“When did you decide to betray the Motherland?” Vatutin asked.
“When did you decide to stop buggering little boys?” the old man replied angrily.
“Filitov—excuse me, Colonel Filitov—you know that you were arrested with a microfilm cassette in your hand, only two meters from an American intelligence officer. On that microfilm cassette was information about a highly secret State defense-research installation, which information you have been giving for years to the Americans. There is no question of this, in case you have forgotten,” Vatutin explained patiently. “What I am asking is, how long you have been doing this?”
“Go bugger yourself,” Misha suggested. Vatutin noticed a slight tremor in his hands. “I am three times Hero of the Soviet Union. I was killing the enemies of this country while you were an ache in your father’s crotch, and you have the balls to call me traitor?”
“You know, when I was in grammar school, I read books about you. Misha, driving the fascisti back from the gates of Moscow. Misha, the demon tankist. Misha, the Hero of Stalingrad. Misha, killer of Germans. Misha, leading the counterattack at the Kursk Bulge. Misha,” Vatutin said finally, “traitor to the Motherland.”
Misha waved his hand, looking in annoyance at the way it shook. “I have never had much respect for the chekisti. When I was leading my men, they were there—behind us. They were very efficient at shooting prisoners—prisoners that real soldiers had taken. They were also rather good at murdering people who’d been forced to retreat. I even remember one case where a chekist lieutenant took command of a tank troop and led it into a fucking swamp. At least the Germans I killed were men, fighting men. I hated them, but I could respect them for the soldiers they were. Your kind, on the other hand ... perhaps we simple soldiers never really understood who the enemy was. Sometimes I wonder who has killed more Russians, the Germans—or people like you?”
Vatutin was unmoved. “The traitor Penkovskiy recruited you, didn’t he?”
“Rubbish! I reported Penkovskiy myself.” Filitov shrugged. He was surprised at the way he felt, but was unable to control it. “I suppose your kind does have its use. Oleg Penkovskiy was a sad, confused man who paid the price that such men have to pay.”
“As will you,” Vatutin said.
“I cannot prevent you from killing me, but I have seen death too many times. Death has taken my wife and my sons. Death has taken so many of my comrades—and death has tried to take me often enough. Sooner or later death will win, whether from you or someone else. I have forgotten how to fear that.”
“Tell me, what do you fear?”
“Not you.” This was delivered not with a smile, but with a cold, challenging glare.
“But all men fear something,” Vatutin observed. “Did you fear combat?” Ah, Misha, you’re talking too much now. Do you even know that?
“Yes, at first. The first time a shell hit my T-34, I wet my pants. But only that first time. After that I knew that the armor would stop most hits. A man can get accustomed to physical danger, and as an officer you are often too busy to realize that you’re supposed to be afraid. You fear for the men under your command. You fear failure in a combat assignment, because others depend on you. You always fear pain—not death, but pain.” Filitov surprised himself by talking this much, but he’d had enough of this KGB slug. It was almost like the frenetic excitement of combat, sitting here and dueling with this man.
“I have read that all men fear combat, but that what sustains them is their self-image. They know that they cannot let their comrades perceive them to be less than what they are supposed to be. Men, therefore, fear cowardice more than danger. They fear betraying their manhood, and their fellow soldiers.” Misha nodded slightly. Vatutin pressed one of the buttons under the table. “Filitov, you have betrayed your men. Can’t you see that? Don’t you understand that in giving defense secrets to the enemy, you have betrayed all the men who served with you?”
“It will take more than your words to—”
The door opened quietly. The young man who entered wore dirty, greasy coveralls, and wore the ribbed helmet of a tank crewman. All the details were right: there was a trailing wire for the tank’s interphones, and the powerful smell of powder came into the room with the young man. The coverall was torn and singed. His face and hands were bandaged. Blood dripped down from the covered eye, clearing a trail through the grime. And he was the living image of Aleksey Il’ych Romanov, Corporal of the Red Army, or as close to it as the KGB could manage in one frantic night’s effort.
