He gave an emphatic nod of the head. “A fine senior officer, yes, Comrade Chairman. He runs a good station. I learned much from him.”
“How well does he know the Vatican?”
That made Rozhdestvenskiy blink. “There is not much to be learned there. We do have some contacts, yes, but it has never been a matter of great emphasis. The Catholic Church is a difficult target to infiltrate, for the obvious reasons.”
“What about through the Orthodox Church?” Andropov asked.
“There are some contacts there, yes, and we have had some feedback, but rarely anything of value. More along the line of gossip and, even then, nothing we cannot get through other channels.”
“How good is security around the Pope?”
“Physical security?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked, wondering where this was going.
“Precisely,” the Chairman confirmed.
Rozhdestvenskiy felt his blood temperature drop a few degrees. “Comrade Chairman, the Pope does have some protection about him, mainly of the passive sort. His bodyguards are Swiss, in plainclothes—that comic-opera group that parades around in striped jumpsuits is mostly for show. They occasionally have to grab a believer overcome by his proximity to the head priest, that sort of thing. I am not even sure if they carry weapons, though I must assume that they do.”
“Very well. I want to know how difficult it might be to get physically close to the Pope. Do you have any ideas?”
Ah, Rozhdestvenskiy thought. “Personal knowledge? No, comrade. I visited Vatican City several times when I was in Rome. The art collection there, as you may imagine, is impressive, and my wife is interested in such things. I took her there perhaps half a dozen times. The area crawls with priests and nuns. I confess I never looked about for security provisions, but nothing was readily apparent, aside from what you’d expect—measures against thefts and vandalism, that sort of thing. There are the usual museum guards, whose main function seems to be to tell people where the lavatories are.
“The Pope lives in the Papal Apartments, which adjoin the church of St. Peter’s. I have never been there. It is not the sort of place in which I had any professional interest. I know our ambassador is there occasionally for diplomatic functions, but I was not invited—my posting was that of Assistant Commercial Attaché, you see, Comrade Chairman, and I was too junior,” Rozhdestvenskiy went on. “You say you wish to know about getting close to the Pope. I presume by that you mean . . . ?”
“Five meters, closer if possible, but certainly five meters.”
Pistol range, Rozhdestvenskiy grasped at once. “I don’t know enough myself. That would be a job for Colonel Goderenko and his people. The Pope gives audiences for the faithful. How you get into those, I do not know. He also appears in public for various purposes. I do not know how such things are scheduled.”
“Let’s find out,” Andropov suggested lightly. “Report directly to me. Do not discuss this with anyone else.”
“Yes, Comrade Chairman,” the colonel said, coming to attention with the receipt of the order. “The priority?”
“Immediate,” Andropov replied, in the most casual of voices.
“I shall see to it myself, Comrade Chairman,” Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy promised. His face revealed nothing of his feelings. Indeed, he had few of those. KGB officers were not trained to have much in the way of scruples, at least outside politics, in which they were supposed to have a great deal of faith. Orders from above carried the force of Divine Will. Aleksey Nikolay’ch’s only concerns at the moment were centered on the potential political fallout to be had from dropping this particular nuclear device. Rome was more than a thousand kilometers from Moscow, but that would probably not be far enough. However, political questions were not his to ask, and he scrubbed the matter from his mind—for the moment, anyway. While he did so, the intercom box on the Chairman’s desk buzzed. Andropov flipped the top-right switch.
“Yes?”
“Your first appointment is here, Comrade Chairman.” His secretary announced.
“How long will this take, Aleksey, do you suppose?”
“Several days, probably. You want an immediate assessment, I assume, followed by what sort of specific data?”
“Correct. For the moment, just a general assessment,” Yuriy Vladimirovich said. “We’re not planning any sort of operation just yet.”
“By your order, Comrade Chairman. I’ll go down to the communications center directly.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Aleksey.”
