There was less snow in Paris, but the city suffered from freezing rain that had coated the streets and walks with ice. The chestnut trees along the Champs Elysées were wrapped in an icy glaze which slowly dripped in the weak sunlight. Walking was dangerous.
Brewer called Matters as soon as he got out of the taxi from DeGaulle.
“I’m more convinced than ever that there’s a fixer in the Russian system somewhere,” Matters said. “A brilliant fixer. And I may be on his trail right now. Listen, Mr. Brewer. Why don’t you check into your hotel, then come around to my place, say about eightish tonight?”
“Have you had your phone checked for taps?” Brewer asked.
“Taps? I have no idea. I suppose it could be tapped very easily. I’m in the phone book.”
“Have you been followed?”
“I don’t bother with things like that, Mr. Brewer. If anything happens to me, there are other journalists who will step right in and continue the search.”
“That won’t impress the Russians,” Brewer said. “If they decide to silence you, they’ll kill you and a hundred other reporters to boot.”
“I understand,” Matters said. “I’ve been threatened before.”
“These people don’t threaten,” Brewer answered. “They don’t warn. They just do. If you’re going to keep digging, you’d better get yourself a bulletproof vest. Or even better, a bulletproof body. See you at eight.”
As an encore to the ice storm that evening snow began to fall in Paris. More than an hour before he was expected at Matters’s flat, Brewer emerged from his hotel and stood in a soft, feathery snowfall. Matters’s insouciance was dangerous: Brewer had decided to check the columnist’s apartment for surveillance before keeping the rendezvous. He decided against taking a cab. Instead he took the metro.
When he reached street level, he waited at the stair top to see if he had been followed. He went back down the steps to see if anyone on the street came down after him. Then he took the metro one more stop and mounted to street level. So far so good.
He looked at his watch; forty-five minutes early. The snow was getting deeper.
“I don’t bother with things like that,” Matters had said. As Brewer walked, his thoughts were on another journalist he had known—Bernie Parker—who did bother with things like that, but in spite of all his precautions, was murdered on the metro steps down by the Champs Elysées.
When he got within several blocks of Matters’s building, Brewer paused. He stepped into a doorway and looked carefully at the dark street ahead of him. He stared at every doorway. He looked into every parked car. He waited a few minutes and reexamined the doorways and cars. Then he stepped out and continued his walk toward Matters’s apartment.
When he reached the building, he paused again, checking cars and doorways. Then he looked at the names on the bells. Matters lived on the third floor. Brewer stepped back into the middle of the narrow street and looked up at the lighted windows on the third floor. The apartment was not a good place to meet. In fact, it was a trap.
Walking and looking into every car and doorway, Brewer shuffled through the snow to the next intersection, circled the block and came around again to the building. There was no surveillance on Matters that he could find. Brewer beat the snow off his coat then tried the front door, found it unlocked, and opened it. Inside was a vestibule, then the stairway up, and beyond that, a corridor that led to a basement door. Brewer went down to the basement.
It was an old foundation, made of brick, with brick support piers for the old chimney stacks. Water pipes, sewer pipes, and electrical wires crisscrossed the ceiling, while the telephone wires and junction box were mounted on the back wall. And there, like a leech, a wiretap was attached to Matters’s phone line.
As Brewer mounted the basement steps, he heard a car pull up in front of the house. Footsteps. Front door opening. Steps mounting the stairs quickly. Brewer stepped into the hallway and looked up. From behind he saw a man carrying a small valise, hastening up the stairs on light feet, two steps at a time. Brewer could hear the motor of the car still running. A few moments later the man came bounding down the stairs. Brewer withdrew to the basement doorway and watched him hurry out of the building. The car sped off.
Brewer ran up the stairs to the third floor. He pounded on Matters’s door.
“Matters!” he yelled. “Pitch it out of the window. Matters! Throw it!”
He raised his fist to pound on the door again. But it was too late. The bomb went off.
