Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Who sent you?” asked Taylor.

  “The boss at Karpetland.”

  “Oh yeah? And who the hell are you?”

  “I work for the boss.”

  “Prove it,” said Taylor. “I never heard of you.”

  The courier removed from his pocket a second sealed envelope, also addressed to Taylor, and handed it to him.

  It was a note from Stone, written in his neat handwriting. “Alan,” it began. “I am sending you this box by courier. When you receive it, give the courier one of your Istanbul business cards, with your signature, which will serve as a receipt. Sealed instructions are in the box. Be well.” The letter was unsigned.

  Taylor did as instructed, handing the courier a signed card in a sealed envelope. He walked him back to the consulate gate and shook his hand. The courier turned and walked off down Mesrutiyet Street. Where did Stone find these people? Taylor wondered.

  Back in the office, door closed, Taylor opened the box. It was tightly and carefully wrapped. Inside was a smaller box and a large envelope sealed with wax. Taylor broke the seal and removed from it another letter from Stone, also handwritten. Taylor read it with astonishment: “My dear Alan, the time has come to pull the chain, as hard as possible. To this end, I am sending you several new items. You’ll find the first in the same envelope as this letter. It is a set of eight hand-drawn maps which show the location of potential targets in the Soviet Union.”

  Taylor stopped reading and removed a packet of material from the envelope. It was just as Stone described. A series of eight carefully drawn maps, with letters and notations in the Cyrillic Turkic languages of Central Asia. Taylor continued:

  “The list of targets includes the headquarters of the Moslem Religious Board in Tashkent; a militia office in a suburb of Samarkand; the Tajik party headquarters in Dushanbe; a military barracks in Margelan, in the Ferghana Valley; the Turkmenistan KGB office in Ashkhabad; an all-union cultural center in Baku; an oil-pumping station in Sumgait; a militia office in the suburbs of Alma-Ata.”

  Taylor counted to make sure he had all eight maps. Then he resumed the letter.

  “In addition to the maps, you will find a small cardboard box. Inside this box is a type of plastic explosive that is quite potent and well regarded by people who are familiar with such matters. I have included four bags of it. These are for show only. For God’s sake, do not under any circumstances use any of it. Someone might get hurt. My intention is that the maps and the explosives should find their way into Soviet hands in Istanbul. Presumably you’ll want to give them to Ahmedov, but I leave the details to you. Don’t dally, because in a few weeks an actual bomb attack will take place in one or more of the Central Asian republics, though obviously not at any of the named targets.

  “The final item is a suitcase, with a letter inside for Frank Hoffman. The suitcase, for your information, contains in its lining a substantial amount of the same plastic explosive contained in the box. Don’t worry about the suitcase, by the way. The explosive can’t be detected, and it’s quite unlikely to explode. Please deliver the letter and the suitcase to Frank at your earliest convenience. Good luck!”

  He’s out of his fucking mind, was Taylor’s first thought. That was also his second thought. But his third thought was that he had better get moving.

  Late that afternoon, Taylor made a crash visit to Munzer’s apartment in Aksaray. He drove himself in one of the consulate cars, bringing with him the box of explosives and the envelope with the drawings. He fought the rush-hour traffic across the Ataturk Bridge and up the boulevard toward Aksaray. He parked his car at the corner of Munzer’s little street just as dusk was falling. The parked car was a giveaway, but what did it matter? For all Taylor knew, the Soviets had already wired Munzer’s apartment.

  Taylor knocked loudly on Munzer’s door.

  “Kim o?” asked Munzer in Turkish. Who is it?

  “Arkadas,” answered Taylor. A friend.

  “Who friend?” demanded Munzer in English.

  “Come on, for chrissake, open up!”

  Munzer opened the door. He was dressed in his pajama bottoms and a sleeveless T-shirt. He looked puzzled.

  “Why for you come?” he asked sleepily. “Is okay everything?”

  “Yes. Everything is fine. But I need to talk to you about something. I want to store some things here, where they’ll be safe.”

  “What things, please?”

  “Why don’t you sit down, Munzer. This is pretty important.”

