VII

Monday 11:45 P.M.

MOSCOW (AP) … The Communist Party newspaper, Izvestia, this evening accused the U.S. of engineering a massive buildup of arms in Israel and Egypt.

Quoting from unnamed sources, the newspaper labeled the arms buildup as “a clear act of aggression against neighboring Arab countries.”

Kremlin sources available to Western news media neither denied nor substantiated the story, but Izvestia is generally regarded as an accurate indicator of Party thinking.…

Ever since the war, whenever Mahoney awoke from a nap or a long sleep when he was troubled, he did so instantly and without moving until he was sure of his surroundings. He opened his eyes now and the room was dark.

It had been noon when Marge had awakened him, helped him out of the tub, helped him dry off and led him into the bed. He had slept without moving since then.

The rain still pattered against the window, and across the room he could see Marge sitting in an easy chair. She was knitting.

“Did the embassy call?” he asked softly.

Marge looked up, a small amount of light from somewhere glinting on her glasses. “Did you sleep well, my darling?”

“Yes.”

“No one called,” she said, putting her knitting in the small wicker basket by her feet. “And if they had I would not have awakened you.”

“What time is it?”

“Nearly midnight, I think. I’ve been knitting. Your sweater is almost finished.”

“With the leather patches on the sleeves?” He could see her smile.

“Yes, Wallace, with leather patches on the sleeves. And pockets for your matches.”

Mahoney let his muscles, which had tensed when he woke, loosen, and he sighed deeply. He had dreamed about the war. But the images he had seen were not clear, and he had spent his dreamtime struggling to get a better view. Zamyatin, the Russian he had worked with more than thirty years ago, had been there and so had Carlisle. They had been working with each other, doing something to someone. Children, he thought now, it had been.

“I wrote two letters while you were sleeping. One to John and the other to Michael. I told them that we would be coming home for vacation in a couple of months, and that you wanted to have a family reunion. Los Angeles would be best.”

“June will be too hot in Southern California,” he said. “Let’s make it Montana.”

“I haven’t sealed the envelopes yet, so I can change it. I thought you might want to add something.”

In Mahoney’s long intelligence service career, whenever things began to go sour he developed a nervous tic in his right eyelid. That eye was twitching like crazy now, but he had no conscious idea why.

“Marge,” he said.

“Yes, Wallace?”

He hesitated a moment. “I love you, do you know that?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

He closed his eyes. “Do you remember when John was little, and we lived on C Street in D.C.? We were as poor as church mice?”

“What made you think of that?”

“This place. And before this, Berlin. And all the other places all the way back to C Street.”

“I’ve never complained.”

He smiled to himself. “No.”

“My mother told me long ago that for the love of a man a woman should never complain.”

“This is the last assignment, Marge. This time I mean it.”

She laughed, but not unkindly. “Were you dreaming about Minnesota again?”

He pushed the covers back and sat up in bed, swinging his legs over the edge. “No. But I was thinking about it the other day. We’ve got plenty in the bank. I’ll cash out my retirement fund, and we can buy a little house on a lake.”

“And a boat so you can go fishing in the morning?”

“Yes,” he said. His legs were throbbing. “And a screened-in porch so you can sit and enjoy the evenings without getting bit up by mosquitoes.”

“I’d like that.”

He got to his feet and grabbed for the bedpost for support. It was the goddamned weather. Cold. Damp. Whenever the weather was like this his legs hurt so badly he seriously thought about amputation. The service doctor had told him that someday his varicose veins would be impossible to live with. Then they would have to be stripped. But that would lay him up for at least a year.

He would live with the pain just a little while longer.

Marge had gotten out of her chair, and she came across the small room and helped him walked slowly into the living room. Movement tended to loosen his leg muscles and ease the pain somewhat. It was something they had been doing for several years.

“We’re going to have the service doctor fix your legs first,” she said as they walked around the tiny living room. “Let the company pay for it. And then you can go on medical recuperation leave, and when that’s over with you can tell them you are retiring.”

