by Ed Kovacs
“You’re right, Mom. I’ll call Kit.”
Staci knew that Kit had friends at the NSA, National Security Agency, and those freaky geeks could do virtually anything in the digital world they wanted to. Congressional oversight? Court orders? Search warrants? The politicians wanted people to believe that all of the snooping was legal and about terrorism, but oversight was a gray area at best, and Washington power politics was a constant exercise in abuse of power. The more spying that was allowed in the name of “keeping Americans safe,” the more risk every citizen ran of becoming a target in the crosshairs of a government agency or employee or politician with an agenda; it happened frequently, regardless of what the politicians or the press led the public to believe.
But the flip side of the coin for Staci was that Kit’s cyber-warrior pals would indeed abuse the system to find the jerk who did this, and then make them pay. So she crossed to the desk and dialed a number into the sat phone.
* * *
Just back from a long workday, Major Kit Bennings stood at the foot of his bed and, with no wasted movement, changed out of the civilian clothes—slacks, dress shirt, and tie—that he usually wore while on duty as an assistant defense attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He could faintly hear his roommates arguing over a game of cards in the main room of their shared apartment off Voykova Street in the Golovinsky District.
His three roomies were army personnel posted to the embassy. Careful scheduling assured that at least one of them was always present in the ground-floor corner apartment, thus preventing agents of the Russian intelligence agencies from ever gaining surreptitious access and bugging the place, as they did at most American government workers’ living quarters in Moscow. Bennings turned up the volume on his digital music player, and the chords of “Boom Boom” by legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker filled his room and masked the indistinct chatter of his roomies.
Bennings’s quarters were a safe room within a safe house; from the exterior, no one could see the bricked-up windows and floors and walls lined with lead. Or the trapdoor leading to a secret tunnel down below.
Kit sat heavily at a small vanity. Recent stress and fatigue lines and dark circles had become fixtures under his thirty-five-year-old brown eyes, indicating a need for more sleep and relaxation. In a preventative effort to fight off the enervating migraines that sometimes plagued him, he used reflexology on himself and dug his right thumb hard into a pressure point on his hand. He winced from the sharp pain but then pressed harder. Then he released and pressed again. Sixty seconds of sharp pain from pressure-point stimulation was far superior to three days of debilitating agony from a migraine. Army doctors had prescribed Imitrex, Zolmitriptan nasal spray, and other medications, but they didn’t help, and instead, infused him with crippling fatigue. So Bennings had come to rely on acupuncture and acupressure to fight off the debilitating migraines.
“Massage” finished, he ran a hand through short-cropped, brown hair as coarse as steel wool and scratched his head vigorously, as if trying to wake up his brain. Tall without being too tall, fit without drawing attention to the fact, Kit had a narrow face, slightly crooked nose, and strong chin highlighting a visage that could blend in easily in Latin America, the Middle East, the West, Russia, or most anywhere, excluding Africa or Asia. And he had often done just that in the years he had spent conducting dangerous operations for a secret army unit originally designated ISA—Intelligence Support Activity. This secret detachment of fearless, highly-trained soldiers went out and gathered intelligence in harm’s way before the boys from Delta or DEV GRU—SEAL Team Six—went in to do their dirty business, although ISA had their share of “shooters,” too.
Sometimes, as during the raid to kill Bin Laden, ISA operatives worked hand-in-hand with Six or Delta or DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency agents or officers from the CIA’s SAD, Special Activities Division. The ISA folks made for some of the spookiest spooks, and while ISA wasn’t even their official name anymore, it didn’t matter: they were referred to by those in the know, usually in whispers, as simply, the Activity.
Kit Bennings felt tremendous pride in having achieved so much success as a member of the Activity. But tonight he was tired, and that could be seen in his most striking feature, his eyes. Even though brown is the most common color of all, his eyes simply … simmered. Not with rage but with intensity and luminosity. He could accuse, judge, and sentence a suspect in one brief glance. They cut like a diamond saw. Were they eagle eyes? Hawk eyes? They were the eyes of a predator, for sure, and when he directed them with intent upon a person, it was like having the red dot of a weapon’s laser pointing at your vitals.