It was one A.M. when Gogol got word from Revin.
“It did only half the job,” Revin’s voice said from Cologne.
“Which half?”
“The wrong half.”
“What happened to the other half?”
“Not a mark,” Revin said.
“Then we still have the same problem.”
“Yes,” Revin said.
“That means it’s a bigger problem than ever.”
“Yes,” Revin said. “Bigger than ever.”
Chapter 27
The snow piles in the Pentagon parking lot seemed deeper than ever to Brewer when he drove to the rendezvous point. And the wind seemed stronger. Behind him came the limousine and the navy-blue escort car.
He watched the chauffeur, with the fluttering newspaper under his arm, walk over to the backseat of the escort car and get in.
“What made you go down to Matters’s cellar?” Limoges asked.
“I was checking for phone taps.”
“Did you find any?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” Limoges said. “Because that’s what saved your life. They waited for you to enter the building, then they delivered the bomb. If you had gone up to his apartment as you were supposed to, instead of down to the cellar, the bomb would have got you both. That’s twice you got lucky. You’d better watch your little po-po, Brewer. You can’t be that lucky a third time.”
“That was about the thirtieth time,” Brewer said.
Limoges lit a cigar. “What did you get?”
“A good case for Mr. X,” Brewer said. “Let me show you a few examples.” Brewer took a sheaf of papers from a file folder. “The Russians were hot to get two PDP-11’s from Digital Equipment Corporation for computer-designing microchips. They used a fictitious front company to buy them and tried to ship them out of New York. But U.S. customs intercepted them. So they bought two more and got them as far as Amsterdam before they were stopped. They made a third try out of Milan. And they failed again. Three misses. Then out of the blue from London, they get the two units. And Western authorities didn’t even know this until months later.
“Here’s another example. They urgently needed a microchip-soldering production line—a series of soldering stations. Same story. Customs nailed them. Twice. Then voilà. They get it.” Brewer handed another piece of paper to Limoges. “Same story with six high-pressure ovens. They got them as far as Berlin, then lost them to Western customs agents. Next time they didn’t miss—they got them through Vienna. And I’ve got two pads full of other case histories. Two or three misses, then success. And those are just the cases we know about. No one knows how many VAXs have been smuggled into Russia. Or IBM 360’s and 370’s.”
“What are you getting at?” Limoges asked.
Brewer said, “I believe there’s a single person behind all this—a Mr. X. He’s their super goal maker. When the regular troops botch a job, the Reds send in their fixer. And he never fails them.” Brewer pointed to his list. “He’s done a lot of damage to the West. For example, last May he smuggled a complete set of photolithographic masks of computer circuits into Zeleenograd from California via Vienna. At the same time, through another source in California, he got the copiers and the etching equipment that transfer the circuits from the masks onto silicon chips … Amsterdam to Strasbourg to Vienna to Mother Russia. He’s a master of the shell game. He just keeps moving the pea until it disappears. Listen to these moves: he shoved a supp
ly of microprocessing spare parts from Chicago to New York to Montreal through Genoa to Austria then back to Switzerland and finally to Vienna to Hungary and into Zeleenograd. It took a group of CoCom investigators weeks to follow the trail of these spare parts. And by that time they were already inside Russian equipment. You may have noticed that Vienna is his favorite city.
“Here’s another piece of smuggling. Five tons of equipment essential for chip making—including crystal-cutting saws and scribers to separate the wafer circuits. That material was wandered in small batches back and forth across the U.S., then went to Europe by way of Amsterdam. Then it was relabeled and reshipped to Coblenz. Relabeled once again and reshipped to Salzburg then to Vienna, where it disappears.
