“Anything interesting today?” she asked. It was almost their daily joke.
“There is never anything interesting at the office,” he joked in reply. No, just the usual messages to and from field officers, which he forwarded to the appropriate pigeonholes for in-house couriers to hand-carry upstairs to the offices of the control officers who really ran things at KGB. A very senior colonel had come down to see the operation the previous week, which he’d done without a smile, a friendly word, or a question for twenty minutes, before disappearing off to the elevator banks. Oleg knew the man’s seniority only from the identity of his escort: the colonel who ran his own operation. Whatever words had been exchanged had been too distant for him to overhear—people tended to talk in whispers, if at all, in his department—and he was trained not to show much interest.
But training could only go so far. Captain Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev was too bright to turn his mind all the way off. Indeed, his job required something approaching judgment for its proper execution, but that was something to be exercised as gingerly as a mouse’s stroll through a roomful of cats. He always went to his immediate superior and always started off with the most humble of questions before getting approval. In fact, his judgmental questions were always approved. Oleg was gifted in that, and he was beginning to get recognized as such. His majority wasn’t all that far off. More money, more access to the closed stores, and, gradually, more independence—no, that wasn’t quite right. A little less circumscription on what he would be able to do. Someday he might even ask if a message going out made good sense. Do we really want to do this, comrade? he’d wanted to ask every so often. Operational decisions were not his to make, of course, but he could—or would be able to in the future—question the wording of a directive in the most oblique terms. Every so often he’d see something going out to Officer 457 in Rome, for example, and wonder if his country really wanted to risk the consequences of having the mission order go bad. And sometimes they did go bad. Just two months before, he’d seen a dispatch from Bonn warning that something had gone wrong with the West German counterintelligence service, and the field officer had urgently requested instructions—and the instructions had been to continue his mission without questioning the intelligence of his superiors. And that field officer had disappeared right off the network. Arrested and shot? Oleg wondered. He knew some of the field officers’ names, virtually all of the operations’ names, and a lot of the operational targets and objectives. Most of all, he knew the code names of hundreds of foreign nationals who were agents of the KGB. At its best, it could be like reading a spy novel. Some of the field officers had a literary streak. Their dispatches were not the terse communiqués of military officers. No, they liked to communicate the state of mind of their agents, the feel of the information and the mission assigned. They could be like travelogue writers describing things for a paying audience. Zaitzev wasn’t really supposed to digest such information, but he was a man with a mind, and besides, there were telltale codes built into every dispatch. The third word misspelled, for example, could be a warning that the officer had been compromised. Every officer had a different such key system, and Zaitzev had a list of them all. Only twice had he caught such irregularities, and on one of those occasions his supervisors had told him to ignore it as a clerical error—a fact that still astounded him. But the mistake had never been repeated, and so, maybe it really had just been an enciphering error by the officer in question. After all, his superior had told him, men trained at The Centre didn’t often get caught in the field. They were the best in the world, and the Western enemies were not that clever, were they? Then Captain Zaitzev had nodded submission to the moment, written down his warning notation, and made sure it was in the permanent files, covering his ass like any good bureaucrat.
What if his immediate superior were under the control of some Western spy agency, he’d wondered at the time and later on, usually after a few drinks in front of his TV set. Such a compromise would be perfection itself. Nowhere in KGB was there a single written list of their officers and agents. No, “compartmentalization” was a concept invented here back in the 1920s, or perhaps earlier still. Even Chairman Andropov was not allowed to have such a thing within his reach, lest he defect to the West and take it with him. KGB trusted no one, least of all its own Chairman. And so, oddly, only people in his own department had access to such broad information, but they were not operations personnel. They were just communicators.
But wasn’t the one person KGB always tried to compromise the cipher clerk in a foreign embassy? Because he or she was the one functionary, the one not bright enough to be entrusted with anything of importance—wasn’t she the one person who was so entrusted? It was so often a woman, after all, and KGB officers were trained to seduce them. He’d seen dispatches along those lines, some of them describing the seduction in graphic detail, perhaps to impress the men upstairs with their manly prowess and the extent of their devotion to the State. Being paid to fuck women didn’t strike Zaitzev as conspicuously heroic, but then, perhaps the women were surpassingly ugly, and performing a man’s duty under such circumstances might have been difficult.
What it came down to, Oleg Ivanovich reflected, was that functionaries were so often entrusted with cosmic secrets, and he was one of them, and wasn’t that amusing? More amusing than his cabbage soup, certainly, nutritious though it might be. So even the Soviet state trusted some people, despite the fact that “trust” was a concept as divorced from its way of collective thinking as a man is from Mars. And he was such a man. Well, one result of that irony was the cute green shirt his little daughter wore. He set a few books on the kitchen chair and hoisted Svetlana there so that she could eat her dinner. Svetlana’s hands were a little small for the zinc-aluminum tableware, but at least it wasn’t too heavy for her to use. He still had to butter her bread for her. It was good to be able to afford real butter.
“I saw something nice at the special store on the way home,” Irina observed as women do over dinner, to catch their husbands in a good mood. The cabbage was especially good today, and the ham was Polish. So she’d shopped today at the “closed” store, all right. She’d gotten into the habit only nine months before, and now she wondered aloud how she’d ever lived without it.
