by Stuart Woods
Majorov rose. “Well, that’s about it for now. I want you to take a few days to acclimate yourself; think of it as leave. I trust you will not find your stay here too confining. The officers training here have a nickname for the place: they call it ‘Malibu,’ after an apparently very attractive place in California.” He smiled. “I rather like that. There is much to divert you here, not the least of which is the group of young women who serve as support personnel. One of them will now take you to your quarters and explain the various facilities of the base.”
“Thank you, sir,” Helder said. “I assure you of my very best performance.” It occurred to him that he had not been given the slightest idea what duties he was to perform, and it didn’t seem a good idea to ask.
Majorov smiled and put a hand on Helder’s shoulder. “I am sure you will do very well, and when the going gets tough in your training, remember that the maximum rank of a division commander is, of course, contra-admiral. If you succeed in the work here, and if the work itself succeeds, I promise you the achievement of maximum rank faster than you ever dreamed possible, and I will not exclude the possibility of flotilla commander.” Majorov gazed at him intently. “What I am talking about, Helder, is the classical circumstance that gives an outstanding officer the chance of a lifetime to make his whole career.”
Helder blinked. The classical circumstance which created that sort of opportunity was war.
He left the office and followed the same blonde sergeant out of the building and across a grassy lawn to a long, low building with many doors. She led him to one, opened it, and stood back for him to enter. Helder had never seen anything like it. The room was about fifteen feet square. One wall contained a built-in wardrobe, bookcases, and a desk. There was a comfortable-looking, leather chair, a reading lamp, and a Bang & Olafson television set with a small black box on top. A door led to a private, tiled bathroom. The curtains and bedcover were of a bright, scandinavian fabric. On the desk were copies of Time, Newsweek, and The International Herald Tribune, only two days old. But of all the things in the room, Helder was most impressed by the bed. He had never slept in a double bed, except in a hotel or a whorehouse.
“Let me show you how the television works,” the girl said, picking up a remote control box from the bedside table. She switched it on and rapidly began changing channels. “You get the same television here as you would in New York,” she said, “although there’s a seven-hour time difference. It’s pirated from an American satellite. There are the three major networks, four movie channels, sports, cartoons, transmissions from the American House of Representatives—altogether, fifty-four channels. There’s a TV Guide magazine to help you figure it out.”
“Fifty-four channels!” Helder was stunned.
“Give me your wristwatch,” she said. He handed it to her, and she gave him a massive Rolex Explorer. “Do you have any other personal jewelry or belongings?” He gave her his wallet and a German cigarette lighter he had traded for years before. He didn’t smoke, but he loved the lighter and hated to see it go. “Don’t worry,” she said, reading him, “you’ll be given lots of junk like that to keep.” She handed him a small folder. “Here’s a map of the place. Anything that’s too far to walk, just grab any bicycle you see. Meals are in any of the half-dozen restaurants on the installation, whenever you like, or you can pick up the phone and order food in your room. There’s a menu in the bedside table drawer.”
Helder stood in silence and gazed at the things around him. He was stunned. He had no experience of a Holiday Inn.
She moved to the door. “My name is Ragulin; you can call me Trina, if you like.”
“You’re a beautiful girl, Trina,” Helder said, unable to keep the hunger from his voice.
She laughed. “Oh, all the girls here are beautiful. Those of us in the office are all gymnasts.” She gave him a wry smile. “Majorov has a special interest in women’s gymnastics.” She leaned against the door jamb. “I get off in a couple of hours. I could come back, if you like.”
Helder nodded. “I would be very pleased if you did,” he said, shakily. He was going to like Malibu.
She smiled again and closed the door. Helder took a deep breath and went immediately to the TV set. A man called Rather was reading the news as if he had experienced all of it. The President of the United States, looking slightly uncomfortable, answered penetrating questions from journalists with chuckles and shrugs. Helder sat down and switched channels. He watched, transfixed, for an hour as an outrageous policeman called Dirty Harry turned San Francisco into a war zone.
