Fidelity

by Jan Fedarcyk

  “What is wrong, my friend?” Pyotr asked, after Tom had put away half of his omelet and all of his bacon in around forty seconds.

  “No disrespect, Pyotr, I am sure your source is reliable. All the same, I dislike such roundabout methods. It relies on too many contingencies, too much presumption. I agree, the brother angle seems our best, indeed our only potential point of access—but I’d still rather we had something firm to use on the target herself.”

  Pyotr laughed. “What can I tell you? Kay Malloy is a moralist,” he said, brushing a bit of sugar off the table. “Like her father.”

  23

  KAY SIGHED, scratched her head, drank a little bit of lukewarm coffee, clicked onto the next subject.

  Bartholemew Ides, age forty-seven. Was he the CIA’s secret mole? Was he the man responsible for the death of three double agents? Was he the fox in the henhouse? She spent a while digging through his files, every little nugget of information that the FBI had assembled on him, internal personnel reports, past history. Cross-checked this personal data against what little they knew of their spy, discounted him immediately. Clicked through to the next.

  It was called the matrix, and it had quickly grown to take over the larger part of Kay’s life.

  A simple enough process. Start with everyone, literally everyone, who knew or may have gleaned the identity of the lost double agents. Next, identify those who may have had access to their compartmented reporting. If one was fortunate, there might be reporting from our double agents concerning the mole. Then start the arduous task of identifying any commonalities between the suspected mole and the lost double agents, things like similar postings abroad or foreign travel by the suspected mole. And then there was no substitute for good old-fashioned investigative work. In this way they might learn about the person who was betraying the country.

  Of course, sometimes—often, in fact—the information was contradictory, or confusing, or oblique. It was more art than science, Kay was swiftly coming to realize, and there was always the nagging fear that you had made the wrong decision, accidentally gone ahead and knocked the mole off the list, set the investigation back months or years or maybe torpedoed it altogether.

  Samuel Abondando, age fifty-nine. Was he the culprit? Had he some hidden weakness that the competition had found a way to prey upon, blackmailing or bribing him into treason? Had he been squirreling away SVR funds, dead drops in the middle of the night, burner phones to contact his handler, secret meetings in obscure places?

  The initial excitement of being involved in such an important investigation had given way almost immediately to the reality of the process, which was tedious and depressing. Kay was doing her best not to keep an accurate count of how much time she had spent in this exact position in the month since Black Bear had begun, knowing the truth would only make it worse.

  “Anything new, Malloy?”

  Kay looked up from the pixelated glare of her monitor to see Jeffries standing above her. Eight o’clock on a Wednesday but she showed no particular signs of fatigue, the eyes behind her glasses undimmed, sipping slowly from her ever-full thermos of coffee.

  “What do you think?” Kay asked, turning the monitor so Susan could see better.

  The ASAC spent a moment staring at the information Kay had up. “Well, he doesn’t speak Russian, hasn’t been abroad for twenty-five years. No operational experience, no obvious avenue by which he could have been approached. Let’s put him in the ‘maybe’ pile.”

  It took Kay a solid ten seconds before she realized that ­Jeffries was making a joke, another five before she decided it was acceptable to smile at it.

  “You need to stop doing this to yourself, Agent Malloy,” Jeffries said, taking a seat, and was it Kay’s imagination or had she heard Jeffries offer the slightest expression of relief upon getting off her feet? Was it possible that she might even be human, just like the rest of them?

  An absurd suggestion. “What do you mean?” Kay asked.

  But Jeffries didn’t answer her for a while, turned her eyes like searchlights on Kay, sipped at her coffee. “Do you know who Robert Hanssen is?”

  “Former Agent who approached the Soviets to become a spy. Sold out the identities of some of our own top recruitments, passed over signals intelligence. Hanssen had unfettered access to many of the espionage investigations, which provided him with a steady stream of intelligence for sale.”

  “And how many years did Mr. Hanssen spy for the Russians before we caught him?”

