Moscow Rules Read online

  Moscow Rules

  Robert Moss

  Copyright © Robert Moss 1985

  The right of Robert Moss to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1985 by Hodder and Stoughton

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Gogol Boulevard

  Chapter One – Discoveries

  Chapter Two – The Aquarium

  Chapter Three – Nikolsky’s Problem

  Chapter Four – Elaine

  Chapter Five – Living with Wolves

  Chapter Six – House of Lies

  Chapter Seven – Bangladesh

  Chapter Eight – Topchy’s Solution

  Chapter Nine – The Coup

  Chapter Ten – Nalivay!

  ‘The mouse dreams dreams that would terrify the cat.’

  Old Armenian Proverb

  Prologue: Gogol Boulevard

  ‘Insurrection is a machine that makes no noise.’

  Trotsky

  He looked crowded behind his desk, like a racehorse confined in a narrow stall. He was very tall, and powerfully built, and his eyes were the gray of Baltic waters, surrendering nothing of their depths. He seemed young to be wearing the shoulder boards of a Soviet major-general with his khaki uniform. Those who were close to him — and there were not many — called him Sasha. Others called him Alexander Sergeyovich or, more formally, General Preobrazhensky.

  He had reached the bottom of the stack of papers on his desk, going through them with the clipped exactitude of an automatic sheet-feeder. He initialed the last report, on army discipline in the Leningrad military district, and stared up at the pale yellow wall across the room. That was where the portrait of the last General Secretary had hung. It was taken down when he died, and the painters were sent round to touch up the faded oblong that was left underneath, so that no trace of the past remained. The authorities were meticulous about things like that.

  There was no portrait of the current General Secretary in Preobrazhensky’s office. To judge from the reports leaking out from Kuntsevo, where the best cardiac specialists available to the Kremlin clinic were gathered around his bedside, this was a sensible economy; it wouldn’t have hung for long. In its place was the standard icon of Lenin and an old photograph of the Defense Minister, thick and jowly even when it was taken.

  There were no books, no mementoes, not even a plaque from one of the Warsaw Pact divisions. You could have scoured that office for clues to the character of the man who occupied it, and learned solely that he was important enough to have a window overlooking Frunze Street, a direct line to the Chief of Staff, a small room at the back with a shower, a bed, and a row of hangers for his dress uniforms. There was only one oddity: among the uniforms was a civilian suit, a neat gray wool-and-polyester blend made in Canada for Brooks Brothers of New York.

  Sasha’s secretary, an army major, came in with a fresh stack of reports and requisitions, mostly addressed to the Chief of Staff, Marshal Zotov. The Marshal was not overly fond of paperwork. It fell to Preobrazhensky, as his personal assistant, to relieve Zotov of the tedium. Sasha drafted most of the orders that were issued over the Marshal’s signature. Sometimes, to spare his boss the burden of handling the documents, Sasha would sign them himself and scrawl p/p where Zotov’s autograph was supposed to appear. In Russian, these initials signified that the Chief of Staff had signed the original, which was assumed to be locked away in a safe somewhere.

  Preobrazhensky swore softly under his breath as he leafed through one of the new reports. It contained a psychiatric evaluation of an army commander he had come to know well when they served together against the Afghan guerrillas. The general had been relieved of his duties and hauled off to the notorious Serbsky psychiatric institute, where dissidents were passed off as lunatics or actually driven insane. The evidence of the general’s psychosis was that he had failed to accept the necessity of ordering his troops to fire on unarmed strikers during the labor troubles at the giant auto factory in Togliatti.

  The report recommended intensified medication. Treatments were scheduled to begin in two days’ time. One of the drugs specified was aminazin. Sasha was familiar with its effects. It replaced memory with a yawning black hole and eroded all the cognitive functions. After being treated with aminazin, even a Nobel laureate for literature would have trouble scanning the headlines of his hometown paper. The treatment prescribed for General Pavel Leybutin would transform him into a grinning vegetable. Then the people who had authorized it would be able to show him to the world to demonstrate that he had disobeyed not because of principle, but because he was off his head.

