High Flight

by David Hagberg

  “Christ, what a mess,” Kennedy said looking away again.

  “It’s become a different world out there, David. One I don’t think anyone really understands yet. Our only choice is to deal with it as best we can.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Then I’m wrong, and we go from there,” McGarvey said, his gut in a knot. “But if I’m right, and if we don’t even try to stop them, a lot of innocent people could get hurt.”

  “Yeah,” Kennedy said softly.

  “It’s a bitch, but it was us who made it this way.”

  Yemlin was waiting for him in a VIP lounge at Dulles when he showed up at 2:00 P.M. An Aeroflot Ilyushin 11-86 was parked at the gate, connected to the boarding area by a jetway. The aircraft looked old, and shabby, its paint job faded and peeling. Once the largest airline in the world, the Russian carrier was in desperate straits.

  “I was about to give up hope,” Yemlin said. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

  “This is important to my company, Viktor Pavlovich. I’ve met with my boss about the details of our offer.”

  Yemlin peered at him for a long beat, as if he were trying to decide what to make of what he was hearing. Something had changed since this morning. The Russian no longer seemed apologetic as before. Evidently he’d gotten further instructions from Moscow. “They’ll want to talk to you about that.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” McGarvey said. “I came to you for help, remember?”

  Taking his place beside Yemlin as the only passengers in first class, it felt like Russia already to McGarvey—even before the jumbo jet left the U.S. The interior of the aircraft was just as threadbare and chipped as the exterior had suggested, and as all of Russia was. McGarvey remembered the first time he’d come into Moscow with his chief of station. It was his first assignment. He’d had the thought that the city needed a coat of paint. A major spring cleaning that all the babushkas out sweeping the roads with straw brooms couldn’t accomplish. The country needed refurbishing, remodeling, updating. Just as this aircraft did. Aeroflot might be having its troubles at home, but in the Western world it wouldn’t last five minutes with shabby, outdated equipment like this. From a practical standpoint he had to wonder if the jetliner would make it across the Atlantic. It’d be a hell of a note, he thought wryly, to die this way.

  Yemlin had a word with the crew, and even before they pulled away from the gate first class was closed off from the rest of the plane, and a good-looking young woman offered them drinks. By the time they were airborne McGarvey was on his second cognac, neat, no water, no ice, but he was still tied up in knots. He was going back, going back and back, down and down, as if he were falling into a bottomless pit with darkness all around him.

  Her name was Tania Fedorovna Sorokin, and she worked as a technical translator and adviser for the government, rendering into Russian sensitive Western technical documents that she would explain in lay terms to the politicians. She was good at her job, but from the beginning she’d never trusted Brezhnev. “The man is mad for power, and he’ll lead the country to nuclear holocaust before he’ll step aside.”

  So far as she knew, or allowed herself to know, McGarvey was a dissident American scientist. An intellectual who wanted to end war once and for all by freely sharing nuclear information with anyone who wanted it. If there are no secrets there will be no wars.

  There were a half-dozen of them, McGarvey told her, but in order for their struggle to have any chance of success they needed hard information about the Brezhnev government, and the extent of Brezhnev’s grasp of Western technical secrets. At that time a great deal of effort was being spent on the Strategic Defense Initiative, both in the West and in the Soviet Union, and information was power.

  Tania had agreed to spy for them. “But don’t let me down,” she’d told McGarvey. “Whoever you really work for.”

  They had become lovers, and McGarvey remembered that he liked lying with her in the hours just before dawn. He would awaken and watch her sleep; watch her chest rise and fall; watch her lips moving sometimes as if she were dreaming; how a few drops of sweat would form on the bridge of her nose, as if she were troubled; how when the morning light finally came the sun would illuminate the peach fuzz at the small of her back. She was a sun person and would come awake then, smiling when she saw him watching her. And they would make love, sometimes slowly with a gentle deliberation and sensitivity for each other’s feelings, and at other times passionately, almost cruelly, wanting only to satisfy their own needs. It was never bad with them; sometimes better than other times, but never bad.

  At home in the United States he’d been married to his first wife for four years. They’d met at Kansas State, and when he’d gone to work for the CIA he’d dragged her around the world. But it wasn’t her life, and their fighting became just as passionate as their lovemaking had been. She began to smoke, mostly to irritate him, and to drink, to drown her little voices, and so he had divorced her.

  No matter what she’d wanted, or thought she’d wanted by her actions, divorce had not been it. Somehow she’d secretly hoped that she could change him. Take away the hex that his parents had somehow put on him. But that was impossible. By the time she’d finally realized that it was too late, it already was. In that she and his second wife, Kathleen, were kindred spirits.

  McGarvey went to Moscow alone, where he developed the network and fell in love with Tania. For that year he felt whole, the only thing missing from his life besides children (his first wife, Audrey, had not wanted them) was his parents who’d died a few years earlier. He’d wanted to show his dad what he was doing, how he was taking the fight to the Soviet Union, and how they were winning.

