In New York, Alex Miro, a tall, thin man, pulled up the fur-lined collar of his brown suede topcoat as he made his way past the Plaza Hotel toward the Columbus Circle entrance on Central Park’s southwest corner. He liked the park — it had brought him luck, and he was as convinced of his purpose as he had been on the very first day those years before when, as a bearded young man, his future before him, he had arrived as one of the thousands of Russian minorities allowed to emigrate to America in the heady days following Gorbachev’s and then Yeltsin’s perestroika.
The reception committee in those days consisted mostly of older émigrés who had managed to flee the Soviet Union before Gorbachev, and Alex could still recall the day when, as one of about thirty new arrivals, he had been taken on a tour of the city by one of these older émigrés. The group had paused for a moment across from the Plaza near the horse-drawn cabriolets.
The wealth of the people entering and leaving the famous hotel overwhelmed the new arrivals almost as much as their first sight of a supermarket. One babushka, from the Ukraine, had kept clicking her tongue and shaking her head beneath the black head scarf at the sight of such opulence. After going north on Fifth Avenue, seeing the stately stone townhouses on the East Side and being told by the guide that only one family lived in each house, Alex had seen the woman’s disbelief, her tongue clicking again as she gazed at the stately buildings, her husband, however, skeptically informing several of the group that the guide was as bad as the old Pravda— “lozh”—”all lies.” It was probably just a Potemkin “village,” he said — made exclusively to impress visitors just as the fake Potemkin village had been for the czarina — why, any fool could see there was enough room for six families in any one of the townhouses.
One of the émigrés asked the guide to take them to Harlem—insisted they see Harlem, the place of the gigantskie basketbolisty. Alex’s beard was so full in those days it had hidden the tight-lipped grimace of satisfaction he’d allowed himself on seeing that what the party had said was true — here was the grinding poverty, the rampant disorder, the half-naked black children, the awful, discordant noise of democracy, the look of hatred and despair in the eyes of me blacks who stared resentfully at the bus of tourists like caged animals, the putrid smell of garbage overpowering.
It was still so vivid in his mind, particularly the loss of dignity he had seen in these faces — a poverty that was horrible to Nikolai Ryzhkov, Ryzhkov being his Russian name before he had taken the oath of allegiance to his newly adopted country and changed Ryzhkov to Miro. It was the lack of dignity in the blacks’ eyes that struck him as being more crushing than any he had known in his youth in Russia. For there, though people had been poorer in material things than their American counterparts, there hadn’t been the burning rage and spiritual deprivation that he saw in these faces.
The memory of this, his first experience of the vast disparity in wealth between rich and poor in America, not only stayed with him but all his life had acted as a spur to his single-minded goal, the memory of Harlem as troubling and as clearly etched on his mind as was that of the immigrants’ first visit to Central Park. There, in the green, ordered world that accepted everybody, it had been completely different, surely what the great Abraham Lincoln had in his mind — a place that did not depend on whom you knew, on special party shops accessible only to the powerful, but was a refuge for the common people. He hated the zoo, though — hating anything being put in a cage — anything that was hemmed in.
As a boy he had loved the Moscow Circus, which he had seen illegally, sneaking beneath the tent flaps of the traveling troupe when it had visited his town. But when they had brought on the bears, the huge, muzzled beasts reduced to playing big babies for the amusement of rude peasants like his father, Alex had felt immeasurably sad — not only for the bears but for those like his father whose sensitivities had been so brutalized by poverty in old Russia, in Siberia to be exact, that they could find the sight of the leashed bears only amusing.
As Alex had grown older, he learned that to liberate such people from such brutality no effective appeal could be made to sensibilities deadened by the constant crush of circumstance. Throughout history, he was convinced, there had been only one way. One had to fight indifference and prejudice, as Lenin had said, not submit to it. But Gorbachev had warned that you would get no thanks for trying to improve the lot of the people — those in chains did not always thank those who set them free. Look at what had happened to Gorbachev himself, and how vividly Alex remembered the Muscovites demonstrating in Red Square, telling the American announcer Mike Wallace, who was doing his open-mouthed “surprise” act, that they’d had enough of perestroika, of glasnost—of how they pined for the order, the comfort of predictability that Stalin’s postwar years had given them.