  “Twenty years, if memory serves.”

  “Twenty-two, off and on,” Jeffries said flatly. “And it was only after paying an SVR officer millions of dollars and setting him and his family up here in the States that we finally got our proof. Aldrich Ames?”

  “CIA equivalent,” Kay answered, enjoying the game. “Worked against the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. Nominally, at least, though in practice he spent the better part of his career doing the reverse. Responsible for the loss of dozens of RIPs and any number of deaths, including the execution of Major General ­Dmitri Polyakov, the highest-ranking Soviet RIP the CIA ever had in place. Passed two polygraph tests and, despite living a lavish lifestyle far beyond what his salary could afford him, was not arrested until almost ten years after he had begun passing information to Russia. The most significant CIA breach in history.”

  “Perhaps not anymore,” Jeffries said. “Kim Philby?”

  “The Brits’ black eye, and one we still shouldn’t let them forget. Became a Soviet double agent in college, before he had ever entered the intelligence world. Joined the SOE, or the Special Operations Executive, during World War II, then MI6. Postings in Turkey, the U.S. Worked for the Soviets for the entirety of his career; at one point was third in line to run Her Majesty’s secret service, despite being an alcoholic traitor. Defected to Russia in the early sixties when the heat got too much for him; spent the rest of his life unpunished.”

  Jeffries didn’t say anything after that, as if waiting for Kay to draw her own conclusions. Then: “We work in a business which prizes secrets, Agent Malloy, and which will pay a high premium for them. There’s always a turncoat somewhere, whether you know it or not. You know I was part of the team that went after Hanssen.”

  Kay’s ears perked up: the chance to fill in the blank spots in Jeffries’s past with real data rather than gossip was not one to be passed up. “I didn’t know that.”

  “For a long time we thought it was this CIA officer; spent months, years, tearing apart this poor guy’s life, setting up false flag operations . . .” Jeffries shook her head sadly at the wasted effort. “It starts to get to you if you let it, digging through strangers’ evils, walking around all day looking at your colleagues and coworkers, wondering which of them has decided to betray their country and their people for a little bit of money, or to get out of some difficulty, or for some other horrible, petty reason. And it’s always petty reasons: they’ve been passed over for promotion, or they get made fun of in the break room, or they want cash to impress a woman half their age.” Jeffries took her glasses off, rubbed at the wrinkles around her eyes.

  It was, Kay felt certain, the longest conversation she had ever had with Jeffries about something that was not directly related to their work, which gave some hint of Jeffries’s personality beyond the hyper-competent facade that she stood behind.

  “But you can’t let it get to you, Malloy,” Jeffries said, her shield back up. “Because if you lose your mental balance, then you’re useless to us; then all of your talent and drive becomes a liability. Staying here late every night, obsessing over the details of the case—it’s counterproductive in the long run. It’s going to dull your edge. This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. You need to find a way to balance this with other things, whatever those other things are. You can’t spend every night and every weekend in front of the computer—can’t and still be any good to the missi
on. You have to put something else into your life besides counterintelligence.”

  Which was strange to hear coming from Jeffries: unmarried, no children, no hobbies that anyone knew about, came in earlier and left later than anyone else on the team—or at least had come in earlier and left later than everyone else on the team before Kay had arrived. “What do you do for recreation?”

  “I go paintballing,” Jeffries said flatly.

  It occurred to Kay that she had no idea whether this was a joke, and she didn’t think she’d have any luck in reading the truth behind Jeffries’s imperceptible eyes.

  “It’s been a very long day,” Jeffries said, finally, getting up from her seat. “Think about what I said. You have too much potential to burn yourself out so early.”

  “Thank you,” Kay said, surprised as much by the sudden termination of the conversation as she was by Jeffries’s unexpected moment of intimacy.

