Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

The silence between the two younger men was electric. Neither could recall any predecessor of Rudin’s ever having been so forthcoming. Stalin had suffered a cerebral hemor­rhage and had probably been finished off by his own Polit­buro as he prepared to liquidate them all; Beria had tried for power and been arrested and shot by his fearful colleagues; Malenkov had fallen in disgrace, as had Khrushchev; Brezhnev had kept them all guessing until the last minute.

Rudin stood up to signal the reception was at an end.

“One last thing,” he said. “Vishnayev is up to something. He’s going to try to do a Suslov on me over this wheat foul-up. If he succeeds, we’re all finished—perhaps Russia, too—because he’s an extremist. He’s impeccable on theory but impossible on practicalities. Now I have to know what he’s doing, what he’s going to spring, whom he’s trying to enlist. Find out for me. Find out in fourteen days.”

The headquarters of the KGB, the Center, is a huge stone complex of office blocks taking up the whole northeastern facade of Dzerzhinsky Square at the top end of Karl Marx Prospekt. The complex is actually a hollow square, the front and both wings being devoted to the KGB, the rear block being Lubyanka interrogation center and prison. The proxim­ity of the one to the other, with only the inner courtyard sep­arating them, enables the interrogators to stay well on top of their work.

The chairman’s office is on the third floor, left of the main doorway. But he always comes by limousine with chauffeur and bodyguard through the side gateway. The office is a big, ornate room with mahogany-paneled walls and luxurious Ori­ental carpets. One wall carries the required portrait of Lenin, another a picture of Feliks Dzerzhinsky himself. Through the four tall, draped, bulletproof windows overlooking the square, the observer must look at yet another representation of the Cheka’s founder, standing twenty feet tall in bronze in the center of the square, sightless eye staring down Karl Marx Prospekt to Revolution Square.

Ivanenko disliked the heavy, fustian, overstuffed, and bro­caded decor of Soviet officialdom, but there was little he could do about the office. The desk alone, of the furniture in­herited from his predecessor, Andropov, he appreciated. It was immense and adorned with seven telephones. The most important was the Kremlevka, linking him directly with the Kremlin and Rudin. Next was the Vertushka, in KGB green, which connected him with other Politburo members and the Central Committee. Others joined him through high-fre­quency circuits to the principal KGB representatives through­out the Soviet Union and the East European satellites. Still others went directly to the Ministry of Defense and its intelli­gence arm, the GRU. All through separate exchanges. It was on this last one that he took the call he had been waiting ten days for, that afternoon three days before the end of June.

It was a brief one, from a man who called himself Arkady. Ivanenko had instructed the exchange to put Arkady straight through. The conversation was short.

“Better face-to-face,” said Ivanenko shortly. “Not now, not here. At my house, this evening.” He put the phone down.

Most senior Soviet leaders never take their work home with them. In fact, almost all Russians have two distinct personae; they have their official life and their private life, and never, if possible, shall the twain meet. The higher one gets, the greater the divide. As with the Mafia dons, whom the Po­litburo chiefs remarkably resemble, wives and families are simply not to be involved, even by listening to business talk, in the usually less-than-noble affairs that make up official life.

Ivanenko was different, the main reason he was distrusted by the risen apparatchiks of the Politburo. For the oldest rea­son in the world, he had no wife and family. Nor did he choose to live near the others, most of them content to dwell cheek by jowl with each other in the apartments on the western end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt during the week, and in neighboring villas grouped around Zhukovka and Usovo on weekends. Members of the Soviet elite never like to be too far from each other.

Soon after taking over the KGB, Yuri Ivanenko had found a handsome old house in the Arbat, the once fine residential quarter of central Moscow, favored before the Revolution by merchants. Within six months, teams of KGB builders, paint­ers, and decorators had restored it—an impossible feat in So­viet Russia save for a Politburo member.

Having restored the building to its former elegance, albeit with the most modern security and alarm devices, Ivanenko had no trouble, either, in furnishing it with the ultimate in Soviet status—Western furniture. The kitchen was the last cry in California-convenient, the entire room flown to Moscow from Los Angeles in packing crates. The living room and bedroom were paneled in Swedish pine via Finland, and the bathroom was sleek in marble and tile. Ivanenko himself oc­cupied only the upper floor, which was a self-contained suite of rooms and also included his study—music room with its wall-to-wall stereo deck by Phillips and a library of foreign and forbidden books in English, French, and German, all of which he spoke. There was a dining room off the living room, and a sauna off the bedroom to complete the floor area of the upper story.

The staff of chauffeur, bodyguard, and personal valet, all KGB men, lived on the ground floor, which also housed the garage. Such was the house to which he returned after work and awaited his caller.

Arkady, when he came, was a thickset, ruddy-faced man in civilian clothes, though he would have felt more at home in his usual uniform of brigadier general on the Red Army Gen­eral Staff. He was one of Ivanenko’s agents inside the Army. He hunched forward on his chair in Ivanenko’s sitting room, perched on the edge as he talked. The spare KGB chief leaned back at ease, asking a few questions, making the occa­sional note on a jotting pad. When the brigadier had finished, he thanked him and rose to press a wall button. In seconds, the door opened as Ivanenko’s valet, a young blond guard of startling good looks, arrived to show the visitor out by the door in the side wall.

Ivanenko considered the news for a long time, feeling in­creasingly tired and dispirited. So that was what Vishnayev was up to. He would tell Maxim Rudin in the morning.

He had a lengthy bath, redolent of an expensive London bath oil, wrapped himself in a silk robe, and sipped an old French brandy. Finally he returned to the bedroom, turned out the lights, barring only a small lantern in the corner, and stretched himself on the wide coverlet. Picking up the tele­phone by the bedside, he pressed one of the call buttons. It was answered instantly.

“Valodya,” he said quietly, using the affectionate diminu­tive of Vladimir, “come up here, will you, please?”

THE POLISH AIRLINES twin-jet dipped a wing over the wide sweep of the Dnieper River and settled into its final ap­proach to Borispil Airport outside Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. From his window seat, Andrew Drake looked down eagerly at the sprawling city beneath him. He was tense with excitement.

Along with the other hundred-plus package tourists from London who had staged through Warsaw earlier in the day, he queued nearly an hour for passport control and customs. At the immigration control he slipped his passport under the plate-glass window and waited. The man in the booth was in uniform, Border Guard uniform, with the green band around his cap and the sword-and-shield emblem of the KGB above its peak. He looked at the photo in the passport, then stared hard at Drake.

“An ... drev ... Drak?” he asked.

Drake smiled and bobbed his head.

“Andrew Drake,” he corrected gently. The immigration man glowered back. He examined the visa, issued in London, tore off the incoming half, and clipped the exit visa to the passport. Then he handed it back. Drake was in.