Mahoney looked down at his wife and laughed out loud. “Mrs. Mahoney, I do believe there is a bit of the bargain-hunting Arab coming out in you.”

She laughed, too. “I’ve had a good teacher.”

Mahoney stopped and pulled his wife to him and hugged her. Their laughter had served to ease his tense mood. “You’re a beautiful woman.”

She parted from him and looked up into his eyes. “Are you going back to work tonight?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “But we have time.”

Without a word they walked arm in arm back into the bedroom, where they parted and went to their own sides of the bed. Mahoney slipped off his shorts and Marge took off her housecoat and pulled her nightgown over her head.

They climbed into bed and held each other closely, Mahoney kissing her neck and behind her ears. She had always loved it when he did that, and now that their lovemaking occurred so infrequently, she seemed to enjoy it even more than before.

Like their daily lives together, which stretched backward thirty-nine years, their love was soft and gentle and slow, yet was in a sort of abbreviated code: each word, each gesture, each touch loaded with meaning and shared experience.

He kissed her breasts which had sagged with age, but he did not see those ravages of time. Instead he saw a woman, a sexual creature, whom he loved with all his heart and soul.

She touched and caressed him the way he enjoyed it most, and when he was ready he entered her, gently and with much feeling.

Sex had always been a very special expression of their love for each other, and it was no different this night. Mahoney, for those few minutes, forgot every other aspect of his life: his children, his job, everything except his love for his wife.

Afterward, they kissed deeply and parted without speaking, words, at this moment, unnecessary for them.

Marge used the bathroom first, and when she was finished she came back into the bedroom. She had put on her nightgown and housecoat again.

“Do you want something to eat before you go to work?”

He got up from the bed. “Just a sandwich and a very large bourbon.” He went to her and touched her cheek with the back of his right hand. “Love,” he said, and he went into the bathroom to clean up, shave, and get dressed.

He was through in the bathroom in ten minutes, and when he came back into the bedroom he quickly strapped on his shoulder holster and .45 automatic, slipped on his suitcoat, then went into the kitchen where Marge had poured him a bourbon in a large glass and made him a liverwurst sandwich. He sat down at the small table, drank deeply of the straight whiskey and began eating his sandwich.

“Did you mean it about retiring?” she said as she puttered with a few dishes at the sink.

He looked up at her. “Yes,” he said between mouthfuls. He took another drink, the whiskey warming his insides.

“Will you be late again?” she asked. During their long marriage she had never asked more than that despite his odd hours and frequent long absences. In the old days it often happened that he would leave for work one morning and not return for two weeks without a word to her. When he would return they would pick up the threads of conversations that had been begun the morning he left as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She knew what he did for a living, but she never questioned him.

“Probably,” he said, finishing his sandwich and then his drink.

He got up and went into the living room where he took his raincoat and hat from the closet and put them on. When he turned around she was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“You’ll be walking to work?” she asked.

He nodded, and she came across the room to him and pulled up his collar and buttoned the top button of the coat. “Don’t catch a cold, old man,” she said.

He kissed her on the cheek. “I won’t,” he said, and he turned and left the apartment, tromping slowly down the stairs, the pain from the varicose veins finally fading from the exercise and the whiskey.

Outside the front door of the building, the Soviet guard in his little guardbox looked up from the newspaper he was reading as Mahoney paused and stared at him. The light in the tiny structure lit the back of the man’s head, throwing his face into shadow, but Mahoney was certain he had never seen the man before.

“Dawbrih y vyehchehr,” Mahoney said in Russian.

“Good evening, sir,” the guard answered in English.

Mahoney continued to stare at the man for a few moments longer, trying to catalogue his features for future reference, and then he turned and went down the steps and headed in the cold rain toward the embassy four blocks away.

“You stupid sonofabitch, one of these days you’ll turn up dead,” Carlisle had told him eleven months ago when he learned that it was Mahoney’s habit to walk to the embassy from his apartment.

That was when Carlisle was new in Moscow, and he had tried to convince Mahoney either to take an apartment with most of the other staffers in the embassy itself, or have a car come for him every day.