Filitov didn’t hear him enter, but turned as soon as he noticed the smell. His mouth dropped open in shock.
“Tell me, Filitov,” Vatutin said. “How do you think your men would react if they learned what you have done?”
The young man—he was in fact a corporal who worked for a minor functionary in the Third Directorate—did not say a word. The chemical irritant in his right eye was making it water, and while the youngster struggled not to grimace at the pain it caused him, the tears ran down his cheeks. Filitov didn’t know that his meal had been drugged—so disoriented was he by his stay in Lefortovo that he no longer had the ability to register the things that were being done to him. The caffeine had induced the exact opposite of a drunken state. His mind was as wide awake as it had been in combat, all his senses sought input, noticed everything that was happening around him—but all through the night there had been nothing to report. Without data to pass on, his senses had begun making things up, and Filitov had been hallucinating when the guards had come to fetch him. In Vatutin he had a target on which to fix his psyche. But Misha was also tired, exhausted by the routine to which he had been subjected, and the combination of wakefulness and bone-crushing fatigue had placed him in a dreamlike state where he no longer had the ability to distinguish the real from the imaginary.
“Turn around, Filitov!” Vatutin boomed. “Look at me when I address you! I asked you a question: What of all the men who served you?”
“Who—”
“Who? The men you led, you old fool!”
“But—” He turned again, and the figure was gone.
“I’ve been looking through your file, all those citations you wrote for your men—more than most commanders. Ivanenko here, and Pukhov, and this Corporal Romanov. All the men who died for you, what would they think now?”
“They would understand!” Misha insisted as the anger took over completely.
“What would they understand? Tell me now, what is it that they would understand?”
“Men like you killed them—not I, not the Germans, but men like you!”
“And your sons, too, eh?”
“Yes! My two handsome sons, my two strong, brave boys, they went to follow in my footsteps and—”
“Your wife, too?”
“That above all!” Filitov snarled back. He leaned forward across the table. “You have taken everything from me, you chekist bastard—and you wonder that I needed to fight back at you? No man has served the State better than I, and look at my reward, look at the gratitude of the Party. All that was my world you have taken away, and you say that I have betrayed the Rodina, do you? You have betrayed her, and you have betrayed me!”
“And because of that, Penkovskiy approached you, and because of that you have been feeding information to the West—you’ve fooled us all these years!”
“It is no great thing to fool the likes of you!” He pounded his fist on the table. “Thirty years, Vatutin, thirty years I have—I have—” He stopped, a curious look on his face, wondering what he had just said.
Vatutin took his time before speaking, and when he did so, his voice was gentle. “Thank you, Comrade Colonel. That is quite enough for now. Later we will talk about exactly what you have given the West. I despise you for what you have done, Misha. I cannot forgive or understand treason, but you’re the bravest man I have ever met. I hope that you can face what remains of your life with equal bravery. It is important now that you face yoursel
f and your crimes as courageously as you faced the fascisti, so that your life can end as honorably as you lived it.” Vatutin pressed a button and the door opened. The guards took Filitov away, still looking back at the interrogator, more surprised than anything else. Surprised that he’d been tricked. He’d never understand how it had been done, but then they rarely did, the Colonel of the Second Chief Directorate told himself. He rose, too, after a minute, collecting his files in a businesslike way before he walked out of the room and upstairs.
“You would have been a fine psychiatrist,” the doctor observed first of all.
“I hope the tape machines got all of that,” Vatutin said to his technicians.
“All three, plus the television record.”
“That was the hardest one I’ve ever come across,” a major said.
“Yes, he was a hard one. A brave one. Not an adventurer, not a dissident. That one was a patriot—or that’s what the poor bastard thought he was. He wanted to save the country from the Party.” Vatutin shook his head in wonderment. “Where do they get such ideas?”
