The Lure

13 Moscow Chatline

Phone ringing.

Its rasp penetrated layers of sleep and merged with a bizarre dream in which she was floating above a TV quiz show. An uncomprehending eyelid dragged itself open; green numbers on a bedside clock read 2.10 a.m.

Phone ringing, at ten past two in the morning.

Dasha! There’s been an accident!

She dragged herself fully awake. A sense of dread washing over her, she threw back the blankets and stumbled through to the tiny living room.

Phone still ringing.

The window was partially open and a black electric cable snaked through the gap down to the battery of a silver Niva five flights below: it was the only way to ensure that her car would start in the minus thirty degrees of a Moscow winter. But the night air from this Moscow winter was drifting in through the gap and she gasped as she opened the living-room door and hurried towards the telephone. The sound of traffic, still rumbling at this hour, came up from the street below.

Still ringing.

Don’t stop!

She banged a shin painfully on the edge of a low table. Keep ringing. I’m almost there!

She found it, dropped the receiver, picked it up, trembling.

Professional voice, deep male: ‘Tatyana Maranovich?’ A doctor or a surgeon. Dasha was in some hospital bed. No. This was a policeman. Her daughter was lying on a mortuary slab somewhere.

Tanya’s voice and hands shook uncontrollably. ‘Yes?’

‘My name is Vashislav Shtyrkov. I want to speak to Professor Velikhov. The duty clerk at the Academy referred me to you. May I have his home phone number?’

Relief and anger struggled in her head, and relief won: Dasha was all right, probably tucked up with Alexei somewhere. Suddenly the bitter cold, which she had ignored, became an issue. ‘Vashislav Shtyrkov, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t give the Professor’s name out to a stranger. I could lose my job.’

‘Let me give you an assurance on that: you will lose it if you don’t.’

‘Can you tell me what this is about?’

‘No.’

‘At least tell me who you are.’

‘A colleague, from the old days.’

Something stirred in Tanya’s mind. ‘Are you the one who called the Professor about that castle in Slovakia?’

‘I am the one. Now will you give me his number?’

‘No, I’m not allowed to do that. But if you give me yours I’ll relay it to him.’

‘That will suffice. But you must give it to him now.’

‘At this hour? The Professor will not thank me for that.’ She was now shivering inside her thick flannel nightgown.

‘On the contrary, Tanya Maranovich, if you call him now he will bring you lilies from the Nile and sunshine from Mexico.’

Georgi Velikhov, as befitted the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had a villa in the Gorki-9 district of Moscow. The villa came with a maid and a cook, six bedrooms and government-issue furniture. His neighbours were diplomats, high government officials and, not two kilometres away, was the fazenda of Mikhail Isayevich Ogorodnikov, President of Russia.

And the central heating stayed on all night. Apart from anything else, the house was full of children: over the New Year, Velikhov was playing Father Frost to his wife Masha, his three daughters and their husbands, and nine grandchildren.

So it was that, although it was three in the morning and the air outside was colder than a domestic freezer, the patriarch was warm and comfortable in a studded green leather chair in his study. A stove, which he had banked up with wood for an overnight slow burn, was burning brightly, and a green shaded lamp suspended from the ceiling was throwing a harsh light over a large leather-topped desk.

He was on the telephone for over an hour. Most of the time he listened, but now and then he would fire off a question in a staccato tone.

He didn’t hear Masha come into the study, didn’t notice his four-year-old granddaughter standing at the open door in a pink nightdress, finger in mouth and hand on the top of her head until Grandmother Masha picked her up and carried her back to bed.

At the end of the call he noticed the hot chocolate in front of him with surprise. It had gone cold but his mouth was dry with talking and excitement and he gulped it down.

Velikhov stood up, stretched briefly, and then paced up and down for some minutes. The Kremlin, of course, would have a duty officer.

Good morning, I want to speak to the President on an urgent matter.

Certainly. I’ll rouse the President’s Chief of Staff now.

Alexy? I believe we’ve been contacted by an alien intelligence.

Thank you, Academician Velikhov. I too find a few Stolichnayas quite heart-warming in this weather.

They have given us information of unbelievable economic, scientific, military and medical importance.

And I especially appreciate being wakened from my bed at three in the morning for a joke. A good New Year to you.

Velikhov smiled grimly and shook his head. No, I don’t think so.

In any case, Ogorodnikov was unlikely to be in the Kremlin. More probably, he was five minutes’ drive from here, tucked up with his little fat Katya; or he might be staying in his other dacha, the modest one in the Odintsovo district. Or no — didn’t he go moosehunting in Sverdlovsk at this time of year?

Sensible to wait until waking hours.

Or a dereliction of duty?

Two miles away from Tatyana Maranovich’s small flat, in a bleak basement in the Nevsky Prospekt, a young man listened to her conversation with Academician Velikhov. The Professor had seemed a bit grumpy about being wakened up; perhaps the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning had something to do with it. The call was recorded automatically and there was little for the man to do but listen, which he did while idly filling in a jumbo crossword. Given the content of the call he was not surprised when, five minutes after it had ended, another one went out from the Academician’s dacha.

The young CIA officer was alone, the Gorki-9 telephone traffic being light in the early hours. He had arrived only three weeks ago, full of enthusiasm about his Moscow posting, on the strength of his background in Van Eck monitoring. To his disappointment, he had been assigned to the ‘chatline’, the routine coverage of private calls to and from the dachas, private and government-owned, of the government officials.

Velikhov’s name and address came up quickly on the screen, but there was a few moments’ delay while the recipient’s location was traced through a satellite.

Ninety-nine per cent of it was drivel — gossip between wives, teenagers talking to each other, remote calls to children in distant places. There was an occasional diversion, the Canadian diplomat’s wife in particular: ‘Ruth’s on!’ would bring a gleeful rush to the terminal, as the calls between her and her opera house lover became ever more steamy and inventive.

No name. Some castle in Slovakia.

At this hour. Interesting.

The phonetic translator threw up the words in passable English but the CIA officer’s Russian was better than the machine’s.

He listened with growing perplexity. This wasn’t a conversation between two normal adults, it was between lunatics. He dropped the crossword and pressed the headphones lightly against his ear, frowning.

And then he smiled. Of course — he was on the receiving end of a joke, some ponderous Russian humour. They were saying, ‘Merry Christmas, Amerika, we know you’re listening in.’

But there was no humour in the voices.

His smile gradually faded. If they knew he was listening in, why tell him this through a joke? Why not use this knowledge to transmit misinformation? Why tell a tale that couldn’t be taken seriously, not for a second?

As the crazy exchange continued, it increasingly dawned on the young man that this was no joke and that if these were actors, they were damn good ones.

The call lasted over an hour. At the end of it, the CIA man took off his headphones with a sigh and scratched his head.

I’ve just intercepted this call about aliens.

Aliens?

The callers were serious.

Of course they were. How long have you been with us? Three weeks?

He shook his head. Three weeks in Moscow and either he had the coup of a lifetime, or he was the victim of a humiliating, career-damaging practical joke.