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by Frederick Forsyth

  Sliding through the throng he came up behind the man and waited until the dark gray suit had finished talking to a lady in a sari and was alone for a second. From behind, he said in Russian:

  “So, my friend, what happened with your son?”

  The man stiffened and turned. Then he gave a smile.

  “Thank you,” said Nikolai Turkin, “he recovered. He is fit and well.”

  “I’m glad,” said Monk, “and by the look of it your career survived as well.”

  Turkin nodded. Taking a gift from the enemy was a serious offense and had he been reported he would never have left the USSR again. But he had been forced to throw himself on the mercy of Professor Glazunov. The old physician had a son of his own and privately believed his country should cooperate with the best research establishments in the world on matters medical. He had decided not to report the young officer and had modestly accepted his colleagues’ plaudits for the remarkable recovery.

  “Thankfully, yes, but it was close,” he replied.

  “Let’s have dinner,” said Monk. The Soviet looked startled. Monk held up his hands in mock surrender. “No pitch, I promise.”

  Turkin relaxed. Both men knew what the other did. The fact that Monk spoke such perfect Russian indicated he could not possibly be in the Trade Section at the U.S. Embassy. Monk knew that Turkin had to be KGB, probably in Line KR, the counterintelligence branch, because of his liberty to be seen talking to Americans.

  The word Monk had used gave the game away, and the fact that he would use it in a joking fashion indicated he was suggesting a brief truce in the Cold War. A “pitch” or “cold pitch” is a term used when one intelligence officer simply proposes to someone from the other side that they change teams.

  Three nights later the two men came separately to a 4 small back street in the old quarter of Madrid called Calle de los Cuchilleros, the street of the knife grinders. Halfway down what is hardly more than an alley is an old wooden door leading to steps into a basement of brick arches, formerly an old wine store dating back to the Middle Ages. For many years it has served traditional Spanish dishes under the name Sobrinos de Botin. The old arches form booths with a table in the center, and Monk and his guest had one to themselves.

  The meal was good. Monk ordered a Marquès de Riscal. They stayed off shop talk out of courtesy, but talked of wives and children—Monk admitted he still had neither. Little Yuri was now at school but staying with his grandparents during the summer vacation. The wine flowed, a second bottle came.

  Monk failed to realize at first that behind Turkin’s affable facade he entertained a seething rage: not at the Americans, but at the system that had so nearly killed his son. The second bottle of the Marquès was nearly gone when he suddenly asked:

  “Are you happy, working for the CIA?”

  Is this a pitch? Monk wondered. Is the idiot trying to recruit me?

  “Pretty good,” he said lightly. He was pouring wine, watching the bottle, not the Russian.

  “If you have problems, do they support you, your people?”

  Monk kept his eyes on the falling wine, the hand steady.

  “Sure. My people will always go to the wire for you, if you need help. It’s part of the code.”

  “It must be good to work for people who live in such freedom,” said Turkin. Finally Monk put down the bottle and looked across the table. He had promised no pitch, but it was the Russian who had made it—to himself.

  “Why not? Look, my friend, the system you work for is going to change. Soon now. We could help it change faster. Yuri will grow up to live as a free man.”

  Andropov had died, despite the medications from London. He had been succeeded by another geriatric, Konstantin Chernenko, who had to be held up under the armpits. But there was talk of a fresh wind blowing in the Kremlin, a younger man called Gorbachev. By the coffee Turkin was recruited; from henceforth he would stay “in place” at the heart of the KGB but work for the CIA.

  Monk’s luck was in that his superior, the Chief of Station. was away on vacation. Had he been in place Monk would have had to hand Turkin over to others to handle. Instead it fell to him to encode the top secret cable to Langley describing the recruitment.

  Of course there was initial skepticism. A major of Line KR right in the heart of the KGB was a top prize. In a series of covert meetings throughout Madrid for the rest of the summer, Monk learned about his Soviet contemporary.

