ZELDOVICH’Simpatience had turned to frustration and instead of giving him a lift, the quantities of vodka he had consumed only depressed him more. He sat in the chair of his compartment only a few feet from Dr. Cousins, but still he had not obtained the information that he required. To make matters worse he had to share the compartment with Yashenko, who rarely talked except in the line of duty.
Zeldovich shook his head, rolled a swalllow of vodka on his tongue, and cursed his fate, his age, his vulnerable position. Soon I will be fifty, he told himself, feeling the vodka slide down the back of his throat. He had fastened himself to Dimitrov twenty years ago, had lapped at his ass like a groveling dog to prove his loyalty, had groped to the stratosphere of power, always at Dimitrov’s beck and call. Self-pity washed over him like a hot wave.
“Can we trust him?” That was Dimitrov’s refrain, to which he returned whenever a new face appeared in the picture. “Can we trust him?” It was Zeldovich’s job to find out—to make the judgment, and to be right. So far he always had been, and he had built his little empire, a KGB within the KGB, on the corpses of a thousand careers. He was the most feared man in the Soviet bureaucracy. Dimitrov had never called him anything but Zeldovich, as if he had no Christian name, no personality of his own. Fyodor Petrovich, you bloody bastard—that’s also my name, he had wanted to scream. How he hated that man to whom he owed everything!
“Can we trust him, Zeldovich?”
“No.”
“Then dump him somewhere.”
“Of course.”
The rivers flowed with the blood they had shed, and now the bastard was going to abandon him to the vultures who would pick his carcass and leave his bones in the desert. He had watched Dimitrov’s energy wane, the once ruddy face turn pale, the strong, well-fleshed frame begin to wither.
It was Zeldovich who had arranged for the tests, confounding the doctors and clinicians so that they could never trace the true identity of the patient.
“Whoever has this disease is a cooked goose,” one of the doctors had told him, not daring to inquire about the patient’s identity, not even daring to think the unthinkable. And then this Kuznetzov had turned up and, for the first time in twenty years, Dimitrov had kept his own counsel. Doesn’t he trustme anymore? Zeldovich wondered, jealous and uncertain. But whatever the doctor had done, whatever magic potion he had poured into Dimitrov’s bloodstream, it had done the trick. The eyes glistened again with their old fire. The color rose in the cheeks.
The question that ate at Zeldovich, like acid in his entrails, was: For how long? How much time did Kuznetzov’s magic potion provide for General Secretary Dimitrov? He had tried to pry the answer out of the doctor, but with no success. And that was only the first question. As Zeldovich knew, all questions were open-ended, leading only to other questions. That had been the prime discipline of the KGB, drummed into his brain when he was a young agent. Answers lead only to other questions. Other questions lead only to more answers and other questions. And there was this mysterious matter with Grivetsky, mysterious only because it had been made a mystery. He could easily surmise Grivetsky’s mission. But why had Dimitrov kept the confidence from him?
In one way, all the questions were the same. At their core was fear, blind, raging fear. Dimitrov had begun it. He had taunted Zeldovich with the possibility.
“What will become of you, Zeldovich, if I were to check out?”
“Check out?”
“Croak.”
“God knows,” he had replied, the possibility beginning to reveal itself in Dimitrov’s glazed look.
“God knows? Zeldovich, we buried Him long ago.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Take a gun to your head, Zeldovich,” Dimitrov had said, watching him, as if he were jealous of his health. “They will tear you apart like an overcooked chicken.”
“Well then, you had best not check out.”
Dimitrov had nodded. “I am not over yet.”
But Zeldovich had developed strategies for survival before. He had an instinct for it, and he would find a way to survive after the old man’s death. He had already toyed with a thousand different ways. When he had first pieced together the nature of Dimitrov’s illness, he had pondered the idea of killing him. It would be quite simple, a vial of poison dumped into his soup, a little change in his medicine dosage. The problem was deciding in advance who would be the winners in the contest for succession. Then he would simply confront them and put his plans on the table.
