Dimitrov ignored the remark. He knows I am probing, Zeldovich thought.
“I want him protected thoughout the journey.”
“Of course.”
“Which means you must go with him.”
“Me?”
“I can trust no one else,” Dimitrov said, his eyes boring into Zeldovich. “And he must not know you are there.” Zeldovich sensed that the Secretary wished to say more, but hesitated. “And you must find a way to restrict his communications.”
So he is suspected of knowing something, Zeldovich thought.
“Grivetsky”—Dimitrov cleared his throat—”General Grivetsky will also be on board.”
Zeldovich understood instantly.
“The doctor will journey to Nakhodka and take the boat to Japan.”
“And then?” Zeldovich felt his tension increase. Dimitrov clenched his fists, a sure sign of uncertainty.
“It is a dangerous journey. The crossing is rough. Many a passenger has fallen overboard.”
Zeldovich said nothing, afraid he would betray his agitation.
“But you must stay in touch,” Dimitrov said, with an air of finality. “I may need his medical advice.”
Another warning bell went off inside Zeldovich’s head. Dimitrov is still uncertain about his health.
“And Zeldovich,” Dimitrov called as he walked to the door. He could tell from the voice’s urgency that this was not an afterthought, more an underlining of what had, up to now, been unspoken.
“Protect him well,” Dimitrov said haltingly, wanting to be understood, but afraid to articulate his meaning plainly.
“Yes, of course,” Zeldovich said. “He holds important knowledge.”
That was, of course, the unspoken thought. Would Dimitrov see it as a probe?
“Yes.” Dimitrov nodded. “I imagine his knowledge would be in great demand.”
“I understand,” Zeldovich said, turning to go. But Dimitrov held him. “Do not try to understand too much,” he said.
It was, of course, a warning.
It came to him. The doctor possessed two bits of knowledge! The China strike as well as the parameters of Dimitrov’s life on earth.
How long did Dimitrov have to live? That was the key to Zeldovich’s own survival. How could one pry this knowledge out of the doctor’s head during a seven-day journey? There were hundreds of ways to unlock information from the human brain. Some were blatantly mechanical—physical or psychological torture, the use of sophisticated truth-inducing drugs, all impossible under the present circumstances.
Other methods were far more subtle. The exploitation of weakness, emotional hunger, sexual inducements, the temptations of the flesh and spirit. But the doctor had not betrayed much about himself at the dacha, although there was that little episode with the nurse. Zeldovich racked his brains, rattling restlessly through the halls of the dacha, taking long walks along the river.
He had a week to work out the problem. Under any other circumstances, it would have been quite simple. Simply snatch the doctor off the train, shoot him with sodium pentothal, get the information and be done with it. In Stalin’s time they would have put electrodes on the doctor’s testicles and thrown the switch until he begged to be allowed to talk.
In his room at the dacha, Zeldovich lay on his bed and watched the ceiling swim as he sucked on his nightly vodka bottle and felt his world breaking into little pieces, nightmare images that no amount of alcohol could defend against.
Anna Petrovna Valentinov had emerged as a potential instrument out of his own desperation. He had called Bogach, the Chief of the Guards Directorate of the KGB, whose appointment Zeldovich had made possible.
“It is a rather odd request, Nikolai Andreyivich,” Zeldovich had said on the telephone, his tone deliberately tinged with self-effacing humor. “A beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman. Not one of those floozy types that are used to compromise those who are too weak to discipline themselves. This is a special need. You must ask your people to search carefully and it must, somehow, be kept out of regular channels.”
Bogach was businesslike and eager to please. He would try. It is ridiculous, Zeldovich told himself, after he had hung up the telephone, an absurd idea. The American doctor was simply not the type. Nothing in his dossier or in his conduct at the dacha indicated that such an idea was workable. But the incident with the nurse had somehow stuck in Zeldovich’s mind, the only bit of revealed information that just might provide the key to the doctor’s mind. Women could be formidable interrogators under the right circumstances.
A hundred times he had decided to call the whole thing off. It was sheer nonsense, exposing himself to consequences perhaps worse than anything that might happen when Dimitrov died. But the more uncertain he became, the more he pressed Bogach.
