Black Gambit Read online

  GAMBIT

  ERIC CLARK

  © Eric Clark 1978

  Eric Clark has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents act, 1998, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain 1978 by Hodder and Stoughton.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

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  Acknowledgements

  Many people in several countries helped me in researching the background to this book. A number of them, mostly present or past employees of government agencies, expressly asked to remain faceless.

  I thank them, as I do those I can name:

  In the United States, William and Lori Jordan, investigators, and Roger L. Simon; in Holland, Sue and Anton Koene, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, the staff of Schipol Airport and in particular M.N. Wartena; in Britain, Iain Elliott, editor of Soviet Analyst, Dr A.G. Marshall, pathologist. Dr Dennis Evans, of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, William Millinship, former Washington correspondent of The Observer, and the Chess Centre.

  Finally, there are four people whose encouragement throughout meant so much: my friend and fellow author Raymond Hawkey, Helena, Maureen McConville, and — above all — my wife Marcelle who had faith.

  For Rachel and her grandparents

  GAMBIT: A chess move in which a player voluntarily sacrifices one or more pawns in an attempt to gain long term advantage

  Chapter One

  VIKTOR MICHAELOVICH PAVLINOV, junior lieutenant KGB, tried to huddle further back in the archway and wondered yet again whether he dared flick his lighter to check the time.

  He decided not. He was proud of the lighter — an American Zippo, a present from his brother-in-law who travelled abroad a great deal — and using it gave him real pleasure. But first he would have to fumble with the layers of clothes, and then it was possible that those in the car would see the light and make an unfavourable mental note.

  In any event it could only be minutes now before he was relieved and allowed back into the tobacco-heavy warmth of the car.

  In the snow and the darkness he could not see the car, though it was only a street’s width away. Lights were never wasted in Moscow’s side streets, particularly in an area like this, the old part of town. Once he saw a cigarette-end make an arc and knew it must have been thrown from a window.

  Even in the twenty or so minutes he had been outside the car, the cold had worked into his body. He was dressed against it, but at this time of year and at this time in the morning, perhaps an hour from dawn, nothing could provide real protection.

  This was his first major assignment since he joined the Fifth Directorate, but so far it had involved nothing more than straightforward surveillance. In four hours, he and the others had taken turns leaving the unmarked Volga and standing in the archway of the cobbled courtyard.

  Surely something must happen soon. He could just make out the outline of the building containing the flats on the far side of the courtyard. It was a pre-Revolutionary mansion that would once have housed a single rich family and their servants.

  Pavlinov’s job was to watch the entrance to the block, an exercise that struck him as pointless for two reasons. For one thing, he could not see that far; for another he was sure that the upravdom was sitting inside even now, his door ajar ready to signal if anyone passed.

  In all blocks, the upravdom — the apartment manager, concierge, and rent collector — was expected to watch the activities of his tenants. Usually his reports were to the local militia. In this case, since the block housed the Zorins, he dealt with the KGB.

  To turn his mind from the cold, Pavlinov began to think of Zorin. Every member of the Fifth Directorate was well-briefed on those men the Western press insisted on calling ‘dissidents’. The Directorate had, in fact, been set up five years ago to deal with this very problem. More recently it had established within itself a department to deal specifically with Jews who wanted to emigrate.

  For many reasons Alexandrai Zorin was regarded as special. He had become a dissident comparatively late; he was not one of those who had become embroiled in the new human rights movement at its birth, eight years before, when the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky were sentenced to concentration camps for writing without a permit and publishing their work abroad.

  Zorin had been drawn in trying to protect friends who had become involved. Then he married Tanya, a Jewess. Now he was an important linking figure between the fragmented groups within the dissident movement: scientists, writers, intellectuals, Ukrainians, Crimean Tartars and, of course, the Jews. His name might not be as widely known abroad as that of other dissidents, but among them — and to the authorities — Zorin’s importance was immense. If there was a protest, he was likely to be one of the organisers; if there was a new campaign to create publicity in the Western press, he was almost certainly an instigator; if there was an illegal meeting, he was probably the co-ordinator. Through it all he stayed in the background. Even the Western newspapermen whom he manipulated so well knew of him vaguely, if at all.

  Pavlinov recalled items from the file. Zorin was forty-one, former Party member (and organizer), married, no children, geneticist, son of the respected Colonel Vladimir Dmitriov Zorin, recipient of the Order of Lenin.

  His wife was a fine concert pianist who, until her career had been stopped, seemed likely to win international acclaim. And she was, of course, Jewish. There was even a rumour, noted on her files, that her family had been close to Mrs Meir, in pre-Revolutionary days. Pavlinov hated the Jews. Not, he would stress if he were ever asked, because they were born Jews but because they insisted on remaining a separate group.

