“That we have an operational requirement for—”
The Chairman cut him off: “Not in a cable. Fly him here. I want security very tight on this, and flying him back and forth from Sofia will raise few eyebrows.”
“By your order. Immediately?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked.
“Da. Yes, at once.”
The colonel came to his feet. “Right away, Comrade Chairman. I will go to communications directly.”
Chairman Andropov watched him leave. One nice thing about KGB, Yuriy Vladimirovich thought, when you gave orders here, things actually happened. Unlike the Party Secretariat.
COLONEL ROZHDESTVENSKIY took the elevator back down to the basement and headed for communications. Captain Zaitzev was back at his desk, doing his paperwork as usual—that’s all he had, really—and the colonel went right up to him.
“I have two more dispatches for you.”
“Very well, Comrade Colonel.” Oleg Ivan’ch held out his hand.
“I have to write them out,” Rozhdestvenskiy clarified.
“You can use that desk right there, comrade.” The communicator pointed. “Same security as before?”
“Yes, one-time pad for both. One more for Rome, and the other for Station Sofia. Immediate priority,” he added.
“That is fine.” Zaitzev handed him the message form blanks and turned back to his work, hoping the dispatches wouldn’t be too lengthy. They had to be pretty important for the colonel to come down here even before they were drafted. Andropov must have a real bug up his rectum. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was the Chairman’s personal gofer. It had to be kind of demeaning for someone with the skills to be a rezident somewhere interesting. Travel, after all, was the one real perk KGB offered its employees.
Not that Zaitzev got to travel. Oleg Ivanovich knew too much to be allowed in a Western country. After all, he might not come back—KGB always worried about that. And for the first time, he wondered why. That was the kind of day it had been. Why did KGB worry so much about possible defections? He’d seen dispatches openly discussing the troublesome possibility, and he’d seen officers who had been brought home to “talk” about it here in The Centre and often never returned to the field. He’d always known about it, but he’d never actually thought about it for as much as thirty seconds.
They left because—because they thought their state was wrong? Could they actually think it was so bad they would do something so drastic as betray their Motherland? That, Zaitzev belatedly realized, was a very big thought.
And yet, what was KGB but an agency that lived on betrayal? How many hundreds—thousands—of dispatches had he read about just that? Those were Westerners—Americans, Britons, Germans, Frenchmen—all used by KGB to find out things that his country wanted to know—and they were all traitors to their mother countries, weren’t they? They did it mainly for money. He’d seen a lot of those messages, too, discussions between The Centre and the rezidenturas discussing the amounts of payment. He knew that The Centre was always niggardly with the money it paid out, which was to be expected. The agents wanted American dollars, British pounds sterling, Swiss francs. And cash, real paper money—they always wanted to be paid in cash. Never rubles or even certificate rubles. It was the only money they trusted, clearly enough. They betrayed their country for money, but only for their own money. Some of them even demanded millions of dollars, not that they ever got it. The most he’d ever seen authorized was £50,000, paid out for information about British and American naval ciphers. What would the Western powers not pay for the communications information in his mind? Zaitzev thought idly. It was a question with no answer. He did not really have the ability to frame the question properly, much less consider the answer seriously.
“Here you go,” Rozhdestvenskiy said, handing over the message blanks. “Send them out at once.”
“As soon as I get them enciphered,” the communicator promised.
“And the same security as before,” the colonel added.
“Certainly. Same identifier tag on both?” Oleg Ivanovich asked.
“Correct, all with this number,” he replied, tapping the 666 in the upper-right corner.
“By your order, Comrade Colonel. I’ll see to it right now.”
“And call me when they go out.”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel. I have your office number,” Zaitzev assured him.
There was more to it than the mere words, Oleg knew. The tone of his voice had told him much. This was going out under the direct order of the Chairman, and all this attention made it a matter of the highest priority, not just something of routine interest to an important man. This wasn’t about ordering pantyhose for some bigwig’s teenage daughter.