“And here are four more tons of equipment—through Frankfort to Zurich to Vienna. Computer-controlled design systems that plan integrated circuits. Here’s an interesting shipment—ion implantation gear, lead-bonding tools, solderless connectors, solder mounting tools. All shipped to Vienna, where they disappear. Here’s another shipment through Munich to Zurich, then by air to Vienna, where he slipped it across the border into Czechoslovakia and on to Zeleenograd. Here are high-pressure oxidation ovens for microchips … and on and on and on, a steady flow of high-tech equipment pouring out of U.S. plants into Europe to Vienna and then into Russia. And he always plays the same game: button, button, who’s got the button? Nothing stops him.”
“How do you know one man is doing all this?”
“The style. The finesse. The techniques. The pattern is always the same. He sets up a bunch of fictitious little companies here in the U.S., blackmails Americans into operating them, then orders what he wants through them. Each of his fake little companies make small, unobtrusive purchases here in the U.S. Nothing that will draw attention. A machine here, a tool there. Then he always covers these purchases with falsified Department of Commerce documents. Forged disclaimers. And he always sends cash with the order. Checks from little banks in rural areas.”
Brewer passed Limoges sheet after sheet of documents. “First-rate forgeries of waybills and certification. Quick relabeling and reshipping, with turn-around times of a few hours to a few minutes. Slick, smooth, and without a hitch. But when you put the circuit masks from here with the crystal-cutting saws from there and the soldering stations from someplace else, it all dovetails perfectly into a complete factory.”
Limoges’s lap was filled with papers.
“Look at this little masterpiece,” Brewer said. “He wanted a clean-room air filter for making microchips. But he couldn’t buy one without military documentation. And those are papers he couldn’t forge. So what did he do? He went to the spare parts department of the same company, and over a period of six weeks sent in seventy orders from eleven different little companies, got all the parts piecemeal that he needed to make a complete air filter, and shipped it to Zeleenograd.
“But he’s not perfect. He leaves little clues. For example, he always orders the equipment wired for East European voltages. And he never buys service contracts. They would be useless to him in Russia. And because he doesn’t buy complete systems from one source, he usually doesn’t get complete service manuals. But back in Zeleenograd they need those service manuals when they do their reverse engineering of American equipment. So he leaves another trail—stolen service manuals.
“He breaks into the offices of legitimate companies all over Europe and the U.S. Very selective break-ins. He never touches anything else in those offices. He ignores valuable equipment, often hefty sums of cash, and even negotiable securities. He steals just one thing. Service manuals. How do I know? When these companies find their manuals missing, they call the original equipment manufacturer for new ones. But the OEMs are very reluctant to provide new ones—because they’re on the embargo list along with the equipment. So right after a load of equipment is smuggled into Russia, OEMs get requests from legitimate companies for replacement of manuals.
“There’s also an unavoidable trail of straw men, fake companies, doctored contracts—he even has used the shipping channels of legitimate companies by bribing shipping clerks, truck drivers, or even executives of common carriers.
“Sometimes, the people he uses get caught. They all say the same thing. They were hired by telephone, paid in cash in advance, usually Swiss francs, and they never saw the man who hired them.
“So he leaves a pattern. First he illegally purchases a piece of equipment. Then he uses forged papers and fake identities to ship it back and forth in Europe until no one is able to follow his trail. Then he smuggles it across the border. Then shortly later, he steals service manuals.”
“One man can do all that?” Limoges asked.
“One man can orchestrate all that,” Brewer replied. “Look here. In a six-month period last year he was smouching up everything in Europe from microchips to mainframes. All kinds of CRT capability. Even command technology for missiles. A variety of computer-manufacturing methods. Machinery plans—blueprints by the pound. Tooling, all kinds of tooling that they can reverse engineer. Disk drives. Communications hardware and software—all of it centering on one thing: microprocessor manufacture and design. In a little over a year Mr. X got enough equipment into Russia to give it a formidable military microchip capability. All of it taken from the heartland of the U.S. It’s been like the sacking of Rome.
“Lately he’s been focusing on Star Wars hardware, and especially trench capacitance on megabit chips. You know what’s number one on his shopping list? Four-bit machinery. It’s brandnew technology. We’ve just made the first machines for this—IBM and a few others. Maybe the Japanese. And Mr. X is on hand, trying to swipe it already.”
