The British spymaster talked for almost an hour. He was uninterrupted. Then the three Americans read the Nightingale transcript and watched the tape recording in its polyethylene bag with something like hunger. When Irvine had finished, there was a short silence. Chip Allen broke it.
“Roll over, Penkovsky,” he said.
“You’ll want to check it all,” said Sir Nigel evenly. No one dissented. Friends are friends, but ... “It took us ten days, but we can’t fault it. The voiceprints check out, every one. We’ve already exchanged cables about the bustup in the Soviet Agriculture Ministry. And of course you have your Condor photographs. Oh, one last thing ...”
From his bag he produced a small polyethylene sack with a sprig of young wheat inside it.
“One of our chaps swiped this from a field outside Leningrad.”
“I’ll have our Agriculture Department check it out as well,” said Benson. “Anything else, Nigel?”
“Oh, not really,” said Sir Nigel. “Well, perhaps a couple of small points ...”
“Spit it out.”
Sir Nigel drew a breath.
“The Russian buildup in Afghanistan. We think they may be mounting a move toward Pakistan and India through the passes. That we regard as our patch. Now, if you could ask Condor to have a look ...”
“You’ve got it,” said Benson without hesitation.
“And then,” resumed Sir Nigel, “that Soviet defector you brought out of Geneva two weeks ago. He seems to know quite a bit about Soviet assets in our trade-union movement.”
“We sent you transcripts of that,” said Allen hastily.
“We’d like direct access,” said Sir Nigel.
Allen looked at Kahn. Kahn shrugged.
“Okay,” said Benson. “Can we have access to the Nightingale?”
“Sorry, no,” said Sir Nigel. “That’s different. The Nightingale’s too damn delicate, right out in the cold. I don’t want to disturb the fish just yet in case of a change of heart. You’ll get everything we get, as soon as we get it. But no moving in. I’m trying to speed up the delivery and volume, but it’s going to take time and a lot of care.”
“When’s your next delivery slated for?” asked Allen.
“A week from today. At least, that’s the meet. I hope there’ll be a handover.”
Sir Nigel Irvine spent the night at a CIA safe house in the Virginia countryside, and the next day “Mr. Barrett” flew back to London with the air chief marshal.
It was three days later that Azamat Krim sailed from Pier 49 in New York harbor aboard the elderly Queen Elizabeth 2 for Southampton. He had decided to sail rather than fly because he felt there was a better chance his main luggage would escape X-ray examination if he went by sea.
His purchases were complete. One of his pieces of luggage was a standard aluminum shoulder case such as professional photographers use to protect their cameras and lenses. As such, it could not be X-rayed but would have to be hand-examined. The molded plastic sponge inside that held the cameras and lenses from banging against each other was glued to the bottom of the case, but ended two niches short of the real bottom. In the cavity were two handguns with ammunition clips.
Another piece of luggage, deep in the heart of a small cabüi trunk full of clothes, was an aluminum tube with a screw top, containing what looked like a long, cylindrical camera lens, some four inches in diameter. He calculated that if it were examined, it would pass in the eyes of all but the most suspicious of customs officers as the sort of lens that camera freaks use for very long range photography, and a collection of books of bird photographs and wildlife pictures lying next to the lens inside the trunk was designed to corroborate the explanation.
In fact, the lens was an image intensifier, also called a night-sight, of the kind that may be commercially bought without a permit in the United States but not in Britain.
It was boiling hot that Sunday, August 8, in Moscow, and those who could not get to the beaches crowded instead to the numerous swimming pools of the city, especially the new complex built for the 1980 Olympics. But the British Embassy staff, along with those of a dozen other legations, were at the beach on the Moscow River upstream from Uspenskoye Bridge. Adam Munro was among them.
He tried to appear as carefree as the others, but it was hard. He checked his watch too many times, and finally got dressed.
“Oh, Adam, you’re not going back already? There’s ages of daylight left,” one of the secretaries called to him.
He forced a rueful grin.
“Duty calls, or rather the plans for the Manchester Chamber of Commerce visit call,” he shouted back to her.
He walked through the woods to his car, dropped his bathing things, had a covert look to see if anyone was interested, and locked the car. There were too many men in sandals, slacks, and open shirts for one extra to be of notice, and he thanked his stars the KGB never seemed to take their jackets off. There was no one looking remotely like the Opposition within sight of him. He set off through the trees to the north.
Valentina was waiting for him, standing back in the shade of the trees. His stomach was tight, knotted, for all that he was pleased to see her. She was no expert at spotting a tail and might have been followed. If she had, his diplomatic cover would save him from worse than expulsion, but the repercussions would be enormous. Even that was not his worry; it was what they would do to her if she were ever caught. Whatever the motives, the term for what she was doing was high treason.
He took her in his arms and kissed her. She kissed him back and trembled in his arms.
“Are you frightened?” he asked her.
“A bit.” She nodded. “You listened to the tape recording?”
“Yes, I did. Before I handed it over. I suppose I should not have done, but I did.”
“Then you know about the famine that faces us. Adam, when I was a girl I saw the famine in this country just after the war. It was bad, but it was caused by the war, by Germans. We could take it. Our leaders were on our side, they would make things get better.”
