The cities of the Eastern Bloc are dark at night. There is light but just enough. In the center of old Prague was a red star, illuminated at night, revolving slowly around and around. From the top story of the restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel—the only modern hotel in Prague—the Soviet visitors and their women of the evening could view the red star revolving above the old church spires. Even above the spires of the old cathedral on the hill.
The restaurant was expensive and glittering. The wines served were from Hungary and Romania and were not very good. The cuisine was French with a heavy touch. Everything about the restaurant was a parody of poshness because parody is the only thing possible in such a society.
Alexa thought it was crude. She honestly loved Paris, for example, and all its excesses; she loved Moscow out of an inborn love for the ancient city that seemed part of her roots; but she saw the rest of the world for what it was. And Prague was a sad old city, neglected too long and full of sorrows buried in the ancient stones.
Perhaps Gorki would have understood. Gorki was a complex man and she was his protégée in the Resolutions Committee. She would have explained her feelings to him on any night but this one. She was too nervous.
He had seduced her in the beginning, as she expected, but had never treated her as his mistress or even his property. Gorki was a detached man who sampled pleasures, never gorged on them.
She thought Gorki had sent men to have her killed. She wanted to understand why. He had seemed surprised to hear her voice when she telephoned.
Prague was a short plane ride from Moscow and from Zurich. They had agreed to meet there because Gorki did not want her to return to Moscow. Not yet.
Gorki put down his glass of brandy—French, not the Hungarian version offered on the menu—and looked across the white tablecloth. Her eyes had never left his face. He was a small man with the delicate manners of the Oriental Soviet. No one who worked for him knew his past and no one wanted to speak too much about it.
He stared at Alexa until she looked away, out the wall of windows.
“All organizations have their duplications,” Gorki said in a quiet voice as though summarizing some lesson. “I have wanted this American agent dead for a long time. The two men you killed—by mistake, dear Alexa—were backup to you and the unfortunate agent in Helsinki failed to explain that to you.”
“Why?” she said.
“Alexei claims no knowledge of the two men but the truth is quite different.” He spoke Russian with patient clarity, as though each word had been painfully learned and was reluctantly released in speech.
“I could have been killed,” she said.
“It was such a waste—”
“I still don’t understand—”
“Nor I,” interrupted Gorki. “But I understand this: November is still alive and that is not acceptable.”
“So I go back to Lausanne,” she began. She had eaten very little. She wore a dark dress with long sleeves that framed her pale features and made her skin seem more like porcelain. She watched Gorki as though she felt she had to be certain that he was telling her the truth; it was the first time she had felt suspicious.
“No. He has left Lausanne.”
“What happened?”
“He left Lausanne. He left the country after four days. He talked to Swiss police. He went to London, we think. Today or tomorrow he flies to New York on the Concorde. We think. We have this information—”
“What are you going to do?” Alexa said. Her words were soft, but she stared at him very hard.
“You,” said Gorki. His lynx eyes glittered at the table. The wine steward came and Gorki waved him away.
“You have watched him so closely, then why—”
“Because this is a delicate matter,” Gorki began.
She saw that he was lying to her. Why was he lying? What part of what he said was a lie and what was the truth?
She felt the same coldness she had felt the first day in Zurich, after the killings, when she tried to decide what to do next. Her first thought had been to contact Moscow but she had elected to do nothing at first. The newspapers were full of information about the killings. She could not understand who the men had been. Even now. She did not believe Gorki at all; she had flown to Prague as though flying to a rendezvous with her own death.
“Who is November?”
“He was our mole in the R Section,” began Gorki.
She waited, her disbelief suspended. Her long fingers held the edge of the white tablecloth as though holding on to reality.
“It is very complex. Seemingly, over the years, he had performed a number of actions against our interest but that was to be expected. He had to be useful. To them and to us. However, most importantly, we began to suspect two years ago that he had changed allegiances—that he had been found out and that he was being used now by R Section to feed us disinformation that we would believe, because we would believe him to be our man. Much as the British did with the German spy network in Britain in the Patriotic War.”
She nodded; she knew the reference to World War II when British intelligence managed to triple every German agent in Britain, creating an entirely traitorous network of German spies working for the British and still feeding their German controls information.
“The important matter now is that he has to be dealt with. It was to be done in Switzerland, before he had any warning. Unfortunately, he has been warned now by the killings and by R Section itself. His cover is blown as far as we’re concerned.”
She waited and the cold feeling grew in her. Gorki spoke in a sharp whisper, the words glittered, he was constructing a story that seemed entirely plausible. And yet Alexa knew it was a lie, it had to be a lie from the beginning. And if it was a lie, then it meant Gorki wanted to eliminate her.
The thought fastened to her like a leech. She felt the blood draining from her face. She went very rigid and pale and cold in that moment. He wanted to kill her.
“You have had the training of an illegal agent and that is what you will become again,” Gorki said, staring at his cognac. It seemed he did not want to look at her. “In the packet is identification. A French passport, papers, driver’s license… all the paperwork. It seems better to travel to Montreal from Paris first and then shuttle to Washington. The Canadian entry is much easier.”
“But our own people… in Washington—”
“This is not a matter for them. It is too delicate for more usual channels—”
She felt the words like blows; they were all lies. Gorki was isolating her and there was nothing she could do about it.
He had sent the killers in Lausanne not to kill the American but to kill her.
A rush of guilt overwhelmed her. It must be some flaw in her that exacted this punishment; some failure.
She was a woman of great beauty and cunning. In that shaken moment, she fell back on her resources.
She reached her hand across the white linen and touched the parchment fingers.
Gorki looked at her for a moment, as though he could not understand the gesture. He looked into Alexa’s glittering eyes. Eyes that could not be disguised, he thought. Eyes that will always give her away.
Gorki smiled at her as though she might have been a child.
“My dear Alexa,” Gorki said, removing his hand. “I fly back to Moscow in an hour. There is so little time. Believe me—” He spoke in a soft voice and then interrupted himself with silence. His eyes spoke regret. He smiled. “Perhaps—” Again, silence intervened. He rose and she saw he had left a packet on the table. Instructions and identification and money—the usual precautions.
But Alexa felt failure. Acute and cold. He was instructing her to follow a trail of lies to her own death. What was her failure?
And what was her alternative?
She shuddered. She looked up. Gorki was already threading his way through the tables, past the Party officials and their girlfriends, his thin frame silhouetted against the black window that looked out on blackened Prague. And the great red star turning slowly, slowly, above the church spires and the steeples.