Gerasimov and Narmonov. No, the Defense Minister would either take over the entire investigation through his own security arm, or use his political power to close the case entirely, lest KGB disgrace Yazov himself for having a traitor for an aide, and so endanger Narmonov.
If Narmonov fell, at best the Defense Minister would go back to being the Soviet Army's chief of personnel; more likely, he'd be retired in quiet humiliation after the removal of his patron. Even if the General Secretary managed to survive the crisis, Yazov would be the sacrificial goat, just as Sokolov had been so recently. What choice did Yazov have?
The Defense Minister was also a man with a mission. Under the cover of the 'restructuring' initiative of the General Secretary, Yazov hoped to use his knowledge of the officer corps to remake the Soviet Army-in the hope, supposedly, of professionalizing the entire military community. Narmonov said that he wanted to save the Soviet economy, but no less an authority than Alexandrov, the high priest of Marxism-Leninism, said that he was destroying the purity of the Party itself. Yazov wanted to rebuild the military from the ground up. It would also have the effect, Vatutin thought, of making the Army personally loyal to Narmonov.
That worried Vatutin. Historically, the Party had used the KGB to keep the military under control. After all, the military had all the guns, and if it ever awoke to its power and felt the loosening of Party control? it was too painful a concept on which to dwell. An army loyal exclusively to the General Secretary rather than the Party itself was even more painful to Vatutin, since it would change the relationship the KGB had to Soviet society as a whole. There could then be no check on the General Secretary. With the military behind him, he could break KGB to his will and use it to 'restructure' the entire Party. He would have the power of another Stalin.
How did I ever start along this line? Vatutin asked himself. I'm a counterintelligence officer, not a Party theorist. For all his life, Colonel Vatutin had never dwelt on the Big Issues of his country. He'd trusted his superiors to handle the major decisions and allow him to handle the small details. No longer. By being taken into Chairman Gerasimov's confidence he was now inextricably allied with the man. It had happened so easily! Virtually overnight-you have to be noticed to get general's stars, he thought with a sardonic smile. You always wanted to get noticed. So, Klementi Vladimirovich, you got yourself noticed all right. Now look where you are!
Right in the middle of a power play between the KGB Chairman and the General Secretary himself.
It was actually quite funny, he told himself. He knew it would be less so if Gerasimov miscalculated-but the crowning irony of all was that if the KGB Chairman fell, then the liberal influences already put in place by Narmonov would protect Vatutin, who was, after all, merely doing the job assigned him by his duly appointed superiors. He didn't think that he'd be imprisoned, much less shot, as had once been the case. His advancement would be at an end. He'd find himself demoted, running the KGB regional office at Omsk, or the least pleasant opening they could find, never again to return to Moscow Center.
That wouldn't be so bad, he thought. On the other hand, if Gerasimov succeeded? head of 'Two' perhaps? And that wouldn't be very bad at all.
And you actually believed that you could advance your career without becoming 'political.' But that was no longer an option. If he tried to get out, he'd be disgraced. Vatutin was trapped, and knew it. The only way out was to do his job to the best of his ability.
The revery ended as he turned back to his reports. Colonel Bondarenko was totally clean, he thought. His record had been examined and reexamined, and there was nothing to indicate that he was anything less than a patriot and an above-average officer. Filitov is the one, Vatutin thought. As insane as it seemed on the surface, this decorated hero was a traitor.
But how the hell do we prove that? How do we even investigate it properly without the cooperation of the Defense Minister? That was the other rub. If he failed in his investigation, then Gerasimov would not look kindly upon his career; but the investigation was hindered by political constraints imposed by the Chairman. Vatutin remembered the time he'd almost been passed over for promotion to major and realized how unlucky he'd been when the promotion board had changed its mind.
Oddly, it did not occur to him that all his problems resulted from having a KGB Chairman with political ambition. Vatutin summoned his senior officers. They arrived in a few minutes.