  Walter Porterfield was his control officer. Since McGarvey was living on the economy, they’d set up a series of letter drops, two escape routes, and three face-to-face meeting points. The drops were serviced on a weekly basis, and sometimes more often because early on Tania and the others who worked in various branches of the Kremlin were supplying him with gold seam product, which was the old term for first rate intelligence information. Once a month, he and Porterfield met face-to-face, if for nothing other than moral support; it was lonely in the field, and it was nice to speak English from time to time.

  During their last meeting, Porterfield had informed him that Audrey was sick, possibly very sick, and that the Company would pull him out for an emergency leave so that he could go back to the States. “It’s up to you,” Porterfield had said.

  “She’s my ex, Walt. Which means I don’t go running when she calls.” McGarvey remembered that decision as clearly as if he were making it at this moment. “It’s probably alcohol poisoning. She’ll go to a detox clinic, get clean for a month or so, then get out and start it all over again. Should I go back for that?”

  Porterfield had given him an odd look. “Maybe you should get out of Moscow anyway. You know, take a little vacation. You look like shit.”

  McGarvey chuckled. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but you’ve seen the stuff coming out of here.”

  “It’s nothing short of fabulous, Mac. Everybody at home is shitting purple peach seeds. Vanhorne would make you President if he could find a way of pulling it off.”

  “Don’t ask me to leave just now.”

  Porterfield had shaken his head. “You’ll have to get out sooner or later.”

  “Right, but not now.”

  By then Tania had become something special, and she was falling in love with him. It was a common occurrence, he’d been taught at the CIA’s training school. The mark, under the tremendous pressure of betraying his or her country, will transform that emotional energy into love for the agent runner. It’s a life jacket for them, so be careful you don’t damage that feeling, because they might grab at another straw—perhaps even their own authorities—to save themselves.

  But he was vulnerable too. Rubbed raw by four years of a marriage, half of which had been spent in utter hell. The irony of i
t, he remembered thinking at the time, was that he still loved his ex-wife. He just couldn’t live with her. So he had told Tania things, had made promises to her that he should not have made, and she believed him. Then Yemlin had arrested them, interrogated them, testified dispassionately at their trials, and had visited them once in Volodga. In the end they were all dead; most of them at the hospital, some of them on the way out, Tania in the snow just short of the Finnish border … and at home, Audrey.

  Yemlin looked up. “Tomorrow will be a very long day. Perhaps you should try to get some sleep, Kirk.”

  After the Second World War the American Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA, set up a new West German secret intelligence service with headquarters outside Munich. Named the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal Intelligence Service, the BND was started by former Nazi intelligence officers who had been politically correct enough to have fought communist Russia and not the U.S. and its Western allies. Headed by Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief communist hunter, the service grew to become one of the most effective intelligence agencies in the world. But, like all such organizations on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the BND had been penetrated, and not all the penetration agents had been discovered. Among them was Karl Schey, who’d been in charge of vetting new recruits, and who from the very beginning had been an agent for the Stasi. He’d retired at the rank of brigadier general several years ago and had been among the fortunate deep-cover Stasi agents whose files had been destroyed before the Wall came down and the two Germanies were reunited. Mueller had a hand in that, and the general was aware of it. From time to time he had been of some help to the Berlin Hit League with inside information. The general still maintained powerful connections with the BND, Interpol, and all the major intelligence services across Europe, as well as Great Britain and the U.S.

  Mueller stood in the cold darkness just within the tall stone walls of the general’s six-acre compound south of the city, on the road to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, waiting for the last of the guests to leave in their Mercedes 560SELs, Jaguar V-12s, and Maserati sedans. Of all evenings, Schey had picked this one to entertain. But then it was a common occurrence. The general had always managed to surround himself with powerful and influential people, as if they were insurance against his being caught.

  At least it had stopped snowing. Mueller shifted his weight and grunted as a sharp pain stitched his left side. He’d cracked a couple of ribs when the helicopter had come down hard in a field a few kilometers from the German border, twenty kilometers from Karlsruhe and the A8 Munich Autobahn. Wind and blowing snow had made it nearly impossible for the pilot to control the machine, and they were lucky to have gotten down alive.

  “I don’t think one in ten thousand pilots could have done as well,” Mueller told the Frenchman.

  He raised his pistol and shot the pilot in the forehead at point-blank range.

  Getting across the unguarded border in any weather would have been child’s play, even in daylight, but because of the snowstorm he was certain that no one had seen him, and in all likelihood the downed chopper would not be discovered for several hours, perhaps not even until the next morning.

  He’d hitched a ride into Karlsruhe with a hospital linen salesman from Amsterdam, where he’d taken a Europabus to Stuttgart and from there the train to Munich, using most of his remaining German currency. At the airport he found a Volkswagen Jetta in the long-term parking lot with one back door unlocked, forced the steering lock, pried the ignition switch out of its slot, and hot-wired it.

  In a shoulder bag he carried something in excess of 200,000F that they’d realized from the bank robbery (there hadn’t been enough time to count it exactly), three legitimate West German passports, and a half-dozen credit cards, also still good so far as he knew. But before he went farther he had to know for sure if his documents would hold up, he had to find out where the manhunt for him was concentrated, and he had to exchange the francs for another currency, all of which the general could help him with.