  “Okay, okay.” He walked to the living room and sat down in a chair.

  “Now listen, my friend. I told you back in Brooklyn that we were getting serious about liberating Turkestan, and I meant it. And don’t forget, that’s what you wanted.”

  “I no forget. What you got in there?” He pointed to the box.

  “Some surprises. For the Russians.” He opened the box very carefully and took out a fat sack containing a whitish substance.

  “What is this?”

  “Explosive,” whispered Taylor.

  “Allah!” Munzer’s sleepy eyes suddenly lit up. Taylor couldn’t tell whether it was from fear or joy.

  “Don’t touch it. Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it. Just put it somewhere out of the way. Do you have a closet?”

  “Yes. Here is closet.” Munzer opened a door at the back of the room.

  “Let’s put it there, then.”

  “What this is for, please?” asked Munzer as Taylor carried the box across the room and gingerly laid it down.

  “For operations.”

  “Where?”

  “Can you keep a secret, my friend, until the day you die?”

  Munzer pounded his heart and growled an unintelligible oath.

  “I trust you, Munzer. So I’m going to show you some of the targets.”

  He took the large manila envelope in his hand and removed the drawings, handing them one by one to Munzer. With each piece of paper, Munzer breathed a sigh of amazement, adding an occasional oath of battle.

  “I am showing you these things because I need your help. It’s not safe to keep them at the consulate, so I want to leave them here for a few days. Is that all right?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “What’s the safest place in your apartment?”

  Munzer thought a long moment. “Under mattress,” he said.

  It was an obvious hiding place, the place a good thief would check first, but Taylor didn’t mind. He walked solemnly to the bedroom with Munzer, raised the mattress a few inches, and slid the manila envelope onto the box spring. Taylor glanced at Munzer and noticed that the round-faced little Uzbek man was standing at attention, like a soldier.

  “I have to go soon,” said Taylor. “Any questions?”

  “This very big secret,” said Munzer.

  “Yes. Very big.”

  “Munzer can talk about it with anybody?”

  “No,” said Taylor.

  “Can I tell my Turkestani brothers, please, that at last we have real army?”

  “Do you really trust any of them?”

  “My friend Khojaev maybe?”

  “But he’s a journalist. They all talk too much.”

  “There is Kirdarov.”

  “Where’s his family from?”

  “Kirgizia.”

  “Too dangerous. He may have contacts with the Chinese.”

  “What about Abdallah? He keep some big secrets, I think.”

  “Are you sure you trust him?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  “Okay. You can tell Abdallah we’re planning operations. But that’s it. And no details.”

  “Okay. Promise.”

  “One more thing, Munzer. Come here a minute.” Taylor motioned him toward the bathroom.

  Taylor led Munzer into the john and turned on the water faucet. Then he leaned toward Munzer and spoke quietly, under the sound of the running water.

  “Don’t you touch either of these containers, under any circumsta
nces. Do you understand me? I have marked each of them so that I will be able to tell if anyone other than me has opened them. And if that person is you, you’re finished. Got it?”

  “Okay. Munzer understand.”

  Taylor turned off the water and walked back to the entrance hall. At the door, Munzer gave him a hug and a kiss on both cheeks.

  It took just a week. Taylor returned to Munzer’s apartment the following Tuesday with a device that would show whether anyone had tampered with the parcels. And to his great satisfaction, he found that both had indeed been opened. The hand-drawn maps had undoubtedly been photographed, one by one. One bag of explosive had also been opened, presumably so that a tiny sample could be removed and analyzed back in Moscow. Taylor didn’t let on that the parcels had been opened. But he did badger Munzer once more about security, just to make sure that he hadn’t snuck a peek.

  “Are they all right, please? Nobody touching?”

  “They’re fine,” said Taylor. “No problem. I’ll take them back now.”

  “Why? Is time now for operation to begin?”

  “Yes, it’s time. I have to get this stuff to the people who will actually be using it.”

  “Munzer can go?”

  “No, my friend. Not yet.”

  “Soon, please. Munzer want to be there when war start.”