“I serve the Soviet Union” was the automatic reply. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy came to attention again, then left-faced for the door. He had to duck his head going out into the secretary’s room, as most men did, and from there he turned right and out into the corridor.
So, how does one get close to the Pope, this Polish priest? Rozhdestvenskiy wondered. It was, at least, an interesting theoretical question. KGB abounded with theoreticians and academics who examined everything, from how to assassinate chiefs of foreign governments—useful in the event that a major war was about to be undertaken—to the best way to steal and interpret medical records from hospitals. The broad scope of KGB field operations knew few limitations.
One could not have guessed much from the colonel’s face as he walked to the elevator bank. He pushed the button and waited for forty seconds until the doors opened.
“Basement,” he told the operator. The elevators all had operators. Elevators were too good a potential dead-drop location to leave unattended. Even then, the operators were trained to look for brush-passes. Nobody was trusted in this building. There were too many secrets to be had. If there were one single place in the Soviet Union in which an enemy would want to place a penetration agent, this building was it, and so everyone looked at everyone else in some sort of black game, always watching, measuring every conversation for an inner meaning. Men made friends here as they did in every walk of life. They chatted about their wives and children, about sports and weather, about whether to buy a car or not, about getting a dacha in the country for the lucky ones with seniority. But rarely did men chat about work, except with their immediate workmates, and then only in conference rooms where such things were supposed to be discussed. It never occurred to Rozhdestvenskiy that these institutional restrictions reduced productivity and might actually hinder the efficiency of his agency. That circumscription was just part of the institutional religion of the Committee for State Security.
He had to pass a security checkpoint to enter the communications room. The watch NCO checked his photo pass and waved him through without much in the way of acknowledgment.
Rozhdestvenskiy had been here before, of course, often enough that he was known by face and name to the senior operators, and he knew them. The desks were arranged with a lot of space between them, and the background noise of the teleprinters prevented ordinary conversation from being overheard at a distance of more than three or four meters, even by the most sensitive ears. This, and nearly everything else about the arrangement of the room, had evolved over the years until the security provisions were as close to perfect as anyone could imagine, though that didn’t keep the efficiency experts on the third floor from wandering about with their scowls, always looking for something wrong. He walked to the desk of the senior communications watch officer.
“Oleg Ivanovich,” he said in greeting.
Zaitzev looked up to see his fifth visitor of the young day, the fifth visitor and the fifth interruption. It was often a curse being the senior watch officer here, especially on the morning shift. The overnight watch was boring, but at least you could work in a straight line.
“Yes, Colonel, what can I do for you this morning?” he asked pleasantly, junior officer to senior.
“A special message to Station Rome, personal to the rezident. I think a one-time pad for this one. I’d prefer that you handle it yourself.” Instead of having a cipher clerk do the encryption, he didn’t say. This was somewhat unusual, and it pricked Zaitzev’s i
nterest. He would have to see it anyway. Eliminating the cipher clerk just halved the number of people that would see this particular message.
“Very well.” Captain Zaitzev took up a pad and pencil. “Go on.”
“Most Secret. IMMEDIATE AND URGENT. FROM MOSCOW CENTRE, OFFICE OF CHAIRMAN. TO COLONEL RUSLAN BORISSOVICH GODERENKO, REZIDENT, ROME. MESSAGE FOLLOWS: ASCERTAIN AND REPORT MEANS OF GETTING PHYSICALLY CLOSE TO THE POPE. ENDS.”
“That’s all?” Zaitzev asked, surprised. “And if he asks what that means? It’s not very clear in its intent.”
“Ruslan Borissovich will understand what it means,” Rozhdestvenskiy assured him. He knew that Zaitzev wasn’t asking anything he shouldn’t. One-time cipher pads were a nuisance to use, and so messages sent that way were supposed to be explicit in all details, lest the back-and-forth clarification messages compromise the communications links. As it was, this message would be telexed, and so was certain to be intercepted, and equally certain to be recognized by its formatting as a one-time-pad encipherment, hence a message of some importance. American and British code-breakers would probably attack it, and everyone was wary of them and their clever tricks. The West’s damned intelligence agencies worked so closely together.
