Saving the Queen Read online

“How many what, ma’am?”

  “Atom bombs.”

  The Prime Minister—an old Etonian, who had cultivated the public school stutter to political advantage—half opened, shut, half opened his mouth again, and said, “I d-d-don’t know exactly, ma’am.”

  “I don’t need to know exactly, Prime Minister. Is it more like ten, like one hundred, or like one thousand?”

  “Do you mean, m-m-ma’am, those held in Great Britain by the United States, pursuant to the codicils of the NATO Treaty? Or d-d-do you mean those bombs over which we have total authority?”

  “The latter.”

  The Prime Minister let out a half sigh—he would not have given out this information to his own Home Secretary.

  “Twenty-six, ma’am.”

  “How many do the Americans have?”

  “I don’t have the e-e-exact figures. Approximately ten times as many.”

  “How many do the Russians have?”

  “We assume they have only a dozen. But they are manufacturing them very rapidly.”

  “How do you know?”

  “American intelligence, ma’am. They have contacts.” He was vastly relieved to be able to add, “We don’t know, of course, who those contacts are, or how reliable they are.”

  “I see. Well, get on with the rose gardens.”

  The Prime Minister did, but it had become a listless performance.

  She yawned and pressed the button. Instantly the large white gilt doors opened, and Emily entered with five newspapers, walked to the Queen’s left and drew the curtains letting in light from the garden, walked to the bedside and bobbed a quick curtsy as she handed the papers to the Queen.

  “Good morning, ma’am.”

  “Good morning, Emily.”

  She flicked on her bedside light and began reading. “Emily,” she called out just as Emily had reached the door.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Please tell Lady Mabel to attend me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lady Mabel Lunford knocked and entered.

  “Mabs, please take this cablegram.”

  Lady Mabel, who had been a secretary before marrying her husband, had eagerly revealed her knowledge of shorthand to the Queen on being retained by the court after her husband’s death. The Queen was delighted to learn this about her family’s old friend, having resisted the dictation of intimate communications through her official personal secretaries. It was always Lady Mabel she asked for when she wanted to communicate with her husband, which was infrequently, during his absences, which were frequent.

  She munched on her toast and toyed with the sausage, looking up at the ceiling. “To the Duke, wherever he is in the Gold Coast, wherever the Gold Coast is. Dear Richard: I plan to give a party on January—what is the second Monday in January?”

  Lady Mabel paused only briefly. “That would be the fourteenth, ma’am.”

  —on the fourteenth of January in honor of Margaret Truman comma whose father comma you will recall comma will be entering his final year of office with visible reluctance period I need to know now whether you will be in London on that day comma as if so comma I shall plan one kind of party dash stuffy end dash semicolon if not comma I shall plan another kind of party dash more amusing period Please advise by return cable period And if you can possibly bring yourself to refrain from doing so comma dear Richard comma I should deem it a personal favor if you can complete your tour of Africa without publicly apologizing for Great Britain’s history of imperialism period Affectionately Caroline.

  The Queen stuck the sausage into her mouth and munched it happily, ringing for Emily who, waiting in the next room, came in instantly.

  “Bring me another sausage, Emily.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And Mabs, kindly instruct the Lord Chamberlain to instruct the Foreign Minister to instruct the ambassador in Washington to convey to Miss Truman an invitation by Her Majesty to be the guest of honor at a dinner dance at Buckingham Palace on January 14. You will note, Mabs, how readily I have mastered royal procedure?” Lady Mabel said nothing, but smiled respectfully. But Caroline felt the affection behind the official smile. “Thank you, Mabs.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She bobbed, turned, and went out the door, and the Queen settled down to reading her five newspapers, to which she would give a full hour.

