Shadow of the Condor

by James Grady

  The color TV set offered Malcolm reruns of all the programs which had mildly -bored him before his own set broke in Cincinnati. The commercials were new, in presentation if not content. After thirty minutes of carefully controlled, contrived TV violence, he shut the set off, took off his shirt, shoes and socks and stretched out on the bed to await inspiration or excitement.

  Neither came. Computation of his breathing rate lost all appeal for Malcolm after a quarter of an hour. He sighed, largely because he thought it was logical reaction for him to make. He briefly thought of getting the map out of the briefcase, but the briefcase was across the room, tightly locked. It wasn't worth the effort, especially since he already knew what'the map looked like and he had seen the area he would be working in from the air.

  He was sure the old man thought the plan improbable even when he was briefing him. The old man's ostensible reasoning was simple: Parkins had been on foot, running away from something or someone. He had been caught and killed. Given the short time between Parkins' death and the arrival of the security teams who canvassed the area before any vehicles would have had time to get far from the missile site, it was lGfical to assume that whoever shot Parkins went to ground very close to the missile site. Since the countryside was open with no trees. Or natural cover, the killer must have gone to ground in one of the nearby farm buildings. Malcolm, using the pretense of a government survey, would canvass the area, looking, prying, trying to find any lead as to where the killer went to ground. And after where, how, who and why.

  Malcolm doubted he would even find the where. He thought the old man felt the same and that the old man knew Malcolm's major function was to be visible, to take the heat off other agents. But no one said anything except how important Malcolm's job was. Nary a discouraging word, thought Malcolm.

  "Oh, well." He spoke aloud to the empty room. "At least it should be safe." And an easy way to pay them off, his mind said quietly, so quietly Malcolm barely heard.

  Malcolm frowned. He needed to check in with Washington. The old woman wouldn't be at the switchboard, so he couldn't just pick up the phone from the bedside table to make his call. He had to leave. He sighed again and sat up. No one could care if I'm dressed or not, he thought. He picked up his keys, let himself out of the room and padded down the hall to the pay phone.

  The connection rang through quickly. The agent in the house in Washington deliberately let the phone ring twice before' answering. After she accepted the collect charges, she said softly, "How are you, dear? Everything okay?"

  "Everything's dandy," said Malcolm, hating the coded euphemism. "I'm calling from an open pay phone at the motel. The switchboard is closed. You could call me back. My room phone number is 555-6479 and you can get through without going through the switchboard."

  "That's all right, we'll just take it here. Do you have anything you'd like to tell Mom?"

  Malcolm thought of several things he would like to say to the old man. "No, just let her know I'll start real work tomorrow."

  "I'll do that. She said she has no messages for you. Good-bye, dear."

  The agent hung up before Malcolm could reply. She immediately called Carl. In turn, Carl phoned the old man at a small dinner party given by a Congressman. When the old man had properly identified himself, Carl said, "Condor is in the field, sir."

  "Fine, my boy," the old man replied, "fine." Then he rejoined his host and continued with his cleverly vulgar anecdote.

  Malcolm held the receiver in his hands for several seconds after his contact hung up. Then he smiled sweetly and said, "Well, dear, good-bye to you too."

  He didn't sleep well that night.

  Carl picked the old man up at the Congressman's dinner party an hour after Malcolm's call. Trailed closely by the security team, Carl drove the old man to the Washington Circle headquarters. He briefed his supenor on the latest information, pleased that his assessment matched the old man's. As Carl expected, the pld man insisted on putting a call through to Kevin. Carl had anticipated this and had alerted London. He knew they had located Kevin and were standing by for a signal. He radioed the Washington Circle headquarters, and by the time they mounted the stairs to the old man's office the transatlantic connection was complete. The old man smiled appreciatively and nodded for Carl to remain in the room. Carl carefully contained his pride: He was in on the big time.

  "Kevin, how are you doing?"

  "Excellent, sir, in fact, if you hadn't arranged to call me, I would have called you later tonight."

  "You have something to report?"

  "Yes, sir. Parkins wisely didn't trust the general's operation. He would post his preliminary reports and notes to a fake name in care of London general delivery, with a notice to return to the sender if not picked up in thirty days. The sender's address is his CO's flat. I used your Special Branch friend to check for just such a deal. It was the only thing I could make out of his advice about the British government being dependable if you wanted something held."

  "My boy, that was excellent, excellent. Have you read his reports?"

  "We just broke the code an hour ago. Parkins overheard two* drunks arguing about the Americans' efficiency. The drunker and more belligerent man tried to put his companion down by saying the Soviets were 'right on top of the American missiles.' Parkins got curious and followed the man home. He decided to do a fast, hard push on the man, and it paid off.

  "The drunk turned out to be one Mikhail Donovich, a KGB courier, who makes shuttle runs between the United States and Moscow. He's actually a German agent, but his ultimate responsibility is to the Soviets. I'm sure they work it that way so that if he gets caught, officially he won't be from them.

