The Man Who Heard Too Much Read online

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  For Lori, who was the woman of all these places

  Little Lamb, who made thee?

  Dost thou know, who made thee?

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  I’m very, very good

  And be it understood—

  I command a right good crew.

  —W. S. GILBERT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is concerned with the questions of Soviet Jewish emigration and the political fate of Lithuania. The book is set in the period before the open Lithuanian Republic push for total independence but after the first glimmers of what is called “glasnost.” It reflects both political and religious entanglements true at the time. This book, like others in the November chronicles, also brings up the continuing and real problem of computer security versus computer virus programs.

  The first book in this series, which is a sort of history of cold war politics and the bureaucracies that direct them, was The November Man [now published under the title Code Name November] and concerned a plot by IRA terrorists to assassinate a cousin of the British Queen while on his boat off the Irish coast. The book appeared a few weeks before Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by terrorists off the Irish coast. The prescience was unintended; it was my attempt to turn reporting observation into a study of future logic. It appears this book, written in 1988, also focused on aspects of an international story before the story actually began to unfold.

  1

  STOCKHOLM

  The fog from the Baltic Sea came in waves across the city of islands. The spires of the palace and the national cathedral and all the other churches and temples of man and God were detached from the earth and held in the clouds, where they disappeared. Silence came down on the narrow, crooked streets of the Old Town section and extended into the harbor. It was October, and the air was damp with expectation of winter. The sun had not set, but the fog made everything beneath the city spires full of gloom and foreboding.

  Viktor Rusinov, twenty-four, seaman aboard the Soviet cargo ship Leo Tolstoy, slipped along the outside passage on two deck toward the radio room. The cargo—Swedish machine parts from the factory at Göteborg—had been loaded, and the Leo Tolstoy would sail in the morning for Gdansk, on the Polish north coast.

  Viktor Rusinov paused on the passageway and sensed his fear. He stood very still to make his fear subside. He smelled the sea and the city beyond. He heard a church bell toll. He blessed himself with the Orthodox sign of the cross because he was a religious man. The fear was suppressed in that ritual.

  There were two political officers assigned to the Leo Tolstoy. They were both ashore now, probably gorging themselves at the smorgasbord served at the Opera. The political officers—who were, in fact, members of the Committee for State Security, the KGB—were totally privileged men.

  Viktor Rusinov had nourished his rudimentary communist hatred for the upper classes during five years at sea. He hated the KGB men and he hated the captain. He hated every superior officer. He hated people with money, and those who could buy goods in the special stores set aside for foreigners. He hated with the fine, certain passion of the committed Christian. He knew God would destroy his superiors in time (and in a particularly cruel way). He was certain hell awaited them for their sins of having more than Viktor Rusinov. Development of this hatred had not been enough for Viktor; he had decided, in the end, to enjoy the benefits of his superiors in the only way left open to him. But there was risk to it, and that made him afraid.

  Viktor came from a small village a hundred miles south of Moscow. He had dreamed always of the sea. He loved the life of it. He loved the company of his fellow seamen. He loved to drink and to fornicate, and he saw nothing in those activities that compromised his religious beliefs. The women he had were not important and did not figure in his complex scheme of good and evil and envy and retribution. He was strong and tall and his eyes were blue. He could have been Swedish or Polish because of his fair complexion.

  He was going to slip over the side in a few minutes and disappear into the fog of neutral Stockholm. He had only waited for his father to die, and his father had obliged him two months earlier in a cancer ward. He had no one left and no obligation to return. He saw it that way, in those correct, legal terms.

  He would have preferred to defect in New York, but Stockholm was here and now. He had been in New York harbor once but had not been allowed to leave the freighter. The immensity of that city thrilled him as well as the constant rumble—the city noises conspired to create a constant sound like that of a train passing in the distance—and he knew it was his destiny to return there sometime. Stockholm was the first step. Besides, in the last few days the KGB men had spent a lot of time watching him. Now was the time. He knew the location of the American embassy—101 Strandvägen, which was the broad street on the harbor in Norrmalm, the northern sector of the city.

  The red flag was limp on the standard at the stem of the ship. The ship was silent, full of a thousand tiny noises that were as comforting as lullabies. The ship rode the slight swell of the harbor, the bulkheads rubbing against the pilings, making soft, purring sounds against the ropes.

  He opened the door of the radio room.

  Yazimoff was there as he should have been. Yazimoff looked up at Viktor.

  “So, it’s now?” But not really a question. Yazimoff almost smirked. It was very annoying, and it made the tense knot in Viktor’s stomach that much more painful.

  Viktor inclined his head without a word. He reached into the pocket of his coat and extracted the wad of rubles, deutsche marks, francs, dollars, and pounds. A lot of money, some of it quite valuable. All he had saved from the liquor trade. Viktor Rusinov, when not counting his resentments and nursing his jealousies, was both a maker and seller of illegal vodka. Nothing had helped his business more than the crackdown on vodka by the Gorbachev government.