  And Zorin? He was a scientist, a famous one. It was that among other things that made it impossible for Pavlinov to understand him. Zorin — and his wife — were members of an elite. To dissent, to apply to emigrate …

  Pavlinov knew why. They were greedy. They had much but they wanted more. They wanted the praise of the Western press; they wanted to live well and to slander the Motherland. The pity was that they were allowed to get away with it — for now at least the Party had to appease the West. Furthermore Pavlinov had no doubt that Zorin’s late father still had friends where it counted. None of which made the reality any less sickening. Perhaps now that the traitor Solzhenitsyn had been dealt with …

  Pavlinov had just become convinced that he was not to be relieved after the agreed thirty minutes when he saw the other car come into sight. Minutes later he spotted the man who must be his replacement. It was Lissov.

  The voice was a whisper, an unnecessary precaution.

  ‘This is it, we’re going in. The major says to wait. It won’t be long.’

  Lissov disappeared in the snow, no doubt back to the warmth of the car.

  Pavlinov could do nothing but stand and stamp his feet, and hurt with cold. At last he began to fumble through his clothes until he found his light
er. No longer able to resist, he lit it. It was 7.11, still nearly a half hour from dawn.

  *

  Alexandrai Leonidovich Zorin woke five minutes before the alarm was set to go off. He lifted himself on one elbow, leaned over and pressed the button to prevent it ringing.

  At 7.25 the first glimmers of light showed through the red curtains covering the one small window. Most other people in the block would be up already, many of them checking their watches as they finished breakfast or wondering whether there was time for more tea. But Zorin’s time was more or less his own. He could indulge his preference for starting later and then working through until the early hours of the next day. It was, he had reflected more than once, the one gift the authorities had given him the day they took away his right to work.

  Zorin eased himself up gently so that his head was supported by his hands clasped behind his neck. He wanted to savour the minutes to full daylight, when he would rise.

  He turned his head and looked down at Tanya, still asleep, curled foetus-like on her side. For a while he watched her in the half light, resisting an urge to reach out and stroke the black hair that flowed on the pillow. He did not want to wake her. She had been sleeping badly — worried, he knew, about what they all feared was coming. Solzhenitsyn had gone. Who next?

  The thought ended his feeling of contentment. He rolled gently out of bed, walked to the window, and lifted the edge of the curtain. It was still snowing but easing. Looking down, he was surprised that someone was not already beginning to clear the courtyard. There was one thing about the Russian state that had to be admired: it knew how to clear snow. Perhaps, he thought as he turned away, the snow was being left on purpose. Another harassment of the homeless alcoholics who gathered there with their bottles of vodka in even the worst of weathers.

  He walked through into the only other room, not bothering to pull on a robe over his pyjamas. At the door he turned. Tanya had moved but was still asleep. He closed the door carefully behind him.

  They met six years before, at a reception for a visiting Westerner. In those days both of them had been highly acceptable to the authorities. Almost immediately afterwards she went abroad on a concert tour. Zorin was then already thirty-six and had never before formed a strong attachment with anyone. This time, to his surprise, he found himself missing this woman he barely knew. They married less than a year later. Now he simply could not imagine existing without her.

  After washing, he looked down at his stomach and then at his face in the wall mirror. He smiled at his reflection: an unlikely looking hero. A Western journal covering the dissident movement had actually called him that. Tanya teased him about it — partly, he knew, to disguise the fear she felt whenever she saw him named in such a context.

  Making tea, he found himself thinking about that article. The authorities seemed convinced that it was Tanya who had drawn him into the dissident movement. Of course, it suited them to believe this — after all, how could a man with his background, with such a father, have acted as he did without outside persuasion? Yet he was convinced that the opinion was held genuinely. The article implied the same point. Strange, because he had never been able to understand how anyone could have acquired such a belief. It was not true. He had tried to correct it, not for the sake of truth but because of a vague feeling that it made Tanya more vulnerable: the state must always have its scapegoat. Zorin made tea and carried his glass to the larger of two armchairs, moved a magazine and sat. Directly in his vision was a pile of books stacked on the floor. He would have to find somewhere to put them. It seemed almost impossible that this room could hold so much: bookshelves, table and chairs, the two armchairs and a sofa that doubled as a bed when friends stayed, two chess sets, books and magazines and pictures …

  It was not that the apartment was small by Russian standards; it was, in fact, large. He knew families of as many as seven people sharing less space. As privileged members of the elite, he and Tanya had once occupied as much space apiece. But they were fortunate to have these rooms, previously occupied by Tanya’s aunt. Zorin and Tanya moved in when she died and — so far at least — no one had tried to evict them.

