“You had something you wished to say, Mr. Metcalfe?”
“Yes,” said Metcalfe.
“Good. I knew you were a reasonable man.”
“You have forced me into this.”
Rubashov stared, his magnified eyes fishlike. “We think of it as persuasion, and indeed, it is only one of many forms of persuasion we employ.”
Blood was pooling in his mouth; Metcalfe spit it onto the carpet. Rubashov’s eyes flashed with anger.
“A shame,” Metcalfe said. “You see, it would have been better—far, far better—for you not to hear what I am about to tell you.” When challenged by authority, you must always lay claim to a greater authority. If you learn nothing else from me, learn this. Alfred Corcoran.
Rubashov’s brows arched above his rimless spectacles.
“Of that I have no doubt, Mr. Metcalfe,” the investigator said gently. “You would much prefer not to tell me the truth. But let me assure you that you are doing the right thing. The difficult thing, yes, but you are a brave man.”
“You misunderstand me, Rubashov. What I am about to tell you, you will wish you had not heard. You see, it is not easy for a businessman such as myself to operate in Russia. Accommodations must be made—inducements at the highest level, shall we say. Arrangements made in great secrecy, discretion observed scrupulously.” Metcalfe raised his hands with difficulty, turned his palms up to indicate the grandeur of the room. “In this fine office you are blissfully unaware of the workings at the very top—at the level of the Politburo—which is how it should be. Matters of state at the highest level are always matters of statesmen, Rubashov. And statesmen are but men, after all. They are human beings. Human beings who have desires. Human beings who have greed, avarice—wants and needs that, in this workers’ paradise, must always be kept private. Wants and needs that must be taken care of by discreet, well-connected individuals. And that is where Metcalfe Industries comes in.”
Rubashov stared, unblinking, betraying no reaction.
“And certainly you will understand that any . . . accommodations my company has made on behalf of the very highest officials in your government must remain entirely secret. So I will not tell you about the Western appliances we have secretly shipped to a house in Tbilisi and in Abkhazia—houses that belong to the mother of your boss, Lavrenty Pavlovich.” He used the name and patronymic of Beria, implying familiarity; it was a little-known fact that Beria had provided his mother with two houses in Soviet Georgia and had furnished them expensively. But Rubashov would know; Metcalfe had no doubt of that.
Rubashov shook his head slowly, his reaction cryptic. Metcalfe continued, “When it comes to himself, of course, your Lavrenty Pavlovich is considerably more extravagant. You will never hear from me about the magnificent little sixteenth-century Tintoretto that hangs in the dining room of his town house on Kachalova Street.” Few, if any, knew where Beria lived, but Metcalfe, who had been briefed, was able to call that detail to mind. “Somehow I doubt you have ever been invited to Lavrenti Pavlovich’s house for dinner, and even if you had, I suspect you wouldn’t even have appreciated the glory of that little gem. The chairman of the NKVD is a refined man with exquisite tastes; you are but a muzhik. And you will never hear from these lips about how Lavrenti Pavlovich raised money for this purchase by selling Russian church artifacts and icons abroad—a transaction handled with complete discretion by Metcalfe Industries.”
The investigator was no longer shaking his head. His face had paled visibly. “Mr. Metcalfe,” he began, but Metcalfe cut him off.
“Please, ask Beria about this. Pick up the phone right now and call him. Ask him, too, about the icons that were removed from the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Please, go on and call him. Ask him.”
Metcalfe returned Rubashov’s look with a blank-faced stare. Rubashov reached the tendrils of his right hand toward the bank of telephones and picked up the receiver of a white one.
Metcalfe sat back against the couch and smiled. “Tell me something, Mr. Rubashov. Was it your decision to arrest me? Or were you following orders from above?”
Rubashov held the receiver against his face. A faint nervous smile played about his lips, but he did not reply. Neither did he dial the phone.
“It is now clear to me that either you are conspiring against Beria . . . or you are being used as a tool, an instrument, by his enemies within this organization. Which is it?”