  Yazimoff stared at the money with reverence. It was quite a lot, more than he had ever seen in his life.

  “This,” Yazimoff said.

  Viktor stared at the handwriting on the paper. It was Yazimoff’s. He did not understand the message, but he understood clearly it was in code.

  “What is this?”

  “Oleg? You know, the fat one? He took the message and he decoded it right away. And he used this.”

  Viktor took the second sheet of paper. The key. It was covered with numbers arranged in sets of four. Viktor didn’t really understand how it worked—but so what? That was someone else’s problem. Viktor wanted to defect to the Americans. The coded message and its key would be a gift, to show his good intentions and to make certain the Americans would not send him back.

  “Is it worth this?” Viktor asked, holding up the bills.

  Yazimoff made a little shrug but held out his hand. He took the roll of bills and put it in his pocket without counting.

  Viktor folded the two sheets of paper carefully into a waterproof envelope attached to a chain around his neck. He rebuttoned his shirt.

  “The water is cold,” Yazimoff said.

  “I’ve swum in colder water,” Viktor Rusinov said. He had a tendency to brag about his abilities, including his prowess with wom
en and his gargantuan need for drink. No one on the Leo Tolstoy much liked him, but as a bootlegger, he was tolerated.

  Viktor closed the hatch to the radio room. It was 1600 hours, and the ship was caught in that curious, sleepy time between the workday and the evening mess. No one was on deck. He went carefully and quietly down the ladders.

  When he reached the main deck, he looked over the side. The Tolstoy rode low in the oily, dark water. The fog made his skin wet. He wiped at his lips. He would drop off on the seaside and swim around to the end of the pier, where it would be safe to climb up the old ladder to land.

  “What are you staring at, Seaman?”

  Viktor turned.

  The first mate of the watch was on the deck, scarcely six feet from him. It was Doesniov, a particularly loathsome specimen in Viktor’s pantheon of hated superior officers. Doesniov was a big, boastful man with a bullying manner. He strutted down the deck to where Viktor stood at the rail.

  “Well? What are you staring at? Do you see something in the water, in all this damned fog?”

  Viktor felt intimidated, not by Doesniov’s size but by his rank. Viktor’s intense hatred for those in superior positions did not alter his almost religious respect for rank.

  “I thought I heard something—”

  “What? Heard a mermaid?”

  “Something in the water.” He was not a very good liar. But Doesniov looked over the rail. There. He was looking over the rail.

  Viktor couldn’t move.

  Doesniov turned to look at him. “You’ve been drinking your own stuff, Viktor Ilyich.”

  “I don’t…” So Doesniov knew about the illegal liquor trade. Why not? Everyone knew everything. “Look—”

  “Are you ill? You look ill.”

  Viktor felt the color drain from his face. He felt fear and cold. He felt the weight of the documents in the waterproof envelope on the chain around his neck. He could give them back, say it was a mistake—

  That was stupid! Yazimoff wouldn’t give back his money. What would the two pigs from KGB do? They already suspected him, he was sure of it.

  “Look!” Victor pointed down at the water, as though something had caught his eye.

  Doesniov turned. Again, he looked over the rail, his head lower than his shoulders.

  Viktor had to do it. God offered him no choice.

  Both hands locked into a hammer of flesh. The hammer came down hard on the base of the skull. Doesniov grunted, his chin broke on the rail, and he slid to the wet deck. God offered no choice. There was only this one way and no other.

  Viktor slipped out of his wool coat and dropped it over the side.

  Not a moment to spare.

  He scarcely made a splash when he hit the water.

  2

  NEW YORK CITY

  Sixteen days later, Devereaux climbed out of the yellow cab in a pouring rain in front of the old Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan. He pushed two twenties through the open window on the passenger side and turned to face the entrance. He carried one small brown canvas bag, which contained all his travel equipment—the clean clothes, the spare sweater, the pharmacopoeia, including uppers and downers and penicillin and cyanide capsules. He had also packed a 9-millimeter Beretta automatic of the design now issued to the U.S. military as well as to “authorized agents of the intelligence services.”

  He crossed the sidewalk and paused at the entrance. The rain was sheer gloom; the chaos of traffic and noise, an audition for hell. Brutal sirens, horns, the screams of ambulances, the belches of buses—it rolled over him in hopeless waves. The sidewalks were temporarily empty because of the rain and because it was the middle of the afternoon. But the fullness of the city noises suffocated him.

  He thought for a moment of refusing to enter the hotel and meet the man who controlled him. He would just turn and run until he could not run anymore, and if they found him, he would kill them.

  The doorman decided for him by opening the door. He went inside the old lobby full of overstuffed chairs and old ladies. He walked to the Blue Bar to the right of the entrance. The barman was wiping a glass, and the waiter was reading the New York Post. Devereaux stood, dripping raindrops on the carpet, staring at the bar. And then he saw Hanley at the little table in the corner.

  It was just after three P.M.

