The Company: A Novel of the CIA (134 page)

"How are we to land helicopters on a roof piled high with furniture?"

"What if Yeltsin manages to slip away in the confusion?"

"We have to consider worst-case scenarios. What will happen if we kill several thousand defenders and still don't capture Yeltsin?"

"What if Yeltsin escapes to the Urals and goes through with his threat to form a shadow government?"

"What if our troops refuse to fire on the people manning the barricades? What then?"

"Worse still, what if our troops attack and are turned back?"

As the discussion dragged on the criticism became more pointed. Sensing that the balance was slowly tilting against them, the putsch leaders tried desperately to save the day. They argued that the stalemate worked for the counterrevolutionists; as long as the White House held out people would continue to rally to Yeltsin. And if Yeltsin were permitted to prevail, the careers, the lives of all those who had sided with the putsch would be in jeopardy.

A combat general who had been for the attack when it was first proposed wavered. "I don't know—if this blows up in our faces, it's the Army's reputation that will bear the stain."

"The Party leadership walks away when things turn sour—the war in Afghanistan is the most recent example," complained another war hero.

The press baron Uritzky pleaded with the field commanders. If Gorbachev and Yeltsin retained power, they would slash military budgets and humiliate the once-proud Soviet army. Gorbachev's military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, who had rushed back to Moscow from vacation to join the coup, insisted that it was too late to back down; once the putsch had been launched the plotters had no option but to go forward, if only to preserve the Army's credibility.

"We have something more important than credibility—we have the respect of the masses, " observed an older officer who had remained silent up to now. "All that goodwill will disappear overnight if we fire on our brothers and sisters in the streets of the capitol."

One senior commander headed for the door in disgust. "They want to smear the Army in blood. I for one will not storm the White House."

A much-decorated Air Force commander agreed. "I categorically refuse to send my helicopters into the air. You'll have to get somebody else to issue the order."

Under the noses of the ringleaders the putsch began to unravel in a flurry of recriminations. Watching from the sill of a window, Yevgeny concluded that the senior military commanders had lost their nerve. As the mood deteriorated, bottles of liquor appeared on the conference table and the putschists began the serious business of drinking themselves into a stupor. Yevgeny joined two others who were heading for the toilet, then slipped into a small office with a telephone on the desk. He lit the green-shaded desk lamp and dialed a number and listened to the phone ringing in a drawer on the other end. When Aza finally came on the line Yevgeny could barely repress the triumph in his voice.

"Yeltsin can go to sleep," he told her. "They have called off the attack... No, the leaders were willing to take the risk. In the end it was the field commanders who didn't have the appetite for bloodshed... I think its over. Without the army behind them, the putschists have no way of swaying the masses. Yeltsin has won... To tell the truth I can hardly believe it either. In a few hours the sun will rise on a new Russia. Things will never be the same... Let us meet at—" Yevgeny stiffened as his ear caught a faint echo in the phone. "Is someone else on this line?" he asked quietly. "Not to worry. It must be my imagination. We will meet at your flat at the end of the afternoon... Yes. For me, too. We will slow down the time left to us so that each instant lasts an eternity."

When he heard Aza hang up, Yevgeny kept the phone pressed to his ear. Twenty seconds went by. Then there was a second soft click on the line that caused him to catch his breath. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows; perhaps it originated with the telephone exchange or the central switchboard operator. Turning off the desk lamp, he walked into the outer office. He stood for a moment waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Hearing the rustle of fabric, he peered into the shadows and realized that someone was in the doorway.

A woman's voice, seething with pent-up fury, hissed, "So it was you, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, the traitor in our ranks who betrayed us to the counterrevolution."

He knew the voice—it belonged to Mathilde, the wife of the press baron Uritzky. An overhead light snapped on and she stepped out of the shadows to confront him. Buried in her fist was a metallic object so small that he thought it could only be a lipstick.

"It was not lost on us that at every turn the counterrevolutionists seemed to know what we were doing. My husband told Kryuchkov there was a traitor in our midst but he didn't pay attention. He was so sure Yeltsin would cave in once he realized the hopelessness of his position."

"He miscalculated," Yevgeny remarked.

"So did you!"

