“If we had the technology to match them in producing goods,” Sophia said.
“We’ll get that from the West itself,” he grinned. “Capitalists always have to make money. We buy their technology and then improve on it, simplify it so it can be produced more cheaply and fuck them with their own shaft.” She grinned at him lasciviously.
“Stop using love words during business hours, bull of the bed. I’m liable to lock the doors, and rape you.”
“Not before I’ve read the Times,” he said. “You wouldn’t do that to your boss, would you?”
“Fuck the New York Times,” she said in a half whisper. “I can wait until this evening. Then I’ll show you what is more important, the football page or pages I can give you to read.” She reached across the desk and picked up the telephone as it began to ring.
“Comrade Director Shevenko’s office, First Directorate,” she said. “Thank you, Comrade. He will be there.”
“Plotovsky’s office harridan, the old witch,” she said as she raised her cup of tea. “He wants you at his office as soon as you can be there. She said it will be a private meeting.” He nodded and finished his pastry and wiped his lips with a Kleenex. Sophia stood up and looked to make sure the door to the hall was closed. She came around the desk and bent and kissed him, her tongue probing his mouth, her hand fondling his crotch.
“Stop it,” he growled. “You want me to walk into his office with a hard-on?”
She giggled. “It might give him a heart attack. I don’t think he’s had it up in ten years.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Shevenko said. “Old, old Communists are the sneakiest fuckers of all.”
Leonid Plotovsky had the copies of the messages from Shevenko’s office on his desk when Shevenko walked in. The old man hawked loudly and spat into his cuspidor and waved Shevenko to a chair in front of the desk.
“I don’t hate the Americans,” Plotovsky growled. “You know that, Igor. They gave us a great deal of help after the war of 1914, kept us from starving. Kept a lot of us from starving. Herbert Hoover.
“I admire their industry and their technology but damn it, they are going too far! This!” He waved a liver-spotted hand over the stack of messages.
“This is very close to open war, my friend. Very close!”
“It wouldn’t have come to this if the Admiral hadn’t ordered the test of his new torpedo,” Shevenko said.
“I know that,” the old man muttered. “Now we have to get out of this mess and get out gracefully. He looked at Shevenko, his old lizard’s eyes half covered by his eyelids.
“You know the folk tale of the Commissar on his way home in a sleigh with the wolves howling behind him. He saved his family by throwing one of the servants in the sleigh to the wolves.” Plotovsky’s lined face was serene. “The question is, which faithful servant will be thrown to the American wolves?”
“The Admiral seems to have placed himself at the rear of the sleigh,” Shevenko said.
“Do you know where the Admiral is right now?” Plotovsky asked.
“No, sir.”
“He’s asked for a meeting with Brezhnev. He’s seeing him now.” He rocked back in his chair and laced his thin fingers across his lean belly.
“If I were to guess I’d say that he was maneuvering to put someone else close to the rear of the sleigh. Someone named Shevenko.”
Shevenko felt a cold chill. “The evidence of the Admiral’s perversion, his infiltration of my office with Lubutkin, whom we know was a sexual pervert, that has been put to one side?”
“No,” Plotovsky said. “It will be used. But it is of such a nature that it can only be used as a last resort. To face him with such things would be to destroy the effectiveness of the evidence. He would laugh in our faces.” He paused. “The Admiral is a clever man. He knows how to fight a rear-guard action. He knew when he cultivated your aide that he might be caught, that the aide might be caught. He prepared defenses. I am sure of that. But I don’t know what defenses he has.” His eyes narrowed.
“Your life has not been blameless, Igor.” He shook his head as Shevenko started to speak. “Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t disapprove of your screwing women. I still do it myself.” A sly grin crossed his face. “Not that you or your bloodhounds would ever be able to prove that. But there are other things; your contact with the Israelis, for one. Who knows what the Politburo would think of that?”
“To maintain such a confidential contact is important to our national security,” Shevenko protested. “It gives us an opening to the West that is to our advantage. Those dispatches from Dr. Saul this morning, that is proof.”
“Granted,” the old Politburo member said in a soft voice. “But what would my fellow members of the Politburo think of your meeting in Israel with the American CIA agent named Bob Wilson, of drinking coffee with him, and giving him cigars and admitting to him that we were guilty of a criminal act in the sinking of the American submarine? There would be an immediate suspicion that you were a double agent.”
Shevenko felt the cold chill spread through his legs. He shook his head from side to side.
“No!” he said in a low whisper. “No! I would never betray my country!”
“Let us say that I believe you,” the old man across the desk said. “You were educated in America, you know their idioms. Let us play ball together, you and I. Now here is what I want you to do.” He leaned across the desk and began to speak slowly and carefully in a voice barely above a whisper.
CHAPTER 18
Admiral Benson and Bob Wilson left the Director’s office on the top floor of the seven-story CIA headquarters building and walked into a private elevator and descended to the basement of the building. A driver stood waiting beside a long, black Cadillac with heavily tinted bulletproof windows. The two men got into the back seat of the car and locked the doors and the car eased out of the quarter-mile long tunnel that extended out of the back of the building. The driver made his way along a narrow roadway that wound through a thick stand of trees. A guard at the high, electrified fence opened a gate and waved the car through. As the car drove down the road toward Langley it passed a faded sign that read “Research Station, U.S. Government,” a pseudonym known to every intelligence agency in the world as the headquarters of the CIA. The car picked up speed and reached the Roosevelt Bridge and crossed the Potomac River, leaving Virginia behind.
Admiral Benson read through the report that Wilson had written, passing each page to Wilson as he finished reading. Wilson took the last page of the report and put it away in his attaché case.
“Things are getting to the critical stage,” he said to Admiral Benson. “That memo from Admiral Brannon about one of his attack submarines bumping, is that what he called it, bumping? Running into the Russian ballistic missile submarine. That’s pretty risky, isn’t it? You make the tiniest mistake and you both go down. Hell of a way to let the other side know you aren’t fooling around.”
“I think Admiral Brannon may be going a little bit too far,” Benson said. “We’ve lost one submarine and we’ve sunk one of theirs in return and it’s being kept a pretty damned good secret. If we lose another submarine because of some tactic like this, keeping it a secret will be damned near impossible.”
“I don’t think the secret is being that well kept,” Wilson said. He reached in his coat pocket for a cigarette and lit it. “You hear the latest? Captain Steel is making his move. And to do that he has to tell some other people about what’s been going on.”