  Nine

  Boris Andreyvich Bolgin peered through the little round porthole on the tatterdemalion IL 12 as the pilot circled the airport. He sometimes felt, approaching Moscow, that it might all end better for him if the pilot would miscalculate while landing in one of those frequent snowfalls, plunging the airplane straight into the ground. He recalled that, as a matter of fact, Comrade Stalin had not eschewed this as an expeditious means of execution. His old superior, Constantine Oumansky, was ambassador to Mexico and in active charge of the entire NKVD operation in Latin America when Comrade Stalin sent for him in 1945. The plane took off, reached fifteen thousand feet, and exploded. For a few months, toward the end of the war, when Stalin was cultivating the image of the fatherly protector of the Russian homeland and the memory of the great bloodshed of the 1930s dimmed, it was possible to talk about Stalin, discreetly to be sure. But his colleagues had talked candidly about the execution of Oumansky and the novel way in which it had been effected.

  “Mexico is becoming a laboratory for Comrade Stalin’s executions,” his counterpart in Norway had commented, not without a trace of admiration. “Trotsky they bungled the first time, but, Boris Andreyvich, you don’t bungle when you put an explosive in an airplane and set it to go off at fifteen thousand feet. Of course there are a few innocent victims, but isn’t that true in any situation?”

  Boris Andreyvich had learned merely to nod his head, rather than contribute verbally to any discussion that might find him suddenly co-opted by the speaker to a point of view.

  Boris Andreyvich Bolgin was not born laconic or passive. As a young exuberant revolutionist in the twenties he had experienced great joy rising up through the party ranks, obeying orders with will and verve, and practicing his catechism in extended ideological conversations over a bottle of vodka with his colleagues and even his superiors. In 1933 the superior in question calculated that at the rate Boris was rising, it would be approximately one year before he would be displacing—the superior in question. Accordingly, on March 30, he was brought in to the headquarters of the OGPU (as the NKVD was then called), and there he was confronted with a sworn statement. He had been overheard to say that however justified Comrade Stalin’s control of the party, someday it would necessarily yield, according to Marxist dogma, to the stateless society.

  He had never said it, the sworn statement was a fabrication, the trial was swift, and the prison sentence was ten years, seven of which he served at a forced-labor camp in Siberia until the requirements of the war effort took precedence and he was assigned to the army, then to army intelligence (he was fluent in German and English), then to the NKVD, though he continued to serve, ostensibly; as military attaché to the Soviet ambassador. Seven years in Siberia permanently dampened Boris Andreyvich’s spirits, and the frostbite permanently altered his physical appearance, so much so that his wife, on seeing him when he first arrived at their tiny flat in Kiev after seven years, screamed; in due course suffered a nervous breakdown; and finally went off with their fourteen-year-old daughter to live with her mother. During the war, she quietly divorced him. Boris lost his final link to his spirited youth and settled down to the job for which there was no practical alternative, as agent of the will of Joseph Stalin, about whom he asked no questions, and permitted himself to think no heretical thoughts, except, in respect of himself, that he hoped he would not live too long, that when he died it would not be in a torture chamber of the NKVD, and that no day would go by in which, at night, he would be deprived of the solace of his own little apartment, his large glass of vodka, and the huge library of the Russian masters of the nineteenth century, which he w
ould not complete, at the studious rate he read them, in the ten years or so he had left to read.

  He shook himself awake from the trance when the airplane touched the ground and wondered whether this would prove to be his last landing. He had been recalled frequently for consultations in the preceding three years, but never quite so abruptly as this time around, and he knew—everyone in the embassy knew—that the center of their earth was heaving and fuming and causing great eructations of human misery in its writhing frustration over the failure of Soviet scientists to develop the hydrogen bomb at the same rate as, he knew, the Americans were proceeding with it. Stalin knew, because Boris had passed along the information, that Clement Attlee had secretly promised Harry Truman to endorse the American use of the bomb in the event a cease-fire in Korea was achieved, and then violated. And he knew, again through Boris, exactly how many atom bombs the British had, even though the majority of the members of the House of Commons were ignorant of the fact that the English had built a single bomb. In fact, Boris mused, his knowledge of British secrets was vastly more extensive than that of any one member of the House of Commons, except perhaps the Prime Minister. He knew, moreover, that the brilliant success he had achieved during the past two years would not satisfy his superiors, who were satisfied only with the satisfaction of their superior, which would not come in Boris’s time on earth.