Since his eyes could be a giveaway, a red flag to the opposition, he had to remember to smile to soften his gaze; or he had to look away to stay unnoticed by others, since his hard countenance was so physically intimidating. He could imply a malevolence in his stare that made men, even hard men, think twice about trying something.
In the past, friendly acquaintances who didn’t know the true nature of his work had felt reassured by simply being in Bennings’s presence, within the aura of his confident physicality, not knowing he was usually involved in something that could get himself and everyone around him killed.
After delivering a final scratch to his scalp, he slid open a drawer in the vanity and silently calculated: within a month, this Moscow duty would be over. The sacrifice on his part to pull off the counterintelligence operation could stop, and he seriously looked forward to that day. He wanted to get back to L.A. to see his mom and sister. He was worried about them; he was always worried about them since the demise of his dad and brother.
He let out an audible sigh, as if signaling some kind of transition, an acquiescence to the next phase of the evening’s activities, and then with delicate precision that belied his large hands and powerful forearms, he popped in green contact lenses, applied eyeliner, and tugged on a shaggy, dirty-blond wig. Then he crossed to an antique armoire and found the rest of tonight’s costume. He squeezed into tight black jeans and pulled on a slim-fit Maroon 5 T-shirt. Completing the transformation into some kind of quasi-goth hipster, he draped a red shoulder bag over his shoulder and lifted the trapdoor, ready to climb down to a dim netherworld, when his encrypted sat phone rang softly.
He checked the caller ID and then quickly answered. “Staci, is everything okay?” Bennings immediately felt a little self-conscious, standing there in front of a full-length mirror looking very nonmilitary; it was like his sister wasn’t calling on a phone from thousands of miles away but had just walked in on him while he was pretending to be Iggy Pop.
After apologizing for the call, she quickly filled him in about the identity theft. “I’m so sorry to interrupt anything, but Mom insisted, and I…”
“I’m glad you called, that’s why I gave you the phone. Listen, I’m busy right now, but you remember my friend Jen Huffman, right?”
“Yes. How is she?”
“Ask her that yourself when she calls you. Tell her everything, give her whatever she needs. Trust her like she’s one of the family, because that’s what she is.”
“Sounds great.”
“She’s a magician with this kind of stuff. We’ll make everything right, I promise.”
Staci exhaled audibly. “I have to say that’s a big relief.”
“Give the phone to Mom, and I’ll say hi to her real quick.”
“She’s fallen asleep in the chair.”
Kit bit his lip. “At eight o’clock in the morning?”
“I’ll tell her you said you love her.”
“I do love her. And I love you too, Staci. And say hello to that fiancé of yours.”
“His name is Blanchard. When are you going to start using it?”
“Maybe when he’s my brother-in-law. But what kind of first name is Blanchard?” asked Kit, smiling.
“What kind of first name is Kitman?”
“I shortened it to Kit, remember? But if you shorten Blanchard, you get
Blanch. ‘Hey everybody, meet Blanch. Great guy with a woman’s name from a Tennessee Williams play!’ Got to go, Sis,” said Kit with a smile to his voice.
“Stay safe, big Brother.”
* * *
The tunnel ran between Bennings’s five-story walk-up concrete-block apartment building to an identical building next door. Identical, in fact, to thousands of other apartment buildings in Moscow. At two feet deep by three feet wide, the crude underground passageway had taken engineers six months to secretly build, the same six months that Bennings had to spend in the Pentagon’s Defense Attaché System training program.
Bennings manually pulled himself along the tunnel while lying on a flat cart that rolled on small sections of plastic rail. The four- or five-times-a-week ritual was an exercise in blind faith and total surrender. He hated it. Undercover operators don’t generally remain successful due to blind faith and total surrender.