But whom could he trust? And, besides, as Dimitrov’s killer he would be a pariah. Even if his faction won out, they would eliminate him as quickly as the other side would. He needed something far more subtle, a scheme that would leave him straddling all camps, a centipede with one foot in every territory.
In trying to assemble the pieces floating in his head, he had decided that, like Dimitrov, he was running a race against time and he could hear the pendulum banging on the sides of his brain. He sensed that the most important starting point for his own campaign of survival was to know exactly how long Dimitrov would live, a timetable locked in the mind of the American doctor. Such knowledge was a golden nugget, valuable enough, perhaps, to buy back his own life.
And then there was Grivetsky. The general had come to the dacha more often lately, always arriving under the tightest security. Zeldovich had begun to wonder if Bulgakov knew about these visits. He dared not ask Dimitrov, but he filed the information for future use.
The reason for these meetings with Grivetsky was perfectly transparent, of course, at least to Zeldovich.
“Do they think I will actually negotiate with the Chinks?” Dimitrov had said to Zeldovich more than once. “What fools!” Zeldovich himself had no such illusion, but he knew that the other members of the Politburo, as well as Bulgakov, believed it.
“I will make a Chinese stew, before that moment ever comes.”
No, Grivetsky’s mission was plain. But knowing that secret was useless until he also knew the timetable. He had only one-half the puzzle. When he knew what the American doctor knew, he could present both halves of the puzzle in a neat package to Bulgakov and somehow receive amnesty in return.
“You must arrange for the doctor’s return to America,” Dimitrov had ordered. He had not even looked up from his desk, although Zeldovich had sensed a hesitation. “By train.”
“Train?” Zeldovich was alert.
“To the East,” Dimitrov had continued.
“The East?”
“The Trans-Siberian,” Dimitrov had said, looking up at last. “It is my gift to him.”
“That trip, a gift? I see.” The doctor was, after all, of Siberian extraction. “He has done wonders for you, Comrade.”
Dimitrov ignored the remark. He knows I am probing, Zeldovich thought.
“I want him protected thoughout the journey.”
“Of course.”
“Which means you must go with him.”
“Me?”
“I can trust no one else,” Dimitrov said, his eyes boring into Zeldovich. “And he must not know you are there.” Zeldovich sensed that the Secretary wished to say more, but hesitated. “And you must find a way to restrict his communications.”
So he is suspected of knowing something, Zeldovich thought.
“Grivetsky”—Dimitrov cleared his throat—”General Grivetsky will also be on board.”
Zeldovich understood instantly.
“The doctor will journey to Nakhodka and take the boat to Japan.”
“And then?” Zeldovich felt his tension increase. Dimitrov clenched his fists, a sure sign of uncertainty.
“It is a dangerous journey. The crossing is rough. Many a passenger has fallen overboard.”
Zeldovich said nothing, afraid he would betray his agitation.
“But you must stay in touch,” Dimitrov said, with an air of finality. “I may need his medical advice.”
Another warning bell went off inside Zeldovich’s head. Dimitrov is still uncertain about his health.
“And Zeldovich,” Dimitrov called as he walked to the door. He could tell from the voice’s urgency that this was not an afterthought, more an underlining of what had, up to now, been unspoken.
“Protect him well,” Dimitrov said haltingly, wanting to be understood, but afraid to articulate his meaning plainly.
“Yes, of course,” Zeldovich said. “He holds important knowledge.”
That was, of course, the unspoken thought. Would Dimitrov see it as a probe?
“Yes.” Dimitrov nodded. “I imagine his knowledge would be in great demand.”
“I understand,” Zeldovich said, turning to go. But Dimitrov held him. “Do not try to understand too much,” he said.
It was, of course, a warning.
It came to him. The doctor possessed two bits of knowledge! The China strike as well as the parameters of Dimitrov’s life on earth.
How long did Dimitrov have to live? That was the key to Zeldovich’s own survival. How could one pry this knowledge out of the doctor’s head during a seven-day journey? There were hundreds of ways to unlock information from the human brain. Some were blatantly mechanical—physical or psychological torture, the use of sophisticated truth-inducing drugs, all impossible under the present circumstances.
