CHAPTER 3

EXPLORATIONS

“WELL, JACK’S GOT HIS DESK in London,” Greer told his colleagues on the Seventh Floor.

“Glad to hear it,” Bob Ritter observed. “Think he knows what to do with it?”

“Bob, what is it with you and Ryan?” the DDI asked.

“Your fair-haired boy is moving up the ladder too fast. He’s going to fall off someday and it’s going to be a mess.”

“You want me to turn him into just one more ordinary desk-weenie?” James Greer had often enough fended off Ritter’s beefs about the size and consequent power of the Intelligence Directorate. “You have some burgeoning stars in your shop, too. This kid’s got possibilities, and I’m going to let him run until he hits the wall.”

“Yeah, I can hear the splat now,” the DDO grumbled. “Okay, which one of the crown jewels does he want to hand over to our British cousins?”

“Nothing much. The appraisal of Mikhail Suslov that the doctors up at Johns Hopkins did when they flew over to fix his eyes.”

“They don’t have that already?” Judge Moore asked. It wasn’t as though it were a super-sensitive document.

“I guess they never asked. Hell, Suslov won’t be around much longer anyway, from what we’ve been seeing.”

The CIA had many ways to determine the health of senior Soviet officials. The most commonly used was photographs or, better yet, motionpicture coverage of the people in question. The Agency employed physicians—most often full professors at major medical schools—to look at the photos and diagnose their ills without getting within four thousand miles of them. It wasn’t good medicine, but it was better than nothing. Also, the American Ambassador, every time he went into the Kremlin, came back to the embassy and dictated his impressions of everything he saw, however small and insignificant it might seem. Often enough, people had lobbied for putting a physician in the post of ambassador, but it had never happened. More often, direct DO operations had been aimed at collecting urine samples of important foreign statesmen, since urine was a good diagnostic source of information. It made for some unusual plumbing arrangements at Blair House, across the street from the White House, where foreign dignitaries were often quartered, plus the odd attempt to break into doctors’ offices all over the world. And gossip, there was always gossip, especially over there. All of this came from the fact that a man’s health played a role in his thinking and decision-making. All three men in this office had joked about hiring a gypsy or two and observed, rightly, that it would have produced results no less accurate than they got from wellpaid professional intelligence officers. At Fort Meade, Maryland, was yet another operation, code-named STARGATE, where the Agency employed people who were well to the left of gypsies; it had been started mainly because the Soviets also employed such people.

“How sick is he?” Moore asked.

“From what I saw three days ago, he won’t make Christmas. Acute coronary insufficiency, they say. We have a shot of him popping what looks like a nitroglycerine pill, not a good sign for Red Mike,” James Greer concluded with Suslov’s in-house nickname.

“And Alexandrov replaces him? Some bargain,” Ritter observed tersely. “I think the gypsies switched them at birth—another True Believer in the Great God Marx.”

“We can’t all be Baptists, Robert,” Arthur Moore pointed out.

“This came in two hours ago on the secure fax from London,” Greer said, passing the sheets around. He’d saved the best for last. “Might be important,” the DDI added.

Bob Ritter was a multilingual speed-reader: “Jesus!”

Judge Moore took his time. As a judge should, he thought. About twenty seconds later than the DDO: “My goodness.” A pause. “Nothing about this from our sources?”

Ritter shifted in his chair. “Takes time, Arthur, and the Foleys are still settling in.”

“I presume we’ll hear about this from CARDINAL.” They didn’t often invoke that agent’s code name. In the pantheon of CIA crown jewels, he was the Cullinan Diamond.

“We should, if Ustinov talks about it, as I expect he will. If they do something about it—”

“Will they, gentlemen?” the DCI asked.

“They’ll sure as hell think about it,” Ritter opined at once.

“It’s a big step to take,” Greer thought more soberly. “You suppose His Holiness is courting it? Not too many men walk up to the tiger, open the cage door, and then make faces at him.”