  Sasha scribbled a request to delay the new treatment for a period of one week so that the high command could pursue a further investigation of the general’s ‘anti-Soviet activities’ in his former military district. At the bottom, he put the letters p/p and his own signature. It was irregular, of course, for the General Staff to try to interfere in this way. Leybutin was now the property of the Committee for State Security. But all he needed was to hold things up for a while.

  A week will be plenty of time, Sasha told himself. If the bitches agree. His long surname sprawled across the paper like an arctic horizon. He called in his secretary and handed him the memo.

  ‘Ilya, give me a cigarette.’

  The major raised his eyebrows. In the months he had worked for General Preobrazhensky, he had never seen him smoke. He fished out a pack of coarse Russian cigarettes, and started making apologies for the brand.

  ‘Just give me a light.’ Impatient, Sasha got up from the desk and stood next to his secretary, towering over him.

  The major was nervous, and his first match sputtered out. Sasha took the box from him and lit the cigarette himself.

  ‘See that report gets processed immediately,’ he instructed his aide.

  Sasha started to prowl between desk and window. Seven floors below him, along the narrow strip of Frunze Street, a line of black staff cars snaked in front of the main entrance to the General Staff building, with its massive Grecian portico. Over to the right, the solid concrete bulk of the building that housed the stacks of the Lenin Library blocked out the domes of the Kremlin. To the left, Sasha could make out the star-shaped Arbat Skaya metro Station, constructed from polished red stone, and, beyond it, the surge of traffic and the double row of ugly tower blocks — the Dentures of Moscow, some wit had called them — along Kalinin Prospekt. Out of sight, under the leafless maples of Gogol Boulevard, pensioners were sitting in twos and threes on the benches, playing chess for a rouble in the thin light of autumn, watching the cars whizz by on either side, toward Kalinin Prospekt or the river.

  Preobrazhensky kept circling back to the lone black telephone on his desk, an old-fashioned rotary model with a row of buttons underneath.

  There should be word, he told himself. He pictured the General Secretary under the scalpel in the bright modern clinic hidden away in the birch woods behind what had once been Stalin’s hunting lodge. The man hadn’t made a public appearance in weeks. That had at least spared the people the embarrassment of listening to him wheezing his way through a speech, losing his place, garbling and jumbling the text until any sense was lost. Moscow was buzzing with rumors. In the beer-bars, you could hear people whispering that the General Secretary was already dead. ‘They’ were keeping the body on ice until they agreed on who was going to take over. Sasha knew better. It was actually the other way around. This time the men who were bent on sharing the succession weren’t waiting for the doctors to pronounce the General Secretary dead before they started dividing up the spoils
.

  The phone shrilled. The flashing light indicated that the call had come through on his direct outside line. He let it ring a second time before lifting the receiver.

  ‘Sasha?’ The voice at the other end was a full, rich baritone, the voice of a man who is always ready to burst into song and probably does not sing too badly.

  ‘Yes, Feliks.’

  ‘Sasha, it’s time. Bangladesh!’ The caller sounded positively elated, possibly a little drunk.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, there’s more trouble in Bangladesh,’ the caller amplified. He added: Not only that, but it’s nearly four o’clock and you haven’t bought me a drink yet. The sooner we get out of our offices, the better.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Preobrazhensky replied, adopting the same bantering tone. ‘I’ll try to think up a new alibi for Lydochka.’

  ‘Ty chto mumu yebyosh?’ the caller goaded him. ‘Why are you fucking a cow?’ This was his favorite invitation to proceed with the drinking. ‘Let’s get to it.’

  ‘All right,’ Sasha laughed. ‘Nalivay!’

  Preobrazhensky hung up, took a deep drag on the last of his cigarette, and mashed the butt into the plain glass ashtray beside the phone. His face was empty of expression.

