by Jan Fedarcyk
But as they walked out, Kay doubted there was much that anyone on the face of the earth could teach Jeffries about duplicity.
The older and senior of the two Agency men, Group Chief Mike Anthony, looked like the image of an intelligence officer you would have read about in John le Carré’s novels. He was short and running towards fat, and he had thick owlish glasses and dark, penetrating gray eyes. He spoke slowly and evenly, as if every sentence were an elaborate algebraic equation that he was doing, neatly and with great competence, inside his head. He began the meeting with such little fanfare that it took Kay half a sentence before she noticed. “I’d like to start by thanking ASAC Jeffries, the rest of you, and the Bureau generally for . . . coming in and helping us out on this one.”
The first story of the day, and the coffee was still warm. If there was one thing the CIA did not like, it was oversight. Oversight to the CIA was like garlic to a vampire, milk to the lactose intolerant, a razor blade to a hemophiliac. CIA case officers were like mushrooms, Marshall had joked with her earlier: they grew best in the dark. For that matter, there was no great love lost between the two organizations. They had the same rivalry as you could find anytime two organizations performed similar tasks, competing for funding and attention from the government. For the CIA to be approaching the FBI for help meant that things at their sister agency had gotten very grim, very grim indeed.
“Happy to help,” Jeffries said flatly. Jeffries had many strengths, but a knack for pleasantries was not one of them. She would have been a very bad telemarketer.
“Recently we’ve lost several RIPs within the Russian heartland and we think it’s time to take a good internal look,” Mike Anthony said.
Looking around, Kay did not think that anyone seemed particularly shocked. The end of the Cold War had seen, happily for the planet Earth, a distinct downward tick in the likelihood of the United States and Russia fighting a tank war or, for that matter, a full-scale nuclear apocalypse. But neither had the intelligence services of the two countries shaken hands, packed up their radio transmitters, and headed home. Like every other major power in the world and most of the smaller ones, the United States was actively working to infiltrate the security services of modern Russia. The Russians, needless to say, were not slow to return the compliment. The KGB had changed their name to the SVR, but apart from that it remained essentially the same. The CIA had not bothered with a shift in nomenclature or in tactics, and in effect the low-grade conflict between the two countries continued unabated. It was, like Jeffries had said, a game that doesn’t end, a chess match without a permanent victor, successes followed by reverses, but hopefully with a few more in the win column.
“This was Mikhail Valenko,” Anthony said, and the large video screen over his shoulder shifted to display a grainy image of a man in his mid-fifties, eyes heavy, nose red from drink. “Born 1962 in Petrograd. At one point he was a top electronics man in the SVR technical service. At another, more recent point he was one of our top RIPs.
“This was Vladimir Dolstoi,” Anthony continued, clicking a button on his computer, the screen shifting to show another man, slightly younger but otherwise more or less identical to the first. “Military background, moved into the SVR shortly after the end of the Cold War. Doubled him a few years back, after he got into some trouble in Berlin.
“This was Dmitri Ulyanov.”Another click, another dowdy-looking Slav. “Worked counterintelligence for the SVR. Until recently, at least.”
It seemed the show-and-tell portion of the meeting was over. Anthony sat back down in his chair and took a deep breath as if preparing himself for an unpleasant task ahead. “These three men represented the Agency’s deepest penetration into the SVR, which is to say Mother Russia. They represented, on my part, personally, many thousands of hours of effort over a dozen years.”
“And?” Jeffries asked quietly.
“And each one of them is now a corpse in some unhappy tundra grave. They have been rolled up. Dispatched. Disappeared. Fifteen years we have groomed these RIPs, and in less than six months every one of them was identified, tried and executed for treason. No doubt their final days were . . . unpleasant.” No doubt. If the aims of the CIA and SVR were roughly similar, their tactics differed significantly. If caught, the Black Bear mole could count on spending the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary, but at least he wouldn’t have to worry about spending any time being tortured in some subbasement at Langley.
Anthony pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The loss of one RIP could be explained as incompetence or bad luck. The loss of two might, less plausibly, be the same. At this point, unfortunately, we are left with one inescapable but unpleasant reality: the SVR has picked off our people because they have someone on our side pointing them out. We have a mole in our house,” he said simply.
Kay felt a wave of self-doubt creep over her. She took a long sip of coffee to process the information.
“And what do we know about this mystery man?” Marshall asked.
“Unfortunately, damn little,” Andrew said regretfully. They were the first words he had spoken since his greeting, and Kay was struck by the harmonious lilt of his voice. “We don’t even know if there is only the one mole: it could be a number of people working in conjunction or separate recruits entirely, each offering the SVR just enough information to figure out who our people were.”
“Word is that Susan has a number of RIPs within the Russian consulate,” Mike Anthony answered.
There were long moments during meetings when, if you did not know Jeffries, you would think she was not paying attention at all—perhaps even that she had fallen asleep with her eyes open. Then she would make some casual aside in her too-soft voice, something that made it clear not only that she had missed nothing of what was said but indeed that she understood the subject better than anyone else in the room. “I’m afraid the identities of our RIPs are going to remain secret.”