“I’ll have to show this to the President tomorrow.” Moore paused for a moment’s thought. His weekly meeting at the White House was set for 10:00 the following morning. “The Papal Nuncio is out of town, isn’t he?” It turned out that the others didn’t know. He’d have to have that one checked out.

“What would you say to him, anyway?” This was Ritter. “You have to figure that the other guys in Rome tried to talk him out of this.”

“James?”

“Kinda takes us back to Nero, doesn’t it? It’s almost as though he’s threatening the Russians with his own death.... Damn, do people really think that way?”

“Forty years ago, you put your life on the line, James.” Greer had served his time on fleet boats in the Second World War, and often wore a miniature of his gold dolphins on the lapel of his suit coat.

“Arthur, I took my chances, along with everybody else on the boat. I did not tell Tojo where I was in a personal letter.”

“The man has some serious cojones, guys,” Ritter breathed. “We have seen this sort of thing before. Dr. King never took a step back in his life, did he?”

“And I suppose the KKK was as dangerous to him as the KGB is to the Pope,” Moore completed the thought. “Men of the cloth have a different way of looking at the world. It’s called ‘virtue,’ I think.” He sat forward. “Okay, when the President asks me about this—and for damned sure he will—what the hell do I tell him?”

“Our Russian friends might just decide that His Holiness has lived long enough,” Ritter answered.

“That’s a hell of a big and dangerous step to take,” Greer objected. “Not the sort of thing a committee does.”

“This committee might,” the DDO told the DDI.

“There would be hell to pay, Bob. They know that. These men are chess players, not gamblers.”

“This letter backs them into a corner.” Ritter turned. “Judge, I think the Pope’s life might be in danger.”

“It’s much too early to say that,” Greer objected.

“Not when you remember who’s running KGB. Andropov is a Party man. What loyalty he has is to that institution, damned sure not to anything we would recognize as a principle. If this frightens, or merely worries them, they will think about it. The Pope has hurled down his gauntlet at their feet, gentlemen,” the Deputy Director (Operations) told the others. “They just might pick it up.”

“Has any Pope ever done this?” Moore asked.

“Resign his post? Not that I can remember,” Greer admitted. “I don’t even know if there’s a mechanism for this. I grant you it’s one hell of a gesture. We have to assume he means it. I don’t see this as a bluff.”

“No,” Judge Moore agreed. “It can’t be that.”

“He’s loyal to his people. He has to be. He was a parish priest once upon a time. He’s christened babies, officiated at weddings. He knows these people. Not as an amorphous mass—he’s been there to baptize and bury them. They are his people. He probably thinks of all Poland as his own parish. Will he be loyal to them, even at the peril of his life? How can he not be?” Ritter leaned forward. “It’s not just a question of personal courage. If he doesn’t do it, the Catholic Church loses face. No, guys, he’s serious as hell, and he isn’t bluffing. Question is, what the hell can we do about it?”

“Warn the Russians off?” Moore wondered aloud.

“No chance,” Ritter shot back. “You know better than that, Arthur. If they set up an operation, it’ll have more cutouts than anything the Mafia’s ever done. How good do you suppose security is around him?”

“Not a clue,” the DCI admitted. “I know the Swiss Guards exist, with their pretty uniforms and pikes.... Didn’t they fight once?”

“I think so,” Greer observed. “Somebody tried to kill him, and they fought a rear-guard action while he skipped town. Most of them got killed, I think.”

“Now they mostly pose for pictures and tell people where the bathroom is, probably,” Ritter thought out loud. “But there has to be something to what they do. The Pope is too prominent a figure not to attract the odd nutcase. The Vatican is technically a sovereign state. It has to have some of the mechanisms of a country. I suppose we could warn them—”

“Only when we have something to warn them about. Which we don’t have, do we?” Greer pointed out. “He knew when he sent this off that he’d be rattling a few cages. What protection he does have must be alerted already.”

