by Ed Kovacs
“So I guess that makes you the bean king,” said Bennings.
“The bean king in exile. My kingdom for a good taco.”
“It makes sense Rufo ditches the marine, whether he’s gay or not,” said Bennings. “She seems to be in love with the Russian guy, Sergei Lopatin.”
“Well, she’s peeling his banana every chance she gets.”
“Lopatin is handsome and smooth. Rufo practically swoons when they’re together.”
“He’s a little too handsome, too smooth. Something’s not right, and you know it,” said Sinclair.
“Be nice if it was a real romance.”
“Has your brain turned to sap? We’ll be getting her on tape passing information to Lopatin any time now.”
“I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but … you’re probably right,” said Bennings.
“Anyway, you know that I read her e-mail and cell-phone texts. He’s coming to her place at ten. We don’t need to waste time tailing her. Let’s just take up position outside her apartment building.”
Sinclair accelerated but drove carefully, unlike most of the other vehicles on the road.
“She’s in a sexual relationship with a Russian national and hasn’t reported it,” said Sinclair. “Thanks to Putin’s expansionist exploits in Crimea and Ukraine and all the other places, the imbeciles in Washington have finally figured out that the Russians are not our good buddies. ‘Reset relations’ my ass.”
Bennings nodded. “So Rufo’s in a little trouble already.” Kit polished off the last piroshki from his sixty-ruble dinner. “Intensive surveillance for another week should tell us if she’s the third mole. One way or another, I just want to wrap this operation up and get back home.” Bennings shrugged.
“You’ve been here a few months and you can’t wait to go back. I’ve been here five friggin’ years.”
Bennings looked intently at his partner. “You telling me they won’t pull you out?”
“Bingo. Some suits back at Langley are making their careers based on the work I do here. They know I want out, but I don’t even ask about it anymore.”
Bennings knew that the Activity—an army unit—would never do that to one of their people. But the CIA was a much different animal. He wanted to ask Sinclair more about the situation, but it wasn’t his business, and his partner changed the subject back to Rufo and made further convincing arguments as to why he thought she was the third mole.
Be sweet if we could catch her in the act tonight, thought Bennings.
CHAPTER 4
Twenty minutes later, Bennings and Sinclair sat parked on the sidewalk half a block down from Julie Rufo’s ten-story concrete apartment building painted beige. Rufo was an E-5 who worked in the communications room at the embassy. She wasn’t anything special to look at, but a lot of guys wouldn’t kick her out of bed, either. It was a toss-up as to whether she might have been targeted by Sergei Lopatin in a classic honey-trap intelligence operation. Sensitive information that came through the communications room had been passed on to the Russians, but that information may have been leaked by one of the two moles whom Bennings and Sinclair had already identified, or by someone else.
Both exposed moles, a senior diplomat and a mid-level consular official, had been quietly picked up and taken back to Washington.
They had resigned their positions, and no arrests had been forthcoming. In spite of hard evidence of damning leaks—espionage against the United States—the current presidential administration, already reeling from scandals, was keeping a lid on the whole affair.
“I hear your girlfriend, the SECSTATE, is coming to town,” teased Sinclair.
“Padilla? Yeah, I have to attend the ball in her honor at the ambassador’s residence. As I think about it, what rotten luck for her to handpick me, pluck me out of the Activity and force me into six months’ worth of attaché training. Just to establish my cover! I mean, half a year to establish a cover,” said Bennings, shaking his head.
“A good cover is a wonderful thing.”
“Yes, except all defense attachés are assumed to be spies. So my cover in Russia is ‘American spy.’ I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around that.”
“Everyone at the embassy thinks you’re spying on the Russians, not them. We’re ferreting out American traitors, my friend, on the deep down-low. What we’re doing here is historic. I mean, for Secretary of State Padilla to not even trust her own counterintelligence people in Diplomatic Security but to go to the president to authorize using us instead … that tells you just how sensitive and important this whole business is. Do you know that the SAD doesn’t know about this op?”
“What?” asked Kit, shocked.