“Your insolence will not be tolerated!” Rubashov exploded, the receiver still to his ear. His anger—helpless anger, it seemed to Metcalfe—was a good sign.
Metcalfe continued as if Rubashov had not said anything. “Of course, I’m sure you imagine that you can simply make me disappear and your problems will disappear as well. Well, I’m afraid you underestimate me. I have family attorneys on retainer in New York who keep some particularly damaging documents in a safe, to be released publicly if I do not contact them by a certain prearranged time. The scandal that will result will be enormous. The names of the men in Moscow with whom Metcalfe Industries has dealt secretly over the years, men even more highly placed than Chairman Beria—well, these are not names you will want to have any part of blackening. One name in particular is not a man one wishes to upset.” Metcalfe turned his head and looked straight at the portrait of Stalin on the wall. Rubashov turned to see where Metcalfe was looking, and then a look of unmistakable terror crossed his ashen face. It was an expression Metcalfe had never seen on the face of a ranking NKVD officer.
“That would be tantamount to signing your own death warrant,” Metcalfe went on. He shrugged. “Not that it makes a difference one way or another to me. After all, you did force me to talk, isn’t that right?”
Rubashov pressed the button on the side of his desk to summon the guards.
Berlin
When Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had finished his briefing, the men around the conference table were thunderstruck. They met in the main conference room of the new Chancellery, which had been built to the Führer’s specifications by his favorite architect, Albert Speer. Outside, a blizzard was raging.
In an alcove above them was a marble bust of Bismarck. None of the men in the room, not even Hitler, knew that it was in fact a replica of the original bust that had sat in the old Chancellery for years. When the original was moved to the new headquarters, it had been dropped and it broke at the neck. Speer had secretly commissioned the sculptor to create an identical replacement, which was then steeped in tea to give it the patina of age. The architect considered the accidental destruction of the original to be an ill omen.
The men at the table were all the topmost leaders of the Reich. They were all here to debate the merits of the prospective invasion of the Soviet Union, which was still in discussion. There remained a good deal of opposition to attacking Russia. Men like Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Alfred Jodl had all argued that their forces were overextended in other theaters of war.
The old arguments had been assembled. They must not enter this quagmire. Instead, they should neutralize Russia, keep it at bay, make sure it did not interfere.
But the intelligence out of Moscow had changed all that.
The atmosphere in the room was electric.
Operation Groza had changed everything. Stalin was secretly planning to attack them. They must move first.
The first objection came from the head of the Reich Main Security Office, SS Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. “How can we be sure this intelligence is not a plant?” he asked.
Admiral Canaris watched the tall, sinister-looking security chief with the long, bony nose and the reptilian eyes. He knew Heydrich well. They were social friends, of a sort. Heydrich, a talented violinist, often played chamber music at the Canaris home with Frau Canaris, who was also a violinist. Canaris knew that the younger man was a barbarous fanatic, never to be trusted. Raising an objection like this was just the sort of thing Heydrich would do. He wanted to demonstrate bef
ore the Führer his superior understanding of the espionage business.
“My people have examined the documents thoroughly, and I would invite you to have your staff do the same,” Canaris replied equably. “You will find that they are genuine.”
“I simply question why it is the NKVD has not yet discovered this leak,” Heydrich persisted.
Field Marshal von Paulus said, “But we have seen no other evidence that Stalin is planning such an attack. We have seen no mobilization, no deployments. Why would the Russians do us the courtesy of attacking?”
“Because Stalin wishes to seize all of Europe,” Jodl said. “That has always been his desire. But it will not happen. There can be no more question that we must launch our Präventiv-Angriff—our preventive attack—on Russia. With eighty or a hundred divisions, we will defeat Russia in four to six weeks.”
Chapter Thirty-one
The streets were dark, covered in a newly fallen blanket of snow, the late-night traffic sparse, the sounds muffled. A street clock told Metcalfe it was one o’clock in the morning. Just up ahead lay the Krymskaya Embankment and then the imposing Krymsky bridge, spanning the Moscow River, the longest suspension bridge in all of Europe, built just two years earlier.