Helder was asleep when Trina came back. She woke him up.
3
KATHARINE RULE sat quietly through most of the regular Wednesday morning meeting of EXCOM TWO at Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. She took no notes. Later, she would update her files from memory, and she rarely missed anything.
EXCOM ONE was official stuff, formed of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), his deputy (DDCI), the Executive Director, and the four Deputy Directors for Operations, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Administration. EXCOM TWO was, on the other hand, entirely unofficial. It was formed, more or less, of a shifting group of “office” (department) heads from the two sexier directorates, Operations (OPS), the covert arm, and Intelligence (DI), the overt analysis arm, respectively referred to by insiders as the “Company” and the “Agency.”
Any younger officer in either wing would have much preferred, given the choice, to sit on EXCOM TWO. TWO, it was widely acknowledged, ignored domestic politics, didn’t worry about what the president should be told, and didn’t have to restrain itself for the record, since there were no minutes. TWO was where the dirt was, and everybody loved dirt. A member of TWO could dine out in perpetuity on the international gossip that rose from the muck raked at its meetings and still never compromise national security. TWO had the additional attraction of being just about the only place where officers of the Company and the Agency had much to do with each other; indeed, it was about the only time when the two groups felt they worked for the same organization.
At these meetings each member tossed in tidbits (reports would be too strong a word) from his section which might be of wider interest, either new facts gleaned from the agency’s worldwide network of listeners and watchers, or new questions raised by such facts. Under the informal rules that had evolved, nothing was too small or obscure to be introduced, although, in practice, and in the interest of time, each member condensed his information to what he thought might be significant, or, almost as important, amusing. The plum item this morning was that a high-ranking figure in MI-5, the British counterintelligence service, had been arrested for “immorally assaulting” an undercover policeman in a Soho gay bar.
“It never ceases to amaze me,” commented the member who had introduced this information, “how any slightly queer member of the British intelligence establishment can, in a room filled with six hundred raving queens, unerringly place his hand on the crotch of the single vice cop in the place.”
“I got an idea,” somebody else offered. “Why don’t we invite the guy over here for a good will tour and run him up and down the hallways as a sniffer? I’ll bet your average MI-5 faggot could clean out the whole intelligence community for us in a short day’s work.” The CIA took a dimmer view of homosexuals in its ranks than did its British counterparts and was forever trying to screen them out.
Rule chuckled along with everybody else, but she was bored. She was the new head of the Office of Soviet Analysis, the youngest office head in the agency, and she thought she had something more substantive to toss on the table. There was a shuffling and a glancing at watches around the table. “Anybody else?” the moderator for the day asked. She caught his eye. “Rule?”
Everybody resettled. Katharine Rule was the only woman in the room; she had attended TWO meetings as a deputy office head for years; her colleagues sometimes found her tedious and stubborn when it came to her
theories, but she was a brilliant analyst, and she usually came to the meetings with good stuff. She was tall and auburn-haired, and most of the men found her attractive, in a businesslike sort of way, but she was divorced from Simon Rule, who had recently become Deputy Director for Operations. That scared off the more timid of her male colleagues, and she turned down the bold ones. Sitter problems was always her excuse. She had a small son and all the usual problems of a single mother, in addition to a demanding job which, apparently, obsessed her.
Rule took a tray of slides to the projector at the end of the table and shoved them into the machine. “I’ve got something here, I’m not sure just what, but something I’d like you all to keep in mind. I want to review what we know about two Soviet names.” She switched on the projector and pressed the advance button. A color photograph of a dark-haired young man in a well-cut tweed suit filled the screen. He was sitting on a bench in a park and seemed interested in two passing girls in very short skirts.
“London,” somebody said. “Sixties. I’d know those skirts anywhere.”
“The breadth of your knowledge never ceases to amaze me, Harry,” Rule said. “You make him?”