  He did not call his friend Kolya over at the Aquarium — military intelligence headquarters — to ask for an update on Bangladesh. He was indifferent to whether one strongman had ousted another in that corner of South Asia. The message he had just received had nothing to do with that Bangladesh.

  He did call his wife, to tell her not to expect him for dinner. No, he could not say when he would be home; he would probably have to spend the night at the office because of something that had blown up. Lydia went through the motions of complaining. She always did. But he knew she would think nothing of it; it had happened often enough before. Certainly, the dialogue would sound natural enough to anyone from the Committee — the office euphemism for the KGB — who happened to be listening in.

  Sasha did not use the black telephone for his next call. Instead, he opened his safe. Inside was a special device that he had had installed only three days before by a military technician. It connected him to the residence of the commander of the special forces brigade at Kavrov, a smoky industrial city on the railroad east of Moscow. When Sasha lifted the handset, Olga — General Zaytsev’s wife — answered at once. There was a slight quaver in her voice, but Sasha knew the woman. She was doggedly loyal, a peasant at heart, like her husband. She would play her role.

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach Fedya,’ Preobrazhensky lied to her. ‘If you happen to talk to him before I do, please tell him Sasha called. Tell him the meeting we arranged cannot take place because our friend must leave immediately for Bangladesh.’ He stressed the last word, the unfamiliar one, to make sure she got it right.

  She did not ask him to repeat anything. As soon as he was finished, she hung up, without formalities.

  Sasha’s third call, on the black phone, was to the special forces base at Kavrov. All messages in and out of the base — by phone, telex, or cable — were monitored by the KGB.

  It took several minutes before Zaytsev was brought to the phone. He was breathing heavily, as if he had been putting himself through punishing physical exercise. Sasha could picture the man, bullnecked, broad-chested, sweating his way around the brutal obstacle course that ran through the pine forests, his arms swinging evenly, like pistons, reminding his recruits that he asked nothing of them he was not prepared to do himself.

  When he spoke to Zaytsev, Sasha was clipped and formal. His tone was that of higher authority dealing with a subordinate. Both men held the rank of major-general, but Sasha was the right arm of the Chief of Staff, and Zaytsev was just a brigade commander, a position held by colonels in most branches of the army. Listening in on the conversation, you would not have suspected that these men were friends.

  ‘The Chief of Staff wishes to know how the preparations for the exercises are coming along,’ Sasha began.

  ‘Comrade General,’ Zaytsev responded equally stiffly, in his low, gravelly voice, ‘everything is proceeding in accordance with standing orders. You can inform Comrade Marshal that he will be able to attend the exercise at the appointed time, one week from today.’

  ‘Good. I am sure you understand that the Marshal is extremely concerned that the maneuvers are executed without a hitch, one week from today.’ Sasha repeated Zaytsev’s phrase to be sure that the KGB monitors did not fail to grasp it. They were sometimes a little slow on the uptake.

  There was a curt exchange about transport arrangements, and then Preobrazhensky hung up abruptly. Another light on his phone had flashed on.

  He punched the button and said, ‘Yes, Comrade Marshal.’

  ‘Get in here immediately,’ Marshal Zotov growled. ‘We have a visitor. A friend from the Committee.’

  As Sasha marched along a corridor the width of a railway car, spotlessly clean under unremitting fluorescent lights, he tried to think of a reason why the KGB had called on the Chief of Staff — any reason except the one he feared most. He had not found a satisfactory answer by the time he reached the door to the Marshal’s office. The door was massive, like the man sitting behind it, oak covered with padded black leather designed to shut out eavesdroppers. The leather was deceptively soft to the touch, like the seat of an old studded chesterfield.

  The Marshal’s adjutant threw open the door, and Sasha’s whole body tensed as if he had just walked into an ambush. Marshal Zotov sat at his desk, his huge arms folded across his chest. His expression suggested he was trying to prevent himself from committing an act of violence with them.

  Lolling in an armchair on the far side of the room, his face turned toward the window, was a man of medium height with the blue tabs of the KGB on his uniform and a colonel’s badges of rank. He affected not to have noticed the new arrival.