Limoges stared at the pile of scattered documents in his lap.
Brewer said, “Let me tell you how good this guy is. On at least three occasions he smuggled VAX 10’s back into the West. And two IBM 370’s. Complete mainframe computers.”
Limoges smiled skeptically. “Reverse smuggling?”
“Yes. The Russians can’t do maintenance on the American computers they’ve stolen. So when they need servicing, Super Red smuggles them over the border into a Western European country, sets them up in a phony factory setting, then has American-trained European technical staffs unwittingly service and repair them. Then he smuggles them back into Russia.
“On one occasion he assembled an entire anti-microcontamination plant in a factory building in Austria and set it working. Next he smuggled in a complete team of factory managers from Zeleenograd and demonstrated it. Then to modify it according to their directions, he went out and swiped other machines they asked for, crated the whole lot—tons and tons of matériel—and slipped it across the border to Hungary and then into Moscow. He’s Moscow’s ace in the hole—Mr. Nevermiss—the invisible man. Yet there’s no record of him anywhere. You never see him or hear of him. He just leaves a shadow. A trademark. A style. All these smuggling jobs I’ve shown you have the imprint of the same mind. He’s a brilliant operator.”
Limoges looked at the pages of documentation that littered his backseat. “Looks like you got everything except the key piece, Brewer,” he said.
“What?”
“His name.”
Brewer smiled grimly at him. “That’s going to be the hard part,” he said. “Your prayers are earnestly solicited.”
In the rear of the computer-repair shop, Gogol stood looking at an array of anti-eavesdropping devices ranged on a workbench. He looked again at the Polaroid photographs Nevans had given him.
“Everything’s on there,” the engineer said, pointing at the workbench. “A duplicate of everything from the trunk of that car is on that workbench.” He held out a list.
“I understand that,” Gogol said. “My question is, how do we penetrate it?”
The engineer made a sour face at the workbench. “We don’t,” he said. “There’s no way in the world.”
Chapter 28
Brewer didn’t move in with Margie again. He
went to his own apartment. He even delayed calling her to let her know he was back. Live together. Die separately.
His living room now looked like a war room. All around the walls he’d pinned up maps of the U.S. and Europe. On each map, with felt markers, he’d traced a different one of Mr. X’s smuggling operations. The felt markers in blue and green and red zigzagged across the motor routes of the U.S. and Europe. X’s patience and cunning were evident in every move, every switch of cargo, every relabeling, every forged manifest, every document.
Limoges was right. Brewer could tell a great deal about Mr. X—his favorite trucking companies in each country, his product interests, his method of operation, his method of finding people to blackmail, and his technique of blackmailing them. He could tell something of how Mr. X’s mind worked and how he timed his operations. Gazing around his living room, it was obvious: he knew a great deal about Mr. X’s methods. But he didn’t know a thing about Mr. X.
The only tangible fact he had—the only hint of a personality, the only individual touch—was the ruble note that had been pushed into Bobby English’s suitcoat pocket. Brewer put it on his kitchen counter and stared at it. He smoothed it with his fingers, read the legend.
Somewhere in all this welter of facts—shipping dates and product lists, airline schedules and names of people who had handled the cargo—somewhere in there was a clue to X’s identity.
Brewer crumpled the ruble in his fist. I’ll get you.
Was Mr. X tall or short? Thirty or forty or fifty? Dour? Humorless? Flamboyant or reserved? Did he drink with the boys or drink alone? Married? Children? And why did he have the thugs in L.A. push a Russian bank note into English’s pocket? Was it a personal message to English, or something more revealing—a romantic flourish?
Sauer had gotten close to Mr. X—in Vienna. Was there some clue that Sauer had omitted—even unwittingly? There was one way to find out.
Brewer went to Sauer’s apartment. He tapped on the door.
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