Icon

by Frederick Forsyth

  The man had been let in at ten. As usual. Via the underground passage. No one had accompanied him. Both guards had been needed to open the three doors, because one had the keypad combination to the street door, the other to the innermost door, and both to the middle door.

  He knew the guards had seen the old man start on the top floor. As usual. He knew the guards had then broken from their TV watching to open the offices of the middle floor, the vital executive suite. He knew that one had stood in the doorway while the cleaning of Mr. Komarov’s personal office had been accomplished and the door then relocked, but that both men had been downstairs when the cleaner completed the remainder of the middle floor. As usual. So ... the cleaner had been alone in Akopov’s office. And he had left earlier than usual, in the small hours.

  At nine Mr. Akopov, extremely pale, was escorted from the building. His own car was used but one of the Black Guard drove. Another sat beside the disgraced secretary in the rear. The car did not drive to Akopov’s apartment. It headed out of the city to one of the sprawling camps housing the Young Combatants.

  By nine Colonel Grishin had finished reading the file from the staff and personnel office containing the employment details of one Zaitsev, Leonid, aged sixty-three, office cleaner. There was a private address, but the man would have left. He was due at the dacha at ten.

  He did not appear. At midnight Colonel Grishin and three Black Guards left to visit the old man’s residence.

  ¯

  AT that hour Celia Stone rolled off her young lover with a happy smile and reached for a cigarette. She smoked little, but this was one of those moments. Hugo Gray, on his back in her bed, continued to pant. He was a fit young man who kept himself in shape with squash and swimming, but the previous two hours had required most of his stamina.

  Not for the first time he wondered why God had so arranged things that the appetites of a love-hungry woman would always exceed the capacities of a male. It was extremely unfair.

  In the darkness Celia Stone took a long pull, felt the nicotine hit the spot, leaned over her lover, and tousled his dark brown curls.

  “How on earth did you get to be a cultural attaché?” she teased. You wouldn’t know Turgenev from Lermontov.”

  “I’m not supposed to,” grumbled Gray. “I’m supposed to tell the Russkies about our culture—Shakespeare, Brontë, that sort of thing.”

  “And is that why you have to keep going into conference with the Head of Station?”

  Gray came off the pillow fast gripped an upper arm, and hissed into her ear:

  “Shut up, Celia. This place could be bugged.”

  In a huff Celia Stone left to make coffee. She didn’t see why Hugo should be so picky about a little tease. Anyway what he did in the embassy was a pretty open secret.

  She was right of course. For the previous month Hugo Gray had been the third and junior member of the Moscow Station of the Secret Intelligence Service. Once it had been much bigger in the good old days at the height of the Cold War. But times change and budgets diminish. In its collapsing state Russia was seen as a small enough threat.

  More important, ninety percent of things that had once been secret were openly available or of minimal interest. Even the former KGB had a press officer, and across the city in the U.S. Embassy the CIA was down to a football team.

  But Hugo Gray was young and keen, and convinced most diplomatic apartments were still bugged. Communism might have gone, but Russian paranoia was doing fine. He was correct, of course, but the FSB agents had already tagged him for what he was and were quite happy.

  ¯

  THE weirdly named Enthusiasts’ Boulevard is probably the most decrepit, shabbiest, and meanest quarter in the city of Moscow. In a triumph of Communist planning it was situated downwind of the chemical warfare research establishment, which had filters like tennis nets. The only enthusiasm ever noted among its inhabitants was possessed by those slated to move out.

  According to the records Leonid Zaitsev lived with his daughter, her truck-driver husband, and their child in a flat just off the main street. It was half-past twelve and still a warm summer’s night when the sleek black Chaika, its driver’s head stuck out of the window to read the grimy street names, pulled up outside.

  The son-in-law’s name was different of course, and they had to check with a roused and drowsy neighbor on the ground floor to establish that the family lived on the fourth. There was no elevator. The four men clumped up the stairs and hammered on the peeling door.

