The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  The “Two” man looked discreetly out the window and saw Filitov’s car come to a halt. The trailing car motored past without a pause as the Army Colonel walked into the building.

  “Subject just entered the building,” a communications specialist said. Inside, a woman with a string-bag full of apples would get on the elevator with Filitov. Up on Filitov’s floor, two people who looked young enough to be teenagers would stroll past the elevator as he got out, continuing down the corridor with overly loud whispers of undying love. The surveillance mikes caught the end of that as Filitov opened the door.

  “Got him,” the cameraman said.

  “Let’s keep away from the windows,” Vatutin said unnecessarily. The men with binoculars stood well back from them, and so long as the lights in the apartment were left off—the bulbs had been removed from the fixtures—no one could tell that the rooms were occupied.

  One thing they liked about the man was his aversion to pulling down the shades. They followed him into the bedroom, where they watched him change into casual clothes and slippers. He returned to the kitchen and fixed himself a simple meal. They watched him tear the foil top off a half-liter bottle of vodka. The man was sitting and staring out the window.

  “An old, lonely man,” one officer observed. “Do you suppose that’s what did it?”

  “One way or another, we’ll find out.”

  Why is it that the State can betray us? Misha asked Corporal Romanov two hours later.

  Because we are soldiers, I suppose. Misha noted that the corporal was avoiding the question, and the issue. Did he know what his Captain was trying to ask?

  But if we betray the State ... ?

  Then we die, Comrade Captain. That is simple enough. We earn the hatred and contempt of the peasants and workers, and we die. Romanov stared across time into his officer’s eyes. The corporal now had his own question. He lacked the will to ask it, but his eyes seemed to proclaim: What have you done, my Captain?

  Across the street, the man on the recording equipment noted sobbing, and wondered what caused it.

  “What’re you doing, honey?” Ed Foley asked, and the microphones heard.

  “Starting to make lists for when we leave. So many things to remember, I’d better start now.”

  Foley bent over her shoulder. She had a pad and a pencil, but she was writing on a plastic sheet with a marker pen. It was the sort of arrangement that hung on many refrigerators, and could be wiped clean with a swipe of a damp cloth.

  I’LL DO IT, she’d written. I HAVE A PERFECT DODGE. Mary Pat smiled and held up a team photo of Eddie’s hockey squad. Each player had signed it, and at the top in scrawling Russian, Eddie had put, with his mother’s coaching: “To the man who brings us luck. Thanks, Eddie Foley.”

  Her husband frowned. It was typical of his wife to use the bold approach, and he knew that she’d used her cover with consummate skill. But ... he shook his head. But what? The only man in the CARDINAL chain who could identify him had never seen his face. Ed may have lacked her panache, but he was more circumspect. He felt that he was better than his wife at countersurveillance. He acknowledged Mary Pat’s passion for the work, and her acting skill, but—damn it, she was just too bold sometimes. Fine-why don’t you tell her? he asked himself.

  He knew what would happen—she’d go practical on him. There wasn’t time to establish another series of cutouts. They both knew that her cover was a solid one, that she hadn’t even come close to suspicion yet.

  But-Goddamn it, this business is one continuous series of fucking BUTs!

  OK BUT COVER YOUR CUTE LITTLE ASS!!!! he wrote on the plastic pad. Her eyes sparkled as she wiped it clean. Then she wrote her own message:

  LET’S GIVE THE MICROPHONES A HARD-ON!

  Ed nearly strangled trying not to laugh. Every time before a job, he thought. It wasn’t that he minded. He did find it a little odd, though.

  Ten minutes later, in a room in the basement of the apartment building, a pair of Russian wiretap technicians listened with rapt attention to the sounds generated in the Foley bedroom.