  Kay sat in her chair awhile afterward, rubbing at her eyes. Thought about knocking off and going home, maybe grabbing a drink. Or giving Christopher a call; they hadn’t chatted in a while, which probably meant he was into something he shouldn’t be. Or Uncle Luis, maybe, or Alice. Kay was young, she was pretty, she had a little bit of money, she was in the greatest city in the world. There had to be something she could do, right? Right?

  Kay sighed, stretched, clicked onward.

  Joe Emanuel, age forty-seven.

  24

  DOING SURVEILLANCE on a potential recruit was not fundamentally different from doing surveillance on a drug dealer or crime lord. There was a lot of sitting around, drinking coffee, trying to keep yourself sharp despite the mind-numbing moment-to-moment boredom of the task. On the plus side, the surveillance that Kay was responsible for, a potential recruit at the Russian mission, at least kept her in nice neighborhoods. Surveillance in Baltimore meant angling down in a Bureau car in the dreariest and most impoverished portions of the city, watching crackheads fidget past aimlessly, staring at shiftless young men on stoops in the middle of the day, all of the ugliest aspects of American urban decay. Here in New York it meant being in the passenger seat across from Agent Marshall, parked on a lovely Manhattan residential block, towering apartment buildings filled with million-dollar condos. Middle-aged women kept young through shots of attenuated botulism and frequent plastic surgeries carried purse dogs to their weekly SoulCycle class.

  “You ever think about what an odd job we have, Marshall?” Kay asked, shifting her legs about in an aimless effort to improve blood flow.

  “Do it as long as I have, Malloy, and the whole thing starts to feel normal.” He was fiddling with the lens on their long-distance camera, more to kill time than anything else. The better part of surveillance, Kay had long ago realized, was finding creative ways to make time a corpse.

  “What’s normal?”

  “You got me,” Marshall said. In a park across the street, a man had painted himself silver and was perched motionless atop a bench. A number of East Asian tourists were happily taking pictures of him. “In this city especially.”

  “You think we got a shot with this guy?”

  “These living statues don’t make very much,” Marshall said. “I think if we pitch it to him the right way, he’ll probably give us what he knows.”

  Kay made a motion as if to punch Marshall, and Marshall put his hands up apologetically. In the months since she had come to New York, Kay had grown closer to her comrades in counterintelligence, although she would have to admit that she had not yet found a friend to compare with Torres. Probably this was as much about Kay as it was them. She had come to Baltimore a fresh-faced new Agent, anxious for camaraderie. Here in New York she was, if not a hardened veteran, then at least not so desperately unsure of herself as she had been after leaving the Academy.

  “Honestly, Kay,” Marshall said, having avoided his beating, “it’s hard to say. A recruitment is never a sure thing, as much work as you try to put in ahead of time to make sure otherwise. Of course, Jeffries thinks he’s worth taking a look at, and Jeffries isn’t wrong all that much. I mean, we’re all wrong sometimes, but she’s not the sort of person you’d want to make a habit of betting against.”

  Kay did not disagree.

  Counterintelligence is not passive, and the investigation into Black Bear included far more than simply staring at a computer. The information for the matrix, after all, had to come from somewhere. Some portion of it might be communications intelligence—or COMINT, as it was more popularly called—tapping phones and intercepting e-mails, the endless ongoing twenty-first-century game of encryption and decryption, of ­electronic cat and mouse. But COMINT was only part of the picture, and perhaps not the most important part, either. Human intelligence, or HUMINT, was still critical, and would remain so for as long as countries tried to spy on one another. An RIP, someone inside the enemy’s operation who could provide not only specific details but background on the competition, was crucial to an ­effective counterintelligence operation. Identifying these potential recruits, tracking them, finding out their weaknesses, recruiting and finally running them, were key responsibilities of an FBI Agent working counterintelligence, albeit ones with which Kay was largely unfamiliar.

