The Manganese Dilemma

by Ian Miller

  "I assume you came along and saw them digging," Burrowes said.

  "Oh no. We were there before you. We were watching Dennis digging, and intended to let him dig up whatever before we questioned him. Then we heard you lot came along, and well, we just remained concealed."

  "You would have had a good warning," Burrowes said. "Those two were not exactly quiet."

  "Indeed not, Charlie. They need a lot of work on their ability to move quietly."

  "You didn't answer the second of Rhonda's questions," Burrowes said. "Why come in here? You had what you wanted."

  "First, we have to restrain you all to stop you organizing pursuit," Svetlana said. "Now, there are two ways of doing that. You can be cooperative, and we shall simply secure you, or you can be pests, and we shall have to render you all unconscious."

  "And second?"

  "I've enjoyed our time together, Charlie. You always tried to treat me right, and at the same time, you were doing your job and were resisting my attempts to manoeuvre you. I respect that. So, if you want to ask some questions before we leave, you have a few minutes."

  "That's generous of you."

  "It is, isn't it? But it will take a few minutes to get ready. I'm sorry, Dennis, but we are going to damage a wall lining. Still, we shall make it up to you in another way." That comment was accompanied by the start of the sound of a wall lining being torn off in another room by one of the other men. Svetlana smiled to Burrowes, and said, "Ask away."

  "Why are you leaving us alive? It would be safer for you to –"

  "Because I recognize you as an American agent, as is probably your girl friend there." As she said that, Burrowes could not help but glance at Rhonda, who was also glancing at him. Her expression was partly unreadable, but it was not one of anger or of denigration. "We do not go around killing agents of the opposition if we can help it. All that does is to initiate tit for tat killing, and it gets just plain messy."

  "Logical," Burrowes nodded.

  "Isn't it? Don't tell me you're disappointed?"

  "Definitely not," Burrowes said, trying to emulate Svetlana's light-hearted banter.

  "Good. I would be disappointed if you had suddenly turned suicidal, or, for that matter, fanatical. So, another question?" The banging continued in the distance.

  "That was your father I saw in Moscow?"

  "Yes," Svetlana said. "It was a total accident, and he suspected he had been recognized."

  "But you stayed on?"

  "For a while, yes. It was a risk, but had I fled then, the whole operation would not have worked."

  "And that operation was a complete scam, to unravel our agents in Russia?"

  "Yes. It was thought up by the GRU." The banging stopped.

  "And who was that who was shot and pretended to be your father?"

  "A criminal, who would have been executed anyway. He was offered a chance to run, and if he made it, he was told he had to pretend to be my father."

  "That wouldn't have worked," Rhonda offered.

  "No, but he was never going to make it. It was just that he did not know that."

  "He should have separated from you and tried his luck on his own," Burrowes said with a shrug.

  "Yes, he should have, but when offered a chance, just before execution, he wasn't bright enough to work that out. Had he, he would have been hunted down and shot anyway."

  "You would have been amused to read about the American comments about the Russian soldier's shooting ability," Burrowes said.

  "Yes, that was the weakest part of the whole scheme. They had to hit him and kill him, then miss me. The shooting was not the problem. Those soldiers were excellent shots. The problem was, would the scene be believed? Fortunately, the American commander was so full of himself he never stopped to consider whether he was being scammed."

  "And there is no special manganese compound."

  "Suppose I said there was?" Svetlana said with a smile.

  "I wouldn’t believe you."

  "Then why ask?"

  "Good point."

  "And your official position if you were to get back to Russia?"

  "Oh, I'll make it, no doubt about that."

  "You're so sure you can get out of the US and make it all that way?"

  "No, I am fully aware that while I shall try my best, there's no guarantee. But if I am caught, I'm sure there will be an exchange. Recall, you people sent special agents into Russia, and we caught them."

  "So, catching you is more about recovering our own," Burrowes said with a sigh.

  "Yes, now enough of this. If you want to know more about who I am, you will have to try your hacking skills."