  34

  The first bomb arrived in Tashkent in late summer, carried in the hand luggage of an Indian businessman from Delhi. He had been in the city five days, negotiating an agreement to purchase cotton from the vast collective farms in northwestern Uzbekistan, and he was scheduled to leave that night on a flight to Kabul and thence back to Delhi. His name, so far as it mattered to Stone and his friends, was QRCOMFORT. His passport identified him as Ramchandra P. Desai.

  It was a bright summer afternoon, the sort of day when Uzbek party officials like to show off the capital of their republic. Tashkent was a city of broad boulevards, three-lined streets, a splendid park bisecting the center of the city, with rose gardens and graceful fountains. The Paris of Uzbekistan, you might say. The great advantage Tashkent had was that the wretched buildings thrown up in the time of Stalin had mostly been destroyed in the great earthquake of 1966. The authorities claimed that only nineteen people had died in the quake—proof of the sublime virtues of the socialist system. The actual death toll was closer to two hundred, which was still a surprisingly small number. Perhaps the authorities couldn’t help themselves. They had to lie. The system required it.

  The Indian traveler left his room in the Hotel Uzbekistan just before five in the afternoon, carrying his small travel bag on a strap over his shoulder. He was a quiet little man, neatly dressed, with that strange combination of servility and arrogance that is characteristic of many Indians when they travel abroad. All week long, he had treated his Russian counterparts with elaborate politeness and the Uzbeks with condescension. They tolerated his behavior because he was a buyer with real money, as opposed to rubles, and because the Indians were known to pay “commissions” if they received a favorable price. It helped, too, that he was a fussy and fastidious man, for as the week wore on and he became more and more nervous, nobody thought to question why. That was just the way these finicky, high-caste Indians behaved.

  Now, as he walked out the front door of the hotel, Mr. Desai felt an acute sense of anxiety. He had done things for the Americans before, but this was different. The man who had given him the bag back in Delhi wasn’t his usual case officer, but someone else. And the mission itself was peculiar: Deliver a bag, contents unknown, to another courier, identity unknown—in a strange city that was, really, no more than a pimple on the backside of Asia.

  The Indian’s skin was prickly, then clammy, then numb; he wanted to climb out of it and hide his quivering body in a new shell, like a hermit crab. Indeed, he thought for a brief moment that he would do almost anything to avoid completing the assignment. Step in front of a car perhaps. At the bottom of the hotel promenade, the cars were whizzing around the traffic circle surrounding Karl Marx Park. But that was no solution; they would still find the bag, and they would torture him, and then kill him.

  Resignedly, Mr. Desai did as he had been told—turned right and walked a short block from the hotel to the entrance of the subway. Yes, the case officer had said, that’s right—Tashkent has a subway, and a damn good one; the perfect place to get lost for a while, and shake off any surveillance. So the Indian paid his five kopecks—which he had been holding in his sweaty palm since he left the hotel—and boarded the subway at the stop called October Revolution. It was a fancy, gilded showpiece, just like the metro in Moscow. How fitting, thought the Indian, that the only thing the Soviets could build competently was underground.

  “Don’t look over your shoulder for surveillance,” the case officer had said. “It’s a dead giveaway.” Mr. Desai resisted his intense desire to do just that; he stared instead at his shoes, then at the faces of the Uzbeks waiting for the train. They all looked like policemen; every moon-faced one of them. After several minutes a train roared into the station and the Indian stepped haltingly aboard.

  He went one stop, to the inevitable V. I. Lenin station, all decorated with glass chandeliers, and walked to the door as if to get off. He put one foot out and then retreated back into the car as the door was closing, just as the case officer had told him. He didn’t see any obvious KGB ape banging on the door to get back in; but then he wouldn’t, would he?

  The Indian rode two stops and exited at Navoye station, decorated with hideous medallions of the hammer and sickle. He walked across the platform to the other side—doubling back on himself to make sure he wasn’t being followed. When the train arrived heading in the other direction, he scanned the passengers boarding it, to make sure that none of them had exited with him, and then hopped aboard. Now, in theory, he was “clean.”

