The Falstaff Enigma (26 page)

The question brought Borskov back to the present dilemma. His mind shifted quickly, regaining its intensity in an instant. "Did you ever mention to her that we were watching Sorovin? Think hard."

"I don't know." David was very uncomfortable and wanted nothing more than to leave the room. "I guess I mentioned it."

"What did you say?"

"I just asked her if she knew anything about Leonid Sorovin."

"Of course she said 'no
’."

"Of course."

"When did you ask her?"

"The day before we began the surveillance."

"Good enough. Just before I left to join you and Nikolai on the morning we were taking Sorovin, I told her I was 'going fishing.' She knew what I meant and she knew who. I think she placed the phone call to Sorovin."

"There is a way to check. There must be telephone records you can look at."

"I have already tried that, but unfortunately the computer that tracks the calls has been inoperative for a week. The spare parts have to come from America."

David stiffened as he recalled a conversation with Svetlana the previous afternoon. He had thought nothing of her questions at the time, but in retrospect he realized she had been
interrogating him with professional subtlety. And he had revealed the name of Yuri Savitsky.

"What is it, David?"

"I mentioned Savitsky's name to her yesterday without even realizing it."

"The evidence builds," murmured Borskov.

"But it's all highly circumstantial. The name could have been given away when you signed out his file yesterday."

"I only have to sign in before I enter the vault. I never wrote down the man's name."

"How do we confirm this?”

"I have a way. It will take planning and much better coordination than we have had so far."

The colonel explained his plan and David agreed. It would settle the question of Svetlana one way or the other. The problem was that if Svetlana were innocent, then the plan would spook Nikolai into running. Either way, they would soon know.

"Afterwards, if Nikolai is loyal, I want the th
ree of you to find another flat. All you need do is go to any address in the city and show your identification. If they have a room and aren't Party members then they will give you a room, no questions asked." Borskov stepped to the bedroom door and started to open it. He paused. "David, I fear what we may find as much as you do."

As David started to walk back to Austin and Nikolai, he paused
and looked Borskov in the eye. “I need to know how you will handle this if the worst is confirmed.”

“Will I kill my wife?” replied the colonel sarcastically. “No, Mr. Margolis. I will not kill my wife. We will either use her for our purposes or send her someplace for a few weeks.”

That was all David needed to hear. He turned and walked out without saying another word.

By the time Svetlana Borskov emerged from the bedroom, Anatoly had already dressed and was finishing a hastily prepared breakfast. The woman glanced out the kitchen window, trying to get her tired eyes to focus properly. She had not slept well the night before. She had sensed the restlessness in the man next to her, the restlessness that only meant that her husband was uncertain of a future outcome. No matter what the stress, if he felt that he was controlling destiny, then he was calm. If destiny controlled him, then – and only then – he knew fear.

"Where are the men this morning?" she asked into the open refrigerator she was now inspecting.

"They've gone out for the morning." The colonel's voice had the same finality it always had when she asked him about business. Anatoly wanted to pique her curiosity, but he couldn't tell whether he had an effect. He knew that the mere fact the men weren't there at this early hour would make her fall for the ruse he was about to implement.

Svetlana sat down at the table with a half grapefruit on her plate. The breakfast delicacy was a treat available only to the families of top Party officials. That knowledge made her enjoy the fruit all the more.

"Svetlana, I would like for you to buy me two white shirts today if you go shopping." The man's words were formal, just an extension of their businesslike marriage.

But the words were what Nikolai had been listening for over the hidden transmitter system the men were using. He Immediately began dialing the number that would ring the apartment’s phone.

"I don't know if I'll get to GUM today," replied the woman.

"Well, if you do get there then ..." the telephone rang “… please buy them for me." The colonel folded the paper in front of him and stood to walk the few steps to the phone.

"Borskov here," said the colonel after he had placed the receiver against his ear. He was silent for about fifteen seconds as the underling delivered his well-rehearsed lines. "Good. You've got a green light." Borskov replaced the phone and returned to his seat.

