Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  The American CIA and FBI knew better, of course, but they knew better in the most misinformed way. Kodakov, who worked in the Russian embassy’s agriculture section, was a known spy, but presumed to be a minor one, a gatherer of data on American grain-crop yields, export plans, and agricultural technology. Had he been assigned to the Soviet United Nations mission in New York, the major center of Russian espionage activity within the United States, or to Ottawa, one of the biggest Soviet spy bases in the West, the American authorities might have had more reason to worry about him.

  But instead, he worked at the relatively unimportant embassy in Washington, where every member of the Soviet legation was under constant surveillance. He prowled the city in search of information from lobbyists, congressional staffs, and minor officials, but it was always agricultural, never military. His listed rank in the KGB was only major. The CIA had duped him so many times they had tired of it, and now treated him almost as an irrelevancy.

  Which was extremely foolish of them. Kodakov’s role as the ineffective, unimportant spy was simply cover. He was one of the Kremlin’s most important operatives, a troubleshooter whose real KGB rank was colonel, whose specialty was counterintelligence, and whose principal function was damage control.

  “Bolshinin is dead,” said Yerofeyev, the KGB Special Service II station chief in Washington and, as such, Kodakov’s immediate superior in counterintelligence and mission cleanup.

  They were in a safe room in the embassy basement. Kodakov disliked the tiny chamber for its closeness, and the humming array of jamming equipment surrounding it. In irrational moments, Kodakov feared for his virility. Kodakov liked American ladies.

  “I did not know there had been instructions,” Kodakov said.

  Bolshinin had been a second-level operative in the Executive Action Department (Department V), the “dirty” or “wet” section responsible for murders, snatches, and sabotage. That he was functioning as a double agent, supplying odd bits of information to American intelligence, had been known to the KGB for some time, but the KGB had tolerated it, using Bolshinin to plant misinformation with the CIA about Department V plans. Lately, however, Bolshinin appeared to be catching on, making efforts to redoctor his intelligence and apparently waiting his chance to go over to the other side for good. Kodakov had wondered how long Dzerzhinsky Square was going to suffer him.

  “There were no instructions,” Yerofeyev said. “It wasn’t us.”

  Yerofeyev looked very Russian, short, heavy, massive cheekbones, blue eyes, graying-blond hair. He spoke with a peasant’s accent, his family having come from somewhere near the Urals. He was one of the brightest men Kodakov knew on either side.

  “The Americans?” said Kodakov. “No, not the Americans. They don’t like to spill blood on their own carpet. How was he killed?”

  “He was strangled to death in a rented house in Key West, Florida,” said Yerofeyev. “His body was naked. He had visited a homosexual bar that evening. He picked up a man. The Florida police have reported it as a sex crime.”

  Kodakov had first encountered Bolshinin years before when the man was a minor functionary in the Illegals Directorate. Bolshinin had gotten into trouble for seducing a cleaning woman in a confidential file room.

  “I thought he liked girls,” Kodakov said.

  “Girls. Little girls. Little boys. Big boys. But, in this event, was only cover.”

  Yerofeyev reached with a pudgy hand and snapped on a tape recorder.

  “Provided by Cuban comrades,” he said. “They had the Key West house wired for us. I feared Bolshinin might be going over with something important.”

  Kodakov lighted one of the long, narrow American cigars he favored, listening to the tape as Bolshinin’s voice came on. Then there was another man, his voice high pitched but not effeminate, a cold, gruff, metallic voice. It was not an educated voice. Kodakov tried to picture the man, but had difficulty. After hearing the lingering sounds of Bolshinin’s unpleasant death, he decided the fellow was at the least a very strong man.

  “I do not know of anyone who has used the name ‘Trench’, before,” Kodakov said. “This Dennis Showers he is going to kill, I think I remember such a Showers in Africa, in the Congo.”