Mahoney had flatly said no to both suggestions. “It’s like trolling for a very smart catfish,” he had told Carlisle later by way of explanation. “If I’m nailed, we’ll know that they understand I’m something more than a trade missionary. If I make it, they either have not tumbled to me, or I’m doing nothing worth a damn to hurt them. Either way when I get to my office safely each time, I work just a little harder to shove it to them.”

The wind was blowing, driving the rain into his face as he walked, and he pulled up his coat collar closer around his neck and pulled his hat down lower over his eyes.

Mahoney was an orderly man. An organizer. A planner. In the morning his routine never varied. Socks and shoes then trousers. Clean the teeth, then shave. T-shirt, shirt, then tie.

Work was the same, and each day he spent these few minutes of walking organizing his thoughts for the coming problems.

At this point there was not enough data for him to draw any conclusions about what had been, and still was as far as he knew, happening in Dzerzhinsky Square.

But that in itself was his first clue. There was no financial data indicating any big push. And according to Munson there had been no significant increase in communications. Which meant either that the Russians were simply doing their spring housecleaning; rounding out paperwork, updating files at all levels, running control operations on their own personnel; or they had finally gotten cagey and were working on a deficit spending budget. If the latter was true, it would be something totally new for the Soviet government. New and very dangerous, because it would mean that henceforth everything the Komitet did would be done in the financial blind as far as the CIA was concerned. There would be no advance tickles on anything, only after-the-fact evaluations.

All along, that had been the CIA’s little secret, even from their British, French, and West German friends. The Russians were naïve when it came to things financial, and had somehow never tumbled to the fact they wore many of their deepest secrets on their financial sleeves for everyone to see.

The streets were totally deserted, and the only light came from an occasional second- or third-story apartment window. Mahoney stopped at the first corner. The embassy was two blocks ahead to Tchaikovsky Street and then one block left. To his right, about one block, Old Town Moscow began, the area of the city unofficially off limits to Western tourists. It was an area of the city that dated back to pre-Revolution days, of old, unpainted and yet ornately carved houses, of French and Italian influenced brick buildings. Here were no modern expanses of glass and steel and smooth concrete: by day the most charming part of the city; by night the darkest and most brooding. But it was as if the Kremlin wanted to keep this section of Moscow a secret: a skeleton in its closet; an old cousin it was ashamed of.

About half a block from his apartment, Mahoney had picked up a single set of footsteps behind him. He had concentrated on his thoughts, allowing only one part of his mind to listen to the soft slap of shoe leather against concrete. He had stopped at the corner as if deep in thought, and the footsteps behind him had also stopped.

Now he stood thinking as he lit a cigar, his blood racing as it had years ago in Germany.

He threw the match away, took a deep breath and turned right down the narrow side street that led into Old Town. As he walked through the shadows he threw his cigar into a doorway so that the glowing tip would not give him away, and then quickly stepped into the next doorway, loosening the buttons of his raincoat as he moved silently on the balls of his feet.

Whoever was following him had not yet rounded the corner. Mahoney withdrew his .45 military automatic from its shoulder holster.

It was highly unusual for a company intelligence analyst to carry any kind of a weapon. They were the office sloggers, not the case officers. But Mahoney was from the old school and had always carried the gun.

“My beefy hog leg,” he called it. “Can’t hit the side of a barn with the goddamned thing, but when it goes off it sure scares hell out of anyone in the vicinity.”

A small man in a dark raincoat and dark hat pulled low came around the corner about thirty feet away and stopped. Mahoney could not make out the man’s features, but he could see the unmistakably Russian cut of the coat.

He raised the .45, snapped the slide back bringing a live round into the chamber and cocking the hammer, the noise itself almost like a gunshot in the quiet back street.

“A little closer,” he said softly in Russian.

The man stiffened and hesitated a moment. Mahoney raised the gun so that it pointed directly at the man’s chest. He could not miss from this distance. The man would be dead with one shot, and within five or six minutes Mahoney could make it on foot to the embassy where he would be safe.

“Edyetyeh syodah,” Mahoney repeated.