'Progress on Filitov?' he asked.
'Our best people are shadowing him,' a middle-level officer answered. 'Six of them round the clock. We're rotating schedules so that he doesn't see the same faces very often, if at all. We now have continuous television surveillance all around his apartment block, and half a dozen people check the tapes every night. We've stepped up coverage of suspected American and British spies, and of their diplomatic communities in general. We're straining our manpower and risking counterdetection, but there's no avoiding that. About the only new thing I have to report is that Filitov talks in his sleep occasionally-he's talking to somebody named Romanov, it sounds like. The words are too distorted to understand, but I have a speech pathologist working on it, and we may get something. In any case, Filitov can't fart without our knowing it. The only thing we can't do is maintain continuous visual contact without getting our people in too close. Every day, turning a corner or entering a shop, he's out of sight for five to fifteen seconds-long enough to make a brush-pass or a dead-drop. Nothing I can do about that unless you want us to risk alerting him.'
Vatutin nodded. Even the best surveillance had its limitations.
'Oh, there is one odd thing,' the Major said. 'Just learned about it yesterday. About once a week or so, Filitov takes the burn-bag down to the incinerator chute himself. It's so routine there that the man in the destruct room forgot to tell us until last evening. He's a youngster, and came in himself to report it-after hours, and in civilian clothes. Bright boy. It turns out that Filitov looked after the installation of the system, years back. I checked the plans myself, nothing out of the way. Completely normal installation, just like what we have here. And that's all. For all practical purposes the only unusual thing about the subject is that he ought to be retired by now.'
'What of the Altunin investigation?' Vatutin asked next. Another officer opened his notebook. 'We've no idea where he was before being killed. Perhaps he was hiding out alone somewhere, perhaps he was protected by friends whom we have been unable to identify. We've established no correlation between his death and the movement of foreigners. He was carrying nothing incriminating except some false papers that looked amateurishly done, but probably good enough for the outlying republics. If he was murdered by CIA, it was a remarkably complete job. No loose ends. None.'
'Your opinions?'
'The Altunin case is a dead end,' the Major answered. 'There are still a half-dozen things that we have to check out, but none has the least promise of an important break.' He paused for a moment. 'Comrade?'
'Go on.'
'I believe this was a coincidence. I think Altunin was the victim of a simple murder, that he tried to get aboard the wrong railcar at the wrong time. I have no evidence to point to, but that is how it feels to me.'
Vatutin considered that. It took no small amount of moral courage for an officer of the Second Chief Directorate to say that he was not on a counterespionage case.
'How sure are you?'
'We'll never be sure, Comrade Colonel, but if CIA had done the murder, would they not have disposed of the body-or, if they were trying to use his death to protect a highly placed spy, why not leave evidence to implicate him as a totally separate case? There were no false flags left behind, even though this would seem the place to do so.'
'Yes, we would have done that. A good point. Run down all your leads anyway.'
'Of course, Comrade Colonel. Four to six days, I think.'
'Anything else?' Vatutin asked. Heads shook negatively. 'Very well, return to your sections, Comrades.'
She'd do it at the hockey game, Mary Pat Foley thought. CARDINAL would be there, alerted by a wrong- number telephone call from a pay phone. She'd make the pass herself. She had three film cassettes in her purse, and a simple handshake would do it. Her son played on this junior-league team, as did Filitov's grand-nephew, and she went to every game. It would be unusual if she didn't go, and the Russians depended on people to stick to their routines. She was being followed. She knew it. Evidently the Russians had stepped up surveillance, but the shadow she rated wasn't all that good-or at least they were using the same one on her, and Mary Pat knew when she saw a face more than once in a day.
Mary Patricia Kaminskiy Foley had typically muddled American ancestry, though some aspects of it had been left off her passport documents. Her grandfather had been an equerry to the House of Romanov, had taught the Crown Prince Aleksey to ride-no small feat since the youngster was tragically stricken with hemophilia, and the