A smile came to his face. "We've got a new fish to net now," he said defiantly. He clinched his right fist and shook it in the air in mock victory. Then he walked into the living room to wait.

He had detected nothing in her face except puzzlement.

Ten minutes later Svetlana walked past the living room on her way to the front door. She was wearing her favorite jeans with a pink long-sleeved button-down shirt. An oversized purse hung from her left shoulder.

“I'm going shopping. I'll be back later."

"See you tonight." The colonel caught a glimpse of her face as she closed the door. She had no make-up on and that simple fact confirmed all his suspicions. She simply wouldn't go out without make-up unless there was an overriding urgency.

"Everybody in place, we're underway," said Borskov into his hidden microphone.

Robert Austin stood in the doorway of a building across the street from the entrance to Borskov's apartment building. He had to extend his head around the corner in order to see the doorway that the woman would soon use. On a side street David and Nikolai sat in a standard issue sedan. They had tapped the phone line of the phone booth closest to the
colonel's building on the way to the Moscow Metro. A small receiver sat on David's lap. It was connected directly to a tape recorder. In the back seat lay a small array of electronic gadgets.

Svetlana Borskov stepped down the few steps and paused on the empty sidewalk. She reached up and adjusted the strap of her purse to a more secure position on her shoulder. She glanced in each direction, confident that she was alone on the street. Turning to her right she began walking. She was headed for the Metro.

“All is as predicted,” said Robert to the three other unseen men.

The woman’s pace was fast. She was intent on reaching an untold destination. As she approached the telephone booth, Austin waited for her to slow down. But she did not slow down at all; she walked past it without the slightest hesitation.

"Trouble, target has bypassed the reception area," said the analyst in an excited voice.

"Hold off," came the immediate reply from the colonel. "There's one more reception
area before boarding. But be discreet."

Austin gave her a block and a half lead before stepping onto the sidewalk and following. He wore a hat and a false moustache, but he realized that distance would be the sole determinant of whether or not the woman discovered the surveillance. "What do we do now?"
the analyst asked into his collar.

"We have the answer here," replied David. He was holding a two foot long microphone and plugging it into the tape recorder he had been using before. "Just let us know when target is twenty feet from reception area."

"Will do." Austin kept walking, the distance between the woman and himself widening.

They had walked two more blocks when the analyst saw the next telephone booth standing in front of the Metro entrance. It was on his side of the street, the side opposite from Svetlana. She was about seventy feet from the booth when she started to cross the street.

"Time to move," said Austin. He headed up the first steps he came to and disappeared into a convenient foyer.

Nikolai put the car into gear and pulled out onto the street. He reached the corner in seconds and turned right. Four blocks ahead they could see the beautiful woman as she crossed over to the side of the street that had both the telephone booth and the entrance to the city's underground transportation network.

David Margolis felt an emotional distance he would have thought impossible the day before. Had he been used by this woman? A woman he took for a naïve, frustrated wife? He had felt her sincerity so deeply, but had he allowed his emotions – his lust – to cloud his judgment? He would know in moments, and he feared his reaction to the answer. For his entire adult life he had been unable to fully trust anyone other than his professional colleagues. He had suspended his distrust for another woman in Moscow and regretted it. Now that distrust seemed destined to be justified yet again, propelling David further away from a life he dreamed of. His feelings vanished at the sight he next saw.

Svetlana Borskov stopped in front of the telephone booth. She looked back for the first time since emerging from her building and failed to
heed the sedan that pulled over to the side of the road a block and a half away. Otherwise, the street was empty. She opened the door and stepped inside.

Nikolai pulled over about 80 meters short of the phone booth. He turned off the engine
and stepped out of the car to walk into a building. He was not sure whether the woman had seen them and was providing the cover that David needed. The Mossad agent had the long microphone resting on the hood of the car, his right arm leaning on the open windowsill of the door, controlling the high-tech device. He lifted the muzzle of the microphone off the hood and zeroed in on the small booth. With his left hand he adjusted the volume on the tape recorder machine until he was satisfied with the level being produced. He played with the microphone until he heard the sounds that told him he was on target. From the machine came the sharp clinking of metal against metal as the woman inserted a coin into the phone. David was astonished at the clarity of the sound, as if he were there beside her.

