A knowing chuckle. “Oh, no. John Wells.”
8
NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND
The MGM National Harbor Resort & Casino had brought big-time gambling to the edge of Washington, not even ten miles from the White House. To match the capital’s low skyline, the casino stretched wide and long, a beached cruise ship. An eight-level, five-thousand-space garage was hidden underneath, a last indignity for losing gamblers. You’ve given us your money. Now find your car and get gone. Drive carefully! À bientôt!
Anton Petrov hadn’t lost. Then again, he hadn’t played. He circled the garage’s lowest level, looking for the black Dodge Challenger with its Tennessee plate. There. He found a spot two rows away, parked his gray Kia Sorento. The most forgettable of vehicles. Perfect. Petrov glanced around, found he had the garage to himself. No surprise. People didn’t linger down here.
He burrowed his head into the hood of his red Nationals sweatshirt and turned for the Challenger. Like all casinos, National Harbor had surveillance cameras everywhere. Petrov preferred to keep his face in shadow. He could have been a poker pro. But he had no interest in poker. He specialized in a riskier game.
He slipped into the Challenger.
Classical music, dark and heavy with violins, rang from the speakers. Petrov didn’t know the composer. The man in the driver’s seat jabbed at the dashboard touch screen until the violins were a whisper.
“Adam,” the man said.
Petrov had lived in the United States for thirteen years, arriving legally from Moscow for a graduate program in computer science. He dropped out after his first year. But he never went home. He now lived as Adam Petersen, a Swede with a driver’s license and a half-dozen credit cards. He had a face just this side of handsome, short brown hair, a narrow nose. He’d smoothed his accent for two years before leaving Russia. He still didn’t sound native, but he didn’t necessarily sound Russian either. He could pass as Swedish to an American ear. Not that people here cared about his origins. In all his time in the United States, he’d been asked where he was from only once. Americans regarded the question as bad form. Of course, a real Swede would see through his cover, but he’d never met one.
He supported himself writing software. Good coders never ran short of work. He picked up most jobs through Craigslist or other websites. The people who paid him never saw him. He lived in a two-bedroom rental apartment in Clarksburg, a Maryland exurb thirty miles northwest of Washington. Far enough from the city that he didn’t have to worry about bumping into professionally curious FBI agents.
He lived alone. He couldn’t risk even a casual girlfriend. He relied on Tinder on those rare occasions he wanted sex with someone other than himself. When he wasn’t coding or playing Xbox, he puttered with his aquarium, his only hobby. He owned a commercial-grade twelve-by-four-by-two-foot model. His favorite fish wasn’t a fish at all but a black-and-white eel, a muscled, toothy creature that hid in the gray reef and ate anything foolish enough to come within striking distance.
A bare existence. But he didn’t mind.
Petrov was the SVR’s top undercover operative in the United States. The CIA called its undercovers non-official. The SVR—the sluzhba vneshney razvedki, the Russian foreign intelligence service, equal to the more famous FSB on the Kremlin’s org chart, though not in reality—referred to them as illegals. The SVR’s description was closer to the truth. Most Russian and American agents worked out of embassies, with official diplomatic protection. If they were caught stealing secrets, they were given a persona non grata letter and sent home.
Undercovers lived as ordinary citizens, subject to the justice of the countries where they operated. Petrov had taken the act a step further. He’d hidden not just his identity but his nationality—a tricky game in a world full of databases. He couldn’t have passed as American-born, so he’d taken a smaller leap. A Swedish programmer was less likely to attract the attention of the FBI or CIA than a Russian of any stripe.
Petrov had been careful at every step. Most important, he hadn’t rushed. He’d taken the years he needed to live his new identity. The effort had paid off. In SVR jargon, he was a 200, a foreign operative with a completely clean cover. The SVR went to great lengths to keep him sterile. Petrov ran with almost no face-to-face oversight. Emails and other coded comms were his primary connection to the service. Though a couple senior operatives in Washington knew about him, his handler was based in Spain rather than the United States. Petrov saw her only once a year. On the rare occasions he had to pick up money or hand over packages, he used old-school dead drops.
The SVR was bureaucratic as well as paranoid. Its willingness to let Petrov operate with such independence proved his importance. The SVR had only two 200-rated operatives in the United States. It saved them for its most valuable missions.
Like running the man in the Challenger.
The agent’s code name was Grad, the Russian word for city. The Russians used the simplest code names for their most important spies. Petrov hadn’t recruited Grad. In fact, the man’s existence had come as a shock to him. Three years before, he’d received an email from his handler telling him to book a cruise out of Miami on the Royal Caribbean Harmony of the Seas. He was to sit by the ship’s main pool on the cruise’s third afternoon. Nothing more. He wondered if he was being told to run. Maybe the CIA or FBI had discovered him. But he’d seen no unusual activity around his apartment, and the Harmony didn’t leave port for a week.