  Sasha had seen this man only once before, in the bar of the Bega restaurant at the Moscow Hippodrome, where successful gamblers drank to their wins and others to obliterate their losses. But the colonel’s face was etched on his memory, the lines traced in acid.

  It was an unremarkable face, undistinguished by any signs of more than average intelligence. The eyes were small and bright and hard, like a jackdaw’s. The features did not seem big enough for the pendulous head; they might have been molded from moist putty. The ears were large, but fitted tightly against the cranium, as if the man had spent most of his life pressed up against keyholes. It was an ageless kind of face, but Sasha knew the man was over sixty. It was not a face to inspire fear, under normal circumstances, just a mildly unpleasant reaction. It was a face that, in a different society, might have belonged to the night clerk at the kind of flophouse where they rent rooms by the hour.

  But for Sasha, this ordinary-looking man was the human symbol of tragedies that had misshapen his youth, deprived him of the possibility of a normal life, and set him on a course that, in the space of twenty-four hours, would end in something almost beyond imagining, an event that would convulse all of Russia — or in the squalor of his own arrest and execution. As he watched Colonel Topchy, Preobrazhensky was certain that, at that moment, the man was a lethal weapon pointed at him. Knotted inside, his adrenaline pumping, the young general still betrayed no outward emotion.

  Marshal Zotov made the introductions.

  ‘Oh yes, General Preobrazhensky. Assigned to the General Staff for Special Missions.’ As Topchy recited Sasha’s official title, he made no effort to conceal the edge of sarcasm in his voice. ‘You have developed quite a reputation in the Third Directorate.’ The Third Directorate of the KGB — Topchy’s section — was charged with spying on the armed forces. It was Topchy’s men who listened in on Sasha’s phone calls. Their power was such that there was nothing incongruous about Topchy, nominally a colonel, dropping in on the Chief of Staff.

  ‘Colonel Topchy is here on some very delicate business,’ the Marshal explained.

  Sash
a scanned the Marshal’s face for guidance. Had there been a leak? Had the operation he had set in motion with his phone call to Zaytsev’s house already been betrayed?

  The Marshal looked confident enough behind his desk, a commanding physical presence, magnificently ugly.

  ‘Our friends from the Committee’ — Zotov’s sideways glance at Topchy was less than friendly — ‘have nominated a new chief for the special unit at Kavrov. A careful and sober man, we are told.’

  Topchy’s department had ‘special units,’ or otdeli, attached to military commands throughout the Soviet Bloc. Zaytsev’s command, the Spetsnaz brigade at Kavrov, rated its own KGB section. A curious incident had taken place at Kavrov a couple of weeks before. The head of the KGB unit responsible for keeping tabs on Zaytsev’s men had broken his neck, apparently in a fall from the tower that was used for parachute training. The circumstances looked fishy; the KGB man was no kind of athlete. At the same time, he had earned a considerable reputation as a zakhleba, a guzzler. And the autopsy showed he had consumed more than a liter of vodka before the accident. The provisional verdict was accidental death while under the influence of alcohol. Topchy’s presence in the Marshal’s office suggested that the Third Directorate was not satisfied with this conclusion. The appointment of a new chief for the KGB section of Kavrov was, after all, a routine business. It did not require a meeting with the Chief of Staff, or even his assistant.

  The drift of the conversation served to deepen Sasha’s suspicions. Colonel Topchy wasted little time talking about Kavrov. When he turned to Sasha, you could hear him working the gears. His manner, at first cold and sarcastic, became exaggeratedly cordial. He complimented Preobrazhensky on his work and on past assignments, dwelling on the time Sasha had spent in the United States on intelligence missions. He threw out some odd, offhanded questions about Sasha’s opinions about the Americans. Sasha began to feel that the KGB man was less interested in what had happened to his spy in Kavrov than in feeling both of them out. There was a treacherous undertow in his words, most forceful when he was most agreeable on the surface.