The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  “Do you speak English, Larissa?”

  “Yes,” she said. “All dancers do.”

  “There’s a man there,” Tatyana said. “An American. Go to him.”

  “Can I trust him?”

  “Give him my name. Tell him I sent you.”

  “He’ll help me?”

  “He’ll be hard to speak to, Larissa. He’ll think you’re GRU. The second you try to approach him, he might disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “He might even kill you.”

  “What?”

  “He’s, how should I say this, unpredictable.”

  “What kind of man are you sending me to?”

  “He’s the only one who can help you, Larissa. Go to him, but approach cautiously. Tell him what you heard, and tell him you need to get out of the country.”

  “Will you tell him I’m coming?”

  “He’s off the grid, Larissa. I can’t contact him.”

  “What if he doesn’t help me, Tatyana? What if I scare him off and he disappears?”

  “I’m sorry, Larissa.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If he doesn’t help you, you have to run. You’ll be on your own.”

  “Tatyana,” Larissa said, her voice cracking.

  “I’m sorry, Larissa.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Tatyana paused.

  “You have to give me his name, Tatyana.”

  “It’s Lance Spector.”

  Tatyana hung up the phone and looked around the room.

  Taking that call changed everything.

  She was exposed. The phone call was traceable.

  She needed to get away from this place, and she needed to do it quickly.

  She packed her things and crept out of her room and into the hallway. There was no one there. She went down the stairs, every step creaking torturously, and let herself out the front door. She shut it behind her, letting it lock.

  She looked around the front of the building to make sure no one was there. The only sign of life was the bar. She crossed the street and approached the nearest taxi. The driver was an old man. The car was battered and rusty. A phone number was stenciled on the door.

  The driver had his window open, and Tatyana said, “Can you give me a ride to Ustavnoye?”

  The man looked her up and down. “Now?” he said.

  He was used to driving drunks home after the bar closed. Ustavnoye was twenty miles away.

  “That’s a bad road to be out on at night,” he said.

  “I can pay double,” she said.

  The man didn’t seem to have any teeth, and he smacked his lips while he thought about it.

  Tatyana counted out a thousand rubles, not a crazy amount, not enough to attract attention, but more than any cab ride in the area would cost.

  “There’s nothing out that way, you know,” the driver said.

  “I’m crossing the border.”

  The old man sighed. “It’s such a treacherous road at night,” he said again.

  She counted out another thousand rubles and handed him the money.

  He nodded to the seat next to him, and she got in. The drive took about thirty minutes, and he was right about it being a bad road. It was narrow and windy, but it had been kept clear by the plows, and apart from a few stretches where he had to drive very slowly, they made it to the village of Ustavnoye without incident.

  Just before the border post, she told him to pull over. The place was quiet. There were a few farmhouses in the surrounding hills, but they were pitch black. Tatyana wondered if they even had electricity. There were orchards on the slopes, and she could hear a dog barking. It wasn’t snowing, but the temperature was below zero, and she wasn’t dressed for it.

  The old man turned in his seat and looked back at her. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “I’ll take you to the border post.”

  “No, this will do,” she said, although she didn’t open her door.

  She knew the border post was about a mile ahead, a desolate little building with two guards sleeping on the job. The walk there would be cold.

  “You don’t want to cross in the forest,” the old man said. “Not at night.”

  He knew this wasn’t kosher. He thought she was going to sneak across. It wasn’t unheard of. The border charged duties and traders would avoid those if they could. For them, a walk in the woods was worth it.

  “I’m not going to cross in the forest,” she said.

  He nodded. She certainly didn’t look ready for a hike. He looked her over one last time, her fancy clothes, her impractical coat.

  “I can’t leave you out here,” he said.

  “Yes you can,” she said. “I know the guards at this post. They’re waiting for me.”

  “If that were true, you’d let me drive you all the way.”

  “I want to surprise them,” Tatyana said.

  The man shook his head. “Please don’t go through the forest. There are wolves out here,” he said. “They find bodies every spring when the ground thaws.”

  “I assure you,” Tatyana said, “the wolves in Moscow are worse.”

  He sighed. He knew she was up to something, but it was out of his hands. What he was waiting for now was some money to pay for his silence. Tatyana reached into her purse and pulled out her cigarettes. She lit one and opened the window.

  This part was important. If she offered too much, she’d scare him. And if she offered too quickly, he’d want more.

  “I’ll give you fifty euros if you forget you brought me here.”

  “A hundred,” the old man said.

  “Seventy-five.”

  “A hundred.”

  She handed him the money and got out of the car.

  “Good luck,” he said to her.

  “Drive carefully,” she said.

  She began walking the mile to the border crossing, and it wasn’t long before she could see its lights. There wasn’t much to the place, a small brick building for the Russian border guards, and another a hundred yards on for the Belarusians. She approached the Russian guardhouse, smoking as she strode past a sign telling her she was exiting federation territory. She ducked under the vehicle barrier and stopped.