“I’d like to take the muzzle off that bear,” young Alex had confessed to his father at the circus. “Osvobodit—set him free.”
“Ha!” his fattier had laughed, “you are the first he’d kill — bite your head off.” But if that’s what his father had said, Lenin had told every younger generation, “Bud’smel. Bud’terpeliv”—Be brave. Be patient — yes, the party had made serious mistakes, but at heart the party was still right.
Lenin was gone now, reviled by some as some atheists reviled Christ, but Alex had not deserted the party, nor had the other members of his “sleeper” cell, as firm as ever in their conviction that capitalism was at heart evil — that its enemies were their friends.
This wintry afternoon, Alex’s returning again to the park seemed propitious. Presently he was joined by a short, stout man, Mike Ricardo. Parks had always been a favorite meeting place for the Soviets, and still were in what was now the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. Last time they met they had set Operation Kirov’s Ballet in action, knocking out Con Ed’s Indian Point plant, poisoning the city’s water supply at Hillsview Reservoir with one Thermos of PCBs, and taking out the cesium clock in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, the pacemaker clock for all the computers in the country, including the Pentagon’s.
“What d’you think?” Mike asked, walking up, helping himself to a chestnut from the packet Alex was holding, tossing the nut from hand to hand, blowing on it, his breath short, coming in sharp puffs of mist in the chilly air. “You think the Chinese’ll cross?”
“They always have.”
“Yeah, I know, but I mean all along the line?”
“Who knows?” Alex replied. “I can’t even figure out how they do embroidery.”
“Embroidery?”
“Double-sided stuff. They’ll do a picture on a silk screen. You swing it around — same picture on the other side but no knots, stitch marks, or loose thread. Beats me where they hide the ends. Must go blind.”
“Time,” Mike explained, peeling the chestnut, its steaming wisp in the air joining that of his own breath. “Chinks are in no hurry, Alex. They’re building up their strength.”
“Chinese can’t wait forever or Freeman might cross the line.”
Mike rolled up the Post he’d been carrying and stuck it under his arm, hands thrust deep in his topcoat pockets. “What’s in it for us?”
“Novosibirsk wants us to give Beijing as much help as we can. Beijing can’t start sending their operatives into New York. ‘Frisco maybe but not here. So we do our job and turn this thing around we’ll be on top. Chinks’ll make a deal with us on the disputed border areas along the Amur.”
“The Black Dragon,” Mike said.
“The Amur,” Alex said. “Anyway, this way Novosibirsk stays out of it — ostensibly — but if we do our job, shut things down here, hit Con Ed again, slow up the sea lift resupply, sow panic in the population, we’ll have Beijing’s IOU.”
Mike took one of the chestnuts from the bag, noticed it was too sooty, pulled out another, and saw a squirrel keeping pace with them in short, quick dashes by the snow-dusted path leading down past the puppet house toward the dairy.
“Son of a bitch is with the CIA.” He threw the husk at the squirrel. “You sure we’ll pull it off?”
“Look, we did Con Ed okay,” Alex reminded him tartly. “If we do this thing right — Christ knows we’ve been training for it long enough — Washington’ll shit its pants. Americans don’t have the stomach for it. You know that.”
“We Americans are tougher than you think,” Mike said.
Alex didn’t like the “we” but figured it was probably a good sign. Mike always got right into the part. Mike pointed out that some of the others, though neither he nor Alex met them very often, had gone a bit soft — not on the strategy, but they’d been waiting so long they’d started going to seed. “Donut guts!” Alex called them. They liked the blue-collar affluence they enjoyed — plumbers eighty bucks an hour! But if they’d gone soft it didn’t mean they’d gone over. Anyway, most still had at least one parent back in the CIS republics, and grandparents, even brothers and sisters — whatever Siberian Intelligence’s KGB Chief Chernko had decided he needed to keep everyone committed to the semya—family.
One of them had gone off the rails completely — started playing around with street women, spending most of his time screwing and spending. Paid out more at the track than he made on his job as subcontractor for New York Port Authority’s HERT, the harbor emergency response team. They’d found him, a floater, in the East River off the South Street Seaport, blood alcohol count of 1.6 and his testicles sewn in his mouth.