  Born in Omsk, western Siberia, in 1951, the son of an engineer in the military industry, Turkin had not been able to get into the university he wanted at the age of eighteen and had gone into the army. He was assigned to Border Guards, nominally under the control of the KGB. There he was spotted and posted to the Dservinsky High School, counterintelligence department, where he learned English. He shone.

  With a small group he was transferred to the KGB foreign intelligence training center, the prestigious Andropov Institute. Like Monk, on the other side of the world, he had been tagged as a high-flier. On graduating with distinction Turkin was permitted to join Directorate K of the First Chief Directorate—counter-intelligence within the intelligence-gathering arm.

  Still only twenty-seven, Turkin also married in 1978 and had a son, Yuri, the same year. In 1982 he got his first foreign posting, to Nairobi; his primary task was to try to penetrate the CIA Station in Kenya and recruit agents either there or throughout the Kenyan establishment. It was a posting to be cut short prematurely by his son’s illness.

  Turkin delivered his first package to the CIA in October. Knowing that a complete covert communications system had been set up, Monk took the package back to Langley personally. It turned out to be dynamite. Turkin blew away just about the entire KGB operation in Spain. To protect their source, the Americans would release what they had bit by bit to the Spanish, ensuring that each roundup of Spaniards spying for Moscow would appear as a fluke, or good detection by the Spanish. In each case the KGB was permitted to learn (via Turkin) that the agent himself had made a silly mistake leading to his own capture. Moscow suspected nothing, but lost its whole Iberian operation.

  In his three years in Madrid Turkin rose to become deputy Rezident, which gave him access to just about everything. In 1987 he would transfer back to Moscow and after a year became head of the entire Directorate K Branch within the KGB’s huge apparat in East Germany until the final pullout after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and then of Communism and the reunification with West Germany in 1990. In all that time, although he passed hundreds of messages and packages of intelligence through dead drops and cutouts, he insisted that he be handled by only one man, his friend-across-the-Wall, Jason Monk. It was an unusual arrangement. Most spies have several handlers, or “controllers,” in a six-year career, but Turkin insisted and Langley had to put up with it.

  When Monk got back to Langley that. fall of 1986 he was summoned to the office of Carey Jordan.

  “I’ve seen the stuff,” said the new DDO. “It’s good. We thought he might be a double, but the Spanish agents he has blown away are Grade A. Your man’s on the level. Well done.”

  Monk nodded his appreciation.

  “There is just one thing,” said Jordan. “I didn’t get into this game five minutes ago. Your report on the recruitment strategy is adequate, but there’s something else, isn’t there? What were his real reasons for volunteering?”

  Monk told the DDO what he had not put in the report, the illness of the son in Nairobi and the medications from the Walter Reed.

  “I ought to can your ass,” said Jordan at length. He rose and walked to the window. The forest of birch and beech running down to the Potomac was a blaze of red and gold, the leaves just about to fall.

  “Jesus,” he said after a while. “I don’t know any guy in the agency who would have let him get away without a favor for those drugs. You might never have seen him again. Madrid was a fluke. You know what Napoleon said about generals?”

  “No, sir.’’

  “He said I do
n’t care if they’re good; I want ‘em lucky. You’re weird, but you’re lucky. You know we’ll have to transfer your man to SE Division?”

  At the very top of the CIA was always the Director. Under him came the two main Directorates, Intelligence and Operations. The first, headed by the Deputy Director (Intel), or DDI, had the task of collating and analyzing the great mass of raw information pouring in, and to produce from it the intelligence digests that would go out to the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, Pentagon, et al.

  The actual gathering was done by Operations, headed by the DDO. Ups Directorate subdivided into divisions according to a global map—Latin American Division, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and so forth. But for forty years of the Cold Wan, from 1950 to 1990 and the collapse of Communism, the key division was Soviet/East European, known as SE.

  Officers in other divisions were often resentful that even though they might cultivate and recruit a valuable Soviet asset in Bogotá or Djakarta, he would after recruitment be transferred to the control of SE Division, which would handle him from then on. The logic was that the recruit would be transferred one day from Bogotá or Djakarta anyway, probably back to the USSR.

