The Moscow Club Read online

  He had once casually suggested, in a footnote to one of his reports, that the President should be physically aflPectionate with Gorbachev when the two met, as demonstrative as Leonid Brezhnev used to be. Stone felt sure this sort of gesture would win over Gorbachev, who was far more “Western” (and therefore reserved) than his predecessors. And then Stone had watched, gratified, as Reagan threw his arm around Gorbachev in Red Square. Trivial stuff, maybe, but in such small gestures is international diplomacy born.

  When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, almost everyone at the Agency was caught by surprise—even Stone. But he had virtually foreseen it, from signals out of Moscow he’d parsed, communications between Gorbachev and the East Germans that the Agency had intercepted. Not much hard data, but a lot of surmise. That prediction sealed his reputation as one of the best the Agency had.

  But there was more to it than seat-of-the-pants instinct. It involved pick-and-shovel work, too. All kinds of rumors came out of Moscow; you had to consider the source and weigh each one. And there were little signals, tiny details.

  Just yesterday morning, for instance. A Politburo member had given an interview to the French newspaper Le Monde hinting that a particular Party secretary might lose his post, which would mean the rise of another, who was much more hard-line, much more stridently anti-American. Well, Stone had discovered that the Politburo member who’d given the interview had actually been cropped out of a group photograph that ran in Pravda, which meant that a number of his colleagues were gunning for him, which meant that, most likely, the man was just blowing smoke. Stone’s record of accuracy wasn’t perfect, but it was somewhere around ninety percent, and that was damn good. He found his work exhilarating, and he was blessed with an ability to concentrate intensely when he wanted to.

  Finally, there was a buzz, and he stepped forward to pull open the inner doors.

  By the time he passed through the vestibule’s black-and-white harlequin-tiled floor and walked up the broad staircase, the receptionist was already standing there, waiting for him.

  “Back so soon, sweetie?” Connie said with a dry cackle, immediately followed by a loose bronchial cough. She was a bleached blonde in her late forties, a divorcee who dressed, unconvincingly, as if she were twenty-five; who chain-smoked Kool menthols and called each of the men at Parnassus “sweetie.” She looked like the sort of woman you would meet sitting on a bar stool. Hers was not a difficult job: mostly, she sat at her desk and received top-secret courier deliveries from the Agency and talked on the phone with her friends. Yet, paradoxically, she was as discreet as they came, and she oversaw the Foundation’s connections to Langley and the outside world with an iron discipline.

  “Can’t stay away,” Stone said without breaking stride.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 17

  “Fancy outfit,” Connie said, indicating with a grand sweep of her hand Stone’s dirt-encrusted jeans, stained sweatshirt, and electric-green Scarpa cHmbing shoes.

  “There’s a new dress code, Connie—didn’t they tell you?” he said, proceeding down the long Oriental rug that ran the length of the corridor to Saul Ansbach’s office.

  He passed his own office, outside of which sat his secretary. Sherry. She had been born and raised in South Carolina but, having ten years ago spent one summer in London when she was eighteen, she had somehow acquired a reasonable facsimile of a British accent. She looked up and raised her eyebrows inquiringly.

  Stone shrugged broadly. “Duty calls,” he said.

  “Indeed,” Sherry agreed, sounding like a West End barmaid.

  Saul Ansbach, the head of the Parnassus office, was seated behind his large mahogany desk when Stone entered. He stood up quickly and shook Stone’s hand.

  “I’m sorry about this, Charlie.” He was a large, beefy man in his early sixties with steel-gray hair cut en brosse and heavy black-framed glasses, the sort of man usually described as rumpled. “You know I wouldn’t call you back if it weren’t important,” Saul said, gesturing to the black wooden rail-backed Notre Dame chair beside his desk.

  Ansbach had been a quarterback at Notre Dame, and he had never quite fit in with the proper, careful Ivy League types that once dominated the CIA. Perhaps that was why they had sent him to New York to run Parnassus. Still, as with most CIA men of his generation, his clothes were more Ivy League than the president of Harvard’s: a blue button-down shirt, a rep tie, a dark suit that had to have come from J. Press.