  "But if you make it, you will have to let me know," Burrowes said.

  "Yes, maybe I shall." At this point one of the black-clad men came into the room and indicated they had finished. "Now, this is what will happen. You two," and she indicated to Burrowes and Rhonda, "will be handcuffed to some supports in the other room. The key to the handcuffs will be left under a mat near the front door.

  "These two inert agents will be securely bound. You, Mr Rutherford will be bound reasonably securely with your hands tied behind your back, but the rope tying them will be within reach of this rather blunt blade that will be secured within rubbing distance. I assume it will take you about six hours to free yourself. Troublesome, but it can be done if you have the will.

  "You, Dennis, will be similarly bound, but this blade is a little sharper, so with a lot of effort you should be free within three hours. That will give you each an interesting decision. You, Dennis, can run and have an estimated three hour start, or you can free your boss, and the two of you have until some time tomorrow as a start, or alternatively you can find the key and free these two, in which case they will probably arrest you. Of course if you run, they will be really annoyed, and my guess is, generous deals will be off the table.

  "Now you two, you can take your chairs and go to the other room and spend your time at least comfortably. If you want to use a toilet, you can, but the door will be open to prevent you from trying some other stupid move. If you wish to cooperate, pick up your chairs."

  There was little doubt their positions would be far more uncomfortable if they did not, so Burrowes asked Rhonda if she wanted to go first. She did, and made the toilet stop. Svetlana then returned and indicated that it was Burrowes' turn. He shortly found himself seated, his arm handcuffed to the wall framework fairly close to Rhonda.

  "I don't suppose you'd get me a pillow from Dennis' bed?" Burrowes asked Svetlana.

  "I'll see what I can do."

  Two minutes later she came back with two cushions. "These will have to do," she said, and threw them one at a time to Burrowes, saying, "Catch!"

  The cushions were caught, one-handed. "Couldn't give them to me?" Burrowes said in the best he could do to make a sad tone.

  "And let you get hands on me?"

  "Would I do that?" he asked, all innocent.

  "If it makes you feel any better," Svetlana said, as she stood in the doorway and ignored Burrowes' last comment, "as soon as I am reasonably free and my position no longer matters, I shall send a message informing where you are, just in case those other two leave you here."

  Burrowes was about to give what he thought would be a smart reply, but Svetlana had disappeared. The house was quiet.

  "I don't suppose you have anything that might be used to pick these locks," Burrowes asked.

  "Yes, I have," Rhonda replied, "but your Russian girlfriend took them and left them on the table in there."

  "Then I guess we'll just have to make the best of it. I for one intend to sleep."

  "Thoughtful of you to ask for cushions," Rhonda said, as she placed her one behind her head, and against a dwang.

  "Yes, well Svetlana wasn't entirely wrong about my motives," he admitted, "but since it didn't work, we might as well rest."

  It was about four hours later that Dennis finally got a hand free, and he quickly freed himself.
/>   "You could free me," Rutherford said.

  "I could," Dennis replied, "but first I'm going to tend to these bleeding wrists. I'll be back in a minute."

  About five minutes later, Rutherford was also free.

  "So, do we free those other two?" Dennis asked.

  "Don't be silly, Dennis. Of course we do. What else would you think of doing?"

  "Well, they'll arrest us, for starters."

  "Do you have a guaranteed bolt-hole, where nobody will find you, and you can live happily ever after?"

  Dennis did not look very confident, and did not reply.

  "I thought not," Rutherford said. "Run, they'll catch you, and it will be a lot worse. Free them, and the chances are the most they can get you for would be for being silly. Run if you want, but I'm going to try and find the key."

  Dennis decided to stay. There was a key, and Rutherford and Dennis brought it into the room.

  "Well, are you going to open these cuffs?" Burrowes asked.

  "I suppose there is the question, what happens next?" Dennis asked.

  "My advice is to free us and make yourselves available," Rhonda said. "The alternative will most certainly lead to your arrest when we catch you, and we will."

