A Very Private Plot (14 page)

For about two years, between ages six and eight, Pavel was given an intensive introductory course in the great history of Russia under the czars. His mother spoke of the explosion of literature—of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol and Chekhov and Turgenev—under the czars' benevolent patronage. She took him a dozen times to view the treasures in the Kremlin. (“Remember,” she whispered more than once, “these are all
ours
!”) When Pavel got to be nine or ten he began to suspect that the whole thing was a hallucination, but he was utterly devoted to his mother and never saw any reason to interfere with a fantasy that made her dizzy with pleasure and anticipation.

And then somehow the historical orientation by his mother affected his view of Russian life. He was utterly absorbed by accounts of the last days of the czar and then of the death of the czar (“My grandfather!” he grinned, viewing the portrait in a book); and, in his teens, he felt the electrifying force of Solzhenitsyn, read in
samizdat
, and he read widely in great literature of dissent, wherever he could find it.

He was by nature cautious, never initiating antiestablishment conversation. But if others brought up the subject, which happened frequently when he was at the technical college at Gorky, he would with some delicacy evaluate the ideological temperature of the critic of the regime. It occurred to him along the way that he could be immensely valuable to the KGB, so pronounced had his skills become in inducing men and women of his age to say perhaps one quarter again as much as they'd have been prepared to say to others about their political grievances. He suspected that some of his friends, after a freewheeling evening, woke the next day saying to themselves, “Oh my God, did I tell Pavel
that
last night?” He laughed as he recalled the underground story of the Russian who rushed to the offices of the KGB to report that his missing parrot's political opinions were in no way related to his own. Meanwhile, contemplating a career in the police, he busied himself learning penology, a field of study in which he found he had a stubborn interest, perhaps traceable to his absorption with the last days of his “grandfather” and the royal brood, and the long ensuing history of bloody oppression.

It wasn't until his return from Afghanistan, honorably discharged as a sergeant after a year's service with the artillery, now feverish in his resentment of the slaughter and of the treatment of the mujahedin, that he came upon Andrei, his physical education instructor at the police academy. Pavel, by coincidence, was in appearance not unlike an adult version of the young czarevich: slight, his features aquiline, his skin a soft white, eyes light brown, his mouth naturally set in a vaguely melancholy configuration. Andrei, on the other hand, was the robust outdoors man: muscular, heavy-chested, and older by five years than Pavel. Before entering the army, Pavel had persuaded a Japanese student who was also studying penology to teach him karate. Pavel had done his exercises regularly, even during his days in the military, gradually achieving a considerable skill. Andrei, learning of this avocation of one of his police cadets, persuaded Pavel to teach him his special skills. They would stay after class in the gymnasium, devoting an hour each day to practicing karate.

After a few weeks, a hard intimacy generated, and under the subtle ministrations of Pavel, the older Andrei confessed first his disillusion with the regime, in due course his abhorrence of it. But he stopped well short of sharing with Pavel his acceptance of the mission of the Narodniki. To go that far he would need the permission of Nikolai, so firm in his insistence that insurrectionary sentiments be carefully suppressed when speaking to others. Meanwhile, Andrei in turn took the interrogatory initiative, curious to know how far Pavel's heretofore amorphous resentments would carry him. He was startled to be told late one night after karate practice in the gym, and after substantial refreshments, that on a day in March, at dawn, in Afghanistan, before an offensive scheduled to begin fifteen seconds later, Pavel had taken careful aim at the back of the head of a lieutenant who was peering over a foxhole fifty meters ahead.

The night before, Pavel explained, blowing cigarette smoke through his nose, his voice faint and husky, he had walked by a detention enclosure on his way to the food line. He stopped at an unlit entrance to a command tent and saw the lieutenant in question inserting a lighted cigarette into first one, then the second eye of a rebel whose arms were pinioned by two enlisted officers.

Pavel doubted, he told Andrei, that he could ever efface from his memory the screams of the now blinded peasant, a young man about his own age. He learned later in the evening from a crusty captain in the regular army that there had been no tactical objective in the torture of the rebel. “The lieutenant just likes to relax a little every now and then. And he thinks that it does no harm for word to get out among the mujahedin that resistance to the Soviet army is very, very dangerous business.”