  There was a car waiting for him. A driver, no escort. Bad sign. He stepped into the car—the only car that had met that flight—and the driver sped off down the lonely, empty highway, the snowy innards of the vast, awful city, where ten thousand bureaucrats dictated the movements of 350 million people, seeking only to please the one figure whose displeasure loosed the Arctic gales of Siberia, and whose wrath dispatched bullets to the brain.

  It did not matter that it was now nine at night or that he had been traveling all day. He was taken directly to the Lubyanka Building and noted with relief that the driver had swung into the official entrance, rather than to that irreversible entrance, at the east end, where the prisoners were taken on what was so often their last ride.

  A plump and cheerless woman with dirty blond hair and fingers that looked as if she had been changing typewriter ribbons all day long gave him a prepared pass, with a small identity photo, and told him to proceed to Comrade Ilyich’s office—he knew where it was.

  The initial greeting was perfunctory, but then it usually was; so far, Boris had detected nothing unusual.

  “A cup of tea, Boris Andreyvich?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  Pyotr Ivanovich Ilyich depressed a button on the elaborate console in front of him and gave the orders.

  “You are tired, comrade?”

  “Well, it is a long trip, but it is refreshing to be back in the Soviet Union,” Boris lied.

  “Yes,” said Ilyich perfunctorily; “yes.” He had grown much older, Boris noticed, and surely he had not seen the sun in months? Years? His dark eyes were ringed with fatigue and tension. Once upon a time Pyotr Ivanovich would have dared to say, under the circumstances—to such a friend and colleague of long standing—that these days it was safer to be away from Russia than in it. No more. To no one would Pyotr Ivanovich say such a thing, save possibly to his wife in moments of great intimacy. Never in front of the children or the maid or the butler—he wondered which of his subordinates the butler worked for, and who replaced the batteries in the microphones buried in his apartment.

  Once, on the pretext that he feared the possibility of foreign intercepts, he had ordered his own top microphone-detection crew to sweep the place. They found three microphones, one in the bedroom, one in the lounge, one in the dining room. Fine. Only then did he realize the dreadful dilemma he was in. If he reached the official conclusion that the microphones were the work of foreign spies, he was guilty of not having exercised the necessary precautions to prevent foreign spies from planting microphones in the home of the director of the NKVD. But the alternative was officially to concede that he had less than the full confidence of Comrade Stalin, whose agents were listening to Ilyich’s conversations. In a flash of inspiration, he solved the problem. He lined up the three members of the crew and, ceremoniously, praised them mightily, telling them that he had had an expert place the microphones in order to test the skills of the sweepers. They had passed their test with flying colors, and he would put in their names for a decoration. After they left, he carefully replaced each of the microphones exactly where it had been. And, sitting in the little drawing room that had served as the children’s nursery, he explained to his wife why, in the future, they must retreat here for any intimate discussions, and routinely after dinner, when, he knew, the postprandial relaxation loosens the tongue. Experience in such survival tactics had equipped him for moments such as this—handling Bolgin.…

  “Boris Andreyvich, we have got to get more information out of London concerning developments in the United States—don’t interrupt me quite yet, let me speak. I am aware that security precautions have been taken in Great Britain as a result of the valor of Fuchs, Burgess, and MacLean. But in the United States, matters are far worse. The proddings of McCarthy have resulted in immobilizing many of our operatives. They have not been detected, but they are greatly neutralized. New security precautions taken in the laboratories where the work is going ahead on the hydrogen bomb has resulted in a nearly impenetrable situation. It has been a full year since we succeeded in getting any reliable technical data from the inside. In that year, however, great strides have been made in the development of the great weapon which Comrade Stalin so rightly tells us we cannot permit the United States to have without our having it also. It is the key. Alongside it our atom bombs are mere … what, blockbusters, as they say in America. The potency of the hydrogen weapon staggers the imagination. What would you say, Boris Andreyvich, if I were to tell you that our scientists estimate, on the basis of all the information we have been able to collect, that a single such bomb could destroy the whole of Moscow!”