  Tanya’s piano was squeezed against one wall, at right angles to his desk. It was old and battered, the possession of a child about to learn, not a professional concert pianist. Tanya treasured it nonetheless. Until she was banned from the rehearsal rooms she had had no piano at home. This one had been bought from a friend, genuinely a child’s outgrown object. Zorin sometimes winced at its tone. Yet even this piano was now threatened: encouraged no doubt by the KGB, neighbours had complained. There had been threats that either the piano or the Zorins must go.

  Zorin took another sip from the glass of tea and lit a cigarette. He sucked the rich smoke in deeply, enjoying the light-headed giddiness the day’s first cigarette always made him feel. There were sounds from the next room: Tanya waking. Then there was silence again. Often she woke, looked around and then fell again into a short, restless sleep …

  No, it was not Tanya who had brought him into the movement, although the two had almost coincided in his life. It had all happened in 1969. As with so many Russians, Pasternak’s expulsion from the Writers’ Union for ‘actions incompatible with the calling of a Soviet writer’ and even the Sinyavsky-Daniel case left Zorin not so much unmoved as uninterested. What was special about 1969 was not that he felt strongly about what was happening, but that for the first time it touched people he knew personally.

  The year had been full of so many actions and retaliations that it was hard to recall them all now: attempts by the authorities to get intellectuals to put their names to a public statement in support of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, mass arrests and secret trials, the hounding of his fellow geneticist Zhores Medvedov who led the attack against Stalin’s crackpot scientist Lysenko.

  Zorin’s involvement had been gradual: trying to help one friend, then another; protesting to one official and then insisting on seeing another. It was at this stage that he married Tanya. She was already active in the Jewish dissident movement — at first, she would confess, as an angry reaction at being forced to cut short her foreign tour because Jews suddenly became universally suspect again.

  Zorin himself had been able to survive as a dissident without much trouble — a tribute, he suspected, to the power of his father’s old friends who protected him, convinced that he was experiencing a temporary aberration inspired by his new wife.

  And so they acted not against him but against Tanya. She was suspended from all her duties as a pianist. When she and her friends protested, using Western correspondents to publicize her case, she was expelled from the Musicians’ Union. As the months went by, Zorin’s involvement in protest became greater. Finally the state acted against him too, but in stages, as though hesitantly. First he was removed — as a ‘security risk’ — from his post in the biological section of the Atomic Energy Institute. He was offered another job. He took it. Then that ended. There were others, increasingly minor. He applied to emigrate to Israel and even as those jobs disappeared, his application was refused.

  He liked to think he had taken the step of applying to emigrate not for himself but for Tanya. He saw how not being able to play affected her; he’d studied her face when she listened to recordings of other musicians — or, worst of all, recordings of her own recitals. He realized the difference between her situation and that of most other ‘confined’ dissidents — writers, after all, could still write and even send their manuscripts abroad. What could a performing musician do but wait knowing that each day that went by she was getting less capable?

  *

  The snow had stopped. The major led the way from the second car. Altogether they were seven, Pavlinov at the rear.

  The door of the block was open. There was no lift. They began to climb the stairs. The steps were stone and their feet clattered in the silence. Although most of the tenants must have been up, no one looked out to satisfy his curiosity at the strange noi
ses.

  The Zorins’ flat was on the top floor. As they passed the third, a door opened and was quickly closed.

  At the top of the last flight, the major stopped and whispered instructions to Pavlinov’s superior. He and one other — the ox-like Dubin who belonged to the Seventh Directorate, the people who normally handled the routine job of surveillance — went forward, along the corridor, and stopped outside the door.

  Pavlinov had been in pre-dawn raids before, though none involving anyone of the standing of the Zorins, Still, he knew the routine. First there would be the knocks, then the sleepy replies from within, then the threats, finally the entrance and search.

  This was different. In the light from one low-powered naked bulb, Pavlinov saw the major nod and Dubin stand back from the door, half turn and lash out with his leg like a mule. The door crashed open on the third kick.

  Pavlinov found himself following the others as they ran down the corridor. There was a narrow hallway packed with a jumble of clothes so that no space in the apartment should be wasted, and then a living room. Zorin — Pavlinov recognized him from his photograph — was standing beside a small desk, facing the door, a pencil in his hand. A moment later a woman called from the bedroom.

  Zorin was shorter than Pavlinov had imagined. He looked tired. His waist was beginning to thicken — middle-age, lack of exercise. His short beard was flecked with silver. But when Zorin stiffened Pavlinov felt the man’s strength. The mouth was firm, stubborn almost. But most of all Pavlinov noticed the eyes — pale, pale blue and burning with intensity.

  A woman entered the room. Her entrance was a cue for a frozen photograph to become a moving film.

  ‘What is it? What is it?’

  Pavlinov turned to watch her. She had pulled on a black robe, sleeves too long, hem trailing the ground. Its size accentuated the tininess of her body, the fragility of her features. Except for her voice, deep even in this emotional moment, she could have been a child.