  "It seems Donovich handles only big accounts. We are checking out all the details of his operation that he told Parkins, and I expect a high corroboration rate. I think Donovich was holding back, hoping he'd have something to bargain with so he could come over. He gave Parkins the teaser that a very big, very important agent was coming through London to check out stations in the U.S., particularly one important project that American security knows nothing about. He refused to elaborate. The courier claimed he hung around his drop zone once to see whom he was dealing with, which leads me to believe he was planning on crossing over anyway. Parkins said he was holding back on a lot of stuff so we would need him."

  "Or he was lying about everything, for one of many, reasons."

  "There's that," Kevin reluctantly agreed, "'but Parkins didn't think so. The courier claimed the agent would pick up a load of money from a drop near the airport and would leave London for the U.S. via Toronto the next day.

  "I think Parkins didn't trust the general's security. So he decided to play the thing out a little more. According to his last report, postmarked from London airport, he picked up the agent at the drop zone, followed him to the airport and booked a seat on the same plane. His last report said he would track him as far as he could. He also said he was worried about losing contact with his people, since the general refused to let them learn any backup system outside of his own department."

  "Stupid system. Did Parkins get any more on the agent? Did the courier give him anything else?"

  "The courier gave him a name, Krumin. The courier didn't know if that was the agent's code name, his real name or what, just that he was referred to once by the courier's superior as Krumin.

  "Parkins told the courier to complete his run. He was scheduled for another one in a week anyway, and by that time Parkins was sure he would have something worked out to deal with the whole thing.

  "There are more details, comments, some loose ends we're checking on, but that's the gist of iL What do you think?"

  There was a long pause before the old man replied. "It could be true, of course. The letters could be genuine, which we should be able to determine. The courier's story -if he was a courier----r-ould be mostly true. Following the agent would certainly account for Parkins being in the United States, although how and why he got to where he was i
sn't clear. Do you have any more on the courier?"

  "Nothing. If he came back, he didn't get in touch with anyone else on our team."

  "Hmm. I'm inclined to believe at least part if not most of Parkins' report, not so much because of what you've learned but because of what I've learned."

  Kevin's disappointment came across the line. "What do you mean?"

  The old man ignored Kevin's feelings. "I called to give you some important news, and instead we end up sharing. We've been monitoring all data since we got into this thing. Something interesting turned up late today. The agency has a double inside the Berlin KGB detachment. He reported that a courier had done just what Parkins report said he had done, gotten drunk and spilled to an American agent. Supposedly the American agent almost aborted a mission, but not quite. The double says the KGB is going to try again, sending another agent through Berlin to London, then over here."

  "That's incredible. How did the KGB know the courier nipped?"

  "How, indeed? Evidently his superiors were already suspicious. They broke him even easier than Parkins. Of course, they had some advantages. At any rate, the double claims the courier was terminated, and a new run is being attempted Tuesday. The double will let us know the flight number the new agent will be taking sometime early Tuesday. Go back to Berlin. Contact the agency's local head. He'll pass the flight number on to you, you board it. We'll run a check on the passengers, and perhaps by the time you hit London we'll have narrowed the potentials down to a few. You'll have assistance and should be able to blow the man's cover."

  "Then what?"

  "Then we wait, we wait and see what is so important that they risk a run after Parkins' death."

  5

  "The game's going on rather better now," she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little. "

  ‘’Tis so," said the Duchess: "and the moral of that is 'Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round" '

  "Somebody said," Alice whispered, "that it's done by everybody minding their own business!"

  "Ah, well! It -means much the same thing," said the Duchess, digging her sharp-little' chin into Alice's shoulder as she added, "and the moral of that is 'Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."

  "How fond she is of finding morals in things!" Alice thought to herself.

  The man in the window seat 42B of the 9:40 BOAC flight from Berlin to London had three passports. He carried his first passport in his left suit-coat pocket, the same pocket containing a cyanide pen gun with an effective range of three meters, a vast improvement over the larger, tubular, cyanide shooting device a KGB agent used in 1957 to assassinate exiled Ukrainian leader Lev Rebet in Munich. The man in 42B's first passport identified him as Ivan Markowitz, a Polish national, and listed his business as industrial representative. Backup, complementary identity papers gave the purpose of his visit to London as a trade exposition. The trade exposition existed, although the real Ivan Markowitz had perished ten years before in a Soviet detention camp. The passengers, second passport identified him as Canadian citizen Ren6 Erickson, and the support papers for this passport told of a lengthy European vacation' with receipts from numerous hotels to show how expensive tourism can be. These papers were sewn into the thick cover of an account ledger containing Ivan Markowitz's business records. The third passport, an emergency backup the passenger fervently hoped he would not have to use, listed him as an American citizen, one Frank Walsh from St. Louis, a college professor of foreign languages. The man in window seat 42B carried no paper which gave his true identity, for Feydor Nurich knew that might prove fatal.

  Nurich pretended to read a magazine while he went over the mission in his mind. He didn't relish the idea of penetrating the United States on such short notice, with little backup and few preliminary precautions. True, he had done technical work before, but he was much better on straight intelligence runs and best at paramilitary activities. He had no idea why it was necessary to send an agent all the way from Russia to reconnoiter the missiles, but, like most intelligence agents, he was used to knowing only the minimum amount of information necessary to perform his part in an operation.