“What’s that?” Oleg asked, sipping his Georgian tea.
“Brassieres, Swedish ones.”
Oleg smiled. Those of Soviet manufacture always seemed to be designed for peasant girls who suckled calves instead of children—far too big for a woman of his wife’s more human proportions. “How much?” he asked without looking up.
“Only seventeen rubles each.”
Seventeen certificate rubles, he didn’t correct her. A certificate ruble had actual value. You could, theoretically, even exchange it for a foreign “hard” currency, as opposed to the valueless paper that they used to pay the average factory worker, whose value was entirely theoretical . . . like everything else in his country, when you got down to it.
“What color?”
“White.” Perhaps the special store had black or red ones, but it was a rare Soviet woman who would wear such things. People were very conservative in their habits here.
With dinner finished, Oleg left the kitchen to his wife and took his little girl into the living room and the TV set. The TV news announced that the harvest was under way, as it was every year, with the heroic laborers on the collective farms bringing in the first crop of summer wheat in the northern areas, where they had to grow and harvest it quickly. A fine crop, the TV said. Good, Oleg thought, no bread shortages this winter . . . probably. You could never really be sure about what was said on the TV. Next, some complaining coverage of the American nuclear weapons being deployed in the NATO countries, despite the reasonable Soviet requests that the West forgo such unnecessary, destabilizing, and provocative actions. Zaitzev knew that the Soviet SS-20s were going into place elsewhere, and they, of course, were in no way destabilizing. The big show on TV tonight was We Ser
ve the Soviet Union, about military operations, fine young Soviet men serving their country. Today would be rare coverage of men doing their “international duty” in Afghanistan. The Soviet media didn’t often cover that, and Oleg was curious as to what they’d show. There were occasional discussions over lunch at work about the war in Afghanistan. He tended to listen rather than talk, because he’d been excused from military service, something he didn’t regret one little bit. He’d heard too many stories about the casual brutality in the infantry units, and besides, the uniforms were not attractive to wear. His rarely worn KGB uniform was bad enough. Still, pictures told stories that mere words did not, and he had the keen eye for detail that his job required.
“YOU KNOW, every year they harvest wheat in Kansas, and it never makes the NBC Nightly News,” Ed Foley said to his wife.
“I suppose feeding themselves is a major accomplishment,” Mary Pat observed. “How’s the office?”
“Small.” Then he waved his hands in such a way as to say that nothing interesting had happened.
Soon she’d have to drive their car around to check for alert signals. They were working Agent CARDINAL here in Moscow, and he was their most important assignment. The colonel knew that he’d have new handlers here. Setting that arrangement up would be touchy, but Mary Pat was accustomed to handling the touchy ones.
CHAPTER 4
INTRODUCTIONS
IT WAS FIVE IN THE EVENING in London, and noon in Langley, when Ryan lit up his secure phone to call home. He’d have to get used to the time zones. Like a lot of people, he found that his creative times of day tended to divide themselves into two parts. Mornings were best for digesting information, but later afternoons were better for contemplation. Admiral Greer tended to be the same way, and so Jack would find himself disconnected from his boss’s work routine, which wasn’t good. He also had to get used to the mechanics of handling documents. He’d been in government service long enough to know that it would never be as easy as he expected, nor as simple as it ought to be.
“Greer,” a voice said, after the secure link was established.
“Ryan here, sir.”
“How’s England, Jack?”
“Haven’t seen it rain yet. Cathy starts her new job tomorrow morning.”
“How’s Basil?”
“I can’t complain about the hospitality, sir.”
“Where are you now?”
“Century House. They gave me an office on the top floor with a guy in their Russian section.”
“I bet you want an STU for your home.”
“Good call, sir.” The old bastard was pretty good at reading minds.
“What else?”
“Nothing comes immediately to mind, Admiral.”
“Anything interesting yet?”
“Just settling in, sir. Their Russian section looks smart. The guy I’m working with, Simon Harding, reads the tea leaves pretty well,” Ryan said, glad that Simon was off at the moment. Of course, maybe the phone was bugged . . . nah . . . not for a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order . . . or would they?
“Kids okay?”
“Yes, sir. Sally’s trying to figure out the local TV.”
“Kids adapt pretty well.”
Better than adults do. “I’ll let you know, Admiral.”
“The Hopkins document ought to be on your desk tomorrow.”
“Thanks. I think they’ll like it. Bernie said some interesting things. This other thing with the Pope . . .”
“What are our cousins saying?”
“They’re concerned. So am I. I think His Holiness has rattled their cage pretty hard, and I think Ivan’s going to notice.”
“What’s Basil saying?”
“Not much. I do not know what assets they have on site. I imagine they’re waiting to see what they can find out.” Jack paused. “Anything from our end?”
