Jack Ryan 5 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin (30 page)

The President stood and walked to the windows behind his desk. They were very thick, to protect him from people with guns. They could not protect him against the duties of his office. He looked at the south lawn, but found no answers. He turned back.

“I don't know. Arthur, you can get your assets in place, but I want your word that nothing will happen without my authorization. No mistakes, no initiative, no action at all without my say-so. I'm going to need time on this one. We have time, don't we?”

“Yes, sir. It will take several more days before we have the pieces in place.”

“I'll let you know when I make my decision.” He shook hands with both men and watched them leave. The President had five more minutes before his next appointment, and used the time to visit the bathroom that adjoins the office. He wondered if there were any underlying symbolism in the act of washing his hands, or did he just want the excuse to look at himself in the mirror? And you're supposed to be the man with all the fucking answers! the image told him. You don't even know why you went to the bathroom! The President smiled at that. It was funny, funny in a way that few other men would ever understand.

“So what the hell do I tell Foley?” Ritter snapped twenty minutes later.

“Back off, Bob,”
Moore
warned. “He's thinking about it. We don't need an immediate decision, and a 'maybe' beats hell out of a 'no.' ”

“Sorry, Arthur. It's just that—damn it, I've tried to get him to come out before. We can't let this man go down.”

“I'm sure he won't make a final decision until I've had a chance to talk with him again. For the moment, tell Foley to continue the mission. And I want a fresh look at Narmonov's political vulnerability. I get the impression that Alexandrov may be on the way out—he's too old to take over from the current man; the Politburo wouldn't stand for replacing a relatively young man with an old one, not after the death parade they had a few years back. Who does that leave?”

“Gerasimov,” Ritter said at once. “Two others may be in the running, but he's the ambitious one. Ruthless, but very, very smooth. The Party bureaucracy likes him because he did such a nice job on the dissidents. And if he wants to make a move, it'll have to be pretty soon. If the arms agreement goes through, Narmonov gains a lot of prestige, and the political clout that goes with it. If Alexandrov isn't careful, he'll miss the boat entirely, get moved out himself, and Narmonov will have his seat nice and safe for years.”

“That'll take at least five years to accomplish,” Admiral Greer noted, speaking for the first time. “He may not have five years. We do have those indications that Alexandrov may be on the way out. If that's more than a rumor, it might force his hand.”

Judge Moore looked up at the ceiling. “It sure would be easier to deal with the bastards if they had a predictable way of running things.” Of course, we have it, and they can't predict us.

“Cheer up, Arthur,” Greer said. “If the world made sense, we'd all have to find honest work.”

Changes

P
ASSAGE
through the
Kattegat
is a tricky affair for a submarine, doubly so when it is necessary to be covert. The water is shallow there, too shallow to run submerged. The channels can be tricky in daylight. They are worse at night, and worse still without a pilot. Since
Dallas
' passage was supposedly a secret one, a pilot was out of the question.

Mancuso rode the bridge. Below, his navigator sweated at the chart table while a chief quartermaster manned the periscope and called out bearings to various landmarks. They couldn't even use radar to help with navigation, but the periscope had a low-light amplifier, which didn't quite turn night to day, but at least made the starless darkness look like twilight. The weather was a gift, with low clouds and sleet that restricted visibility just enough that the low, dark shape of the 688-class submarine would be difficult to spot from land. The Danish Navy knew of the submarine's transit, and had a few small craft out to ward off any possible snoopers—there were none—but aside from that,
Dallas
was on her own.

“Ship on the port bow,” a lookout called.

“I got him,” Mancuso answered at once. He held a pistol-like light-amplifying scope and saw the medium-sized container ship. The odds, he thought, made it an East Bloc vessel. Within a minute, the course and speed of the inbound ship were plotted, with a CPA—Closest Point of Approach—of seven hundred yards. The Captain swore and gave his orders.

Dallas
had her running lights on—the Danes had insisted on it. The rotating amber one above the masthead light marked her positively as a submarine. Aft, a seaman struck down the American flag and replaced it with a Danish one.

“Everybody look Scandinavian,” Mancuso noted wryly.

“Ja-ja, Kept'n,” a junior officer chuckled in the darkness. It would be hard for him. He was black. “Slow bearing change on our friend. He isn't altering course that I can tell, sir. Look—”

“Yeah, I see 'em.” Two of the Danish craft were racing forward to interpose themselves between the container ship and
Dallas
. Mancuso thought that would help. All cats are gray at night, and a submarine on the surface looks like . . . a submarine on the surface, a black shape with a vertical sail.

“I think she's Danish,” the Lieutenant observed. “Yeah, I got the funnel now. Maersk Line.”

The two ships closed at a rate of a half a mile per minute. Mancuso turned to watch, keeping his scope on the ship's bridge. He saw no special activity. Well, it was three in the morning. The bridge crew had a tough navigating job to do, and probably their interest in his submarine was the same as his main interest in their merchantman—please don't hit me, you idiot. It was over surprisingly fast, and then he was staring at her stern light. It occurred to Mancuso that having the lights on was probably a good idea. If they'd been blacked out and then spotted, greater notice might have been taken.