  Mary Pat Foley woke up at her customary six-fifteen. It was still dark outside, and she wondered how much of her grandfather’s character had been formed by the cold and the dark of the Russian winters ... and how much of hers. Like most Americans assigned to Moscow, she thoroughly hated the idea of listening devices in her walls. She occasionally took perverse pleasure in them, as she had the previous night, but then there was also the thought that the Soviets had placed them in the bathroom, too. That seemed like something they’d do, she thought, looking at herself in the mirror. The first order of business was to take her temperature. They both wanted another child, and had been working on it for a few months—which beat watching Russian TV. Professionally, of course, pregnancy made one hell of a cover. After three minutes she noted the temperature on a card she kept in the medicine cabinet. Probably not yet, she thought. Maybe in a few more days. She dropped the remains of an Early Pregnancy Test kit in the waste can anyway.

  Next, there were the children to rouse. She got breakfast going, and shook everyone loose. Living in an apartment with but a single bathroom imposed a rigid schedule on them. There came the usual grumbles from Ed, and the customary whines and groans from the kids.

  God, it’ll be nice to get home, she told herself. As much as she loved the challenge of working in the mouth of the dragon, living here wasn’t exactly fun for the kids. Eddie loved his hockey, but he was missing a normal childhood in this cold, barren place. Well, that would change soon enough. They’d load everyone aboard the Pan Am clipper and wing home, leaving Moscow behind—if not forever, at least for five years. Life in Virginia’s tidewater country. Sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. Mild winters! You had to bundle kids up here like Nanook of the fucking North, she thought. I’m always fighting off colds.

  She got breakfast on the table just as Ed vacated the bathroom, allowing her to wash and dress. The routine was that he managed breakfast, then dressed while his wife got the kids going.

  In the bathroom, she heard the TV go on, and laughed into the mirror. Eddie loved the morning exercise show—the woman who appeared on it looked like a longshoreman, and he called her Workerwommannn! Her son yearned for mornings of the Transformers—“More than meets the eye!” he still remembered the opening song. Eddie would miss his Russian friends some, she thought, but the kid was an American and nothing would ever change that. By seven-fifteen everyone was dressed and ready to go. Mary Pat tucked a wrapped parcel under her arm.

  “Cleaning day, isn’t it?” Ed asked his wife.

  “I’ll be back in time to let her in,” Mary Pat assured him.

  “Okay.” Ed opened the door and led the procession to the elevator. As usual, his family was the first one to get moving in the morning. Eddie raced forward and punched the elevator button. It arrived just as the rest of the family reached the door. Eddie jumped onto it, enjoying the usual springiness of Soviet elevator cables. To his mother, it always seemed as though the damned thing was going to fall all the way to the basement, but her son thought it entertaining when the car dropped a few inches. Three minutes later they got into the car. Ed took the wheel this morning. On the drive out, the kids waved at the militiaman, who was really KGB, and who waved back with a smile. As soon as the car had turned onto the street, he lifted the phone in his booth.

  Ed kept his eye on the rearview mirror, and his wife had already adjusted the outside one so that she could see aft also. The kids got into a dispute in the back, which both parents ignored.

  “Looks like a nice day,” he said quietly. Nothing following us.

  “Uh huh.” Agreed. They had to be careful what they said around the kids, of course. Eddie could repeat anything they said as easily as the opening ditty of the Transformers cartoon. There was always the chance of a radio bug in the car, too.

  Ed drove to the school first, allowing his wife to take the kids in. Eddie and Katie looked like teddy bears in thei
r cold-weather clothing. His wife looked unhappy when she came out.

  “Nikki Wagner called in sick. They want me to take over her class this afternoon,” she told him on reentering the car. Her husband grunted. Actually, it was perfect. He dropped the Volkswagen into gear and pulled back onto Leninskiy Prospekt. Game time.

  Now their checks of the mirrors were serious.

  Vatutin hoped that they’d never thought of this before. Moscow streets are always full of dumptrucks, scurrying from one construction site to another. The high cabs of the vehicles made for excellent visibility, and the meanderings of the look-alike vehicles appeared far less sinister than would those of unmarked sedans. He had nine of them working for him today, and the officers driving them communicated via encrypted military radios.