Mathilde stepped closer and raised the object in her fist and pointed it at Yevgeny's forehead. It dawned on him what she was holding and he understood there would be no time left to slow down. "To the success," he murmured, "of our hopeless—"

All of Moscow erupted in a paroxysm of jubilation. On the sweating asphalt avenues around the Kremlin, long convoys of tanks and armored personnel carriers headed out of the city, cheered on by women tossing carnations and roses up to the laughing soldiers. Bystanders lining the route applauded the departing troops who, clearly relieved to be heading back to their barracks, applauded back. "Thanks to God, we're going home," one officer shouted from the turret of a tank.

Outside the Central Committee building, thousands of demonstrators chanted defiantly, "Dissolve the Party" and "Smash the KGB." Communist functionaries could be seen fleeing from side entrances carting off everything that wasn't bolted down—fax machines, computers, television sets, video recorders, air conditioners, lamps, desk chairs. Word spread that the apparatchiki still inside were feeding mountains of paperwork into shredders; in their panic to destroy evidence of the putsch the Communists neglected to remove the paperclips, causing the machines to break down. When a portable radio at a kiosk blared the news that Yeltsin was said to be preparing a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party, effectively ending seventy-four years of Bolshevik dictatorship, people linked arms and danced euphorically. In parks and squares around the city, construction workers armed with crowbars pried the statues of Old Bolsheviks from their pedestals and smashed them against the ground. In the great square outside the Lubyanka, a crane lifted the enormous statue of Feliks Dzershinsky off its base. For a few delicious minutes Dzerzhinsky, the cruel Pole who in 1917 created the Cheka, the precursor of the despised KGB, hung from the cable around his neck while the crowd cheered hoarsely.

Sleepwalking through streets teeming with people celebrating the victory of something they barely understood and the defeat of something they understood only too well, Aza happened to witness what newspapers would call "the execution of the executioner." But even that brought her no relief from the ache of the emptiness that would fill the rest of her life.

Only the notion that she might somehow find a way to speed time up gave her a measure of comfort.

The Uighurs checked the stairwell off the fifth floor of the Hotel Ukraine and waved to Endel Rappaport to tell him the coast was clear. Rappaport went in first and held the door for the Sorcerer. "We can talk here," he told Torriti as the heavy fire door swung closed behind him.

"Who's he?" asked the Sorcerer, eyeing the short, slender Russian leaning against a wall; in his early forties and dressed in a smart business suit, he certainly wasn't one of Rappaport's Uighurs. There was a deadpan expression in his humorless eyes; to Torriti, the stranger looked as if he could be bored to death by an assassin.

Rappaport chuckled. "Vladimir is a business associate from Dresden."

"Hello to you, Vladimir," ventured Torriti.

Vladimir didn't crack a smile or respond.

Rappaport asked Torriti, "When are you flying out?"

"This afternoon."

Rappaport, wearing a double-breasted blazer with gold buttons and carrying a walking stick with a golden dog's head on top, waggled his pinkie in the Sorcerer's face. "The country you are leaving is not the same as the one you came to."

"For sure," Torriti conceded. "Yeltsin will pack Gorbachev off into retirement and destroy the Communist Party, so far so good. Sixty-four thousand dollar question is, what's going to take its place?"

"Anything will be better than what we had," Rappaport contended.

"Hey, you got to live here, pal, not me."

Rappaport cleared his throat. "About those contracts." When Torriti glanced at the dour Russian against the wall, Rappaport said, "You can speak in front of him—I have no secrets from Vladimir."

"About those contracts," the Sorcerer agreed.

"Given who you are, given whom you represent, my associates are eager to do the right thing. In light of the fact that the contracts were supposed to be fulfilled before the recent events, they are ready to cancel the contracts and return the sums deposited in Switzerland."

The Sorcerer jowls quivered with the comedy of the situation. "In the United States of America," he said, "people have been heard to say, Better late than never.

"Do I understand you correctly, Mr. Sorcerer? Despite the lateness of the hour, you still wish my associates to deliver on these contracts?"

"Look at the situation from my point of view, friend. My clients want to make sure Yeltsin won't have the same jokers diddling with him this time next year."