The Post had run a story that the man, a diver for HERT, had been humping one of the mob’s tarts. It had shaken everybody up except Alex, who, Mike thought, might have done it. The thing was, you never knew who was Chernko’s iceman in New York or anywhere else. Before the war, the rezidents in the U.N., UNICEF, or in the embassy in Washington would have handled it. Now you never knew who it was. Alex said it didn’t matter who whacked the big spender, that the Americans would do the same to any one of their people who started screwing anything in sight. You couldn’t afford the risk of who they’d blab to when they’d gone that far off the rails.
“Oh yeah?” Mike said in an accent as flawlessly American as Alex’s. “What about Kennedy? He screwed anything in a skirt.”
“And they whacked him,” Alex said.
Mike got the message, though he’d never bought the idea of a conspiracy theory — some big organizational plan to get Kennedy — even though he did think for one man to get away three shots at a moving target in a few seconds was tough to do. He, Alex, and every other “apprentice” at Spets training school in Novosibirsk had tried it. Alex had been the fastest and most accurate, blowing Kennedy’s head off three times in a row. But that wasn’t why he’d been chosen as the “foreman,” nor had he been chosen because he could do a floater if needed. No — Alex’s outstanding quality was his ability to sustain the long view, to bide his time through all the Gorbachev-Yeltsin turbulence and to hold the others to it.
Whoever shot the floater, Alex told Mike, was unimportant. The point was, he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants and he paid for it. “Drew too much attention to himself. Put everybody at risk.”
They saw Stefan, a wiry man well over six feet with what the doctors had told him was poor posture — stooped “from ducking doorways,” Mike joked. Stefan was a tradesman, too, an electrician from upstate, but he always wore a jacket and tie that made him look like a small businessman. He was standing by the monkey cage watching one of the animals sitting high on the loops, the monkey ignoring them, peering down into his crotch, grooming himself. Alex could smell Stefan’s breath as he approached him and tried not to make a face. Here Stefan was, living in the most advanced industrial country on earth, the home of the brave and dental floss, and he wouldn’t take care of his teeth. But it was a subject that Alex, for all his hard-nosed Spets training, couldn’t bring himself to broach, though he did move around Mike so that he was upwind as they stood either side of Stefan.
“Look at his red ass!” Stefan said.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “He’s a party monkey.”
“How big’s the park?” Alex asked flatly, and he wasn’t smiling at Mike’s little joke. Stefan, immediately sensing Alex was in his usual all-business mood, answered, “Eight hundred and forty-three acres.” Then Stefan asked his question. “How many blocks?”
Despite being upwind, Alex had to turn away from Stefan’s bad breath before answering. “Fifty-one blocks.”
Chernko in Novosibirsk, obsessed by the possibility of infiltration, insisted that every cell go through the formality of such a preset exchange after an American look-alike years ago had penetrated the Walker ring in Vienna on appearance alone.
The formality over, Alex suggested the three of them walk down to the reservoir.
“Christ, if I’d known that,” Stefan complained, adjusting the porkpie corduroy hat that made him look strangely elfish despite his height, “I could have met you at Eighty-fourth Street.”
“I like to walk,” Alex said, and offered Stefan a chestnut — maybe that’d help his breath.
“No thanks — makes my throat itchy. Listen, I know this is it, but which one do we take care of? Eeny, meeny, miney, mo?”
“What do you care?” Alex asked, unsmiling. “All you need to know is how to work your end.”
“Don’t worry about me, Alexi,” Stefan said. “Could do it with my eyes closed. Just like to know how many are going down, that’s all. We’re lucky Johnny Ferrago didn’t get to tell them anything.” Ferrago had been the foreman of another cell. They’d done their job poisoning the New York water supply earlier in the war, but Ferrago had ended up being taken out in a SWAT team firefight.
Alex quietly stepped to his left on the pathway to let a weaving ghetto blaster with skateboard attached fly through them. Closing the gap, he told Stefan, “All four of ‘em,” his tone unchanged. “Rush hour’s the best time for eeny. Meeny, early morning between two and three. Miney and mo anytime after that. Have you got the rats ready?” he asked Stefan.
