by Tom Clancy
“Comrade, you’ve left some change. I thank you, but we do not need the extra money.” He handed this, and the receipt, over. Plus something else. It was so easy. Nobody ever checked the pockets, just as in the West.
“Ah, truly you are an honorable man,” the lady said with an odd formalism common in the Soviet Union. “Good day, Comrade.”
“And to you,” the man replied. “Next!”
The lady—her name was Svetlana—walked off to the Metro station as usual. Her schedule allowed for a leisurely walk in case of problems at either end of her exchange. The streets of Moscow were invariably crowded with bustling, unsmiling people, many of whom looked at her coat with brief glances of envy. She had a wide selection of English clothing, having traveled to the West many times as part of her job at GOSPLAN, the Soviet economics planning ministry. It was in England that she’d been recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service. She was used in the CARDINAL chain because the CIA didn’t have all that many agents in Russia who could be used, and she was carefully given jobs only in the center of the chain, never at either end. The data she herself gave the West was low-level economic information, and her occasional services as a courier were actually more useful than the information of which she was so proud. Her case officers never told her this, of course; every spy deems him- or herself to possess the most vital intelligence ever to make its way out. It made the game all the more interesting, and for all their ideological (or other) motivations, spies view their craft as the grandest of all games, since they must invariably outsmart the most formidable resources of their own countries. Svetlana actually enjoyed living on the jagged edge of life and death, though she did not know why. She also believed that her highly placed father—a senior Central Committee member—could protect her from anything. After all, his influence enabled her to travel to Western Europe two or three times a year, didn’t it? A pompous man, her father, but Svetlana was his only child, the mother of his only grandchild, and the center of his universe.
She entered the Kuznetskiy Most station in time to see one train leave. Timing was always the tricky part. In rush hour, the Moscow Metro trains run a mere thirty seconds apart. Svetlana checked her watch, and again she had timed her arrival perfectly. Her contact would be on the next one. She walked along the platform to the exact spot for the forward door on the second car of that train, ensuring that she’d be the first one aboard. Her clothing helped. She was often mistaken for a foreigner, and Moscovites treated foreigners with deference ordinarily reserved for royalty—or the gravely ill. She didn’t have to wait long. Soon she heard the rumble of an approaching train. Heads turned, as they always did, to see the lights of the lead car, and the sound of brakes filled the vaulted station with high-pitched noise. The door opened, and a rush of people emerged. Then Svetlana stepped in and took a few steps toward the back of the car. She grabbed the overhead bar—all the seats were filled, and no man offered his—and faced forward before the train lurched forward again. Her ungloved left hand was in her coat pocket.
She’d never seen the face of her contact on this train, but she knew that he’d seen hers. Whoever he was, he appreciated her slim figure. She knew that from his signal. In the crush of the crowded train, a hand hidden by a copy of Izvestia ran along her left buttock and stopped to squeeze gently. That was new, and she fought off the impulse to see his face. Might he be a good lover? She could use another one. Her former husband was such a ... but, no. It was better this way, more poetic, more Russian, that a man whose face she’d never know found her beautiful and desirable. She clasped the film cassette between her thumb and forefinger, waiting the next two minutes for the train to stop at Pushkinskaya. Her eyes were closed, and a millimeter of smile formed on her lips as she contemplated the identity and attributes of the cutout whose hand caressed her. It would have horrified her case officer, but she gave no other outward sign of anything.
The train slowed. People rose from their seats, and those standing shuffled about in preparation to leave. Svetlana took her hand out of the pocket. The cassette was slippery, whether from water or some oily substance from the cleaners she didn’t know. The hand left her hip—a last, lingering trail of gentle pressure—and came upward to receive the small metal cylinder as her face turned to the right.
Immediately behind her, an elderly woman tripped on her own feet and bumped into the cutout. His hand knocked the cassette from Svetlana’s. She didn’t realize it for a moment, but the instant the train stopped, the man was on all fours grabbing for it. She looked down more in surprise than horror to see the back of his head. He was going bald, and the shroud of hair about his ears was gray—he was an old man! He had the cassette in a moment and sprang back to his feet. Old, but spry, she thought, catching the shape of his jaw. A strong pronte—yes, he’d be a good lover, and perhaps a patient one, the best kind of all. He scurried off the train, and she cleared her mind. Svetlana didn’t notice that a man sitting on the left side of the car was up and moving, exiting the car against traffic a second before the doors closed again.
His name was Boris, and he was a night-watch officer at KGB headquarters now on his way home to sleep. Ordinarily he read the sports newspaper—known originally as Sovietskiy Sport—but today he’d forgotten to get one at the kiosk in the headquarters building, and he’d accidentally happened to see on the dirty black floor of the subway car what could only be a film cassette, and one too small to come from an ordinary camera. He hadn’t seen the attempted pass, and didn’t know who’d dropped it. He assumed that the fiftyish man had, and noted the skill with which the man had retrieved it. Once off the car, he realized that a pass must have taken place, but he’d been too surprised to respond properly, too surprised and too tired after a long night’s duty.