  Colonel Vatutin himself was in the apartment next door to Filitov’s. The family who lived there had moved into the Hotel Moscow two days before. He’d watched the videotapes of his subject, drinking himself to insensibility, and used the opportunity to get three other “Two” officers in. They had their own spike-microphones driven into the party wall between the two flats, and listened intently to the Colonel’s staggering through his morning routine. Something told him that this was the day.

  It’s the drinking, he told himself while he sipped tea. That drew an amused grimace. Perhaps it takes one drinker to understand another. He was sure that Filitov had been working himself up to something, and he also remembered that the time he’d seen the Colonel with the traitorous bath attendant, he’d come into the steam room with a hangover ... just as I had. It fitted, he decided. Filitov was a hero who’d gone bad—but a hero still. It could not have been easy for him to commit treason, and he probably needed the drink to sleep in the face of a troubled conscience. It pleased Vatutin that people felt that way, that treason was still a hard thing to do.

  “They’re heading this way,” a communications man reported over the radio.

  “Right here,” Vatutin told his subordinates. “It will happen within a hundred meters of where we stand.”

  Mary Pat ran over what she had to do. Handing over the wrapped photo would allow her to recover the film that she would slip inside her glove. Then there was the signal. She’d rub the back of her gloved hand across her forehead as though wiping off sweat, then scratch her eyebrow. That was the danger-breakout signal. She hoped he’d pay attention. Though she’d never done the signal herself, Ed had once offered a breakout, only to be rejected. It was something she understood better than her husband had—after all, her work with CIA was based more on passion than reason—but enough was enough. This man had been sending data West when she’d learned to play with dolls.

  There was the building. Ed headed for the curb, jostling over the potholes as her hand gripped the parcel. As she grabbed the door handle, her husband patted her on the leg. Good luck, kid.

  “Foleyeva just got out of the car and is headed to the side entrance,” the radio squawked. Vatutin smiled at the Russification of the foreign name. He debated drawing the service automatic in his belt, but decided against it. Better to have his hands free, and a gun might go off accidentally. This was no time for accidents.

  “Any ideas?” he asked.

  “If it was me, I’d try a brush-pass,” one of his men offered.

  Vatutin nodded agreement. It worried him that they’d been unable to establish camera surveillance of the corridor itself, but technical factors had militated against it. That was the problem with the really sensitive cases. The smart ones were the wary ones. You couldn’t risk alerting them, and he was sure that the Americans were alerted already. Alerted enough, he thought, to have killed one of their own agents in that railyard.

  Fortunately, most Moscow apartments had peepholes installed in them now. Vatutin found himself grateful for the increase in burglaries, because his technicians had been able to replace the regular lens with one that allowed them to see most of the corridor. He took this post himself.

  We should have put microphones on the stairwells, he told himself. Make a note of that for the next time. Not all enemy spies use elevators.

  Mary Pat was not quite the athlete her husband was. She paused on the landing, looking up and down the stairwell and listening for any sound at all as her heart rate slowed somewhat. She checked her digital watch. Time.

  She opened the firedoor and walked straight down the middle of the corridor.

  Okay, Misha. I hope you remembered to set your watch last night.

  Last time, Colonel. Will you for Christ’s sake take the breakout signal this time, and maybe they’ll do the debrief on the Farm, and my son can meet a real Russian hero ... ?

  God, I wish my grandfather could see me now ...

  She’d never been here before, never done a pass in this building. But she knew it by heart, having spent twenty minutes going over the diagram. The CARDINAL’s door was ... that one!

  Time! Her heart skipped a beat as she saw the door open, thirty feet away.

  What a pro! But what came next was as cold as a dagger made of ice.

  Vatutin’s eyes widened in horror at the noise. The deadbolt on the apartment door had been installed with typical Russian workmanship, about half a millimeter out of line. As he slipped it in preparation to leap from the room, it made an audible click.

