Then Benjamin noticed the icons on the bottom menu bar. The one for the Trash was bulging.
"Here," he said. "He threw a file away, but didn't delete it."
He opened the trash. Inside its window was a single file, marked "Untitled."
"Open it," Wolfe said eagerly.
Benjamin clicked on the "Untitled" file.
Four lines of text appeared, divided neatly into a table.
Contact Name Contact Date Contact Response
F. Myorkin Free Russia News
SP
10/1
10/16 – Cnfrmd Sznri 55. Ck CSA archv.
N. Orlova Russian Cultural Center
DC
10/17
B. Wainwright LoC
DC
10/20
10/20 – arrvs tmrrw. TG.
A. Sikorsky Georgetown U.
DC
"I'll be damned," said Wolfe.
"My god," Benjamin said. "Those Russian names." He swallowed hard, turned and looked at Wolfe. "It appears I was wrong about Jeremy."
"It's not that," Wolfe said absently.
"What do you mean? Isn't this list pretty much a smoking gun?"
Wolfe smiled down at him. "So you're part of a Russian spy ring? And this F. Myorkin is, I would hazard, a journalist working for the Free Russia News. And Orlova at the Russian Cultural Center? Hardly FSB headquarters in Moscow."
Benjamin looked back to the list. "And this Sikorsky?"
"Ah," nodded Wolfe, " that one I most definitely know. Anton Sikorsky, of Georgetown University. His name on this list guarantees it has nothing to do with Russian spies."
Benjamin turned back to the screen. "Then what do you make of these notes? Is that a code?"
"A crude one, perhaps. Fletcher was, among other things, a computer programmer. Programmers have a habit of condensing text by eliminating the vowels. That line by Fyorkin could be something like 'Confirmed Something 55.' And if FRN is still operating in St. Petersburg, then that's the SP. And if that's correct, there is a particularly interesting archive in St. Petersburg, the Central State Archives, where they house all the KGB's records."
"Jesus," exhaled Benjamin. "What was Jeremy doing?"
"Whatever it was," Wolfe said, "this Fyorkin's response seems to have sparked his interest in contacting other people. It's immediately after he hears from him that he contacts this Orlova at the RCC. And then you. But apparently not Anton. Not yet anyway. Perhaps he simply ran out of time…"
Benjamin glanced back at the screen. "So if you're reading his code right, his note by my name would read as…"
" 'Arrives tomorrow,' " said Wolfe.
"And the TG?" asked Benjamin.
Wolfe smiled ruefully. "I would suspect it meant 'Thank god.' "
With that, Wolfe reached down, closed the file, carefully removed it from the computer trash, and shut off the laptop.
"Well," he said with finality, "I believe we've extracted everything we can from the scene of the… incident, that is without this TEACUP password. We need sustenance. After all, empty stomachs make for empty brains."
He bent and began packing the can and flashlight back into the briefcase. When he was done he turned to Benjamin and said, "Ready?"
Benjamin nodded, then said, "I was just wondering."
"What?"
"At that last moment, as he died. I wonder what Jeremy was feeling."
Wolfe snapped the briefcase closed. "Regret, I imagine."
"Regret?" Benjamin asked.
"Yes." Wolfe moved into the hallway. "That he hadn't finished his work."
Benjamin followed him. Wolfe pulled the door closed and locked it. He took a small roll of transparent tape out of his pocket, tore a one-inch strip from it, and pressed it firmly against the top of the doorjamb.
"Now," he sighed, "let's see about a little eye-opener, shall we?"
CHAPTER 5
The rather large man sat on the bed, reading a brochure. This seemed an odd thing to do, given that there was a smaller man on the bed next to him, lying faceup, struggling to breathe.