He climbed up through the trapdoor into a ground-floor apartment of his neighboring building, a unit decorated in goth musician chic and that faced away from his real apartment. Hidden timers controlled the lights, TV, and water usage, to give the appearance to any utility snoops that someone actually lived there. But to be extra careful, Bennings grabbed his Fender Stratocaster, the same electric guitar he had played as a so-so lead guitarist in a high school blues band called Chord on Blue. He plugged into a small Marshall amp, sank into the secondhand sofa, turned up the volume, and started playing a bad rendition of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Cold Shot.”
Thirty seconds into the song, the old lady who lived next door began pounding on the wall. He turned the volume down and finished up the tune. Practicing his blues guitar licks for only three minutes wasn’t improving his shoddy musicianship, but it helped establish with certainty that a human being lived in the apartment, and in Moscow, this was no small thing. Bennings also simply loved to play, and even three minutes a day, even a frustrating three minutes of wrong notes and missed chords, helped to lighten his mood.
He switched off the amp. After checking concealed security cameras that showed the hallway outside the apartment door to be empty, he slid on a pair of very dark sunglasses, adopted a slack posture, and with a bouncy walking gait unlike his own, disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER 3
Bennings rode the Metro to Chistye Prudy station. The only way to be certain he wasn’t being followed required time and patience. He spent over an hour using elaborate countersurveillance moves to ensure there were no shadows on his tail. All the walking gave him ample opportunity to call Jen Huffman in the States and ask her to help out his sister with the identify-theft issue. Jen had spent several years with the NSA monkeys at Fort Meade before transferring to USSOCOM, the United States Special Operations Command. She was a bona fide cyber-wizard.
Bennings changed into sweats and switched wigs in a grungy public squat toilet next to a KFC. He turned his shoulder bag inside out, and the red bag became black. He stashed his rock-and-roll clothes in the bag, and then stepped out into the cool Moscow spring evening. He grabbed a couple of greasy piroshki to go from a kiosk on Marosejka.
After another ride on the Metro and some judicious walking, he found himself pretending to peruse a menu inside the TGI Friday’s restaurant on Tverskaya in the city center. Right away he spotted Julie Rufo, his target for the night, and her dinner date.
Bennings strolled back outside and crossed the street. He pretended to window-shop while finishing off a piroshki, as the perpetually insane chaos called Russian traffic played its never-ending street dramas, such as five cars trying to simultaneously occupy the space of one. Conducting foot surveillance with only one person and not an entire team was outlandish but had so far worked fairly well here in Moscow.
Bennings felt tired but good. He enjoyed operating on the edge, with a lot of risk involved. And while he preferred functioning as an intelligence collector and not a counterintelligence spy-catcher going after his own people, he was well suited to accomplish the task. His day job as a defense attaché was a necessary charade, for it gave him access to many of the most sensitive areas of the U.S. embassy. But working undercover with a lot riding on the outcome was what got his blood pumping. His “night job” of uncovering moles in the American embassy was the real reason he’d been sent to Moscow.
His Russian cell phone vibrated with an incoming text. Bennings checked it and then moved to the curb. He never took the same route twice when going to meet Sinclair, and they never met at the same place. If he ever led a tail to Herb Sinclair, arguably the most successful American spy who ever operated in Moscow, it would most likely cost the man his life. Which is why the U.S. government spent the money to construct the secret tunnel connecting Bennings’s apartment to a sterile one.
Herb Sinclair was a CIA Special Activities Division “illegal,” a deep-cover American spy operating without official cover. As a defense attaché, Bennings held diplomatic immunity; Sinclair had no such thing.
Looking without appearing to look, Bennings held out his arm at 45 degrees to the ground, the Russian gesture for those trying to hail a taxi or hitch a ride, and a panel van pulled over. He quickly got in and closed the door.
“She’s having dinner in the TGI Friday’s across the street with one of the embassy marines,” said Bennings in perfect Moscow-accented Russian as Sinclair pulled into traffic. They always spoke Russian as part of good operational security.