  Because the Soviet Union was the main enemy, SE Division became the star unit in Ops Directorate. Places were sought after. Even though Monk had majored in Russian at college, and spent years perusing Soviet publications in a back room, he had still served a tour in African Division and was even then assigned to Western Europe.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “You want to go with him?”

  Monk’s spirits leaped.

  “Yes, sir. Please.”

  “Okay, you found him, you recruited him, you run him.”

  Monk was transferred to SE Division within a week. He was tasked to run Major Nikolai Ilyich Turkin, of the KGB. He never returned to Madrid to reside, but he visited, meeting Turkin covertly at picnic sites high in the Sierra de Guadarrama, where they would talk of a thousand things as Gorbachev came to power and the twin programs of perestroika and glasnost began to relax the rules. Monk was glad, because apart from an asset he regarded Turkin as a friend.

  Even by 1984 the CIA was becoming, and some would say had already become, a vast and creaking bureaucracy, dedicated more to paperwork than pure intelligence gathering. Monk loathed bureaucracy and despised paperwork, convinced that what was written down could be stolen or copied. At the ultra-secret heart of the paperwork of the SE Division were the 301 files, which listed the details of every Soviet agent working for Uncle Sam. That fall Monk “forgot” to list all the details of Major Turkin, code-named GT Lysander, in the 301 files.

  ¯

  JOCK Macdonald, Head of Station for the British SIS in Moscow, had a dinner he could not avoid on the night of July 17. He returned briefly to his office to deposit some notes he had made during dinner—he never trusted his apartment not to be burgled—and his eye fell on the black-covered file. Idly he flicked it open and began to read. It was in Russian, of course, and typed, but he was bilingual.

  In fact he never went home that night. Just after midnight he called his wife to explain, then returned to the file. There were some forty pages, divided into twenty subject headings.

  He read the passages concerning the reestablishment of a one-party state and the reactivation of the chain of slave-labor camps for dissidents and other undesirables.

  He perused the tracts dealing with the final solution of the Jewish community and the treatment of the Chechens in particular plus all the other racial minorities.

  He studied the pages concerning the nonaggression pact with Poland to buffer the western border and the re-conquest of Belarus the Baltic States and the southern republics of the former USSR, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova.

  He ingested the paragraphs dealing with the reestablishment of the nuclear arsenal and the targeting of the surrounding enemies

  He pored over the pages describing the destiny of the Russian Orthodox Church and all other religious denominations.

  According to the manifesto the shamed and humiliated armed forces now brooding sullenly in tents, would be rearmed and reequipped, not as a force for defense but for re-conquest. The populations of the reacquired territories would work as serfs to produce food for the Russian masters. Control over them would reside in the ethnic Russian populations in the outer territories, under the aegis of an imperial governor from Moscow. National discipline would be assured by the Black Guard, increased to a force of 200,000 men. They would also handle the special treatment of the anti-socials—liberals, journalists, priests, gays, and Jews.

  The document also purported to reveal the answer to one enigma that had already puzzled Macdonald and others: the source of the Union of Patriotic Forces’ limitless campaign wealth.

  In the aftermath of 1990, the criminal underworld of Russia had been a vast patchwork of gangs who, in the early days, conducted vicious turf wars, leaving scores of their own dead on the streets. Since 1995, a policy of unification had been in progress. By 1999, all Russia from the western border to the Urals was the fiefdom of four great consortia of criminals, chief among them the Dolgoruki, based in Moscow. If the document before him was true, it was they who were funding the UPF, to earn their reward in the future, the elimination of all other gangs and the supremacy of their own.

  It was five in the morning when, after the fifth rereading, Jock Macdonald closed the Black Manifesto. He sat back and stared at the ceiling. He had long ago given up smoking, but now he longed for a drag.

