Come on, Ivan. I’m wearing the fucking tie, just like you said. He’d gotten on at the right stop. KGB headquarters was just a block from the escalator. So, yeah, this guy was probably a spook. And not a false-flag. If this was some Second Chief Directorate guy, they would have staged it differently. This was too obvious, too amateurish, not the way KGB would do things. They would have done it at a different subway stop.
This guy’s fuckin’ real, Foley told himself. He forced himself to be patient, which wasn’t easy, even for this experienced field officer, but he took an imperceptible deep breath and waited, telling the nerve endings in his skin to report the least shift in the weight of his topcoat on his shoulders. . . .
ZAITZEV LOOKED AROUND the car as casually as he could. There were no eyes on him, none even looking in this general direction. So his right hand slid into the open pocket, quickly but not too quickly. Then he withdrew.
BINGO, FOLEY THOUGHT, as his heart skipped two or three beats. Okay, Ivan, what’s the message this time?
Again, he had to be patient. No sense getting this guy killed. If he was really a guy from the Russian MERCURY, then there was no telling how important this might be. Like the first nibble on a deep-sea fishing boat. Was this a marlin, a shark, or a lost boot? If a nice blue marlin, how big? But he couldn’t even pull back on the fishing rod to set the hook yet. No, that would come later, if it came at all. The recruitment phase of field operations—taking some innocent Soviet citizen and making him an agent, an information-procuring asset of the CIA, a spy—that was harder than going to a CYO dance and getting laid. The real trick was not getting the girl pregnant—or the agent killed. No, the way the game was played, you had the first fast dance, then the first slow dance, then the first kiss, then the first grope, and then, if you got lucky, unbuttoning the blouse . . . and then . . .
The reverie stopped when the train did. Foley removed his hand from the overhead rail and looked around. . . .
And there he was, actually looking at him, and the face went into the mental photo album.
Bad tradecraft, buddy. That can get your ass killed. Never look right at your case officer in a public place, Foley thought, his eyes passing right over him, no expression at all on his own face as he walked past the guy, deliberately taking the long way to the door.
ZAITZEV WAS IMPRESSED by the American. He’d actually looked at his new Russian contact, but his eyes had revealed nothing, had not even looked at him directly, but past him to the end of the carriage. And, just that quickly, the American had walked away. Be what I hope you are, Oleg Ivan’ch’s mind thought, just as loudly as it could.
FIFTY METERS UP on the open street, Foley refused even to let his hand go into the coat. He was certain that a hand had been there. He’d felt it, all right. And Ivan Whoever hadn’t done it looking for change.
Foley walked past the gate guard, into the building, and went up in the elevator. His key went into the lock, and the door opened. Only when it was closed behind him did he reach into the pocket.
Mary Pat was there, watching his face, and she saw the unguarded flash of recognition and discovery.
Ed took the note out. It was the same blank message form and, as before, it had writing on it. Foley read it once, then again, and a third time before handing it over to his wife.
Mary Pat’s eyes flared, too.
It was a fish, Foley thought. Maybe a big one. And he was asking for something substantive. Whoever he was, he wasn’t stupid. It would not be easy to arrange what he wanted, but he’d be able to pull it off. It just meant making the gunnery sergeant angry, and more important, visibly angry, because the embassy was always under surveillance. Something like this could not appear routine, or deliberate, but it didn’t have to be an Oscar-class bit of acting either. He was sure the Marines could bring it off. Then he felt Mary Pat’s hand in his.
“Hey, honey,” he said, for the microphones.
“Hi, Ed.” Her hand entered his.
This guy’s re[al], her hand said. He answered with a nod.
Tomor[row] mor[ning], she asked, and got another nod.
“Honey, I have to run back to the embassy. I left something in my desk, damn it.” Her answer was a thumbs-up.
“Well, don’t take too long. I have dinner on. Got a nice roast from the Finnish store. Baked potatoes and frozen corn on the cob.”
“Sounds good,” he agreed. “Half an hour, max.”
“Well, don’t be late.”
“Where are the car keys?”
“In the kitchen.” And they both walked that way.
“Do I have to leave without a kiss?” he asked in his best pussy-whipped voice.
“I guess not” was the playful reply.
“Anything interesting at work today?”
“Just that Price guy from the Times.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“Tell me about it. Later, honey.” Foley headed for the door, still wearing his topcoat.
He waved to the gate guard on the way back out, a frustrated grimace on his face for theatrical effect. The guards would probably write down his passage—maybe even call it in somewhere—and, with luck, his drive to the embassy would be matched against the tapes from the apartment, and the Second Chief Directorate pukes would tick off whatever box they had on their surveillance forms and decide that Ed Foley had fucked up and indeed left something at the office. He’d have to remember to drive back with a manila envelope on the front seat of the Mercedes. Spooks earned their living most of all by remembering everything and forgetting nothing.
The drive to the embassy was faster than taking the metro at this time of day, but that was factored in to everything else his working routine encompassed. In just a few minutes, he pulled into the embassy gate, past the Marine sentry, and took a visitor’s slot before running in, past some more Marines, and up to his office. There he lifted the phone and made a call, while he took a manila envelope and slid a copy of the International Herald Tribune into it.
