Not all of the intelligence operations of KGB are headquartered in the dreary building on Dhzerzhinski Square, which the other intelligence services call Moscow Center. The Committee for External Observation and Resolution, for example, is located in a long and windowless building two miles east of the square.
The man who was called Gorki (by the same computer that named Alexa) sat in his office at the end of a long hall. There was a reception area at the end of the hall and three closed doors. One of the doors led to Gorki; a second led to a supply room; the room beyond the third door was not spoken of by anyone.
Gorki’s office was wrapped in darkness made more acute by the fluorescent lamp on his desk. Everything in the office had been chosen as a prop, save for the giant General Electric air conditioner built into the wall. The building was something of an embarrassment. It had taken too long to construct, it was gloomy (even by Russian standards), and the marble corridors had been stripped at last because the great slabs of marble kept falling off the walls. A party undersecretary had been injured shortly after the building opened by a piece of marble that separated from the wall. The stripped marble was now used as flooring in the various dachas of high Party officials around Moscow.
Gorki’s office was decorated with the portraits of three men: Lenin, Felix Dhzerzhinski, the founder of the secret police, and Gorbachev. He had no other ornaments. He was a spare man with Eurasian features and small, quick eyes that seemed to glitter in the light of the single lamp in the room. His skin was parchment and it was yellow with age and liver disease.
The man across from him was an agent called Alexei, a man of little consequence from the Helsinki station.
Alexei was sweating profusely though the office was very cool in the way a tomb is cool.
Gorki did not smile or speak; he sat very still for a long time. He took a file folder and dropped it on the desk and indicated with a nod of his head that Alexei was to retrieve it. The desk was very wide and Alexei, sitting in an overstuffed chair in the cramped room in front of the large desk, had to rise awkwardly and reach across the desk for the file folder. When he sat down heavily, he was sweating all the more. He had to squint to see the photographs.
“She killed these men,” Gorki began.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this,” said Alexei. He really didn’t understand. He stared at the faces. There were four photographs. They were grouped in twos by paper clips. The first man was shown as he appeared for his official photograph (updated each year—the Russians have great faith in the power of photographs to identify people). The second had a man with his face blown away.
“It’s the same man?” said Alexei.
“Of course.”
The second grouping featured a hairless man staring at a camera. The “after” picture showed him on a slab in a morgue, his eyes open, a large wound on the side of his head.
“She killed them? Alexa?”
“Alexa. She was informed at Zurich they would accompany her on her… assignment. The contract on this second November. November.” Gorki closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, they were liquid and on fire. “Will no one get rid of November for me? Does he subvert every agent? Does he have nine lives?”
Alexei said nothing. The questions were not to be answered.
“Alexa was our most formidable agent in her specialty. What has happened to her? She goes to Lausanne and she betrays us. Why?”
“How were they killed?”
“She had gone to the apartment of the agent. The American we had told her was the second November—”
“The blue moon,” Alexei said.
Gorki blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“I was—” Alexei blushed. “It was nothing, Director.”
Gorki resumed in the same sandpaper voice. “I want to question you as I will question our stationmaster in Zurich. I want to be absolutely certain that Alexa understood the contract and what was expected of her. The two agents she murdered in that apartment—I say ‘murdered’ because it was nothing more than that—I want to know exactly how this came about. There was an old woman also killed. The police in Switzerland are not very happy. The missions in Geneva and Zurich have been shut down in part until the matter is over—”
“How do you know she killed them? It might have been this November.”
“The police are looking for this woman. There was a child she hired to distract the concierge, to gain entry to the apartment in the first place. It appears she ambushed Yuri and Vladimir—the agents, I can use their names now, they are dead. November is gone, Alexa is gone. What does that suggest to you?”
“Comrade Director,” Alexei began. “I don’t know what to make of it. I told her to go to Zurich. To wait for her instructions. You have talked to our Zurich stationmaster—”
“Not yet. He is sent for. He filed a long dispatch and he is flying into Moscow this afternoon from Zurich.” Gorki projected a sense of self-pity: Alexei knew this would be marked against him; something like this had to have blame affixed. It was nearly a repeat of what had happened to the agent Denisov who had been sent into the United States once, to Florida, who had been turned by November and induced to defect… And now Alexa. “I cannot emphasize too strongly the displeasure felt by the Committee—”
“My deepest sympathies, Comrade,” said Alexei, who understood that the focus of scrutiny was on Gorki and that Gorki wished to shift it to another. But not Alexei. Alexei had been in Helsinki. Alexei knew nothing. Alexei was quite certain he could not be blamed.