“This will get the President’s attention, too. He’s going to want to know more, and he’s going to want options. Jesus, people, ever since he made that Evil Empire speech, there’s been trouble across the river. If they really do something, even if we can’t pin it on them, he’s going to erupt like Mount Saint Helens. There’s damned near a hundred million Catholics right here in America, and a lot of them voted for him.”

For his part, James Greer wondered how far out of control this might spin. “Gentlemen, all we have to this point is a fax of a photocopy of a letter delivered to the government in Warsaw. We do not know for certain that it’s gone to Moscow yet. We have no sign of any reaction to this from Moscow. Now, we can’t tell the Russians we know about it. So we can’t warn them off. We can’t tip our hand in any way. We can’t tell the Pope that we’re concerned, for the same reason. If Ivan’s going to react, hopefully one of Bob’s people will get us the word, and the Vatican has its own intelligence service, and we know that’s pretty good. So, for the moment, all we have is an interesting bit of information that is probably true, but even that is not yet confirmed.”

“So, for the moment, you think we just sit on this and think it through?” Moore asked.

“There’s nothing else we can do, Arthur. Ivan won’t act very fast. He never does—not on something with this degree of political import. Bob?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” the DDI agreed. “Still, the President needs to hear about it.”

“It’s a little thin for that,” Greer cautioned. “But, yes, I suppose so.” Mainly he knew that not telling the President, and then having something dire happen, would cause all of them to seek new employment. “If it goes further in Moscow, we ought to hear about it before anything drastic happens.”

“Fine, I can tell him that,” Judge Moore agreed. Mr. President, we’re taking a very close look at this. That sort of thing usually worked. Moore rang his secretary and asked for some coffee to be sent in. Tomorrow at ten, they’d brief the President in the Oval Office, and then after lunch would be his weekly sit-down with the chiefs of the other services, DIA and NSA, to see what interesting things they had happening. The order should have been reversed, but that’s just how things were usually scheduled.

 

 

HIS FIRST DAY at work had lingered quite a bit longer than expected before he’d been able to leave. Ed Foley was impressed by the Moscow Metro. The decorator must have been the same madman who’d designed Moscow State University’s wedding-cake stonework—evidently beloved of Joe Stalin, whose personal aesthetic had run the gamut from Y to Z. It was strangely reminiscent of the czarist palaces, as interpreted by a terminal alcoholic. That said, the metro was superbly engineered, if somewhat clunky. More to the point, the crush of people was very agreeable to the spook. Making a brush-pass or other sort of pickup from an agent would not be overly trying, so long as he kept to his training, and that was something Edward Francis Foley was good at. Mary Pat would love it here, he was sure now. The milieu for her would be like Disney World was for Eddie. The crush of people, all speaking Russian. His Russian was pretty good. Hers was literary, having learned it at her grandfather’s knee, though she’d have to de-tune it, lest she be made out as someone whose language skills were a little too good to be merely those of the wife of a minor embassy official.

The subway worked well for him. With one station only a couple of blocks from the embassy, and the other practically at their apartment house’s doorstep, even the most paranoid Directorate Two shadow would not find his use of it terribly suspicious, despite the well-known American love for cars. He didn’t look around any more than a tourist would, and thought that maybe he’d made one tail. There’d probably be more than that for the moment. He was a new embassy employee, and the Russians would want to see if he wiggled like a CIA spook. He decided to act like an innocent American abroad, which might or might not be the same thing to them. It depended on how experienced his current shadow was, and there was no telling that. For certain, he’d have a tail for a couple weeks. That was an expected annoyance. So would Mary Pat. So, probably, would Eddie. The Soviets were a paranoid bunch, but then, he could hardly complain about that, could he? Not hardly. It was his job to crack into the deepest secrets of their country. He was the new Chief of Station, but he was supposed to be a stealthy one. This was one of Bob Ritter’s new and more creative ideas. Typically, the identity of the boss spook in an embassy wasn’t expected to be a secret. Sooner or later, everyone got burned one way or another, either ID’d by a false-flag operation or through an operational error, and that was like losing one’s virginity. Once gone, it never came back. But the Agency only rarely used a husband-wife team in the field, and he’d spent years building his cover. A graduate of New York’s Fordham University, Ed Foley had been recruited fairly young, vetted by an FBI background check, and then gone to work for The New York Times as a reporter on a general beat. He’d turned in a few interesting stories, but not too many, and had eventually been told that, while the Times wasn’t going to fire him, it might be better for him to seek employment with a smaller newspaper where he might blossom better on his own. He’d taken the hint and gotten a job with the State Department as a Press Attaché, a job that paid a decent bureaucratic wage, though without a supergrade’s destiny. His official job at the embassy would be to schmooze the elite foreign corespondents of the great American papers and TV networks, granting them access to the ambassador and other embassy officials, and then keeping out of the way while they filed their important stories.