  She listened. The place was entirely silent. The snow on the road was clean, unsullied by traffic. No one had used the crossing in hours.

  The guards were asleep. They were always asleep. Most of them had full-time day jobs they never declared. A single desk lamp lit the interior of the office. She stood outside and waited for something to happen, for someone to say something, but no one did. There was a security camera above the traffic barrier, and she looked right at it. She wasn’t worried about that now. She was tempted to blow it a kiss, one final act of defiance, but she merely flicked her cigarette butt at it.

  A hundred yards ahead of her was the second barrier. Next to it was the Belarusian flag and a sign that informed arrivals of Belarusian national highway speed limits. They were the same as in Russia.

  The Belarusian guardhouse was also the same as the Russian one. Both were built hastily after the Soviet break up in 1991, and the administrators on both sides drew from the same standardized design they’d been given by the Buildings Bureau in Moscow.

  Between the two barriers was nothing but a patch of clean white snow.

  This was what it was like, she thought. This was what it meant to defect, to turn her back on the country of her birth, to betray the Motherland.

  She walked toward the Belarusian barrier, and the only sound was the crunch of snow beneath her feet.

  Long ago, she’d forced herself to memorize the terrain and configuration of every Russian border crossing. There were hundreds of them, stretching from Europe to China and North Korea, and for a long time, she’d known she’d be crossing one of them under circumstances like these.

  She knew that the first village on the Belarusian side was Gorbachevo, a tiny farming village about three kilometers to the we
st. She looked at the horizon. The sun would rise before she got there.

  Traffic would pick up then.

  In Gorbachevo she would pay a local farmer to drive her to Rasony, the first town of any size, and from there she’d catch a bus to the capital city, Minsk. The bus would stop at every little village along the way, taking over six hours to cover the two hundred mile journey.

  She would be dropped off at Minsk’s enormous railway station, a monument to the country’s ruler that had taken over twenty years to construct, and that was now one of the largest passenger train stations in the world.

  She’d been there many times. She knew the GRU had access to its security cameras. She also knew they’d have someone waiting for her when she got there.

  She couldn’t worry about that now. One step at a time. She would slip through the station in the evening crowd, buy a ticket to Warsaw, and after another painfully slow journey that involved taking the train into a huge wooden warehouse at the Polish border, jacking up all the carriages, and re-gauging them so that they’d fit European tracks, she would be inside the European Union.

  She’d breathe easy then. In Warsaw, she’d catch a high-speed connection to Berlin, and two hours later, she’d be in the German capital.

  By then, she thought, she would have traveled in reverse, the same journey the Wehrmacht made during Operation Barbarossa. It was a distance of eleven-hundred miles and took the German war machine five months. By the time they were stopped at the bridge over the canal at Khimki station, millions of corpses lay in their tracks.

  She didn’t hate her country. She was proud of it. It was the Russians, not the British or the French or the Americans, who’d stopped Hitler. It was their sacrifice that saved the twentieth century. The west was used to thinking of the Soviets as an evil empire.

  She knew the truth was more complicated.

  Were it not for her country, the twentieth century may well have belonged to Hitler, and not America.

  She picked up her pace. She felt she was already there, in Europe, free, when a set of floodlights came on, lighting her up from behind.

  She stopped walking.

  Before her, her shadow stretched out like it was the personification of all her hopes for the future.

  Dogs were barking.

  “Halt,” a voice yelled. “Halt, or I’ll shoot.”

  14

  Lance arrived at the bar slightly earlier than usual. It was seven, and there were a few other customers there.

  “The usual?” the woman said when she saw him.

  He’d come to the bar the night before, after putting Tatyana on the train, and she’d brought a bottle of vodka to the table without his asking. They’d ended up working their way through it together.

  He nodded and sat in his usual spot by the window.

  She brought him his soup and coffee and then stood by the table looking at him.

  He was about to dig into the soup but stopped to look back.

  “How’s your head?” she said.

  He hadn’t intended to drink, but when she’d opened the bottle, one shot quickly turned into more. It had been hard saying goodbye to Tatyana. Harder than it should have been.

  He’d felt strangely melancholy.

  “How’s yours?” he said.

  She laughed and went back to the bar. He watched her polishing a glass. She looked up at him from it more than once.

  She wasn’t an attractive woman, but she flirted with him all the same. It had even crossed his mind to take her up to the apartment and give her something to tell the girls at the hair salon about. He might even have done it. He’d been drunk, Tatyana was gone, the world was cold and harsh and lonely.

  But she’d said to him, “You can look at me like that, you can look all you want, but don’t get any ideas.”

  It turned out she was married.

  She didn’t wear her ring, she said the metal irritated her skin, but had assured him she had a husband at home and that a woman who fooled around deserved all the misfortune she found.

  She sure did flirt a lot, though.

  He looked down at his soup. Now that Tatyana was out, he wanted to leave the city. He would wait for word from Roth that she was safe, and then he would go.