“We’re both working under a secret presidential ‘Finding.’ The DCI had this shoved down his throat by your friend Padilla, is what I heard.”
Kit whistled softly. “Padilla has a set of brass ones. It’s no secret she hates the director of Central Intelligence.”
“Screw them all,” said Sinclair bitterly.
“I don’t do what I do for the pricks in D.C., that’s for sure. And I don’t like working counterintelligence ops, but it felt damn good to catch those traitors,” said Bennings. “So I guess the six months of attaché training was well spent.”
“Becoming an attaché helped smooth out some of your rough edges, Bennings. Now you get to go to fancy balls, wear your prissy uniform, and suck up to a lot of creeps like the ambassador.”
Bennings broke into a big smile. “You damn well know I didn’t want to become a defense attaché.”
“You’re an assistant attaché, junior.”
“You’re jealous because we attachés are always having to throw cocktail parties for the idiots we’re spying on and we get to flirt with their hot dates.”
“You serve watered-down drinks, right?” asked Sinclair.
“Russian champagne. Which can also be used as paint remover.”
Bennings yawned, then rubbed his eyes, as if trying to shake off fatigue. Sinclair stole a look at his partner, and his voice softened. “How’s your mom doing?”
“Well … not too good,” said Bennings.
“But your sister lives with her, right? Taking care of her.”
“Yeah. They kind of take care of each other.”
“I know you’re pulling double duty—the embassy all day and then out with me for half the night. But if Rufo is the third little birdie singing to the Russians—and I think she is—I won’t be going home, but at least you will.”
* * *
At exactly ten on the dot, Bennings and Sinclair watched Sergei Lopatin, a handsome, confident dark-haired man in his late twenties, as he entered Rufo’s apartment building. The men used laptops and earbuds to watch and listen in via the bugs and cameras Sinclair had already planted. Video showed Rufo and Lopatin go through their usual routine in her apartment: the couple drank a bottle of red wine while listening to soft Russian pop as he quizzed her on the boring details of her life since they last met.
Rufo’s eyes sparkled, her smiles beamed cherubic, a glow of happiness engulfed her; even on the laptop screen she looked like a person in love. As for Lopatin, Bennings couldn’t help suspecting it was just an act, as Herb Sinclair had been suggesting.
Twenty minutes of drink and chat later, the heavy petting began, and then five minutes later they made the short trek into her bedroom.
This part of the evening didn’t interest Bennings—his job was to follow Lopatin when he left the apartment—but he kept an earbud in one ear as he thought about his mother and sister and wished he was with them to help. His mom was no slouch with computers, but that had been before her nervous breakdown. She either got sloppy and gave up her personal information in a phishing scam or maybe a Web site she trusted had been hacked and her data had been stolen. Either way, she had been aggressively targeted, and he felt a strong need to set things right.
* * *
At 2:17 A.M. Bennings stood in shadows watc
hing as Sergei Lopatin emerged from Julie Rufo’s apartment building. Tailing the Russian on foot, without assistance, was not ideal, but Bennings had performed similar tasks dozens of times all over the world.
But there would be no footwork tonight; a shiny black Mercedes with tinted windows squealed around the corner and stopped just as Lopatin reached the curb. The Russian hopped in and was gone in moments. Sinclair was not to attempt to follow.
Bennings started walking toward the nearest Metro station. Fourteen minutes and three blocks later, Sinclair stopped his van next to him, and Bennings piled in.
Neither man looked happy.
“That car had ‘mob’ written all over it,” said Bennings.
“Maybe, but my money is on our friends in the FSB, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or one of the other intelligence services. Sloppy for them to pick him up right in front of her place.”
“How is she passing him the information? What have we missed?” asked Bennings, frustration evident in his voice.
“I hate to tell you, but you’re going to have to tail her to and from work. Maybe he slipped her a cell phone or a netbook we don’t know about. Maybe she’s using a dead drop along her route to the embassy.”
