8:56. Sam plunked himself down on a granite bench in a small park a few blocks off the Arbat and reached into his coat pocket for the cigarritos and matches. He lit one of the small cigars and, hiding his actions, unfolded the slip of paper that the woman in the canteen had slipped into the box, concealed it in his palm, and glanced down.
In small, precise Cyrillic handwriting was the message
It wasn’t an address Sam was familiar with. But there was no way he was going to check his map while sitting in plain view. Sam rolled the message into a ball between the fingers of his left hand and, as he took the small cigar from between his lips, rolled the paper into his mouth and swallowed it.
He checked the street. There was a bar about a hundred meters away. He finished his cigar, then rose, and made his way there. The door was painted wood. It was a neighborhood joint that smelled of old beer and stale cigarette smoke, similar to the Irish bars on Second and Third Avenue when Sam was growing up in New York. Sam pulled the door open and stepped inside the smoky gloom.
It was just like walking into a Blarney Stone. Four regulars hunched over the stained wood bar, their right feet raised on the bar rail. All were drinking vodka in the tall, narrow shot glasses that held a tenth of a liter. Three of the four chased the vodka with beer—Baltika—drunk straight out of halfliter bottles.
In 1950s New York it would have been Three Feathers or Four Roses, chased with draft Knickerbocker or Ballantine.
Sam ambled up to the bar and slapped three coins on the sticky surface. “Baltika tri”
The bartender swept the change off the bar and threw it in an antique cash box sitting on the back bar. Then he reached down, unlatched the door of an old wooden cooler, extracted a half-liter bottle of lager, flipped the top off, and slapped the beer in front of Sam. “Pazhalsta”
“Spacibo” Sam wiped the mouth of the bottle with his hand, picked it up, and gulped. It was good, even at this hour. “Ahh.”
He pulled out his cigars and lit one. The rich tobacco balanced the cool beer nicely. Sam glanced around. He probably had a little time to kill, although he wanted to check the map in order to see where the hell Mar’inoj Rošci was located. For all he knew, it could be in one of the suburbs. No—it couldn’t. If it had been, Irina would have added the information.
He sipped the beer, then rapped on the bar. “Where’s the toilet?”
The bartender looked up from his newspaper and indicated with his chin.
“I’ll be back.” Sam walked to the rear and found the toilet. It was empty. There was the usual pissoir, and a single stall. Sam was happy to see it had a working door. He took it, closed the thin metal behind him and latched it, then turned to discover there was no commode—only what he knew as a Turkish toilet: two size-sixteen concrete footprints flanking a hole in the floor. There was a half-filled ancient bucket with no handle, and a dripping spigot.
God help those whom nature calls. Sam pulled the street map out of his pocket. Quickly he checked the street index, found what he was looking for, and unfolded the map. He located 2 Mar’inoj Rosei. The street was in the northern part of the city—at least a mile from the closest metro stop. But it was close to a couple of trolley-bus lines. From Arbat, Sam guesstimated it was a thirty-minute trip.
He had just refolded the map when the toilet door opened with a thump and there was a rude pounding on the thin sheet-metal door of the stall. “Get out, goddammit, I have to take a huge dump.”
Sam smiled in spite of himself. Direct, these Muscovites. “Keep it in your pants another ten seconds, comrade.” He tossed the bucket of water down the hole, adjusted his clothes, opened the door, and stepped out. “Bucket’s empty.”
A large, red-faced man in a black sheepskin coat lurched by him, his shoulder bumping Sam’s. “I’ll piss it clean, asshole.”
9:37. Sam climbed aboard a boxy, red-and-cream-colored No. 13 trolley bus heading north. The old-fashioned vehicle reminded him of the buses he’d ridden in New York as a kid. The seats were covered in the same rough, hardy velour as metro cars. In Washington, which was a graffiti-rich environment, there was nothing used on public transportation that couldn’t be power-washed or steam-cleaned.