  “It is the same man,” Yerofeyev said. “He is now in the Northern Europe section of State Department and will shortly be transferred to Ottawa as the functional head of U. S. embassy there.” Yerofeyev leaned back in his chair, drumming his stubby fingers on his belt buckle. “No one in Special Service Two has ordered Showers’ elimination. No one in Department Five. No one in entire Committee for State Security has asked for this. No one in GRU. No one in any Warsaw Pact security organization. We have no interest in this man’s death. As you are well aware, we particularly have no interest in the death of a high-ranking American diplomat assigned to Canada. Not just now. Especially not now. Especially a death connected to someone from Department Five.”

  “Perhaps it is a CIA operation,” Kodakov said. “They have been doing many strange things since that crazy man took over. But they wouldn’t hire free-lance killers. Not again. Not since they hired mafiosi to eliminate Castro.”

  “And mafiosi instead eliminated Kennedy,” Yerofeyev said.

  “But I don’t know. They are so crazy now. That New Hampshire sewing machine man they hired as chief of agents when Casey was running things. That scheme to eliminate Qaddafi with turncoat mercenaries.”

  “Find out. I want to know who hires this man Trench through Bolshinin, and why, and quickly. We cannot afford this kind of trouble with Americans right now.”

  “Am I to stop this Trench? Eliminate him?”

  “It will depend. Find out first.”

  “Expenses?”

  Yerofeyev made a face, looking like a potato that was mashing itself. “Take what you need. But no more than that. No Las Vegas this time.”

  Kodakov puffed his thin cigar contentedly, but without expression. He was very clever with expenses. He was better at expenses than he was at espionage, and at espionage he was among the very best. He would get a new suit out of this one. Maybe cowboy boots, too.

  Prime Minister York liked to hold his cabinet meetings in his office. It was a large chamber, but hardly comfortable for thirty-four cabinet members, and with eleven army generals and RCMP officials added, the room was decidedly uncomfortable. They all perched, rather than sat, many in folding chairs or on the arms of his three couches. York himself lounged expansively in the huge leather swivel chair, his massive desk serving the purpose of a throne. If the reason for the meeting weren’t quite so serious, he thought he might put his feet up on his desk blotter.

  There was, unfortunately, too much smoking. Next time, York decided, he would remove most of the ashtrays.

  He swiveled in his chair to face his minister of justice. “This ultimatum,” he said. “It’s genuine and legitimate?”

  “It’s worse than that, prime minister. It amounts to a legal brief. Unless your amendments are strengthened in favor of the west, as these guys suggest, an act of secession will be introduced in the Alberta provincial parliament.”

  “And it will pass,” said York’s deputy prime minister. “Probably unanimously.”

  “And the army?” said York, swiveling toward one of the generals, a very blue-eyed man with a sandy mustache who groomed himself to look as British as possible.

  “The army is ready,” he said. “We can mobilize in twelve hours and have a division occupying Edmonton in three days.”

  “There are two million people in Alberta,” York said. “Two million Canadians.”

  “There are six million in Quebec,” said the minister of state for multiculturism. “And they don’t want amendments in any form.”

  “The army is ready for that contingency, too,” said the general, setting down his swagger stick and reaching for his briefcase. York stopped him with a wave of his hand. What in hell was the man doing with a swagger stick indoors?

  “The army has a co
ntingency plan for everything,” York said. “I believe you once had one for the invasion of the United States.”

  “We still do,” said the general. “Unfortunately, it calls for the seizure of Detroit and Buffalo. Perhaps we had better redraft it.”

  The laughter that followed was cut short by York’s hard look. The prime minister glared at a number of them, then swiveled his chair completely around to gaze at the huge map of Canada on the wall behind him. “What’s the ‘worst case scenario,’ as the Americans put it?” he said.

