by S. D. Skye
And they knew it, they meaning Jake and the rest of the motley crew.
The Gs were the FBI’s “gift with” purchase. Buy a diplomatic visa, get a G-team. On the street. In the woods. Under footbridges. Their eyes were watching. And the fate of J.J.’s sources depended on it. Her future depended on it. The future of the FBI’s counterintelligence program depended on it.
• • •
Upper Northwest, the location of the Russian Embassy, was thirty minutes from FBI Headquarters in traffic. Jake turned down his window and allowed the cool September air to wash away the ill-effects of his ritual adrenaline rush, then mashed his gas pedal to the floor.
His Charger cut through the wind as he hot-dogged it to Tunlaw Road, double-fisting his wheel like a gray-haired grandmother. He steered tightly and carefully, though; another accident would set him back even further.
His chronic distractions might cost him more than a few traffic tickets if he didn’t pull it together. Two electric poles and a marked Secret Service police car sideswiped in the heat of surveillance, the list of damaged vehicles had expanded as fast as his personnel file.
Jake glanced at his watch and exhaled. He’d arrived before schedule. He scanned the area to ensure he couldn’t be seen, and then shook his head in dismay. Why in hell would the State Department give the Russians land on the highest peak in the Nation’s Capital? The location was a signal collector’s dream. They could tap into communications from every U.S. government agency east of the Mississippi.
Jake slipped on his sunglasses and then flipped the switch on his secure radio. Everyone would be expecting an update by now.
“Breaker breaker one-nine. This is J. Swiff behind the wheel of steel. I’m in position. Let’s keep it short, guys. Our friends are listening,” Jake reminded the crew. Russian Impulse officers monitored the area for FBI radio traffic. The Gs’ radio signals were encrypted so the Russians couldn’t hear conversations. But increased signal activity put them on alert.
His stomach growled as he rifled through the remnants of his Burger King bag with his free hand. “Waiting for Plotnikov to exit the building. Jiggy, what’s your twenty?”
“Copy that Swiff. I’m at the corner of Wisconsin and O Streets. Cham and Money T are a few blocks south of you at Calvert. Jazz and the rest are running a picket near the choke point. Over,” Jiggy responded.
“Roger that, everybody! Sounds good.” J.J. said on her long range radio. “Tony and I are headed into the vault and won’t have any reception for a few minutes. But this is just a simple routine coverage. Stay loose and keep an eye out for Golikov’s people. Piece of cake. We’ll see you back here in a couple of hours.”
Jake swallowed hard, bit a hunk out of his burger. Anticipating the trouble ahead, he braced himself for a long afternoon. “When all hell breaks loose,” he mumbled to himself, “only the devil survives.”
Moments later, Plotnikov, dressed in a black suit cloaked beneath a cliché trench coat, stepped outside the embassy doors as scheduled.
Jake exhaled. The op should go down as planned. What could go wrong? A second later he was sorry he asked.
His heart thumped, he grabbed the radio. Fuck! “Houston, we have a problem.”
• • •
Maps of the Washington, D.C. area poked with colored thumbtacks adorned the walls in J.J.’s and Tony’s tight compartment inside the vault. At a small round table, they scanned through each file, frantically flipping pages to ensure Jack would find no information that could damage their cases. And there were only three files for Russian intelligence officers operating in Washington that they needed to be concerned about, the most important of which belonged to Karat.
Documents relating to Aleksey Dmitriyev, a counterintelligence officer linked to Karat since the day he arrived, must also be scrubbed. If any FD-302s mentioning him and Karat (as Plotnikov) didn’t reflect the information from the fake file, the jig was up. The file of Aleksandr Mikhaylov was last. The lookouts had spotted him in the company of both Dmitriyev and Plotnikov on multiple occasions. J.J. had been tailing him since he’d stepped on U.S. soil. She didn’t know if any pertinent information existed, but she’d scrub the file just in case.
Call it a hunch. Perhaps an intuition. But Mikhaylov made her skin crawl. He ran the most insidious and evasive cadre of Russian spies—illegals. They assumed the identities of American citizens to gain access to classified information. Almost impossible to catch because the Bureau had little success in identifying them until the 2010 New York bust.