Other methods were far more subtle. The exploitation of weakness, emotional hunger, sexual inducements, the temptations of the flesh and spirit. But the doctor had not betrayed much about himself at the dacha, although there was that little episode with the nurse. Zeldovich racked his brains, rattling restlessly through the halls of the dacha, taking long walks along the river.
He had a week to work out the problem. Under any other circumstances, it would have been quite simple. Simply snatch the doctor off the train, shoot him with sodium pentothal, get the information and be done with it. In Stalin’s time they would have put electrodes on the doctor’s testicles and thrown the switch until he begged to be allowed to talk.
In his room at the dacha, Zeldovich lay on his bed and watched the ceiling swim as he sucked on his nightly vodka bottle and felt his world breaking into little pieces, nightmare images that no amount of alcohol could defend against.
Anna Petrovna Valentinov had emerged as a potential instrument out of his own desperation. He had called Bogach, the Chief of the Guards Directorate of the KGB, whose appointment Zeldovich had made possible.
“It is a rather odd request, Nikolai Andreyivich,” Zeldovich had said on the telephone, his tone deliberately tinged with self-effacing humor. “A beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman. Not one of those floozy types that are used to compromise those who are too weak to discipline themselves. This is a special need. You must ask your people to search carefully and it must, somehow, be kept out of regular channels.”
Bogach was businesslike and eager to please. He would try. It is ridiculous, Zeldovich told himself, after he had hung up the telephone, an absurd idea. The American doctor was simply not the type. Nothing in his dossier or in his conduct at the dacha indicated that such an idea was workable. But the incident with the nurse had somehow stuck in Zeldovich’s mind, the only bit of revealed information that just might provide the key to the doctor’s mind. Women could be formidable interrogators under the right circumstances.
A hundred times he had decided to call the whole thing off. It was sheer nonsense, exposing himself to consequences perhaps worse than anything that might happen when Dimitrov died. But the more uncertain he became, the more he pressed Bogach.
“Anything?” he would ask, burning up the phone lines.
“Not yet.”
“You must work faster.”
“I assure you—”
“Faster.”
He could almost hear the whir of the computers as the clerks in the Registry and Archives division plumbed their categories, the massive lists of Soviet citizens who had enlisted in the KGB’s work, some for money, some for patriotism, some for adventure. And then the call from Bogach came.
He had come up with a single name—Anna Petrovna Valentinov. She met the requirements, except for one point: she had not worked for the KGB for ten years. She was at this moment in Moscow, at a seminar of history professors, and had made arrangements to return to her home in Irkutsk via the Trans-Siberian. She was staying at the faculty building at Moscow University. Zeldovich, who refused ever to write anything down, memorized her name and address.
“She is marvelous-looking,” Bogach had crowed into the telephone, “with quite an impressive list of academic honors.”
“And what has she done for us?”
“Surreptitious interrogation. Her file indicates that she was quite efficient, especially in the intellectual community.”
At first Mrs. Valentinov had been adamant in her refusal.
Bogach had arranged the meeting in her room at the faculty building, a whitewashed cell furnished with only a bed and a chair. She had refused to be seated, pacing the little space like a caged tigress. She was full-bodied, supple, intense, with an intelligence as striking as her appearance. In her presence, Zeldovich had felt bumbling and clumsy, more like a supplicant than the powerful KGB agent whose name could strike fear in the hearts of the nation’s most important leaders.
“I’ve done my share,” she insisted, not intimidated, as if she sensed her superiority over him.
“This is a special assignment,” Zeldovich said.
He was not good with women. The only way he could dominate them was by paying for the privilege.
“It’s much different with me now. I can’t pretend as well as I did then. Believe me, I know myself. When I was younger, I had more confidence in my own physical impression. I was vain enough about my looks to think I could do anything. Really, I don’t believe I can do the job.”
“Is that the only reason?” he had asked, hoping that his words would hint at further intimidation.
