Then he turned his attention to striking workers in the starving, freezing city. Through the firing squad, the truncheon, and the torture cell he reestablished order, then began tearing down sections of the city to provide fuel for the rest of it. All this activity brought him to the attention of the rising power in Moscow, Joseph Stalin.
“He next shows up in China,” Haverford went on. “In, of all places, Shanghai.”
It was, after all, at Stalin’s insistence that the Nationalists slaughtered the Communists there in 1927, and Uncle Joe thought Chiang Kai-shek could use an adviser experienced in such matters.
Nicholai was just a small boy when this happened, but he nevertheless remembered it. He used to prowl the streets of Shanghai, knew the “Reds” from the “Greens,” and when the shootings, stabbings, and beheadings of thousands of young Reds occurred, it was for him childhood’s end.
“We lose track of him for the next fifteen years,” Haverford said. “No one knows where he was or what he was doing, but it’s a pretty fair bet that he was involved in the Trotsky assassination in Mexico as well as Stalin’s staged murder of Sergei Kirov as a pretext for his great purges of the 1930s.”
The purge turned on Voroshenin himself. The dictator’s paranoia led him to imprison and execute his most gifted and ruthless subordinates, especially those who had stories to tell, and Yuri was tossed into Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison.
Voroshenin’s career should have ended there, with a bullet in the back of his head. But, as noted, he was a survivor who used all his craft, guile, and courage to survive his interrogations. He became a source of information too valuable to kill, and he sat in his cell for three long years, listening to the screams of less talented men, hearing their executions, and waiting for a moment of opportunity.
“Prison teaches you patience,” Voroshenin later said.
“It does,” Nicholai agreed, to Haverford’s blush.
Hitler opened the prison door when he invaded Russia. Faced with destruction, Stalin could no longer afford to keep his best people locked up. Voroshenin was quickly rehabilitated and released.
Yuri landed on his feet again.
Rather than be sent to the killing grounds of the war against Germany, he used his former connection to the Kuomintang to be assigned back to China, and found himself reunited with Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing. His assignment was not to help the Generalissimo fight the Japanese, but to track down Mao and his Communists, whom Stalin accurately viewed as a potential future rival.
Voroshenin had no problem fighting against his brother Marxists. No longer a true believer, he had lost his faith in Lubyanka, and was now a hardened cynic, believing in the advance of nothing except Yuri Voroshenin. To that end, he would ally himself with anyone, and as easily betray them.
Haverford showed Nicholai another photograph of a khaki-clad Voroshenin standing outside a Daoist temple with Chiang. Bareheaded, his hairline receding into a widow’s peak, his skin pale and drawn from the years in prison, there was still a vitality about him. His shoulders were wide, if a little stooped, and he had certainly put on no weight since his youth. A handsome man, powerful, he loomed over Chiang as both men pretended to study a map for the benefit of the photographer.
“Our man Yuri stayed with the Nats through the whole war and then some,” Haverford said. “When Stalin called all his agents back from China, he was afraid they’d been contaminated by Mao, so he had them purged.”
Again Voroshenin’s head should have been the first on the block, but he was the first to inform on his comrades and became the supervisor, rather than the prime victim, of the purge. Voroshenin personally conducted the interrogations, directed the torture, supervised the executions, in some cases pulling the trigger himself.
And now he was back in China.
“This is the man,” Haverford said, “that Stalin chose to represent him in China.”
It was a deliberate slap in the face, but what could Mao do about it? Isolated abroad, struggling to create a government and a viable economy at home, he needed Russian aid. If that meant swallowing his pride, the Chairman was willing to smile and bow and do it.
For the time being.
Nicholai listened to the biographical sketch of the Russian murderer and torturer, but much of it was redundant. From his mother, the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna, he already knew a great deal about Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin.
The question was how to accomplish the mission.
Beijing at the start of 1952 was perhaps the most tightly guarded city in the world. The Chinese secret police were everywhere, and the “Order Keeping Committees” – volunteer snitches and informers – were on every block and in every factory.
Worse, foreigners were a rarity in the country. Mao used the Korean War as a pretext to deport “spies” and “agents,” and the very few Westerners who remained were kept under constant surveillance.
“Why do you think that I – as opposed to another one of your ‘assets’ – have a chance to succeed at this?”
The question had been much discussed in rooms at Langley, and now Haverford debated with himself how much of the answer he should share with Nicholai Hel.
“The assignment requires someone who is fluent in Chinese,” Haverford said, “but who could pass for Russian if the moment demanded it.”
“You doubtless have many such people on your payroll,” Nicholai observed.
“True,” Haverford answered. “But in addition to being multilingual, the man must also be brilliant, unflappable, and a trained killer who can do the job without the benefit of a gun or other standard weapon. At this point the list of available candidates gets very short.”
Nicholai understood the thinking. A gun would be very hard to arrange in a police state, and in any case, Voroshenin wouldn’t be likely to let an armed assassin anywhere near him. That made sense, but Nicholai knew that there were other qualifications that narrowed the pool of candidates down to him, and he wondered if Haverford knew of the very personal motivation he had to kill Voroshenin. Certainly Haverford was manipulative enough – he wouldn’t blink at it. But Nicholai doubted that he knew – there was really no way that he could. No, Nicholai thought, he chose me for other reasons.
“You also require,” he said, “a man desperate enough to accept an assignment that has only a slight chance of success, and almost no chance of escape even if he succeeds in the mission. Isn’t that true?”
“Only partially,” Haverford answered. “We’ll have an extraction team standing by to get you out. But the odds are, yes, slim enough to require a man who otherwise has little to lose.”
Well, Nicholai thought, that would be me.
Or “Michel Guibert.”
The identity solved the problem of inserting Nicholai into Beijing. There was no “cover” available as a Russian, because he would instantly be spotted as an imposter. Obviously, he couldn’t be Chinese. An American or British identity was likewise impossible.
But the Guiberts had been particular darlings of the international left since the days of bomb-throwing anarchists with mustaches, and Papa Guibert had paid particular attention to the French Communists in Vichy during the war. So the Guiberts were exactly the type of capitalists that the Communists would tolerate.
And now the Chinese, Haverford explained, had a particular use for the son.
“It’s about Vietnam,” he said.
“More precisely?”
Both China and Russia supported Ho Chi Minh and his insurgency against the French colonial regime in Vietnam. Ho’s Viet Minh troops needed weapons – preferably American as the United States supplied the French and the Viet Minh could rearm themselves with captured ammunition. China possessed a large cache of American arms through weapons captured in Korea, and because the Americans had also armed the Kuomintang, from whom the Communist victors had seized mountains of American weaponry.
“Why can’t the Chinese simply send the guns to the Viet Minh?” Nicholai asked.
China shared a border with Vietnam and the Viet Minh controlled the mountainous area on the frontier. It should have been a simple matter to bring the armaments through the remote terrain to the Viet Minh strongholds.
“They can and do,” Haverford answered. “But it all comes down to money.”
Of course, Nicholai thought.
“The Chinese are cash poor,” Haverford explained. “They’d like to make some dough – especially in foreign