“I waited until the general firing began,” Pavel said tersely, seated at a quiet end of the bar. “I needed plenty of cover. It wasn't long, a minute, two at the most. There was firing everywhere, in every direction it seemed. I squeezed the trigger and hit him in the neck. He jerked up and then fell down in his own blood. The soldiers at either side were too preoccupied with the firefight to bother with him. When a pause came, one of them grabbed him by the helmet and drew his head back. He must have decided he was dead. He just let him fall down again. If anybody suspected the shot came from behind, we never heard about it.”

They met together, the six of them, at an abandoned barn at Okateyvsky, one hour from Moscow, a short walk from the bus station. The barn had not been used for several years, but the smell of dried manure was still there. The barn was on the farm where Mariya and Vitaly's parents had worked when they were growing up. Nikolai Trimov was the tacit leader, Andrei Belinkov, his deputy. Viktor Pletnev had become in effect the coordinator. Pavel Pogodin was their principal window on official Moscow.

The meeting began at eleven in the morning, and the whole day stretched before them. The purpose, Nikolai explained, was to become acquainted. Vitaly Primakov and his sister Mariya, devoted friends of Viktor, whom they had known since they were teenagers, would take on any duty assigned them, Nikolai explained. They both worked in the post office in Moscow's Lyubertsy district. The need now was to light again the fire of the Narodniki, a fire for liberty that had been doused by the regime against which they were now committed. The absolute requirement: Every one of them must be prepared to lose his life. If there was any hesitation on this point, it was imperative that such hesitation be expressed now.

Nikolai waited. No one spoke up.

They were seated on objects of convenience in the old building, Nikolai on a mound of hay, Viktor on a large log. Pavel and the Primakous—redheaded, with blustery complexions that belied their clerical work, long days spent indoors—on what was left of a long bench. Nikolai told the little band that Pavel, as a cadet at the police academy, had been formally instructed in some of the security procedures for guarding the chief of state. After considerable study, he and Pavel had come up with a plan.

On October 2, Gorbachev would attend the opening of the Bolshoi Ballet. He had done this the year before, his first year in office. It had become traditional for the chief of state to celebrate the ballet's annual opening. Chernenko had missed out, but then he was chronically ill. But Andropov had done it once; Brezhnev, year after year.

The procedure, Nikolai went on, was at once routine and carefully orchestrated. The procession of automobiles, eight or ten, drove into Theatre Square, the lead car gradually turning left on approaching the entrance to the old theater. The second car, and then the other cars, followed suit, and the caravan drew to a halt simultaneously when alongside the pavement that led up to the wide marble steps—sixteen of them, ascending to the entrance. The crowd that inevitably materialized to ogle was grouped by the police to the right and to the left of the spacious marble ascent, down the center of which the long red carpet would stretch, reaching from the top step to the bottom.

Nikolai turned to Pavel. “Tell us what happens then.”

“What happens is that whichever car the General Secretary is in, and no one can know which it will be, is the car that parks directly alongside the red carpet. Four men step out of cars ahead and behind and approach the critical car. Gorbachev steps out. The guards flank him and he climbs up the red carpet. Everybody on either side claps and shouts. Thirty, forty seconds is all it takes to climb the stairs.

“But”—Pavel lifted his right hand to signal an important detail—“we were shown a film of the whole operation during our training, to give us an example of how his protection is effected. Brezhnev and Andropov never paused while mounting the steps. But Gorbachev likes crowds. This film of Gorbachev shows him responding to the applause. Suddenly he darted to the left, well ahead of his security guards, and took the arm of a girl who was waving at him. He shook two, even three more hands before moving back to the red carpet and up the entrance to the hall.” Pavel paused now, deferring to Nikolai, who said:

“We have to be patient. But we must not lose any opportunity. My plan is to attempt the assassination
provided
Gorbachev does the same thing he did last year, which was, as Pavel told us, to swerve left and clasp hands.”