His most important job was to appear competent, but little more. Already the local Times correspondent was telling his colleagues that Foley hadn’t had the right stuff to make it big as a journalist at America’s Foremost Newspaper, and since he wasn’t old enough to teach yet—the other resting place for incompetent reporters—he was doing the next worst thing, being a government puke. It was his job to foster that arrogance, knowing that the KGB would have its people ping on the American press corps for their evaluation of the embassy personnel. The best cover of all for a spook was to be regarded as dull and dim, because the dull and the dim weren’t smart enough to be spies. For that, he thanked Ian Fleming and the movies he’d inspired. James Bond was a clever boy. Not Ed Foley. No, Ed Foley was a functionary. The crazy part was that the Soviets, whose entire country was governed by dull functionaries, more often than not fell for this story just as readily as if they were someone fresh off the pig farm in Iowa.

There is nothing predictable about the espionage business . . . except here, the Station Chief told himself. The one thing you could depend on with the Russians was predictability. Everything was written down in some huge book, and everybody here played the game by the book.

Foley got aboard the subway car, looking around at his fellow passengers, seeing how they looked at him. His clothing marked him as a foreigner as clearly as a glowing halo marked a saint in a Renaissance painting.

“Who are you?” a neutral voice asked, rather to Foley’s surprise.

“Excuse me?” Foley replied in badly accented Russian.

“Ah, you are American.”

“Da, that is so. I work at American embassy. My first day. I am new in Moscow.” Shadow or not, he knew that the only sensible thing was to play this straight.

“How do you like it here?” the inquisitor asked. He looked like a bureaucrat, maybe a KGB counterespionage spook or a stringer. Or maybe just some officer-sitter for some government-run business who suffered from curiosity. There were some of those. Would an ordinary citizen approach him? Probably not, Foley judged. The atmosphere tended to limit curiosity to the space between a person’s ears . . . except that Russians were curious as hell about Americans of every stripe. Told to disdain or even to hate Americans, the Russians frequently regarded them as Eve had regarded the apple.

“The metro is very impressive,” Foley answered, looking around as artlessly as he could.

“Where in America do you come from?” was the next question.

“New York City.”

“You play ice hockey in America?”

“Oh, yes! I’ve been a fan of the New York Rangers since I was a child. I want to see the hockey here.” Which was entirely truthful. The Russian skate-and-pass game was the closest thing to Mozart in the world of sports. “The embassy has good tickets, they told me today. Central Army,” he added.

“Bah!” the Muscovite snorted. “I am Wings fan.”

The guy might just be genuine, Foley thought with surprise. The Russians were as picky about their hockey clubs as American baseball fans were with their home teams. But the Second Chief Directorate probably had hockey fans working there, too. “Too careful” was a concept he did not admit to, especially here.

“Central Army is the champion team, isn’t it?”

“Too prissy. Look what happened to them in America.”

“In America we play a more physical—is that the right word?—game. To you they must seem like hooligans, yes?” Foley had taken the train to Philadelphia to see that game. The Flyers—more widely known as the Broad Street Bullies—had beaten the snot out of the somewhat arrogant Russian visitors, rather to his amusement. The Philadelphia team had even wheeled out its secret weapon, the aging Kate Smith, singing “God Bless America,” which for that team was like breakfasting on nails and human infants. Damn, what a game that one had been!