They were in the
Baltic Sea
proper an hour later, on a course of zero-six-five, using the deepest water they could find as
Dallas
picked his way east. Mancuso took the navigator into his stateroom and together they plotted the best approach to, and the safest place on, the Soviet coast. When they'd selected it, Mr. Clark joined them, and together the three discussed the delicate part of the mission.

In an ideal world, Vatutin thought wryly, they would take their worries to the Defense Minister, and he would cooperate fully with the KGB investigation. But the world was not ideal. In addition to the expected institutional rivalries, Yazov was in the pocket of the General Secretary and knew of the differences of opinion between Gerasimov and Narmonov. No, the Defense Minister would either take over the entire investigation through his own security arm, or use his political power to close the case entirely, lest KGB disgrace Yazov himself for having a traitor for an aide, and so endanger Narmonov.

If Narmonov fell, at best the Defense Minister would go back to being the Soviet Army's chief of personnel; more likely, he'd be retired in quiet humiliation after the removal of his patron. Even if the General Secretary managed to survive the crisis, Yazov would be the sacrificial goat, just as Sokolov had been so recently. What choice did Yazov have?

The Defense Minister was also a man with a mission. Under the cover of the “restructuring” initiative of the General Secretary, Yazov hoped to use his knowledge of the officer corps to remake the Soviet Army—in the hope, supposedly, of professionalizing the entire military community. Narmonov said that he wanted to save the Soviet economy, but no less an authority than Alexandrov, the high priest of Marxism-Leninism, said that he was destroying the purity of the Party itself. Yazov wanted to rebuild the military from the ground up. It would also have the effect, Vatutin thought, of making the Army personally loyal to Narmonov.

That worried Vatutin. Historically, the Party had used the KGB to keep the military under control. After all, the military had all the guns, and if it ever awoke to its power and felt the loosening of Party control . . . it was too painful a concept on which to dwell. An army loyal exclusively to the General Secretary rather than the Party itself was even more painful to Vatutin, since it would change the relationship the KGB had to Soviet society as a whole. There could then be no check on the General Secretary. With the military behind him, he could break KGB to his will and use it to “restructure” the entire Party. He would have the power of another Stalin.

How did I ever start along this line?
Vatutin asked himself. I'm a counterintelligence officer, not a Party theorist. For all his life, Colonel Vatutin had never dwelt on the Big Issues of his country. He'd trusted his superiors to handle the major decisions and allow him to handle the small details. No longer. By being taken into Chairman Gerasimov's confidence he was now inextricably allied with the man. It had happened so easily! Virtually overnight—you have to be noticed to get general's stars, he thought with a sardonic smile. You always wanted to get noticed. So, Klementi Vladimirovich, you got yourself noticed all right. Now look where you are!

Right in the middle of a power play between the KGB Chairman and the General Secretary himself.

It was actually quite funny, he told himself. He knew it would be less so if Gerasimov miscalculated—but the crowning irony of all was that if the KGB Chairman fell, then the liberal influences already put in place by Narmonov would protect Vatutin, who was, after all, merely doing the job assigned him by his duly appointed superiors. He didn't think that he'd be imprisoned, much less shot, as had once been the case. His advancement would be at an end. He'd find himself demoted, running the KGB regional office at Omsk, or the least pleasant opening they could find, never again to return to Moscow Center.

That wouldn't be so bad, he thought. On the other hand, if Gerasimov succeeded . . . head of “Two” perhaps? And that wouldn't be very bad at all.

And you actually believed that you could advance your career without becoming “political.”
But that was no longer an option. If he tried to get out, he'd be disgraced. Vatutin was trapped, and knew it. The only way out was to do his job to the best of his ability.

The revery ended as he turned back to his reports. Colonel Bondarenko was totally clean, he thought. His record had been examined and reexamined, and there was nothing to indicate that he was anything less than a patriot and an above-average officer. Filitov is the one, Vatutin thought. As insane as it seemed on the surface, this decorated hero was a traitor.

But how the hell do we prove that? How do we even investigate it properly without the cooperation of the Defense Minister? That was the other rub. If he failed in his investigation, then Gerasimov would not look kindly upon his career; but the investigation was hindered by political constraints imposed by the Chairman. Vatutin remembered the time he'd almost been passed over for promotion to major and realized how unlucky he'd been when the promotion board had changed its mind.

Oddly, it did not occur to him that all his problems resulted from having a KGB Chairman with political ambition. Vatutin summoned his senior officers. They arrived in a few minutes.

“Progress on Filitov?” he asked.

