by J A Heaton
“Yeah,” Tina said. “I’ll let you know when Carter gives me a free moment.”
Daniel was unsure if that was a good sign or not, but he was thankful she hadn’t entirely shot him down.
“Speaking of Officer Carter, I have a meeting with her tomorrow I need to be ready for,” Daniel said quickly as he rushed away. “I’ll be in touch about a time, maybe Saturday night.”
Daniel hurried out.
“What about where?” Tina asked.
Daniel didn’t hear the question as he left because he was amazed that the disastrous gun discussion had somehow turned into a date with Tina.
And she’s my coworker now, Daniel thought.
3
Moscow.
September 4, 1987.
The pounding on the door woke Dmitri early. This was the morning Dmitri was to pass his goldmine of information to the American.
Confused, he checked his clock. It read 5:59am. His alarm was due to wake him up in one more minute.
Who the hell could be pounding on my door at this time of the morning?
Dmitri froze as he came to his senses. He knew exactly who could be pounding on his door at any time they damn well pleased. But normally, they would come at night. Normally, they would enter unannounced.
That was little comfort to Dmitri as he turned the locks and braced himself to face the chill that would creep under his bathrobe when he opened the door.
Dmitri had always hoped that when they came to take him away to never be seen again, he would be dressed decently and go with dignity. He feared he was about to be denied this wish.
When he opened the door, he was relieved to see a low-level KGB gopher, perhaps the one from night duty. Dmitri looked about outside, but nobody else was with him.
“Your presence is urgently requested,” the man explained. “Come as you are. Do not bring anything. Everything you need will be provided. You will understand when you arrive.”
Dmitri glanced down at his threadbare slippers and his worn bathrobe, and the man nodded as if to say, “Do put something on more than that.”
Dmitri put on pants, shirt, socks, and finally his shoes. As he dressed quickly, he calculated in his mind. He put his coat on. The paper was still hidden in a hem.
He hesitated to take it with him, but he knew his apartment would be searched, and he couldn’t hide it now without raising suspicion from the man waiting in his doorway.
With one last glance around his apartment, Dmitri wondered if it would be the last time he saw it. He looked at his old family photos for a moment.
What would my father think of me? Dmitri asked himself.
Dmitri followed the driver down to his car. He considered attacking the driver and then fleeing to the US Embassy. But there were no other KGB in sight. The driver seemed as if he was only doing his job, and that there was no reason to be afraid.
Dmitri took a deep breath before he got into the back seat of the vehicle. Dmitri hoped that he had not missed his last chance to escape to the US Embassy. When it came down to it, Dmitri knew the young driver was merely doing his job. He couldn’t bring himself to attack the young man on the slim chance that he might be able to escape.
“This is unusual,” Dmitri observed to the driver as they pulled away. “Do you know what this is about?”
The driver gave him a quick glance in the rearview mirror and shrugged his shoulders.
The car zoomed down the center lane towards the KGB headquarters. When they arrived, a man let Dmitri out and led him higher up into the KGB building.
Not to the basement, Dmitri thought to himself.
Untold numbers of Russians had met their gruesome fate in the basement of this building. Some were intentional, some were torture gone too far, some were KGB colleagues, but many were simple Soviet citizens. Dmitri didn’t dare guess how few of them were genuinely guilty of doing anything wrong.
Dmitri again noted that no guards were there to force him along, and the further away he got from the basement, the more he felt that he would survive. But he was going up so high to a KGB office, Dmitri wondered who had summoned him.
When they stopped climbing, the guide led him through a double wooden door. The guide nodded to a secretary at a desk, and then pushed open another double wooden door. They entered a large office whose walls were lined with portraits of Soviet heroes. Behind a massive wooden desk sat an elderly mound of Russian flesh wearing glasses, smoking, and drinking more vodka before 7 AM than the average Soviet drank before noon.
Dmitri managed a slight bow, unable to speak. He felt naked without his proper uniform. He could not calculate how many layers and steps of the hierarchy this man was above him.
“I am sorry for the unusual timing,” the elderly man said without hardly looking up from his desk to Dmitri. He was writing furiously with a pen. “Kozlov’s death yesterday was unfortunate.”
Dmitri tensed slightly, wondering if he was under suspicion.
Did they suspect foul play in Kozlov’s death?
Dmitri was relieved when the old man continued, “Kozlov was due to depart for a new post. I, for one, am thankful that he died. He was an over-privileged and incompetent pig. It’s only because of his family connections he rose as high as he did, and his family connections are a constant source of headache for me.” The man grunted and took a slow pull on his cigarette before coughing and then continuing. “However, he was about to depart for an important post, which he is now unable to fill. You must take his new post. You will receive your orders when you arrive. It is in the far reaches of the Soviet Union. But don’t let the distance from Moscow fool you. The KGB is most needed there. I don’t trust the military, and I certainly don’t trust the politicians. Your train leaves immediately. Everything will be provided, and your personal effects will be sent on from your own apartment.”
“Thank you,” Dmitri murmured, unable to speak without great difficulty. Relief swept over him as he thought of the paper folded in his coat hem instead of waiting at his apartment for discovery. “I will fulfill my post honorably.”