“They play roughly, yes, but they are not fairies. Central Army thinks they are the Bolshoi, the way they skate and pass. It’s good to see them humbled sometimes.”

“Well, I remember the ’80 Olympics, but honestly that was a miracle for us to defeat your fine team.”

“Miracle! Bah! Our coach was asleep. Our heroes were asleep. Your children played a spirited game, and they won honestly. The coach needed to be shot.” Yeah, this guy talked like a fan.

“Well, I want my son to learn hockey over here.”

“How old is he?” Genuine interest in the man’s eyes.

“Four and a half,” Foley answered.

“A good age to learn to skate. There are many opportunities for children to skate in Moscow, aren’t there, Vanya?” he observed to the man next to him, who’d watched the exchange with a mixture of curiosity and unease.

“Make sure he gets good skates,” the other man said. “Bad ones can injure the ankles.” A typical Russian response. In this often harsh country, solicitude for children was endearingly genuine. The Russian bear had a soft heart for kids, but one of icy granite for adults.

“Thank you. I will be sure to do that.”

“You live in the foreigners’ compound?”

“Correct,” Foley confirmed.

“Next stop is yours.”

“Oh, spasiba, and good day to you.” He made his way to the door, turning to nod a friendly good-bye to his newfound Russian friends. KGB? he wondered. Perhaps, but not certainly. He’d determine that by whether or not he saw them on the train a month or so from now.

What Ed Foley didn’t know was that the entire exchange had been observed by a man a mere two meters away, holding a copy of today’s Sovietskiy Sport. His name was Oleg Zaitzev, and Oleg Ivanovich was KGB.

The Station Chief left the subway car and followed the crush to the escalator. At one time, it would have led him to a full-standing portrait of Stalin, but that was gone now, and not replaced. The outside air was acquiring the early autumn chill, just enough to feel good after the stuffiness of the metro. Around him, ten or more men lit up their foul-smelling cigarettes and walked their separate ways. It was only half a block to the walled compound of apartment blocks, with its guard shack and the uniformed attendant, who looked Foley over and decided he was an American by the quality of his overcoat, without acknowledging his passage by even a nod, and certainly not a smile. The Russians didn’t smile much. It was something that struck all American visitors to the country; the outwardly dour nature of the Russian people seemed almost inexplicable to foreigners.

 

 

TWO STOPS FARTHER DOWN, Oleg Zaitzev wondered if he should write up a contact report. KGB officers were encouraged to do so, partly as a sign of loyalty, partly to show their eternal vigilance against citizens of the Main Enemy, as America was known within his professional community. It was mostly to show their institutional paranoia, a characteristic openly fostered by KGB. But by profession Zaitzev was a paper-pusher and he didn’t feel the need to generate more meaningless paper. It would just be looked at, read in a cursory way at most, and tossed into some file box by some other bureaucrat from his upstairs office, never to be read again. His time was too precious for that sort of nonsense. Besides, he hadn’t even talked to the foreigner, had he? He left the train at the proper stop, rode up the moving stairs into the crisp evening air, lighting his Trud cigarette as he got outside. It was a vile thing. He had access to the “closed” stores and could have bought French, British, or even American smokes, but they were too costly, and his funds were not as unlimited as his choices. So, he smoked the well-known “Labor” brand, like untold millions of his countrymen. The quality of his clothing was a tiny bit better than that worn by most of his comrades, but not overly so. Not so much that he stood out from the others. It was two blocks to his apartment building. His flat was #3 on the first—the Americans would have called it the second—floor instead of higher up, and that was fine with him, because it meant that he didn’t risk a heart attack if the elevator didn’t work, which happened about once a month. Today it worked. The elderly woman who occupied the janitor/superintendent’s flat on the ground floor had her door closed today, instead of open to denote some mechanical problem she’d have to warn him about. So nothing in the building was broken today. Not quite cause for celebration, just one of the small things in life for which to be grateful to God or whoever determined the vagaries of fate. The cigarette died as he walked through the main door. Zaitzev flicked the butt into the ashtray and walked to the elevator, which, remarkably, was waiting for him with the door open.