“Not yet” was the terse reply. It was a step up from nothing I can talk to you about. Does Admiral Greer really trust me now? Jack wondered. Sure, Greer liked him, but did he really trust him to be a good analyst? Perhaps this London sojourn was, if not boot camp, then maybe a second trip through the Basic School. That was where the Marine Corps made sure that young men with lieutenant’s bars really had the right stuff to lead Marines in the field. It was reputed to be the hardest school in the Corps. It hadn’t been especially easy for Ryan, but he had graduated at the top of his class. Maybe he’d just been lucky . . . ? He hadn’t served long enough to find out, courtesy of a broken CH-46 over the island of Crete, an event that still visited him in the occasional nightmare. Fortunately, his gunnery sergeant and a navy corpsman had stabilized him, but Jack still got a chill even thinking about helicopters. “Tell me what you think, Jack.”
“If my job were to keep the Pope alive, I’d be a little nervous. The Russians can play rough when they want to. What I cannot evaluate is how the Politburo might react—I mean, how much starch they might have in their backbone. When I talked to Basil, I said it comes down to how scared they are by his threat, if you call it a threat.”
“What would you call it, Jack?” the DDI asked from 3,400 miles away.
“Yes, sir, you have me there. I suppose it is a threat of sorts to their way of thinking.”
“Of sorts? How does it look to them?” Jim Greer would have been one tough son of a bitch teaching graduate-level history or political science. Right up there with Father Tim at Georgetown.
“Noted, Admiral. It’s a threat. And they will see it as such. I am not sure, however, how serious a threat they will take it to be. It’s not as though they believe in God. To them, ‘God’ is politics, and politics is just a process, not a belief system as we understand the term.”
“Jack, you need to learn to see reality through the eyes of your adversary. Your analytical ability is first-rate, but you have to work on perception. This isn’t stocks and bonds, where you dealt with hard numbers, not perceptions of numbers. They say El Greco had a stigmatism in his eyes that gave everything a visual slant. They see reality through a different lens, too. If you can replicate that, you’ll be one of the best around, but you have to make that leap of imagination. Harding’s pretty good at that. Learn from him to see the inside of their heads.”
“You know Simon?” Jack asked.
“I’ve been reading his analyses for years.”
None of this is an accident, Jack, he told himself, with more surprise than there ought to have been. His second important lesson of the day. “Understood, sir.”
“Don’t sound too surprised, my boy.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” Ryan responded like a Marine shavetail. I won’t make that mistake again, Admiral. And in that moment, John Patrick Ryan became a real intelligence analyst.
“I’ll have the embassy deliver the STU to you. You know about keeping it secure,” the DDI added as a cautionary note.
“Yes, sir. I can do that.”
“Good. Lunchtime here.”
“Yes, sir. Talk to you tomorrow.” Ryan replaced the receiver in the cradle and then extracted the plastic key from the slot in the phone set. That went into his pocket. He checked his watch. Time to close up shop. He’d already cleared his desk of classified folders. A woman came around about 4:30 with a shopping cart to take them back to central-records storage. Right on cue, Simon came back in.
“What time’s your train?”
“Six-ten.”
“Time for a beer, Jack. Interested?”
“Works for me, Simon.” He rose and followed his roommate out the door.
It was only a four-minute walk to the Fox and Cock, a very traditional pub a block from Century House. A little too traditional: It looked like a relic from Shakespeare’s time, with massive wooden timbers and plaster walls. It had to be for architectural effect; no real building could have survived that long, could it? Inside was a cloud of tobacco smoke and a lot of people wearing jackets and ties. Clearly an upscale pub, a lot of the patrons were probably from Century House.
Harding confirmed it.
“It’s our watering hole. The publican used to be one of us, probably makes more here than he ever did at the shop.” Without being bidden, Harding ordered two pints of Tetley’s bitter, which arrived quickly. Then he ushered Jack to a corner booth.
“So, Sir John, how do you like it here?”
“No complaints so far.” He took a sip. “Admiral Greer thinks you’re pretty smart.”
“And Basil thinks he’s rather bright as well. Good chap to work for?” Harding asked.
“Yeah, big-time. He listens and helps you think. Doesn’t stomp on you when you goof. He’d rather teach than embarrass you—that’s my experience, anyway. Some of the more senior analysts have had him tear a stripe off their ass. I guess I’m not senior enough for that yet.” Ryan paused. “You supposed to be my training officer over here, Simon?”
The directness of the question surprised his host. “I wouldn’t say that exactly. I’m a Soviet specialist. You’re more a generalist, I take it?”
“Try ‘apprentice,’ ” Ryan suggested.
“Very well. What do you want to know?”
“How to think like a Russian.”
Harding laughed into his beer. “That’s something we all learn every day. The key is to remember that to them everything is politics, and politics, remember, is all about nebulous ideas, aesthetics. Especially in Russia, Jack. They can’t deliver real products like automobiles and television sets, so they have to concentrate on everything fitting into their political theory, the sayings of Marx and Lenin. And, of course, Lenin and Marx knew sod-all about doing real things in the real world. It’s like a religion gone mad, but instead of thunderbolts or biblical plagues, they kill their apostates with firing squads. In their world outlook, everything that goes wrong is the result of political apostasy. Their political theory ignores human nature, and since their political theory is Holy Writ, and therefore is never wrong, it must be human nature that’s wrong. It’s not logically consistent, you see. Ever study metaphysics?”