Svetlana picked up the receiver and dialed the number given to her two days earlier. The rotary phone system was slow by touch-tone standards, but it produced sounds that made it possible to know exactly what number had been dialed. Those sounds were now safely imprinted on the tape in David's machine.

There were three rings before the call was answered. Silence greeted the caller.

"The weather is nice here and I have some news," said Svetlana, using the code words she had been taught two months before. Still there was silence from the other end. "He is pursuing a new possibility right now, but I have no name."

"Get the name," came the reply. The voice was calm and confident, the voice of a killer.

"I will, I swear it."

"What else?”

"That's all.”

The killer hung up. The woman's usefulness had been expended for the day. She returned the receiver to its cradle and stepped out of the booth, continuing her trek to the department stores downtown.

"Marshal, the Byelorussian Military District has attained a ninety per cent operational status. I am proud to say that this is the highest readiness since the Great Patriotic War." The Army general stood erect as he addressed his commanding officer. The general's voice was full of pride; he would follow the marshal into hell.

"How many of our units are now in East Germany?" the marshal
asked.

"About one third, sir," replied General Ivan Maslov. "That is usual for the July maneuvers. But next week when we release our Helsinki report to NATO, we will announce a very large maneuver. This will give us the excuse to move another third of our units into East Germany before October Day. We have stockpiled enough oil throughout Poland to keep our armored units running for one month. I am confident that we will catch NATO off balance."

"Very good, Ivan." Marshal Anton Timolenko looked at the map on his wall. His mind raced over every detail, searching for any flaw, any crack that could mean failure. He could think of only a couple, but they would be taken care of well before July Fourth – October Day.

The marshal put his finger on the black dot on the map that signified the beautiful East German town of Wünsdorf, just south of Berlin. It was now the headquarters of the "Group of Soviet Forces in Germany," the huge Soviet
Army group that occupied East Germany and acted as the first line of defense against the threatening Western powers. "I will be very nervous until you are firmly in command of the GSFG. 'Blue five' had his chance to join us and soon he will realize the error of his choice."

The marshal went to his executive-sized chair and sat down. He closed his eyes and let the melodic chords of Beethoven invade his consciousness, but for only a moment.

"You remember that day in 1941, don't you, Ivan?" asked Marshal Timolenko rhetorically. "June 22. Sunday. I was in Kiev, and on that day all the factory workers were gathered in Stalin Square for a festival. I was excited and arrived at 0900, searching for the girl who worked as a typist in my factory. I was going to marry her. At least that's what I kept telling myself." He frowned faintly as he struggled to remember that which had been so utterly destroyed. He was no longer sure if the face he had in his mind was accurate or just a idealized dream.

His face saddened and then angered as he continued. "Only an hour had passed when the Latvian band stop
ped playing in the middle of a waltz. A young man was frantically running around the stage, searching for some type of bullhorn. He finally found one of those old paper cones and stood up in the center of that stage. I still remember those words as if it was this morning: 'Comrades, please listen,' he shouted. The band stopped and the crowd was quiet in no time. We could sense the panic and the pride in his voice. 'Comrades, the fascists of Germany have invaded our beloved country this morning with all their might. We are now in a struggle in which victory is inevitable, but the Motherland needs you! Return now to your families, but every strong man between 18 and 55 should meet right here tomorrow morning so that we can immediately join the fight to save our great revolution!” His eyes were closed, his mind was reliving a moment that could never recede from his memory.

“The next morning I was there with at least 40,000 others. Within two months I was a private in action in the Pripet Marshes. My unit was overrun, but I survived and escaped capture with a few other soldiers. Six months later we had formed a ragtag group of 500 partisans and by 1944
, I commanded this group, which had grown to over 70,000 men and women." The marshal was far off, yet the memories were vivid. They formed the structure of his life.