The brochure was all about the Winter Ice Festival in St. Petersburg. It explained to visitors the history behind the commemorative Ice Palace that was being constructed in the square near the Mars Field. In 1740, the Empress Anna Ivanovna, Ruler of All the Russias, decreed that a palace was to be constructed in her capital of St. Petersburg. But this was to be a very special palace; a palace made entirely of ice! Complete with miniature rooms, furniture, statues-even a royal bedchamber with bed. All made of ice! And when it was finished, its first occupants were nearly also its first victims. Displeased with the conduct of one of her ministers, the empress had forced him to marry a female serf in that very ice palace, and then demanded that they spend their wedding night on that bed of ice. They both nearly froze to death!
The large man snorted, as though amused at such a deadly caprice. Meanwhile, the struggles of the man on the bed had grown considerably weaker, his breath now coming in sharp, infrequent gasps.
The large man sighed, stood up, walked to the window. His round head and rounded shoulders made him seem bearlike. He was dressed in a nondescript blue nylon leisure suit and white sneakers. His only distinguishing feature, other than his bulk, was a streak of white in otherwise dark brown hair.
Beyond the window, the modern St. Petersburg skyline was still beautiful. One could see all the way down Nevsky Prospekt to the dual snakes of lights lining the Neva River. During the day, from this vantage, one could make out the Winter Palace, sometimes even the Peter and Paul Fortress across the Neva.
The bearlike man stepped over to the bed, lowered his bulky frame onto it, which made the mattress bounce-as well as the now-quiet body lying across it, which now looked merely passed-out drunk; an impression reinforced by the near-empty bottle of Koskova vodka on the nightstand. The heavyset man reached into his pocket, took out a pair of latex gloves, slipped them with some effort over his thick hands. Then he reached over and took the vodka bottle and the half-full glass next to it. He stood, walked with them into the bathroom, where he poured the remaining vodka from both down the sink. He used a washcloth to wipe them clean, then, holding the bottle and glass gingerly, walked back into the room and set them carefully back on the nightstand.
He surveyed the room: a suitcase on top of the dresser, a small valise leaning against the closet.
He went through the suitcase first. Finding nothing of interest, he indifferently repacked the clothes, set the suitcase where he'd found it.
Taking the valise to the bed, he unzipped it. Tucked in a pocket was a Russian passport. The name there was just as it should be.
Fyodor Ivanovich Myorkin.
Behind the passport were press credentials in Fyodor's name from Svobodniye Rossia Novosti, the Free Russia News.
He found the journalist's notebook, flipped it open. It was filled with notes from Fyodor's visit that day to the Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, the Central State Archives of St. Petersburg, housed in its squat, Soviet-style blockhouse on Varfolomeevskaia.
He nodded, satisfied, and pocketed the notebook. He was about to zip the valise closed when he noticed a letter, tucked down inside a pocket. He extracted the envelope, pulled out the single page, careful not to wrinkle it.
It was handwritten in Russian. He scanned the text quickly. It was from an American academic doing work on the Holodnaya Voyna, the Cold War. The academic wrote that he'd read some of Myorkin's earlier articles exposing secrets of Soviet policies; then he asked politely if Myorkin had ever, in his own research, come across any references to something called Borba s tenyu?
The man read the contents again, his lips moving as he read, committing the important parts to memory. He was about to tuck the letter back into its envelope when he thought to check the signature at the bottom of the letter and find out who this Americanski was, writing to the late Mr. Myorkin.
Jeremy Fletcher, it read.
He repeated the name to himself. Then he replaced the letter in the valise, glanced about the room once more, and, with a last nod to the peaceful Fyodor on the bed, he opened the door, checked the hallway, and left.
CHAPTER 6
Natalya hadn't been able to resist. She'd puttered around her apartment in the morning, watering plants, cleaning dishes, looking through mail… all in an attempt to distract herself from thinking about the strange letter she'd received from Dr. Jeremy Fletcher. All to no avail.
But before she'd left her apartment, Yuri had called to invite her to dinner with some of the embassy staff. They were going to the Russkiy Dom restaurant, over on Connecticut. Was she interested? Under pressure and wishing to stay in Yuri's good graces, she finally said yes, perhaps.
