
, and in less than one month those few paragraphs on the Narodniki will have had an impact on hundreds, maybe thousands of students. Imagine how the next issue of a newspaper would sell if it carried
just those three paragraphs
!”

Nikolai looked down at his army-issue watch. “Viktor, I need to think. And you need to think. And we must take every precaution. We must not, while at Pitkin, be seen together more than casually. And Viktor …”

“Yes?”

“When I next approach you, I will have proposals for regular meetings, and you can make your own proposals to me. It will be a very long time before we can—well, act decisively. We must be patient, but also inventive.”

Nikolai felt the special intensity of the grip of Viktor's handshake.

CHAPTER 13

SEPTEMBER 1985

Blackford Oakes reached CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just after eight. At the same time, Director William Casey drove in, secure in his secure limousine, an armed guard sitting in the front seat beside the driver, the windows bulletproof, the route taken from his dwelling circuitous. It infuriated the Director to submit to the same disciplines he rigidly enforced on others, such were his carefree ways.

He had been around a long time; his associates were used to him, they liked and respected him, and they knew that his intimacy with the President guaranteed his tenure as Director. As Deputy Director for Operations, Blackford was indispensable to Casey, in big ways and little ways. There was, for instance, the Director's incapacity to handle any mechanical object invented after the wheelbarrow. He had mastered the use of the telephone, and it was rumored that while at college he typed his own papers, but no one alive, as far as Blackford knew, had seen Casey handle any mechanical or electronic gadget more complicated than a radio, and sometimes he wrestled with the doorknob, having forgotten that it needed to be turned clockwise in order to function. Blackford regularly opened the Director's safe for him.

It amused Blackford to think of Casey's wrestling with a computer and doing such things as inserting codes and commands and chasing the cursor this way and that. Casey communicated in writing, done by dictation to his secretary, or else orally, imposing a major strain on the listener—Casey spoke indistinctly, requiring of the addressee a kind of onomatopoetic facility to understand what it was the Director was saying. President Reagan's wisecrack about Casey, that Casey actually contrived his unintelligibility—“That way, whoever he is talking to simply agrees from sheer fatigue with whatever he has said”—was widely circulated.

Blackford got on well with the Director, and vice versa. Casey respected the field experience of his chief of covert operations, who had been (to be sure, with not uninteresting interruptions) with the Agency ever since graduating from college in 1951. There were many rumors about Blackford's first tour of duty in England, the details of which were known to only one man, the Director learned on coming into office, the legendary Rufus. And Casey knew that around Blackford Oakes a quiet cult, mostly made up of retired agents, thrived. Oakes never encouraged it, never spoke about his background or his work.

Stepping out of his car, Casey greeted Blackford. “Black, you got any input for the session on Soviet investment in their strategic defense operation?”

“I'm up on it,” Blackford replied. “If the figures you get from our analysts are way off, I'll tell you.”

“That's what the President most wants to shove at Gorbachev in Geneva.”

“Yes. I'd have guessed that.” The two men walked into the main entrance and went separately to their offices before convening for the 9 a.m. senior staff session, which focused primarily on arming the President with arguments to use in defense of his Star Wars program.

The Deputy Director reported the Agency's estimate that the Soviets were currently spending “over twenty-five billion dollars” in developing their own strategic defense, hardly consistent with their disparagement of the U.S. effort. Casey looked over at Blackford, who nodded his head slightly: the figure was right. “Okay,” Casey said, “and that's a nice round figure. The President will like that much of it.” He got up. “See you around,” he said to his five primary assistants. He signaled Blackford to stay on.

“How is it going with the Stingers?”

The Pakistanis had received a threat from Gorbachev, delivered through his ambassador in Karachi: If Pakistan's General Zia didn't stop conveying U.S. Stingers to the Afghan rebels, the Soviet government would devise a “suitable means of retaliation.”

“We've set up an alternative delivery route, in case Zia gets cold feet, which I doubt he'll get.”

Casey nodded. “He told State he wanted indemnifications.”

“He's had those.”

“
Arhhreuh
!”

Blackford had got used to the emunctory sounds distinctive to the Director. The consensus was that the sound he had just now emitted meant: “You're-goddamn-right.”

Blackford said, “I think the last time around we promised to give Zia Detroit. Or was it Illinois?”

“He can have New York, far as I'm concerned,” Casey nodded. Blackford left the room and went to his own office.

He then undertook his Monday morning ritual. He went to the computer and wrote into it his personal code. He painstakingly tapped in a second code he had committed to memory five years ago. The technician who had written it into the tele-computer had kept no record of the operation. The key to opening the line of communication rested exclusively in Blackford's memory.

It was still gripping to recall, even after almost five years, the corner of the little café in Paris where the startling arrangements had been made. The Soviet's terms were explicit. Blackford Oakes, and only Blackford, would cue in to receive information. He would do this unfailingly once every week. The communications link, to fortify security, would be only one-way: Cyclops could relay information to Oakes. Oakes could not communicate with Cyclops, except through an emergency procedure in Moscow, which, if used, might jeopardize the continuation of the contact. It was not, for that reason, an ideal arrangement. But during the fifty-eight months that had gone by, much vital information had come in. And none of it had proved deceptive.

Cyclops was a laconic communicator. He did not use more words than he needed to use. But, experienced as he was, Cyclops knew how many words Blackford would need in order to put the information to use. Blackford was never shortchanged.

Sometimes two weeks would go by with the screen entirely blank. But Cyclops would never let a third week go by. To do so might give the impression that he had been detected. If there was nothing on week number three to report, the screen would ring in merely the one word: “Okay.” Blackford had had an Okay the preceding week. It had been three weeks since Cyclops reported that an extra one hundred Soviet scientists had been diverted to Krasnoyarsk, to augment the force at work on a defense shield.

Blackford completed the coding and stared now at the screen. He could feel his heart beating. He reached over to the desk and grabbed a legal pad. He wrote down the exact message from Cyclops. Word for word. He then closed the circuit, electronically blocking it, and went to his desk chair. He tore off the top sheet of paper, brought out his scissors from the desk drawer, cut the sheet of paper in half, discarded the blank bottom, then folded and refolded the top half. He pulled out his wallet and stuck the paper between the bills. He thought deeply for a full half hour, and then dialed dear, reliable Kathy in the White House. Fifteen minutes later his private line rang. Kathy. The meeting was set: 5:45, and yes, the President agreed that no one else would be in the Oval Office, just the two of them.

Ronald Reagan had worked closely with Blackford, most recently on the Grenada operation. He liked Blackford's directness, and his capacity to laugh, spontaneously and easily. He knew that Blackford had himself engaged over the years in covert activities, some of high importance. And he knew that several of his commissions had been directly supervised by John F. Kennedy and, later, by Lyndon Johnson.