General G. sought for a final phrase to convey the threat without defining it. He found it. ‘There will be,’ he paused and looked, with artificial mildness, down the table, ‘displeasure.’
5 | KONSPIRATSIA
The Moujiks had received the knout. General G. gave them a few minutes to lick their wounds and recover from the shock of the official lashing that had been meted out.
No one said a word for the defence. No one spoke up for his department or mentioned the countless victories of Soviet Intelligence that could be set against the few mistakes. And no one questioned the right of the Head of SMERSH, who shared the guilt with them, to deliver this terrible denunciation. The Word had gone out from the Throne, and General G. had been chosen as the mouthpiece for the Word. It was a great compliment to General G. that he had been thus chosen, a sign of grace, a sign of coming preferment, and everyone present made a careful note of the fact that, in the Intelligence hierarchy, General G., with SMERSH behind him, had come to the top of the pile.
At the end of the table, the representative of the Foreign Ministry, Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky of RUMID, watched the smoke curl up from the tip of his long Kazbek cigarette and remembered how Molotov had privately told him, when Beria was dead, that General G. would go far. There had been no great foresight in this prophecy, reflected Vozdvishensky. Beria had disliked G. and had constantly hindered his advancement, sidetracking him away from the main ladder of power into one of the minor departments of the then Ministry of State Security, which, on the death of Stalin, Beria had quickly abolished as a Ministry. Until 1952, G. had been deputy to one of the heads of this Ministry. When the post was abolished, he devoted his energies to plotting the downfall of Beria, working under the secret orders of the formidable General Serov, whose record put him out of even Beria’s reach.
Serov, a Hero of the Soviet Union and a veteran of the famous predecessors of the M.G.B. – the Cheka, the Ogpu, the N.K.V.D. and the M.V.D. – was in every respect a bigger man than Beria. He had been directly behind the mass executions of the 1930s when a million died, he had been
And Beria and all his court had gone to the gallows, while General G. had been given SMERSH as his reward. As for Army General Ivan Serov, he, with Bulganin and Khrushchev, now ruled Russia. One day, he might even stand on the peak, alone. But, guessed General Vozdvishensky, glancing up the table at the gleaming billiard-ball skull, probably with General G. not far behind him.
The skull lifted and the hard bulging brown eyes looked straight down the table into the eyes of General Vozdvishensky. General Vozdvishensky managed to look back calmly and even with a hint of appraisal.
That is a deep one, thought General G. Let us put the spotlight on him and see how he shows up on the sound-track.
‘Comrades,’ gold flashed from both corners of his mouth as he stretched his lips in a chairman’s smile, ‘let us not be too dismayed. Even the highest tree has an axe waiting at its foot. We have never thought that our departments were so successful as to be beyond criticism. What I have been instructed to say to you will not have come as a surprise to any of us. So let us take up the challenge with a good heart and get down to business.’
Round the table there was no answering smile to these platitudes. General G. had not expected that there would be. He lit a cigarette and continued.
‘I said that we have at once to recommend an act of terrorism in the intelligence field, and one of our departments – no doubt my own – will be called upon to carry out this act.’
An inaudible sigh of relief went round the table. So at least SMERSH would be the responsible department! That was something.
‘But the choice of a target will not be an easy matter, and our collective responsibility for the correct choice will be a heavy one.’
Soft-hard, hard-soft. The ball was now back with the conference.
