by Tom Clancy
The metro carriage stopped at his station, and Zaitzev made his way to the sliding metal door, to the platform, left to the escalator, up to the street on a fine, clear, late-summer day, again part of a crowd, but one that dispersed as it moved. A medium-sized contingent walked at a steady pace toward the stone edifice of The Centre, through the bronze doors, and past the first security checkpoint. Zaitzev showed his pass to the uniformed guard, who checked the picture against his face and jerked his head to the right, signaling that it was all right for him to enter the vast office building. Showing the same lack of emotion as he would any other day, Zaitzev took the stone steps down to the basement level through another checkpoint and finally into the open-bay work area of the signals center.
The night crew was just finishing up. At Zaitzev’s desk was the man who worked the midnight-to-eight shift, Nikolay Konstantinovich Dobrik, a newly promoted major like himself.
“Good morning, Oleg,” Dobrik said in comradely greeting, accompanied by a stretch in his swivel chair.
“And to you, Kolya. How was the night watch?”
“A lot of traffic last night from Washington. That madman of a president was at it again. Did you know that we are ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’?”
“He said that?” Zaitzev asked incredulously.
Dobrik nodded. “He did. The Washington rezidentura sent us the text of his speech—it was red meat for his party faithful, but it was incendiary even so. I expect the ambassador will get instructions from the foreign ministry about it, and the Politburo will probably have something to say. But at least it gave me a lively watch to read it all!”
“They didn’t put it on the pad, did they?” A complete transmission on a one-time cipher pad would have been a nightmare job for the clerks.
“No, it was a machine job, thank God,” Dobrik replied. His choice of words wasn’t entirely ironic. That euphemism was a common one, even at The Centre. “Our officers are trying to make sense of his words even now. The political department will be going over it for hours—days, more likely, complete with the psychiatrists, I wager.”
Zaitzev managed a chuckle. The back-and-forth between the head doctors and the field officers would undoubtedly be entertaining to read—and, like good clerks, they tended to read all of the entertaining dispatches.
“You have to wonder how such men get to rule major countries,” Dobrik observed, standing up and lighting a cigarette.
“I think they call it the democratic process,” Zaitzev responded.
“Well, in that case, thanks be for the Collective Will of the People as expressed through the beloved Party.” Dobrik was a good Party member, despite the planned irony of his remark, as was everyone in this room, of course.
“Indeed, Kolya. In any case”—Zaitzev looked over at the wall clock. He was six minutes early—“I relieve you, Comrade Major.”
“And I thank you, Comrade Major.” Dobrik headed off to the exit.
Zaitzev took the seat, still warm from Dobrik’s backside, and signed in on the time sheet, noting the time. Next he dumped the contents of the desk ashtray into the trash bucket—Dobrik never seemed to do that—and started a new day at the office. Relieving his colleague had been a rote process, if a pleasant one. He hardly knew Dobrik, except for these moments at the start of his day. Why anyone would volunteer for continuous night duty mystified him. At least Dobrik always left a clean desk behind, not one piled up with unfinished work, which gave Zaitzev a few minutes to get caught up and mentally organized for the day.
In this case, however, those few minutes merely brought back the images that, it seemed, were not about to go away. And so Oleg Ivanovich lit up his first work cigarette of the day and shuffled the papers on the metal desk while his mind was elsewhere, doing things that he himself didn’t want to know about just yet. It was ten minutes after the hour when a cipher clerk came to him with a folder.
“From Station Washington, Comrade Major,” the clerk announced.
“Thank you, comrade,” Zaitzev acknowledged.
Taking the manila folder, he opened it and started leafing through the dispatches.
Ah, he thought, this CASSIUS fellow has reported in . . . yes, more political intelligence. He didn’t know the name or face that went along with CASSIUS, but he had to be an aide to a senior parliamentarian, possibly even a senator. He delivered high-quality political intelligence that hinted at access to hard intelligence information. So a servant to a very senior American politician worked for the Soviet Union, too. He wasn’t paid, which made him an ideologically motivated agent, the very best sort.
He read through the dispatch and then searched his memory for the right recipient upstairs . . . Colonel Anatoliy Gregorovich Fokin, in the political department, whose address was Washington Desk, Line PR, First Department, First Chief Directorate, up on the fourth floor.
OUTSIDE OF TOWN, Colonel Ilya Fedorovich Bubovoy walked off his morning flight from Sofia. To catch it, he’d had to arise at three in the morning, an embassy car taking him to the airport for the flight to Moscow. The summons had come from Aleksey Rozhdestvenskiy, whom he’d known for some years and who had shown him the courtesy to call the day before and assure him that nothing untoward was meant by this summons to The Centre. Bubovoy had a clear conscience, but it was nice to know, even so. You never could be sure with KGB. Like children called to the principal’s office, officers were often known to have a few upper-gastric butterflies on the way into headquarters. In any case, his tie was properly knotted, and his good shoes shined properly. He did not wear his uniform, as his identity as the Sofia rezident was technically secret.