He walked to the cipher-book storage room to get two books, the ones for Rome and Sofia, and then he pulled out his cipher wheel and laboriously encrypted both messages. All in all, it took forty minutes. The message to Colonel Bubovoy in Sofia was a simple one: Fly to Moscow immediately for consultations. Zaitzev wondered if that would make the rezident’s knees wobble a little. Colonel Bubovoy could not know what the numerical identifier meant, of course. He’d find out soon enough.
The rest of Zaitzev’s day went routinely. He managed to lock up his confidential papers and walk out before six in the evening.
LUNCH AT CENTURY HOUSE was good, but British-eccentric. Ryan had learned to enjoy the British Ploughman’s Lunch, mainly because the bread was so uniformly excellent over here.
“So, your wife’s a surgeon?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, eye cutter. She’s actually starting to use lasers for some things now. She’s hoping to be a pioneer in that stuff.”
“Lasers? What for?” Harding asked.
“Some of it’s like welding. They use a laser to cauterize a leaky blood vessel, for instance—they did it with Suslov. Blood leaked inside the eye, so they drilled into the eyeball and drained out all the fluid—aqueous humor, I think they call it—and then used lasers to weld shut the leaky vessels. Sounds pretty yucky, doesn’t it?”
Harding shuddered at the thought. “I suppose it’s better than being blind.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when Sally was in shock-trauma. The idea of somebody carving up my little girl didn’t exactly thrill me.” Ryan remembered how fucking awful that had been, in fact. Sally still had the scars on her chest and abdomen from it, though they were fading.
“What about you, Jack? You’ve been under the knife before,” Simon observed.
“I was asleep, and they didn’t make videos of the operations—but you know, Cathy would probably be interested in seeing all three of them.”
“Three?”
“Yeah, two when I was in the Marines. They stabilized me on the ship, then flew me to Bethesda for the rest of it—I was asleep practically the whole time, thank God, but the neurosurgeons there weren’t quite good enough, and that left me with a bad back. Then, when Cathy and I were dating—no, we were engaged then—my back blew up again over dinner in Little Italy, and she took me into Hopkins and had Sam Rosen take a look at me. Sam fixed it all up. Good guy, and a hell of a doc. You know, sometimes it’s nice to be married to a doctor. She knows some of the best people in the world.” Ryan took a big bite of turkey and baguette. It was better than the burgers in the CIA cafeteria. “Anyway, that’s the short version of a three-year adventure that started with a broke helicopter on Crete. It ended up with me being married, so I guess it all worked out okay.”
Harding filled his pipe out of a leather pouch and lit it. “So, how’s your report coming on Soviet management and practices?”
Jack set his beer down. “It’s amazing how screwed up they are, especially when you compare their internal documents with the hard data we learn when our guys get hands-on with their gear. What they call quality control, we call a dog’s breakfast. At Langley, I saw some stuff on their fighter planes that the Air Force got, mainly through the Israelis. The goddamned parts don’t fit together! They can’t even cut aluminum s
heets into regular shapes. I mean, a high-school kid in shop class would have to do better or flunk out of school. We know they have competent engineers, especially the guys who work in theoretical stuff, but their manufacturing practices are so primitive that you’d expect better from third-graders.”
“Not in all areas, Jack,” Harding cautioned.
“And not all the Pacific Ocean’s blue, Simon. There are islands and volcanoes, sure. I know that. But the rule is the ocean is blue, and the rule in the Soviet Union is shitty work. The problem is that their economic system doesn’t reward people for doing good work. There’s a saying in economics: ‘Bad money drives out good.’ That means poor performance will take over if good performance isn’t recognized. Well, over there, mainly it isn’t, and for their economy it’s like cancer. What happens in one place gradually carries over to the whole system.”
“There are some things at which they are very good indeed,” Harding persisted.
