Cauldron

by Larry Bond

  SEPTEMBER 16 — MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, RUSSIAN REPUBLIC, MOSCOW

  Pavel Sorokin stared in consternation at the brown-haired man sitting comfortably across from him.

  “Fifty thousand rubles? Per truckload? Have you gone mad?”

  The man he knew as Nikolai Ushenko shrugged. “You want the food. I have the food. The price is what we call a marketing decision, Pavel Ilych.”

  “Bugger the market!” Sorokin spat out the distasteful word. Despite nearly six years of stunning economic reforms, he still had trouble dealing with the new capitalist reality. “Look, be reasonable, will you? I’ve got a strict budget limit here. Meeting your price would run me out of money long before year’s end.”

  Ushenko shrugged again in studied disinterest. “So get your precious marshals to up your budget. The charge is fifty thousand per — not a kopek less. If you don’t want my wheat and beef, I can assure you the boys over at your Foreign Ministry will. They’ve already offered me forty thousand — sight unseen.”

  “Those bastards? You know they don’t have that kind of money. Not unless they’ve got a printing press in their basement.” Sorokin ground his teeth in frustration. The way the Ukrainian slurred crisp-edged Russian words into a soft mush was almost as irritating as his tough bargaining stance.

  Pavel Sorokin had taken the job as general supply manager for the Ministry of Defense because of the endless opportunities it seemed to offer for a little lucrative graft and corruption. After all, everyone knew how slipshod the military was about minding its money. Unfortunately all that had changed when the old Soviet Union shattered into the Commonwealth and its confusing array of semi-independent republics. The soldiers whose careers had survived the transition were notoriously tightfisted with their limited resources. Now the kind of “private appropriation of state property” that used to be winked at if you were a party member in good standing could land you in prison — all after a fair trial, of course. And the government-owned foodstuffs he sold for private gain had to be carefully hidden in a paperwork maze of “transportation spoilage” reports and falsified inventories. It was all a lot more work than he’d ever bargained for.

  He spread his hands. “Come on, Nikolai. This is your old friend Pavel you’re talking to. The diplomats talk a good game, but they’re fickle. They’ll take your goods one week and dump you the next for some other supplier. But you and me, we’ve been doing business for what, almost six months? We can trust each other, true? I’m a guaranteed customer, also true? And that ought to be worth something… say, a five-thousand discount from the forty you’ve been offered.”

  Ushenko’s brown eyes brightened as he laughed. “Nice try. But no deal. I couldn’t possibly take anything under forty-five. Not and make a profit.”

  Sorokin winced. He needed this shipment badly. Marshals and generals and colonels wouldn’t react well to missing their midday meals because the ministry canteen didn’t have any food to fix. And new jobs for overweight and out-of-date ex-bureaucrats were few and far between.

  He tugged at the knot of his gray wool necktie, loosening it. “What you’re asking for is impossible. I just don’t have the money to pay more than forty thousand. Not and keep my job.”

  “Too bad, Pavel. It’s been nice chatting with you.” The other man stood up, reaching for his fur-lined jacket. An ice-cold wind already howled down Moscow’s wide avenues, an alarming portent of the winter to come.

  “Wait. Wait. Don’t be hasty.” Sorokin half rose, inwardly furious at himself for buckling to this Ukrainian bandit. “There are others in this building who owe me some favors I could call in. So maybe we can make another kind of deal. Cash plus a swap.”

  For a long minute, Ushenko stood motionless — as if still undecided about whether to stay or go. Then, with a sigh, he sat down. “What kind of swap? I’m not about to go into the gun-running business, so don’t bother offering me a used tank or two.”

  “No, nothing like that.” Sorokin smiled weakly at what he hoped was the other man’s joke. “I’m talking about information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  Sorokin spread his hands. “How about the relocation timetables and sites for three motor rifle divisions?”

  Ushenko snorted. “And what good are those to me? What am I supposed to do, sell them to the Americans? Or the Germans? I’m no traitor.”