A uniformed sergeant of the Red Army met him at the gate and led him out to a car—in fact, the sergeant was KGB, but that wasn’t for public knowledge: Who knew if CIA or other Western services had eyes at the airport? Bubovoy picked up a copy of Sovietskiy Sport at a kiosk on the walk out to the car. It would be thirty-five minutes in. Sofia’s soccer team had just beaten Moscow Dynamo, 3-2, a few days before. The colonel wondered if the local sportswriters would be calling for the heads of the Moscow team, couched in appropriate Marxist rhetoric, of course. Good socialists always won, but the sportswriters tended to get confused when one socialist team lost to another.
FOLEY WAS ON the metro as well, running a little late this morning. A power failure had reset his alarm clock without formal notice, so he’d been awakened by sunlight through the windows instead of the usual metallic buzz. As always, he tried not to look around too much, but he couldn’t help checking for the owner of the hand that had searched his pocket. But none of the faces looked back at him. He’d try again that afternoon, on the train that left the station at 17:41, just in case. In case of what? Foley didn’t know, but that was one of the exciting things about his chosen line of work. If it had been just happenstance, all well and good, but for the next few days he’d be on the same train, in the same coach, standing in much the same place. If he had a shadow, the man wouldn’t remark on it. The Russians actually found it comforting to trail someone who followed a routine—the randomness of Americans could drive them to distraction. So, he’d be a “good” American, and show them what they want, and they wouldn’t find it strange. The Moscow Chief of Station shook his head in amazement.
Reaching his stop, he took the escalator up to the street level, and from there it was a short walk to the embassy, just across the street from Our Lady of the Microchips, and the world’s largest microwave oven. Foley always liked to see the flag on the pole, and the Marines inside, more proof that he was in the right place. They always looked good, in their khaki shirts over dress-blue uniform trousers, holstered pistols, and white caps.
His office was as shabby as usual—it was part of his cover to be a little on the untidy side.
But his cover did not include the communications department. It couldn’t. Heading embassy comms was Mike Russell, formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Army Security Agency—ASA was the Army’s own commu
nications-security arm—and now a civilian with the National Security Agency, which officially did the same for the entire government. Moscow was a hardship tour for Russell. Black and divorced-single, he didn’t get much female action here, since the Russians were notoriously dubious of people with dark skin. The knock on the door was distinctive.
“Come on in, Mike,” Foley said.
“Morning, Ed.” Russell was under six feet, and he needed to watch his eating by the look of his waist. But he was a good guy with codes and comms, and that was sufficient for the moment. “Quiet night for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, just this.” He fished an envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it over. “Nothing important, looks like.” He had also decrypted the dispatch. Even the ambassador wasn’t cleared as high as the head of communications. Foley was suddenly glad for Russian racism. It made Mike that much less likely to get turned. That was a scary thought. Of all the people in the embassy, Mike Russell was the one guy who could rat everyone out, which was why intelligence services always tried to corrupt cipher clerks, the underpaid and spat-upon people who had enormous information power in any embassy.
Foley took the envelope and opened it. The dispatch inside was lower than routine, proof positive that CIA was just one more government bureaucracy, however important its work might be. He snorted and entered the paper into his shredder, where rotating steel wheels reduced it to fragments about two centimeters square.
“Must be nice to get your day’s work done in ten seconds,” Russell observed, with a laugh.
“Wasn’t like that in Vietnam, I bet.”
“Not hardly. I remember once one of my troops DF’d a VC transmitter at MAC-V headquarters, and that was one busy night.”
“Get him?”
“Oh yeah,” Russell replied with a nod. “The locals were seriously pissed about that little dink. He came to a bad end, they told me.” Russell had been a first lieutenant then. A Detroit native, his father had built B-24 bombers during World War II, and had never stopped telling his son how much more satisfying that had been than making Fords. Russell detested everything about this country (they didn’t even appreciate good soul music!), but the extra pay that came with duty here—Moscow was officially a hardship posting—would buy him a nice place on the Upper Peninsula someday, where he’d be able to hunt birds and deer to his heart’s content. “Anything to go out, Ed?”
“Nope, not today—not yet, anyway.”
“Roger that. Have a good one.” And Russell disappeared out the door.
It wasn’t like the spy novels—the job of a CIA officer was composed of a good deal more boredom than excitement. At least two-thirds of Foley’s time as a field officer was taken up with writing reports that somebody at Langley might or might not read, and/or waiting for meets that might or might not come off. He had case officers to do most of the street work, because his identity was too sensitive to risk exposure—something about which he had to lecture his wife on occasion. Mary Pat just liked the action a little too much. It was somewhat worrying, though neither of them faced much real physical danger. They both had diplomatic immunity, and the Russians were assiduous about respecting that, for the most part. Even if things should get a little rough, it would never be really rough. Or so he told himself.
“GOOD MORNING, Colonel Bubovoy,” Andropov said pleasantly, without rising.
“Good day to you, Comrade Chairman,” the Sofia rezident replied, swallowing his relief that Rozhdestvenskiy hadn’t lied to him. You could never be too careful, after all, or too paranoid.