“Really,” she said, stopping her pacing, “it won’t work. It has nothing to do with ideology, or lack of commitment to Marx and Lenin and to the society which we have evolved for ourselves. No. I refuse to be defensive. It’s just that I’m no longer able to carry out the charade, whatever the circumstances.”
She was the perfect agent, the perfect mixture of the soft and the hard, provocative yet subtle. He wanted her for the job, and made the decision to tell her more than he had planned, in order to persuade her.
“It is a question of the Chinese.”
“The Chinese?”
He had aroused her curiosity. She was, after all, from Irkutsk, where the Chinese horde was a living presence. Confrontations with the Chinese were not taken lightly in Irkutsk. He knew he had stoked the ashes of her fear.
“If it meant the possible destruction of your city, of the whole of Eastern Siberia—”
He was embroidering now.
“I don’t understand.”
“If it meant the obliteration of all the humanity in that part of the world—”
Was he carrying it too far? She had stopped her pacing, was suddenly looking pale.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I must have your complete confidence, your total commitment to secrecy.”
“Now really, Comrade. How else would I answer a KGB agent?”
“This is beyond the KGB.”
“You are talking in circles.”
“I have reason to believe that Comrade Dimitrov will within a short time provoke an armed confrontation with China.”
“You mean we will start it.”
“Either that or we will provoke them to fire the first missile.”
“My God! That’s madness.” She lit a cigarette and pushed the smoke out of both nostrils.
“Dimitrov is dying. It will be his final stroke, the last effort to unite all comrades under the Soviet umbrella.”
“And are you sure he’s dying?”
“He has leukemia.”
“That is terminal.”
“If it were only that simple. It seems that an American doctor has treated him successfully with chemotherapy. We don’t know how long he has to live.”
“You realize that this sounds like a fairy tale.”
“I told you it was important.”
“What am I supposed to do?” She laughed, a high, nervous twitter.
I am reaching her, he thought.
“We must find a way to stop it.”
“You want me to assassinate the General Secretary?” she said sarcastically.
“You’d better curb your tongue,” he said severely, almost as a reflex. He watched her, saw the brief spark of fear flicker, then recede.
“Think of your children, your family. Everything we have strived for.”
“But we are far more powerful than the Chinese.”
“We would, of course, win, if that is the correct definition of emerging from a conflict with thousands of square miles in total desolation, perhaps uninhabitable for years.”
“Siberia?” she asked, her eyes glistening.
“Siberia has always been expendable to the Russians. It is, in their minds, the dump for their garbage.”
“The bastards,” she hissed. He was sure he was reaching her now. She lifted her blue eyes to his face. “What can I do?” she asked with determination.
It was the one moment of elation that Zeldovich had experienced since the onset of Dimitrov’s illness.
Later, in the car returning to the dacha, he felt gloomy again. It may not work, he thought. If it did, what would be the next step? Whatever happened, she would have to be eliminated, he told himself without pity. What did one more matter?
Now they were all on the train, an interminable journey into timelessness. He had not shaved, had barely touched the fatty sausages and dark bread that Yashenko had provided, and felt only a growing anxiety as he watched the boring landscape pass monotonously before him. Keeping out of Kuznetzov’s sight was not as simple as he had expected, and he was constantly confined to his compartment, where Yashenko was driving him crazy with his blank fawning stare and long stretches of silence. He thought of Grivetsky. Keeping an eye on him was fraught with potential danger. There was a tacit understanding among the top rank of the military and KGB that precluded the possibility of overt surveillance. Of course, they all knew it was an illusion, a game of mirrors, since they all watched each other in any case.
He wondered if he, too, was being watched. Dimitrov was capable of anything now that he had decided to act. What galled him was the nature of the act, so untypical of Dimitrov whosemodus operandi was never the frontal bold stroke.
Zeldovich was frightened and because the emotion was so new to him, he knew he was acting differently. Even the requisition of an entire train of KGB guard troops provided by Bogach seemed an extension of his own fear.