  “No, no. Of course not.” Sorokin lowered his voice. “But you could find other buyers — some of those entrepreneur friends of yours, for example. Moving that many soldiers means big transportation and big construction contracts. Surely a little advance word of that in the right ears could be worth quite a lot.”

  The Ukrainian’s own ears seemed to perk up at that. “Go on.”

  And so Sorokin did. In the end it took nearly an hour of heated argument and furious bargaining, but he got his truckloads of food. And all for only forty thousand rubles apiece. Plus a few photocopied folders of Ministry of Defense documents.

  Alex Banich strode briskly out of the mammoth ministry building and climbed straight into a blue Mercedes waiting for him at the curb. A parking permit prominently displayed on its dashboard identified it as belonging to the New Kiev Trading Company. His driver, a fair-haired young man named Mike Hennessy, tipped his cigarette out the car window and pulled out onto the New Arbat Road, narrowly dodging an oncoming truck. Both men ignored the blaring horns behind them. Russian drivers were used to living dangerously and driving badly. Defensive driving would have been out of character.

  “So how’d it go, boss?”

  Banich grinned. “Not bad. We’ll clear a cool ten thousand per load, plus…” He pulled the papers he’d been given out of his jacket. “Sorokin gave me a little present that’ll keep some of Langley’s gophers happy and busy for a few more weeks,”

  The information on Russian troop movements would help keep Washington’s picture of the still-strong Russian Army up to date. Best of all, the documents represented a chink in Pavel Sorokin’s armor. His decision to trade one package of relatively low-grade state secrets now would make it that much easier to persuade him to sell more important data later on.

  Hennessy matched his smile. “So this guy still thinks you’re plain old Nikolai Ushenko, purveyor of fine foodstuffs?”

  “Not a chance.” Banich stuffed the papers back inside his jacket. “He’s convinced I’m Nikolai Ushenko, a spy on the side. But since he thinks I’m only working for a bunch of get-rich-quick Ukrainian businessmen, trading me a few secrets doesn’t bother him much.”

  Hennessy nodded. Most Russians still thought of their Commonwealth partners like Ukraine as partly owned subsidiaries of their own republic. Even men in the security services and the armed forces viewed their sister states’ efforts to build independent military and intelligence units with something approaching paternal amusement. That made Banich’s choice of a cover identity positively inspired. Many post-communist Russians still viewed American CIA agents as potential villains for spy thrillers or suspense films — crafty, dangerous, and devious. But Ukrainian spies? Well, they made perfect cutup characters for the new sitcoms pouring out of Moscow’s film and TV studios. Nobody really took them seriously.

  And that was a weakness Alex Banich was fully prepared to exploit.

  A childhood spent with émigré Ukrainian grandparents and years in the CIA’s intensive language training program let him shift fluidly and easily from English to colloquial Russian to flawless Ukrainian — all in the same sentence. He could pass himself off as anyone from a greedy wheeler-dealer to a stern, self-righteous soldier or policeman. Ten years of successful assignments throughout Eastern Europe had honed his acting and language abilities to a razor’s edge. There were nights when he even dreamed in Russian. All in preparation for what should have been the pinnacle of his active-duty career: assignment as the senior field operative for the CIA’s Moscow Station.

  Banich’s grin slipped to one side, becoming a wry smile aimed at his own misp
laced ambition. Driven by an unrelenting need to be “the best,” he’d worked hard, sweated blood, and wrecked his marriage to get to Moscow. And for what?

  The hard-line communists he’d grown up hating were gone — in prison, dead, or learning how to be good little capitalists. The once-mighty USSR was just as dead. Its successor states seemed too busy trying to survive to cause much trouble for the world. And Moscow Station, once viewed as the CIA’s most challenging posting, was now seen by many as little more than a dirty and cold backwater.

  The real action was supposed to be somewhere else to the east or west — in Europe’s great capital cities or in bustling Tokyo. The Agency’s congressional minders were constantly pushing for more data on the French, the Germans, and the Japanese, not the Russians. For Washington’s trendy power elite, nuclear missiles and tank divisions were out. Trade balances and subsidy levels were in.