  "What do you mean, make ourselves available?"

  "Don't disappear," Rhonda said. "Don't run."

  "At this stage," Burrowes said, "provided you shut up, there isn't a lot of evidence against you."

  "And that is?" Dennis asked.

  "At this point, the only crime we suspect you of is that you broke into a property and stole some documents," Burrowes said. "Assuming that's all you stole, there might be a problem proving this because the documents have gone. We can allege that the package we saw were the documents, but your lawyer would presumably argue that we don't know that, and he'd be right."

  "There was that bit about treason?"

  "All we suspect is you stole some documents," Burrowes continued. "There is no evidence you contacted a foreign power."

  "There were Russians here tonight."

  "And Svetlana probably worked out that you were here the same way we did. They stole at gunpoint whatever was in that package."

  "So you'll not –"

  "I won't," Burrowes said, "but I'm not in a position to do so anyway. The situation is certainly murky, but I assure you, you do the wrong thing now, and the murk will become clearer, and it won't be in your favour."

  "The treason will be on the table," Rhonda said, "because leaving us here will stop us from putting out a search for those Russians."

  That was sufficient to convince Dennis. As Rhonda noted later, he really was more a frightened boy caught in a prank than an arch criminal.

  Chapter 38

  The White House woman gave an icy stare at those assembled. She knew only too well that her job was on the line. This time she had Burrowes and Rhonda there as well as Lawton and Ruth Telfar, and she needed either a scapegoat or something approaching good news.

  "Ms Telfar, damage report please?" she asked.

  "Overall, we now have lost twelve agents due to arrest," she replied, her voice somewhat bitter as she had advised against many of the actions that had led to that. "Additionally, we have lost the services of four others, including the Sobchaks and our Ufa agent." She paused, and addressed Burrowes. "Thanks to you, they got sufficient warning that they were able to get out of Russia. They wish to thank you personally."

  "I'm glad they made it," Burrowes said. "Why did they make it and the others did not?"

  "Trade craft," Telfar replied. "It turned out that the FSB was aware of what Nadezhda did, but they did not know exactly who she was. By the time the FSB worked it out the Sobchaks were safe. Our Ufa agent happened to be in Iran at the time, so she did not return. Most of the others were arrested either while they were trying to intercept that van, or as a consequence of subsequent interrogation of those arrested," and now more bitterness struck home.

  "Yes, well these things happen," the White House woman muttered.

  That did not go down well. There were embarrassed expressions around the table.

  "So are we sure the Russians do not have this paint of invisibility?" the White House woman continued.

  "I am convinced," Burrowes said. "Svetlana told me it was a scam."

  "And you trust a Russian agent?"

  "Yes," Burrowes replied simply. "If they really had a secret like that, why would their special intelligence agency tell us they had it?"

  "To catch our spies?" the woman taunted.

  "In which case, why tell us the truth? Why not find some other scam base." He paused, then continued, "Added to which, I think you'll find eventually the physics doesn't make sense."

  "Then why didn't someone tell us that at the start?"

  "Because the experts had been told that it was true and were asked to work out how it worked. Naturally they couldn't."

  "And when you tell them it isn't true, they jump to the opposite side of the fence," the woman said angrily.

  There was no answer to that.

  "And down in Delaware, those Russians got away?"

  "Ms Antonovna did," Rhonda said, "and we are not sure how. They had a four-hour start, and at that time of the day it was difficult to get things going fast enough. Apparently they stole a motor launch and headed out into the Atlantic. The Coast Guard intercepted the launch when it was heading north along the coast and the two men aboard were arrested. We are reasonably convinced they were the Russian spies."

  "And what did they say about Ms Antonovna?"

  "Nothing. They remained silent."

  "So you think Ms Antonovna was picked up by some Russian vessel?"

  "Maybe by a sub, but we can't be sure. The launch might have been a decoy."

  "So," she sighed, "we've lost the secrets about that torpedo."

