She padded softly to the kitchen. She scrambled up onto one of the chairs and pried open the hatch leading to their crawl space. She lay the package by the opening and then levered herself up inside.
The space was small and dark, but dry. Crammed with boxes from Mendel’s sister’s family, there was just enough room for her to sit cross-legged on the wooden planks. She pulled the string to turn on the lightbulb.
She untied the twine and opened the paper around the package Paul had given her. As he’d said, there were five tiny cameras, all of them disguised as lipstick tubes. The tubes were different colors: cherry red, mint green, shiny metallic blue, gold, and silver. He’d also included a new book to use for decryption, a thick roll of rubles, and a lengthy note.
She unfolded the pages of the note and began decoding the tightly scrawled numbers into English text. She matched the numbers to the book pages, taking the third letter on each page. As she worked, she listened for any sounds of stirring in her apartment.
She couldn’t afford for Kolya or Mendel to find her up here with so much incriminating evidence in her lap, but she didn’t have a better alternative.
This little hideaway was the best place available to decipher the notes without detection. Sofia’s father was convinced that the KGB had broken into their homes and set up cameras to spy on them.
Any camera would have a hard time seeing what she was doing in the thick shadows. But also, Max’s things were here, and she could almost feel her brother-in-law’s presence.
She couldn’t confide in anyone about her work for the CIA. But her connection to Max had made her espionage possible, and she liked to imagine him supporting her in her efforts and approving of her choices.
Choices that might free him, his wife, and their daughter.
Once she finished the work of matching numbers to letters, she began to translate in her head. Paul’s note included the usual flowery language, the gratitude for her information, the praise of her efforts and savvy. She skimmed the flattery and the information about the bank account they claimed to have set up for her and went straight to the requests.
She found them on the bottom of the second page, a list of two pages of typed questions about radar and nuclear capabilities.
She discerned that the file on the new missile test might not answer their questions directly but would go a long way toward addressing their areas of greatest interests.
She would make that document her priority.
She jumped when she caught the sound of a creaking floorboard. Quickly, she wrapped the paper around the cameras and other contents and stuffed them into a corner behind the storage boxes. Then she shimmied out of the crawl space.
She had just managed to shut the door when Mendel entered the kitchen. He flipped on the light and rubbed wearily at his eyes. He wore a pair of pajamas she had given him years ago as a birthday present. They’d been the perfect size back then, but now they draped loosely around his body.
“What are you doing in here in the dark?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you or Kolya with the light. I thought I’d have some tea before bed,” she lied.
“You didn’t turn the stove on for the kettle,” he observed.
“Not yet,” she said. “I was just taking a moment to enjoy the quiet.”
He didn’t respond. She sensed he didn’t quite believe her.
Chapter FIFTEEN
ARTUR
AFTER PARTING WAYS with Edik for the night, Artur headed to KGB headquarters. The large yellow and gray brick building was impressive and imposing, perhaps more so in the middle of the night, presiding over the empty square.
Artur had not yet become immune to the effect of the tall doors and endless corridors, designed to humble the building’s occupants. Entering the building, he still had the awed sense of his own lowly significance, his small role in something so much greater.
But if Victor’s behavior was any indication, he expected that many of his fellow agents had become immune to the building’s powers, entering with their great arrogance unchecked.
He rode the usually crowded elevator alone and exited on his floor. The lights were off. He was the only one here tonight. No need for stealth as he headed for the cubicles where his desk adjoined Victor’s.
He sat down at Victor’s desk, not his own. He flicked on the small lamp and rifled through the files and papers heaped on top. No surprise, the fattest file belonged to Mendel Reitman.
It was time to play catch-up.
He settled into Victor’s chair and began reading the files on Mendel and everyone associated with him, paying special attention to his wife, Edik’s beloved Sofia.
As he studied Sofia Reitman’s photograph, Artur couldn’t understand Edik’s unrelenting fascination with his cousin. Her hair was inky, nearly black, and bushy with curls. Thick eyebrows slashed over her slightly slanted almond-shaped eyes. She was homely, unless you preferred dark, Mediterranean-looking women.
Artur most certainly did not. His own wife was a pure Russian, a paragon of beauty, long-limbed and fine-boned, with milky white skin and platinum hair.
Sofia’s file was thin on details. She had once been a doctoral student and then a lecturer at Moscow State University, until she had been kicked out after applying to emigrate. Like Edik, she had applied multiple times for an exit visa. She had been repeatedly denied on the grounds that her work in Max Abromovich’s laboratory had provided her with access to sensitive information.
Max Abromovich. Artur recognized that name, too. Abromovich was an infamous dissident. The physicist’s name got trotted out every time foreign diplomats wanted to scold the Soviet regime about supposed human rights violations.
Max had been Sofia’s thesis advisor. Just prior to his arrest, she had married his brother-in-law, Mendel Reitman, whose name was also frequently thrown in their faces like an insult. And who was the target of Victor’s current assignment.
