Edwin J. Campbell sat across the table and watched his Soviet opposite number with some fellow feeling. Over two months, working until fatigue overcame both of them, he had developed a fairly warm relationship with the man from Moscow—as much, at least, as their positions and their duties would allow.
In breaks between the talks, each had visited the other in the opposing delegation’s suite. In the Soviet drawing room, with the Muscovite delegation present and its inevitable complement of KGB agents, the conversation had been agreeable but formal. In the American room, where Sokolov had arrived alone, he had relaxed to the point of showing Campbell pictures of his grandchildren on holiday on the Black Sea coast. As a leading member of the Academy of Sciences, the professor was rewarded for his loyalty to Party and cause with a limousine, chauffeur, city apartment, country dacha, seaside chalet, and access to the Academy’s grocery store and commissary. Campbell had no illusions but that Sokolov was paid for his loyalty, for his ability to devote his talents to the service of a regime that committed tens of thousands to the labor camps of Mordovia; that he was one of the fat cats, the nachalstvo. But even the nachalstvo had grandchildren.
He sat and listened to the Russian with growing surprise.
You poor old man, he thought. What this must be costing you.
When the peroration was over, Edwin Campbell rose and gravely thanked the professor for his statement, which on behalf of the United States of America he had listened to with the utmost care and attention. He moved an adjournment while the U.S. government considered its position. Within an hour he was in the Dublin embassy to begin transmitting Sokolov’s extraordinary speech to David Lawrence.
Some hours later in Washington’s State Department, David Lawrence lifted one of his telephones and called President Matthews on his private line.
“I have to tell you, Mr. President, that six hours ago in Ireland the Soviet Union conceded six major points at issue. They concern total numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen-bomb warheads, through conventional armor, to disengagement of forces along the Elbe River.”
“Thanks, David,” said Matthews. “That’s great news. You were right. I think we should let them have something in return.”
The area of birch and larch forest lying southwest of Moscow where the Soviet elite have their country dachas covers little more than a hundred square miles. They like to stick together. The roads in this area are bordered mile after mile by green-painted steel railings, enclosing the private estates of the men at the very top. The fences and the driveway gates seem largely abandoned, but anyone trying to scale the first or drive through the second will be intercepted within moments by guards who materialize out of the trees.
Lying beyond Uspenskoye Bridge, the area centers on a small village called Zhukovka, usually known as Zhukovka Village. This is because there are two other and newer settlements nearby: Sovmin Zhukovka, where the Party hierarchs have their weekend villas; and Akademik Zhukovka, which groups the writers, artists, musicians, and scientists who have found favor in Party eyes.
But across the river lies the ultimate, the even more exclusive, settlement of Usovo. Nearby, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Politburo, retires to a sumptuous mansion set in hundreds of acres of rigorously guarded forest.
Here on the night before Christmas, a feast he had not recognized in more than fifty years, Maxim Rudin sat in his favorite button-back leather chair, feet toward the enormous fireplace in rough-cut granite blocks where meter-long logs of split pine crackled. It was the same fireplace that had warmed Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev before him.
The bright yellow glare of the flames flickered on the paneled walls of the study and illuminated the face of Vassili Petrov, who faced him across the fire. By Rudin’s chair arm, a small coffee table held an ashtray and half a tumbler of Armenian brandy, which Petrov eyed askance. He knew his aging protector was not supposed to drink. Rudin’s inevitable cigarette was clipped between first finger and thumb.
“What news of the investigation?” asked Rudin.
“Slow,” said Petrov. “That there was outside help is beyond doubt. We now know the night-sight was bought commercially in New York. The Finnish rifle was one of a consignment exported from Helsinki to Britain. We don’t know which shop it came from, but the export order was for sporting rifles; therefore it was a private-sector commercial order, not an official one.
“The footprints at the building site have been checked out against the boots of all the workers at the place, and there are two sets of footprints that cannot be traced. There was damp in the air that night and a lot of cement dust lying around, so the prints are clear. We are reasonably certain there were two men.”
“Dissidents?” asked Rudin.
“Almost certainly. And quite mad.”
“No, Vassili, keep that for the Party meetings. Madmen take potshots, or sacrifice themselves. This was planned over months by someone. Someone out there, inside or outside Russia, who has got to be silenced, once and for all, with his secret untold. Whom are you concentrating on?”
“The Ukrainians,” said Petrov. “We have all their groups in Germany, Britain, and America completely penetrated. No one has heard a rumor of such a plan. Personally, I still think they are in the Ukraine. That Ivanenko’s mother was used as bait is undeniable. So who would have known she was Ivanenko’s mother? Not some slogan-dauber in New York. Not some armchair nationalist in Frankfurt. Not some pamphleteer in London. Someone local, with contacts outside. We are concentrating on Kiev. Several hundred former detainees who were released and returned to the Kiev area are under interrogation.”
“Find them, Vassili, find them and silence them.” Maxim Rudin changed the subject, as he had a habit of doing without a change of tone. “Anything new from Ireland?”
“The Americans have resumed talking but have not responded to our initiative,” said Petrov.
Rudin snorted. “That Matthews is a fool. How much further does he think we can go before we have to pull back?”
“He has those Soviet-hating senators to contend with,” said Petrov, “and that Catholic fascist Poklewski. And of course he cannot know how close things are for us inside the Politburo.”
Rudin grunted. “If he doesn’t offer us something by the New Year, we won’t carry the Politburo in the first week of January.”
He reached out and took a draft of brandy, exhaling with a satisfied sigh.
“Are you sure you should be drinking?” asked Petrov. “The doctors forbade you five years ago.”
“To hell with the doctors,” said Rudin. “That’s what I really called you here for. I can inform you beyond any doubt that I am not going to die of alcoholism or liver failure.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Petrov.
There’s more. On April thirtieth I am going to retire. Does that surprise you?”
Petrov sat motionless, alert. He had twice seen the supremos go down. Khrushchev in flames, ousted and disgraced, to become a nonperson. Brezhnev on his own terms. He had been close enough to feel the thunder when the most powerful tyrant in the world gives way to another. But never this close. This time he wore the mantle unless others could snatch it from him.
“Yes,” he said carefully, “it does.”
“In April I am calling a meeting of the full Central Committee,” said Rudin. “To announce to them my decision to go on April thirtieth. On May Day there will be a new leader at the center of the line on the Mausoleum. I want it to be you. In June the plenary Party Congress is due. The leader will outline the policy from then on. I want it to be you. I told you that weeks ago.”