Your Chairman, he reminded himself, wants to do much the same thing-or more accurately to save the country for the Party. Vatutin leaned against the wall for a moment while he tried to decide how similar or how different the motivation was. He concluded quickly that this was not a proper thought for a simple counterintelligence officer. At least not yet. Filitov got his ideas from the clumsy way the Party treated his family. Well, even though the Party says it never makes mistakes, we all know differently. What a pity that Misha couldn’t make that allowance. After all, the Party is all we have.
“Doctor, make sure he gets some rest,” he said on the way out. There was a car waiting for him.
Vatutin was surprised to see that it was morning. He’d allowed himself to focus too fully these last two days, and he’d thought that it would be nighttime. So much the better, though: he could see the Chairman right now. The really amazing part was that he was actually on a fairly normal schedule. He could go home tonight and get a normal night’s sleep, reacquaint himself with wife and family, watch some television. Vatutin smiled to himself. He could also look forward to a promotion, he told himself. After all, he’d broken the man earlier than promised. That ought to make the Chairman happy.
Vatutin caught him between meetings. He found Gerasimov in a pensive mood, staring out his window at the traffic on Dzerzhinskiy Square.
“Comrade Chairman, I have the confession,” Vatutin announced. Gerasimov turned.
“Filitov?”
“Why, yes, Comrade Chairman.” Vatutin allowed his surprise to show.
Gerasimov smiled after a moment. “Excuse me, Colonel. There is an operational matter on my mind at the moment. You do have his confession?”
“Nothing detailed yet, of course, but he did admit that he was sending secrets to the West, and that he has been doing so for thirty years.”
“Thirty years—and all that time we didn’t detect it ...” Gerasimov noted quietly.
“That is correct,” Vatutin admitted. “But we have caught him, and we will spend weeks learning all that he has compromised. I think we will find that his placement and operational methods made detection difficult, but we will learn from this, as we have learned from all such cases. In any event, you required the confession and now we have it,” the Colonel pointed out.
“Excellent,” the Chairman replied. “When will your written report be ready?”
“Tomorrow?” Vatutin asked without thinking. He nearly cringed awaiting the reply. He expected to have his head snapped off, but Gerasimov thought for an infinity of seconds before nodding.
“That is sufficient. Thank you, Comrade Colonel. That will be all.”
Vatutin drew himself to attention and saluted before leaving.
Tomorrow? he asked himself in the corridor. After all that, he’s willing to wait until tomorrow?
What the hell? It didn’t make any sense. But Vatutin had no immediate explanation, either, and he did have a report to file. The Colonel walked to his office, pulled out a lined pad, and started drafting his interrogation report.
“So that’s the place?” Ryan asked.
“That’s it. Used to be they had a toy store right across from it, over there. Called Children’s World, would you believe? I suppose somebody finally noticed how crazy that was, and they just moved it. The statue in the middle is Feliks Dzerzhinskiy. That was a cold bloody piece of work—next to him Heinrich Himmler was a boy scout.”
“Himmler wasn’t as smart,” Jack observed.
“True enough. Feliks broke at least three attempts to bring Lenin down, and one of them was pretty serious. The full story on that never has gotten out, but you can bet the records are right in there,” the driver said. He was an Australian, part of the company contracted to handle perimeter security for the embassy, and a former commando of the Aussie SAS. He never performed any actual espionage activities—at least not for America—but he often played the part, doing strange things. He’d learned to spot and shake tails along the way, and that made the Russians certain that he was CIA or some sort of spook. He made an excellent tour guide, too.
He checked the mirror. “Our friends are still there. You don’t expect anything, do you?”
“We’ll see.” Jack turned. They weren’t being very subtle, but he hadn’t expected that they would. “Where’s Frunze?”
“South of the embassy, mate. You should have told me that you wanted to go there, we’d have hit it first.” He made a legal U-turn while Ryan kept looking back. Sure enough, the Zhiguli—it looked like an old Fiat—did the same, following them like a faithful dog. They went past the American compound again on the way, past the former Greek Orthodox church known to embassy wags as Our Lady of the Microchips for all the surveillance devices it surely contained.
