The Company: A Novel of the CIA (130 page)

Leo squinted into the shadows. "As a matter of fact—"

"Oh, thank goodness," the woman exclaimed in relief. She materialized out of the shadows and approached Leo. "Sorry again, but I don't suppose you'd know which of these apartments Leon Kritzky lives in?"

Leo's face turned numb as stone. "Who are you?" he demanded. He raised his fingertips to his cheek and felt only dead skin.

The woman drew closer and peered at Leo. He could hear her catch her breath. "Daddy?" she whispered in a child's anguished voice.

"Tessa? Is that you?"

"Oh, Daddy," she moaned. "It is me. It's me, it's me."

Leo felt time and place and regret and heartache fall away. He opened his arms and Tessa, quaking with sobs, collapsed into them.

It was a long while before either of them could utter a word. They stood there in the shadows clinging to each other until Tessa's tears had saturated the lapel of Leo's windbreaker. Later, neither could remember how they had gotten into the apartment or who had opened the bottle of Bulgarian wine or where the open sandwiches spread with roe had come from. They gazed at each other across the folding table. Every now and then Leo would reach over and touch his daughter and her eyes, riveted on his, would brim with tears.

Tessa had checked into a hotel off Red Square but there was no question of her going back to it; they would collect her valise and the package of books she had brought for Leo the next morning. They spread a sheet on the couch for her and propped up pillows on either end of it and talked in soft voices husky with emotion into the early hours of the morning. Tessa, a thin, handsome woman closing in on forty, had just ended another in a series of love affairs; she always seemed to fall for men who were already married or leery of committing themselves to permanent relationships. And as her sister constantly reminded her, the biological clock was ticking. Tessa was toying with the idea of getting pregnant by her next lover even if the affair never went anywhere; she'd at least wind up with a child, which is what she wanted more than anything.

Vanessa? Oh, she was fine. Yes, she was still married to the same fellow, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University; their son, who had been named Philip after his grandfather, was a strapping four-year-old who already knew how to work a computer. Why hadn't she warned Leo she was coming? She hadn't wanted to get his hopes up. Hers either. She was afraid she might chicken out at the last moment, afraid of what she would find—or what she wouldn't find. She hadn't even told Vanessa where she was going. "Oh, Daddy, if only..."

"If only?"

"If only you hadn't..."

He understood what she couldn't bring herself to say. "I had allegiances and loyalties that went back to before I joined the CIA," he told her. "I was true to these allegiances and loyalties."

"Do you have any regrets?"

The regrets that had fallen away in the corridor flooded back. "Your mother," he said; "I bitterly regret what I did to Adelle. Your sister; I regret that she can't bring herself to talk to me. You; I regret that I can't share your life and you can't share what's left of mine."

"When I first saw you in the hallway, Daddy, I had the terrible feeling that you weren't glad to see me."

"No, it's not true—"

"I saw it in your eyes."

"Seeing you here is the most wonderful thing that's happened to me in seven and a half years. It's only—"

"Only what?"

"This isn't the best time to be in Moscow, Tessa."

"With Gorbachev in power, I thought it'd be a fascinating time to be in Moscow."

"That's just it. Gorbachev may not be in power long."

"Is there going to be a coup d'etat? Gosh, that would be fun—to be in the middle of a real revolution." Suddenly Tessa looked hard at her father. "Do you know something, Daddy, or are you only repeating rumors?"

"A coup is a real possibility."

"Excuse me for asking but do you still work for the KGB?"

He tried to smile. "I'm retired. I draw a pension. I get what information I have from the newspapers."

Tessa seemed relieved. "Predicting coups is like predicting the weather," she said. "Everybody knows the newspapers get it wrong most of the time. So if they say there's going to be a coup d'etat, chances are things will be quiet as hell. Too bad for me. I could have used some excitement in my life."