“How go things in Sofia?” Andropov waved him to the leather seat opposite the big oak desk.
“Well, Comrade Chairman, our fraternal socialist colleagues remain cooperative, especially with Turkish matters.”
“Good. We have a proposed mission to undertake and I require your opinion of its feasibility.” The voice stayed entirely pleasant.
“And what might that be?” Bubovoy asked.
Andropov outlined the plans, watching his visitor’s face closely for his reaction. There was none. The colonel was too experienced for that, and besides, he knew the look he was getting.
“How soon?” he asked.
“How quickly could you set things up?”
“I will need to get cooperation from our Bulgarian friends. I know who to go to—Colonel Boris Strokov, a very skillful player in the DS. He runs their operations in Turkey—smuggling and such—which gives him entrée into Turkish gangster organizations. The contacts are very useful, especially when a killing is necessary.”
“Go on,” the Chairman urged quietly.
“Comrade Chairman, such an operation will not be simple. Without a means of getting a gunman into the private residence of the target, it will mean making the attempt at a public appearance, at which there will necessarily be many people. We can tell our gunman that we have the means of getting him away, but that will be a lie, of course. From a tactical point of view, it would be better to have a second man present, to kill him immediately after he takes his shot—with a suppressed weapon. For the second killer, escape is far easier, since the attention of the crowd will be on the first gunman. It also alleviates the possible problem of our gunman talking to the police. The Italian police do not have a good public reputation, but this is not, strictly speaking, true. As our rezident in Rome can tell you, their investigative arms are quite well organized and highly professional. Thus, it is in our interest to have our gunman eliminated at once.”
“But won’t that suggest the involvement of an intelligence service?” Andropov asked. “Is it too elegant?”
Bubovoy leaned back and spoke judiciously. This was what Andropov wanted to hear, and he was ready to deliver it. “Comrade Chairman, one must weigh one hazard against another. The greatest danger is if our assassin talked about how he came to be in Rome. A dead man tells no tales, as they say. And a silenced voice cannot give out information. The other side can speculate, but it is merely speculation. For our part, we can easily release information through the press sources we control about Muslim animosity toward the head of the Roman church. The Western news services will pick it up and, with proper guidance, we can help shape the public understanding of what has taken place. The United States and Canada Institute has some excellent academicians for this purpose, as you know. We can use them to formulate the black propaganda, and then use people from the First Chief Directorate to propagate it. This proposed operation is not without risk, of course, but, though complex, it is not all that difficult from a conceptual point of view. The real problems will be in its execution and in operational security. That’s why it’s critical to eliminate the assassin immediately. The most important thing is the denial of information to the other side. Let them speculate all they wish, but without hard information, they will know nothing. This operation will be very closely held, I presume.”
“Less than five people at present. How many more?” Andropov asked, impressed at Bubovoy’s expertise and sangfroid.
“At least three Bulgarians. Then they will select the Turk—it must be a Turk, you see.”
“Why?” Though Andropov figured he knew the answer.
“Turkey is a Muslim country, and there is a long-standing antipathy between the Christian churches and Islam. This way, the operation will generate additional discord between the two religious groups—consider that a bonus,” the Sofia rezident suggested.
“And how will you select the assassin?”
“I will leave that to Colonel Strokov—his ancestry is Russian, by the way. His family settled in Sofia at the turn of the century, but he thinks like one of us. He is nashi,” Bubovoy assured his boss, “a graduate of our own academy, and an experienced field operator.”
“How long to set this up?”
“That depends more on Moscow than Sofia. Strokov will need approval from his own command, but that is a political question, not an operational one. After he gets his orders . . . two weeks, perh
aps as many as four.”
“And the chances of success?” the Chairman asked.
“Medium to high, I should think. The DS field officer will drive the killer to the proper place, and then kill him a moment after the mission is accomplished, before making his escape. That is more dangerous than it sounds. The assassin will probably have a pistol, and it will not be a suppressed weapon. So the crowd will be drawn to the sound. Most people will draw back, but some will leap forward into danger, hoping to detain the gunman. If he falls from a silent bullet in the back, they will still rush in, while our man, like others in the crowd, draws back. Like waves on the beach,” Bubovoy explained. He could see it all happening in his mind. “Shooting a pistol is not as easy as the cinema would have us believe, though. Remember, on a battlefield, for every man killed, two or three are wounded and survive. Our gunman will get no closer than four or five meters. That’s close enough for an expert, but our man will not be an expert. And then there’s the complicating factor of medical care. Unless you’re shot through the heart or brain, skilled surgeons can often reach into the grave and pull a wounded man back out. So, realistically, it is a fifty-percent operation. The consequences of failure, therefore, must be taken into account. That is a political question, Comrade Chairman,” Bubovoy concluded, meaning that it wasn’t his ass on the line, exactly. At the same time, he knew that mission success meant general’s stars, which, for the colonel, was an acceptable gamble with a huge upside and little in the way of a downside. It appealed to his careerism as well as his patriotism.