He’d walked from the Gray Line’s Zwetnoi Bulewar metro stop, using tradecraft to make sure he wasn’t being surveilled. His appearance had changed once again, too. Now Sam sported a thick brush of a mustache on his upper lip, and the fur hat had metamorphosed back into a tweed cap.
Sam checked his watch, an anonymous stainless steel Rolex with an adjustable bezel. The trolley bus would take eight or nine minutes at the most. He knew he’d be early at Mar’inoj Rošci by almost two hours. But he wanted the time to do countersurveillance just in case Irina had been careless.
The trolley bus lurched up Olimpiskij Prospekt, then took a hard left that bounced Sam against the door guardrail. He peered through the dirty window only to be rudely bumped again, when the trolley bus swerved right and slammed to a stop.
The doors swung open. The street sign caught Sam’s eye. It readULITSA DUROVA. That was the street Howard mentioned in connection with a dead drop. Impulsively, Sam swung through the rear doors just before they smacked shut with a pneumatic hiss.
He found himself on the wide sidewalk in front of the old Red Army staff headquarters. To his right stood a 1930s, Art Deco police station. Behind and to his left, in the middle of a small plaza, was a statue of Field Marshal Suvorov, the greatest of the imperial Russian generals and one of the most successful tacticians who’d ever lived. It was Suvorov who had invented the dictum “Train hard, fight easy.”
On the roof of the building just beyond Suvorov’s statue was the old vizir site. Involuntarily, Sam glanced up to see if it was still active. He was too far away to be certain.
He sensed no untoward activity. The radar screen in his head clear, Sam turned right and walked east, slaloming his way past half a dozen blue-and-white police cars parked provocatively up on the sidewalk, impeding pedestrian traffic. A pair of cops, their chins tucked into the high collars of thick bulletproof vests, stomped booted feet as they patrolled a fifty-foot beat between the police cars and the sandbagged doors of the station, submachine guns hung around their necks.
The increased police presence in the streets made Sam nervous. Sure, the cops were deployed to guard against more terrorist attacks. But their very presence made his own work a lot more difficult. Sam turned the corner, heading against the traffic flow on Samarskij Lane. Abruptly, he cut behind the station and turned into the park.
Ed Howard had described the site as a hollowed-out tree just north of the police station. Sam scanned the vista. There was a ragged line of leafless poplars. Beyond them, across the snow-covered parkland, lay a bottle-shaped pond.
Idly, Sam took the path that paralleled the tree line, his eyes probing for Howard’s dead drop. He made his first pass without result. He turned, pulled a cigarrito from the tin, stopped to light it—which gave him half a minute to take a closer look at the poplars—then ambled back the way he’d come.
Nothing. He made his way back to Samarskij Lane, turned north, walked as far as the edge of the pond, where the lane merged with Olimpiskij Prospekt, then stopped. Frankly, he was getting nervous. There was almost no one else in the park. A lone man, poking at trees, was bound to attract attention.
Sam turned north again and strolled along the prospekt, trying to put himself inside Howard’s head. If this was his dead drop, where would he locate it?
He paused and looked back to the south. Certainly, nowhere near the police station. Too much chance of being discovered in flagrante delicto. That ruled out the poplar trees. He panned his gaze west. The pond was bordered by a wide pathway, flanked by a smattering of birches and some evergreens. Nah: too much open space. You wanted someplace you could pass quickly, insert your package, and move on.
Sam’s eyes kept moving. In the northwest corner of the park stood the Red Army Museum. Directly north of where he stood was an unmarked, L-shaped street—more of a lane, actually. A row of removable cast-iron stanchions blocked each end of the L, where the twenty-meter-wide band of asphalt merged with the prospekt. No doubt it had been built as an athlete staging area during the Olympics.
Between the apex of the lane and the museum’s back entrance, a path meandered in a wavy sine curve. Just below the path, roughly half the distance to the museum, stood a square, green-painted steel shed perhaps twenty-five feet on each side. It was a utilitarian structure—probably used to house and maintain tractor-drawn lawn mowers and other park equipment. A small grove of mature birch trees stood between the front of the shed and the pathway.
