by David Archer
RED SQUARE
Copyright © 2017 by David Archer.
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PROLOGUE
John Wilkerson put away his broom and sat down in the little janitorial office. Most janitors found their offices in the basement, but John, head janitor for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had an office on the very top floor. The reason for this was simple; John Wilkerson was a janitor only when he was not performing his less official function of being a very special agent of the CIA.
On this particular morning, less than a week before he would have been celebrating his birthday if he were back home, John put on headphones connected to what appeared to be a small portable stereo while he powered up the computer on the desk. When it came to life and he saw the icon on the screen that indicated he was secure and free of any electronic eavesdropping or surveillance, he clicked on a game icon and entered a password.
The game opened up on the screen, showing what appeared to be a three-dimensional city. John scrolled down the screen to the image of a small island in a digital ocean and clicked on what appeared to be nothing but a rock. An internal messaging system opened up on the screen, and he saw that there were eleven messages waiting for him. He clicked on the first one and saw that it was from Vasily Jovovich.
Michael,
There's a rumor that someone in the highest levels is greatly dissatisfied with events in the Kremlin. This could be a terrific opportunity, but I can tell you that there's also great risk involved. I would advise extreme caution, but it might be prudent to explore the possibility of arranging a channel for defection. I'll provide more information as I get it.
Vasily was one of John’s most valuable recruits. He was a low-level clerk in the Russian government, but one of his duties was to act as messenger for various government figures and agencies. As a result, he was known by just about everyone and could move around the Kremlin almost completely unnoticed.
He was also very good at spotting opportunities. It was Vasily who had orchestrated the defection of a Politsiya supervisor eight months earlier. The information and insights gained from that defection had completely revolutionized espionage within Moscow, by providing details about Russian police procedures and activities that had previously been shrouded in mystery.
If he had come across someone in the higher levels of government who might be open to either cooperation or defection, John was going to have to pursue that possibility.
He went through the rest of the messages, most of which were of only minor importance, but the last one was another from Vasily.
Michael,
My earlier message has some serious potential. Anton Kalashnikov, currently the First Deputy Minister of Defense, is prepared to defect to the United States. He has some conditions that must be met before he can do so. I've extremely high confidence in this, as I've placed my own listening devices in his offices and have found no evidence that this is anything other than a genuine dissatisfaction with the Kremlin. I await your instructions on setting up a meeting.
Kalashnikov would be an incredible source of information. John sent a quick response telling Vasily to proceed, then left his little office to go and speak to his supervisor, Albert Duke.
“Hey, John,” Duke said as he entered. “How is it going?”
“Might have something major coming up,” John said. “One of my sources has found out that Anton Kalashnikov is interested in getting out of Russia. I told him to set up a meeting, so that I can find out what’s going on. Vasily says Kalashnikov has certain conditions that have to be met before he can actually defect, but that he is seriously considering it if we can meet them.”
Duke’s eyes were about as wide as John had ever seen them. “Kalashnikov? Holy—John, if you pull this off, you'll be looking at a commendation and a medal! Just be as certain as possible that it isn’t a trap. Ever since Ryan Fogle, the FSB has been trying their best to bait us into making another big screwup.”
John chuckled. “Ryan wasn’t even real,” he said. “You and I both know that whole thing was nothing but a diversion, something to occupy the Russian press while we made some other move they didn’t see coming. I mean, come on, what real spook would walk around with a dimestore spy kit made up of wigs and sunglasses?” He shook his head. “Vasily thinks this is legit, and he has been right on the money so far. I understand the risks, but if we can get someone like Kalashnikov to roll over, I have to believe it would be worth it.”
“I have to agree,” Duke said, “but I want to be careful. I can’t afford to lose you, John. You've turned more doubles than anybody else I've had. Don’t take any chances, okay?”
“Al, don’t make me laugh,” John said seriously. “Our lives are all about taking chances. I'll let you know what I find out, but as always, if anything happens to me…”
“Don’t worry,” Duke said. “I'll see that Liz is taken care of.”
It was two days later before John heard back from Vasily, and the message was blunt and to the point.
Michael,
Kalashnikov is ready to meet. Vorontsovski Park, in front of the manor house, at lunchtime. He has already arranged for security to be nonexistent at that time. He will be wearing the uniform of a maintenance worker for the park.
Vorontsovski Park. The exact place where that idiot Fogle was arrested for trying to bribe Russian intelligence officers. John couldn’t help wondering if that was a bad omen of some kind.