“Once you arrive and receive your orders,” the old man said with a raised voice as the guards led Dmitri away, “it will make sense to you.”
Now two guards hurried Dmitri down the stairs. These two men were more urgent and seemed like the type who would lead victims to the basement.
What if the old man was just toying with me, Dmitri thought to himself. He resisted the urge to touch his fingers to the paper tucked inside his hem, fear gripping him.
But it was too late for Dmitri to resist. He could perhaps kick one of the men in the groin, but he would never get away from both of them.
When they reached the ground floor, Dmitri stopped to double over and claimed that he was not feeling well.
“We don’t have time for this,” one of the men said gruffly. The two bent over, and each of them grabbed Dmitri by the shoulder and elbow. They began dragging Dmitri, and fear took over. Dmitri was about to yell, but they opened the door and took him outside, towards another waiting car.
They aren’t taking me to the basement? Dmitri wondered.
His legs were still rubber, and as his head spun, the escorts drove him to a train that they nearly tossed him onto as it was beginning to pull away.
Dmitri sat and looked about. There was a guard at each end of the compartment, but Dmitri knew he had no choice now. Dmitri thought he would have to jump off the train at some point. Dmitri was sure that this train was taking him to Siberia, and a life of misery. But not everything made sense. His wrongdoing deserved execution, not a labor camp.
Why are they sending me to Siberia? Dmitri wondered.
As the train headed east, Dmitri tried to speak with the guards to discover where they were going. The guards were not forthcoming, so he made the most of the comfortable train, tea, and bread. He feared that those, too, were part of a cruel joke by the KGB that would finally be revealed when they dumped him at a gulag.
In Moscow, the KGB prep
ared Dmitri’s apartment for its next occupant. Dmitri would never return. They had to search it before the next KGB bureaucrat replaced Dmitri.
Although Agent Bishop had been a productive asset, he never had a radio. And so the search team never found a radio. They did not uncover paper for invisible writing or cameras. Even after tearing up the floorboards, they found nothing to indicate that Dmitri was a spy.
The search team put Dmitri’s family photos, those of his parents, in a box. Most of his books had not been read for years, other than an old copy of Marx and Engels’ work. Unknown to the search team, this book had served as the key for the rare coded written messages that Agent Bishop had sent to Patrick Riley. But to the search team, this was a typical book for a loyal communist to have in his apartment.
Although the search team’s job was easier when they found nothing incriminating, the leader of the search team had always relished the excitement of discovering something suspicious. But in Dmitri’s case, Agent Bishop was such a professional spy, his apartment was without blemish.
Almost too clean, the leader of the search team thought to himself.
But the one disastrous bit of incriminating evidence was with Agent Bishop himself, neatly tucked away in his coat’s hem.
The search team left with Dmitri’s family photos and reported that the apartment was ready for its next occupant.
Two days later, the train bearing Dmitri eastward suddenly began heading south. Dmitri wondered if the tracks would veer off to the east again, but he was soon convinced that he was not going to Siberia. He was going somewhere far to the southeast of the Soviet Union. He would later discover that he was going to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia.
Dmitri Petrov had been born on the outskirts of Moscow. The year had been 1933, and so he was young when the Nazis invaded. He remembered waiting in Moscow, confident that the Nazis would lose, although the Nazis had always seemed victorious in the past. And yet the winter turned back the Nazis, and so Dmitri and his father both survived the war.
His mother, however, did not. Physically, she was not stout. Some might say she was frail. Looking back at old photos, Dmitri understood what he did not and could not have understood back then. His mother was slender and beautiful. His father was portly and ugly. His father had the wits about him to be on the right political side, and so his father joined the KGB when it was called the NKVD.
Dmitri’s mother, however, was from a much lower station, and yet beautiful. Her looks allowed her to marry a man who had a position in the KGB that would afford her some safety, for she secretly practiced her Russian Orthodox religion. Though technically allowed, it was frowned upon. Dmitri remembered her saying prayers, referring to scriptures, and even occasionally humming a song. His father ignored all that religious stuff. He had clearly married her for her looks. And so, when she died during the siege of Moscow, although it was heartbreaking for Dmitri, her death was only one of millions. His mother’s religion had not saved her, and his godless father had survived.
Unfortunately for Dmitri, he inherited his mother’s physical frailty, but he also inherited his father’s bad looks. To his advantage, however, he inherited his mother’s intellect who, although her husband was no dummy, was sharper than her husband ever would have admitted. Some might say that Dmitri inherited her religious conscience, or perhaps her religious observances somehow took hold in Dmitri’s heart.
Dmitri, seeking safety, had followed his father’s footsteps into the KGB. His father was willing to do that for him: provide a safe place. But as he had his mother’s frailty, he would never be a good soldier, and his lack of physical prowess convinced others he would never survive in the field. The West would chew him up and spit him out, he was so weak.
He recalled his father returning from Hungary in 1956 and recounting for him how the Soviet tanks had put down an uprising. His father felt that he was telling his son secrets about the strength and might of the Soviet Union. For Dmitri, however, his father was sowing seeds of doubt. To Dmitri, squashing the Hungarian uprising was an abuse of power. But Dmitri continued his duties in the KGB as usual. Somebody who merely shuffled papers and dealt with files was not involved in the dirty work.