Gorki had spent the morning with the Secretary of the Fourth Directorate. It had not been a good morning. A new administration in the Soviet Union was cleaning house in all areas, including the area called Committee for State Security. There were, nominally, 300,000 agents who qualified to call themselves KGB. But some were nothing more than timekeepers in factories that consistently fell below quota or where the level of theft was unusually high. Simple policemen and nothing more. The business of intelligence-gathering and disinformation dissemination and the business of agents like Alexa—they were handled by a select group, carefully screened, given long profile tests and psychological examinations. How could Alexa have gone crazy?
It was the perpetual question of the Secretary of the Fourth Directorate, who had pounded his desk again and again, until the little toy railroad engine on the desk danced to the edge and fell off and broke. It did not improve the Secretary’s humor. There were breakdowns in security at every level. Just this winter, the second man in the San Francisco station in the United States had been seduced into defection by a homosexual CIA agent. A homosexual! the Secretary had stormed. Why did our profiles not screen out the homosexuals?
Gorki could not explain that the homosexual agent had been sent to San Francisco in the first place to seduce other homosexuals in positions of power inside Silicon Valley. The world of spies, Gorki thought, was a mirror constantly reflecting different images—but always the mirror image of itself.
What was real? The mirror or the thing beyond the mirror?
Alexa was an embarrassment particularly because November had been presumed dead once and then presumed to be another man—a man named Ready who was still unidentified in the morgue in Helsinki. Was it so simple to fool a bureaucracy? the Secretary had asked with sarcasm as he put the pieces of the broken toy train into his center drawer.
Gorki had no answer that would satisfy either of them. He interrupted his thoughts to speak: “You and Alexa worked together. A long time ago.”
“Yes, Comrade Director,” said Alexei. “I reminded her of this when I saw her in Helsinki. I can assure you, the meeting was brief. I had many matters—”
“You were reprimanded—”
“I can assure you, we met in the open, in the lobby of the Presidentti Hotel. I told her the assignment as I knew it and she caught the afternoon plane to Zurich.” He reached into his pocket for a notebook. “Flight 21, Finnair to Zurich, it left at 14:22 hours—”
“Yes,” said Gorki. “We know.” He sounded disappointed. He sounded tired. Where would he be able to begin?
The red light on the telephone console flashed on.
He picked up the receiver and said nothing.
He replaced it without a word. He looked across at Alexei.
“Go back to the hotel, Alexei. We’ll send for you—”
“Comrade Director—”
Gorki looked at him sharply.
Alexei blushed, struggled to rise, and squeezed out of the chair. He went to the door in the dark room and looked back for a moment. If only there was something he could say.
But he opened the door in silence, stepped outside and closed it. The secretary in the bare, depressing foyer with its linoleum floor and blank white walls stared at him. Alexei saw that a light on her telephone console was flashing. There was a call waiting for Gorki and he wished to take it alone; it was probably from the Zurich stationmaster, kept in another anteroom, waiting to tell Gorki that the problem of Alexa had been the fault of the man in Helsinki, that he must have fouled the message in some way. Alexei felt very sorry for himself as he crossed the bare reception room with its straight wooden chairs lined along one wall. He said something to the secretary, apologized, took his coat from the rack, and opened the door that led to the hall.
Gorki picked up the telephone again.
He heard the voice of his secretary. She said the call was waiting on the third line, the one protected from listening devices by the expedient of a black box that emitted radio signals to jam the line. It was not as efficient and marvelous as the electronic scrambler system used by the Americans but it worked well enough. He dialed to line three and waited.
The line crackled and then was silent. Then he spoke in a whisper: “Moscow is waiting.”
They were the usual code words.
The voice at the other end of the line finished the obligatory salutation: “Everything must go ahead.”
So. The code was complete.
Gorki realized he felt immense dread in that moment. He gripped the receiver tightly.
He knew the voice on the line. There was no mistake.
It was Alexa.