  Ansbach’s office was dominated by a marble fireplace almost four feet high. It was suffused by the orange light of the late afternoon, which sifted in through the double-glazed, soundproof windows.

  They had met when Stone was in his last year at Yale.

  Stone had been taking a seminar in Soviet politics taught by a large brassy woman who had emigrated from Russia after World War II. He was the star of the class; here, studying the very thing that his

  18 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  father had once done for a Hving, he had found his natural miHeu, the first subject in college he really cared about, and he began to shine.

  One day after class the teacher asked him whether he’d like to have lunch the next day at Mory’s, the private club on York Street where the professors ate Welsh rarebit and complained about Guggenheim fellowships they hadn’t received. She wanted him to meet a friend of hers. Charlie showed up, uncomfortable in his blue blazer and the Yale Co-op tie that was threatening to strangle him.

  Sitting at the small wooden table next to his teacher was a tall crewcut man with thick black glasses. His name was Saul Ansbach, and for much of the lunch Charlie had no idea why they’d invited him. They chatted about Russia and the Soviet leadership and international communism and all that sort of thing, but they weren’t just talking; later he realized that Ansbach, who at first said he worked for the State Department, was actually testing him.

  When it came time for coffee. Stone’s teacher excused herself, and then Ansbach tried for the first time to recruit him for an intelligence program about which he remained vague. Ansbach knew that Charlie was the son of the infamous Alfred Stone, who’d been condemned as a traitor in the McCarthy hearings, but he didn’t seem to care. He saw instead a brilliant young man who had demonstrated an extraordinary flair for international politics and Soviet politics in particular. And who was also the godson of the legendary Winthrop Lehman.

  Charlie, who considered the CIA vaguely sinister, said no.

  Several times before he graduated, Saul Ansbach called, and each time Charlie politely told him no. A few years later, after Stone had embarked upon an illustrious career as a scholar in Soviet politics, teaching at Georgetown, then M.I.T., Saul asked again, and this time Stone finally gave in. Times were different; the CIA seemed far less odious. Intelligence work increasingly appealed to him, and he knew that now, with his reputation, he could have things his way.

  He set down his conditions. He’d work when he wanted to (and climb mountains when he wanted); he wanted to work at home in New York and not have to move back to Washington, whose govern-

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 19

  merit buildings and white pedestrian “malls” gave Stone the shudders— to say nothing of dreary old CIA headquarters in Langley. And—since he was giving up the security of academic tenure—they’d pay him very, very well. For work he so enjoyed that he’d do it for free.

  You never know, he later thought, how one quick decision can change your life.

  Now Saul walked to the heavy mahogany double doors and shut them, emphasizing the gravity of what he was planning to say.

  “It better be important,” Stone said with false gruffness, about to observe that being plucked from the mountaintop was a little like being interrupted during sex before you’re finished. But he held his tongue, preferring not to have Saul ask when Charlie had last seen his estranged wife, Charlotte. Charlie didn’t want to think about Charlotte right now.

  If you tell yourself, Don’t think about white elephants, you will. The
last time he saw her.

  She is standing in the hallway. Her bags are packed for Moscow. And her eyes, unforgettable: too much makeup, as if her sense of palette had left her. She’d been crying. Stone is standing next to her, tears in his eyes, too, his arms half outstretched to touch her once more, to change her mind, to kiss her goodbye.

  Ah, now you want to kiss me, she says sadly, turning away, a beautiful doll with smudged eyes. Now you want to kiss me.

  Saul sank into his own chair, exhaling slowly, and picked up a dark-blue folder from his desk. He waved it and said, “We just got something in from Moscow.”

  “More garbage?” Most of the intelligence the CIA receives from the Soviet Union consists of rumor and unsubstantiated gossip; the Agency’s Kremlinologists spend much of their time doing close analysis of information that is publicly available.