"And we paid the price." His voice grew louder. “We spilled our blood to end the Nazi madness! While twenty million brave Russians died, the damned Americans sat back and waited. They waited until the fascist pigs were already beaten and then they sent in their forces to proclaim a glorious victory." He had risen to his feet, although he wasn't aware of it. His eyes saw only the battlefields of four decades
earlier.

"And they took Western Europe, which was rightfully ours. They took it away from us so they could rebuild the fascist parties and rearm those who would wish us dead.

"But now the unfinished war shall be finished, and Europe shall be liberated for all time. The Americans will realize the zeal that we command through justice." He stepped over to the wall map and slapped his open right palm against the paper, his hand covering most of Western Europe. "Ivan, we have waited forty years too long, but we will finally finish the inevitable, only this time it will be the fascists who will be caught off guard."

The marshal walked over to a small cabinet by the office door. He pulled out a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. “A toast to victory'"

"And to those brave soldiers who will give their lives for victory." The glasses were raised, the intoxicating substance consumed.

"And to the bastards who took away my command," the marshal
continued. He had been the commander-in-chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany until a year earlier. In that position he had known true power. It was the only Army group command in the Soviet military where the title was "commander-in-chief" instead of just "commander," and the only command where the commander either had the rank of marshal when given the command or was promoted to marshal shortly thereafter. Some of the men who had held the position before included Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Sokolovsky, Marshal Grechko, Marshal Zakharov, and Marshal Kulikov. All of them were legends in Soviet military history and all went on to higher positions such as chief of the general staff or minister of defense.

In the next great war, it was expected that the commander-in-chief of the GSFG would become the commander of the Western Strategic Direction, thereby directly commanding the war against NATO.

And this was the destiny of Marshal Anton Timolenko. He had first realized it ten years before when he became the commander of the Kiev Military District. He grew friendly with many members of the Politburo and became known for his conservative defense of party dogma and his ability to spur loyalty from his subordinates. After six years in Kiev, he was transferred to East Germany and the command he knew would be his.

He immediately pushed for a build-up of Soviet forces in response to what he saw as a massive rearmament campaign in the West. "We watched as Hitler and his gang of thugs built up their military. All the while, we sat back and duped ourselves into thinking Hitler was only interested in Austria and the Sudetenland. Fools!" These were the words he used on one and all, sometimes feeling that he was on a one-man campaign against the ignorance and complacency caused by the enchantment of his leaders with the toys of the capitalist West. They had been subverted and had forgotten their own people – and he hated them for this.

Then it happened – one of those random events thrown into one's life that offers the chance to pursue destiny. Two American F-4 Phantoms outfitted for reconnaissance had crossed over the border and flown forty miles into East Germany before returning. The lead fighter's navigation computer had malfunctioned, but it did not matter. The opportunity was there and Marshal Timolenko had to seize it.

It was April 15, 1982 and the harsh winter had seen its last heavy snowfalls. The warm temperatures of the previous couple of weeks had done their magic. The snows had largely melted and the timing was now perfect for an armored thrust across the plains of Northern Europe. Fate had played its hand and delivered the perfect timing to the man with the perfect instrument of war at his command. He was equal to the task.

Within thirty minutes he had ordered his forces to Defense Posture Three, which meant that all units should be on a war footing within ten hours. Reports were quickly dispatched to Moscow, relating the American intrusion and documenting the other NATO war "preparations" of the preceding twenty-four hours. The firestorm was ignited, the debate heated and deadly and confined to the highest circles of the Soviet infrastructure.

The wires between Moscow and Wünsdorf were suddenly alive, demands for more information followed by sketchy retorts eliciting further demands for amplification and clarification. Timolenko was in a race against time; he had to raise the level of tension between East and West before the bureaucracy of the Politburo interjected some caution into these events. He was counting on the U.S. to intercept and correctly interpret these messages, hoping to provoke NATO forces into a mobilization. He even ordered an adjutant to send out a couple of incendiary messages to his subordinates using an old code that he assu
med had long since been broken.