“Perhaps they can sort things out this time,” said Munro lamely.
Valentina shook her head angrily.
“They’re not even trying,” she burst out. “I sit there listening to their voices, typing the transcripts. They are just bickering, trying to save their own skins.”
“And your uncle, Marshal Kerensky?” he asked gently.
“He’s as bad as the rest. When I married my husband, Uncle Nikolai was at the wedding. I thought he was so jolly, so kindly. Of course, that was his private life. Now I listen to him in his public life; he’s like all of them, ruthless and cynical. They just jockey for advantage over each other, for power, and to hell with the people. I suppose I should be one of them, but I can’t be. Not now, not anymore.”
Munro looked across the clearing at the pines but saw olive trees and heard a boy in uniform shouting. “You don’t own me!” Strange, he mused, how establishments with all their power sometimes went too far and lost control of their own servants through sheer excess. Not always, not often, but sometimes.
“I could get you out of here, Valentina,” he said. “It would mean my leaving the diplomatic corps, but it’s been done before. Sasha is young enough to grow up somewhere else.”
“No, Adam, no, it’s tempting but I can’t. Whatever the outcome, I am part of Russia, I have to stay. Perhaps, one day ... I don’t know.”
They sat in silence for a while, holding hands. She broke the quiet at last.
“Did your ... intelligence people pass the tape recording on to London?”
“I think so. I handed it to the man I believe represents the Secret Service in the embassy. He asked me if there would be another one.”
She nodded at her shoulder bag.
“It’s just the transcript. I can’t get the tape recordings anymore. They’re kept in a safe after the transcriptions, and I don’t have the key. The papers in there are of the following Politburo meeting.”
> “How do you get them out, Valentina?” he asked.
“After the meetings,” she told him, “the tapes and the stenographic notes are brought under guard to the Central Committee building. There is a locked department there where we work, five other women and I. With one man in charge. When the transcripts are finished, the tapes are locked away.”
“Then how did you get the first one?”
She shrugged.
“The man in charge is new, since last month. The other one, before him, was more lax. There is a tape studio next door where the tapes are copied once before being locked in the safe. I was alone in there last month, long enough to steal the second tape and substitute a dummy.”
“A dummy?” exclaimed Munro. “They’ll spot the substitution if ever they play them back.”
“It’s unlikely,” she said. “The transcripts form the archives once they have been checked against the tapes for accuracy. I was lucky with that tape; I brought it out in a shopping bag under the groceries I had bought in the Central Committee commissary.”
“Aren’t you searched?”
“Hardly ever. We are trusted, Adam, the elite of the New Russia. The papers are easier. At work I wear an old-fashioned girdle. I copied the last meeting of June on the machine, but ran off one extra copy, then switched the number control back by one figure. The extra copy I stuck inside my girdle. It made no noticeable bulge.” Munro’s stomach turned at the risk she was taking. “What do they talk about in this meeting?” he asked, gesturing toward the shoulder bag.
“The consequences,” she said. “What will happen when the famine breaks. What the people of Russia will do to them. But Adam ... there’s been one since. Early in July. I couldn’t copy it; I was on leave. I couldn’t refuse my leave; it would have been too obvious. But when I got back, I met one of the girls who had transcribed it. She was white-faced and wouldn’t describe it.”
“Can you get it?” asked Munro.
“I can try. I’ll have to wait until the office is empty and use the copying machine. I can reset it afterward so it will not show it has been used. But not until early next month; I shall not be on the late shift when I can work alone until then.”
“We shouldn’t meet here again,” Munro told her. “Patterns are dangerous.”
He spent another hour describing the sort of tradecraft she would need to know if they were to go on meeting. Finally he gave her a pad of closely typed sheets he had tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.
“It’s all in there, my darling. Memorize it and burn it. Flush the ashes down the can.”
Five minutes later she gave him a wad of flimsy paper sheets covered with neat, typed Cyrillic script from her bag and slipped away through the forest to her car on a sandy track half a mile away.
Munro retreated into the darkness of the main arch above the church’s recessed side door. He produced a roll of tape from his pocket, slipped his pants to his knees, and taped the batch of sheets to his thigh. With the trousers back up again and belted, he could feel the paper snug against his thigh as he walked, but under the baggy, Russian-made trousers, they did not show.
By midnight, in the silence of his flat, he had read them all a dozen times. The next Wednesday, they went in the Messenger’s wrist-chained briefcase to London, wax-sealed in a stout envelope and coded for the SIS liaison man at the Foreign Office only.
The glass doors leading to the Rose Garden were tightly shut, and only the whir of the air conditioner broke the silence in the Oval Office of the White House. The balmy days of June were long gone, and the steamy heat of a Washington August forbade open doors and windows.
Around the building on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, the tourists, damp and hot, admired the familiar aspect of the White House front entrance, with its pillars, flag, and curved driveway, or queued for the guided tour of this most holy of American holies. None of them would penetrate to the tiny West Wing building where President Matthews sat in conclave with his advisers.