  The effects showed up whenever Langley allocated its annual operations budget and made personnel assignments. Year by year, Moscow Station’s share of both got smaller and smaller.

  Banich shook his head. He didn’t see how much further the Agency could shrink its operations here. Not and expect his networks to gather significant amounts of useful information. The Soviet Union’s self-destruction may have made spying inside its former territories easier, but it certainly hadn’t made it any cheaper. These days Russians didn’t pass military or political secrets to America because they hated communism. Communism was dead. Now they sold them — sold them for the money to buy extra food, more heat, or to cover gambling debts or stock market losses.

  The shortsighted nature of the continuing cutbacks mandated by Congress gnawed at him every time he risked losing a valuable source by haggling too hard over a price. For all their internal problems, Russia and its partner republics still possessed a formidable stockpile of nuclear warheads, accurate ICBMs, and huge arsenals of conventional weapons. And behind the array of fledgling parliaments and elected presidents, Banich knew there were still dangerous men in high places who harbored imperial ambitions for their nations. Such men should be watched, not ignored.

  Unfortunately most of Washington’s policymakers were shortsighted by their very nature. Nations they didn’t view as a near-term threat to America’s security and issues that didn’t threaten their electoral prospects tended to drop off their screens. The usual rule of thumb was: out of congressional sight and interest, out of budget.

  Hennessy’s voice summoned him back to more immediate concerns. “I checked your messages while you were inside taking Sorokin to the cleaners.”

  “Oh?” Banich leaned forward from the backseat, unable to resist the opening even in his somber mood. “Anything pressing?”

  The younger man winced. His boss rarely punned, but when he did they were always awful.

  “Sorry.”

  “Uh-huh.” Hennessy floored the Mercedes, flashing through a crowded intersection narrowly ahead of a surge of oncoming traffic. “Seriously, Kutner wants to see you back at the embassy, yesterday and not tomorrow… if you get my drift.”

  “Yeah.” Banich pondered that in silence. The chief of station, Len Kutner, rarely interfered with field operations in progress. Instead, he passed judgment on proposed ops and then ran interference for them against second-guessing by the “goody two-shoes” — the embassy’s State Department regulars. Something fairly important must be in the wind. Something Banich was suddenly sure he wouldn’t like at all.

  THE U.S. EMBASSY, PRESNYA DISTRICT, MOSCOW

  The two uniformed Russian militiamen standing close to the embassy compound’s main entrance weren’t there on any kind of guard duty. They were just trying to cadge whatever warmth they could from the heated U.S. Marine sentry box right behind the gate. It had been chilly even with the sun high overhead. Now, with night drawing closer and thick black storm clouds piling up in the east, the outside temperature was slipping toward the freezing mark. Some pessimistic forecasters were even predicting Moscow’s first brief snowfall by early morning.

  Banich was still crossing the street when one of the marine guards recognized him and opened the gate.

  The tallest of the two Russian cops stopped blowing on his ungloved hands long enough to sketch a quick wave. “Hello, Mr. Banich.” His English was pretty good.

  “Hi, Pyotr. What’d you and Mischa do to wind up on night duty this close to the river? Screw your sergeant’s grandmother?”

  Both men laughed. They were part of the crime-prevention detail assigned to patrol streets near the embassy. Russia’s capital needed all the U.S. aid and investment it could attract, and having American diplomats routinely mugged didn’t strike anyone in Moscow as a particularly good advertisement for the city’s charms.

  Banich stepped through the gate and headed for the huge red brick chancery building.

  “Hey, Mr. Banich?”

  He half turned. “Yes?”

  “Got any investment advice for us?”

  Banich paused for a moment, pretending to fumble for the right, poorly pronounced Russian words. “Of course. Buy low… and sell high.”

  He left them chuckling behind him.

