The Russian moved away and continued strolling. Munro surveyed the scene calmly for ten minutes. No one showed interest. He scooped up the mackintosh, newspaper, and buff envelope inside it and returned by Metro to Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The envelope contained an up-to-date list of Red Army officer postings.
CHAPTER TWO
WHILE ADAM MUNRO was changing trains at Revolution Square shortly before eleven A.M. that morning of June 10, a convoy of a dozen sleek black Zil limousines was sweeping through the Borovitsky Gate in the Kremlin wall a hundred feet above his head and thirteen hundred feet southwest of him. The Soviet Politburo was about to begin a meeting that would change history.
The Kremlin is a triangular compound, with its apex, dominated by the Sobakin Tower, pointing due north. On all sides it is protected by a fifty-foot wall studded by eighteen towers and penetrated by four gates.
The southern two thirds of this triangle is the tourist area, where docile parties troop along to admire the cathedrals, halls, and palaces of the long-dead tsars. At the midsection is a cleared swath of tarmacadam, patrolled by guards, an invisible dividing line across which tourists may not step. But the cavalcade of custom-built limousines that morning purred across this open space toward the three buildings in the northern part of the Kremlin.
The smallest of these is the Kremlin Theater to the east. Half exposed and half hidden behind the theater stands the building of the Council of Ministers, seemingly the home of the government, inasmuch as the ministers meet here. But the real government of the USSR lies not in the Council of Ministers but in the Politburo, the tiny, exclusive group who constitute the pinnacle of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU.
The third building is the biggest. It lies up along the western facade, just behind the wall’s crenelations, overlooking the Alexandrovsky Gardens down below. In shape it is a long, slim rectangle running north. The southern end is the old Arsenal, a museum for antique weaponry. But just behind the Arsenal the interior walls are blocked off. To reach the upper section, one must arrive from outside and penetrate a high, wrought-iron barrier that spans the gap between the Ministers Building and the Arsenal. The limousines that morning swept through the wrought-iron gates and came to rest beside the upper entrance to the secret building.
In shape, the upper Arsenal is a hollow rectangle; inside is a narrow courtyard running north and south, and dividing the complex into two even narrower blocks of apartments and offices. There are four stories, including the attics. Halfway up the inner, eastern office block, on the third floor, overlooking the courtyard only and screened from prying eyes, is the room where the Politburo meets every Thursday morning to hold sway over 250 million Soviet citizens and scores of millions more who like to think they dwell outside the boundaries of the Russian empire.
For an empire it is. Although in theory the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic is one of fifteen republics that make up the Soviet Union, in effect the Russia of the tsars, ancient or modern, rules the other fourteen non-Russian republics with a rod of iron. The three arms Russia uses and needs to implement this rule are the Red Army, including as it always does the Navy and Air Force; the Committee of State Security, or KGB, with its 100,000 staffers, 300,000 armed troops, and 600,000 informers; and the Party Organizations Section of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, controlling the Party cadres in every place of work, thought, abode, study, and leisure from the Arctic to the hills of Persia, from the fringes of Brunswick to the shores of the Sea of Japan. And that is just inside the empire.
The room in which the Politburo meets in the Arsenal Building of the Kremlin is about fifty feet long and twenty-five wide, not enormous for the power enclosed in it. It is decorated in the heavy,
marbled decor favored by the Party bosses, but dominated by a long table topped with green baize. The table is T-shaped.
That morning, June 10, 1982, was unusual, for they had received no agenda, just a summons. And the men who grouped at the table to take their places sensed, with the perceptive collective nose for danger that had brought them all to this pinnacle, that something of importance was afoot.
Seated at the center point of the head of the T in his usual chair was the chief of them all, Maxim Rudin. Ostensibly his superiority lay in his title of President of the USSR. But nothing except the weather is ever quite what it appears in Russia. His real power came to him through his title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. As such, he was also Chairman of the Central Committee, and Chairman of the Politburo.
At the age of seventy-one he was craggy, brooding, and immensely cunning; had he not been the latter, he would never have occupied the chair that had once supported Stalin (who rarely ever called Politburo meetings), Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. To his left and right he was flanked by four secretaries from his own personal secretariat, men loyal to him personally above all else. Behind him, at each corner of the north wall of the chamber, was a small table. At one sat two stenographers, a man and a woman, taking down every word in shorthand. At the other, as a countercheck, two men hunched over the slowly turning spools of a tape recorder. There was a spare recorder to take over during spool changes.