“Simon, the Bolshoi Ballet isn’t going to attack into West Germany. Neither is their Olympic team,” Jack retorted. “Their military may be competently led at the higher levels, but their equipment is crummy, and the middle-level management is practically nonexistent. Without my gunnery sergeant and my squad leaders, I could not have used my platoon of Marines efficiently, but the Red Army doesn’t have sergeants as we understand them. They have competent officers—and, again, some of their theoretical people are world-class—and their soldiers are probably patriotic Russians and all that, but without proper training at the tactical level, they’re like a beautiful car with flat tires. The engine might turn over and the paint job might shine, but the car isn’t going anywhere.”
Harding took a few contemplative puffs. “Then what are we worried about?”
Jack shrugged. “There’s a hell of a lot of them, and quantity does have a quality all its own. If we go forward with our defense buildup, however, we can stop anything they try. A Russian tank regiment is just a collection of targets if we have the right equipment and our guys are properly trained and led. Anyway, that’s what my report is probably going to say.”
“It’s a little early for a conclusion,” Simon told his new American friend. Ryan hadn’t yet learned how a bureaucracy was supposed to work.
“Simon, I used to make my money in trading. You succeed in that business by seeing things a little faster than the next guy, and that means you don’t wait until you have every last little crumb of information. I can see where this information is pointing me. It’s bad over there, and it’s getting worse. Their military is a distillation of what is good and bad in their society. Look at how badly they’re doing in Afghanistan. I haven’t seen your data, but I’ve seen what they have at Langley, and it isn’t pretty. Their military is performing very poorly in that rockpile.”
“I think they will ultimately succeed.”
“It’s possible,” Jack conceded, “but it’ll be an ugly win. We did a lot better in Vietnam.” He paused. “You guys have ugly memories of Afghanistan, don’t you?”
“My great-uncle was there in 1919. He said it was worse than the Battle of the Somme. Kipling did a poem that ends with an instruction to a soldier to blow his brains out rather than be captured there. I’m afraid some Russians have learned that lesson, to their sorrow.”
“Yeah, the Afghans are courageous, but not overly civilized,” Jack agreed. “But I think they’re going to win. There’s talk at home about giving them the Stinger SAM. That would neutralize the helicopters the Russians are using, and without those, Ivan’s got a problem.”
“Is the Stinger that good?”
“Never used it myself, but I’ve heard some nice things about it.”
“And the Russian SAM-seven?”
“They kind of invented the idea of a man-portable SAM, didn’t they? But we got a bunch through the Israelis in seventy-three, and our guys weren’t all that impressed. Again, Ivan had a great idea, then couldn’t execute it properly. That’s their curse, Simon.”
“Then explain KGB to me,” Harding challenged.
“Same as the Bolshoi Ballet and their ice hockey teams. They load a lot of talent and money into that agency, and they get a fair return for it—but they have a lot of spooks skip over the wall, too, don’t they?”
“True,” Simon had to concede.
“And why, Simon?” Jack asked. “Because they fill their heads with how corrupt and messed up we are, and then when their people get here and look around, it isn’t all that bad, is it? Hell, we have safe houses all over America with KGB guys in them, watching TV. Not many of them decide to go home, either. I’ve never met a defector, but I’ve read a lot of transcripts, and they all say pretty much the same thing. Our system is better than theirs, and they’re smart enough to tell the difference.”
“We have some living here as well,” Harding admitted. He didn’t want to admit that the Russians also had a few Brits—nowhere near as many, just enough to be a considerable embarrassment to Century House. “You’re a hard man to debate, Jack.”
“I just speak the truth, buddy. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”
“That’s the theory,” Harding had to admit. This Ryan fellow would never be a bureaucrat, the Brit decided, and wondered if that was a good thing or bad. The Americans took a different slant on things, and the contrast to his own organization’s take was entertaining, at least. Ryan had a lot to learn . . . but he also had a few things to teach, Harding realized. “How’s your book coming along?”
Ryan’s face changed. “Haven’t gotten much work done lately. I do have my computer set up. Hard to concentrate on that after a full day here—but if I don’t make the time, the thing will never get done. At heart, I’m lazy,” Ryan admitted.