  The whole incident had been recorded, of course. Probably by a hidden mike monitored in one of the apartment houses across the street from the embassy. Russia’s Federal Investigative Service didn’t have all the resources or powers of the old KGB, but it still existed to protect the new state from foreign spies. And foreign spies tended to work out of foreign embassies.

  FIS surveillance was one of the reasons Banich always carefully changed his outward appearance before coming back from a stint as Nikolai Ushenko. It usually only took a quick stop at the downtown apartment he rented under Ushenko’s name. The Ukrainian’s thick, fur-lined jacket, brown sweater, and American-made blue jeans were gone, replaced by a blue London Fog raincoat, dark gray suit, white shirt, and red silk tie. The stylish pair of horn-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a splash of after-shave, and a dab of Jack Daniel’s or wine completed the transformation from plain-spoken, shrewd rustic to lazy, fun-loving, junior-grade diplomat.

  When he first arrived in Moscow, Banich had spent more than a month thoroughly playing his part as a mediocre deputy assistant economic attaché firmly committed to doing as little real work as possible. While apparently evaluating sales and investment opportunities for U.S. firms, he’d led FIS watchers on a dizzying round of factory tours, boring business conferences, and marathon pub crawls. The whole booze-tinged process had been well worth it. Day by day, the team of agents tailing him had dwindled, with man after man pulled off to follow more promising suspects — or to nurse long-term hangovers. Now they hardly bothered to keep tabs on him at all.

  That technique wouldn’t have worked six or seven years before. The KGB would never have allowed a foreign official, especially an American, to wander at will though Moscow and the surrounding countryside. But the KGB had been torn apart for its complicity in the August 1991 coup. And the fragment tasked with counterespionage, the FIS, spent a lot of its time and resources spying on itself; trying to sniff out the faintest whiff of a renewed hard-line threat to Russia’s elected government. Rumor said the splintered agency’s morale and effectiveness were still at an all-time low.

  Of course, that robbed Banich’s own job of some of its challenge. He shrugged the thought off. He’d welcome anything that made intelligence-gathering in this crazy country easier. His own nation’s changing priorities made the job tough enough as it was.

  Len Kutner was waiting for him in his cramped, sixth-floor interior office. That was something else Banich liked about the tall, balding chief of station. The man never played phony power games such as holding every meeting on his own turf.

  “Alex. Sorry to break in on you like this. Everything okay?”

  Banich shook Kutner’s outstretched hand and nodded. “Fine. Hennessy’s faxing shipping orders down to Kiev right now. And I picked up this for our troubles.” He held out the sheaf o
f Ministry of Defense documents.

  The station chief flipped through them rapidly, his forehead wrinkling with effort as he translated technical terms into their English equivalents. “They’re moving three full divisions? Rather expensive, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.” Banich pointed to the last few pages in Kutner’s hands. “And they’re moving them back into Belarus from up near the St. Petersburg Military District.”

  “Closer to the Polish border? Curioser and curioser.” Kutner looked up from the documents. “Have you heard anything else about this? From your sources in the Parliament, say?”

  Banich shook his head. “Not a whisper. Which I find very interesting indeed.”

  “Very. Maybe some of the generals are falling back into some bad old habits, eh?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Right. Put some time in on this one, Alex…” Kutner paused, looking troubled. “Or at least, as much time as you can afford. We’ve received some new marching orders from D.C., through Langley.”

  Banich waited for the other man to explain. Now they were getting to why he’d been called out of the field so soon.

  Kutner laid the documents down on his subordinate’s file-strewn desk and looked him right in the eye. “It seems there’s a new push on from some damned interagency working group. The Joint Trade Task Force. Whatever in God’s name that is.

  “Anyway, they’re complaining that most of our product focuses too much on military and political matters… and not enough on trade and commerce. Stuff they call ‘the real measure of a nation’s strength.’”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Kutner nodded bet kept going. “Whatever you or I may think about it, Alex, these folks have real pull with the Congress. And they’ve got backing inside the Agency, too.” He handed Banich a message flimsy. “That came down the satellite link this morning. It lists our new priorities in order of importance.”