“Our best people are shadowing him,” a middle-level officer answered. “Six of them round the clock. We're rotating schedules so that he doesn't see the same faces very often, if at all. We now have continuous television surveillance all around his apartment block, and half a dozen people check the tapes every night. We've stepped up coverage of suspected American and British spies, and of their diplomatic communities in general. We're straining our manpower and risking counterdetection, but there's no avoiding that. About the only new thing I have to report is that Filitov talks in his sleep occasionally—he's talking to somebody named Romanov, it sounds like. The words are too distorted to understand, but I have a speech pathologist working on it, and we may get something. In any case, Filitov can't fart without our knowing it. The only thing we can't do is maintain continuous visual contact without getting our people in too close. Every day, turning a corner or entering a shop, he's out of sight for five to fifteen seconds—long enough to make a brush-pass or a dead-drop. Nothing I can do about that unless you want us to risk alerting him.”

Vatutin nodded. Even the best surveillance had its limitations.

“Oh, there is one odd thing,” the Major said. “Just learned about it yesterday. About once a week or so, Filitov takes the burn-bag down to the incinerator chute himself. It's so routine there that the man in the destruct room forgot to tell us until last evening. He's a youngster, and came in himself to report it—after hours, and in civilian clothes. Bright boy. It turns out that Filitov looked after the installation of the system, years back. I checked the plans myself, nothing out of the way. Completely normal installation, just like what we have here. And that's all. For all practical purposes the only unusual thing about the subject is that he ought to be retired by now.”

“What of the Altunin investigation?” Vatutin asked next.

Another officer opened his notebook. “We've no idea where he was before being killed. Perhaps he was hiding out alone somewhere, perhaps he was protected by friends whom we have been unable to identify. We've established no correlation between his death and the movement of foreigners. He was carrying nothing incriminating except some false papers that looked amateurishly done, but probably good enough for the outlying republics. If he was murdered by CIA, it was a remarkably complete job. No loose ends. None.”

“Your opinions?”

“The Altunin case is a dead end,” the Major answered. “There are still a half-dozen things that we have to check out, but none has the least promise of an important break.” He paused for a moment. “Comrade . . .”

“Go on.”

“I believe this was a coincidence. I think Altunin was the victim of a simple murder, that he tried to get aboard the wrong railcar at the wrong time. I have no evidence to point to, but that is how it feels to me.”

Vatutin considered that. It took no small amount of moral courage for an officer of the Second Chief Directorate to say that he was not on a counterespionage case.

“How sure are you?”

“We'll never be sure, Comrade Colonel, but if CIA had done the murder, would they not have disposed of the body— or, if they were trying to use his death to protect a highly placed spy, why not leave evidence to implicate him as a totally separate case? There were no false flags left behind, even though this would seem the place to do so.”

“Yes, we would have done that. A good point. Run down all your leads anyway.”

“Of course, Comrade Colonel. Four to six days, I think.”

“Anything else?” Vatutin asked. Heads shook negatively. “Very well, return to your sections, Comrades.”

She'd do it at the hockey game, Mary Pat Foley thought. C
ARDINAL
would be there, alerted by a wrong-number telephone call from a pay phone. She'd make the pass herself. She had three film cassettes in her purse, and a simple handshake would do it. Her son played on this junior-league team, as did Filitov's grand-nephew, and she went to every game. It would be unusual if she didn't go, and the Russians depended on people to stick to their routines. She was being followed. She knew it. Evidently the Russians had stepped up surveillance, but the shadow she rated wasn't all that good—or at least they were using the same one on her, and Mary Pat knew when she saw a face more than once in a day.

Mary Patricia Kaminskiy Foley had typically muddled American ancestry, though some aspects of it had been left off her passport documents. Her grandfather had been an equerry to the House of Romanov, had taught the Crown Prince Aleksey to ride—no small feat since the youngster was tragically stricken with hemophilia, and the utmost caution had needed to be exercised. That had been the crowning achievement of an otherwise undistinguished life. He'd been a failure as an Army officer, though friends at court had ensured his advancement to colonel. All that had accomplished was the utter destruction of his regiment in the
Tannenberg
Forests
, and his capture by the Germans—and his survival past 1920. Upon learning that his wife had died in the revolutionary turmoil that followed the First World War, he'd never returned to Russia—he always called it Russia— and eventually drifted to the United States, where he'd settled in the suburbs of New York and remarried after establishing a small business. He'd lived to the ripe old age of ninety-seven, outliving even a second wife twenty years his junior, and Mary Pat never forgot his rambling stories. On entering college and majoring in history, she learned better, of course. She learned that the Romanovs were hopelessly inept, their court irredeemably corrupt. But one thing she'd never forget was the way her grandfather wept when he got to the part about how Aleksey, a brave, determined young man, and his entire family had been shot like dogs by the Bolsheviks. That one story, repeated to her a hundred times, gave Mary Pat a view of the
Soviet Union
which no amount of time or academic instruction or political realism could ever erase. Her feelings for the government which ruled her grandfather's land were completely framed by the murder of Nicholas II, his wife, and his five children. Intellect, she told herself in reflective moments, had very little to do with the way people feel.