“Good evening, Comrade Zaitzev,” the operator said in greeting.

“Good evening, Comrade Glenko.” The man was a disabled veteran of the Great Patriotic War, with the medals to prove it. Artilleryman, so he said. Probably the building informer, the man who reported unusual occurrences to some other KGB stringer, in return for which he got a niggardly stipend to supplement whatever pension the Red Army paid him. That was the extent of their exchange. Glenko turned the handle and brought the elevator car smoothly to his floor and opened the door. From there, it was a mere five meters to his home.

Opening his apartment door, he was greeted by the smell of boiling cabbage—so cabbage soup for dinner. Not unusual. It was a staple of the Russian diet, along with rich black bread.

“Papa!” Oleg Ivanovich bent down to scoop up his little Svetlana. She was the light of Zaitzev’s life, with her cherubic face and welcoming smile.

“How is my little zaichik today?” He scooped her up in his arms and accepted her darling little kiss.

Svetlana attended a day-care center crowded with other children her age—not quite a preschool, not quite a nursery. Her clothing comprised about the only colorful things to be had in his country, in this case a green pullover shirt and gray pants over little red leather shoes. If his access to the “closed” shops had one advantage, it was in what he could get his little girl. The Soviet Union didn’t even have cloth diapers for its infants—mothers usually made them out of old bedsheets—much less the disposable kind favored in the West. As a result, there was a premium on getting the little ones toilet-trained, which little Svetlana had managed some time ago, much to her mother’s relief. Oleg followed the smell of cabbage to his wife in the kitchen.

“Hello, darling,” Irina Bogdanova said from the stove. Cabbage, potatoes, and what he hoped was some ham cooking. Tea and bread. No vodka yet. The Zaitzevs drank, but not to excess. They usually waited until Svetlana went down to bed. Irina worked as an accountant at the GUM department store. The possessor of a degree from Moscow State University, she was liberated in the Western sense, but not emancipated. Hanging by the kitchen table was the string bag she carried in her purse everywhere she went, eyes always on the lookout for something she might buy to eat or brighten their drab flat. It meant standing in line, which was the task of women in the Soviet Union, along with cooking dinner for her man, regardless of his professional status in life or hers. She knew that he worked for State Security, but did not know his job there, just that it paid a fairly comfortable salary, and came with a uniform that he rarely wore, and a rank soon to take a jump upward. So, whatever he did, he did it well enough, she judged, and that was sufficient. The daughter of an infantryman in the great Patriotic War, she’d gone to state schools and gotten above-average marks, but never quite achieved what she’d wished. She’d shown some talent at the piano, but not enough to go onward to a state conservatory. She’d also tried her hand at writing, but there, too, she’d fallen short of the necessary talent to get published. Not an unattractive woman, she was thin by Russian standards. Her mouse-brown hair fell to her shoulders and was usually well brushed-out. She read a good deal, whichever books she could get that were worth her time, and enjoyed listening to classical music. She and her husband occasionally attended concerts at the Tchaikovsky. Oleg preferred the ballet, and so they went there as well, helped, Irina assumed, by his job at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. He was not yet so senior as to allow them to hobnob with senior State Security officials at comradely parties. Perhaps when he got his colonelcy, she hoped. For the moment they lived the middle-class life of state-employed bureaucrats, scratching by on their combined salaries. The good news was that they had occasional access to the “closed” KGB stores where at least they could buy nice things for her and Svetlana. And, who knew, maybe they could afford to have another child in due course. They were both young enough, and a little boy would brighten their home.

“Anything interesting today?” she asked. It was almost their daily joke.