5

NEAR FOROS ON THE CRIMEAN PENINSULA, MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1991

FLYING INTO THE WHITEWASHED BULL'S-EYE HELIPAD IN A GIANT bug-like Army helicopter, Yevgeny saw the onion-domed Church of Foros clinging to the granite cliffs and the surf breaking against the jagged shoreline far below it. Moments later Mikhail Gorbachev's compound on the southern Crimean cliffs overlooking the Black Sea came into view. There was a three-story main house, a small hotel for staff and security guards, a separate guest house, an indoor swimming pool and movie theater, even a long escalator to the private beach under the compound.

As soon as the helicopter had touched down, the delegation from Moscow—Yuri Sukhanov representing the KGB, General Varennikov representing the Army, Oleg Baklanov representing the military-industrial complex, Oleg Shenin from the Politburo, Gorbachev's personal assistant and chief of staff Valery Boldin, Yevgeny Tsipin representing the powerful banking sector—was rushed over to the main house in open Jeeps. As the group made its way through the marble and gilt central hall, the head of the compound's security detachment whispered to Sukhanov that he had cut off Gorbachev's eight telephone and fax lines at four thirty, as instructed. "When I informed him that he had unexpected visitors, he picked up the phone to see what it was all about," recounted the officer. "That's when he discovered the lines were dead. He even tried the direct phone to the commander in chief—the one that's kept in a box. He must have understood immediately what was happening because he turned deathly pale and summoned his family—his wife, Raisa Maksimovna, his daughter, his son-in-law. They are all with him now in the living room. Raisa was particularly shaken—I heard her say something to her husband about the Bolsheviks murdering the Romanov family after the October revolution."

Pushing through double doors, the delegation found Gorbachev and his family standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the grand living room. There was a breathtaking view of the cliffs and the sea through the picture window behind them. The General Secretary, barely able to control his rage, stared at his chief of staff, Boldin. "Et tu. Brute?" he said with a sneer. Gorbachev eyed the others. "Who sent you?" he asked with icy disdain.

"The committee appointed in connection with the emergency," Sukhanov told him.

"I didn't appoint such a committee," Gorbachev shot back. "Who is on it?"

Yevgeny went up to Gorbachev and handed him a sheet of onionskin on which the names of the members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency had been typed. The Secretary General fitted on a pair of eyeglasses and looked at the list. "Kryuchkov! Yazov—my God, I plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense! Pugo! Varennikov! Uritzky!" Gorbachev's head rocked from side to side in disgust. "Do you really think the people are so tired that they will follow any dictator?"

General Varennikov stepped forward. "You don't have much choice in the matter, Mikhail Sergeyevich. You must go along with us and sign the emergency decree. Either that or resign."

Gorbachev glanced at Raisa and saw that she was shivering with fear. He rested a hand on her shoulder, then told the delegation, "Never—I refuse to legalize such a decree with my signature."

In a barely audible voice Raisa asked her husband, "Yeltsin—is his name on the list?"

Sukhanov said, "Yeltsin will be arrested."

Gorbachev and his wife stared into each other's eyes. Their daughter moved closer to her mother and took her hand. Gorbachev smiled grimly at both of them; they all understood that there was a strong possibility of ending up in front of a firing squad. He turned back to the delegation. "You are adventurers and traitors," he said in an even voice. "You will destroy the country. Only those who are blind to history could now suggest a return to a totalitarian regime. You are pushing Russia to civil war."

Yevgeny, conscious of having a role to play, remarked, "You are the one pushing Russia to civil war. We are trying to avoid bloodshed."

Sukhanov said, "Mikhail Sergeyevich, in the end we ask nothing from you. You will remain in Foros under house arrest. We will take care of the dirty work for you."

"Dirty work is what you will be doing," Gorbachev agreed bitterly.

"There is nothing more we can accomplish here," Sukhanov told the other members of the delegation. He approached Gorbachev and thrust out his hand; the General Secretary and the head of the KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate had been on close terms for years. Gorbachev looked down at the hand, then with a contemptuous sneer turned his back on him. Shrugging off the insult, Sukhanov led the way out of the room.

Heading back in the helicopter to Belbek airport, where a Tupolev-154 was waiting to fly them to Moscow, Sukhanov issued instructions over the radiophone to the head of the security detachment at Foros; the General Secretary and the members of his family were to be cut off from the world. No person and no news was to be allowed in or out. Understood?