  "No we haven't," Burrowes said, "unless, of course, something's happened that I don't know about."

  "They escaped with that package," the woman shook her head.

  "Yes, which means, according to McKenzie, they've been scammed a second time," Burrowes said with a smile. "It isn't often you can trick someone once, and repeat the process."

  Everybody at the table looked at him, while he maintained a Cheshire Cat face.

  "Would you care to explain?" Lawton asked.

  "When there was a burglary at Ellison and Lamont, with the sole purpose of stealing the torpedo plans, the burglar was stopped by a further player. The burglar was seated with a hood over his face so he could not see what was happening, but the person or persons who did this then spent about a quarter of an hour doing something, then they replaced the documents in a drawer."

  "So you assume they copied the pages?" the woman from the White House asked.

  "Yes, but I also assumed there was a further player interested in these documents. Now, as it happened, these were crude frauds, but anyone without any technical knowledge would not have any idea, at least not at first. Anyway, I assumed that whoever it was had a contact within Rutherford's organization."

  "And you suspected Ms Antonovna?"

  "Not really then. I mainly suspected Mr Hooper, but I couldn't rule out Dennis or Brian, nor, I suppose, Rutherford himself. At that stage Svetlana was not high on my list of suspects because I didn't think she had the physical strength to overpower that burglar. In any case, with no evidence, I thought it best to keep my suspicions to myself. I couldn't make anything stick, so why let on I suspected?"

  "Fair comment," Ruth Telfar said, although in a totally unemotional tone.

  "Anyway," Burrowes continued, "I was fairly sure that whoever that third party was would eventually find out what happened, so I thought it might be useful to have another dummy document. So I got McKenzie to draw up a document showing all his work to date, except limiting it to what did not work but to present it as if it did. It doesn't look like a fraud, but in the end, McKenzie assures me that if anyone tried it, they would waste a lot of time before they realised
it was a fake.

  "McKenzie did this, but then there was the question, what to do with it? There was nothing obvious, so apparently he put it in a desk drawer."

  "Then there are no further documents?" There was now concern in the woman's voice.

  "Oh yes, there are," Burrowes said. "I eventually got it out of McKenzie that a long time ago, for safety, he put them in a safe deposit box in a bank. Then he apparently forgot he had done it. Or alternatively, he was trying to really get at Hooper, and didn't want to admit it."

  "So why didn't you tell us they were fake documents?" Rhonda asked. She did not look happy.

  "At that time I had no idea what was stolen, and remember, it was Hooper who discovered the burglary and he fed in the original information. It seems that McKenzie had told him the documents were there, and maybe he didn't even know what Hooper was talking about. He says he thought Hooper was asking him to produce my scam documents."

  "That sounds thin," Rhonda said.

  "Yeah, and my guess is McKenzie has spent some time mentally massaging his story, but from my point of view, I had no idea what had been stolen. McKenzie did not tell me about where the real ones were, or even that there were more real ones, until all this was over, which I suppose supports his, 'I forgot' explanation. He probably also did not want Hooper to know anything about the safe deposit box."

  "And Hooper did not think to ask whether these were real?"

  "Hooper did not know about the second scam, so when Hooper discovered the burglary, he found a desk drawer left open and empty, while all the other drawers were full. After he had searched everywhere else in the apartment, he decided the required documents must have been stolen. He told Jason, but Jason did not know about the fakes. I knew they were possibly fakes, but for all I knew, there were the real ones there too. There were no other documents there, so where were the real ones? I assumed the burglar took both lots."

  "So why didn't you check with McKenzie?"

  "I tried, but he didn't answer his phone, and anyway, did it matter? At that stage I thought it was Dennis who was involved with the Russians."

  "And if he weren't?"

  "Then he'd messed up my plan," Burrowes replied, "but if he had taken the plans for some other reason, there was still the possibility that the plan could be resurrected." He shook his head and said, "When I was sure about Svetlana, I thought we'd better get to Dennis and set something up. I didn't count on Svetlana having arranged for troops to be there already."