Джозеф Файндер - The Moscow Club

It was stamped “Eyes Only/Delta,” which meant the need-to-know requirements were so stringent that no more than a handful of people at the very top of the U.S. government would ever be permitted to see it. Stone glanced at it quickly, then read it again, more slowly. His jaw literally dropped in astonishment.

“You see,” Saul said, dragging out his words as if it pained him to speak, “Gorbachev has been in trouble in the Politburo since the day he was named General Secretary. You know that; you’ve warned of that for years.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, massaging them wearily. “Then all this turmoil in Eastern Europe. He’s a man with enemies. And with the summit coming up in a matter of weeks, the President heading for Moscow, I thought it was vital–”

Stone was nodding, his face flushed. “And if we can figure out what this reference to a ‘Lenin Testament’ means, we can determine who’s involved, what their motivations are. …” His voice trailed off; he was lost in thought.

Ansbach was peering at Stone now with a fevered intensity. He asked, almost whispering: “You read it the way I do, too, huh?”

“There’s no other way to read it.” Stone could hear the faint sound of typing from down the hall, which had somehow managed to penetrate the massive doors, and for a long moment he watched the pattern of sunlight and shadow on the wall, a neat geometric grid cast by the slats of the window blinds. “These people – whoever they are – are about to pull off the first coup in the history of the Soviet Union.”

“But nothing inside the Kremlin,” Saul added, shaking his head as if he didn’t want to believe it. “Nothing like that. Something much, much worse. You with me on this?”

“Look, Saul, if that report is accurate,” Stone said, his glance still riveted on the wall, “we’re talking about the fall of a government. Massive bloody chaos. A dangerous upheaval that could plunge the world …” He shifted his gaze back to Saul. “You know, it’s funny,” he said softly. “For years we’ve wondered if this exact thing could ever happen. We’ve speculated about the terrible notion that someday the power that’s now held by the Kremlin could ever be seized by another, much more dangerous clique. We’ve talked and talked about it, so much that you’d think we’d get used to the idea. But now – well, the thought of it scares the hell out of me.”

Moscow

The word “dacha,” which means “cottage,” was a laughably modest designation for the palatial three-story stone structure tucked away behind a grove of pines in the town of Zhukovka, eighteen miles west of Moscow. Zhukovka is the enclave of some of the most powerful figures in the Soviet elite, and this particular dacha indeed belonged to one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

He and eleven other men sat around a dining table inside, in a low-ceilinged room whose walls were covered with religious icons that gleamed in the amber light. The table was set with Lalique crystal and Limoges china, caviar and toast points, an abundance of fresh baby vegetables, chicken tabaka, and French champagne. To all appearances, it was nothing more than the table of one of Russia’s privileged.

In fact, the room itself was swept regularly for electronic listening devices with a spectrum analyzer, which could monitor any transmissions on any frequency. Several small speakers mounted high on the walls emitted the steady, high-pitched hiss of “pink sound,” sure to foil any devices that had somehow escaped detection. Nothing said within this room would ever be overheard.

The twelve dinner companions, each of whom occupied or had occupied extraordinarily powerful positions in the government – from the top rank of the Central Committee, to the Red Army, to the military-intelligence agency GRU – were the leaders of a small, hand-picked group that called itself by the singularly undramatic name Sekretariat. Informally, sometimes, they called themselves the Moscow Club. They shared a fierce but secret zealotry: an unshakable devotion to the Soviet empire, which was, it seemed, crumbling day by day. And so they all nurtured a hatred of the Kremlin leadership under Gorbachev, and of the fearful direction in which the nation was headed.

At dinner, the conversation was as it always was. They spoke of the decline of the Russian empire, of the unconscionable chaos introduced into Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev. These men, ordinary Moscow bureaucrats of reasonable temperament, collectively incited one another to heights of pique and alarm. It didn’t take much.

The Berlin Wall had been bulldozed. The Warsaw Pact was little more than a name. East Germany was gone. One by one, like a house of cards upset by a puff of breath, the Soviet-ruled, pro-Communist governments of the Soviet-bloc nations were toppling. From Prague to Budapest to Vilnius to Warsaw itself, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum. Citizens were marching, demanding the abolition of Communism. Lenin and Stalin were no doubt spinning in their graves as they witnessed how Mikhail Gorbachev had given away the shop.

And the republics within the Soviet Union were, one after another, pulling out, raising a defiant fist at Soviet rule.

The whole empire, once so strong, a world power forged by Stalin, was disintegrating. It was a nightmare.

One of the Sekretariat’s leading members, an economist named Yefim S. Fomin, had been ousted from the Politburo for his outspoken views, and he was one of the most outspoken tonight. He was a member of the Central Committee in charge of industrial planning, and he spoke with some authority.

“Gorbachev’s economic schemes are disastrous,” he remarked. Fomin was a heavyset man with a thick shock of white hair who had a peculiar knack of speaking almost without moving his lips. “Our economy is falling apart, we can all see that. The Communist Party is no longer in control! The man is destroying our nation from within.”

When dinner was over, the first to speak was the Sekretariat’s coordinator, Colonel Gennadi Ryazanov, a pale, thin man of forty-five in charge of the GRU’s foreign-intelligence section. Ryazanov looked weary; he had been working himself almost nonstop in the last few weeks. He had four children and a wife, all of whom kept asking when he was going to spend some time away from the office. He had a boss at the GRU who knew he wasn’t working especially long hours there and wondered what the hell could be wrong – marital problems, a sick kid? No one but the men in this room and one other – the leader of the Sekretariat, who could not be seen with them – knew what was absorbing so much of his time and nervous energy: the very plans they were discussing tonight.

Ryazanov was a high-strung perfectionist who abhorred mistakes and miscalculations. He had awakened every morning for weeks with an acid stomach. He hadn’t touched his dinner tonight.

Now he spoke extemporaneously, occasionally consulting a sheaf of neatly typed notes, which he placed beside a glass of water. “It is generally accepted in the West – in fact, throughout most of the world – that the Soviet leadership is, to coin a phrase, coup-proof.” He turned up his lips in a small, tight smile. Ryazanov was not a natural speaker, and some of the men in this room, who knew him well, realized he had been working on this presentation for some time. “After all, we’ve now got some democracy here. Our Supreme Soviet routinely vetoes laws that the Kremlin demands. I think that perception will help us.”

He looked around the table to engage everyone’s eyes, paused a moment, and continued, tapping a pencil on his sheaf of notes. There was uncomfortable stirring; he had dilated too long.