  He crossed the room to Hanley’s corner. Hanley looked up from the folded front page of the Times. Devereaux stood a moment and then shrugged out of his wet raincoat, folded it on a chair, and sat down. A thick carpet covered the floor, and rows of glittering bottles rested on the shelf behind the bar. The barman was Chinese, and he looked as sour as the waiter who approached the table.

  Devereaux ordered a vodka. Hanley, clearing his throat, asked for another bowl of nuts. The waiter made it understood with a pull to his mouth that he was extending himself. He nodded without a word and went back to the service bar.

  “Tell me,” Hanley said.

  But it had been a long flight and the days of interrogation had worn Devereaux out as certainly as if he had been the one being questioned. He didn’t feel in the mood to respond, and something about Hanley’s tone irritated him. Devereaux knew he was a mere cog in the great intelligence machine, but he suddenly wanted to insist he was human, that he was tired, that even a cog can break down. Instead, he looked at Hanley and smiled. “You arrange these meetings in places like this.”

  “What’s wrong with places like this?”

  “Old New York. Club 21 or the bar at the Algonquin or the lobby of the Plaza. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you’re living in an old movie?”

  Devereaux’s sarcasm made him feel better. Hanley was struggling to understand. It would come to him in a moment, and then he would blink like a startled rabbit, and Devereaux knew that would please him, too.

  Hanley blinked.

  He was small, bald, and he was very rigid after a lifetime in the service. He believed in R Section, which made it that much worse. He had fixed his beliefs and ideas when he was a boy in Nebraska, dreaming through storybooks or at the weekly picture show. New York was such and such; here was China, and here was the way of Chinamen; here was London, full of knights and kings; and here was Washington, seat of power in the world and true to Manifest Destiny, full of dedicated men given to ferocious patriotism. That his view did not reflect reality then or now was the spark that drove the engine.

  “I like this old hotel and this old bar,” he explained. “I like old things. I am conservative, and it seems that the old things were better.”

  “Silk stockings and segregation,” Devereaux said. His voice was weary, but Hanley always revived a sleeping sarcasm in him. “The best of times.”

  “We make the best of times,” Hanley said.

  The waiter brought two drinks and a metal bowl full of nuts. He put them down on the little table along with an absurd bill and went out of the room.

  “Viktor is a genuine,” Devereaux said after sipping his vodka. Vodka numbed him all the more now because he had refused to drink on the long flight back from Stockholm. He had taken a pill and slept most of the way across the Atlantic, even through a patch of bad headwinds. It did no good. When the stewardess awakened him thirty minutes before the plane touched down at Kennedy, he felt as though he had never slept in his life.

  He had kept at Viktor Rusinov for eight days. The CIA station chief had his turn as well, and R Section had been called in to “share” with great reluctance. But part of Viktor’s coded documents demanded R Section involvement. And the participation of Devereaux.

  “Are you sure? That Viktor is who he says he is?”

  “Nothing is sure.” Devereaux put down his drink and leaned forward. “He’s a hateful man, really. He explained to me his envy as a theory of unfairness directed at him. He has justified everything in his life, every act, every petty revenge. His hatreds are rooted in a ferocious kind of religiosity. In His heart, God knows Viktor is right.”

  “He sounds der
anged,” Hanley said.

  “Perhaps he is. Perhaps he’s only being normal by Soviet standards. He said the KGB men on the ship suspected him of wanting to defect. He thought he’d killed the first mate when he hit him. He’s a big boy, Viktor. I told him the Soviets insisted he stand trial for mutiny and murder. It scared him, but it also made him angry, and he went on about how unjust the world was to deny Viktor Rusinov his due. Maybe he’s that simple, just crazy.” Devereaux’s voice softened. “He can come to America and join his fellow lunatics living out of their shopping carts on the streets.”

  Hanley lowered his eyes and sipped gin. “Which are not made of gold.”

  “Viktor’s message had two names. ‘Skarda.’ ‘Henry McGee.’ Viktor simply does not know either name or how they connect. He’s the messenger,” Devereaux said.

  Henry McGee. Nothing else in the defection incident had interested R Section as much as the name of Henry McGee.

  Henry McGee was now in federal prison, thanks to Devereaux. McGee had penetrated R Section for years as a mole from Moscow—which also made him an American traitor because he was born in Alaska. McGee had been set the task of destroying the credibility of R Section and had nearly succeeded.

  When Viktor defected to the American embassy at 101 Strandvägen in Stockholm, the message had been turned over to CIA, which had bucked it to the code breakers at National Security Agency. Very routine. All the intelligence services were alerted to the results: a message fragment in which only the names “Henry McGee” and “Skarda” and the routine wording “no operational difficulty in any connection for penetration of Eagle” stood out. “Eagle” was the current Soviet euphemism for American intelligence. What did the American services make of this message? Was it genuine? Was Viktor genuine?

  So Devereaux, because he had broken the penetration of Henry McGee, was the logical man to send to Stockholm to question Viktor, to see if he was genuine, to see if he understood more than the coded message fragment. Henry McGee frightened the brass at R Section, even now when he was buried in a fifty-year sentence in a maximum federal prison.