Nikolai went to his briefcase and pulled out what, unfolded, turned out to be a large sheet of drawing paper, four feet square. He thrust one corner of the paper onto a rusty protruding nail in one of the wooden pillars behind him and asked Mariya to hold up the other end.

They could see his sketch of the marble staircase, the red carpet, the cordons on either side, a penciled line describing every stair. He pointed up to the twelfth step on the left.

“My plan is that one of us, armed, will be standing there right up by the cordon, wearing a police uniform. In the film Pavel saw there were policemen scattered on both sides of the staircase. Pavel,” Nikolai's fingers moved two or three inches down, “will be here, approximately at the eighth step. If Gorbachev swerves to the left, our member”—he pointed back to the first position—“will fire as many rounds as possible into Gorbachev's head.

“And almost simultaneously …” Nikolai hesitated, his voice caught, affected by what he had now to say, “Pavel will aim his police revolver and kill our member.”

There was silence.

“The objective,” Nikolai cleared his throat, “is plain. If our Narodnik is caught alive, which almost certainly would otherwise happen, within hours all of us will be apprehended, tortured, and executed. He cannot be permitted to survive the episode.” He watched them. The barn was still, except for the creaking of the bench as Mariya swung her booted feet gently.

“Now, is there disagreement on this point?”

Once again there was silence.

“In that case, it only remains for us to draw straws, to see who will be that person on October 2. We will do so at our next meeting.” He decided to explain the reason, though they all knew. “It is prudent to allow time to go by, in the event any one of us wishes to rethink the plan or his commitment to the enterprise.”

CHAPTER 17

MAY 1995

Nobody had quite anticipated the furor that arose from putting Blackford Oakes in jail. A festering popular resentment against what the
Wall Street Journal
labeled the “disestablishment of American security” became vocal. People here and there, on talk shows, in the letters columns of newspapers, hotly questioned the moral passions of Senator Hugh Blanton and the “elephantiasis of Senate pride,” as Rush Limbaugh put it. The tabloids teemed with fanciful tales of adventures allegedly had by super-spy Blackford Oakes himself, or else done under his supervision. These included everything from seizing the minutes of Khrushchev's Twentieth Party Congress speech in 1956, denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin, to hand-delivering the Stingers that had finally brought the Soviet juggernaut to a stop in Afghanistan. Blackford soon was linked to every turn of history in Soviet-American relations that benefited the West, including the defection of Nureyev, the escape to the West of Solzhenitsyn, the spotting of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba …

“Really, darling,” Sally said to him in the one telephone call to her he was permitted every day, “I had absolutely no idea that you single-handedly managed to win the Cold War. Tell me, Blacky, did you hypnotize Gorbachev into instituting glasnost? Perestroika?… But I shouldn't tease, my love. To tell the truth, I'm rather enjoying it, because I think it must be some comfort for you in that awful place they have you. Oh darling, why don't you just swallow your pride, agree to appear, and take the Fifth Amendment?”

Blackford gently reminded her that the night before he turned himself in to the Justice Department ten days ago she had pledged not to argue that line again, for the sake of domestic tranquility. “To tell the truth,” he said, “I don't particularly mind that the whole subject of covert activity is coming up a month or so before Blanton files his report. A few weeks ago I'd have predicted his no-covert-activity bill would sail through Congress. I'm not so sure anymore. What we need is a little friendly nudge from the White House. All the right arguments are being laid out, though of course the case could be made stronger if we could actually talk history, and talk about the uses of covert activity right now. But anyway, it gives me something to do, watching it all. I don't have much to do except read the papers and watch television. If I'm in here another week I'm going to end up reading Norman Mailer's novel on the CIA.”

“And doing your push-ups?”

“And doing my push-ups. I do those, and I say my prayers, and I miss you desperately, and might even reread Jane Austen. By the way, Sally, does anybody ever confess to just plain ‘reading' Jane Austen? I know only people who ‘reread' Jane Austen. Goodbye, darling. They're waving me away from the phone. I'll call tomorrow.”