“Yeah, Ed?” The voice belonged to Dominic Corso, one of Foley’s field officers. Actually older than his boss, Corso was covered as a Commercial Attaché. He’d worked Moscow for three years and was well regarded by his Station Chief. Another New Yorker, he was a native of the Borough of Richmond—Staten Island—the son of an NYPD detective. He looked like what he was, a New York guinea, but he was a quite a bit smarter than ethnic bigots would like to have admitted. Corso had the fey brown eyes of an old red fox, but he kept his intelligence under wraps.
“Need you to do something.”
“What’s that?”
Foley told him.
“You’re serious?” It wasn’t exactly a normal request.
“Yep.”
“Okay, I’ll tell the gunny. He’s going to ask why.” Gunnery Sergeant Tom Drake, the NCO-in-Charge of the Marine detail at the embassy, knew whom Corso worked for.
“Tell him it’s a joke, but it’s an important one.”
“Right.” Corso nodded. “Anything I need to know?”
“Not right now.”
Corso blinked. Okay, this was sensitive if the COS wasn’t sharing information, but that wasn’t so unusual, was it? Corso reflected. In CIA, you often didn’t know what your own team was doing. He didn’t know Foley all that well, but he knew enough to respect him.
“Okay, I’ll go see him now.”
“Thanks, Dom.”
“How’s the boy like Moscow?” the field officer asked his boss on the way out the door.
“He’s adjusting. Be better when he can skate some. He really likes hockey.”
“Well, he’s in the right town for that.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Foley gathered his papers and stood. “Let’s get this one done, Dom.”
“Right now, Ed. See you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 14
DANGER SIGNAL
IF THERE IS ANYTHING CONSTANT in the business of espionage, it is a persistent lack of sleep for the players. That comes
from stress, and stress is always the handmaiden of spooks. When sleep was slow in coming for Ed and Mary Pat Foley, they could at least talk with their hands in bed.
He’s re[al as] h[ell], b[aby], Foley told his wife under the covers.
Y[ep], she agreed. Have w[e] ev[er] had a g[uy] fr[om] that far in[side]? she wondered.
N[o] way José, he replied.
Lan[gley] will flip.
B[ig]-time, her husband agreed. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs, full count, and the pitcher had hung a curveball right over Main Street, and he was about to stroke it over the scoreboard. Assuming we don’t fuck it all up, Foley warned himself.
Want me to get inv[olved]? she wondered next.
Need to wait n s[ee].
A sigh told him, Yeah, I know. Even for them, patience came hard. Foley could see that curveball, hanging right over the middle of the plate, just about belt-high, and the Louisville Slugger was tight in his hands: his eyes were locked on the ball so tight that he could see the stitches turning as it approached—and this one was going out of the park, going down-fuckin’-town. He’d show Reggie Jackson who was the hitter on this playground . . .
If he didn’t fuck it up, he thought again. But Ed Foley had done this kind of operation in Tehran, had developed an agent in the revolutionary community, and had been the only field officer in the station to get a feel for how bad it was for the Shah, and that series of reports had lit up his star at Langley and made him one of Bob Ritter’s varsity.
And he was going to take this one deep, too.
At Langley, MERCURY was the one place that everyone was afraid of—everybody knew that an employee there under foreign control could damned near bring the whole building down. That was why they all went “on the box” twice a year, polygraphed by the best examiners FBI had—they didn’t even trust CIA’s own polygraph experts for that tasking. A bad field officer or a bad senior analyst could burn agents and missions, and that was bad for everyone involved—but a leaker in MERCURY would be like turning a female KGB officer loose on Fifth Avenue with an American Express Gold Card. She’d be able to get anything her heart desired. Hell, the KGB might even pay a million bucks for such a source. It would bust the Russian exchequer, but they would cash in one of Nikolay II’s Fabergé eggs, and be glad for it. Everyone knew there had to be a KGB counterpart office to MERCURY, but nobody in any intelligence service had ever bagged a Russian national from there.
Foley found himself wondering what it was like, how the room looked. At Langley it was immense, the size of a parking garage, with no internal walls or dividers, so that everyone could see everyone else. There were seven drum-shaped cassette storage structures, named for Disney’s Seven Dwarfs; they even had TV cameras on the inside, should some lunatic try to get in there, though he’d almost certainly be killed by such an adventure, since the motorized retrievers turned powerfully and without warning. Besides, only the big mainframe computers—including the fastest and most powerful one, made by Cray Research—knew which cassette had which data and lay in which storage slot. The security there was unreal, multilayered, and checked on a daily—maybe an hourly—basis. The people who worked there were occasionally and randomly followed home from work, probably by the FBI, which was pretty good at such stuff, for a bunch of gumshoed cops. It must have been oppressive for the people who worked there, but if anyone had ever complained about it, those reports hadn’t come to Ed Foley. Marines had to run their three miles per day and undergo formal inspections, and CIA employees had to put up with the overpowering institutional paranoia, and that was just how things were. The polygraph was a particular pain in the ass, and the Agency even had psychiatrists who trained people in how to defeat them. He’d undergone such training, and so had his wife—and still CIA put them on the box at least once a year, whether to test their loyalty or to see if they still remembered their training, who could tell?