  General Schey was in his mid-sixties and lived alone except for a housekeeper/cook and her husband who worked as a groundskeeper, chauffeur, and occasional butler. They lived in a separate wing of the sprawling two-story orange brick house, and when the general’s guests were gone they would be occupied in cleaning up.

  It was well after midnight when the last automobile pulled out and headed down the long driveway, and the front lights were extinguished. Mueller, very stiff and cold, circled through the woods to the rear of the house, keeping to the deeper shadows along the edge of the six-car garage that faced a parking area. So far as he knew there were no outside guards or alarm systems. The general didn’t believe in them. But the house itself was probably wired against intruders.

  Light spilled from a large window onto a back porch and small trash Dumpster. Mueller could see it was the kitchen. An older woman, wearing a long white apron that was stained, was saying something to a much younger, good-looking woman who wore the black-and-white uniform of a maid. The older woman did not seem happy. A moment later a gray-haired man wearing a butler’s uniform, his tie loose, came into the kitchen, took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Suddenly he got angry and shouted something at the young woman, who flipped her head, turned, and stalked out of the kitchen. The man said something else, then took a bottle of what looked like liquor from a cabinet, poured two drinks, and he and the older woman sat at the table and drank together, the bottle between them.

  Mueller darted across the parking area, mounted the four steps to the porch, and flattened against the wall beside the back door, listening and waiting for an alarm to be sounded or for someone to come. When nothing happened, he tried the door. It was unlocked. He let himself into the back corridor. To the right, a door was partially open into a large pantry and storage area. Light came from under the kitchen door at the other side of the pantry. Straight ahead was a third door, which Mueller figured opened onto a main corridor that probably led to the stair hall at the front of the house. To his immediate left was a narrow staircase that led up. It would be used by the servants, but there would be a connecting hall to the general’s second-floor living quarters. He took the stairs, careful to make as little noise as possible.

  At the top was a bathroom and two small bedrooms, beyond which was a much larger suite of rooms including a separate bathroom. Mueller didn’t know about the young woman, but one of the smaller bedrooms looked as if it had been occupied by a teenager. Clothing hung in the closet, on the backs of chairs, and over the bedposts; a robe and some other clothing hung on the back of the door, and several photographs of an old, smiling woman had been taped to a mirror above the dresser. A vanity table was filled with makeup and brushes.

  Straight ahead a door opened into the second-floor corridor directly across from the stairs. Mueller was in time to see the general and the young woman enter a room to the left and shut the door.

  So, Mueller thought grinning, the general was a human after all. In the BND he’d had the reputation of being “Iron Karl,” the man without a weakness, the man who never smiled.

  Waiting a moment to make sure no one else was coming upstairs, Mueller slipped into the corridor, hurried to the left, and let himself into the bedroom next to the general’s. He laid his shoulder bag aside, took off his coat, and pressed his ear against the wall. He could hear vague, indistinct voices, but not well enough to make out what they were saying.

  Mueller had been taking chances, and surviving, all of his life. He had to have the general’s help, and he had to have it now, tonight, before the Action Service, and probably Interpol, tightened their net, making escape impossible.

  He took out his pistol, checked the load and the safety catch, then went to the general’s door and knocked softly. If he had to murder the entire house staff, he would. Their deaths would be of no consequence so long as he could get safely out of Europe.

  “What is it?” the general called.

&nb
sp; Mueller knocked softly again, glancing over his shoulder to make certain that the old man or woman from downstairs weren’t coming up.

  “Was ist?” the general demanded irritably and opened the door. His eyes widened slightly when he saw who it was.

  Beyond the general, Mueller caught a glimpse of the young woman, the top of her dress unbuttoned, going into the bathroom.

  “I’m in the next room,” Mueller whispered, looking into the general’s eyes for any sign that the man would betray him. There was nothing but impatience.

  “I was expecting you,” General Schey said. “Go back in there and I’ll join you in a couple of hours.”

  Mueller reached out and took the general’s scrawny arm by the biceps. “Get rid of her now.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll kill them all, you included.”

  “I have no doubt that you mean it,” the general said, undaunted, “in which case you’d be captured or dead within twenty-four hours. Interpol is already looking for you. The French found the helicopter at the border. They know you’re in Germany.”

  The normally inefficient French had evidently taken umbrage with him for what he’d done and were moving much faster than normal.

  “You’ll be leaving before dawn, and you’ll be out of Europe within twelve hours. It’s all been arranged.”

  “But where?” Mueller asked, surprised despite himself.

  “America. I have a friend in Washington who has need of your services. I talked to him a few hours ago. He’s getting everything ready. Now get out of sight until I can come for you.”

  Mueller stepped back, the gun hanging loosely at his side. He was going back to America.

  The Aeroflot Ilyushin touched down at Moscow’s Sheremeteyvo Airport a few minutes before eleven in the morning, local. Surface air temperature was minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and as they taxied to the terminal McGarvey could see smoke rising straight up from chimneys, which meant there was no wind to make it feel colder. A black Zil was waiting for them when they parked, and a tall angular man in civilian clothes got out from the back seat.