“Then how did you become rich?” Harding demanded. He got a grin.
“I’m also greedy. Gertrude Stein said it, pal: ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. It’s better to be rich.’ Truer words have never been spoken.”
“I must discover that for myself someday,” the British civil servant observed.
Oops, Ryan thought. Well, it wasn’t his fault, was it? Simon was smart enough to make money in the real world, but he didn’t seem to think in those terms. It made good sense to have a smart guy here in the analyst pool at Century House, even though that meant sacrificing his own well-being for his country. But that was not a bad thing, and Ryan reflected that he was doing it, too. His advantage was that he’d made his money up front and could afford to kiss this job off and go back to teaching whenever the urge struck him. It was a sort of independence that most government employees would never know. . . . And their work probably suffered because of it, Jack thought.
ZAITZEV MADE HIS WAY out past the various security checkpoints. Some people were frisked at random by the guards to make sure that they weren’t taking anything out with them, but the checks—he’d suffered through his share of them—were too cursory to be effective, he thought. Just enough to be a nuisance, and not regular enough to be a real threat—perhaps once in thirty days—and, if you got frisked one day, you knew you were safe for at least the next five or so, because the guards knew all the faces of the people they checked out, and even here there was human contact and friendly relationships among the employees, especially at the working level—a kind of blue-collar solidarity that was in some ways surprising. As it happened, Zaitzev was allowed to pass without inspection and made his way into the capacious square, then walked to the metro station.
He didn’t usually dress in the paramilitary uniform—most KGB employees did not choose to do so, as though their employment might make them seem tainted to their fellow citizens. Neither did he hide it. If anyone asked, he gave an honest answer, and the questioning usually stopped there, because everyone knew that you didn’t ask questions about what went on at the Committee for State Security. There were occasional movies and TV shows about KGB, and some of them were even fairly honest, though they gave little away concerning methods a
nd sources beyond what some fiction writer might imagine, which wasn’t always all that accurate. There was a small office at The Centre that consulted on such things, usually taking things out and—rarely—putting accurate things in, because it was in his agency’s interest to be fearful and forbidding to Soviet citizens and foreigners alike. How many ordinary citizens supplement their incomes by being informers? Zaitzev wondered. He almost never saw any dispatches about that—that sort of thing rarely went overseas.
The things that did go out of the country were troubling enough. Colonel Bubovoy would probably be in Moscow the next day. There was regular air service between Sofia and Moscow through Aeroflot. Colonel Goderenko in Rome had been told to sit down and shut up, and to forward to The Centre the Pope’s appearance schedule for the indefinite future. Andropov hadn’t lost interest in that bit of information.
And now the Bulgarians would be involved. Zaitzev worried about that, but he didn’t need to wonder all that much. He’d seen those dispatches before. The Bulgarian State Security Service was the loyal vassal of KGB. The communicator knew that. He’d seen enough messages go to Sofia, sometimes through Bubovoy, sometimes directly, and sometimes for the purpose of ending someone’s life. KGB didn’t do much of that anymore, but Dirzhavna Sugurnost did, on occasion. Zaitzev imagined that they had a small subunit of the DS officers who were trained and skilled and practiced at that particular skill. And the message header had the 666 suffix, so this dispatch concerned the same thing that Rome had been initially queried on. So this was going forward.
His agency—his country—wanted to kill that Polish priest, and that, Zaitzev thought, was probably a bad thing.
He took the escalator down to the subterranean station amid the usual afterwork crowd. Usually, the crowd of people was comforting. It meant that Zaitzev was in his element, surrounded by his countrymen, people just like himself, serving one another and the State. But was that true? What would these people think of Andropov’s mission? It was hard to gauge. The subway ride was usually quiet. Some people might talk to friends, but group discussions were rare, except perhaps for some unusual sporting event, a bad referee’s call at a soccer match, or a particularly spectacular play on the hockey rink. Other than that, people were usually alone with their thoughts.