  Finally he rose, locked the document in his safe, and let himself out of the embassy. On the pavement, in the half light, he gazed across the river at the walls of the Kremlin beneath whose shadow an old man in a threadbare greatcoat had sat forty-eight hours earlier and stared at the embassy.

  Spymasters are not generally conceived to be religious people, but appearances and professions can be misleading. In the Highlands of Scotland there is a long tradition among the aristocracy of devout adherence to the Roman Catholic faith. These were the earls and barons who rallied with their clansmen to the banner of the Catholic Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, to be wiped out a year later at the field of Culloden.

  The Head of Station came from the heart of that tradition. His father was a Macdonald of Fassifern, but his mother had been a scion of the house of Fraser of Lovat and had brought him up in the faith. He began to walk. Down the embankment to the next bridge, the Bolshoi Most, then across toward the Orthodox St. Basil’s Cathedral. He skirted the onion-domed edifice and wended his way through the waking city center toward New Square.

  It was as he was leaving New Square that he saw the first early-morning queues for the soup kitchens beginning to form. There was one just behind the square, where once the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR had held sway.

  A number of foreign charitable organizations were involved in the relief aid to Russia, as was the United Nations on a more official basis; the West had donated as generously as earlier to Romanian orphanages and Bosnian refugees. But the task was formidable, for the destitute from the countryside poured toward the capital, were rounded up and expelled by the militia, and reappeared again either as the same people or their replacements.

  They stood in the predawn half light, the old and ragged, the women with babies at their breasts, the peasantry of Russia unchanged since Potemkin in their ox-like passivity and patience. In late July the weather was warm enough to keep all alive. But when the cold came, that bitter cutting cold of the Russian winter. ... The previous January had been bad, but as for the next ... Jock Macdonald shook his head at the thought and marched on.

  His path brought him to Lubyanskaya Square, formerly known as Dzerzhinski. Here for decades had stood the statue of Iron Feliks, Lenin’s founder of the original terror machine, the Cheka. At the back of the square stood the great gray and ocher block known simply as Moscow Center, headquarters of the KGB.

  Behind
the old KGB building lies the infamous Lubyanka jail where confessions too numerous to count had been extracted and executions carried out. Behind the jail are two streets, Big Lubyanka and Little Lubyanka. He chose the second. Halfway up Lubyanka Malaya is the Church of St. Louis, where many of the diplomatic community and some of the few Russian Catholics go to worship.

  Two hundred yards behind him and out of his vision because of the KGB building, a number of tramps were sleeping in the broad doorway of the giant toy shop, Detskiy Mir, or Children’s World.

  Two burly men in jeans and black leather jackets walked into the shop doorway and began to turn the sleeping bodies over. One wore an old army greatcoat with a few soiled medals clinging to the lapel. The men stiffened, then bent over him again, shaking him out of his slumber.

  “Is your name Zaitsev?” snapped one of them. The old man nodded. The other man whipped a portable phone out of his blouse pocket, punched in some numbers, and spoke. Within five minutes a Moskvitch swerved to the curb. The two men hustled the figure between them and threw him into the rear, piling in on top of him. The old man tried to say something before he went in, and there was a glint of stainless steel at the front of his mouth.

  The car raced around the square, drove behind the great building that once housed the All-Russian Insurance Corporation before becoming a house of terror, and roared up Lubyanka Malaya, passing the figure of a British diplomat on the pavement.

  Macdonald let himself into the church with the aid of a drowsy sacristan, walked to the end of the aisle, and knelt in front of the altar. He looked up and the figure of the crucified Christ looked down. And he prayed.

  A man’s prayers are a very private thing, but what he prayed was: “Dear God, I beg you, let it be a forgery. For if it is not, a great and dark evil is going to descend upon us.

  CHAPTER 4

  BEFORE ANY OF THE REGULAR STAFF ARRIVED FOR WORK Jock Macdonald was back at his desk. He had not slept, but no one would know it. A fastidious man, he had washed and shaved in the staff bathroom on the ground floor and changed into the clean shirt he kept in his desk.