  The woman who answered, sleepy and bleary-eyed, must have been in her mid-thirties but looked a decade older. Grishin was polite but insistent. His men pushed past and fanned out to search the flat. There was not much to search; it was tiny. Two rooms in fact, with a fetid lavatory and a curtained cooking alcove.

  The woman had been sleeping with her six-year-old in the one family-sized bed in one of the rooms. The child now woke and began to whimper, the whine rising to a cry when the bed was turned over to see if anyone hid beneath it. The two miserable plywood cupboards were opened and ransacked.

  In the other room Zaitsev’s daughter pointed helplessly at the cot along one wall where her father slept, and explained that her husband was miles away on a trip to Minsk and had been for two days. By now weeping helplessly, a cue taken up by the child, she swore her father had not returned the previous morning. She was worried but had taken no steps to report him missing. He must have fallen asleep on a park bench, she thought.

  In ten minutes the Black Guards had established that no one was hidden in the flat, and Grishin was convinced the woman was too terrified and ignorant to lie. Within thirty minutes they were gone.

  Grishin directed the Chaika not back into central Moscow but to the camp forty miles away where Akopov was being held. For the rest of the night he questioned the hapless secretary himself. Before dawn the sobbing man admitted that he must have left the vital document consigned to his care lying on his desk. He had never done such a thing before. He could not understand how he had forgotten to lock it up. He begged for forgiveness. Grishin nodded and patted him on the back.

  Outside the barracks block he summoned one of his inner-core deputies.

  “It is going to be a stinking hot day. Our friend in there is distressed. I think a predawn swim is in order.”

  Then he drove back to the city. If the vital file had been left lying on Akopov’s desk, he reasoned, it had either been wrongly thrown out, or the cleaner had taken it. The former theory did not work. Trash from party headquarters was always retained for several days, then incinerated under supervision. The paper trash of the previous night had been sifted sheet by sheet. Nothing. So, the cleaner. Why a semiliterate old man should want to do such a thing, or what he had done with it, Grishin could not fathom. Only the old man could explain. And explain he would.

  Before the normal hour of breakfast he had put two thousand of his own men, all in civilian clothes, onto the streets of Moscow to search for an old man in a threadbare ex-army greatcoat. He had no photograph, but the description was precise, even down to the three steel teeth at the front of the mouth.

  However, the job was not that easy, even with two thousand searchers. There were ten times that number of derelicts crowding the back alleys and parks, of all ages and sizes, and all shabbily dressed. If, as he suspected, Zaitsev was now living on the streets, everyone would have to be examined. One of them would have three steel teeth and a black-covered file. Grishin wanted both and without delay. His bewildered but obedient Black Guards, in ordinary pants and shirts for the day was hot, fanned out through Moscow.

  Langley, December 1983

  JASON Monk rose from his desk, stretched, and decided to go down to the commissary. A month back from Nairobi, he had been told his performance reports were good and in some cases extremely so. Promotion was in the pipeline and the head of the Africa Division was pleased but would be sorry to lose him.

  Monk had arrived back to find himself assigned to the Spanish
language course on which he would begin just after the Christmas and New Year break. Spanish would constitute his third foreign language, but more, it would open up the whole Latin American Division to him.

  South America was a big territory and an important one, for not only was it within the American backyard, as prescribed by the Monroe Doctrine, it was also a prime target for the Soviet bloc, which had targeted it for insurrection, subversion, and Communist revolution. As a result the KGB had a big operation south of the Rio Grande, one the CIA was determined to head off. For Monk at thirty-three South America was a good career move.

  He was stirring his coffee when he felt someone standing in front of his table.

  “Great suntan,” said a voice. He looked up. Monk recognized the man who was smiling down at him. He rose, but the man gestured him to stay seated, one of the aristocracy being nice to the peasants.