  Ansbach smiled cryptically. “Put it this way: this file has been seen by exactly three people—the director, a transcriptionist cleared straight to the top, and me. Is that sensitive enough for you?”

  Stone nodded appreciatively.

  20 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  “I realize you don’t know much about how we get the intelhgence we do,” Saul said, leaning back in his chair, still holding the file. “I like to keep collection and analysis separate.”

  “I understand.”

  “But I’m sure you’re aware that since Howard we’ve had hardly any assets inside Russia.” Ansbach was referring to Edward Lee Howard, a CIA Soviet Division case officer who defected to Moscow in 1983, rolling up virtually all the CIA’s human sources in the U.S.S.R. —a devastating blow from which the Agency had never fully recovered.

  “We’ve recruited another,” Stone prompted.

  “No. One of the few we had left was a driver in the KGB’s Ninth Directorate. Code-named hedgehog. A chauffeur assigned to various members of the Central Committee. We got him early, with steady money, paid in rubles, since hard currency would be too risky.”

  “And in return he listened to what was going on in the back seat.”

  “We gave him a recorder, actually. He concealed it under the back seat.”

  “Clever fellow.”

  “Well, he’d been noticing that one of the people he was assigned to had been having an awful lot of late-night meetings outside Moscow with a number of other high-powered people, and his ears pricked up. We got several tapes from him. Unfortunately, the poor shmuck didn’t know how to operate a tape recorder. He kept the volume dial all the way down, so the sound quality is lousy. We’ve been trying to run a voice-print ID on the speakers, but the rumble is too loud. We managed to transcribe most of it, but we have no idea who’s involved, who’s doing the talking.”

  “And you want to figure out what’s going on,” Stone concluded. He was looking not at Ansbach but at the framed prints of mallard ducks and botanical oddities that hung on the wall above the wainscoting. He admired Saul’s attempts to make headquarters resemble a baronial estate more than an office. “But, Saul, why me? You’ve got others who can do this.” He crossed his legs and added studiedly: “Who were already in town.”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 21

  Ansbach, by way of reply, handed him the blue folder. Stone opened it, frowned, and began reading.

  After a few minutes of silence, he looked up. “All right, I see you’ve highlighted the parts you want me to pay attention to. So we’ve got two guys talking here.” He read aloud the yellow-highlighted fragments, skipping as he read, conflating them into one long string.

  ” ‘Secure? … The Lenin Testament … Only other copy, Winthrop Lehman has … the old fart got it from Lenin himself … the tin god … can’t do anything to stop it … ‘ “

  Stone cleared his throat. “This Winthrop Lehman—I assume they’re talking about the Winthrop Lehman.”

  “You know another one?” Ansbach asked, spreading his hands with his palms up. “Yeah. Your Winthrop Lehman.”

  “No,” Stone said softly. “Now I see why you wanted me.”

  Winthrop Lehman, who would become his godfather, had been national-security adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In 1950 he had hired a brilliant young Harvard historian named Alfred Stone—Charlie’s father—as his assistant. Later, even during Alfred Stone’s disgrace, the so-called Alfred Stone affair, when Senator Joseph McCarthy had successfully branded Alfred Stone a traitor on a trumped-up charge of passing secrets to the Russians, Lehman had stood by him. Lehman, the statesman, aristocrat, and what news magazines had dubbed “philanthropist” (which simply meant he’d been passingly generous with his vast fortune), was now eighty-nine years old. Stone was aware that he would not have been recruited to Parnassus were it not for some behind-the-scenes power-brokering on the part of the enormously influential Lehman.

  Saul Ansbach steepled his large, knobby hands and placed the point under his chin as if he were saying a prayer. “You recognize the reference, Charlie?”

  “Yes,” Stone replied tonelessly. “The phrase ‘Lenin Testament’ came up during my father’s hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was never explained; it was never mentioned again.” In spite of himself, he found his voice growing steadily louder. “But I’d always assumed—”

  “Assumed it was just some mistake, is that it?” Saul asked quietly. “Some glitch, some shoddy piece of research done by some young vvhippersnapper on the Committee’s staff?”