“Your accent is terrible, Mahoney,” the man said, slowly withdrawing his hands from his pockets and moving forward. “But then you never did speak the language well.”

The voice was soft, cultured, obviously Russian but with a heavy British accent.

He stopped about five feet from Mahoney and tipped his hat back. “There is no need for the weapon. I am alone and unarmed.”

Mahoney slowly lowered the gun and eased the hammer back to safety. “Zamyatin,” he said. “Yuri Zamyatin.”

“That is right,” Zamyatin smiled, moving closer and holding out his hand.

Mahoney pocketed the gun and took the Russian’s hand.

“It has been a long time since the war, my friend. I did not know if you would remember or recognize me.”

“I could not forget,” Mahoney said, and he could hear the disapproval in his own voice although he had not meant to sound that way.

“Those were ruthless times.”

“Peopled by ruthless men.”

“Yes,” Zamyatin said almost sadly.

Mahoney studied the man’s face in the dim light for several long seconds, neither of them speaking. He had aged considerably since the war. His hair had started to turn gray, and his features had lost their cragginess. The most striking change in the Russian that Mahoney could see, however, was in his eyes. In 1945 they had been bright, flashing, very intense. But now they seemed deep, gentle, and very understanding.

“May I walk along with you?” Zamyatin said almost apologetically as if he did not want to intrude into Mahoney’s thoughts.

“What do you want with me, Zamyatin?” Mahoney asked evenly. This, of course, had not been a happenstance meeting.

Zamyatin shrugged. “To reminisce perhaps about the war. To discuss our respective futures.”

“We have nothing to say to each other.”

“Yes we have,” The Russian quickly contradicted. “I’m a colonel now,” he said more slowly. “In charge of the Komitet’s Political Service Division.” He smiled. “It is my job, my old friend, to watch your embassy. Watch you and your assistant Congdon, and your boss Carlisle, who did an outstanding job in Portugal.”

Mahoney reached for his .45 and was about to withdraw it again, when Zamyatin laughed.

“I am unarmed. I am alone. No one has followed me. No one knows I am here. You may search me if you would like. And afterward we can run the rabbit to elude a tail. But we must talk. Out here. Away from any ears. Your people’s or mine.”

This was a setup. Mahoney could feel it through Zamyatin’s apparent sincerity.

So they had tumbled to him after all. Him and Carlisle and Congdon. Probably Bennet and Switt were known as well. Perhaps they had gotten it from the microwave scans that had been going on for the past several years. Perhaps there were other listening devices besides the one found in the fifties behind the U.S. seal in the ambassador’s office. Perhaps someone from within the embassy had sold out.

Perhaps a lot of things, Mahoney told himself. But it was no perhaps that Zamyatin was here now, wanting to talk.

“Your people have been busy in Dzerzhinsky Square,” Mahoney said.

Zamyatin smiled tiredly. “And so have your people in the embassy.”

“Our president is coming on Thursday.”

Something flashed across Zamyatin’s eyes, and Mahoney felt a chill rise up his back, the hairs on his neck standing on end.

“I know,” the Russian said. He took Mahoney’s left arm, and they started down the street, deeper into Old Town. “Years ago, just after the war, my wife and I lived down here. Not too far from where we are at this moment.”

“And where do you live now, Colonel?”

Zamyatin glanced up at Mahoney. “I have a wonderful apartment not too far from Kutuzovsky Prospekt where Comrade Brezhnev himself lives.”

“Do you have children?”

“I have three marvelous children. But my wife is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She died eleven years ago giving birth to our only son, Aleksei.”

“Are your children well?”

“Yes,” Zamyatin smiled. “And anxiously awaiting our holiday. We plan to go back to the Caspian.”

Mahoney stopped and looked into Zamyatin’s eyes. “The war was a long time ago, Yurianovich. Then came the cold war. And Korea. Then Vietnam. Detente. And now your dissident trials and my president’s hopes for world peace and human rights.”

“Let us not forget your race riots or your jailed draft evaders.”