“Tony, I haven’t seen the most recent volume of Karat’s file. You don’t have it do you?” J.J. asked.
“No,” he said as he checked through his stack. “It’s not in my stuff. Maybe we left back in the breakout room.”
“Hmmm. Maybe. I’m gonna check as soon as we get out of here.”
They studied each case file, lookout log, surveillance report, and photo and decided to tuck the real files inside the jacket folders of long dead sources. As J.J. placed her hand on Plotnikov’s photo and prepared to stash it away, she recollected the moment she dug the hole into her present predicament, her promises to Viktor. Promises she wished she hadn’t made. Promises she wished didn’t have to keep.
Chapter 4
Two Years Ago…
Before Polyakov’s hand arrived at Moscow station, there was ICE Phantom’s second victim and J.J.’s second source—Kostya Belikov. He disappeared, vanished like billowing smoke in the night air. J.J. slept for what felt to her like five minutes a day in the following months. She was consumed to the point of obsession, determined to identify a replacement asset. She needed someone who could not only provide information on Belikov’s fate, but help her identify the FBI scourge who had all but delivered the fatal bullet to his head. When she wasn’t thinking and planning, she drank. Not guzzles, but little sips, every couple of hours, every day.
Her barely conscious hours were spent at Dulles airport monitoring Russian diplomatic arrivals and departures, hoping to spot a new mark.
And there he appeared.
A diminutive schlep of a man in a slightly oversized navy-blue busi-ness suit. His shiny dome and silver-framed spectacles, unimposing and unremarkable, clashed with the more dapper attire of the counterintelli-gence officer accompanying him—Aleksey Dmitriyev, a Second Secretary and fairly high ranking for an intelligence officer..
Weeks later, J.J. cornered Plotnikov in an empty men’s bathroom at an outlet mall during an embassy-sponsered shopping excursion. He’d just shoplifted over a thousand dollars’ worth of goods–grand larceny and a lot of trouble if she chose to threaten him. But that’s not how J.J. operated.
She quickly crafted an out of order sign out of a paper towel and chewing gum and waited for him. Listened. Smelled. Gagged. Her stomach convulsed. The odor permeating the room would make a Marine cry foul. When he emerged from the stall, her tall frame blocked the exit.
He froze.
“Who are you? What are you doing in here?” He appeared startled at first, but a moment later the tension in his shoulders released. Now his expression alarmed her.
J.J. paused before speaking. His colleagues might be searching for him. She had to be careful. Looking downward with her hand covering the visible side of her face, she poked her head outside.
No passersby. All clear.
She closed the door and moved toward the nearest stall. In it, she could conceal her presence if someone walked in.
“I’m Special Agent J.J. McCall with the FBI. Please. Feel free to go ahead and wash your hands.”
Plotnikov eased over to the sink, pressed his hand against the soap dispenser. He sucked in a deep frustrated breath as he thrust his hands under the stream of water. “Yes. Agent McCall,” he said. “You are quite legendary in the Embassy—or perhaps a better term would be infamous? What pray tell brings you to the men’s room on this glorious afternoon?”
His comment told her the one thing she hadn’t been sure of until he spoke—he was an
intelligence officer. A clean administrative officer would have no concerns about the FBI.
“Well, if you’ve heard the legend of me,” she fought the urge to roll her eyes, “ then I think we both know why I’m here.”
He silently walked over to the hand dryer, rubbed his hands beneath, and looked down at his expensive watch. “I’m a diplomat and have no interest in speaking with the FBI. Leave immediately or I’ll file a complaint with the State Department.”
Her skin prickled, and she flinched.
“Listen, you don’t have to lie to me. I’m not your security officer. Consider me more like family. I’m not going to talk about your recent acquisitions from Lord & Taylor and Macy’s—nice Movado, by the way.
“Instead, I think it would be more productive to our relationship if you’d permit me to share some information with you…about your father,” she offered, opting to take a more sensitive approach. He mattered, and J.J. wanted him to trust her. Sources who believed they mattered divulged the most secrets.