As Metcalfe approached, he saw a solitary figure standing in the middle of the bridge, on the pedestrian walkway. A female figure clad in an overcoat and a head scarf. It was Lana; he had no doubt. His heartbeat quickened; he couldn’t help it. He quickened his pace as well, through the frigid night air, but he could not run, not yet; his legs and rib cage ached fiercely. The ravages of the beating had only begun to subside. The wind knifed through his wretched ruined clothing, which was little more than rags.
Chief Investigator Rubashov had ordered his immediate release, all paperwork expunged. All of his possessions were returned to him, with the exception of his gun. But Metcalfe felt no sense of victory; he felt nothing but a hollowness, a numbness.
The Moscow River was still and flat, the full moon broken into a million shards along its surface. Moonlight glinted off the bridge’s silver chains and iron beams. The occasional car or truck passed over the bridge, making it tremble.
The walk seemed interminable; she seemed so far away, and he could barely get his limbs to move. Lana stood with her back to him, looking over the water, seemingly lost in thought. An hour or so earlier he had placed a call to the Bolshoi from a public telephone kiosk. When she heard his voice, she gasped, then cried out: “My dearest, my darling, where have you been?” Terse words were exchanged, cryptic phrases employed, a rendezvous site established without revealing the specifics to anyone who might be listening in.
He was ashamed that, in a moment of weakness, he had suspected her of complicity in his arrest. It simply could not be. If she had betrayed him, then how could he believe in the immutable physics of the world? How could he believe in the law of gravity, in the existence of the sun and the moon?
She turned, saw him trudging across the bridge, and suddenly ran toward him. When she got close enough to see his face, she screamed, then threw her arms around him.
He groaned, “Hey, careful, there.”
“What have they done to you?” She loosened her embrace, held his pain-wracked body gingerly. She kissed him, and for a long time he was enveloped in her arms; he smelled her perfume, felt the warmth of her mouth. He felt oddly safe, though he knew there was nothing at all safe about being with his love in Moscow. “Your face—” Sobs convulsed her body. “Stiva, they beat you!”
“They call it persuasion. They told me the Lubyanka isn’t a spa, and I learned they’re right. But it could have been far worse. And I was lucky—I survived.”
“It was the Lubyanka! I didn’t know where you’d gone—I asked Ilya; he said he’d been stopped, that the police had searched the van and found you, arrested you. He said he couldn’t stop them, he didn’t know what to do. He seemed so terrified; I felt so bad for him. Friends of mine went to the police, demanded to know what had happened to you. But the police claimed not to know what I was talking about. After three days a friend went for me to Lefortovo Prison, and she was told they had no such prisoner. But everyone lies here; I didn’t know, couldn’t find out, the truth. You’ve been missing for five days! I thought you’d been sent away, maybe executed!”
“Your assistant is a stukach,” Metcalfe said, using the word for informer.
Her eyes widened, and for a long moment she did not speak. “I never suspected it, or I would never have let him go near you, Stiva, you must believe me!”
“I do believe you.”
“So many questions over the years, so many strange little details, now make sense. Things I ignored. He sometimes sells tickets on the outside, illegally, yet he never seems to be very careful about it. So many insignificant things I overlooked, when I should have taken them as clues!”
“You couldn’t have known. How long has he worked for you?”
“Several months he’s worked as my dresser and assistant, though we’ve known each other for years. He’s always been very friendly. Four or five months ago he began spending more time around me, helping me out, doing me favors. One day he said he wanted to be reassigned as my assistant during performances, if I was interested, and of course I—”
“Was this after you began your relationship with von Schüssler?”
“Well, yes, just after, but . . . Yes, of course, it could be no coincidence. The authorities wanted to keep a close watch on me, and they planted Ilya on me to do that.”