“If you say so, Comrade Colonel. I’ll send it out within the hour.” Zaitzev checked the wall clock to make sure he could do that. “It should be on his desk when he gets into his office.”
It will take twenty minutes for Ruslan to decrypt it, Rozhdestvenskiy estimated. Then will he query us about it, as Zaitzev suggests? Probably. Goderenko is a careful, thorough man—and politically astute. Even with Andropov’s name at the top, Ruslan Borissovich will be curious enough to ask for a clarification.
“If there is a reply, call me as soon as you have the clear text.”
“You are the point of contact for this line?” Zaitzev asked, just to make sure he routed things correctly. After all, the message header, as this colonel had dictated it to him, said “Office of the Chairman.”
“That is correct, Captain.”
Zaitzev nodded, then handed the message blank to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy for his signature/confirmation. Everything in KGB had to have a paper trail. Zaitzev looked down at the checklist. Message, originator, recipient, encryption method, point of contact . . . yes, he had everything, and all spaces were properly signed. He looked up. “Colonel, it will go out shortly. I will call you to confirm transmission time.” He would also send a paper record upstairs for the permanent operations files. He made a final written notation and handed off the carbon copy.
“Here’s the dispatch number. It will also be the operation-reference number until such time as you change it.”
“Thank you, Captain.” The colonel took his leave.
Oleg Ivanovich looked again at the wall clock. Rome was three hours behind Moscow time. Ten or fifteen minutes for the rezident to clear-text the message—the field people were so clumsy at such things, he knew—and then to think about it, and then . . . ? Zaitzev made a small wager with himself. The Rome rezident would send back a request for clarification. Sure as hell. The captain had been sending out messages and getting them back from this man for some years. Goderenko was a careful man who liked things clear. So he’d leave the Rome pad in his desk drawer in readiness for the return message. He counted: 209 characters, including blank spaces and punctuation. A pity they couldn’t do this on one of those new American computers they were playing with upstairs. But there was no sense wishing for the moon. Zaitzev pulled out the cipher-pad book from his desk drawer and unnecessarily wrote down its number before walking to the west side of the capacious room. He knew nearly all of them by number, a product of his chess background, Zaitzev imagined.
“Pad one-one-five-eight-nine-zero,” he told the clerk behind the metal screen, handing off the paper slip. The clerk, a man of fifty-seven long years, most of them here, walked a few meters to fetch the proper cipher book. It was a loose-leaf binder, about ten centimeters across by twenty-five high, filled with punched paper pages, probably five hundred or more. The current page was marked with a plastic tag.
The pages looked like those in a telephone book, until you looked closely and saw that the letters didn’t form names in any known language, except by random accident. There were on average two or three such occurrences per page. Outside Moscow, on the Outer Ring Road, was the headquarters of Zaitzev’s own directorate, the Eighth, the part of KGB tasked with making and breaking codes and ciphers. On the roof of the building was a highly sensitive antenna which led to a teletype machine. The receiver that lay between the antenna and the teletype listened in on random atmospheric noise, and the teletype interpreted these “signals” as dot-dash letters, which the adjacent teletype machine duly printed up. In fact, several such machines were cross-connected in such a way that the randomness of the atmospheric noise was re-randomized into totally unpredictable gibberish. From that gibberish were made the one-time pads, which were supposed to be totally random transpositions that no mathematical formula could predict or, therefore, decrypt. The one-time-pad cipher was universally regarded as the most secure of encryption systems. That was important, since the Americans were the world leaders at cracking ciphers. Their “Venona” project had even compromised Soviet ciphers of the late 1940s and ’50s, much to the discomfort of Zaitzev’s parent agency. The most secure one-time pads were also the most cumbersome and inconvenient, even for experienced hands like Captain Zaitzev. But that couldn’t be helped. And Andropov himself wanted to know how to get physically close to the Pope.