“Just what I need … less sleep.” Bennings templed his fingers together, thinking. “Okay, but I can’t start this morning. I have a breakfast meeting with Viktor Popov.”
“The ex-KGB warhorse?” KGB stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, the former main intelligence agency of the old Soviet Union. Kit nodded. “I see him once a week. Makes me look like a real defense attaché, collecting information about the Russian’s nonlethal weapons program. I’m supposedly here in Moscow to get secrets from Russians, remember?”
“Be careful with Popov. People trying to get something from that old spy bastard usually get dead.”
* * *
Dennis Kedrov, the big blond Russian chief henchman of Viktor Popov’s American operations, stood under camouflage netting as the sound of heavy equipment rumbled around him. All vehicles and equipment at the site were shrouded with similar camouflage, as was the heavy equipment currently doing the digging.
Smoke from a Turkish cigarette clenched between his teeth curled up into his eyes. He squinted, ignoring the smoke, and settled into a putting stance while holding a collapsible travel putter. He took two short practice strokes, then putted a yellow golf ball right into a Styrofoam coffee cup lying on its side in the dirt four feet away.
He took a final puff, then flicked the cigarette aside, smiling. He sat on a folding hunter’s chair, poured a small shot of vodka from a silver flask, and knocked it back. An ice chest served as a desk for his laptops. He was uplinked directly to satellites and stayed in secure communications with Popov and other members of the specialized teams assembled for the current operation—a complex, brilliant scheme and a stellar example of Russian maskirovka: the use of deception and deceit, a technique employed by the Russians ever since they defeated the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan 120 miles south of present-day Moscow. Although originally used in terms of military operations, it was a concept long-embraced and used by Russians in everyday affairs.
Dennis knew that the current deceptions were so clever that with a little luck, the Americans would never learn what actually happened. Eventually, they might come to suspect the truth, but it would be far too late by then. The chances were excellent that Dennis and his fellow vor v zakone, “thieves-in-law,” were about to pull off the biggest scam in the history of the planet.
Dennis glanced at his laptop screens, then sharply craned his neck at the sound of the backhoe going silent. He checked his watch, then yelled, “What now?”
A rail-thin Russian worker walked up to him holding a tape measure. “We’re at fourteen feet.”
CHAPTER 5
The Moscow Marriott Grand was one of the better hotels in the city center. Security was tight; goons in black suits packing heat lurked everywhere, and one had to walk through a metal detector to enter from the street. An efficient staff provided good service, and the generous breakfast buffet in the lobby was top-notch and usually packed with foreign businessmen in town on a never-ending pursuit of rubles, regardless of which country Vladimir Putin was destabilizing at the moment.
“Are you sure you wish to place your knight there?” asked Viktor Popov with a sly smile.
Kit Bennings was dangling his white knight over position e8. The chess set was a small travel size that barely fit on the table crowded with a coffee urn, plates of cheese, pastries, yogurt, fruits, and piles of ham, bacon, and sausage. Viktor enjoyed large breakfasts; Kit had stopped after half a croissant.
“Not trying to psych me out, are you?” said Kit, smiling. He placed his knight in the e8 square.
They sat at a table as far from the buffet as possible, giving them a bit of privacy from the other guests, since most of the hungry diners liked to sit close to the goodies.
“In this instance, no. Just trying to prolong the game a bit. But, alas…” Viktor moved his knight. “Checkmate.”
“Damn … I didn’t see that coming.”
“It would seem there have been a few things you and your government haven’t seen coming lately,” said Popov, smirking.
Kit glanced at the general. The old man never missed a chance to dig in the needle.
“You’re not too sharp this morning, Major. And you look terrible. A pretty Russian girl keep you awake last night?”
“I prefer American women, General.”
“Perhaps you will change your mind about that.”
Viktor Popov was a very tall, large man, who at sixty-seven was still physically intimidating and in incredibly good shape. A deep bass voice enhanced the command presence he conveyed, keying even strangers to the fact that he was an authority figure. One moment Popov could be absolutely charming, the next he would snap orders with a tone that suggested dire circumstances if the instructions weren’t carried out immediately.