“Uh…” another voice interjected. “Yeah, what’s his name—Roy something.”
“Firsov,” somebody else said.
“Very good, gentlemen. Harry, this just goes to illustrate what we’ve always suspected: when you were in London you were more interested in miniskirts than in the KGB.”
“Yeah, that’s Firsov,” said Harry, defensively. “He wasn’t much. We tailed him, off and on. He seemed to be more interested in soaking up London in the swinging sixties than spying on anybody.”
“You must have seen a lot of him, then, Harry,” Rule came back. “Let me refresh your memories, everybody. Roy Firsov—we never had a patronymic on him—was way down the pecking order at the Soviet Embassy in London in ‘sixty-eight and ‘sixty-nine. His cover was counselor for culture and sports, mostly to do with sports; he never showed much interest in the opera or ballet. Harry’s right, we never tied him to any operation. He seemed to spend most of his time learning to be an Englishman. He went to the movies all the time; he had suits made—at Huntsman, no less; shoes, Lobb; shirts, Turnbull & Asser. He made it to Ascot, he shot grouse in Scotland, he sailed at Cowes Week. He passed himself off as a Polish aristocrat quite successfully, more English than the English. He went down well. His single known intelligence coup was that he crashed the Carlton Club for lunch nearly every day for the last three months of his tour in London.”
“Isn’t that the Tory club?”
“Right, and they never nailed him. Everybody thought he was a member. One of our people, though, was asked to lunch there one day and nearly choked on his soup when he spotted old Roy. Firsov actually gave him a broad wink. Our man never told his host.”
“That’s terrific,” somebody said, with genuine admiration.
“After ‘sixty-nine we didn’t pay him much attention. He turned up at the Munich Olympics in ‘seventy-two as the deputy manager—really the political officer—of the women’s gymnastics team. He came there directly from the sailing Olympics at Kiel, where he had won a bronze medal in Starboats.”
“Gee, why doesn’t anybody from the agency ever win at the Olympics? Why does the KGB get all the medals?”
“Firsov turned up again at the U.N. for about a year, in ‘seventy-three-’seventy-four, where, in contrast to his London service, he kept a low profile. He was in Stockholm for eighteen months in ‘seventy-four-’seventy-five, again as cultural officer. In neither New York or Stockholm did we ever tag him with anything.” She quickly flipped through other slides taken at these locations. “Then he went home, we reckoned for more training, and dropped out of sight until he was spotted at Andropov’s funeral, wearing the uniform of a navy captain first grade, or commodore. He would have gone unnoticed then, except that he was the only person seen at the funeral, aside from Mrs. Andropov, who shed an actual tear, crocodile or otherwise.”
“Now that’s interesting,” somebody said. Anything on him since then?”
Rule ignored the question and switched off the projector. “I don’t have a photograph for the other name. None exists.” She returned to her seat. The other name is Viktor Sergeivich Majorov.”
There was a stirring in the room. “A deputy director of the KGB,” somebody offered.
“Chairman of the First Chief Directorate—foreign operations,” Rule said. “Anything else, anybody?”
“He seemed to lose out in the shuffle when Andropov succeeded Brezhnev,” somebody said. “I got the impression he was out of favor. Apart from that, we seem to know even less about him than we knew about Andropov.”
Rule flushed slightly. Her section had been made to look like idiots in the press when Andropov had come to power. Although Rule had had a good file on Andropov for years, the administration had somehow furthered the notion that nobody knew anything about the man. All those news stories about how he liked American novels and Glen Miller records hadn’t helped, either. But today, she figured to make up lost ground. “We know a bit more, now,” she said. “A couple of years ago, an Italian computer expert named Emilio Appicella had a visit from a Russian at his workshop in Rome. Appicella had a white Russian grandmother and grew up speaking the language at home. He’s more than just an expert in computers, he’s a pirate. He specializes in stealing computer software and making it run with previously incompatible hardware, without, of course, paying any royalty to the people who developed it. He comes to the United States, hits a few computer stores for the latest stuff, takes it back to Italy, breaks the entry codes, and turns it to his own uses. He designs and makes a lot of his own circuit boards to make it all hang together.”