“Come on, Susan, how about a little bit of interagency trust?”
“I trust you fine, Mike,” Jeffries said. “I just don’t trust everyone working for you. And since I can’t trust everyone who works for you, I can’t trust anyone who works for you. Which means we’re going to keep our cards inside our vest.”
Anthony shrugged. Jeffries worked counterintelligence: it was a matter of principle and habit to play things close, and he couldn’t have expected the Assistant Special Agent in Charge to suddenly break protocol. But then, Anthony was a spy, and it was in his nature to ferret out secrets, and probably he couldn’t quite help himself. “Fair enough,” he said. “But understand that at Langley this case has the attention of executive leadership. Anything that can be done, we’ll do. Andrew here,” he said, nodding to his colleague, “will head to New York to act as liaison and to render whatever assistance he can. Needless to say, he’ll have no contact with our office there: his existence, as well as that of the rest of the Black Bear squad, will remain unknown to anyone in the CIA besides myself and a few of my immediate superiors.”
Which made sense: it might very well turn out that their mole was operating out of the CIA’s National Resource Office in New York, in which case it obviously wouldn’t do to have any of them aware of Black Bear’s existence or that Andrew was a part of it. They discussed a few other procedural matters and then the meeting broke up, Kay, Jeffries and the rest of the squad returning to another conference room.
“That was Mike Anthony,” Marshall said. “I thought he’d be taller.”
“He’s a spy, not a basketball player,” Kay said.
“Still, a man with his history, you expect a little more to it.”
Kay had never heard of Mike Anthony before, but then, she was new to the world of counterintelligence. From what she gathered from her colleagues, in his own agency Anthony was held in a similar regard to that which Jeffries enjoyed internally: as a seasoned, old-school professional with
more skeletons in his closet than a cut-rate embalmer. Relationships between the two agencies were often clouded by rivalry and distrust, but it seemed that Anthony’s reputation had gone some way towards smoothing over such differences.
Feelings about Andrew, however, were rather more mixed. “The Agency couldn’t have saddled us with anyone prettier?” Marshall grumbled, unhappy to discover that his dubious distinction of being the best-looking man in the office had come to an abrupt end.
“Word is he’s a blue-flamer,” Wilson said. “Supposed to be very sharp; spent some time out east doing top-quality work.”
“That means we have to spend the rest of the investigation with him peeking over our shoulder?”
“We’re all in it together,” Jeffries counseled them. “One mission, one fight. We will, of course, give . . . Andrew our fullest cooperation. Keep him up-to-date on any information we think would be of help to him.”
“So we ought to start turning over our RIPs? Just open up the company books and let the man peruse through?”
“Let’s not exaggerate here, Agent Marshall,” Jeffries said. “Andrew gets our output and whatever might be relevant to Black Bear. He obviously is not in that privileged inner circle that gets to know where exactly we are receiving our information.” Protecting one’s sources was one of the most basic elements of spycraft: information might be passed on to other intelligence partners, or to the political overseers, but where that information came from was a secret that a good Agent would be tortured without revealing.
“Lately we’ve been wondering why we keep you in it,” Wilson said to Marshall, who laughed and shrugged.
“We don’t need to get into a turf war with the CIA over protocol,” said Jeffries, never one to let a moment of levity stretch out too long. “But let’s not forget that they’re here because they’ve got a leak they can’t plug. Let’s make absolutely sure that nothing that we’re responsible for drains out through it. Beyond that, you don’t need me to explain to you the seriousness of the situation. This mole is out there and he is very obviously quite active. We need to pick him up as soon as we can before he trades any more national secrets to the SVR.”
“What now?” Kay asked.
Marshall and Wilson looked at each other. “Now we’re going to introduce you to the matrix, Kay. The two of you are going to get to be very, very close over the course of the next few months. Years. Decades.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Depends on how you feel about drudgery,” Wilson said. “What can I tell you, Malloy? It’s not fun but it’s absolutely necessary.”
22
I REGRET to inform you that, as of this point, direct surveillance of the target has been fruitless.”
They were sitting in a Midtown diner, the kind that was increasingly priced out of the city by boutique cocktail bars and Asian fusion restaurants. They looked conspicuous sitting together, but there was nothing that could be done about that. Tom was six-two vertical and not half that in width, and he dressed like he was about to go to the gym, though a quick look at his belly suggested that he probably was not. Pyotr was a slim man, shorter than average, and he dressed in a charcoal suit that was just a bit too conservative to be described as exquisite.
“To be expected,” Pyotr answered. He spoke Russian in hushed tones. New York City was the capital of the world, any given room might have a dozen people speaking English as a second tongue and caution was second nature to Pyotr. “She’s young, idealistic, dedicated to her work. I hardly expected she’d turn out to be shooting heroin over her lunch hour.”
“Perhaps nothing quite so dramatic,” Tom admitted. “But still, most people have something they’d rather keep hidden. Some bit of vice, or sin, or simple foolishness. But this one . . .”