“There is never anything interesting at the office,” he joked in reply. No, just the usual messages to and from field officers, which he forwarded to the appropriate pigeonholes for in-house couriers to hand-carry upstairs to the offices of the control officers who really ran things at KGB. A very senior colonel had come down to see the operation the previous week, which he’d done without a smile, a friendly word, or a question for twenty minutes, before disappearing off to the elevator banks. Oleg knew the man’s seniority only from the identity of his escort: the colonel who ran his own operation. Whatever words had been exchanged had been too distant for him to overhear—people tended to talk in whispers, if at all, in his department—and he was trained not to show much interest.

But training could only go so far. Captain Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev was too bright to turn his mind all the way off. Indeed, his job required something approaching judgment for its proper execution, but that was something to be exercised as gingerly as a mouse’s stroll through a roomful of cats. He always went to his immediate superior and always started off with the most humble of questions before getting approval. In fact, his judgmental questions were always approved. Oleg was gifted in that, and he was beginning to get recognized as such. His majority wasn’t all that far off. More money, more access to the closed stores, and, gradually, more independence—no, that wasn’t quite right. A little less circumscription on what he would be able to do. Someday he might even ask if a message going out made good sense. Do we really want to do this, comrade? he’d wanted to ask every so often. Operational decisions were not his to make, of course, but he could—or would be able to in the future—question the wording of a directive in the most oblique terms. Every so often he’d see something going out to Officer 457 in Rome, for example, and wonder if his country really wanted to risk the consequences of having the mission order go bad. And sometimes they did go bad. Just two months before, he’d seen a dispatch from Bonn warning that something had gone wrong with the West German counterintelligence service, and the field officer had urgently requested instructions—and the instructions had been to continue his mission without questioning the intelligence of his superiors. And that field officer had disappeared right off the network. Arrested and shot? Oleg wondered. He knew some of the field officers’ names, virtually all of the operations’ names, and a lot of the operational targets and objectives. Most of all, he knew the code names of hundreds of foreign nationals who were agents of the KGB. At its best, it could be like reading a spy novel. Some of the field officers had a literary streak. Their dispatches were not the terse communiqués of military officers. No, they liked to communicate the state of mind of their agents, the feel of the information and the mission assigned. They could be like travelogue writers describing things for a paying audience. Zaitzev wasn’t really supposed to digest such information, but he was a man with a mind, and besides, there were telltale codes built into every dispatch. The third word misspelled, for example, could be a warning that the officer had been compromised. Every officer had a different such key system, and Zaitzev had a list of them all. Only twice had he caught such irregularities, and on one of those occasions his supervisors had told him to ignore it as a clerical error—a fact that still astounded him. But the mistake had never been repeated, and so, maybe it really had just been an enciphering error by the officer in question. After all, his superior had told him, men trained at The Centre didn’t often get caught in the field. They were the best in the world, and the Western enemies were not that clever, were they? Then Captain Zaitzev had nodded submission to the moment, written down his warning notation, and made sure it was in the permanent files, covering his ass like any good bureaucrat.

What if his immediate superior were under the control of some Western spy agency, he’d wondered at the time and later on, usually after a few drinks in front of his TV set. Such a compromise would be perfection itself. Nowhere in KGB was there a single written list of their officers and agents. No, “compartmentalization” was a concept invented here back in the 1920s, or perhaps earlier still. Even Chairman Andropov was not allowed to have such a thing within his reach, lest he defect to the West and take it with him. KGB trusted no one, least of all its own Chairman. And so, oddly, only people in his own department had access to such broad information, but they were not operations personnel. They were just communicators.

But wasn’t the one person KGB always tried to compromise the cipher clerk in a foreign embassy? Because he or she was the one functionary, the one not bright enough to be entrusted with anything of importance—wasn’t she the one person who was so entrusted? It was so often a woman, after all, and KGB officers were trained to seduce them. He’d seen dispatches along those lines, some of them describing the seduction in graphic detail, perhaps to impress the men upstairs with their manly prowess and the extent of their devotion to the State. Being paid to fuck women didn’t strike Zaitzev as conspicuously heroic, but then, perhaps the women were surpassingly ugly, and performing a man’s duty under such circumstances might have been difficult.

