Deep Cover (11 page)

“I'll be at the ranch most of the day.”

“All right, I'll reach you when there's something to report.”

“Wrap it up as fast as you can, Top, because I've got another chore for you.”

“Tucson or Washington?”

“Tucson. We're going to test the nation's security.” Forrester said it dryly and his smile was one-sided.

“Now that sounds like fun,” Top said, and rang off. Forrester rolled over on his shoulder and exhaustion lowered him into a warm pool of sleep.

Chapter Four

The great iron doors swung open slowly and the dark Chaika limousine rolled out of the courtyard of Lubianka Tiurma where Rykov had just completed his regular morning tour of inspection. Behind the limousine the iron doors swung closed with a solid noise that echoed the metallic clangings of the several underground levels of dungeons inside. The chauffeur was armed and a silent bodyguard shared the rear seat with Rykov; the interior curtains were half-drawn across the double thickness of bulletproof glass in the small windows. The route took them past the Bolshoi Theatre and Sverdlov Square and there was a very thin morning traffic of Moskviches, Pobedas and Volgas on the boulevard. Rykov's limousine kept to the center lane, reserved for official vehicles only, and he encountered no delays.

In Revolution Square a girl Intourist guide was lecturing to
a thick-bundled coagulation of determined foreign tourists. The pavements were crowded with pedestrians on their way to work. Many of the men wore uniforms—civil servants, most of them; every Muscovite wanted to wear a uniform.

At Arbatskaya Square Rykov climbed out to walk the rest of the way. The slow-moving Chaika accompanied him. The possibility of assassination was one which Rykov accepted without qualms, but sensible precautions were not out of order and the bodyguard car stayed close.

Rykov's footsteps crunched the snowy cobblestones with an uneven rhythm broken by the thudding of his cane, for he had a bad leg now, the result of the unpublicized crash-landing of an Aeroflot jetliner six years before. The pronounced limp added a fine touch to his sinister appearance and by implying constant pain, enhanced his reputation for stoic fortitude. Now that he had worked his way up to a position where he gave more orders than he took it was gratifying to have members of the ruling troika inquire solicitously after his health.

He walked through the wide Arbat Boulevard past an elderly woman sweeping snow off the sidewalk. She wore a scarf over her head, not against the cold but because it was traditionally immodest for a peasant woman not to wear a scarf tied under her chin. The woman bowed with a gesture of obeisance; she did not smile, because she knew who Viktor Rykov was. So did at least ten million other Russians and several thousand foreign intelligence people.

He was a long way, not only in time and distance, from his birthplace in the Circassian mountains of Georgia.

When the October Revolution had stripped them of their lands his kulak parents had moved down to Tiflis, a city of mosques and bazaars, smugglers and vice, and Viktor Rykov had learned the devious texts of intrigue and deceit. In 1938 Beria's secret police had recruited him to spy on international black marketeers in the Crimea; Rykov had organized a cell of informants—an underground within the underworld—and his unique achievements had brought him to Moscow as a Control in 1940.

In 1941 at Smolensk he had been attached to the Fourth Bureau and posted out to the west to infiltrate the Abwehr.
At Moscow against Von Bock, and at Leningrad, he had done superb work: it had been one of his agents, in a Wehrmacht uniform, who had walked into Guderian's Panzer headquarters and brought out the detailed plans for the siege of Moscow.

Rykov had shown a genius for training Russians to look and act and think like Germans. There had been decorations and promotions and the transfer to the Far East: in August 1945 Rykov's deep-cover seedlings in Hirohito's crumbling empire had paralyzed Japanese matériél transport during the brief and bitter Soviet blitzkrieg of northeast Asia. From 1946 to 1953 Rykov had controlled Soviet networks in China, both in the Kuomintang and in the People's Republic. By 1953 he had completed the construction of the Amergrad camp at Kolkhoz Tselino and within eighteen months its graduates had begun seeding into America. Then Khrushchev had cemented his authority, Tolubchev had been retired, and Rykov had stepped into power in the Arbat.

Winter gray misted the city. A youth passed Rykov, one of the new upstart generation in peasant
valenki
boots and a sulky frown and a cotton-padded jacket. The young ones wanted everything given to them and it was not pleasant to speculate what would become of the world when these young nihilists took it over.

In time history always upstaged the hard-handed pioneers, found them redundant and superseded them with suave men of greater finesse and sophistication but lesser gut courage—the squeamish, effete, decadent ones.

Pioneers became forgotten men and these young soft ones listened to revanchist Nazism on the Voice of America and read the
samizdat
drivel that circulated underground: they had memories even shorter than their years, they had not lived through the war, they had never suffered, and now they found it all dull—the Revolution was almost sixty years ago and to them it was history, boring. There was no longer excitement or danger in being a Communist. They did the proper things but they did them dutifully with the knowledge that fathers were responsible for the politics of their sons. They joined the
October Society at seven and the Young Communist League of Komsomol at fourteen and learned to pay lip service to the goal of perfecting the working people's socialist alliance. They wrote drably for,
Komsomolskaya Pravda
and massed their voices in uninspired rhetoric against those who challenged the national virtue and virility but all the time they wanted soft bourgeois comforts and they thought of their elders with contempt as the “uncles.”

Rykov had no children and he was glad of it.

He limped past the Lenin Library and turned into the wide side street. A suite of offices in one of the Kremlin towers had been assigned to him for official purposes but he rarely set foot in it because he had no taste for bootlicking and here in this huge gray unmarked building in the Arbat district a kilometer west of Red Square no one's boots but Rykov's own were licked.

