The Devil's Alternative

“Darling, I’m sorry. Listen.”

He told her of the visit by Ambassador Kirov to President Matthews the previous evening; of the news being passed to London; of the demand to him that he try to find out why the Kremlin was taking such an attitude over Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because those animals murdered Captain Rudenko, a man with a wife and children.”

“Valentina, we have listened to the Politburo these past nine months. The Treaty of Dublin is vital to your people. Why would Rudin put it in jeopardy over these two men?”

“He has not done so,” answered Valentina. “It is possible for the West to control the oil slick if the ship blows up. The costs can be met. The West is rich.”

“Darling, there are twenty-rune seamen aboard that ship. They, too, have wives and children. Twenty-nine men’s lives against the imprisonment of two. There has to be another and more serious reason.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It has not been mentioned in Politburo meetings. You know that also.”

Munro stared miserably through the windshield. He had hoped against hope she might have an answer for Washington, something she had heard inside the Central Committee building. Finally he decided he had to tell her.

When he had finished, she stared through the darkness with round eyes. He caught a hint of tears in the dying light of the moon.

“They promised,” she whispered. “They promised they would bring me and Sasha out, in a fortnight, from Rumania.”

“They’ve gone back on their word,” he confessed. “They want this last favor.”

She placed her forehead on her gloved hands, supported by the steering wheel.

“They will catch me,” she mumbled. “I am so frightened.”

“They won’t catch you.” He tried to reassure her. “The KGB acts much more slowly than people think, and the higher their suspect is placed, the more slowly they have to act. If you can get this piece of information for President Matthews, I think I can persuade them to get you out in a few days, you and Sasha, instead of two weeks. Please try, my love. It’s our only chance left of ever being together.”

Valentina stared through the glass.

“There was a Politburo meeting this evening,” she said finally. “I was not there. It was a special meeting, out of sequence. Normally on Friday evenings they are all going to the country. Transcription begins tomorrow—that is, today—at ten in the morning. The staff have to give up their weekend to get it ready for Monday. Perhaps they mentioned the matter.”

“Could you get in to see the notes, listen to the tapes?” he ask

ed.”

“In the middle of the night? There would be questions asked.”

“Make an excuse, darling. Any excuse. You want to start and finish your work early, so as to get away.”

“I will try,” she said eventually. “I will try—for you, Adam, not for those men in London.”

“I know those men in London,” said Adam Munro. “They will bring you and Sasha out if you help them now. This will be the last risk, truly the last.”

She seemed not to have heard him, and to have overcome, for a while, her fear of the KGB, exposure as a spy, the awful consequences of capture unless she could escape in time. When she spoke, her voice was quite level.

“You know Detsky Mir? The soft-toys counter. At ten o’clock this morning.”

He stood on the black tarmac and watched her taillights vanish. It was done. They had asked him to do it, demanded that he do it, and he had done it. He had diplomatic protection to keep him out of Lubyanka. The worst that could happen would be his Ambassador’s summons to the Foreign Ministry on Monday morning to receive Dmitri Rykov’s icy protest and demand for his removal. But Valentina was walking right into the secret archives, without even the disguise of normal, accustomed, justified behavior to protect her. He looked at his watch. Seven hours, seven hours to go, seven hours of knotted stomach muscles and ragged nerve ends. He walked back to his car.

Ludwig Jahn stood in the open gateway of Tegel Jail and watched the taillights of the armored van bearing Mishkin and Lazareff disappear down the street.

For him, unlike for Munro, there would be no more waiting, no tension stretching through the dawn and into the morning. For him the waiting was over.

He walked carefully to his office on the first floor and closed the door. For a few moments he stood by the open window, then drew back one hand and hurled the first of the cyanide pistols far into the night. He was fat, overweight, unfit. A heart attack would be accepted as possible, provided no evidence was found.

Leaning far out of the window, he thought of his nieces over the Wall in the East, their laughing faces when Uncle Ludo had brought the presents four months ago at Christmas. He closed his eyes, held the other tube beneath his nostrils, and pressed the trigger button.

The pain slammed across his chest like a giant hammer. The loosened fingers dropped the tube, which fell with a tinkle to the street below. Jahn slumped, hit the windowsill, and caved backward into his office, already dead. When they found him, they would assume he had opened the window for air when the first pain came. Kukushkin would not have his triumph. The chimes of midnight were drowned by the roar of a truck that crushed the tube in the gutter to fragments.