  Monk was surprised. He knew the speaker was one of the key men in the Ops Directorate, for someone had pointed him out in the corridor, the newly appointed head of the Soviet Branch, Counterintelligence Group of the Soviet/East European Division.

  What surprised Monk was how nondescript the man appeared. They were much the same height, two inches under six feet, but the other man, though nine years older, was well out of condition. Monk noticed the greasy hair slicked back straight from the forehead, the thick moustache covering the upper section of a weak and vain mouth, the owlish myopic eyes.

  “Three years in Kenya,” he said to explain the tan.

  “Back to wintry Washington, eh?” said the man. Monk’s antennae were giving him bad vibes. Behind the eyes there was a mockery. I’m a lot smarter than you, they seemed to be saying I m extremely smart indeed.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Monk. A heavily nicotine-stained hand came out. Monk noticed this and the maze of tiny capillaries round the base of the nose that often betrayed the heavy boozer. He rose and flashed a grin, the one the girls in the typing pool called among themselves the Redwood Special.

  “And you must be ... ?” said the man.

  “Monk. Jason Monk.”

  “Good to know you, Jason. I’m Aldrich Ames.”

  ¯

  NORMALLY, the embassy staff would not have been working on a Saturday—least of all, on a hot summer Saturday when they could have been off on a sylvan weekend—but the president’s death had produced a welter of extra work and weekend labors were required.

  If Hugo Gray’s car had started that morning, many men who later died would have stayed alive and the world would have taken a different course. But ignition solenoids are a law unto themselves. After frantically trying to get a reaction, Gray ran after the red Rover as it neared the barrier of the enclave and tapped on the window. Celia Stone gave him a lift.

  He sat beside her as she swerved out into Kutuzovsky Prospekt and headed past the Ukraina Hotel toward the Arbat and the Kremlin. His heels scuffed something on the floor. He stooped and retrieved it.

  “Your takeover bid for Izvestia?” he asked. She looked sideways and recognized the file he was holding.

  “Oh, God, I was going to trash it yesterday. Some old lunatic threw it into the car. Nearly frightened the life out of me.”

  “Another petition,” said Gray. “They never stop. Usually it’s for visas, of course.” He flicked open the black cover and glanced at the title page. “No, it’s more political.”

  “Great. I’m Mister Bonkers and here is my master plan to save the world. Just give it to the ambassador.”

  “Is that what he said? Give it to the ambassador?”

  “Yep. That, and thanks for the beer.”

  “What beer?”

  “How should I know? He was a nutcase.”

  Gray read the title page and turned over several more. He grew quiet.

  “It is political,” he said. “It’s some kind of manifesto.”

  “You want it, you have it,” said Celia. They left the Alexandrovsky Gardens behind and turned toward the Stone Bridge.

  Hugo Gray was going to give the unwanted gift a quick skim and then ease it into the wastepaper basket. But he read ten pages, rose, and sought an interview with the Head of Station, a shrewd Scot with a mordant wit.

  The Head’s office was swept daily for bugs, but really secret conferences were always held in the bubble. This strange confection is usually a conference chamber suspended from reinforced beams so that it is surrounded on all sides by an air-filled gap when the doors are closed. Regularly swept inside and out, the bubble is deemed unbuggable by hostile intelligence. Gray did not feel confident enough to ask they adjourn to the bubble.

  “Yes laddie?” said the Head

  “Look Jock I don’t know whether I m wasting your time. Probably am. Sorry. But something odd happened yesterday. An old man threw this into the car of Celia Stone. You know? That press attaché girl. It may be nothing …”

  He petered out. The Head regarded him over the top of his half-moons.

  “Threw it into her car?” he asked gently.

  “She says. Just tore the door open, threw it into the car asked her to give it to the ambassador and was gone.”

  The Head of Station put out his hand for the black-covered file with Gray’s two footprints on it.

  “What kind of man?” he asked.

  “Old, shabby, stubbled. Like a tramp. Frightened the hell out of her.”

  “A petition, perhaps.”