Rule looked around. She had the undivided attention of everybody present. “Anyway, Appicella had this little visit from a Russian, KGB, of course, but posing as a trade official. He said that his office in Moscow had some substandard word processing equipment that was driving them crazy. They wanted Appicella to come to the Soviet Union and adapt the equipment to run a well-developed and refined WP program, WordStar, then train their personnel to use it.”
“Ho!” somebody hooted. “Wait’ll they try WordStar. That’ll drive ‘em even crazier.”
“You can buy WordStar off the shelf in hundreds of computer stores,” somebody else interjected.
“Yes, but the Soviets couldn’t make it work on their hardware. You know what a pinch they’re in for up-to-date computer stuff. They didn’t even have the MS-DOS operating system up and running, which they needed for IBM compatibility. Our ban on shipments to the East is working, it seems.”
“I’m glad to hear something’s working,” was the reply.
Rule continued. “Of course, this sort of thing was right down Emilio’s alley, and he saw an opportunity to turn a handsome buck. He made three trips to Moscow during the next four months, staying anywhere from a week to a month at a time. He was taken to a building in Dzerzhinsky Square, diagonally across from the Children’s World department store”
“Jesus, you mean he was inside Moscow Center?”
“He was, indeed, although he had no idea what it was. He always entered the building from Kirov Street, and he thought he was in some government trade office. He still thinks that, in fact. He was introduced to the head of the office, a Comrade Majorov, and given a large, windowless conference room in which to work. Majorov, who turns out to be something of a technology freak, stopped in to see him often. Emilio trundled back and forth from Rome to Moscow, flying via Vienna, taking just enough hardware with him each time to complete part of the job. No fool, our Emilio, he played his cards very close to the chest. He refused to teach any Soviet anything about what he was doing with the hardware, and, after he had adapted the WordStar software for their use, he set up his own security codes, which he says the Russians couldn’t break in a million years, so they couldn’t copy it. He developed a special keyboard for
the machines that made it easier for an operator to switch from typing Roman to typing Cyrillic characters, and he translated the manuals and instructed the office girls in the use of the software. But if anything breaks, they have to go back to Emilio. I expect he must have driven them crazy.”
“What about Majorov? What did the Italian give us?”
“He was very happy to talk about Comrade Majorov, who he reckons is very high up in the Soviet trade mission, because of his ability to get what he wants in a hurry, and because of his life-style. He actually spent a weekend as Majorov’s guest at a dacha in the Crimea—this, when Majorov apparently held out some hope of persuading Appicella to part with his technical secrets. When Emilio made it plain—after consuming quantities of beluga caviar and not a few of the office girls—that he had no intention of parting with his technology, the relationship became strictly businesslike again.”
“So what about Majorov?”
“Quite handsome, likes the ladies, more than one at a time, usually. Always blondes. Dresses well, seems quite smooth and cultivated, has a weakness for anything expensive and Western. He was tooling around in a Porsche 928 at the dacha. Good company, holds his vodka well, has terrific self-confidence.”
“That’s it? That’s all Appicella gave us?”
“That’s all Majorov gave Appicella.”
Harry spoke up. “There’s something else, isn’t there, Rule?”
“Yes, there is. The Rome station showed Emlio Appicella some pictures, and Emilio immediately made him.”
“You said were no photographs of Majorov.”
“None. But there are lots of photographs of Roy Firsov.”
“Ahhhhh…”
“Ah, indeed. It seems we underestimated Comrade Firsov. We should have known that anybody who lived like a duke on KGB funds was giving them value for money. It’s my best guess now that he was running the London station when he was there, although that would have been remarkable for a man only in his late twenties.”