  Mary Pat Foley scarcely broke stride. Her training took over her body like a computer program. There was a peephole on the door that went from dark to light:

  —there was somebody there

  —that somebody just moved

  —that somebody just slipped the door lock.

  She took half a step to her right and rubbed the back of her gloved hand across her forehead. She wasn’t pretending to wipe sweat away.

  Misha saw the signal and stopped cold, a curious look on his face that began to change to amusement until he heard the door wrenched open. He knew in an instant that the man who emerged was not his neighbor.

  “You are under arrest!” Vatutin shouted, then saw that the American woman and the Russian man were standing a meter apart, and both had their hands at their sides. It was just as well that the “Two” officers behind him couldn’t see the look on his face.

  “Excuse me?” the woman said in excellent Russian.

  “What!” Filitov thundered with the rage only possible to a hung-over professional soldier.

  “You”—he pointed to Mrs. Foley—“up against the wall.”

  “I’m an American citizen, and you can’t—”

  “You’re an American spy,” a captain said, pushing her against the wall.

  “What?” Her voice contained panic and alarm, not the least amount of professionalism here, the Captain thought, but then his mind nearly choked on the observation. “What are you talking about? What is this? Who are you?” Next she started screaming: “Police—somebody call the police. I’m being attacked! Somebody help me, please!”

  Vatutin ignored her. He had already grabbed Filitov’s hand, and as another officer pushed the Colonel against the wall, he took a film cassette. For a flicker of time that seemed to stretch into hours, he’d been struck with the horrible thought that he’d blown it, that she really wasn’t CIA. With the film in his hand, he swallowed and looked into Filitov’s eyes.

  “You are under arrest for treason, Comrade Colonel.” His voice hissed out the end of the statement. “Take him away.”

  He turned to look at the woman. Her eyes were wide with fear and outrage. Four people now had their heads out of doors, staring into the hall.

  “I am Colonel Vatutin of the Committee for State Security. We have just made an arrest. Close your doors and go about your business.” He noted that compliance with his order took under five seconds. Russia was still Russia.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Foley,” he said next. He saw her struggle to gain control of herself.

  “Who are you—and what is this all about?”

  “The Soviet Union does not look kindly upon its guests stealing State
secrets. Surely they told you that in Washington—excuse me, Langley.”

  Her voice trembled as she spoke. “My husband is an accredited member of the U.S. diplomatic mission to your country. I wish to be put in contact with my embassy at once. I don’t know what you’re jabbering about, but I do know that if you make the pregnant wife of a diplomat lose her baby, you’ll have a diplomatic incident big enough to make the TV news! I didn’t talk to that man. I didn’t touch him, and he didn’t touch me—and you know it, mister. What they warned me about in Washington is that you clowns love to embarrass Americans with your damned-fool little spy games.”

  Vatutin took all of the speech impassively, though the word “pregnant” did get his attention. He knew from the reports of the maid who cleaned their apartment twice a week that Foleyeva had been testing herself. And if—there would be a larger incident over this than he wanted. Again the political dragon raised its head. Chairman Gerasimov would have to rule on this.

  “My husband is waiting for me.”

  “We’ll tell him that you are being detained. You will be asked to answer some questions. You will not be mistreated.”

  Mary Pat already knew that. Her horror at what had just happened was muted by her pride. She’d performed beautifully and knew it. As part of the diplomatic community, she was fundamentally safe. They might hold on to her for a day, even two, but any serious mistreatment would result in having a half-dozen Russians shipped home from Washington. Besides, she wasn’t really pregnant.

  All that was beside the point. She didn’t shed any tears, showed no emotion other than what was expected, what she’d been briefed and trained to show. What mattered was that her most important agent was blown, and with him, information of the highest importance. She wanted to cry, needed to cry, but she wouldn’t give the fuckers the satisfaction. The crying would come on the plane ride home.