Fourth came the final group, the invisible one, those whom no one could identify in any easy way. These were the spies and the counterespionage agents who hunted them. They could be distinguished from the security officers, who watched everyone with suspicion, but from the room’s perimeter, as invisible as the waiters who circulated about with heavy silver trays of champagne and vodka in crystal glasses that had been commissioned by the House of Romanov. Some of the waiters were counterespionage agents, of course. Those had to circulate through the room, their ears perked for a snippet of conversation, perhaps a voice too low or a word that didn’t fit the mood of the evening. It was no easy task. A quartet of strings in a corner played chamber music to which no one appeared to listen, but this too is a feature of diplomatic receptions and doing without it would be noticed. Then there was the volume of human noise. There were well over a hundred people here, and every one of them was talking at least half the time. Those close to the quartet had to speak loudly to be heard over the music. All the resulting noise was contained in a ballroom two hundred feet long and sixty-five wide, with a parquet floor and hard stucco walls that reflected and reverberated the sound until it reached an ambient level that would have hurt the ears of a small child. The spies used their invisibility and the noise to make themselves the ghosts of the feast.
But the spies were here. Everyone knew it. Anyone in Moscow could tell you about spies. If you met with a Westerner on anything approaching a regular basis, it was the prudent thing to report it. If you did so only once, and a passing police officer of the Moscow Militia—or an Army officer strolling around with his briefcase—passed by, a head would turn, and note would be taken. Perhaps cursory, perhaps not. Times had changed since Stalin, of course, but Russia was still Russia, and distrust of foreigners and their ideas was far older than any ideology.
Most of the people in the room thought about it without really thinking about it—except those who actually played this particular game. The diplomats and politicians had practice guarding their words, and were not overly concerned at the moment. To the reporters it was merely amusing, a fabulous game that didn’t really concern them—though each Western reporter knew that he or she was ipso facto thought an agent of espionage by the Soviet government. The soldiers thought about it most of all. They knew the importance of intelligence, craved it, valued it—and despised those who gathered it for the slinking things they were.
Which ones are the spies?
Of course there was a handful of people who fitted into no easily identified category—or fitted into more than one.
“And how did you find Moscow, Dr. Ryan?” a Russian asked. Jack turned from his inspection of the beautiful St. George clock.
“Cold and dark, I’m afraid,” Ryan answered after a sip of his champagne. “It’s not as though we have had much chance to see anything.” Nor would they. The American team had been in the Soviet Union only for a little over four days, and would fly home the next day after concluding the technical session that preceded the plenary one.
“That is too bad,” Sergey Golovko observed.
“Yes,” Jack agreed. “If all of your architecture is this good, I’d love to take a few days to admire it. Whoever built this house had style.” He nodded approvingly at the gleaming white walls, the domed ceiling, and the gold leaf. In fact he thought it overdone, but he knew that the Russians had a national tendency to overdo a lot of things. To Russians, who rarely had enough of anything, “having enough” meant having more than anyone else—preferably more than everyone else. Ryan thought it evidence of a national inferiority complex, and reminded himself that people who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions. That one factor dominated all aspects of the arms-control process, displacing mere logic as the basis for reaching an agreement.
“The decadent Romanovs,” Golovko noted. “All this came from the sweat of the peasants.” Ryan turned and laughed.
“Well, at least some of their tax money went for something beautiful, harmless—and immortal. If you ask me, it beats buying ugly weapons that are obsolete ten years later. There’s an idea, Sergey Nikolay’ch. We will redirect our political-military competition to beauty instead of nuclear weapons.”
“You are satisfied with the progress, then?”
Business. Ryan shrugged and continued to inspect the room. “I suppose we’ve settled on the agenda. Next, those characters over by the fireplace have to work out the details.” He stared at one of the enormous crystal chandeliers. He wondered how many man-years of effort had gone into making it, and how much fun it must have been to hang something that weighed as much as a small car.
“And you are satisfied on the issue of verifiability?”
That confirms it, Ryan thought with a thin smile. Golovko is GRU. “National Technical Means,” a term that denote spy satellites and other methods of keeping an eye on foreign countries, were mainly the province of CIA in America, but in the Soviet Union they belonged to the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Despite the tentative agreement in principle for on-site inspection, the main effort of verifying compliance on an agreement would lie with the spy satellites. That would be Golovko’s turf.
It was no particular secret that Jack worked for CIA. It didn’t have to be; he wasn’t a field officer. His attachment to the arms-negotiation team was a logical matter. His current assignment had to do with monitoring certain strategic weapons systems within the Soviet Union. For any arms treaty to be signed, both sides first had to satisfy their own institutional paranoia that no serious tricks could be played on them by the other. Jack advised the chief negotiator along these lines; when, Jack reminded himself, the negotiator troubled himself to listen.
“Verifiability,” he replied after another moment, “is a very technical and difficult question. I’m afraid I’m not really that conversant on it. What do your people think about our proposal to limit land-based systems?”
“We depend on our land-based missiles more than you,” Golovko said. His voice became more guarded as they discussed the meat of the Soviet position.
“I don’t understand why you don’t place as much emphasis on submarines as we do.”
“Reliability, as you well know.”
“Aw, hell. Submarines are reliable,” Jack baited him as he re-examined the clock. It was magnificent. Some peasant-looking fellow was handing a sword to another chap, and waving him off to battle. Not exactly a new idea, Jack thought. Some old fart tells a young kid to go off and get killed.
“We have had some incidents, I regret to say.”
“Yeah, that Yankee that went down off Bermuda.”
“And the other.”
“Hmph?” Ryan turned back. It took a serious effort not to smile.
“Please, Dr. Ryan, do not insult my intelligence. You know the story of Krazny Oktyabr as well as I.”
“What was that name? Oh, yeah, the Typhoon you guys lost off the Carolinas. I was in London then. I never did get briefed on it.”
“I think the two incidents illustrate the problem we Soviets face. We cannot trust our missile submarines as completely as you trust yours.”
“Hmm.” Not to mention the drivers, Ryan thought, careful lot to let his face show a thing.
Golovko persisted. “But may I ask a substantive question?”
“Sure, so long as you don’t expect a substantive answer.” Ryan chuckled.
“Will your intelligence community object to the draft treat proposal?”
“Now, how am I supposed to know the answer to that?” Jack paused. “What about yours?”
“Our organs of State security do what they are told,” Golovko assured him.
Right, Ryan told himself. “In our country, if the President decides that he likes an arms treaty, and he thinks he can get it through the Senate, it doesn’t matter what the CIA and Pentagon think—”
“But your military-industrial complex—” Golovko cut Jack off.
“God, you guys really love to beat on that horse, don’ you? Sergey Nikolayevich, you should know better.”
But Golovko was a military intelligence officer, and might not, Ryan remembered too late. The degree to which America and the Soviet Union misunderstood each other was a one and the same time amusing and supremely dangerous Jack wondered if the intelligence community over here tried to get the truth out, as CIA usually did now, or merely told its masters what they wanted to hear, as CIA had done a too often in the past. Probably the latter, he thought. The Russian intel agencies were undoubtedly politicized, just a CIA used to be. One good thing about Judge Moore was that he’d worked damned hard to put an end to that. But the Judge had no particular wish to be President; that made him different from his Soviet counterparts. One director of the KGB had made it to the top over here, and at least one other tried to. That made KGB a political creature, and that affected its objectivity. Jack sighed into his drink. The problem between the two countries wouldn’t end if all the false perceptions were laid to rest, but at least things could be more manageable.