The Politburo had thirteen members, and the other twelve ranged themselves, six a side, down the stem of the T-shaped table, facing jotting pads, carafes of water, ashtrays. At the far end of this arm of the table was one single chair. The Politburo men checked numbers to make sure no one was missing. For the empty seat was the Penal Chair, sat in only by a man on his last appearance in that room, a man forced to listen to his own denunciation by his former colleagues, a man facing disgrace, ruin, and once, not long ago, death at the Black Wall of the Lubyanka. The custom has always been to delay the condemned man until, on entering, he finds all seats taken and only the Penal Chair free. Then he knows. But this morning it was empty. And all were present.
Rudin leaned back and surveyed the twelve through half-closed eyes, the smoke from his inevitable cigarette drifting past his face. He still favored the old-style Russian papyrossy, half tobacco and half thin cardboard tube, the tube nipped twice between finger and thumb to filter the smoke. His aides had been taught to pass them to him one after the other, and his doctors to shut up.
To his left on the stem of the table was Vassili Petrov, age forty-nine, his own protégé and young for the job he held, head of the Party Organizations Section of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee. Rudin could count on him in the trouble that lay ahead. Beside Petrov was the veteran Foreign Minister, Dmitri Rykov, who would side with Rudin because he had nowhere else to go. Beyond him was Yuri Ivanenko, slim and ruthless at fifty-three, standing out like a sore thumb in his elegant London-tailored suit, as if flaunting his sophistication to a group of men who hated all forms of Westernness. Picked personally by Rudin to be chairman of the KGB, Ivanenko would side with him simply because the opposition would come from quarters who hated Ivanenko and wanted him destroyed.
On the other side of the table sat Yefrem Vishnayev, also young for the job, like half the post-Brezhnev Politburo. At fifty-five he was the Party theoretician, spare, ascetic, disapproving, the scourge of dissidents and deviationists, guardian of Marxist purity, and consumed by a pathological loathing of the capitalist West. The opposition would come here, Rudin knew. By his side was Marshal Nikolai Kerensky, age sixty-three, Defense Minister and chief of the Red Army. He would go where the interests of the Red Army led him.
That left seven, including Vladimir Komarov, responsible for Agriculture and sitting white-faced because he, like Rudin and Ivanenko alone, knew roughly what was to come. The KGB chief betrayed no emotion; the rest did not know.
“It” came when Rudin gestured to one of the Kremlin praetorian guards at the door at the far end of the room to admit the person waiting in fear and trembling outside.
“Let me present Professor Ivan Ivanovich Yakovlev, Comrades,” Rudin growled as the man advanced timorously to the end of the table and stood waiting, his sweat-damp report in his hands. “The professor is our senior agronomist and grain specialist from the Ministry of Agriculture, and a member of the Academy of Sciences. He has a report for our attention. Proceed, Professor.”
Rudin, who had read the report several days earlier in the privacy of his study, leaned back and gazed above the man’s head at the far ceiling. Ivanenko carefully lit a Western king-size filtered cigarette. Komarov wiped his brow and studied his hands. The professor cleared his throat.
“Comrades,” he began hesitantly. No one disagreed that they were comrades. With a deep breath the scientist stared down at his papers and plunged straight into his report.
“Last December and January our long-range weather forecast satellites predicted an unusually damp winter and early spring. As a result and in accordance with habitual scientific practice, it was decided at the Ministry of Agriculture that our seed grain for the spring planting should be treated with a prophylactic dressing to inhibit fungoid infections that would probably be prevalent as a result of the dampness. This has been done many times before.
“The treatment selected was a dual-purpose seed dressing: an organomercurial compound to inhibit fungoid attack on the germinating grain, and a pesticide and bird repellant called lindane. It was agreed in scientific committee that because the USSR, following the unfortunate damage through frost to the winter wheat crop, would need at least one hundred forty million tons of crop from the spring wheat plantings, it would be necessary to sow six and a quarter million tons of seed grain.”
All eyes were on him now, the fidgeting stilled. The Politburo members could smell danger a mile off. Only Komarov, the one responsible for Agriculture, stared at the table in misery. Several eyes swiveled to him, sensing blood. The professor swallowed hard and went on.
“At the rate of two ounces of organomercurial seed dressing per ton of grain, the requirement was for three hundred fifty tons of dressing. There were only seventy tons in stock. An immediate order was sent to the manufacturing plant for this dressing at Kuibyshev to go into immediate production to make up the required two hundred eighty tons.”
“Is there only one such factory?” asked Petrov.
“Yes, Comrade. The tonnages required do not justify more factories. The Kuibyshev factory is a major chemical plant, making many insecticides, weed killers, fertilizers, and so forth. The production of the two hundred eighty tons of this chemical would take less than forty hours.”
“Continue,” ordered Rudin.