His longish gray hair was combed back and meticulously held in place with hair gel, suggesting he paid attention to his looks. His gray eyes moved slowly, always lingering, as if they didn’t want to miss a detail, however insignificant. Big hands betrayed enlarged knuckles, suggesting Popov had been no stranger to fisticuffs in the past. A bone-colored raw-silk Burberry blazer that must have cost a hundred thousand rubles looked as good on Popov as it would have on a young male catwalk model; the general was a bit of a dandy.
“Smart,” “slick,” and “deadly” were three words Kit Bennings had written in a report after his first meeting with former KGB general Viktor Popov.
Viktor poured them shots from a carafe of vodka—not an uncommon sight at Russian breakfast tables. “Hair of the dog,” he said, holding up his small crystal vodka glass. “To beautiful Russian girls.”
Kit didn’t want the drink, but social protocol called for it. “To beautiful women everywhere.”
They clinked glasses and drank. Bennings had been meeting Popov regularly every week. As an attaché, he was expected to solicit relationships with knowledgeable foreign nationals, including military and intelligence types. A kind of camaraderie without trust had developed, at least for Kit, and he sometimes would not even bother to pump Viktor for any information. Since they were both avid pilots of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, they often argued over performance specs between Russian and American craft. But today Bennings didn’t feel like talking airplanes.
“Speaking of beautiful Russian ladies,” said Viktor, “and at the risk of offending you, I have a favor to ask … for you to consider.”
Bennings quickly went more alert. A favor?
“It goes without saying that I’m not recording this conversation, you’re not,” said Viktor as he placed a sophisticated bug detector on the table and ran a check, “and it seems the esteemed intelligence agencies of Mother Russia aren’t recording, either.”
Now he had Kit’s full attenti
on, and Bennings didn’t mask his wariness.
“My niece Yulana,” Viktor said, handing Kit a photo. “She’s twenty-eight, beautiful, divorced, and wants to move to the United States. I’m not talking about visiting as a tourist. She wants to live there. So I want to help her do that. Legally. I’ve given you much valuable information these last few months and asked for nothing in return. But I was hoping you could be of help in this matter.”
“There are people at the embassy I can pass this on to.…”
“No, no, you misunderstand me. The U.S. State Department and myself are no longer on such good terms. My name can’t be connected to this.”
Kit handed the photo back to Viktor. “I’m sure you know that I’m not in any position to order or even politely ask the consular folks to grant your niece a visa. But I can keep your name out of it, forward the paperwork, and request that she gets a fair hearing.”
“I was thinking of a different approach.” Viktor’s eyes locked onto Kit’s; they were like two predators sizing each other up.
“I truly appreciate the tidbits you’ve given to me, General Popov, but you haven’t shared any earth-shattering information since we’ve been meeting,” said Kit firmly. “Give me something juicy and I can make the visa happen.”
“I don’t have anything ‘juicy’ for you Americans right now.”
At this point, Bennings wished he were recording the conversation. He knew what a sly fox Viktor Popov was, since he had studied his background closely.
Viktor Popov had met many foreign “businessmen” at the Marriott Grand for meals and drinks since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like many former high-ranking KGB officers, Popov had scrambled to position himself to cash in on the chaos of the early 1990s, as mob wars raged across Moscow and criminals penetrated literally every division, agency, and department of the Russian government.
Incredibly, the huge arsenals of the Russian military were simply plundered. With the help of his scientist wife, who worked and lived in Samara—a large industrial city on the Volga River with major defense plants—Popov had looted an entire warehouse full of electromagnetic pulse and directed energy weapons and sold them on the black market. He brokered the sale of an entire squadron of Mi-28 helicopters based in Kyrgyzstan, to Kenya. Trucks, munitions, secrets, technicians—he sold, rented, and bartered what he could to capitalize himself for bigger things and to grow and groom a legion of loyal minions, all operating under a criminal code, the principal tenets of the Russian mobs, the vor v zakone—“thieves-in-law.”