“Yeah. Listen, Alex — you sure all four are going down? I mean — man, it’s gonna be an asylum.”
“Well,” Alex said, watching another ghetto blaster approaching, “it wasn’t meant to be a tea party, was it?” Not waiting for an answer, he continued. “By the book, remember. None of your families leave. That’s the first thing they’ll be looking for — a sudden move to another city. All you’ve gotta do is just follow the instructions to the letter and you’ll be okay.”
“Alex?” It was Mike, trying not to look as worried as Stefan, but he was bothered, too. It had come as a bit of a shock. They’d been living with a secret for so long that by now they’d stopped worrying about it ever getting out. And now suddenly they were going to do it. Their lives would never be the same — not after a job this big.
They were approaching Bethesda Terrace, the sun already lost to the skyscrapers. “It’d sure help to know there were others in the same boat,” Mike said. “I mean, I know— yeah, sure we shouldn’t ask.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Alex said. “Are you nuts? Christ, it’s basic. Right, Stefan? Only one of us knows two others— ever. That way we could lose a cell but not the whole group.” Alex cupped his hands to warm them against his mouth. “What is it?” he asked them, sensing a sudden reluctance. “You all want to hold hands? Your wives? You going soft!” He was looking at both Stefan and Mike. “We’ve had perfect cover for over fifteen years, and now you’re going slack-ass on me? Like Gregory?” Gregory was the floater whom the police had found in the East River. “Too old for it?” Alex pressed. “Is that it? Mommy’s boys?”
“Jesus—” Stefan said. “Jesus, Alex. It was — we were only asking.”
Alex turned on him. “Well don’t. Just do your fucking jobs. Or I can send your request for ‘layoff’ to Cheerio.” “Cheerio” was the name they used for Chernko. “He’s got the master list. Knows where everybody lives. We can replace you two quick as I did Gregory. You aren’t the only fish in the tank. We’ve got understudies all me way.”
“Okay, Alex,” Mike said. “Relax. We’re ready to go. No problem.”
“Stefan?” Alex snapped.
“Yeah. Fine, no problem.”
Alex was so angry with Stefan he was about to tell him to clean his goddamn teeth.
When they reached Bethesda Terrace, where the footpath they were on, an extension of East 72nd Street, wound westward, a silence reigned over the three as they approached the winged statue fountain, the water falling from the tapered tier in an uninterrupted veil, the air remarkably clean, a small boy kneeling, trying to crack a thin crust of ice at the edge to put in a sailboat. Alex watched him, automatically looking for any sign that the older man reaching down holding the boy’s jacket was carrying a parabolic pickup mike, using the kid as cover. Even though he knew Mike was carrying a detector, there was always the possibility that its batteries were on the fritz. But then he realized his sudden anxiety was merely a result of Mike and Stefan asking too many questions.
“This is the last meet,” he told them quietly. “After it’s done you fade back into the woodwork.” He told them, if they hadn’t already seen it for themselves, that the ad, like the one for a man in his “early thirties desiring a live-in companion, sexual preference not important, must like cats-no Republicans,” which had activated the Ferrago cell earlier in the war, was now appearing in every major newspaper across the United States. It was Chernko’s “go” signal for Spets “sleepers,” who had so easily infiltrated the U.S. during the KGB’s vershina—”high summer”—of the West’s honeymoon with Yeltsin and the CIS.
Before they parted, they spoke a little longer about incidental family concerns, Alex trying to ease things up a little, showing he understood how they felt, complaining about his kids’ dental bills. “Christ — they’ll break me,” he said, smiling.
“You’d be covered by the Con Ed benefits?” Mike said.
“Yeah but not ‘preexisting conditions.’ “
“What the hell does that mean?” Mike asked.
Alex shrugged. “Anything they don’t want to pay for, I guess.”
Stefan nodded toward the boy across the pool. “That kid’ll fall in if he’s not careful.”
“The weather should help us,” Alex said. “They say there’s a cold front moving down from Canada.”
He was half right. There was a cold front moving down from Canada, but it was the storm brewing over Virginia and moving up the coast that would help them most of all to shatter American morale.
“Oh shit,” Stefan said, and started off around the edge of the pool — the kid with the boat having fallen in and the old man frantically reaching for him.