  He was breathing heavily.

  “Now, the whole of Moscow means, among other things, destroying Comrade Stalin. Comrade Stalin, the heart and soul of the international Communist movement, and Moscow, the heart and soul of the Russian and socialist fatherland—all with a single bomb. There is only one certain way to contain its use, and that is to have one of our own. Comrade Stalin told us two evenings ago that there is no substitute for this achievement, no other priorities, save this one, no other sources of concern, save this one. That’s when I sent for you.

  “Now,” he said, “you. Where do you figure? You have in the past year fed us a most remarkable fund of important information. I don’t mind telling you, Boris Andreyvich, that I consider your operation the most successful of any we have. I have said that to Comrade Stalin, mentioning you by name.” Boris Andreyvich shuddered. “He wisely concludes, with his usual magnificent grasp, that England has really become the center of our American intelligence effort. There is a close collaboration between British and American scientist’s, and a regular flow of information was promised by Truman to Attlee at their most recent conference. Some of that information has already come in to us. But we must have more. We must have some direct answers to certain technical questions, and some not so technical.”

  “Such as?”

  “We need to know, for instance, when exactly it is projected that the United States will detonate a test bomb. And when it will go into production after that. And what are the characteristics of that bomb. How heavy will it be? What is the proposed vehicle for delivery? Are there American missiles yet designed which would carry its weight?

  “Now, your contact, this ‘Robinson.’ I must know more about him. I trust greatly in your judgment, but it is only by a careful study of him and his entire range of contacts that we can conclude here whether he is passing along all the information he might have access to. I need therefore to know everything about him—everything. Begin.”

  “I know nothing about him, Pyot
r Ivanovich.”

  The director of the NKVD rose behind his huge desk and shouted, “You know nothing about Robinson! What are you talking about! It is from Robinson that we have been getting information for over a year!”

  “I know that, Pyotr Ivanovich. But Robinson is a very peculiar man. I have never laid eyes on him.”

  Pyotr Ivanovich was a volatile man who felt that genuine emotion cannot be communicated except by totalist vocal measures. So he cried out at the top of his voice. “You have never laid eyes on him! Are you mad?”

  Boris replied calmly. “One question at a time. Three times I asked him to disclose his identity. The third time he told me if I made the request again he would disappear, never again to surface.”

  “How does he communicate with you?”

  “In a confessional.”

  “In a what?”

  “A Roman Catholic confessional.”

  “Where?”

  “I shall answer that question if you insist, Pyotr Ivanovich. But I must have your request in writing, and I will insist that you overrule my written reservations. These reservations are based on my estimate of Robinson’s turn of mind. If I give you the information, someone on your staff might decide, on his own initiative, to have Robinson followed so as to discover his identity. If that should happen, it is my prediction that Robinson will cease to be useful to us in any way. Remember, we could not blackmail him even if we discovered who he is: because there is not a shred of evidence that he is the source of the information we have collected. To attempt to get between me and Robinson is to jeopardize the most important source of information we have in the Western world.”

  Pyotr Ivanovich tapped his fingers on the desk, his eyebrows lowered in deep thought.

  He would on no account overrule Boris Andreyvich in writing.

  And he doubted that, when he conferred with him, Stalin would instruct him to do so. Boris Andreyvich’s posture was bureaucratically perfect: He would obey any order, but that order had to be carefully and deliberately given.