The Stavka – the Chief Military Council or high command of the Armed Forces – mulled over the contrived facts only superficially before endorsing Timolenko's decision about an hour before General Secretary Brezhnev could return from his weekend dacha and convene the Politburo. T
he general secretary was then 75 years old and everyone knew his health was failing fast. Mikhail Suslov, who was exercising control over the Politburo as Brezhnev’s health declined the previous fall, had died unexpectedly in January 1982. The Politburo was reduced to a gang of sycophants all lusting over who would replace Brezhnev – each ready to stab the other in the back. The country was rudderless. Timolenko considered all of this to be part of the plan that fate had delivered in his lap.

Time was working for the Marshal. He had gained the support of his commanders and was confident he would be ordering his troops across the Elbe River within a day. The Politburo would squabble endlessly, as they always did, and soon learn that events were beyond their control. Destiny would be fulfilled.

But General Secretary Brezhnev acted with a decisiveness he had rarely displayed over the prior year. He arrived at the Kremlin and immediately called in the old marshals and generals that he knew were loyal – the ones that Timolenko knew advocated mollifying the West. The old men rallied around their leader, all of them content with the bourgeois trappings that surrounded them and defined their weaknesses.

Most important, the general secretary had convinced Andropov of the insanity of war with the West. With Andropov at his side, Brezhnev controlled the KGB, and that meant that they controlled the reins. Before Timolenko's forces had awakened from their peacetime slumber, three marshals of the Stavka were under arrest. Their retirements were reported a week later and their deaths rumored a week after that.

The new commander of soviet land forces was on the phone with Timolenko three hours after the first wire had been sent to the Stavka. Timolenko had underestimated his opposition and had lost his race against time. His hand shook as his new commander told him to order his forces to a normal standing.
How could I have been wrong? How could it have slipped from my grasp?

Marshal Timolenko was never sure why he was spared. He had a theory that one of his supporters in the Stavka had contrived an intricate lie to cover his role as instigator. Or maybe he had a secret ally high up in the Politburo or the KGB? Whatever the reason, he received his transfer to the Byelorussian Military District the next day. He had been spared. Destiny had interceded to allow for another chance.

The toll on Brezhnev was more clear. In early May he suffered a serious stroke. He lingered until November 10 as nothing more than a zombie. If fate gave him a second chance, Timolenko told himself, he would not underestimate the old guard. He would control the reins of power, leaving nothing to chance.

A year had passed and the time to seize his destiny was painfully close.

"Enter."

The corporal opened the door just enough to insert the upper half of his body into the marshal's sanctum. Timolenko was always amazed at how young his soldiers appeared. He had a hard time believing that this corporal had yet gone through puberty, even though he knew the boy was at least eighteen.

“Sir, you have a ‘blue-one’ call on the line,” said the young soldier. He slipped out of the room quickly, not waiting for a reply.

The marshal waited until a small light began flashing on the phone on the right of a
group of three. In seconds the small bubble on the phone's face emitted a soft white glow. The marshal picked up the handset. "Blue one?"

"Yes, sir." Sorovin's voice was immediately recognized by the marshal. "Blue-five will be eliminated three days from now."

"Good. How will you do it?"

"A flying accident."

"You have the go-ahead. What about our friend in the KGB?"

"No change in status as far as I'm concerned, but the source reported this morning that he might be on the track of one of my men."

"You mean another one of your men, don't you? How many Savitskys are going to die?"

"He was not a major loss, but I admit that I have und
erestimated the man's abilities," Sorovin replied. His voice was unusually modest.

"I hope that I have not overestimated yours."

"No, sir. I will take care of 'blue-five' and our other problem within a short time."

"Good, comrade. What about
your man who is being tracked?"

"I don't have a name, but I warned all my men. They will be able to protect themselves. I will inform you when we have taken care of all our problems."