  He had a life of his own in Montana to get back to. He even had a house guest, a girl called Sam. She was the daughter of one of the men in his former unit. That man had taken a bullet for him. In return, he’d promised to keep an eye on the girl, something he couldn’t very well do if he was sipping vodka in a dingy Moscow bar with an older woman who didn’t wear her wedding ring.

  He was troubled, though. Something wasn’t right. They’d just assassinated three of the most powerful men in Russia, three members of the president’s fabled inner circle, the Dead Hand. These were the men behind most of Russia’s aggressive actions over the past decade.

  And there had been no response from the Kremlin.

  Nothing.

  Not a diplomatic peep.

  Something was going to happen, and when it came, it wouldn’t be pretty. Someone had to be in Moscow when that happened, the agency needed to be able to respond swiftly.

  But he didn’t work for the agency any longer.

  He told himself it wasn’t his problem. America and Russia had been at each other’s throats since before he was born. The CIA had made it this far without his help. They’d make it through whatever happened next.

  But something about that didn’t sit right with him.

  People were going to die. He knew that in his bones. And if he did nothing, he’d have to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.

  He glanced out the window and saw a beat-up old Volkswagen pull up outside his building. There wasn’t anything suspicious about it, but he noticed the girl in the driver’s seat.

  There was something about her. She was painfully attractive, like something out of a fashion magazine, but that wasn’t what caught his attention. It was something else. Something he couldn’t put his finger on.

  He watched her step out of the car and cross the street toward the bar. He had a gun in his coat, and he moved his hand slowly from the table onto his lap.

  He’d been trained long ago to notice things that were out of the ordinary. Things that felt off. The agency called them pattern interruptions, and he’d learned the hard way that it paid to raise his guard around them.

  The girl wore a white bomber jacket and skirt that was too short for the weather. Black fishnet stockings rose above her shoes, which were brown leather with a short heel and closed-toe. They reminded him of the sort a tap dancer might wear in an old movie.

  She opened the door, and a gust of cold air whipped into the bar with her. Everyone but Lance looked her way.

  She was young, twenties, with bleached blonde hair and showy makeup. She was dressed to get attention. Lance looked down at his soup. She didn’t seem to have noticed him sitting there.

  She walked up to the bar and asked for coffee to go.

  “Is everything all right?” the waitress said to her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Why?”

  “You seem in a hurry.”

  The girl nodded. “I am in a hurry.”

  The waitress began preparing the coffee, and Lance watched the girl as she waited. He didn’t know what to make of her. Nothing about her was GRU standard issue. They liked to use attractive women, but they didn’t dress them like this. They didn’t drive beat-up old cars. They didn’t run out for coffee before a job.

  He thought about getting her attention but held back.

  The waitress brought the coffee with a few packets of sugar and milk, and the girl paid.

  Every man in the bar watched her leave. They hadn’t taken their eyes off her once.

  A GRU agent couldn’t work attracting that kind of attention.

  She went back to the car and got in the driver’s seat. Then she sat there, sipping her coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. She opened her window slightly and ash
ed through the crack.

  Lance stayed where he was and watched her.

  After about an hour, she got out of the car. She had her paper coffee cup in her hand, and she put it in a garbage can on the sidewalk. Then she walked up to the door of Lance’s building and pressed the buzzer. He couldn’t see what button she pressed. It might have been his.

  Nothing happened.

  No one answered.

  She carried a large purse and rooted around in it. He saw her take a handgun from it and put it into the pocket of her bomber jacket.

  Then she leaned against the wall and lit another cigarette. She finished the cigarette, threw it on the ground, then went back to the car, presumably to warm up.

  Lance watched everything. Watching was the most important part of his job. It was what they’d trained him to do. Above all else, the weapons training, the hand-to-hand combat, the computer hacking and car hot-wiring and lock picking, what the CIA valued most, was the ability to wait. To stay still, to remain silent, to watch, and to notice.

  That was what the job of spy boiled down to.

  He looked at the car and memorized the plate.

  Who was this woman? She could be GRU, but it sure didn’t feel like it. The GRU didn’t ring your door buzzer and wait outside. They didn’t dress their girls like this.

  This girl looked like she was waiting for someone.

  “She got your attention, didn’t she?” the waitress said.

  She’d come over to refill his coffee and bum one of his cigarettes.

  “Who?” he said.

  She smiled. “Very cute,” she said, helping herself to one of his cigarettes.

  “You ever see her before?” Lance said.

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “Why did you ask if she was all right?”

  “Didn’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “She’d been crying.”

  Lance had only looked at her face through the window and hadn’t noticed the tears.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Believe me,” she said, “I know what smeared mascara looks like.”

  “Do you think she was a…” Lance said, hesitating while he chose his words.

  “Prostitutka?” the waitress said.

  “I was going to say naymit,” Lance said, which meant something more like working girl.