  Over the course of the last few months, the Black Bear squad, spearheaded by ASAC Jeffries, had begun to assemble a complex dossier on the history, character and habits of one Artur Vadim, a Suspected Intelligence Officer, or SIO, working cover at the Russian mission. It was a strange sort of way to get to know someone. Kay did not know what Vadim’s voice sounded like, or if he had a good sense of humor, or if he was the sort of person who would hold the door open if someone else was coming by, carrying a package. But she knew where he had been born and where he had gone to school and when he had started working at the Russian mission, and some of the intelligence work with which he was affiliated, and the contents of his bank account, and his spending habits, and dozens of other intimate, personal details.

  It beat staring at the matrix, at least. “Artur Vadim,” Kay said as if she had just heard it for the first time.

  “Artur Vadim,” Marshall seconded, because he was bored also and didn’t have much else to say.

  “What’s our in with this guy?” Kay asked.

  “Money,” Marshall informed her. “It’s almost always money. Back in the good old days, I suppose, you had the occasional recruit coming in for philosophical reasons. Like Polyakov.”

  Major General Dmitri Polyakov had been the crown jewel of the U.S. intelligence service’s foreign assets throughout much of the Cold War, a high-ranking Soviet military officer who had passed on key secrets from his native country. Unlike the vast majority of placements, even during the Cold War, he had no interest in money, felt ideologically estranged from the regime of which he was a part, did his best to bring it down from the inside—until his identity was betrayed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, and he was tried, convicted, and executed for treason.

  “Look what happened to him,” Kay said.

  Marshall grunted. “Vadim’s no Polyakov, I’ll give you that. But he’s high enough in the Russian mission to be of real potential value, assuming we can hook him. And some of his ­habits—the cocktail bars, the opera tickets, that custom-tailored suit which we saw him walk out of work wearing—are difficult to indulge on his salary.”

  Kay nodded. “When do we make the approach?”

  “Up to Jeffries,” Wilson said. “But you only ever get one shot with these. If you blow it”—he drew a finger across his throat—“you’re iced. Best to be damn well prepared first.”

  “So what you’re saying is I ought to get used to sitting in the BuCar?” Kay used the slang for a Bureau-issued car.

  “It ain’t all honor and glory.”

  “You said that already,” Kay said, trying without success to find a comfortable way to position her legs.

  25

 
TWO MONTHS after the beginning of Black Bear, Kay met Andrew in the basement of New York’s Penn Station, one of the busiest—and unquestionably the ugliest—train stations in the country. Kay was early, as she was to most things, and spent half an hour drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and watching the departures board. Five minutes before nine and she started to get worried that she’d be making the trip solo, and then there was a tap on her shoulder and there he was.

  “So sorry,” Andrew explained, smiling that smile of his. “Shall we grab a seat?”

  Before she could say anything, Andrew was off again, and Kay followed him through the mob and down into the bowels of the station, onto a crowded platform and then into the air-conditioned Acela Express. Kay was annoyed that he was late and also annoyed that his being late hadn’t cost them anything, that they had gotten a comfortable seat without much trouble. Andrew was the sort of person for whom things worked out naturally: that rare, lucky breed that draws as much jealousy as it does admiration.

  He offered her the window seat but Kay refused it, mostly out of pique, because she actually would have preferred it. Andrew didn’t seem to mind. He headed to the dining car and came back with two cups of coffee. Kay grunted thanks and turned to her book.

  Kay would have liked to think that representing the FBI in today’s meeting with Mike Anthony was a select honor, although she lacked such a capacity for self-deception. This was a hassle, not a privilege. The train ride down to Union Station, a cab to CIA headquarters, a few pleasantries, then down to the meat of it—which was, in short, that thus far Jeffries’s crack counterintelligence squad had come up with nothing firm as to the possible identity of the CIA’s penetration. For that matter, they didn’t have anything flimsy, either. Months of working the matrix; grueling months; months that Kay had not found overwhelmingly entertaining; months that had, unfortunately, gotten them no closer to the end of the Black Bear investigation. As the newest member of the squad, it had seemed only reasonable that she would be the one to make the haul to D.C.: seniority had its privileges, after all.