“Anything?” he would ask, burning up the phone lines.
“Not yet.”
“You must work faster.”
“I assure you—”
“Faster.”
He could almost hear the whir of the computers as the clerks in the Registry and Archives division plumbed their categories, the massive lists of Soviet citizens who had enlisted in the KGB’s work, some for money, some for patriotism, some for adventure. And then the call from Bogach came.
He had come up with a single name—Anna Petrovna Valentinov. She met the requirements, except for one point: she had not worked for the KGB for ten years. She was at this moment in Moscow, at a seminar of history professors, and had made arrangements to return to her home in Irkutsk via the Trans-Siberian. She was staying at the faculty building at Moscow University. Zeldovich, who refused ever to write anything down, memorized her name and address.
“She is marvelous-looking,” Bogach had crowed into the telephone, “with quite an impressive list of academic honors.”
“And what has she done for us?”
“Surreptitious interrogation. Her file indicates that she was quite efficient, especially in the intellectual community.”
At first Mrs. Valentinov had been adamant in her refusal.
Bogach had arranged the meeting in her room at the faculty building, a whitewashed cell furnished with only a bed and a chair. She had refused to be seated, pacing the little space like a caged tigress. She was full-bodied, supple, intense, with an intelligence as striking as her appearance. In her presence, Zeldovich had felt bumbling and clumsy, more like a supplicant than the powerful KGB agent whose name could strike fear in the hearts of the nation’s most important leaders.
“I’ve done my share,” she insisted, not intimidated, as if she sensed her superiority over him.
“This is a special assignment,” Zeldovich said.
He was not good with women. The only way he could dominate them was by paying for the privilege.
“It’s much different with me now. I can’t pretend as well as I did then. Believe me, I know myself. When I was younger, I had more confidence in my own physical impression. I was vain enough about my looks to think I could do anything. Really, I don’t believe I can do the job.”
“Is that the only reason?” he had asked, hoping that his words would hint at further intimidation.
“Really,” she said, stopping her pacing, “it won’t work. It has nothing to do with ideology, or lack of commitment to Marx and Lenin and to the society which we have evolved for ourselves. No. I refuse to be defensive. It’s just that I’m no longer able to carry out the charade, whatever the circumstances.”
She was the perfect agent, the perfect mixture of the soft and the hard, provocative yet subtle. He wanted her for the job, and made the decision to tell her more than he had planned, in order to persuade her.
“It is a question of the Chinese.”
“The Chinese?”
He had aroused her curiosity. She was, after all, from Irkutsk, where the Chinese horde was a living presence. Confrontations with the Chinese were not taken lightly in Irkutsk. He knew he had stoked the ashes of her fear.
“If it meant the possible destruction of your city, of the whole of Eastern Siberia—”
He was embroidering now.
“I don’t understand.”
“If it meant the obliteration of all the humanity in that part of the world—”
Was he carrying it too far? She had stopped her pacing, was suddenly looking pale.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I must have your complete confidence, your total commitment to secrecy.”
“Now really, Comrade. How else would I answer a KGB agent?”
“This is beyond the KGB.”
“You are talking in circles.”
“I have reason to believe that Comrade Dimitrov will within a short time provoke an armed confrontation with China.”
“You mean we will start it.”
“Either that or we will provoke them to fire the first missile.”
“My God! That’s madness.” She lit a cigarette and pushed the smoke out of both nostrils.
“Dimitrov is dying. It will be his final stroke, the last effort to unite all comrades under the Soviet umbrella.”
“And are you sure he’s dying?”
“He has leukemia.”
“That is terminal.”
“If it were only that simple. It seems that an American doctor has treated him successfully with chemotherapy. We don’t know how long he has to live.”
“You realize that this sounds like a fairy tale.”
“I told you it was important.”
“What am I supposed to do?” She laughed, a high, nervous twitter.
I am reaching her, he thought.
“We must find a way to stop it.”
“You want me to assassinate the General Secretary?” she said sarcastically.