Sam turned. From where he stood, it appeared that the shed was almost directly north of the back side of the police station. He walked between the stanchions, his boots making deep prints in virgin snow. At the top of the lane he veered onto the path leading to the museum.
As he walked, Sam said aloud, “Good tradecraft, Ed.” It was good tradecraft, too. Now Sam had what the instructors at the Farm call cover for status—he had a reason to be on the path. He was going to visit the museum.
He slowed down as he came up on the maintenance shed. It was shielded from the path by one-two-three-four-five-six-seven trees. He passed the first, then the second. He stopped at the middle tree. It had been pruned. Sam squinted. The cuts were recent, too. Certainly, the work had been done within a month or so. Quickly, he scanned all seven birches. The middle tree—number four—was the only one that had been touched.
Sam examined the pruning. The work was all on one side of the tree. Two of the lower branches had been cut back extensively. The stubs were very short—less than an inch. Just above them, a third cut had been made. But the pruner hadn’t been so careful. The stub stuck out almost three inches from the tree trunk.
Sam stepped back and looked at the trees again. Seven trees. The middle tree had been pruned.
The middle tree. It was tree number four no matter which direction he counted from. Number four. Number four. His mind raced. Four—a-b-c-d.
D was the fourth letter of the alphabet. D. And the letter D, in Morse code, was long-short-short. Letter D—long-short-short. Letter D was the emergency call out signal for Sam’s fateful meeting with Pavel Baranov. Was it reaching? Maybe. But as Howard had said during the short face-to-face at Rand Arthur’s house, in the spy’s trade there are no coincidences.
From the way the pruning had been done, it was obvious Howard had completed this dead drop before he’d left for the United States. The defector’s trip had been as well planned out as was his subsequent escape from Washington. But what was Howard’s true purpose? The only thing Sam knew for certain was that Howard’s clues were for Sam and Sam alone. Of their ultimate intention, Sam had not a clue.
There are no coincidences. His heart pounding, Sam left the pathway and walked up to the tree. On the far side, inconspicuous but unmistakable, the bark had been peeled back, the area beneath it hollowed out, and the bark strip resecured with dark, unnoticeable tacks.
Don’t rush. Work smoothly. His pulse racing, Sam pulled the flap, reached inside, and discovered something small and cold. He removed the object and dropped it into a pocket. He replaced the bark strip, then walked away toward the museum.
Sam’s fingers examined the packet. It was small. It was wrapped in some kind of thick plastic. There was tape.
He very much wanted to pull the package out of his pocket and take a look. But that was impossible right now. Right now he had to depart the area safely; extract unnoticed.
Sam made his way along the pathway to the broad rear courtyard of the Army Museum. There was an exit doorway to his left. Cutting through buildings with multiple entrances was basic denied area tradecraft. He stepped over a mound of plowed snow, edged between the parked cars, and made his way to the door. A sign taped to the gunmetal gray entrance instructed him to use the front unless he was a staff member. So much for that idea.
He turned right, walking along the windowless rough-hewn stone rear wall of the museum. As he turned the corner, a Zil coupe passed him. Sam let it go by. Had the driver seemed unduly interested in him? Sam wasn’t sure. But he wasn’t going to take any chances either. Not now. He double-checked to make sure he was alone and unobserved. So far, so good. Suddenly Sam’s head snapped backward, as if in anticipation of a huge sneeze. Sam’s right hand flew into his trouser pocket. It emerged with a balled-up handkerchief. Sam shook the white linen like a flag, put it to his face, and sneezed hard. He brought his left hand up, blew his nose, and then returned the handkerchief—which now contained the false mustache—to his pocket.
Newly clean-shaven, he turned the comer onto Sovietsky Armii Street and stood for a few seconds, monitoring the traffic.
Sam checked his watch. It was almost a quarter of eleven. There was going to be precious little time for countersurveillance on Mar’inoj Rošci Lane. He saw a No. 13 trolley bus making its way up the one-way avenue and jogged north so he could intercept it and climb aboard at the next stop.