So eventually she found herself at the embassy, almost alone. The white walls and shining stone floors created a sense of cavernous emptiness. Yet once there and with Fletcher's letter before her, she still wanted to postpone her investigation. She decided to check on some of the details for the embassy's reception for the Bolshoi the coming Monday evening.
They were using an American caterer rather than the embassy's own kitchen-money had changed hands there, she was sure-and as soon as she looked at the menu faxed over from the caterer's the day before, she knew there was a problem.
Borsch was on the menu. Which for Americans, she knew, meant a watery beet soup with a mass of sour cream dumped on top.
That wasn't borsch. At least not Russian borsch.
Russian borsch was more of a stew, with beef, onions, potatoes, peppers… How, she wondered, did Americans think Russians had survived on beets in hot water?
And then she saw that caviar was also on the menu-no doubt served with chopped eggs, onions, chives, black olives, and probably half a dozen other garnishes, all of which were another American invention-like chop suey-and there for people who actually didn't like the taste of fish eggs.
But true Russians did, and enjoyed their caviar with nothing more complicated than hard bread and butter. And they probably would serve red caviar as well as black, but unless the red caviar was sevruga, it would be an insult at such an important dinner.
A half hour later she hung up the phone, having tactfully if forcefully explained all this to a Mr. Foy, the manager of the catering service.
"Well, of course," he'd said finally, exasperation evident, "if that's what you want. We strive to be ethnically authentic."
Ethnically authentic? The Soviet Union may have fallen, but she was sure Mr. Foy thought of Russians with the same old Cold War cliches: borsch-slurping, vodka-swilling, caviar-snob savages who just happened to possess nuclear weapons.
Would Americans and Russians ever truly understand one another? Was that even possible between two such vastly different cultures, one formed by Enlightenment logic, the other steeped in centuries of Pagan mysticism?
She realized she was still distracting herself from Fletcher's letter.
She carefully unfolded Fletcher's letter and read it again. Perhaps she was reluctant to dive into it because he had provided so very little to go on: he was doing research on the Cold War period, specifically 1960-1970; he was particularly interested in documents concerning Russian nuclear war strategies-a word, curiously, he'd translated as stzenariy, which meant something more like screenplay, rather than the more literal strategija; she shrugged and read on-and he wondered if Natalya had any knowledge of a particular book about such stzenarii, something called Borba s tenyu… though, he admitted, he wasn't sure if it was a book, a report, a memorandum… or even if that was the title at all.
Well, the subject and period provided her with at least one clue: if whatever Fletcher was after had been published in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1970, and it was about Soviet nuclear arms strategy, then it couldn't possibly have been an official Soviet publication. So it could only have been samizdat: something produced unofficially by one of the dozens of small illegal presses run from basements by brave, idealistic dissidents-which would only make tracking it down all the more difficult.
The first reference she discovered wasn't a book at all, but rather a film; a silent film at that, titled Borba za Ultimatum, a title translated into English as The Fight for the Ultimatum Factory. But it was much too early, 1923.
Natalya thought for a moment. The word borba was old Russian; in fact, its roots could be traced to the Serbo-Croatian;Борба, which meant simply "struggle." So she tried the search from that angle.
This soon revealed that Borba had been the title of a newspaper in Belgrade, printed by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Nuclear secrets published in a Party paper in Belgrade? Unlikely. But then perhaps tenyu, shadow or shade, was the pseudonym of a dissident writer for the paper, someone using the Party organ to expose its own secrets?
She wasted a full hour looking through the archives of the newspaper Borba, searching for any mention of tenyu. But most of the archived material was either numbingly routine or the raving paranoid fantasies that passed for commentary during those dark, suspicious years: articles about Americans needing to buy their oxygen from vending machines, being thrown out of the windows of hospitals for not paying their bills… amusing stuff, but hardly Cold War intrigue.