But did KGB do that as well? They’d be crazy not to, but he wasn’t sure if they had polygraph technology, and so . . . maybe, maybe not. There was so much about KGB that he and CIA didn’t know. Langley made a lot of SWAGs—stupid wild-ass guesses—mainly from people who said, “Well, we do it this way, and therefore they must, too,” which was total horseshit. No two people, and damned-sure no two countries, had ever done anything exactly the same way, and that was why Ed Foley deemed himself one of the best in this crazy business. He knew better. He never stopped looking. He never did anything the same way twice, except as a ruse, to give a false impression to someone else—especially Russians, who probably (almost certainly, he figured) suffered from the same bureaucratic disease that circumscribed minds at CIA.
Wh[at] if this g[uy] wants a tick[et] out? Mary Pat asked.
First class on Pan Am, her husband answered, as fast as his fingers could move, and he gets to screw the stew.
U R bad, Mary Patricia responded, with the gagging sound of a suppressed laugh. But she knew he was right. If this guy wanted to play spy, it might be smarter just to yank his ass out of the USSR and fly him to Washington, and toss in a lifetime pass to Disney World for after the debrief. A Russian would go into sensory overload in the Magic Kingdom, not to mention the newly opened Epcot Center. Coming out of Space Mountain, Ed had joked that CIA ought to rent the whole place for one day and take the Soviet Politburo around, let them ride every ride and gobble down the burgers and swill the Cokes, and then, on the way out, tell them, “This is what Americans do for fun. Unfortunately, we can’t show you the things we do when we’re serious.” And if that didn’t scare the piss out of them, nothing would. But it would scare the piss out of them, both Foleys were sure. They—even the important ones with access to everything KGB got out of the Main Enemy—even they were the most insular and provincial of people. For the most part, they really did believe the propaganda because they had nothing to measure it against, because they were as much victims of their system as the poor dumb muzhiks— peasants—driving the dump trucks.
But the Foleys didn’t live in a fantasy world.
So, w[e] d[o] what he says, then what? she asked next.
One step at a time, he replied, and she nodded in the darkness. Like having a baby, this couldn’t be rushed unless you wanted a funny-looking kid. It told Mary Pat that her husband wasn’t a total curmudgeon, though, and that elicited a kiss in the darkness.
ZAITZEV WASN’T COMMUNICATING with his wife. For him, right now, even a half liter of vodka couldn’t help him sleep. He’d made his request. Only tomorrow would he know for sure if he was dealing with someone able to help him. What he’d asked wasn’t entirely reasonable, but he didn’t have the time or the security to be reasonable. He was secure in the knowledge that even KGB couldn’t fake what he’d specified. Oh, sure, maybe they could get the Poles or the Romanians or some other socialist country to do it, but not the Americans. Even KGB had its limits.
So, again, he got to wait, but sleep didn’t come. Tomorrow he would not be a very happy comrade. He could feel the hangover coming already, like an earthquake trapped and contained inside his skull. . . .
“HOW’D IT GO, SIMON?” Ryan asked.
“It could have been worse. The PM didn’t rip my head off. I told her that we only have what we have, and Basil backed me up. She wants more. She said that in my presence.”
“No surprise. Ever hear of a president who wanted less information, buddy?”
“Not recently,” Harding admitted. Ryan saw the stress bleeding off his workmate. Damned sure he’d have a beer at the pub before heading home. The Brit analyst loaded his pipe and lit it, taking a long pull.
“If it makes you feel any better, Langley doesn’t have any more than you guys do.”
“I know. She asked, and that’s what Basil said. Evidently, he talked to your Judge Moore before driving over.”
“So we’re all ignorant together.”
“Bloody comforting,” Simon Harding snorted.
It was far past going-home time. Ryan had waited to se
e what Simon would say about the meeting at 10 Downing Street, because Ryan was also here to gather intelligence on the Brits. They would understand, because that was the game they all played. He checked his watch.
“Well, I’ve got to boogie on home. See you tomorrow.”
“Sleep well,” Harding said, as Ryan headed out the door. Jack was reasonably sure that Simon would not. He knew what Harding made, as a mid-level civil servant, and it wasn’t quite enough for this stressful a day. But, he told himself out on the street, that’s Life in the Big City.
“WHAT DID YOU tell your people, Bob?” Judge Moore asked.
“Just what you told me, Arthur. The President wants to know. No feedback yet. Tell the Boss he’s going to have to be patient.”
“I said that. He was not overly pleased,” the DCI responded.
“Well, Judge, I can’t stop the rain from falling. We don’t have power over a lot of things, and time is one of them. He’s a big boy; he can understand that, can’t he?”
“Yes, Robert, but he likes to get what he needs. He’s worried about His Holiness, now that the Pope has kicked over the anthill—”
“Well, we think he has. The Russians might be smart enough to work through diplomatic channels and tell him to cool down and let things work out, and—”