Lunch time was less than an hour away and it was a thirty-minute drive to the park. John shut down his computer and headed for the elevator. After a quick stop at Duke’s office to let his supervisor know where he was going, he left the building and got into his embassy-assigned Lada Priora, and arrived at the park with twenty minutes to spare.
He parked the car at one of the smaller entrances and strolled in, stopping once at a concession stand to get a soft drink. As Vasily had said, there did not appear to be any security in sight, so he finally made his way to the manor house. This had once been the home of a Russian noble, but it was simply a tourist attraction now.
Like most of the espionage agents in the embassy, John was quite familiar with the appearance of most of the ministers and their deputies. He spotted Kalashnikov quickly, as the man walked along and picked up trash. Tourists had a tendency to be litter bugs, John thought to himself. He walked across the grounds at an angle that would let him intercept Kalashnikov when he reached a stand of trees.
“Touris
ts are pigs,” he said in English when he got close enough. Kalashnikov turned and looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
“It's always so,” he said. “Do I know you?”
“We have a mutual friend,” John said. “He suggested I might drop by here today.”
“Then let us speak clearly and quickly. I do not have a lot of time today. Our mutual friend has suggested I might be happier if I relocated, and I think there may be truth in that.”
“Just tell me how I can help,” John said. “I'll be happy to do whatever I can.”
Kalashnikov nodded. “I've a lot of information that your people would want, and there's so much corruption in the Kremlin today that I'm prepared to cooperate. It is, in my opinion, the only way we will avoid a global conflict that will destroy much of the world. There is, however, a problem. Should I suddenly disappear, my family would suffer. My wife and children must go with me, but it must be in such a way that the Kremlin will believe we're dead. Can this be arranged?”
John was surprised, but he didn’t let it show on his face. To make an entire family appear to be dead could be quite a daunting task. “I'm certain it can,” he said. “I would have to explore the options to see what would be involved and how quickly it could be done. You have a timetable?”
“If it's to happen, it must be no later than the end of this month. After that, I'll not be in a position to have any freedom from observation for a long time. It's even possible that my superior will be changing positions, in which case I would be forced to accept his job. At that point, it would be impossible to accomplish this.”
“All right. I'll get on this immediately, and I'll send our mutual friend to let you know what can be done.” John strolled away without another word, giving the apparent maintenance worker only a friendly wave goodbye.
All the way back to his car, John expected FSB officers to leap out from behind a bush or tree, but he made it back with no interference. A quick glance at the car failed to show that it had been tampered with, so he got in and started it up. He drove back to the embassy by a convoluted route and finally arrived more than an hour later.
Duke looked up as John entered his office. “How did it go?”
“Kalashnikov wants to defect, and he says he will happily cooperate with our intelligence services in order to avoid World War III. The only problem is that he wants to take his wife and children with him, and he wants us to make it look like they're dead. Has to be done before the end of the month, or we will never get another chance, he says. I told him I thought we could arrange that, but that I would have to find out for sure. What do you think, Al? Could we do it?”
Duke scoffed. “Not us,” he said. “That's beyond our immediate capabilities, especially having to do it so quick.” He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his chin. “There are specialists who handle this kind of thing, though. I could send a message off to Langley and see what they can come up with. Somebody there would answer back as soon as they can figure something out.”
“The sooner the better,” John said. “This is an awfully big fish, and I would hate to have him slip off the hook.”
“Okay, let’s think this through before I send off a request. If we’ve got to make the Russian government believe the whole family is dead, we’re probably going to need a lot of information. Get hold of your guy and tell them we need as much information about this family as possible. Names, dates of birth, photographs, descriptions, their clothing sizes, medical records, anything else you can think of. We’ll need it all, if there’s any hope of the right people pulling this off.”
John nodded and got to his feet. “I'll get on it right now.” He left Duke’s office and headed back to his own, where he sent a message off to Vasily. The software in the game encrypted the message and inserted it into Vasily’s message inbox, and John Wilkerson sat back to wait.
The following morning, John found a reply waiting for him.
It will take me several hours to gather up all this information. Meet me tonight, 9 PM LavkaLavka. You can buy me dinner.
John sent off a response confirming the appointment, then spent the rest of the day taking care of other duties. He handled the couple of message drops that always seemed to be part of his day, recovering the scribbled notes and thumb drives that his various double agents used to give information to him. He ended up working until after seven that night, just pulling information off the thumb drives and scanning the notes to be sent to the main data analysis groups back in Langley.