  Two more stops and Mr. Desai got off, feeling the travel bag against his side. The case officer hadn’t told him what was sewn into the lining—hadn’t said a word about it—and the Indian, in truth, didn’t care. He just wanted to get rid of it, get on his plane, and get home.

  The Indian surfaced into the afternoon sun and walked down Karl Marx Prospect as casually as he could manage. It was a long, tree-lined pedestrian walkway, flanked by open-air restaurants, theaters and shops. It was crowded with Uzbeks out strolling, thank God. Who would notice a small Indian man with his travel bag, taking one last look at the city before leaving? He inched past the cafés, his legs shaky as wobbly stilts, looking for a particular open-air restaurant called Krokodil, where he was to have dinner.

  Eventually he found it, and stood in line for the house specialty, indeed the only dish they served, which was pilau—a greasy concoction of rice, carrots and spices, topped with a few pieces of gristly meat. He paid his one ruble, took his plate of rice, and sat down at an empty table in the back. The flies seemed to find him instantly. Struggling to maintain his dignity, the Indian removed his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped clean his spoon. He might be heading for Lubyanka Prison, but he would not eat with a dirty spoon. He put the travel bag under the table, just as he had been told, and took a bite of the rice. The grease and the aroma made him feel nauseated.

  After several minutes, a fat Uzbek sat down at the next table and began digging into an immense pile of pilau, smacking his lips as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks. This most certainly was not the man the Indian was waiting for. That man arrived soon after. He shambled over to the table, approached the Indian, and said, in soft-spoken English: “May I join you, please?” just as he was supposed to. The Indian managed to answer: “I will be leaving shortly,” just as instructed, but he was suffering from a terrible shock. For he could see that his counterpart in this clandestine meeting, the man to whom he was entrusting his life, was an African—as black as the mud at the bottom of the river Ganges. Now I am dead, thought the Indian businessman. Very definitely, I am dead. He stared at his plate for twenty seconds and then got up
and walked away, leaving the travel bag behind.

  The black man was a student from Tanzania named Vladimir Ilyich Mbane. He had been recruited by the chief of station in Dar es Salaam three years before, just as he was heading off to university in the Soviet Union. It had seemed like a sensible enough recruitment—an extra body to have on hand in Moscow or Leningrad or Kiev, or wherever the young man ended up. But the Soviets assigned the Tanzanian to a university in Tashkent, and there he sat idly for two years before the SB Division finally dropped him from the payroll. At that point, he had come to Stone’s attention, and he had begun another sort of life, considerably more interesting.

  Mbane ate his dinner slowly, with a genuine calm. He was the sort of man who made a perfect liar, and a perfect agent. In place of the nerve endings that, in most people, became sharp and brittle in times of stress, the African was all syrup and soft cotton. You could have hooked him up to a polygraph at that very moment and gotten a reading as flat as the waters of Lake Victoria on a windless day.

  The Tanzanian finished his meal, hoisted the travel bag on his shoulder, and headed up Karl Marx Prospect toward Lenin Square. You might have thought he would stand out, a black man walking the streets of Tashkent, but the opposite was more nearly true. That was the great blessing of racism. Uzbeks and Russians disdained Africans as part of the baggage of socialist internationalism. A black man in the streets was, in many respects, invisible. People didn’t look at him, didn’t talk to him, didn’t imagine that he could possibly be doing anything of consequence.

  He walked up the prospect, past hundreds of unseeing eyes, to a broad square bordered by an arc of fountains. A ten-lane boulevard cut through the square—the ceremonial route used for May Day parades—and across it stood a towering statue of Lenin. The young African stared up at the visage of Lenin, nearly a hundred feet above. It had a particular look, this Tashkent version of Lenin. In the same way that each Christian community will give its figure of Jesus a touch of the national character—hair color, skin tone, the set of the eyes—this was an Asian Lenin. His eyes had the tight slant of the East, the cheekbones were as high and prominent as a Mongolian’s, and the arm brandished a scroll, as if he were a socialist imam extending a firman toward his people.