The words "Your orders will be carried out" crackled over the radio.

Baklanov produced a bottle of cognac from a leather satchel and, filling small plastic cups to the brim, handed them around. Everyone started to drink. "You have to hand it to him," General Varennikov shouted over the whine of the rotors. "Anyone else in his shoes would have signed the fucking decree."

Sukhanov leaned his head back against the helicopter's bulkhead and shut his eyes. "Everything now depends on isolating Boris Yeltsin," he shouted. "Without Gorbachev, without Yeltsin, the opposition will have nobody to rally around."

Yevgeny agreed. "Yeltsin," he said, his thoughts far away, "is definitely the key."

Returning to Moscow well after midnight, Yevgeny rang Aza's apartment from a public phone in the airport parking lot. Using a prearranged code phrase, he summoned her to a quick meeting in a garage across the alleyway from the back door of her building. He found her waiting in the shadows when he got there and they fell into each others arms. After a moment Yevgeny pushed her away and, in short disjointed sentences, explained what had happened: the putschists had unexpectedly moved up the date of the uprising; he and some others had flown down to Foros to try to browbeat Gorbachev into signing the decree establishing the State Committee for the State of Emergency; Gorbachev had flatly refused and was being held prisoner in the Foros compound. Even as they spoke, Marshal Yazov was promulgating Coded Telegram 8825 putting all military units on red alert. Within hours detachments of tanks and half-tracks loaded with combat troops would occupy strategic positions in Moscow, at which point the public would be informed that Gorbachev had suffered a stroke and resigned, and all governmental power was now in the hands of the State Committee for the State of Emergency.

Aza took the news calmly. The events were not unexpected, she noted, only the timing came as a surprise. She would borrow a car from a neighbor and drive out to warn Boris Nikolayevich immediately, she said. Yeltsin would undoubtedly barricade himself inside the massive Russian parliament building on the Moscow River known as the White House and try to rally the democratic forces to resist. If the White House phones were not cut off, Yevgeny might be able to reach her at the unlisted number in Yeltsin's suite of offices that she had given him. In the darkness she caressed the back of his neck with her hand. "Take care of yourself, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," she said, and she whispered a coda from their fleeting romance so many, many years before: "Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you."

The line, which Yevgeny instantly recognized, left him aching with regret at what might have been; aching with hope at what still could be.

Aza threaded the small Lada through the deserted streets of the capitol. She turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt and headed out of Moscow in the direction ofUsovo, the village where Boris Yeltsin had his dacha. She had stopped for a red light—the last thing she wanted was to be pulled over by the police for a traffic violation—when she realized that the ground was shaking under the wheels of the car. It felt like the foreshock of an earthquake. She heard the rumbling at the same moment she saw what was causing it. To her stupefaction, a long column of enormous tanks heading toward downtown Moscow hove into view on the avenue. A soldier wearing a leather helmet and goggles stood in the open turret of each tank. Suddenly the trembling of the earth matched the rhythm of Aza's heart; until this instant the putsch had been a more or less abstract concept, but the sight of the tank treads grinding along the cobblestones into Moscow made it painfully real. The tankers didn't stop for the red light, which struck Aza as outrageous. Who did they think they were! And then it hit her; it was preposterous to think that tanks heading for a putsch would obey traffic regulations. One soldier must have noticed there was a woman behind the wheel of the Lada because he made a gallant gesture as he rolled past, doffing an imaginary top hat in her direction.

The instant the light turned green Aza threw the car into gear and, racing past the line of tanks, sped toward Usovo. On the outskirts of Moscow, the buildings gave way to fields with ornate entrances to collective farms or factories set back from the road. Gorki-9, just before Usovo, was deathly still when she drove down the single paved street and turned onto a dirt lane and braked to a stop in front of a walled compound. The two soldiers on duty, country boys from the look of them, were dozing in the guardhouse when she rapped on the window. One of them recognized her and hurried out to open the gate.

"Kind of early for you, isn't it, little lady?" he said.

"I wanted to put Moscow behind me before traffic jammed the streets," she replied.