“Von Schüssler’s a German diplomat, an important potential intelligence source, and you’re a nationally renowned performer. The risks and the potential were too great for the NKVD not to assign someone.”
“But Kundrov—”
“He’s GRU, military intelligence—a rival agency. Each wanted its own source; each works in a different way, the NKVD more covertly. But Lana—listen to me. I need to ask you again; I want you to think about this seriously, because I know it’s a big decision. I want you to come with me.”
“No, Stiva. That I cannot do—we’ve talked about this. I never will. I won’t leave my father, I won’t leave Russia. I can’t! You must understand!”
“Lana, it’s never going to be safe for you here.”
“This is my home, this terrible place that I love.”
“If you don’t come with me now, they’ll never let you leave.”
“No, Stiva. That’s not true. In just a few days they’re sending my troupe to Berlin on a friendship mission to perform for the top Nazi leadership. We will always be allowed to travel outside the country.”
“And you’ll still be a prisoner. Berlin is no less a prison than Moscow, Lana.”
There was the metallic click, the unmistakable sound of a gun’s safety being released. Metcalfe spun toward its source. Even in the darkness, the pale eyes and blond hair were horribly familiar, as was the expression of triumph in the NKVD man’s face as he pointed his weapon at Metcalfe. He had approached stealthily, his footfalls covered by the sound of traffic rattling the bridge and by the lovers’ absorption in each other.
Metcalfe instinctually reached for his own weapon, then realized he had none. It had been confiscated in the Lubyanka.
“Hands in the air,” the NKVD man said. “Both of you.”
Metcalfe smiled. “You’re off the reservation. Or no one’s bothered to inform you. You might want to speak with your superiors before you make an idiot of yourself. Rubashov, for example—”
“Silence!” roared the secret policeman. “Your lies about Beria may have intimidated a weak, cowardly careerist such as Rubashov, but fortunately, I report directly to Beria’s office. Hands up, now!”
Metcalfe and Lana both complied. “So you do intend to make an idiot of yourself,” Metcalfe said. “You persist and persist, making a personal mission out of this, refusing to accept the error of your ways. You seem to forget that you are but a lowly street agent. You know nothing about matters far
above your level. It’s no longer your own career you’re destroying with your pigheadedness. Now it’s your very life.”
The Russian made a spitting sound, indicating derision and hostility. “You lie creatively, and brazenly—but sloppily. I was the one who found your transmitter. Buried in the woods southwest of Moscow, near the American embassy dacha.”
Metcalfe’s expression displayed only bland, amused skepticism, but his mind reeled. Rubashov had made no mention of a transmitter! If he had known, he would have mentioned it; why had he not?
“Yes,” the gray-eyed agent resumed. “A small detail I withheld from my report to Rubashov. A fact held in reserve for later use—I’ve never trusted that ass-kissing swine. But the transmitter has been examined by our special technical section, and I’ve seen the results. Constructed by the British secret service for agent field communications. Not the sort of communication needed by any businessman.” He shifted his gun a few inches, toward Lana’s chest. “But extremely useful for transmitting military intelligence obtained from the daughter of a Red Army general.”
“No, it’s not true!” sobbed Lana. “It’s a lie! I’m not conspiring against the government!”
“Step away from each other! This time, the only way either of you will leave the Lubyanka is in a pine box,” the NKVD man said.
“She’s mine,” came another voice. Metcalfe turned, saw the red-haired GRU man approaching from the other direction.
“Kundrov!” Lana shouted. She actually seemed relieved to see her GRU minder. “You watch me, you know me—this monster hurls all kinds of insane accusations!”
“Yes,” Kundrov replied calmly, addressing the NKVD agent. “I know the woman. She’s been assigned to me. You know the procedures, Ivanov. This arrest is the responsibility of the GRU, as the originating agency.”
The NKVD man shifted his pistol back toward Metcalfe, the glacial expression on his cruel face wavering not a bit. “You will take the woman into custody,” he replied. “I’ll take the American spy.”