Mahoney continued as if Zamyatin had not interrupted him. “You and I are from opposite sides of the world. Opposite ideologies. Opposite goals.”

“Yes, my friend, but you are now operating in my country.”

“Only to better defend my own.”

Zamyatin seemed to weigh those words carefully in his mind, and before he replied a look of infinite sadness came over him. Mahoney was moved almost to reach out and touch him.

“The war changed us all in this country, my friend. But the changes were much greater afterward.”

“And you?”

“And me, perhaps, most of all.”

“You say you came to me alone. And you want to talk without fear of being heard. What do you want?”

“Let’s walk,” Zamyatin said, and again they moved arm in arm down the narrow, deserted street, the rain seemingly colder and more intense.

Mahoney kept his right hand in his coat pocket, his fingers curled around the butt of the .45, part of his mind listening for something, anything behind them. During the war Zamyatin had been a ruthless man. Perhaps he was telling the truth, and he indeed had changed, softened. But Zamyatin also had been a very careful man. Mahoney doubted if that had changed. In all likelihood he had become more careful, which meant that every detail of this meeting had been meticulously worked out, every word painstakingly orchestrated in advance.

But why?

“I need your help,” Zamyatin said as they neared the end of the long block.

Mahoney didn’t break stride. “I’m listening, Colonel.”

“Something quite extraordinary happened late Saturday night.”

“I gathered as much,” Mahoney said dryly, and Zamyatin looked at him.

“I’m not playing a game with you.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“No one knows I am contacting you.”

“Yet,” Mahoney said sharply, and Zamyatin started to protest, but he cut him off. “A colonel in the KGB, Political Services Division, who obviously knows my habits, contacts me on the street in the middle of the night after his organization has operated full blast for almost forty-eight hours.”

Zamyatin said nothing, and Mahoney continued.

“This colonel knows not only of me, but he claims knowledge of others whom I work with. Which means Soviet surveillance of my embassy amounts to much more than mere observation. Perhaps even a double agent within the embassy itself. Low level. Maybe a janitor, or a cook, or even a minor staffer who got in over his head at one time or another.”

“Already you have enough information to seriously hamper my division’s operations. Enough information to have me shot as a traitor.”

“Exactly,” Mahoney said, pulling his arm away from Zamyatin’s. “Which leads me to speculate on what kind of an operation you are attempting to work on me at this very moment.”

Mahoney pulled his hand out of his pocket and suddenly spun Zamyatin around and quickly frisked him. Zamyatin did not move, and when Mahoney was finished he smiled.

“No weapons, no tape recorder, no transmitting device.”

Mahoney searched the building fronts and roof line for any kind of a sign—a careless face in a window, the glint of metal from a rooftop parapet.

“And no long-range listening devices,” Zamyatin said. “We can walk anywhere you would like except your own apartment or embassy.”

Mahoney looked deeply into the man’s eyes, but all he could detect besides an almost too obvious sincerity was perhaps a slight trace of fear.

“What do you want, Zamyatin? Are you defecting?”

Zamyatin laughed. “I am not a man who would want a life of constantly being on the run. I am not mobile. I have three children.”

“What then?” Mahoney snapped. “What do you want from me?”

“Help.”

“You already said that.”

“Saturday night, near midnight, Professor Doctor Leonid Sakharov was kidnaped from his office at Moscow State University by two men who identified themselves as Directorate T officers.”

“Scientific and technical operations.”

“Exactly. But no such operation was authorized or carried out.”

“The two men were imposters?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll come back to that,” Mahoney said after a moment’s hesitation. “Meanwhile, who is Doctor Sakharov?”

“The leading laser scientist in the Soviet Union. The one man who has contributed more to military weapons laser research than any other man in the country.”

“And he was snatched—just like that?”

“Just like that, Mahoney. We do not keep all of our scientists under lock and key on military installations.”

What Zamyatin was telling him was extraordinary, almost too extraordinary. “How did you get involved?”

“The entire Komitet is on alert. Our orders are simply to find Professor Doctor Sakharov.”

