Forty pairs of eyes were riveted upon the image of the man addressing a mass rally at Tukhovo earlier that summer as the sonorous Russian oratory rose and fell, the voice of the interpreter, dubbed onto the sound track, a subdued counterpoint.
“Yes, my brothers, yes, my sisters, we can hear her. The men of Moscow with their fur coats and their doxies cannot hear her. The foreigners and the criminal scum who feast upon her body cannot hear her. But we can hear our mother calling to us in her pain, for we are the people of the great land.”
The young filmmaker Litvinov had done a brilliant job. Into the film he had inserted cutaways of moving pathos: a young blond mother, her baby at her breast, gazing adoringly upward toward the podium; a desperately handsome soldier with tears trickling down his cheeks; a seamed laborer from the land, his scythe across his shoulder, the years of hard toil bitten into his face.
None could know that the cutaway shots had been filmed separately, using actors. Not that the crowd was faked; from a high elevation other shots revealed ten thousand supporters, rank upon rank, flanked by the uninformed cheerleaders of the Young Combatants.
Igor Komarov dropped his voice from a roar to something a little above a whisper, but the microphones caught and brought it across the stadium.
“Will no one come? Will no one step forward to say: Enough, it shall not happen. Patience, my brothers of Russia, wait a little more, daughters of the Rodina …”
The voice rose again, moving up through the scales from a murmur to a cry.
“For I am coming, dear Mother, yes, I, Igor your son, am coming. …”
The final word was almost lost as the rally rose in unison to the prompted chant: “KO-MA-ROV, KO-MA-ROV.”
The projector was switched off and the image faded. There was a pause and then a collective exhalation of breath.
As the lights went up, Nigel Irvine moved to the head of the long rectangular refectory table of Wyoming pine.
“I think you know what you have seen,” he said quietly. “That was Igor Alexeivich Komarov, leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces, the party most likely to win the elections in January and project Komarov into the presidency. As you will have seen, he is an orator of rare power and passion, and clearly enormous charisma.
“You will know also that in Russia eighty percent of the real power already lies in the hands of the president. Since the time of Yeltsin the checks and curbs on that power, such as obtain in our societies, have been abolished. A Russian president today can govern more or less as he likes and bring in, by decree, any law he likes. That could well include the restoration of a one-party state.”
“Seeing the state they are in at the moment, is that such a bad idea?” asked a former ambassador to the United Nations.
“Perhaps not, ma’am,” said Irvine. “But I did not ask for this presentation to discuss the possible course of events after the election of Igor Komarov, but rather to present the council with what I believe to be some hard evidence as to that course, and the nature it will take. I have brought from England two reports, and here in Wyoming, using the office copier, have run off thirty-nine copies of each.”
“I wondered why I needed to bring in so much paper,” said their host, Saul Nathanson, with a grin.
“I am sorry to have worn out your machine, Saul. Anyway, I did not wish to carry forty copies of each document across the Atlantic. I will not ask you to read them now, but to take a copy of each and read them in privacy. Please read the report marked ‘Verification’ first, and the Black Manifesto second.
“Finally, I should tell you that three men have died already because of what you are about to read tonight. Both documents are so deeply classified that I must ask they all be returned for destruction by fire before I leave this compound.”
All levity had vanished by the time the members of the Council of Lincoln took their copies and retired to their rooms. To the bewilderment of the kitchen staff, no one appeared for supper. Meals were asked for and served in the cabins.
Langley, August 1990
THE news from the CIA stations inside the Soviet Bloc was bad and getting worse. By July it was clear that something had happened to Orion, the hunter. The previous week Colonel Solomin had failed to show up for a routine brush pass, something he had never failed to do before.
A brush pass is a simple device that normally compromises nobody. At a given moment, by pre-agreement, one of the parties walks down a street. He may be followed, he may not. Without warning he swings off the pavement and into the door of a café or restaurant. Any crowded place will do. Just before he enters, the other man has paid his bill, risen, and is walking toward the door. Without making any eye contact they brush against each other. A hand slips a package no larger than a matchbox into the side pocket of the other man. Both continue on their way, one in, the other out. If there is a tail, by the time the followers swing through the door there is nothing to see.
In addition, Orion had failed to service two dead drops despite clear chalk-mark warnings that there was something for him in them. The only inference was that he had switched off, or been switched off by someone else. Again, the emergency sign-of-life procedure had not been utilized. Whatever had happened was instant, without warning. Heart attack, auto crash, or arrest.
Moreover, from West Berlin came the news that the regular monthly letter to the East German safe house had not been received from Pegasus. Nor had anything appeared in the Russian dog breeders’ magazine.
With Professor Blinov’s increasing ability to travel locally inside Russia away from Arzamas-16, Monk had suggested he send a completely harmless letter once a month to a safe East Berlin postbox address. It did not even need any secret writing on it, just the signature Yuri. He could drop the letter into a box anywhere outside the sealed complex, and it would never be traced back to him even if intercepted. With the Berlin Wall in pieces, the old trick of smuggling the letter through to the West was no longer necessary.
To add to this, Blinov had been advised to purchase a mated pair of spaniels. This had been much approved of inside Arzamas-16, for what could be more harmless for the widower academic than to breed spaniels? Each month with perfect justification he could mail a small ad to the dog breeders’ weekly in Moscow notifying that there were puppies for sale, weaned, newborn, or expected. The usual monthly ad had not appeared.
Monk was by now at his wit’s end. He complained to the highest levels that something was wrong, but was told he was panicking too soon. He should be patient; contact would no doubt be reestablished. But he could not be patient. He began to fire off memoranda to the effect that he believed there was a leak deep inside Langley.
Two men who would have taken him seriously, Carey Jordan and Gus Hathaway, had retired. The new regime, mostly imported since the winter of 1985, were simply annoyed. In another part of the edifice the official mole hunt, dating back to the spring of 1986, crawled on.
¯
“I FIND it hard to believe,” said a former U.S. Attorney General, as the plenary discussion opened after breakfast.