That’s when it hit Zaitzev: Physically close to the Pope. But why would anyone want that? Surely Yuriy Vladimirovich didn’t want anyone to hear his confession.
What was he being asked to transmit?
The Rome rezident, Goderenko, was a highly experienced field officer whose rezidentura operated many Italian and other nationals as agents for the KGB. He forwarded all manner of information, some overtly important, some merely amusing, though potentially useful in compromising otherwise important people with embarrassing foibles. Was it that only the important had such weaknesses, or did their positions merely allow them to entertain themselves in manners which all men dreamt about but few could indulge in? Whatever the answer, Rome would have to be a good city for it. City of the Caesars, Zaitzev thought, it ought to be. He thought of the travel and history books he’d read on the city and the era—classical history in the Soviet Union had some political commentary, but not all that much. The political spin applied to every single aspect of life was the most tiring intellectual feature of life in his country, often enough to drive a man to drink—which, in the USSR, wasn’t all that distant a drive, of course. Time to go back to work. He took a cipher wheel from his top drawer. It was like a phone dial—you set the letter to be transposed at the top of one dial, then rotated the other to the letter indicated on the page of the transposition pad. In this case, he was working from the beginning of the twelfth line of page 284. That reference would be included in the first line of the transmission so that the recipient would know how to get clear text from the transmitted gibberish.
It was laborious despite the use of the cipher wheel. He had to set the clear-text letter he’d written in the message form, then dial to the transposition letter on the printed page of the cipher-pad book, and write down each individual result. Each operation required him to set his pencil down, dial, pick up the pencil again, recheck his results—twice in his case—and begin again. (The cipher clerks, who did nothing else, worked two-handed, a skill Zaitzev had not acquired.) It was beyond tedious, hardly the sort of work designed for someone educated in mathematics. Like checking spelling tests in a primary school, Zaitzev grumbled to himself. It took more than six minutes to get it right. It would have taken less time had he been allowed to have a helper in the process, but that would have violated the rules, and here the rules were adamantine.
Then, with the task done, he had to repeat everything to make sure
he hadn’t transmitted any garbles, because garbles screwed everything up on both ends of the system, and this way, if they happened, he could blame them on the teletype operators—which everyone did anyway. Another four and a half minutes confirmed that he hadn’t made any errors. Good.
Zaitzev rose and walked to the other side of the room, through the door into the transmission room. The noise there was enough to drive a man mad. The teletypes were of an old design—actually, one had been stolen from Germany in the 1930s—and sounded like machine guns, though without the banging noise of exploding cartridges. In front of each machine was a uniformed typist—they were all men, each sitting erect like a statue, his hands seemingly affixed to the keyboard in front of him. They all had ear protection, lest the noise in the room land them in a psychiatric hospital. Zaitzev walked his message form to the room supervisor, who took the sheet without a word—he wore ear-protectors, too—and walked it to the leftmost typist in the back row. There, the supervisor clipped it to a vertical board over the keyboard. At the top of the form was the identifier for the destination. The typist dialed the proper number, then waited for the warbling sound of the teleprinter at the other end—it had been designed to get past the ear plugs, and it also lit up a yellow light on the teletype machine. He then typed in the gibberish.
How they did that without going mad, Zaitzev did not understand. The human mind craved patterns and good sense, but typing TKALNNETPTN required robotic attention to detail and a total denial of humanity. Some said that the typists were all expert pianists, but that couldn’t be true, Zaitzev was sure. Even the most discordant piano piece had some unifying harmony to it. But not a one-time-pad cipher.
The typist looked up after just a few seconds: “Transmission complete, comrade.” Zaitzev nodded and walked back to the supervisor’s desk.
“If anything comes in with this operation-reference number, bring it to me immediately.”
“Yes, Comrade Captain,” the supervisor acknowledged, making a notation on his set of “hot” numbers.