“And me?” Mahoney asked. At this moment he had absolutely no idea what was coming, but whatever it was it would be big. Zamyatin was suddenly nervous.

“Whoever snatched Sakharov also took a portable laser device. It is small enough to fit into a briefcase, and yet powerful enough to be used as a weapon. A very effective weapon. Long-range. Silent. No real defense against it.”

“An assassination,” Mahoney said. “Brezhnev is the suspected target?”

Zamyatin shook his head. “If that were the case I would not be contacting you. I would be fighting you with everything at my command.”

“Aren’t you now?” Mahoney said, but the words were a cover for his surprise.

“No. I’m trying to enlist your cooperation.” Zamyatin reached out and touched Mahoney’s arm. “I’m sincere, my old friend, in my request for help.”

“Make your point.”

“The entire Komitet is on alert. Worldwide. No limitations. The operation, to find and recover Sakharov and the laser device.”

Mahoney was about to interrupt, but Zamyatin held him off.

“Find and recover Sakharov and the laser by 1100 hours Thursday.”

For several long moments Mahoney just stared at the Russian who had suddenly become agitated. The deadline was the significant factor, the one point of information that Zamyatin had seemed overly intense about.

Suddenly it fell into place. Chillingly so, and Zamyatin evidently read the recognition from Mahoney’s face.

“Yes, my friend. There may be an attempted assassination. But not of Brezhnev. Of your own president. Here in Moscow on Soviet soil as he steps off Air Force One Thursday morning.”

Mahoney pulled his gun from his pocket as he stepped back away from Zamyatin. He pulled the hammer back and pointed the gun at the Russian. “You are coming with me.”

“Don’t be a fool, Mahoney,” Zamyatin said. “If I was pulling an operation on you, why would I tell you what I have?”

“I don’t know, and that’s what worries me.”

“I need your help. And you need mine. If you pull me in now everything will be ruined. Neither one of us will be able to do a thing to stop it.”

Mahoney looked at Zamyatin who held one hand out in a gesture almost of supplication.

“How is this operation being budgeted?”

“I don’t have that information, nor am I interested in it.”

“What do you want from me? Specifically.”

“One of two things is happening,” Zamyatin said, lowering his voice. “First the kidnaping was arranged by a Soviet group—for what reason, I do not know.”

“To assassinate my president. You’ve already said it.”

“But why? No Soviet citizen in his right mind would do such a thing.”

“We are not talking about sanity,” Mahoney started to say, but Zamyatin cut him off savagely.

“The other possibility—the one more likely—is that this operation is being carried out by your own people.”

“For what reason?”

“Our little war is based on such coups, Mahoney. Your president is kidnaped or assassinated in Moscow. Think of the repercussions against us. Your president is not a popular man in your country, but his death blamed on us would be brilliant.”

“We would not kill our own president.”

“What about Kennedy?”

Mahoney almost shot the Russian at that moment, but something made him hold back. This was all like some sort of horrible dream. At their last meeting Congdon had suggested the possible assassination of President Forsythe. But as a Russian operation. The situation in the Middle East was coming to a head. President Forsythe was coming to Moscow to speak with Brezhnev about it. Meanwhile the prophets of doom were already saying it was too late. That war, perhaps even nuclear war, was inevitable between the Arab bloc countries and Israel. Translated, that meant a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States fought in the Middle East.

Who would gain by the president’s death? The Russians because they hoped to gain the upper hand in the confusion? The American military because it hoped to use the president’s death as an excuse to fire the first shot? Or was it some individual Soviet group who objected to President Forsythe’s interference on the human rights issue?

None of it made any sense, but all of the possibilities were viable. And meanwhile Zamyatin stood here asking for help.

Mahoney once again let the hammer back to safety and pocketed the .45. The relief was visible on Zamyatin’s face.

“You will help?”

“Perhaps,” Mahoney said.

“If it is a Soviet group, I will find them,” Zamyatin said. “If it is an American operation, there will be indications of it at your embassy. If that is the case, you must stop them. None of us wants a repeat of the Kennedy business. It would surely mean war between our two countries. A war from which none of us would survive.”