The Devil's Alternative

“He won’t,” said Munro. “Believe me, my darling, he’ll grow up in freedom, in the West, with you as his mother and me as his stepfather. My principals have agreed to bring you out in the spring.”

She looked up at him with hope shining in her eyes.

“In the spring? Oh, Adam, when in the spring?”

“The talks cannot go on for too long. The Kremlin needs its grain by April at the latest, The last of the supplies and all the reserves will have run out by then. When the treaty is agreed upon, perhaps even before it is signed, you and Sasha will be brought out. Meanwhile, I want you to cut down on the risks you are taking. Only bring out the most vital material concerning the peace talks at Castletown.”

“There’s one in here,” she said, nudging the bag over her shoulder. “It’s from ten days ago. Most of it is so technical I can’t understand it. It refers to permissible reductions of mobile SS-Twenties.”

Munro nodded grimly.

“Tactical rockets with nuclear warheads, highly accurate and highly mobile, borne on the backs of tracked vehicles and parked in groves of trees and under netting all across Eastern Europe.”

Twenty-four hours later, the package was on its way to London.

Three days before the end of the month, an old lady was heading down Sverdlov Street in central Kiev toward her apartment block. Though she was entitled to a car and a chauffeur, she had been born and brought up in the country, of strong peasant stock. Even in her mid-seventies she preferred to walk rather than drive for short distances. Her visit to spend the evening with a friend two blocks away was so short she had dismissed the car and chauffeur for the night. It was just after ten when she crossed the road in the direction of her own front door.

She didn’t see the car, it came so fast. One minute she was in the middle of the road with no one about but two pedestrians a hundred yards away; the next, the vehicle was on her, lights blazing, tires squealing. She froze. The driver seemed to steer right at her, then swerved away. The wing of the vehicle crashed into her hip, bowling her over in the gutter. It failed to stop, roaring away toward Kreshchatik Boulevard at the end of the Sverdlov. She vaguely heard the crunch of feet running toward her as passersby came to her aid.

That evening, Edwin J. Campbell, the chief U.S. negotiator at the Castletown talks, arrived back, tired and frustrated, at the ambassadorial residence in Phoenix Park. It was an elegant mansion that America provided its envoy in Dublin, and fully modernized, with handsome guest suites, the finest of which Edwin Campbell had taken over. He was looking forward to a long, hot bath and a rest.

When he had dropped his coat and responded to his host’s greeting, one of the messengers from the embassy handed him a fat manila envelope. As a result his sleep was curtailed that night, but it was worth it.

The next day, he took his place in the Long Gallery at Castletown and gazed impassively across the table at Professor Ivan I. Sokolov.

All right, Professor, he thought, I know what you can concede and what you cannot. So let’s get on with it.

It took forty-eight hours for the Soviet delegate to agree to cut the Warsaw Pact presence of tracked tactical nuclear rockets in Eastern Europe by half. Six hours later, in the dining room, a protocol was agreed whereby the United States would sell the USSR $200 million worth of oil-drilling and -extraction technology at bargain-basement prices.

The old lady was unconscious when the ambulance brought her to the general hospital of Kiev, the October Hospital at 39 Karl Liebknecht Street. She remained so until the following morning. When she was able to explain who she was, panicked officials had her wheeled out of the general ward and into a private room, which rapidly filled with flowers. During that day the finest orthopedic surgeon in Kiev operated to set her broken femur.

In Moscow, Ivanenko took a call from his personal aide and listened intently.

“I understand,” he said without hesitation. “Inform the authorities that I shall come at once. What? Well, then, when she has come out of the anesthetic. Tomorrow night? Very well, arrange it.”

It was bitter cold on the evening of the last night of October. There was no one moving in Rosa Luxemburg Street, onto which the October Hospital backs. The two long black limousines stood unobserved at the curb by this back entrance which the KGB chief had chosen to use rather than the grand portico at the front.

The whole area stands on a slight rise of ground, amid trees, and farther down the street, on the opposite side, an annex to the hospital was under construction, its unfinished upper levels jutting above the greenery. The watchers among the frozen cement sacks rubbed their hands to keep the circulation going, and stared at the two cars by the door, dimly illuminated by a single bulb above the archway.

When he came down the stairs, the man with seven seconds to live was wearing a long, fur-collared overcoat and thick gloves, even for the short walk across the pavement to the warmth of the waiting car. He had spent two hours with his mother, comforting her and assuring he

r the culprits would be found, as the abandoned car had been found.

He was preceded by an aide, who ran ahead and flicked off the doorway light. The door and the pavement were plunged into darkness. Only then did Ivanenko advance to the door, held open by one of his six bodyguards, and pass through it. The knot of four others outside parted as his fur-coated figure emerged, merely a shadow among shadows.

He advanced quickly to the Zil, engine running, across the pavement. He paused for a second as the passenger door was swung open, and died, the bullet from the hunting rifle skewering through his forehead, splintering the parietal bone and exiting through the rear of the cranium to lodge in an aide’s shoulder.

The crack of the rifle, the whack of the impacting bullet, and the first cry from Colonel Yevgeni Kukushkin, his senior bodyguard, took less than a second. Before the slumping man had hit the pavement, the plainclothes colonel had him under the armpits, dragging him into the recesses- of the rear seat of the Zil. Before the door was closed, the colonel was screaming, “Drive! Drive!” to the shocked driver.

Colonel Kukushkin pillowed the bleeding head in his lap as the Zil screeched away from the curb. He thought fast. It was not merely a question of a hospital, but of which hospital for a man like this. As the Zil cleared the end of Rosa Luxemburg Street, the colonel flicked on the interior light. What he saw—and he had seen much in his career—was enough to tell him his master was beyond hospitals. His second reaction was programmed into his mind and his job : no one must know. The unthinkable had happened, and no one must know, save only those entitled to know. He had secured his promotion and his job by his presence of mind. Watching the second limousine, the bodyguards’ Chaika, swing out of Rosa Luxemburg Street behind them, he ordered the driver to choose a quiet and darkened street not less than two miles away, and park.

Leaving the curtained and motionless Zil at the curb, with the bodyguards scattered in a screen around it, he took off his blood-soaked coat and set off on foot. He finally made his phone call from a militia barracks, where his I.D. card and rank secured him instant access to the commandant’s private office and phone. It also secured him a direct line. He was patched through in fifteen minutes.

“I must speak to Comrade Secretary-General Rudin urgently,” he told the Kremlin switchboard operator. The woman knew from the line on which the call was coming that this was neither joke nor impertinence. She put it through to an aide inside the Armory Building, who held the call and spoke to Maxim Rudin on the internal phone. Rudin authorized the transfer of the call.

“Yes,” he grunted on the line, “Rudin here.”

Colonel Kukushkin had never spoken to him before, though he had seen him and heard him at close quarters many times. He knew it was Rudin. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and spoke.