“Isn’t that the restaurant chain that got busted back in the States for watering down the hard liquor?”
“That’s why I distill my own sake back home. Cold sake is the bomb.”
“Distilling sake sounds too much like real work. Just give me a Dos Equis, ice cold, with a lime, thank you very much,” said Sinclair, winking. Herb Sinclair had thick hair becoming more salty than peppery, and he constantly pushed up the heavy black-framed glasses on his nose as he drove. He’d put on weight since he was posted to Moscow, but if you tapped his belly, it was like hitting a side of beef.
Herb was a legendary spook because of his now-long-term deep-cover penetration in Moscow. The Russians were adept at planting dozens of sleeper agents in America, while the CIA, mostly due to the nature of Soviet/Russian society, had few such operatives. Sinclair had originally gone undercover in Moscow for a single op, having assumed the identity of a Russian carpenter. But his superiors saw the value of keeping him in place and ordered him to become a “stay-behind” agent, something of a sleeper who was only activated for very sensitive operations. So for the last five years, Sinclair ran a small but thriving Moscow remodeling business as his cover.
Part of his success was due to the fact he was off the books. He had zero contact with the CIA’s Moscow station, and few in the agency knew he in fact existed. He preferred to work alone as a “singleton,” and had actually refused to take part in some operations because he felt it risked his exposure.
But Sinclair would work with partners on ops run by the SAD, the Special Activities Division, if he had previous experience with at least one team member he could trust.
Kit Bennings, though twenty years younger, had saved Sinclair’s bacon on an op in Iran once when they were both with the Activity, and that’s the only reason they were working together now.
Sinclair’s primary forte was as a close-in “knob-turner,” and he was one of the best COMINT—communications intelligence—geek maestros ever to walk the planet. If the NSA was gathering up the personal digital data of all Americans in the States, then Herb Sinclair was being even more invasive into the private affairs of all Americans working for the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The justification was simple: an American spy ring in the Moscow embassy had been passing sensitive information over to the Russians during the last eighteen months. Bennings and Sinclair had secretly uncovered two of the moles; one more was believed to remain.
So Sinclair operated as the COMINT element of the two-man team, with Bennings handling HUMINT—human intelligence.
Benni
ngs’s and Sinclair’s spy-catching detail had been crafted by Secretary of State Margarite Padilla, with presidential backing. Kit Bennings had been pulled from the Activity and seconded to the Diplomatic Security Counterintelligence Directorate while simultaneously being transferred into the Defense Attaché System training program in preparation for the Moscow mission the two men were now conducting.
“So you tailed Rufo from the embassy?” asked Sinclair.
“No, just some good hard intelligence collecting called scuttlebutt. The embassy gossip mill is in high gear twenty-four/seven, and I’m plugged in.”
“I’m surprised she’s going out with a marine.”
“The dinner date is just for show. For both of them. She’ll ditch the marine after dessert without sleeping with him,” said Bennings.
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s eating with Shaw.”
“Oh. One of the doughnut punchers. They must have made the date in person at the embassy, because I didn’t pick it up on any of her comms.”
“Which is why you knob-turners need HUMINT guys and gossipmongers like me,” said Bennings.
“So which gay marine is she with?”
“I just told you, it’s Shaw.”
“Oh, right, the bean queen,” said Sinclair. “He likes Hispanic guys.”
Embassy marines don’t have big secrets to spill, but you still wouldn’t want them giving up what they know. While in-the-closet gays are theoretically more susceptible to blackmail, Sinclair and Bennings had already ruled out any of the marines, including the gay ones, as being the remaining mole.
Special operators are very pragmatic individuals; both Bennings and Sinclair had worked with plenty of gays and had no issues in that regard whatsoever. Just as with the color of people’s skin or their religion or gender, the only thing that mattered was were they good at their jobs and could you count on them in the clutch?
“One of the things I miss most living here in Moscow is Mexican food and Mexican ladies.”