If Sofia wasn’t their traitor, then she was highly likely to know who was, more likely than the hapless Edik.
Indeed, Sofia had a highly intriguing set of family ties. Edik was the least of them, it seemed. Her father and uncle, Edik’s father, had both been assigned KGB tails, with surveillance on them going back years, information that had been omitted from the case file Victor had given Artur on Edik.
Artur spent several hours alone in Victor’s cubicle, piecing together the information that had been denied him. The more he read, the more he suspected Victor had been deliberately hoarding information.
He closed the last of the files, put everything back into the haphazardly organized disarray in which he’d found it, and went home.
He found his wife and son asleep, cuddled together in the armchair in the living room. In sleep, they both looked so sweetly innocent—white-blond angels, a dangerous illusion.
At four, Aleksei was prone to kicking, screaming tantrums that could last hours. Maya, Artur had learned, bottled the same brand of rage when thwarted, but she had perfected the art of distilling hers, and serving her potent poison chilled.
He leaned down to plant a kiss on her cheek, and her blue eyes fluttered open. “You’re home,” she murmured with a flush of sleepy pleasure. “Tell me everything.”
He couldn’t ever tell her everything. She didn’t have security clearance, even if her father was a Spymaster, seated high in the KGB organization. And even if she had, there were some concerns better kept to himself.
“Let’s put Aleksei to bed first,” he stalled. He needed the scant extra minutes to sort his thoughts and figure out what he could and couldn’t share.
He lifted their little boy out of her lap and carried him to his bedroom. He hadn’t seen Aleksei all day, but he was glad the child didn’t awaken. Despite his undisputed handsomeness, the high cheekbones from his father and the coloring and refined features from his mother, t
he boy was prickly and difficult.
Artur found fatherhood far easier when he didn’t actually have to interact with his son, a fact he would never share with the boy’s mother, who thought the sun rose and set only for him.
He tucked the covers around Aleksei’s small frame, gently tousled his spiky hair, and utilized his considerable training to slip swiftly and soundlessly from the room before Aleksei could rouse.
Maya waited for him in the study with a glass of cognac. “You’re so late,” she scolded. Irritation seemed to have replaced her earlier pleasure at his arrival now that she’d consulted the clock. “It’s almost morning.”
Despite her ambitions for him, she jealously guarded their time together. She seemed to need constant proof that she was first in his esteem and affection, even above her father, his boss.
She would have wanted him to come home first with his suspicions about Victor and the case, would have preferred for him to lay them at her feet before heading to the office to gather the facts.
“I was out late with the target.”
Maya perched on the corner of his carved mahogany desk, crossed her long legs, and asked, “Is she beautiful?”
“No. No one would say he is beautiful,” Artur said, killing her jealousy at the root. “But the man does drink like a fish.”
He swirled the cognac in his snifter, Waterford crystal. The brandy set was a lavish gift from his father-in-law in recognition of his latest promotion. Artur regarded his wife over the rim. The window behind her looked out on a nighttime view of Moscow, dark and quiet. With her moonlight-pale hair and her luminous skin, she looked almost ethereal, a fairy queen reigning over the slumbering city.
His work had long been a dangerous point of contention in their marriage, even if it was the precise reason she’d been attracted to him in the first place. She didn’t like his long hours or his keeping secrets from her or his membership in a club from which she would forever be excluded.
A club to which, Artur knew, she dreamed of belonging. But the KGB wasn’t the place for a woman like Maya. Her skills and intellect could be put to far better use.
“It took a long time to get him drunk enough that he would tell me what I wanted to know,” Artur said.
“Maybe a truth serum next time to speed things along?” she suggested. She liked to try to participate in his cases to the extent he could let her, which was usually not at all.
“I know you have great faith in chemistry,” he said. She worked as a chemist. “But truth serums work better in theory than practice. Interviews with truth serums take forever. The subject spills his guts about anything and everything in his mind, and the whole thing sounds like crazy ramblings. It’s hard even to know what’s real and what’s just stuck there in his head.”
“Alcohol is also a chemical,” she said a little sharply, and Artur held back a sigh.
It might always be a sore point in their relationship that he could tread where she could not. At least he knew how to placate her, a skill he hadn’t yet mastered with their child.
“I know it’s late,” Artur said with honest regret. He would have liked nothing better than to crawl into bed with her and try again for the second child she wanted so very badly. “I’m sorry for waking you, but I wanted to get your advice before I have to head back out again.”
“My advice?” she preened. She took the cognac snifter from his hand and sipped from the glass she’d poured for him. “Tell me everything,” she said huskily, putting him in mind of Lilya.
Before Aleksei’s birth, she had campaigned hard with her father to be an agent. Artur expected she would have made an even more alluring dangle than Lilya, but Semyon thought such a role unseemly for his only child, besides which Maya’s constitution was far too delicate for such sordid assignments.
“The interview went very well tonight,” he said, without giving her any particulars.
“How well?” she asked. She caressed the polished wood of his desk with her fingertip.
“Well enough that I can establish myself as an effective spy handler,” Artur said.