He was a former case officer who’d operated in Spain before being invalided home after a heart attack and set on the night desk in his section. His rank was major. He felt he deserved a colonelcy for the work he’d done, but this thought, too, was not in his mind at the moment. His eyes searched the platform for the gray-haired man in the brown coat. There! He moved off, feeling a small twinge in his left chest as he walked after the man. He ignored that. He’d quit smoking a few years before, and the KGB doctor said that he was doing well. He got within five meters of the man, and closed no more. This was the time for patience. He followed him through the crossover to the Gor’kovskaya Station and onto the platform. Here things got tricky. The platform was crowded with people heading to their offices, and he lost visual contact with his quarry. The KGB officer was a short man and had trouble in crowds. Could he dare to close farther? It would mean pushing through the crowd... and calling attention to himself. That was dangerous.
He’d been trained in this, of course, but that was over twenty years behind him, and he frantically searched his mind for procedures. He knew fieldcraft, knew how to identify and shake a tail, but he was a First Directorate man, and the shadowing skills used by the ferrets of the Second Directorate were not part of his repertoire. What do I do now? he raged at himself. Such a chance this was! The First Directorate men naturally hated their counterparts in the Second, and to catch one of them at—but what if there might be a “Two” man here? Might he be observing a training exercise? Might he now be the subject of curses from a “Two” man who had a case running on this courier? Could he be disgraced by this? What do I do now? He looked around, hoping to identify the counterintelligence men who might be working this courier. He couldn’t hope to discern which face it was, but he might get a wave-off signal. He thought he remembered those. Nothing. What do I do now? He was sweating in the cold subway station, and the pain in his chest increased to add another factor to his dilemma. There was a system of covert telephone lines built into every segment of the Moscow subway system. Every KGB officer knew how to use them, but he knew he didn’t have time to find and activate the system.
He had to follow the man. He had to run the risk. If it turned out to be the wrong deci
sion, well, he was an experienced field officer in his own right, and he had looked for the wave-off. The “Two” people might tongue-lash him, but he knew he could depend on his First Directorate supervisors to protect him. The decision now made, the chest pain subsided. But there was still the problem of seeing him. The KGB officer wormed his way through the crowd, enduring grumbles as he did so, but finally finding his way blocked by a gang of laborers who were talking about something or other. He craned his neck to get a look at his quarry—yes! still standing there, looking to the right... The sound of the subway train came as a relief.
He stood there, trying not to look too often at his target. He heard the subway doors open with a hiss, heard the sudden change in noise as the people got off, then the rasping shuffle of feet as people crowded forward toward the doors.
The car was full! His man was inside, but the doors overflowed with bodies. The KGB officer raced to the rear door and fought his way in a moment before it shut. He realized with a chill that he might have been too obvious, but there was nothing he could do about that. As the train began moving, he worked his way forward. The people seated and standing noticed this untoward movement. As he watched, a hand adjusted a hat. Three or four newspapers rattled—any of these signals could be a warning to the courier.
One of them was. Ed Foley was looking away after adjusting his glasses with a right hand that wore one glove and held another. The courier turned back forward and went over his escape procedures. Foley went over his own. The courier would dispose of the film, first exposing it by pulling it out of the metal cylinder, then dumping it in the nearest trash receptacle. That had happened twice before that he knew of, and in both cases the cutout had gotten away cleanly. They’re trained how, Foley told himself. They know how. CARDINAL would be warned, and another film would be made, and... but this had never happened on Foley’s watch, and it took all of his discipline to keep his face impassive. The courier didn’t move at all. He got off at the next stop anyway. He’d done nothing unusual, nothing that didn’t appear normal. He would say that he’d found this funny little thing with the—was it film, Comrade?—stuff pulled out on the floor of the train, and thought it merely trash to be disposed of. In his pocket, the man was trying to pull the film out of the cassette. Whoever took it always left a few millimeters out so that you could yank all of it—or so they’d told him. But the cassette was slippery and he couldn’t quite get a grip on the exposed end. The train stopped again and the courier moved out. He didn’t know who was trailing him. He knew nothing other than that he’d gotten his wave-off signal, and that signal also told him to destroy what he had in the prescribed way—but he’d never had to do it before. He tried not to look around, and moved out of the station as quickly as anyone else in the crowd. For his part, Foley didn’t even look out of the train’s windows. It was nearly inhuman but he managed it, fearing above all that he might endanger his cutout.
The courier stood alone on a moving step of the escalator. Just a few more seconds and he’d be on the street. He’d find an alley to expose the film, and a sewer to dump it in, along with the cigarette he’d just lit. One smooth motion of the hand, and even if he were picked up, there would be no evidence, and his story, drilled into his head and practiced there every day, was good enough to make the KGB wonder. His career as a spy was now over. He knew that, and was surprised at the wave of relief that enveloped him like a warm, comfortable bath.