It was a graceless mausoleum, drab and cold. It housed the nerve center of the Soviet intelligence system; to neighbor agencies it was known as the Organs. A small sign in plain Russian characters hung inside the entrance hall:

K     omitet
G     osudarstvennoi
B     esopastnosti

The hall guards were big men, well armed and fully trained in unarmed-combat techniques. Rykov returned their salutes perfunctorily and went back through the building with his cane tapping disrhythmically. He waited at the lifts and heard the building's quiet thrummings.

These lower floors were filled with code and cipher rooms and the offices of Control officers commanding subsidiary networks of field agents. KGB was modern and efficient and heavy-budgeted, and it was huge: for each of the 200,000 employees of the American CIA there were twenty KGB agents; most of them were paid or blackmailed informants, not full staff members, but still the cadre of professionals was more than a million in number. In these offices their activities were coordinated and analyzed by banks of Minsk-32 computers,
and the distillations of millions of words of daily reports were delivered each day to the desk of Viktor Rykov because Rykov was the supreme commander of this greatest secret army in the world. In his sixty-second year Rykov was heir to the mantle of Lavrenti Beria.

Rykov's office was imposing, the result of baroque and melodramatic whims on the part of a predecessor. It was a long trip across a series of Oriental carpets to the desk. The huge windows, arched and crenellated, looked out across the vast sprawl of Moscow's ancient low rooftops with their clustered chimney pots. The spire of Moscow University was a lean landmark against the gray sky. Here and there sprouted the dreary Stalin Wedding Cakes, sterile gray apartment towers with icings of snow.

Rykov hung his things on the coat rack and, as always, lit a Pamir before he sat down and reached under the orange silk lampshade to switch on his work light. He thumbed through the stack of reports and memos on his desk and turned to his bank of telephones to begin the morning round of calls to district commanders and Controls. It took nearly an hour and left him waspishly frustrated; he had the weight of organization on him and he despised it. At times he also feared it: the temptation to surrender to it was great—to become lulled by routine.

He pressed the button to summon his aide and almost immediately Andrei Bizenkev appeared. “Good morning, Comrade General.” It was his little joke: Rykov was a general by rank and pay but he disdained the title and preferred to be addressed as Comrade Minister. Andrei had always enjoyed needling him and Rykov had always enjoyed being needled because there was a part of him that recognized the grave danger in taking himself too seriously.

The years had put a layer of fat on Andrei and pushed his hairline back so that he had become bookish and gentle in appearance. It was a deceit: in Rykov's view Andrei was the second best Intelligence expert in the Soviet Union.

Rykov separated out the Chinese signals and tossed the rest
of the papers across the desk. “None of that requires our attention. Have the assistants answer the ones that need answering.”

“Very good.” Andrei picked them up. “And the China dispatches?”

“I'll want to study them.”

Andrei left without further talk. Rykov hardly heard the door close. He opened a drawer and picked out a pocket box of Drazhe candy drops, selected a lozenge and popped it into his cheek and spread the China decodes out on the desk. His mind picked up a word here and a phrase there and fitted them into a pattern while another part of him reviewed the meeting yesterday.

They had met in Comrade Secretary Fyodor Yashin's extravagant Kremlin office, each wall paneled in a different rare wood, an Imperial Russian Samovar tea service gleaming on a side tray.

The room was huge and the chandeliers pushed at the gloom. String tendons held Yashin's starched collar away from his neck but the lean hawked face was alert and hard. Yashin removed his rimless glasses. “Good day, Comrade.” His voice had become scratchy with age. He pointed the stem of his meerschaum toward the two men in wing chairs, Marshal Oleg Grigorenko and Alexai Strygin, who was Vice-Chairman of the Presidium and personal representative of Party boss Kazakov.

They both stood up to greet Rykov.

Grigorenko had gone tub-bellied and his face had put on so much flesh that all planes and angles had disappeared and it was hard to visualize any bone structure underneath. He spoke politely in his rumbling deep voice and there was a faint click as he brought his heels together.

Alexai Strygin extended his hand and Rykov shook it quickly and firmly. One of the few modern changes of which Rykov approved was the substitution of the western handshake for the traditional bear hug. He and Strygin had known each other since boyhood: not enemies, but too cautious to be friends. Strygin was a small man with a Lenin beard and
a half-bald head on which hair made a bushy line across the top from ear to ear. To some extent Strygin was a comfortable man, ambitious but secure in his position, and Rykov disliked comfortable men.

Not since Khrushchev's had a single pair of hands held all the reins of Soviet power. The policies of all the Russias were dictated by the twelve-man Presidium (Politburo) and in turn the Presidium was commanded by a troika of its members. Of those three men the best known was Marshal I. G. Tsvetnoy, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and ostensible chief of state of the Soviet Union. Tsvetnoy was Zhukov's heir and in the reshuffling that followed the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime the Army, always a key force in Russian politics, had showed enough muscle to elevate one of its own to the top position in Russian government. But the Stalin and Khrushchev years had taught the necessity of checks and balances and Tsvetnoy's strength was delimited by the other two members. One of them, represented here by Strygin, was First Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Kazakov. The other, Secretary General of the Presidium and Premier of the Council of Ministers, was Yashin.

Yashin's was the least known face: he was not a public celebrity in Moscow and in Western countries very little was known about him. Yashin had seen to this because in spite of his vanities he disliked spotlights and always worked best behind the scenes …

Yashin never could resist dipping in a spoon. “The situation only grows more perilous with time, because every day increases the chance the Americans will break your system. How can you be sure they haven't broken it already? How do we know they're not poised to sweep all your people into a net?”