  “That’s what she thought. She was going to throw it away. But she gave me a lift in this morning. I read some of it on the way. It seems more political. The inside title page has the stamp of the logo of the UPF. It reads as if written by Igor Komarov.”

  “Our president-to-be. Odd. All right, laddie, leave it with me.”

  “Thanks, Jock,” said Gray, and rose. The intimacy of first names even between juniors and senior mandarins is encouraged inside the British Secret Intelligence Service. It is deemed to encourage a sense of camaraderie, of family, underlining the us-and-them psychology common to all services in this strange trade. Only the chief himself is referred to as Chief or Sir.

  Gray had reached the door when his boss caused him to pause, his hand on the doorknob.

  “One thing, laddie. Apartments in the Soviet era were shoddily built and the walls were thin. They remain thin. Our Third Trade Secretary this morning is red-eyed with lack of sleep. Fortunately his lady wife is in England. Next time, could you and the delightful Miss Stone be just a wee bit quieter?”

  Hugo Gray went as red as the Kremlin walls and left. The Head of Station put the black document to one side. He faced a busy day and the ambassador wanted to see him at eleven. His Excellency was a busy man and would not wish to be troubled with objects thrown into staff cars by tramps. It would not be until that night, working late in his office, that the spymaster would read what would later come to be known as the Black Manifesto.

  Madrid, August 1984

  BEFORE it moved to a new address in November 1986, the Indian Embassy in Madrid was situated in an ornate turn-of-the-century building at 93 Calle Velasquez. On Independence Day 1984 the Indian ambassador held, as customary, a large reception for leading members of the Spanish government and for the diplomatic corps. As always, it was on August 15.

  Because of the extreme heat of Madrid in that month, and the fact that August is usually chosen for governmental, parliamentary, and diplomatic vacations, many senior figures were away from the capital and were represented by more junior officers.

  From the ambassador’s point of view it was regrettable, but the Indians can hardly rewrite history and change their Independence Day.

  The Americans were represented by their chargé d’affaires supported by the second trade secretary one Jason Monk. The chief of the CIA station within the embassy was also away, and Monk, elevated to the number-two slot in the station, was standing in for him.

  It had been a good year for Monk. He had passed the six-month Spanish course with flying colors, and earned a promotion from
GS-12 to GS-13. The Government Schedule (GS) tag might mean little to those in the private sector because it is the pay scale for federal civil servants, but within the CIA it indicated not only salary but rank, prestige, and the progress of a career.

  More to the point, in a shuffle of top officers, CIA Director William Casey had just appointed a new Deputy Director (Operations) to replace John Stein. The DD(O) is the head of the entire intelligence-gathering arm of the agency and therefore in charge of every agent in the field. The new man was Monk’s original spotter and recruiter, Carey Jordan.

  Finally, on completing the Spanish course, Monk had been assigned not to the Latin America Division but to Western Europe, which had only one Spanish-speaking country, Spain itself.

  Not that Spain was a hostile territory—quite the contrary. But for a single thirty-four-year-old CIA officer the glamorous Spanish capital beat the hell out of Tegucigalpa.

  Because of the good relations between the United States and her Spanish ally, much of the CIA work was not spying on Spain but collaborating with the Spanish counterintelligence people and keeping an eye on the large Soviet and East European community, which was riddled with hostile agents. Even in two months, Monk had created some good relationships with the Spanish domestic agency, most of whose senior officers dated back to the days of Franco and were intensely anti-Communist. Having a problem pronouncing “Jason,” which comes out in Spanish as “Xhasson,” they had dubbed the young American El Rubio, Blondie, and liked him. Monk had that effect on people.

  The reception was hot and typical; groups of people circulating slowly, sipping the Indian government’s champagne, which became warm in the fist in ten seconds, and making polite but desultory conversation that they did not mean. Monk, having estimated he had done his bit for Uncle Sam, was about to leave when he spotted a face he knew.