That part of his job often frustrated him, because he didn’t understand how someone sitting in a cushy desk back in the States could understand the nuances of what was happening in Moscow better than he could. He had been living there for almost a year and a half now and had become quite familiar with the way the city and its people operated.
He arrived at the restaurant a few minutes late, his skin two shades darker than usual, brown contacts obscuring his normally blue eyes, and his blond hair dyed midnight black. He looked for all the world like someone from the Ural Mountains, and that was his intent. Vasily was from that area, and John Wilkerson had carefully cultivated this appearance so that he could pass as the cousin Vasily would claim him to be if they were questioned.
“Vasily,” he called as he spotted his friend. “It's me, Nikolai.”
Vasily smiled and stood, shaking his hand as if seeing him for the first time in years. “You've gotten fat, old friend,” he said. The seemingly friendly insult was a code indicating that they were unlikely to be observed. “Your wife is feeding you too well, I see.”
“At least I have a wife,” John said. “I take it you're still single?”
Vasily invited him to sit at his table and the two of them kept up the small talk for quite some time. They ordered dinner and continued while they ate, and then John insisted on picking up the check. An observer would have seen two old friends enjoying a dinner together, and then laughing about some private joke as they left the restaurant and went their separate ways.
John drove back to the embassy by a circuitous route that took him more than half the night. It was 3 o’clock in the morning by the time he got back into his office and plugged the disposable cell phone that had been stuck with chewing gum under his side of the table into his computer.
Hidden in its memory chips was almost 50 MB of data. Everything they could possibly need to know about Anton Kalashnikov and his family was there, and he carefully encrypted the information and sent it to Duke’s computer.
Six hours later, Albert Duke downloaded it to a secure data chip that was then inserted into a diplomatic pouch. It was carried under armed guard to the airport and passed directly to the courier, who never left the plane.
Fifteen hours later, it was in the hands of Nick Weber, Deputy Director of Analysis for the CIA. The cover letter that accompanied it explained Kalashnikov’s desire to defect and his insistence on bringing his family with him, and all that it would entail. Nick thought about it for a total of five minutes, then repackaged it and got it ready to send out again.
CHAPTER ONE
Allison Peterson sat at her desk and looked at the encrypted message that had opened up on her computer screen. The CIA was requesting her assistance in arranging the defection of a high-level Russian Deputy Minister. The problem was that, in order to bring him in, he insisted on bringing his family along, but he wanted the Russian government to believe that they were all dead.
This was not an unusual request, and it had been necessary in the past for E & E to fake deaths this way, but it was usually only a single individual. This particular man had a wife and two children, teenagers, a boy and a girl. It would be impossible to substitute bodies, because even the families of Russian officials had their DNA recorded. The only scenario that could work would be for the bodies to be absolutely unidentifiable, but for the family to appear to meet its end in such a way that it wouldn’t be doubted. The death scene would have to be highly visible and d
ramatic, leaving convincing evidence that there were no survivors.
There were ways to accomplish this, of course. The family could be in an airplane that crashed into the sea, or perhaps on a sinking ship. As long as there could be no doubt the family was present at the time of the disaster, and the entire disaster witnessed to the point that it could not be doubted, there was potential for making it work. The only problem was how to get the family safely out of the crashing airplane or the sinking vessel before they really did die.
How to accomplish it wasn’t Allison’s problem; whether to even try, unfortunately, was. The request from CIA was loaded with fancy words like “incredible opportunity,” “absolute necessity,” “avoid global conflict,” and “gold mine of information.” In Allison’s mind, all of that translated to, “Please, please, please make this happen!”
Even worse, the request was endorsed by the president himself. While he could not order Allison to accept a particular mission, his endorsement indicated just how serious the need to pull this off really was. There was just no way in the world she could refuse and still be able to keep everybody happy, but before she would agree to such a difficult mission, she had to have more opinions than just her own.
She picked up the phone on her desk and punched in a number. “Donald? Find Molly and get your butts in here. We've got us a puzzler.”
She hung up the phone and sat back, but it was only a couple of minutes before Donald Jefferson and Molly Hansen entered the room. Jefferson was her second in command at E & E, and Molly was a brilliant data analyst who could almost predict the future from bits of data anyone else would overlook. She let them take their seats and get comfortable, then briefed them on the request.
When she finished, Jefferson was staring at her with his eyebrows almost meeting in the middle. Molly, on the other hand, was looking up at the ceiling with her eyes open wide, a sure sign that she was running various scenarios through her computer-like mind and evaluating their chances of success. Allison watched both of them, waiting to see which would speak first.