In front of his desk were Stanislaw Poklewski and Robert Benson. They had been joined by the Secretary of State, David Lawrence, a Boston lawyer and pillar of the East Coast establishment.
President Matthews flicked the file in front of him closed. He had long since devoured the first Politburo transcript, translated into English; what he had just finished reading was his experts’ evaluation of it.
“Bob, you were remarkably close with your estimate of a shortfall of thirty million tons,” he said. “Now it appears they are going to be fifty to fifty-five million tons short this fall. And you have no doubt this transcript comes right from inside the Politburo?”
“Mr. President, we’ve checked it out every way. The voices are real; the traces of excessive lindane in the root of the wheat plant are real; the hatchet job inside the Soviet Agriculture Ministry is real. We don’t believe there is room for any substantive doubt that tape recording was of the Politburo in session.”
“We have to handle this right,” mused the President. “There must be no way we make a miscalculation on this one. There has never been an opportunity like it.”
“Mr. President,” said Poklewski, “this means the Soviets are not facing severe shortages, as we supposed when you invoked the Shannon Act last month. They are facing a famine.
Unknowingly he was echoing the words of Petrov in the Kremlin two months earlier in his aside to Ivanenko, which had not been on the tape. President Matthews nodded slowly.
“We can’t disagree with that, Stan. The question is, what do we do about it?”
“Let them have their famine,” said Poklewski. “This is the biggest mistake they have made since Stalin refused to believe Western warnings about the Nazi buildup on his frontier in the spring of 1941. This time, the enemy is within. So let them work it out in their own way.”
“David?” asked the President of his Secretary of State.
Lawrence shook his head. The differences of opinion between the arch-hawk Poklewski and the cautious Bostonian were legendary.
“I disagree, Mr. President,” he said at length. “Firstly, I don’t think we have examined deeply enough the possible permutations of what might happen if the Soviet Union were plunged into chaos next spring. As I see it, it is more than simply a question of letting the Soviets stew in their own juice. There are massive implications on a worldwide basis consequent on such a phenomenon.”
“Bob?” asked President Matthews. His Director of Central Intelligence was lost in thought.
“We have the time, Mr. President,” he said. “They know you invoked the Shannon Act last month. They know that if they want the grain, they have to come to you. As David says, we really should examine the perspectives consequent upon a famine across the Soviet Union. We can do that as of now. Sooner or later, the Kremlin has to make a play. When they do, we have all the cards. We know how bad their predicament is; they don’t know we know. We have the wheat, we have the Condors, we have the Nightingale, and we have the time. We hold all the aces this time. No need to decide yet which way to play them.”
Lawrence nodded and regarded Benson with new respect. Poklewski shrugged.
President Matthews made up his mind.
“Stan, as of now I want you to put together an ad hoc group within the National Security Council. I want it small, and absolutely secret. You, Bob, and David here. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of Defense, the Treasury, and Agriculture. I want to know what will happen, worldwide, if the Soviet Union starves. I need to know, and soon.”
One of the telephones on his desk rang. It was the direct line to the State Department. President Matthews looked inquiringly at David Lawrence.
“Are you calling me, David?” he asked with a smile.
The Secretary of State rose and took the machine off its hook. He listened for several minutes, then replaced the receiver.
“Mr. President, the pace is speeding up. Two hours ago in Moscow, Foreign Minister Rykov summoned Ambassador
Donaldson to the Foreign Ministry. On behalf of the Soviet government he has proposed the sale by the United States to the Soviet Union by next spring of fifty-five million tons of mixed cereal grains.”
For several moments only the ormolu carriage clock above the marble fireplace could be heard in the Oval Office.
“What did Ambassador Donaldson reply?” asked the President.
“Of course, that the request would be passed on to Washington for consideration,” said Lawrence, “and that no doubt your answer would be forthcoming in due course.”
“Gentlemen,” said the President, “I need those answers, and I need them fast. I can hold my answer for four weeks at the outside, but by September fifteenth at the latest I shall have to reply. When I do, I shall want to know what we are handling here. Every possibility.”
“Mr. President, within a few days we may be receiving a second package of information from the Nightingale. That could give an indication of the way the Kremlin sees the same problem.”
President Matthews nodded. “Bob, if and when it comes, I would like it decoded and on my desk immediately.”
As the presidential meeting broke up in the dusk of Washington, it was already long after dark in Britain. Police records later showed that scores of burglaries and break-ins had taken place during the night of August 11, but down in Somerset the one that most disturbed the police was the theft from a sporting-gun shop in the pleasant country town of Taunton.
The thieves had evidently visited the shop in the daylight hours during the previous day or so, for the alarm had been neatly cut by someone who had spotted where the cable ran. With the alarm system out of commission, the thieves had used powerful bolt cutters on the window grille in the back alley that ran behind the shop.
The place had not been ransacked, and the usual haul, shotguns for the holding up of banks, had not been taken. What was missing, the proprietor confirmed, was a single hunting rifle, one of his finest, a Finnish-made Sako Hornet .22, a highly accurate precision piece. Also gone were two boxes of shells for the rifle, soft-nosed 45-grain hollow-point Remingtons, capable of high velocity, great penetration, and considerable distortion on impact.