“Effective enough for a station position?” she asked with a wide dreamy smile. She hoped to accompany Artur on an international assignment. Posing as a diplomat’s wife, a real-life role that would suit her well, given her intelligence and cool demeanor, was the closest she could hope to come to any real espionage.
He wanted to give that to her. He wanted to give her everything.
“Possibly,” Artur said. “But there’s a wrinkle.”
The instant crinkle of worry in her smooth brow made him flinch inwardly. She could have had any man in the KGB, and she had hitched her lot to him, choosing him above all of the others, handing him the proverbial brass ring.
He never wanted her to think she’d chosen wrong or to admit to himself that perhaps he had.
She took a long sip of cognac and said, “Tell me.”
“During the interview, I realized that my informant was linked to a high profile investigation and that, for whatever reason, Victor had withheld that information from me.”
Her expression remained neutral as he spoke, but her foot kicked back and forth, like a pendulum marking time.
“And that’s why you want my advice?” Maya asked.
“Yes. What’s he up to?” Artur had his own ideas, but he wanted her perspective.
Daughter to a career politician, Maya had often accompanied Semyon to events and had cultivated an uncanny knack for reading people and situations, establishing herself as an asset to her father and now her husband. She paid special attention to the members of the First Directorate, Artur’s department, and of the Second Directorate, Semyon’s. It was common for agents to move between the two, and she and Artur hoped he would establish his credentials in the First Directorate and then move onto foreign intelligence assignments abroad, working as an intelligence officer for the Second Directorate under Semyon.
“Victor, Victor, Victor.” She tapped her finger thoughtfully against her rosy lips. “Victor Zhirov, right? No one likes him,” she said finally, “but no one talks against him, either. He’s been steadily promoted, but very slowly. He’s—what?—a good ten years older than you?”
“Yes,” Artur confirmed. He’d been married to Maya for five years, only slightly less time than he’d been with the KBG. Their marriage had catapulted him through the ranks. He’d been handed coveted assignments and leapfrogged the line for promotions and recognition. But his charmed life, the speed with which he met his ambitions, came with an unseen burden.
He constantly had to prove to everyone—especially to Maya and her father—that he was worthy of the favor they bestowed on him.
Victor had made it clear he doubted Artur’s true value as an agent.
“I’m sure Victor resented it when he got stuck with me as a partner.” Artur had deferred to the more seasoned agent, trying to smooth Victor’s ruffled feathers at being assigned such a novice as partner. He had thought to use his own charisma to circumvent the KGB’s internal politics and the agents’ professional jealousies. A mistake.
“Only because he doesn’t recognize your talent yet,” Maya said loyally. She had grand ambitions for him, for them. Of course, he wanted the same things she did. But he suspected that if he couldn’t climb to the heights they both imagined in whatever time frame she’d secretly allotted, he would lose her love.
“Victor played me,” Artur confessed, despite his reluctance to admit any shortcomings to her. “He wanted me to believe this spy handling assignment was a chance to prove my skill to him.”
“He fooled both of us,” she said. “You talked about spy handling, and I immediately started imagining the possibilities. A posting at station Budapest. Or even Paris.”
“Or New York,” Artur said ruefully. “I let him distract me with visions of opportunity, when he was only sending
me after a marginal suspect. The guy’s little better than a dead end as an informant.”
“He handed you the barest crumb,” she agreed. “Something that wouldn’t hurt his case if you failed but also wouldn’t steal his thunder if you succeeded.”
“Maybe he wanted to keep me out of his way, but I suspect he also wanted me to fail. He sent me in blind.”
He leaned on the desk beside Maya, his hip touching her thigh. She didn’t censure him and pull away.
“He sabotaged me. At best, I’d report to Kasparov looking overly pleased with myself for an insignificant contribution to the case.” Kasparov, his supervisor, would not have been at all impressed.
“And at worst?”
“Grossly incompetent. Having no clue what the case was about and gleaning nothing useful.” He took the glass from her and took his own sip. The hot burn of the alcohol didn’t ease the pain of his own gullibility.
She touched her palm to his cheek, and he turned his face into her caress, grateful, so grateful, that she was sympathetic.
She didn’t begrudge him for his foolishness and inexperience. Not this time, anyway.
“It was only luck that I stumbled onto the right trail,” he admitted.
“It was more than luck, darling,” she said, but he knew better.
For now, he was simply content that Victor hadn’t succeeded. He had a lot more to lose than his standing in the KGB.
He nuzzled Maya’s long, elegant neck and breathed in her subtle French perfume, a signature combination of lavender and lilacs.
She pushed at his shoulder. “Later,” she said. “Let’s figure this out first. What options are you considering?”
Artur stood, clearing his head. He moved to the window and stared out at the darkened cityscape, a habit that helped him think. The lights were off in the apartments he could see from his window, a large swath of Moscow. He imagined the residents sleeping peacefully in their beds, untroubled by the kinds of worries that plagued him.
To Catch a Traitor Page 8