  Nurich's actual commander, a major in the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, also had questions and reservations about this mission, but there was nothing he could do to satisfy himself. He would have to wait until Nurich completed the task for the KGB and reported back to the GRU.

  Spying on one Soviet intelligence agency for another bothered Nurich no more than spying on other nations. He found the danger inherent in both levels of his work approximately equal, and he vacillated on which of his intelligence roles he considered the more important. Nurich was a Russian, a soldier, a communist and a spy, in that order. Being a Russian and a communist gave him firm, active conviction in fighting the enemies of his country and his cause. His-inclination for the military was almost genetic in origin. Nuriches have defended Mother Russia against Napoleon, Hitler and other villains on battlefields throughout Europe. Feydor Nurich was the first of his family to be an officer, an accomplishment he took pride in even though his rank was a military secret not shared knowingly with ' civilians. Nurich's faith in the military, learned at his father's knee, had been the overriding factor in his espionage career since he entered that field in 1959, a young, talented linguist fresh out of college and "inducted" into Soviet civilian espionage.

  Three days after he learned he had "won" the opportunity to join the ranks of the secret police, an opportunity he had prudently accepted, an old military acquaintance of his father's who bad somehow risen to a captaincy while avoiding the numerous purges contacted the younger Nurich with a counterproposal. Feydor should by all means join the MVD (one of the names used by the secret police before the adoption of the KGB designation), but he should join as an agent of the military. By serving the military first, the civilian secret police second, Nurich could contribute the most to keeping Mother Russia strong and secure.

  Nurich hadn't needed much convincing to accept the military's offer. Although he had never told anyone, even his family, Nurich had concluded that Russia's strength depended on the supremacy of its military, a supremacy which of necessity had to be measured through more than comparison with enemy nations' potentials, a strength which of necessity meant Soviet military supremacy and domination of all levels of the state's activities. Only a calm, rational, strong military could protect Russia and the Soviet system from the ravages of foreigners and-the cancerous destruction of incompetent, self-serving civilian bureaucracies. The military would perfect the Soviet system, would keep the revisionist and capitalist elements in check and would do so without making the disastrous mistakes perpetuated by the predominantly civilian Russian government.

  When he searched for blatant examples of civilian mistakes, Nurich always remembered a neighbor and his daughter. The girl was nineteen, a year older than Nurich the night she and her father disappeared from their Moscow home in a civilian secret police Black Maria. Nurich never discovered what happened to her, and he had been wise enough not to ask. He knew the military would, not make a mistake like that, for the girl and her father were good Russians and good communists. The military would never send the wrong people to the camps,

  All, well, he thought regretfully, that was long ago. Today was today, and if he concentrated on his work, if be did the best he could, perhaps on another day such things would be impossible. Once again Nurich carefully reviewed his plan for the mission. The review didn't convince him to like the plan any more than he did when he received his first briefing.

  Kevin sat in seat 27A at the rear of the same compartment Nurich occupied. Kevin paid no attention to Nurich; he had no reason to. While pretending to read a magazine, he was actually watching the passenger in seat 31A. That passenger was a fellow CIA agent, an agent who Kevin fervently hoped would soon receive a list of probable suspects for the Russian spy.

  The CIA's source in the Berlin KGB section had passed on the flig
ht number the Russian agent was scheduled to take. Kevin had agents from the CIA's Berlin section photograph all the passengers as they waited in the lounge prior to departure. With the cooperation of Western German intelligence, a CIA agent filled in for the regular boarding clerk. As each passenger presented his ticket, a small camera hidden in the checkin booth took a picture. The "clerk" assigned each passenger's seat and picture a corresponding number as he checked his ticket. American and West German intelligence officials were investigating the background of the flight's passengers before the plane left the ground. Kevin hoped at least to narrow the field of suspects before the plane's landing in London complicated matters. He and another CIA agent also boarded the plane.

  Forty-five minutes before the plane arrived in London, Kevin's fellow CIA agent received a note from a stewardess. She passed him the note while handing him a drink he hadn't ordered. The agent didn't read the note. He waited a discreet three minutes, then walked to the mid-ships bathroom. Two minutes later he returned to his seat, and two minutes after that Kevin went to the same bathroom.

  A looped piece of scotch tape held the note to the metal wall deep inside the used-towel receptacle. Kevin almost dropped the note trying to retrieve it. The note listed three names and seat numbers: Johan Ristov, 1211; Ivan Markowitz, 42B; and Sean O'Flaherty, 15A. The hunt had narrowed to three suspects.

  The simple dead drop system of placing another agent between Kevin and the communications received by the plane's radio operator was a precaution the CIA Berlin director thought unnecessary. Kevin overruled the director’s objections. If the Russian saw who received the note and if his suspicions were aroused, the note's recipient would be blown and could not be used on the case again. Kevin wanted at least to protect himself from that possibility, no matter how remote it was. The intermediary in such a system is called a "cutout."