The air was a cold reminder of reality, but the sun was rising, and the sky was beautifully clear. He turned right and walked off. There was an alley half a block away, and a sewer grate that he could use. His cigarette would be finished just as he got there, yet another thing that he’d practiced. Now, if only he could get the film out of the cassette and exposed to sunlight... Damn. He slipped off his other glove and rubbed his hands together. The courier used his fingernails to get the film. Yes! He crumpled the film and put the cassette back into his pocket, and—
“Comrade.” The voice was strong for a man of his age, the courier thought. The brown eyes sparkled with alertness, and the hand at his pocket was a strong one. The other, he saw, was in the man’s pocket. “I wish to see what is in your hand.”
“Who are you?” the courier blustered. “What is this?”
The right hand jerked in the pocket. “I am the man who will kill you, here on the street, unless I see what is in your hand. I am Major Boris Churbanov.” Churbanov knew that this would soon be false. From the look on the man’s face, he knew that he had his colonelcy.
Foley was in his office ten minutes later. He sent one of his men—actually a woman—out on the street to look for the signal that the dump had been made successfully, and his hope was that he’d simply goofed, that he’d overreacted to a commuter who was trying too hard to get to work. But... but there was something about that face that had said professional. Foley didn’t know what, but it had been there. He had his hands flat on the desk and stared at them for several minutes.
What did I do wrong? he asked himself. He’d been trained to do that, too, to analyze his actions step by step, looking for flaws, for mistakes, for... Had he been followed? He frequently was, of course, like all Americans on the embassy staff. His personal tail was a man he thought of as “George.” But George wasn’t there very often. The Russians didn’t know who Foley was. He was sure of that. That thought caught in his throat. Being certain about anything in the intelligence business was the surest route to disaster. That was why he’d never broken craft, why he never deviated from the training that had been drilled into him at Camp Peary, on the York River in Virginia, then practiced all over the world.
Well. The next thing he had to do was predetermined. He walked to the communications room and sent a telex to Foggy Bottom. This one, however, went to a box number whose traffic was never routine. Within a minute of its receipt, a night-watch officer from Langley drove to State to retrieve it. The wording of the message was innocuous, but its meaning was not: TROUBLE ON THE CARDINAL LINE. FULL DATA TO FOLLOW.
They didn’t take him to Dzerzhinskiy Square. KGB headquarters, so long used as a prison—a dungeon for all that happened there—was now exclusively an office building since, in obedience to Parkinson’s Law, the agency had expanded to absorb all its available space. Now the interrogations were done at Lefortovo Prison, a block from the Sputnik Cinema. There was plenty of room here.
He sat alone in a room with a table and three chairs. It had never occurred to the courier to resist, and even now he didn’t realize that if he’d run away or fought the man who’d arrested him, he might still be free. It wasn’t the idea that Major Churbanov had had a gun—he hadn’t—but simply that Russians, in lacking freedom, often lack the concepts needed for active resistance. He’d seen his life end. He accepted that. The courier was a fearful man, but he feared only what had to be. You cannot fight against destiny, he told himself.
“So, Churbanov, what do we have?” The questioner was a Captain of the Second Chief Directorate, about thirty years old.
“Have someone develop this.” He handed over the cassette. “I think this man is a cutout.” Churbanov described what he’d seen and what he’d done. He didn’t say that he’d rewound the film into the cassette. “Pure chance that I spotted him,” he concluded.
“I didn’t think you ‘One’ people knew how, Comrade Major. Well done!”
“I was afraid that I’d blundered into one of your operations and—”
“You would have known by now. It is necessary for you to make a full report. If you will accompany the sergeant here, he’ll take you to a stenographer. Also, I will summon a full debriefing team. This will take some hours. You may wish to call your wife.”
“The film,” Churbanov persisted.
“Yes. I will walk that down to the lab myself. If you’ll go with the sergeant, I’ll rejoin you in ten minutes.”
The laboratory was in the opposite wing of the prison. The Second Directorate had a small facility here, si
nce much of its work centered on Lefortovo. The Captain caught the lab technician between jobs, and the developing process was started at once. While he waited, he called his Colonel. There was as yet no way to measure what this “One” man had uncovered, but it was almost certainly an espionage case, and those were all treated as matters of the utmost importance. The Captain shook his head. That old war-horse of a field officer, just stumbling into something like that.
“Finished.” The technician came back. He’d developed the film and printed one blow-up, still damp from the process. He handed back the film cassette, too, in a small manila envelope. “The film has been exposed and rewound. I managed to save part of one frame. It’s interesting, but I have no idea what it actually is.”
“What about the rest?”
“Nothing can be done. Once film is exposed to sunlight, the data is utterly destroyed.”
The Captain scanned the blow-up as the technician said something else. It was mainly a diagram, with some caption printed in block letters. The words at the top of the diagram read: BRIGHT STAR COMPLEX #1, and one of the other captions was LASER ARRAY. The Captain swore and left the room at a run.
Major Churbanov was having tea with the debrief team when the Captain returned. The scene was comradely. It would get more so.
“Comrade Major, you may have discovered something of the highest importance,” the Captain said.
“I serve the Soviet Union,” Churbanov replied evenly. It was the perfect repty—the one recommended by the Party. Perhaps he might leap over the rank of lieutenant colonel and become a full colonel...
“Let me see,” the chief debriefer said. He was a full colonel, and examined the photographic print carefully. “This is all?”