She sensed this was a wild-goose chase, as the Americans put it-though she'd never been able to understand why the goose had to be wild; was there such a thing as a tame goose? Did early Americans keep such geese as pets, teach them tricks, put them in circuses, like Russians with their bears?
There was so much cultural history beneath almost every colloquialism-so much meaning that was simply taken for granted-it sometimes astounded her that people from two different cultures could communicate at all. And then sometimes, too, she wondered if they ever truly did.
She thought back to her one brief affair with an American. He'd been a speechwriter for the White House. She remembered one very early morning in particular, a discussion that had seemed unimportant at the time, but had by now become a symbol for the cultural gulf between them.
They'd been lying in bed after making love, smoking, the ashtray set on the gold satin sheet-she brought them out especially for his visits-when he'd started complaining about his job.
"It's difficult to keep coming up with phrases that say much but mean nothing."
She'd smiled. "Mr. Gorbachev was a master at such speech. We called it sotryasat vozdukh, shaking the air."
"Well, he's much admired in this country," said her lover, exhaling smoke.
"And hated in Russia," said Natalya.
He had suddenly grown serious. "The Soviet Union was rotten to the core. It had to collapse. He was just trying to limit the damage."
"And of course the Americans did not benefit from this 'damage control.' "
He sighed. "There you go again, with those paranoid theories. Did you ever consider that sometimes there is no plot? Sometimes, as we say, shit happens?"
And sometimes, she'd thought, shit very conveniently happens. But she hadn't said anything, not wanting to start another argument.
And eventually it was such arguments that ended the affair.
To her mind, most Americans were naive children, playing at world politics as though the Bad Guys always wore black hats, like in their cowboy fairy tales. Growing up during Soviet times, even in their sunset years, had taught her that enemies were not always so clearly identifiable; that, more often than not, the hats they wore were gray, not black.
"Gray Cardinals" they were called in her culture; the true power that stood always behind the throne, whispering into the ears of those seemingly in charge, all the while remaining invisible.
The faint bluish glow of the computer screen suddenly seemed irritating, her eyes unable to focus on the multicolored symbols.
Natalya leaned back and stretched, trying to work some of the tension out of her back. No one had returned to work in the last hour. Apparently the weekend staff was taking a more traditionally Soviet lun
ch break. She remembered what a friend had said of those days: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."
She walked out of the small glass-walled office, saw no one, then wandered over to the window and gazed out on Wisconsin Avenue. Even on a Saturday it was filled with taxicabs and heavy traffic. She looked up to the clear blue sky, a crisp early fall day. The row of maple trees across Wisconsin were crowned in fall colors, the distant pinnacle of the Washington Monument a stark intrusion into the cloudless sky.
The scene made her want to give up the search now and leave, perhaps walk over to the Mall, visit the Lincoln Memorial, a diversion she always found refreshing. There was something so comforting, yet so tragic, in that immense statue's face that she always felt both inspired and humbled in its presence.
Of course tragedy was something Russians knew a great deal about. In fact, she'd often thought that was what most mystified Americans about her countrymen: their ability, even their need, to treat sadness as an emotion like any other, as something necessary to life, like joy or determination. She'd voiced that idea once to a counterpart in the American embassy, and he'd replied, "Oh, I see. So Russians aren't happy unless they've got something to be depressed about?"
Perhaps there was something to that. She felt in her own heart the need to know and appreciate both sides of her emotions, both the light of pleasure as well as its shadow.
And at that thought her mind suddenly went back to her search. So far she'd been focusing on the word borba. What if she took tenyu, "shadow" or "shade"-there was really no distinction in Russian-as the key?
With renewed energy she went back to her desk. She sat down and immediately began typing.
And immediately she got a hit: another film, this one titled Боu с mен b ю (Boy s tenyu). But it wasn't the film itself that had caught her attention, it was the English translation of the title.
The shadow war Page 5