Tom paused as the waitress arrived. Pyotr, abstemious as ever, ordered a coffee, black. Tom had the menu open but had yet to make up his mind between the fruit cup and something more substantial. As was often the case, his ulcer and his tongue were in direct conflict. He ended up ordering a Western omelet with a side of bacon and french fries.
“White as cream,” Tom finished after the waitress had disappeared.
“And the alternative we discussed?”
“That, however, shows some promise.” Tom took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and passed it over. Inside were a handful of photographs, and Pyotr studied each one carefully.
“Christopher Malloy, age thirty-one. Unmarried, no children. Two arrests for possession of marijuana, one for drunk and disorderly, both quashed before trial. He lives in a sort of squat in what we used to call Bushwick, though I’m sure some clever real estate agent has given it a sexy-sounding acronym of which I’m unaware.”
“ ‘A sort of squat’? What does that mean, exactly?”
“Twenty or thirty years ago it was a warehouse. Now it’s a large, decaying structure to which the housing authority does not pay very much attention. In a few years, no doubt, when the next wave of gentrification breaks against its shores, it will be torn down and a glittering yuppie condo building will be put up in its place. In the meantime whoever has the deed on it makes a little bit of money by letting people occupy some of its square footage. It’s not exactly legal, but”—Tom shrugged—“it is the sort of thing which has become popular with artist types.”
“Is Christopher one of those?”
“He is rather unkempt, and doesn’t hold a real job, and seems to think very much of himself, so in that sense, yes, I would say he is an artist type. As to having any actual creative ability? That would be up to the listener, I suppose. He plays guitar in some sort of”—Tom made a face—“metal band, and busks on occasion. I would not expect to see any of his music hit the charts in the near future.”
“And what does Mr. Malloy do, other than not being a particularly skilled guitar player?”
“He pours drinks at a nearby bar a few nights a week. He walks aimlessly around the city. He has a motorcycle which he spends a great deal of time fixing. He has a number of different women that he visits. And he sells a small amount of cocaine now and again.”
Tom had known that Pyotr would show no emotion at this happy piece of news, and indeed he did not. Tom was not quite sure what it would take to excite Pyotr; did not think in twenty years of working together he had seen him flustered or even particularly interested. He had a face like a block of ice left out in a blizzard. “Go on,” he said.
“A sideline, dealing from behind the bar. Small quantities: a few dollars here, a few dollars there. Not the sort of the thing the police would likely be interested in, but . . .”
“A promising avenue of approach, at least,” Pyotr said.
“Such was my thinking,” Tom agreed. “The last month I have had some of my associates patronizing his establishment during the nights Christopher works. Apparently he is a garrulous young man, happy to make new friends. Two weeks ago he sold one of my people a gram of cocaine, just as a way of saying welcome to the neighborhood.”
“What are you thinking?” Pyotr asked.
“I am thinking that perhaps Mr. Malloy, an American raised on rap music and dreams of easy money, might be interested in jumping up a few rungs in the world of narcotics distribution.”
Pyotr chuckled. “You can arrange that?”
“Without difficulty.”
“And what happens afterward?”
“Any number of ways to play the matter from there,” Tom explained. “He could be threatened with arrest and prosecution, though I think we’d be better off with a rather more circuitous route. The first step is to get him buying from us, rather than the other way around.”
“And you think he’ll be up for that?”
“I don’t see why not. Thus far his involvement in narcotics has been hand to hand, strictly small-time, baggies passed between friends. But from what I have seen of Christ
opher he is not a man prone to caution. The promise of money should be enough to convince him to ignore any qualms he has about moving up in the ranks. Yes,” Tom said, feeling confident, “I think he would be amenable. As to whether his misfortunes will prove of sufficient concern to his sister for her to put her future on the line, I’m afraid I cannot speak so affirmatively.”
“There is no question,” Pyotr corrected him. “Kay Malloy feels a great sense of loyalty to her brother, would go . . . will go to great lengths to save him.”
“I have had people watching your Agent Malloy for months now. In that time she has seen her sibling exactly one time, on her birthday. From what I can tell, her primary, perhaps her sole obsession is her career. Are you certain that she will be willing to jeopardize that for a no-good brother whom she rarely sees?”
“You’ll have to go ahead and trust me on the matter,” Pyotr said, smiling. “Christopher is her only living family, and their infrequent contact belies the ferocity of her loyalty.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am certain.”
“Why, exactly?”
Pyotr smiled but did not answer. Tom shrugged, unoffended. He did not need to know everything. There were many reasons that Tom was very good at his job: he was industrious, he was clever, he had a sharp eye for human weakness. But part of this package—and not a small part, either—was that he was comfortable operating as a cog in the wheel, taking firm control over that aspect of an operation that was within his area of expertise and studiously avoiding looking outside of it. And of course Pyotr was the best; Tom was quite sure that Pyotr had never been wrong about something important. If Pyotr did not think that Tom needed to know the identity of his source, then this was certain to be the case.
The waitress returned then with their orders. Pyotr looked for a while at the black coffee in his cup but made no move to drink it. Tom threw himself into his own food with almost manic intensity, smearing butter onto his toast like he was trying to break the thing in two.