The Devil's Alternative

“No, Adam, no, it’s tempting but I can’t. Whatever the outcome, I am part of Russia, I have to stay. Perhaps, one day ... I don’t know.”

They sat in silence for a while, holding hands. She broke the quiet at last.

“Did your ... intelligence people pass the tape recording on to London?”

“I think so. I handed it to the man I believe represents the Secret Service in the embassy. He asked me if there would be another one.”

She nodded at her shoulder bag.

“It’s just the transcript. I can’t get the tape recordings anymore. They’re kept in a safe after the transcriptions, and I don’t have the key. The papers in there are of the following Politburo meeting.”

> “How do you get them out, Valentina?” he asked.

“After the meetings,” she told him, “the tapes and the stenographic notes are brought under guard to the Central Committee building. There is a locked department there where we work, five other women and I. With one man in charge. When the transcripts are finished, the tapes are locked away.”

“Then how did you get the first one?”

She shrugged.

“The man in charge is new, since last month. The other one, before him, was more lax. There is a tape studio next door where the tapes are copied once before being locked in the safe. I was alone in there last month, long enough to steal the second tape and substitute a dummy.”

“A dummy?” exclaimed Munro. “They’ll spot the substitution if ever they play them back.”

“It’s unlikely,” she said. “The transcripts form the archives once they have been checked against the tapes for accuracy. I was lucky with that tape; I brought it out in a shopping bag under the groceries I had bought in the Central Committee commissary.”

“Aren’t you searched?”

“Hardly ever. We are trusted, Adam, the elite of the New Russia. The papers are easier. At work I wear an old-fashioned girdle. I copied the last meeting of June on the machine, but ran off one extra copy, then switched the number control back by one figure. The extra copy I stuck inside my girdle. It made no noticeable bulge.” Munro’s stomach turned at the risk she was taking. “What do they talk about in this meeting?” he asked, gesturing toward the shoulder bag.

“The consequences,” she said. “What will happen when the famine breaks. What the people of Russia will do to them. But Adam ... there’s been one since. Early in July. I couldn’t copy it; I was on leave. I couldn’t refuse my leave; it would have been too obvious. But when I got back, I met one of the girls who had transcribed it. She was white-faced and wouldn’t describe it.”

“Can you get it?” asked Munro.

“I can try. I’ll have to wait until the office is empty and use the copying machine. I can reset it afterward so it will not show it has been used. But not until early next month; I shall not be on the late shift when I can work alone until then.”

“We shouldn’t meet here again,” Munro told her. “Patterns are dangerous.”

He spent another hour describing the sort of tradecraft she would need to know if they were to go on meeting. Finally he gave her a pad of closely typed sheets he had tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.

“It’s all in there, my darling. Memorize it and burn it. Flush the ashes down the can.”

Five minutes later she gave him a wad of flimsy paper sheets covered with neat, typed Cyrillic script from her bag and slipped away through the forest to her car on a sandy track half a mile away.

Munro retreated into the darkness of the main arch above the church’s recessed side door. He produced a roll of tape from his pocket, slipped his pants to his knees, and taped the batch of sheets to his thigh. With the trousers back up again and belted, he could feel the paper snug against his thigh as he walked, but under the baggy, Russian-made trousers, they did not show.

By midnight, in the silence of his flat, he had read them all a dozen times. The next Wednesday, they went in the Messenger’s wrist-chained briefcase to London, wax-sealed in a stout envelope and coded for the SIS liaison man at the Foreign Office only.

The glass doors leading to the Rose Garden were tightly shut, and only the whir of the air conditioner broke the silence in the Oval Office of the White House. The balmy days of June were long gone, and the steamy heat of a Washington August forbade open doors and windows.

Around the building on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, the tourists, damp and hot, admired the familiar aspect of the White House front entrance, with its pillars, flag, and curved driveway, or queued for the guided tour of this most holy of American holies. None of them would penetrate to the tiny West Wing building where President Matthews sat in conclave with his advisers.

In front of his desk were Stanislaw Poklewski and Robert Benson. They had been joined by the Secretary of State, David Lawrence, a Boston lawyer and pillar of the East Coast establishment.

President Matthews flicked the file in front of him closed. He had long since devoured the first Politburo transcript, translated into English; what he had just finished reading was his experts’ evaluation of it.

“Bob, you were remarkably close with your estimate of a shortfall of thirty million tons,” he said. “Now it appears they are going to be fifty to fifty-five million tons short this fall. And you have no doubt this transcript comes right from inside the Politburo?”

“Mr. President, we’ve checked it out every way. The voices are real; the traces of excessive lindane in the root of the wheat plant are real; the hatchet job inside the Soviet Agriculture Ministry is real. We don’t believe there is room for any substantive doubt that tape recording was of the Politburo in session.”