For a day or two he had amused himself with the electronic surveillance device that Yashenko had attached to the speaker in the doctor’s compartment. But the talk about Siberia, the sentimental flabbiness of the conversation only made him more impatient. He had not dared to monitor Grivetsky’s compartment. If the general discovered a surveillance device, he would set off a chain reaction that would go right up to Dimitrov and Zeldovich’s goose would be cooked. Instead, he had Yashenko keep an eye on Grivetsky and check up on him by questioning the railway personnel aboard the train.
Zeldovich lay on his bunk, occasionally putting on the ear phones, imagining what might be taking place on the other side of the steel plating. Sometimes he napped, but his mind could not sleep for very long. It raced like a mouse on a treadmill, working out scenarios of survival.
Suddenly he sat up, shocked into alertness. The sound link had been broken. There was only one reason why: Anna Petrovna had simply cut him off. He swung out of the bunk and began to pace the compartment. He looked at his watch. They had passed through Omsk, where the delay had occurred, and they were heading toward Novosibirsk.
“Bring Mrs. Valentinov to me at the first opportunity,” he had ordered Yashenko.
Yashenko had whisked her into their compartment, grabbing her from behind with a hand over her mouth and an arm holding her in a vise around the waist. He stood, holding her that way in the compartment, waiting for a signal from Zeldovich as she struggled to break free. Zeldovich put a finger to his lips. She stopped squirming, and blinked her eyes in assent. Yashenko released her.
“This was hardly necessary,” she said, brushing back her hair, straightening her housecoat and looking contemptuously into Yashenko’s dull, obedient face.
“I’m sorry,” Zeldovich said.
He signaled for Yashenko to leave, then stood up and held out the vodka bottle. Anna Petrovna nodded and he poured out a tumblerful.
“You must have more trust, Zeldovich,” she said, lifting her glass.
“Trust?” he said. “I was merely backing you up.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot, Zeldovich?”
“Of course not.”
“Emotionally vulnerable? Is that it?”
“It hadn’t occurred to me,” he said. Until now, he told himself.
It was she who had raised that issue. There was no mistaking the sounds he had heard, before she had cut off the link. But emotion? He had not thought in those terms.
“What have you learned?” Zeldovich asked, deliberately refocusing their conversation.
“He is cautious.”
“Of course.”
“It is not so simple,” she said, after a long pause.
“Do you think he suspects you?”
“Perhaps. He is not a fool.”
He felt that she wanted to say more, but had checked herself.
“The question remains,” she said. “What happens when we learn the truth? How can we prevent a holocaust?”
He took a deep swallow from the vodka bottle. The holocaust was not his concern. What he cared about was his own survival.
“We must take one step at a time,” he said. “We will know better how to proceed when we know how long Dimitrov will be with us.”
“And then?”
“Others will need to know.”
“And quickly.”
“So you see why I am anxious,” he said, feeling the edge of his own cunning. “For all we know, there is no time left at all.”
“You mustn’t get too impatient. There is a delicacy here. We are dealing with a sensitive man. There is, actually, some question whether he will ever tell us what we want to know.”
Zeldovich could feel again the irritation in his nerve ends that no quantity of vodka could erase. Perhaps he was being too subtle. Other methods might be far more effective. He took another swallow from the bottle. His eyes roved over the compartment. It was confining, maddening. Like Dimitrov, he craved space, big high-ceilinged rooms, a large scale. This confinement is killing me, he thought.
Anna Petrovna looked out into the darkness. “We will be in Novosibirsk soon,” she said wistfully. “We are heading home.”
“It is a godforsaken country,” Zeldovich said, shivering lightly. Hearing his own words, sensing her disapproval, he knew he had spoken rashly.
“Forsaken?”
“I mean it is formidable, huge, an enigma.” He felt himself reaching for ways to placate her.
“The future is here.” She stood up, then moved toward the door. “You will know when I know. And don’t send for me again.” She opened the door a sliver, paused, then let herself out.
Alone in the compartment, Zeldovich felt the full weight of his depression descend, and he emptied the vodka bottle to the dregs.