“Don’t you dare speak of my father! Don’t you speak his name!” he said, his expression gruff.
She froze. The sound of footsteps neared. She watched the door and waited, prepared to conceal herself in a stall. Within seconds, they passed.
“Sergey Plotnikov, right?” she asked, eager to glimpse his reaction. If he was angry, well...anger was a good sign. “I know what the KGB did to him. And I know what he did.” She said, poking the bear to get a reaction.
He breathed heavily and growled, “He was innocent!” His stark expression hardened, knowing and cold. The scars from his memories were still fresh and soul-deep. At that moment, she believed he’d secretly willed her to show up. Somewhere. Anywhere. She would be the vessel he used to exact his revenge.
“They used him as a pawn, as if they really needed another excuse to justify the Cold War,” she said. “He never worked for us. We targeted him, but he feared for his family’s safety so he refused to cooperate,” she said, referring to U.S. intelligence services, the CIA in particular. “Can we talk?”
“But I—I have to . . . we’re returning to the embassy in a short time. I must leave.”
J.J.’s eyebrow rose. A plan. She needed a plan. She expected to cast the bait. She didn’t expect the big fish to bite on the first try.
• • •
To his embarrassment, J.J. staged a fake arrest and in conjunction with the mall police. J.J. arrived in the small holding area and found Viktor seated and sipping on a Coke. Now, he and she could have a tête-à-tête before Vorobyev, the embassy security officer, suspected Viktor had uttered so much as a cordial hello to an FBI special agent.
To J.J.’s surprise, they fell into easy conversation. The SVR gave Plotnikov shit work. Stuck him in a low-level position, assumed he’d never do any harm. But Viktor was sharp. Smarter than they gave him credit for. And he had loyal friends in the right places. The more they conversed, the more the deep-seated pain from his past bubbled to the surface. Plotnikov’s eyes flooded and he crumbled with emotion.
“My Papa,” he said, his voice trembling, “was a former KGB Colonel who’d been falsely accused of working with the CIA and committing treason in the 1970s. Golikov’s father orchestrated his execution, tortured him, shot him in the back of the head with a high-caliber pistol. The penetration so powerful it blew off his face, so I’m told.”
J.J. gasped as she choked down her own tears. With her own moth-er’s death still looming heavily on in the fabric of her life, she could relate to the pain spilling from his eyes.
“Dear Papa. We never got a chance to say goodbye or visit his burial place. Golikov’s father and his thugs threw my father into an unmarked grave, face down, so his soul would go straight to hell. Our family was shunned, stripped of everything we owned, isolated from everyone we loved, betrayed by everyone we trusted. From a very young age, I vowed to one day make the KGB pay, to avenge our destitution.”
His eyes tightened with contempt. He was a Predator drone, pre-programmed to strike in perfect time.
“Twenty years later, the report was released. An American mole, one of the senior FBI or CIA officers controlled by our service, passed information that would set me on course to exact my revenge. Although one source was executed as a result of the intelligence, my father was exonerated, cleared of all charges.”
“So you decided to work for the Russian intelligence?”
“Yes, it was still the KGB at the time, in 1993, just before the break-up of the Soviet Union. They recruited me and a colleague from the Foreign Language Institute, gave me a dead-end government job with a promise of foreign travel to assuage my wounds. It was the KGB way. Keep your enemies even closer than your friends.”
Nothing he confessed sparked a backlash from her gift. His hunger to avenge his father’s death seeped through his pores, loomed heavily on the conviction in his expression and the acid in his voice.
Confident of his intent, J.J. set up a communications plan and gave him the code name KARAT because encryption codes were as good as gold. They would make periodic phone calls for updates and mark signals for emergencies. She also provided him with a throw-away cell phone to be used in only the most catastrophic situations. He concealed it inside the crumpled piece of paper stuffed in his new tennis shoes.
“I understand how important family is to you, Viktor,” she remem-bered saying to him as their first meeting drew to an end. “I’ll do everything in my power to protect you and your family. You will not meet your father’s fate, not on my watch. That’s a promise.”