“You’d better curb your tongue,” he said severely, almost as a reflex. He watched her, saw the brief spark of fear flicker, then recede.
“Think of your children, your family. Everything we have strived for.”
“But we are far more powerful than the Chinese.”
“We would, of course, win, if that is the correct definition of emerging from a conflict with thousands of square miles in total desolation, perhaps uninhabitable for years.”
“Siberia?” she asked, her eyes glistening.
“Siberia has always been expendable to the Russians. It is, in their minds, the dump for their garbage.”
“The bastards,” she hissed. He was sure he was reaching her now. She lifted her blue eyes to his face. “What can I do?” she asked with determination.
It was the one moment of elation that Zeldovich had experienced since the onset of Dimitrov’s illness.
Later, in the car returning to the dacha, he felt gloomy again. It may not work, he thought. If it did, what would be the next step? Whatever happened, she would have to be eliminated, he told himself without pity. What did one more matter?
Now they were all on the train, an interminable journey into timelessness. He had not shaved, had barely touched the fatty sausages and dark bread that Yashenko had provided, and felt only a growing anxiety as he watched the boring landscape pass monotonously before him. Keeping out of Kuznetzov’s sight was not as simple as he had expected, and he was constantly confined to his compartment, where Yashenko was driving him crazy with his blank fawning stare and long stretches of silence. He thought of Grivetsky. Keeping an eye on him was fraught with potential danger. There was a tacit understanding among the top rank of the military and KGB that precluded the possibility of overt surveillance. Of course, they all knew it was an illusion, a game of mirrors, since they all watched each other in any case.
He wondered if he, too, was being watched. Dimitrov was capable of anything now that he had decided to act. What galled him was the nature of the act, so untypical of Dimitrov whose
modus operandi
was never the frontal bold stroke.
Zeldovich was frightened and because the emotion was so new to him, he knew he was acting differently. Even the requisition of an entire train of KGB guard troops provided by Bogach seemed an extension of his own fear.
For a day or two he had amused himself with the electronic surveillance device that Yashenko had attached to the speaker in the doctor’s compartment. But the talk about Siberia, the sentimental flabbiness of the conversation only made him more impatient. He had not dared to monitor Grivetsky’s compartment. If the general discovered a surveillance device, he would set off a chain reaction that would go right up to Dimitrov and Zeldovich’s goose would be cooked. Instead, he had Yashenko keep an eye on Grivetsky and check up on him by questioning the railway personnel aboard the train.
Zeldovich lay on his bunk, occasionally putting on the ear phones, imagining what might be taking place on the other side of the steel plating. Sometimes he napped, but his mind could not sleep for very long. It raced like a mouse on a treadmill, working out scenarios of survival.
Suddenly he sat up, shocked into alertness. The sound link had been broken. There was only one reason why: Anna Petrovna had simply cut him off. He swung out of the bunk and began to pace the compartment. He looked at his watch. They had passed through Omsk, where the delay had occurred, and they were heading toward Novosibirsk.
“Bring Mrs. Valentinov to me at the first opportunity,” he had ordered Yashenko.
Yashenko had whisked her into their compartment, grabbing her from behind with a hand over her mouth and an arm holding her in a vise around the waist. He stood, holding her that way in the compartment, waiting for a signal from Zeldovich as she struggled to break free. Zeldovich put a finger to his lips. She stopped squirming, and blinked her eyes in assent. Yashenko released her.
“This was hardly necessary,” she said, brushing back her hair, straightening her housecoat and looking contemptuously into Yashenko’s dull, obedient face.
“I’m sorry,” Zeldovich said.
He signaled for Yashenko to leave, then stood up and held out the vodka bottle. Anna Petrovna nodded and he poured out a tumblerful.
“You must have more trust, Zeldovich,” she said, lifting her glass.
“Trust?” he said. “I was merely backing you up.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot, Zeldovich?”
“Of course not.”
“Emotionally vulnerable? Is that it?”
“It hadn’t occurred to me,” he said. Until now, he told himself.
It was she who had raised that issue. There was no mistaking the sounds he had heard, before she had cut off the link. But emotion? He had not thought in those terms.