  He continued speaking without waiting for an answer. “Alberta goes out,” he said. “We bring in troops, and there is fighting. Some of the insurgents go underground. Most move into the mountains west of Calgary. We bring in the Air Force but they cut the Canadian Pacific and the Queen’s Road. Saskatchewan and British Columbia go out, too, in sympathy. The CP and the highway are cut in several places. Television and radio stations are seized. Post offices and public buildings are seized. Army and RCMP units are surrounded. Some of them fight. Some surrender. Some defect. The Yukon goes out. The pipeline is cut. Manitoba sits nervously. It wants to go out, but it’s too close to Ontario. Quebec goes out, in a hell of a hurry. The terrorists run amok. Rene Levesque proclaims an independent republic to restore order. The Atlantic provinces, scared to death, petition Congress to become U.S. territories.”

  “And Vancouver Island demands to become part of the United Kingdom,” said another minister. It was a joke, but no one laughed.

  “You haven’t mentioned casualties,” said the minister of justice. “What would be your ‘worst case’ estimate of casualties?”

  “Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?” York shrugged. “It’s hard to say. It would depend on how desperately we wanted to suppress all this. The casualties would be mostly up to us. To me.”

  “This seems vaguely familiar,” said the minister for multiculturalism.

  “I wrote an obscure book about it once, years ago,” said York. “When I was with the University. It was called A Short History of the Fall of Canada.”

  “Yes, I remember it,” said the minister. “Canada fell to the Yanks. They were ultimately able to annex everything except Quebec.”

  “The Yanks are on our side in this,” said the blue-eyed general, reaching for his briefcase again, without hesitation. He pulled out a manila folder. “Here. You should see these. They’re surveillance photos. Aerial and satellite. The American embassy security section …”

  “CIA station,” interrupted York, coldly.

  “… sent them over this morning.”

  York glanced at one of them, amazed at the clarity and nearness of the figures and objects. There were a great many figures with guns.

  “Hunters?” he said sarcastically.

  “Armed men. The CIA photo-analysis section counts more than a thousand in aggregate, in all these photos. They seem to be training. The photo you have there was taken two days ago, in the mountains north of Banff.”

  York-dropped the photographs onto his desk with an angry gesture. “I am not going to have this country run by the American CIA,” he said. “I am not going to make my decisions on the basis of CIA spy photographs.” He turned and looked darkly at his secretary of state. “Draft a note of protest about these spy flights. Put in something about the Russians having not yet occupied Banff.”

  He looked to his deputy prime minister. “I’ll go to Alberta myself and deal with these people in person,” he said, then turned again, this time to the minister of defense. “In the meantime, I’d like to see some sort of military maneuvers out there. Something with helicopters.”

  “The army is ready,” the general said.

  Showers dropped everything when his secretary told him who was on the phone. He hurried past her into his office, shutting the door firmly behind him. It was Stansfield Joyce, sounding a little weary.

  “Mr. Showers, your Felicity Stuart is long gone. Left town years ago. I think I’ve got her traced to California. Maybe. But I’m not sure you want me to go any further.”

  “What do you mean? Where are you?”

  “New York. I’m at a public phone a couple of blocks from her last address. I can give you a fill, man, a long report. I can take some pictures. But, hell, maybe you ought to come up here and see for yourself and then decide. I mean, man, this girl got herself in a mess of trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve got her covered until June 1971,” Joyce said. Showers could hear what sounded like pages of a notebook being turned. “Hell, man, where do I start. She’s got an arrest sheet and …”

  “You said you had her traced to California.”

  “Right. To San Francisco, but it was more than ten years ago. And that’s all I know about it. If you want more, I’ll have to go out there. Now, I sure wouldn’t mind taking this gig, but I gotta be fair to you. I mean, you ought to check out the scene here before you make up your mind.”

  “I’ll be on the four o’clock Eastern shuttle,” Showers said.

  8

  They stood where the cab had let Showers off, at the grimy, litter-strewn intersection of Second Avenue and Third Street, in what had once been called the Bowery and more recently the East Village. No one walking by looked remotely respectable. Scruffy jeans and T-shirts were common, on females as well as males. An old woman wearing dirty gray slacks, red socks, torn slippers, and a T-shirt was sitting on the curb, hunched forward, staring vaguely at the noisy traffic thumping over the manhole covers as she smoked a cigarette. Across the narrow width of Third Street, lounging against the wall and parked cars, was a strange assemblage of black men, with menacing faces and filthy, tattered clothes.