“What exactly are we doing?” the driver asked.
“We’re just driving around. The last time I was here, all I saw was the way to and from the Foreign Ministry and the inside of a palace.”
“And if our friends get any closer?”
“Well, if they want to talk with me, I suppose I might oblige,” Ryan answered.
“Are you serious?” He knew Ryan was CIA.
“You bet.” Jack chuckled.
“You know I have to do a written report on things like that?”
“You have your job. I have mine.” They drove around for another hour, but nothing happened. That was to Ryan’s disappointment, and the driver’s relief.
They arrived the usual way. Though the crossing points were shuffled at random, the car—it was a Plymouth Reliant, about four years old, with Oklahoma tags—stopped at the Border Patrol control booth. There were three men inside, one of whom appeared to be asleep and had to be roused.
“Good evening,” the Border Patrolman said. “Could I see some identification, please?” All three men handed over driver’s licenses, and the photographs matched. “Anything to declare?”
“Some booze. Two quarts—I mean liters—for each of us.” He watched with interest as a dog sniffed around the car. “You want us to pull over and pop the trunk?”
“Why were you in Mexico?”
“We represent Cummings-Oklahoma Tool and Die. Pipeline and refinery equipment,” the driver explained. “Mainly large-diameter control valves and like that. We’re trying to sell some to Pemex. The sales stuff is in the trunk, too.”
“Any luck?” the Border Patrolman asked.
“First try. It’ll take a few more. They usually do.”
The dog handler shook his head negatively. His Labrador wasn’t interested in the car. No smell of drugs. No smell of nitrates. The men in the car didn’t fit the profile. They looked fairly clean-cut, but not overly so, and had not chosen a busy time to make the crossing.
“Welcome back,” the patrolman said. “Safe trip home.”
“Thank you, sir.” The driver nodded and dropped the car into drive. “See ya.”
“I don’t believe it,” the man in the back said, once they were a hundred meters away from the control point. He spoke in English. “They don’t have the first idea of security.”
“My brother’s a major in the Border Guards. I think he’d have a heart attack if he saw how easy that was,” the driver observed. He didn’t laugh. The hard part would be getting out, and as of now they were in enemy territory. He drove right at the posted speed limit while local drivers whizzed by him. He liked the American car. Though it lacked power, he’d never driven a car with more than four cylinders and didn’t really know the difference. He’d been in the United States four times before, but never for a job like this, and never with so little preparation.
All three spoke perfect American English, with a prairie twang to coincide with their identification papers—that’s how they all thought of their driver’s licenses and Social Security cards, even though they could hardly be called proper “papers.” The odd thing was that he liked America, especially the easy availability of inexpensive, wholesome food. He’d stop at a fast-food place on the way to Santa Fe, preferably a Burger King, where he’d indulge his love for a charcoal-cooked hamburger served with lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. That was one of the things Soviets found most amazing about America, the way anyone could get food without standing in a block-long line. And it was usually good food. How could Americans be so good at difficult tasks like food production and distribution, he wondered, and be so stupid about simple things like proper security? They just didn’t make any sense at all, but it was wrong—dangerous—to be contemptuous of them. He understood that. The Americans played by a set of rules so different as to be incomprehensible ... and there was so much randomness here. That frightened the KGB officer in a fundamental way. You couldn’t tell which way they’d jump any more than you could predict the behavior of a driver on a highway. More than anything else, it was that unpredictability that reminded him that he was on the enemy’s ground. He and his men had to be careful, had to keep to their training. Being at ease in an alien environment was the surest route to disaster—that lesson had been pounded home all the way through the academy. There were just too many things that training could not do. The KGB could scarcely predict what the American government would do. There was no way they could be prepared for the individual actions of two hundred-plus million people who bounced from decision to decision.