The gnome-like Russian looked up at the Sorcerer. "You are one in a thousand, Mr. Sorcerer." He thrust out a hand and the Sorcerer gave it a limp shake.

"It's a pleasure to do business with you, Endel. You don't mind I call you Endel? I feel as if we've known each other for weeks. Listen, I'm concerned about your remuneration. I wouldn't want you to come away from all this without a little something for your troubles."

"I am moved almost but not quite to tears by your concern, Mr. Sorcerer. Rest assured, I have been in touch with the Rabbi, who has been in touch with someone who goes by the appellation of Devisenbeschaffer—"

Torriti was startled. "You know of the existence of the currency acquirer?"

Endel Rappaport's thick lips curled into a sheepish smirk. "The legendary Rabbi Hillel, who made something a name for himself in the second century, is said to have posed the ultimate question: If I am not for myself, who is for me? Vladimir here has been tracking the Devisenbeschaffer's pecuniary activities in Dresden for me. A third of what the Rabbi gets from the currency acquirer will wind up in Swiss accounts that I control."

"People like me do not meet people like you every day of the week," Torriti said seriously. "A third of what the Rabbi gets is a pretty penny. What are you going to do with all that money?"

The smirk froze on Rappaport's face. "Before they cut off my fingers I was a student of the violin. Since then I have not been able to listen to music. What I am going to do with my share of the money is get even."

"Even with who?"

"Russia."

"Yeah, well, I'm glad we never got to cross paths during the Cold War. Your premature death would have weighed on my conscience."

Rappaport's brow wrinkled in pain. "I feel the same about you. Do have a good trip back to wherever it is you are going."

"I'm heading home," Torriti said. "The end of the line is East of Eden, a paradise on earth for golfers and/or alcoholics."

Merriment danced in Rappaport's eyes. "I need not ask which category you fall into."

Torriti had to concede the point. "No, I don't suppose you do."

The deaths were all listed on police blotters as accidents or suicides.

Nikolai Izvolsky, the Central Committee's financial wizard who had siphoned Party funds to the Devisenbeschaffer in Germany, fell to his death from the roof of a Moscow apartment house while taking the air late one night. A crotchety old woman in the next building later told police that she had seen four men on the roof next door moments before she heard the scream and the police sirens. As the woman was well known in the local precinct for inventing stories of Peeping Toms on the roofs of adjacent buildings, the state procurator discounted her testimony and ruled the death an accident.

The press baron Pavel Uritzky and his wife, Mathilde, were discovered asphyxiated in their BMW parked in the private garage behind their kottedzhi on the edge of Moscow. One end of a garden hose had been inserted into the exhaust pipe, the other end run into the ventilation tubing under the hood. The nurse in the ambulance responding to the frantic call from the couple's butler broke the car window with a hammer, switched off the motor, dragged the bodies outside and administered oxygen, but it was too late. In his subsequent declaration to the authorities, the nurse mentioned having detected the pungent odor of chloroform in the garage. The first policemen on the scene made no mention of this and the question of chloroform was relegated to a footnote in the official report. The state procurator noted that the car doors had been locked on the inside, with the remote door control device attached to the key in the ignition. The second remote device, normally in Mathilde's possession, was never found but no conclusions were drawn from this. Careful examination revealed no bruises on the corpses and no evidence under the fingernails to indicate there had been a struggle. No suicide note was found. Pavel Uritzky had been one of the ring-leaders of the putsch and deeply depressed at its failure. Mathilde was linked to the shooting of the banking magnet Tsipin and said to be terrified of being prosecuted. The deaths of the Uritzkys were listed as a double suicide and the case was closed.

Moscow neighbors of Boris Pugo heard what sounded like a shot and summoned the police, who broke down the door and discovered the Interior Minister slumped over the kitchen table, a large-caliber pistol (obviously fallen from his hand) on the linoleum floor and brain matter seeping from an enormous bullet wound in his skull. A note addressed to his children and grandchildren said, "Forgive me. It was all a mistake." Pugo's old father-in-law was found cowering in a clothes closet muttering incoherently about assassination squads, but police psychiatrists decided the father-in-law was suffering from dementia and the state procurator eventually ruled that Pugo's wound was self inflicted.