  A scrawny dog ambled by, sniffed at one of the green plastic garbage bags piled on the street, then urinated next to the old woman, who paid it no mind.

  Showers had a particularly cherished memory of Felicity. One bright, clear October afternoon in 1958, a group of them had gone to a farm outside Braddock Wells to gather corn shucks as decorations for the high school homecoming dance. Showers and Felicity had ridden together in the rumble seat of a friend’s antique 1934 Ford. Reaching the cornfield, he had dismounted, and then took her by the waist and swung her to the ground. She had lingered a moment within his hands, looking up at him with those quick, bright green eyes, the slightest of smiles showing at the corners of her lips. They had helped with the corn shucks for a brief time, then gone off among the corn stalks on their own. Out of sight of the others, he had kissed her several times. She had worn a white blouse with a red and black plaid vest and skirt. Walking back, finally, struck by the intensity of the moment, the brilliance of the autumn color of the surrounding Westchester hills, he had told her he loved her. She had smiled, looking down at the ground, saying nothing. He told her she reminded him of a Sir Walter Scott heroine. She had laughed and called him ridiculous, and then she had taken his hand.

  A muttering youth with long hair and gritty sideburns came by, spitting on the sidewalk in front of Showers without once breaking his scuffing stride.

  “Down Third Street there is the only municipal soup kitchen left in Manhattan,” said Joyce. “Those mean-looking dudes against the wall are the clientele; winos, junkies, halfway-house mental patients, ex-cons just out of the slammer. They’ve remodeled the insides of some of these buildings and converted them into swanky digs for adventurous rich folk betting on the come, but most of the joints are flops with tenants like these. Down there is the headquarters of New York’s Hell’s Angels. See all the Harleys lined up in a row? A few blocks over is a funeral home popular with gents in dark glasses. Up there is a junkie crash pad.”

  Showers said nothing. When he had lived in New York in the early 1960s, he had never come this way.

  “What you have to understand, man, is that this neighborhood that you see is coming up now. They’re calling it Cooper Union Square. With all the remodeling and money they’re bringing in, this’ll be as high priced as the West Village
in a couple of years. Back when she lived here, though, man, it was really scumbag.”

  Showers looked up at dirt-encrusted windows. “She lived here? In one of these?”

  “A little ways down the block. They lived here. Like I told you, a whole mob of them. Down the block, and then about three blocks from here, and, for a little while before she moved to California, she lived by herself over in Brooklyn. It wasn’t much better.”

  “I want to hear all of it,” Showers said, after taking a deep, almost painful breath.

  “First, I’d suggest we split the scene. Before we get rolled for our clothes. Let’s find a bar. In another neighborhood.”

  “Of course. We’ll walk over to the West Village. There’s a place I used to go, Chumley’s.”

  Except for the music on the juke box, Chumley’s hadn’t changed at all since Showers had drank there as a student in the early 1960s. Except for the juke box itself, it hadn’t changed since Lee Chumley had opened it in the 1920s—a warm, dimly lit, Old English tavern with dusty book jackets on the walls and several decades of initials carved into the tops of the tables. Showers had taken all his favorite girls there, but never, by then, Felicity. For the first few years, he had fantasized about encountering her there some rainy night, finding her all alone and in need of help and friendship, happy to go back with him to his little room near Gramercy Park.

  “This is the arrest sheet,” Joyce said, taking some papers from his breast pocket. They were at a quiet corner table, near the stairs that led to Chumley’s unmarked street door. Joyce had a beer, Showers a glass of sherry.

  “Disorderly conduct, mob action, possession of a dangerous substance. Drunk and disorderly.” It got worse.

  Joyce leaned back, looking at Showers expectantly. The other read slowly, painfully. “Now I’m supposed to say ‘I don’t believe it,’” Showers said.

  “The sheet’s legit, Mr. Showers.”