Who had recruited whom?
Plotnikov served as a code clerk, one of two to three embassy personnel responsible for transmitting and receiving every classified and unclassified communication to and from Moscow Center, Russian intelligence headquarters. He owned the proverbial keys to the king-dom—encryption keys as it were. If he passed those codes to U.S. Intelligence, the FBI could decrypt intercepted Russian classified communications.
In his first dead drops, KARAT had only given the Bureau a few gold nuggets. To seal up the leak and identify the mole, the FBI needed Fort Knox, the identities of American government and military employees cooperating with Russian intelligence service. If he passed the codes used to transmit counterintelligence message traffic, they‘d find ICE Phantom. She had no doubt. So J.J. pressed for the intel. And pressed hard.
KARAT hemmed and hawed, suggested he’d see what he could do. Weeks later, during a pre-scheduled phone call, he came through, or so he intimated. Finally, he told J.J. he had compiled the information she needed. He’d schedule the drop as soon as he could do so without alerting internal security.
She’d compromised herself and her career, overstayed her long-vanished welcome in the FBI in order to protect KARAT and his family. If anyone—Jack or, God forbid, the Director—ever found out the depth of her deception, she wouldn’t have to worry about quitting. She’d be fired on the spot.
It all seemed so easy at the time. Like every other agency in the Intelligence Community that was aware of the breaches, she believed the mole to be CIA, not FBI. She’d made a promise she thought she could keep.
Her ability to fulfill her promise had been hampered by one thing.
One person.
And the time had finally come to find out who the hell he was.
Chapter 5
Thursday Afternoon…
“Uhhh, heads up everybody. Plotnikov has departed the main building,” Jake said. “But he’s not alone—and his hands are full.”
“I don’t even understand why J.J.’s so pressed to watch this guy. He’s a nobody,” Jiggy complained, speaking freely because J.J. and Tony were in the vault. “I could be at home catching up on the Young and the Restless.”
Jake let out a strained chuckled and hopelessly watched his mark. The counterintelligence operational line chief for Washington’s Russian intelligence residency escorted Plotnikov from the residential wing to his diplomatic vehicle and j
umped into the driver’s seat. “Well, J.J. doesn’t have to worry about Golikov’s people or counterintelligence following him. Aleksey Dmitriyev is his fucking chauffeur.”
“What the hell?” Jiggy said. “Plotnikov can’t meet our guy with a counterintelligence guy in the car. I mean, aren’t these the guys who tortured and shot spies working for the FBI?”
“Correct,” Jake said. “And it looks like they’re carrying luggage.”
Dmitriyev had two jobs in the residency: one—recruit American intelligence personnel willing to collect classified American intelligence and sell it to the Russians; and two—prevent Russian embassy personnel from cooperating with American intelligence. With Dmitriyev at his side, Plotnikov could do nothing except buckle his seatbelt and enjoy the ride.
When the words “leaving with luggage” finally processed through the team’s minds, murmurings bubbled across the airwaves.
“Wait a minute,” Jiggy said, interrupting the chatter. “You said luggage. As in suitcases?”
“No. As in suitcases,” Jake replied. “Something wrong with your English today?”
“Could be comms equipment.” Jiggy said, apparently trying to avoid any thought of the worst-case scenario.
“I doubt it,” Jake said. “Shit! J.J. and Tony are in the vault and I don’t have the number to the bat phone. Should I stay with them or abort?” Jake hoped Jiggy would suggest aborting the op. What purpose would going through the motions serve?
“We should be asking you—Obi Wan,” Jiggy replied.
“I’m thinking no way he’s gonna make the meet with a security officer in the car.”
“That may be true, but I say we stick to Plotnikov like honey to a bee’s ass no matter what,” Jiggy said. “I refuse to be the one to tell J.J. we dropped coverage and don’t know what happened to the mark.”
“Good point,” Jake said.
The gates opened. Jake peered into his targets’ car through his Steiner binoculars. Embroiled in a heated discussion, Dmitriyev didn’t bother scanning for surveillance which meant he didn’t give a damn about the G presence or he knew he could evade them.