In 1957, Dmitri married. Ironically, the woman married him for the same reasons that Dmitri’s mother married his father. For again, Dmitri was not good-looking, and he was not wealthy or powerful, but being in the KGB did afford some advantages and a small amount of safety. And so, it was that a beautiful young woman was willing to marry him. To her delight, she would learn that Dmitri did indeed have a soft disposition and a kind attitude about him, along with intelligence that his exterior did not betray.
But their marriage together was short. She died while giving birth to their first, and only child, in 1960. By then, Dmitri’s father had also died from liver problems, no doubt from massive excesses of vodka, and so when his wife left him, his son was all that he had. A single man trying to raise a son was unusual and unheard of, but the state provided. The KGB took care of it. But it also meant that Dmitri’s son would necessarily go to the military.
And so, it was that Dmitri’s sole child and love of his life was sent to war in Afghanistan. He was killed there in 1980. Dmitri was handling intelligence briefs about what was happening in Afghanistan, and Dmitri’s mind was made up. The Soviet Union was just as, if not more, horrible and corrupt than the czars that preceded it. On occasion, he would check older files deep in the history of the Soviet Union and read about the exploits of the secret police meant to protect its people. He encountered far too many euphemisms that indicated the extermination of thousands of their own citizens.
And so it was that in 1983, Dmitri began spying for the United States of America. Eventually, he would take on the codename of Agent Bishop, and Patrick Riley would be his handler in Moscow.
But abruptly, Dmitri was summoned to the far reaches of the Soviet Union in service of the Motherland. He was sent there on a KGB mission to replace the inconveniently deceased Kozlov.
There, in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, he made a new start. He had no way of contacting Patrick Riley, or anybody connected to the United States. After a few years, Agent Bishop’s past faded away. He had done what he could, but now he was in a corner of the world where he could not do anything. He met another woman and married her, and he had a happy life. It was so happy, in fact, that when the Soviet Union finally disintegrated, he stayed with his new wife. He had learned to love his new home, faults and all.
Besides, he was occasionally reminded that he had indeed committed treason against the Soviet Union. And even though the Soviet Union no longer existed, he knew that it was old KGB thugs who now ran Mother Russia. And the old Agent Bishop’s efforts had previously resulted in the untimely deaths of many Soviet assets. Many of these had been friends of the men now in power. Agent Bishop knew that while Westerners have short memories, Russians have long ones. They hold grudges, and they don’t let them go. For years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Agent Bishop lived as Dmitri Petrov, the happily married man in the far reaches of the former Soviet Union.
Then one day, in September 2002, he saw on the newscast a story about the United States that was now making use of an air base in Uzbekistan to fight against the radical Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan. There was video footage of the American Ambassador, Fitzpatrick, and his staff in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. What Dmitri saw in the background made him drop his tea, and it spilled all over the floor.
Without any explanation to his wife, he caught a taxi within an hour to Tashkent. He needed to visit an old friend the next day, September 11, 2002.
4
Washington DC.
September 11, 2002.
Daniel swiped his security pass and limped into the room filled with cubicles.
“You okay?” a woman from three cubicles down asked with some concern.
“Just sore,” Daniel answered.
Since the formation of the MDF team
months prior, Daniel had been going through a brutal training regimen from 6 AM until noon. In the afternoon, he worked on his linguistic and translation work for the CIA. Daniel loved the translation work and analyzing reports, mind-numbing as it could be at times. But at least it didn’t hurt his body like the physical training.
Rex, the SpecOps man and weapons leader of the MDF team, was getting Daniel what he called “field fit.” That basically meant that Daniel, as a part-time job in the morning, had to go through Rex’s physical program to make sure he was proficient with weapons and in hand-to-hand combat. Initially, Daniel thought the physical training would give his mind a rest from his analysis, but after one day with Rex, he discovered that the physical regimen was mentally demanding as well.
Daniel plopped himself down into his cubicle and checked the stack of translations that awaited him. His glutes were sore. One hand still shook from all the recoil it had endured from his target practice with the pistol. At least he could respectably handle a handgun. A Glock, anyway.
“Not bad for an egghead,” Rex had said when he first took stock of Daniel’s shooting ability. Thanks to the training he received from his father, Daniel was better than the average American at handling a firearm, but compared to a Green Beret, Daniel had a long way to go. Rex was not too shy to let him know about that.
“Tough day at the gym?” Jenny said outside Daniel’s cubicle. Jenny was always a bright spot in Daniel’s day. A computer geek to the core, with a bubbly personality who sometimes could not filter what was going on in her mind, Jenny always maintained an optimistic attitude. They had known each other since college, and through the dot-com boom days. Daniel had gotten her the job in the CIA, and he’d brought her on to the new MDF team as the computer and forensics expert.
“You could say that,” Daniel said. “New glasses?” He didn’t remember Jenny wearing any glasses other than her dark-rimmed ones, but the ones she had on now were different.