  “No. The ‘Lenin Testament’ that / know about is no mystery. It was a document written by Lenin in his final days, in which, among other things, he warned about Stalin’s getting too powerful. Stalin tried to suppress it, but it came out a few years after Lenin’s death.” He caught Saul’s half-smile. “You don’t think that’s what they’re referring to, do you?”

  “Do you?”

  “No,” Stone agreed. “But why don’t you have hedgehog find out more?”

  “Because he was killed two days ago,” Saul said.

  Stone’s eyes widened somewhat; then he shook his head slowly. “Poor guy. KGB got on to him?”

  “We assume it was KGB.” He shrugged broadly. “Apparently, the hit was professional. As for how he was blown—well, that’s another troubling thing. We don’t know.”

  “So you want me to find out what they meant by ‘Lenin Testament,’ if possible, right? Talk to my father, try to worm the information out of him, maybe? No, Saul. I don’t think I’d like that very much.”

  “You know your father was set up. Did you ever ask yourself why?”

  “All the time, Saul.”

  All the time.

  Alfred Stone, professor of twentieth-century American history at Harvard, had once been one of the stars in his field, but that was years ago. Before it had happened. Since then, since 1953, he was a broken man. He had published almost nothing. In recent years, he’d begun to drink too much. He was—it was a cliche, but in this case it was accurate—a husk of his former self.

  Once, before Charlie was born, Alfred Stone had been a young, fiery lecturer and a brilliant academic, and in 1950, at the age of thirty-one, he was asked to join the Truman White House. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for his studv of the United States and the end of

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 23

  the First World War. The president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, had asked him to serve as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but he decided instead to go to Washington. Winthrop Lehman, one of Truman’s assistants, and a holdover from the Roosevelt administration, had heard about this rising star at Harvard and had asked him to the White House, and Alfred Stone had accepted.

  He should have gone on to become some sort of minor national celebrity. Instead, he returned to the Harvard campus in 1953 shattered, kept on at Harvard’s sufferance, never again to produce anything of any worth.

  Charlie Stone had been ten years old when he first learned about his father’s tortured past.

  One day, after school, he found the door to his father�
��s book-crammed study open and no one inside. He began poking around, exploring, but finding nothing of interest. He was about to give up when he found a large leather-bound scrapbook on his father’s desk. He opened it. His heart started pounding when he realized he had made a discovery, and he pored through the book with guilty pleasure and complete absorption.

  It was a collection of clippings from the early 1950s concerning a part of his father’s life he had never heard about before. One article, in Life magazine, was titled “The Strange Case of Alfred Stone.” Another headline, in the New York Daily News, called his father “Red Prof.” Rapt, Charlie went through one yellowed clipping after another, as the mildewy, vanilla smell of the scrapbook enveloped him. Suddenly various bits of overheard conversation came together, things he had heard people say about his father, quick, nasty things, and arguments between his parents in their bedroom. Once someone had painted a large red hammer and sickle on the front of the house. A few times, he remembered rocks being thrown through the kitchen window. Now, finally, it made sense.

  And of course his father had returned to his study suddenly and caught him at the scrapbook, whereupon he strode to the desk in a dark fury and snapped it closed.

  The following day, his mother, the willowy, dark-haired Margaret Stone, sat Charlie down and gave him a brief, sanitized account of

  what had happened in 1953. There was a thing called the Un-American Activities Committee, she said, which was once very powerful before you were born. There was a terrible man named Joseph McCarthy who thought America was overrun with communists and who said they were ever'where, even in the White House. Your father was a very prominent man, an adviser to President Truman, and he was caught up in a battle between McCarthy and the President, a battle that the President wasn’t able to fight on all fronts. McCarthy dragged your father before his Committee and accused him of being a communist, a spy for Russia.