What it came down to, Oleg Ivanovich reflected, was that functionaries were so often entrusted with cosmic secrets, and he was one of them, and wasn’t that amusing? More amusing than his cabbage soup, certainly, nutritious though it might be. So even the Soviet state trusted some people, despite the fact that “trust” was a concept as divorced from its way of collective thinking as a man is from Mars. And he was such a man. Well, one result of that irony was the cute green shirt his little daughter wore. He set a few books on the kitchen chair and hoisted Svetlana there so that she could eat her dinner. Svetlana’s hands were a little small for the zinc-aluminum tableware, but at least it wasn’t too heavy for her to use. He still had to butter her bread for her. It was good to be able to afford real butter.

“I saw something nice at the special store on the way home,” Irina observed as women do over dinner, to catch their husbands in a good mood. The cabbage was especially good today, and the ham was Polish. So she’d shopped today at the “closed” store, all right. She’d gotten into the habit only nine months before, and now she wondered aloud how she’d ever lived without it.

“What’s that?” Oleg asked, sipping his Georgian tea.

“Brassieres, Swedish ones.”

Oleg smiled. Those of Soviet manufacture always seemed to be designed for peasant girls who suckled calves instead of children—far too big for a woman of his wife’s more human proportions. “How much?” he asked without looking up.

“Only seventeen rubles each.”

Seventeen certificate rubles, he didn’t correct her. A certificate ruble had actual value. You could, theoretically, even exchange it for a foreign “hard” currency, as opposed to the valueless paper that they used to pay the average factory worker, whose value was entirely theoretical . . . like everything else in his country, when you got down to it.

“What color?”

“White.” Perhaps the special store had black or red ones, but it was a rare Soviet woman who would wear such things. People were very conservative in their habits here.

With dinner finished, Oleg left the kitchen to his wife and took his little girl into the living room and the TV set. The TV news announced that the harvest was under way, as it was every year, with the heroic laborers on the collective farms bringing in the first crop of summer wheat in the northern areas, where they had to grow and harvest it quickly. A fine crop, the TV said. Good, Oleg thought, no bread shortages this winter . . . probably. You could never really be sure about what was said on the TV. Next, some complaining coverage of the American nuclear weapons being deployed in the NATO countries, despite the reasonable Soviet requests that the West forgo such unnecessary, destabilizing, and provocative actions. Zaitzev knew that the Soviet SS-20s were going into place elsewhere, and they, of course, were in no way destabilizing. The big show on TV tonight was We Serve the Soviet Union, about military operations, fine young Soviet men serving their country. Today would be rare coverage of men doing their “international duty” in Afghanistan. The Soviet media didn’t often cover that, and Oleg was curious as to what they’d show. There were occasional discussions over lunch at work about the war in Afghanistan. He tended to listen rather than talk, because he’d been excused from military service, something he didn’t regret one little bit. He’d heard too many stories about the casual brutality in the infantry units, and besides, the uniforms were not attractive to wear. His rarely worn KGB uniform was bad enough. Still, pictures told stories that mere words did not, and he had the keen eye for detail that his job required.

 

 

“YOU KNOW, every year they harvest wheat in Kansas, and it never makes the NBC Nightly News,” Ed Foley said to his wife.

“I suppose feeding themselves is a major accomplishment,” Mary Pat observed. “How’s the office?”

“Small.” Then he waved his hands in such a way as to say that nothing interesting had happened.

Soon she’d have to drive their car around to check for alert signals. They were working Agent CARDINAL here in Moscow, and he was their most important assignment. The colonel knew that he’d have new handlers here. Setting that arrangement up would be touchy, but Mary Pat was accustomed to handling the touchy ones.