Nikolayev looked up. “It’s a matter of history, Aleksei.” “This lot will take the rest of the day.” “Longer than that.” Nikolayev opened his battered leather briefcase and took out paper and pens. He picked the first thick file folder marked with four stars to designate highly sensitive, though not top secret, material and opened it to the promulgation page. It was titled: BUDGET PROPOSALS: UN OPERATIONS: FISCAL 1971-72. He looked up again, but Budakov had gone back to the adjacent computer center, a large glass window separating it from the reading room. He could see the back of the director of archives’s head. Nikolayev selected several other files, which he laid out on the table, before pulling out the folder marked with three diagonal red stripes from the bottom shelf of the cart. NETWORK MARTYRS: MOST SECRET, with a need-to-know list on the inside front cover that included only seven names; among them Baranov, Zhuralev, a couple of KGB generals, two ministers and Brezhnev himself. The file, which was contained in a buff gray accordion folder fifteen or sixteen centimeters thick, was bound with a heavy red ribbon. One of the other files he had pulled was just as thick, and contained in a buff-colored accordion folder, but this one was tied with a green ribbon and marked with only one star, meaning low-grade confidential material. Making sure that he wasn’t being observed, Nikolayev switched files. When he was finished he got up, took the one star file now containing NETWORK MARTYRS and stepped out into the corridor to the bathrooms. He propped the door ajar with a chair as he usually did so that he would arouse no suspicions; so he could get back into the locked reading room without going all the way around to the front of the building. He moved slowly, nonchalantly, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, though his heart was racing impossibly fast; the fluttering in his chest was very pronounced, his knees were weak and his stomach was sour. His jaw and left shoulder ached, and he tried to ignore it. The pain would go away, it usually did. He passed the rest rooms and at the end of the corridor turned right past the guard, who looked up, smiled and waved, then went back to the television program he was watching. Nikolayev went to his car and tossed the folder on the passenger seat. There was no guard at the front gate. No one to challenge him. In the old days it would not have been so easy. He drove directly to Komsomol Square, with its crowds of beggars and drunks and its three fantastic train stations: the Yaroslavl art noveau monstrosity, which was the start of the Trans Siberian line; the rather Asian-looking Kazan Station on the south side of the square, from which trains bound for central Asia and western Siberia departed; and the Leningrad Station, Moscow’s oldest, with its grand soaring clock tower where trains started for St.
Petersberg and beyond to Finland. Later, on the Finnair flight from Helsinki to Paris, Nikolayev thought that by now his abandoned car would have either been stolen or certainly stripped to the bare chasis.
It would make it more difficult for the SVR to pick up his trail when Budakov reported him missing. A lot would depend on how soon they discovered that he’d switched files, but in the meantime he was able to relax for the first time in days with a glass of good white wine, safe for the moment. There had been no one to notice him parking his car two blocks from the Leningradsky vokzal, packing the file in his overnight bags in the trunk, destroying his old passport and papers after retrieving his new identity from a hollow behind a body panel and going the rest of the way on foot. Just another old man on a journey; with a serious heart problem and the fear that he might be too late to stop what could well turn out to be a blood bath from which no one would come out the winner; not the United States and certainly not Russia. Everything depended on what was in the file names, operational details, timetables. All that would have to wait until he reached Paris, and safety. But Martyrs had lain dormant for all these years, another day or two would not make a difference. Hopefully.
THREE
PROMISES
The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.
SUNDAY
FOUR
BUT SOMETHING OR SOMEONE WAS COMING AGAIN.
It was the beginning of one of the coldest, snowiest winters in Washington, D.C.‘s history. The house backing on the fifteenth fairway of the Chevy Chase Country Club was long, low; a modern colonial with a swimming pool, covered now, the patio snowbound; but with long lawns and bright flowers in hanging baskets from the broad eaves in the summer. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac of similar houses seven miles north of the capital. A few minutes before noon of a Sunday morning a stereo softly played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Kirk Cullough McGarvey was seated at his desk in his study reading copies of some never-been-published letters of Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire that an old friend at the Sorbonne in Paris had sent over on loan. Kathleen, his wife, was at church, and he was waiting for her to come home. As had happened several times in the past hour, his concentration was broken, and he looked up, his wide, honest, gray-green eyes narrowing in concentration. Had he heard something? He listened intently, but there was nothing except for normal house sounds; the rush of warm air through the vents, the music. Falling snow blanketed sounds from outside. No one was sneaking up on them from across the golf course as had happened before. There was no reason for it this time. He got up and went into the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee, his moccasins whisper soft on the tile floor. He looked out across the snow-covered fairway. No one there. No tire tracks or footprints. And nothing from the air; visibility was less than a few hundred feet. He was a tall, well-built man with the rugby player’s physique, a thick shock of brown hair starting to go gray at the temples, and an air about him that when he was around everything would be okay. He exuded self-confidence, and the easy, relaxed manner of the consummate professional that he was, even dressed in faded jeans and a worn pullover sweater. But sooner or later paranoia comes to all intelligence officers, even the pros. It was the old line. Awareness, heightened perceptions, hair trigger reflexes, an automatic processing of information as fast as it arrived to find the out-of-place bits and pieces that if you were not careful could suddenly rise up to kill you.
Sometimes he felt like a besieged king who was trying to make this place a fortress. A lot of Americans felt the same since the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. It had almost become a national obsession. In the stair hall he looked up at the landing.
The Russian clock he’d been given from a Typhoon class submarine kept perfect time except that its red second hand was permanently stuck at four. He’d not gotten around to taking it to a clock maker From some points of view the world was a more dangerous place than it had ever been. Terrorists could strike anywhere. But as terrible as that had become, no country seemed to be on the verge of starting an all-out global thermonuclear war. Not North Korea or Iran, and not Pakistan or India. That’s what the Cold War had been all about, he thought, staring at the Russian clock. We won, the bad guys lost. But something was coming. He could feel and taste the menace on the air like smoke from a not-so-distant forest fire. At fifty he had been appointed as the youngest director in the history of the Agency; a job that he was uneasily settling into since Roland Murphy had retired two months ago. His Senate confirmation hearings were scheduled to start on Tuesday, and he could not say which he dreaded most, being rejected or being confirmed.
He wanted out. After twenty-five years of service he wanted to go back to teaching Voltaire, even to bored young undergraduates who wouldn’t recognize a line worth remembering if it came up and bit them on the ass. Good years, some of them, and very bad some of the others. In his mind’s eye he could see the face of every man