The Harmony was the world’s biggest cruise ship, longer than an aircraft carrier and twice as heavy. It included an ice rink and a fourteen-hundred-seat theater. And it was full for Petrov’s voyage, eight thousand passengers and crew members roaming its decks. Petrov had no hope of figuring out who belonged or who didn’t. He didn’t try. He relaxed. After so many years undercover, Petrov understood his truest camouflage came from eliminating the gap between actor and role. He didn’t play at being a vacationing programmer. He was a vacationing programmer.
He covered his skin in sunblock and lined up for the hundred-foot waterslide. He leafed through a boring manual on C++ coding. He drank margaritas and ate nachos. Americans weren’t good for much, but they led the world in tasty ways to fatten themselves. Mostly, he sat behind his sunglasses and watched women. College girls in bikinis, moms chasing their kids, divorcées wearing oversized hats to hide their wrinkles. The college girls were out. He wasn’t interested in the moms. Maybe he’d have a chance with the divorcées. But trying would be too much trouble. Both Adam and Anton were content to look.
Petrov knew he wasn’t a deep thinker. Way back during SVR training, he’d seen the recruits who were. They tied themselves up over spying’s moral quandaries. They didn’t last. Maybe Americans could afford such nonsense. Not Russians. Russians had learned sometime between Genghis Khan and Napoleon that survival was its own moral imperative. And Petrov didn’t like the United States. It had humiliated his people after the Soviet Union collapsed. To this day, it took every opportunity to tell the world how weak and untrustworthy Russia was.
On the third afternoon, he felt himself stirring. The gap between his twin selves opened a fraction. He wondered how his masters would signal him. What they’d want. The hours passed. The humidity rose, and the sun disappeared behind a scrim of clouds. The pool emptied out. Petrov nursed his margarita, the day’s third. He must have dozed because he woke to a cold shower. His controller, Julianna, dumping water on his head.
“Hey!” The shock of being woken meant that the word formed in his mind in Russian, but he pushed it out in English.
Julianna took the deck chair beside his. She had long blond hair and ropy muscled arms. Her girlfriend, Shira, stood at the other end of the pool. Shira’s pregnant belly popped from her black one-piece. The SVR had correctly gauged that even if the CIA’s Madrid Station realized Julianna was a Russian agent, it would pay her little attention. Langley would assume the SVR w
ouldn’t give important jobs to a lesbian with a Jewish girlfriend.
Petrov had known Julianna eight years. He liked her, but her foolishness today nettled him. He toweled off his face. “What if I’d yelled in our old language, Julianna?”
“Swedish, you mean.” She grinned. She was half drunk, he saw. Fortunately, no one was within fifteen meters.
“You’re taking your cover a bit far, don’t you think?”
“I think this ship is filled with people who care more about their next meal than anything else in the world. I could wear a hat that says Russian Spy on my head and no one would notice.”
Petrov waved at Shira. “Is it yours, Julianna?”
“Is what mine?”
“The baby, of course.”
“I always knew women’s insides confused you.”
“I don’t care enough for them to confuse me. How are you these days?”
“Come to our room at nine, I’ll show you. Ninety-two thirty-six, the ninth deck.”
“Nine-two-three-six.”
“That’s right. And don’t eat too much at dinner. You’re getting fat, Adam.”
At precisely 9 p.m., he sat on the edge of Julianna’s bed, reading a thin file. She sat beside him. Shira was off doing whatever an eight-month-pregnant woman did when she wasn’t allowed in her room.
“This is real?” he said when he was done.
“No, I made it up.”
“Men like him, they don’t betray their countries.” He was whispering. He knew Julianna was right: No one on this ship was listening. No one had the faintest idea who they were or what they were doing. But given what he’d just read, he couldn’t help himself.
The American had offered to betray the United States on his own, without even being recruited. The CIA called traitors like him walk-ins. The SVR term was kamikazes, because they all blew themselves up sooner or later.
Naturally, the SVR had considered the possibility that the man was a dangle, a fake mole offered by the CIA as a way to feed false information. But he was too senior to be used that way. And his first dump of information had been too valuable to be anything but real. Petrov flipped through the file again, checked the pictures. A successful, handsome man. A celebrity, of sorts. American royalty.
At a dinner at the French embassy in Washington, this man slipped a key and a piece of paper to the SVR’s deputy chief of station, Dmitri Zlobin. An address and number, nothing more. The address led to a self-service storage facility in Northeast Washington. The number to a ten-by-ten locker.
Zlobin opened the locker himself. At first glance, it seemed empty. An odd prank. Then he saw the flash drive taped to the base of the back wall.
Now the American had a new name.
The drive included a two-page letter from the American with instructions on making contact and his demands for payment, as well as a brief explanation of his motives. I know you may question my sincerity . . . The letter and a Russian translation were included in the file Petrov held. The man wanted two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month, paid into a Panamanian bank account controlled by a Cyprus-based trust.
On the surface, the money explained Grad’s betrayal. But he had millions of dollars already. As Petrov read the file, he decided the money was a smoke screen. The American’s real motive was jealousy.
Petrov didn’t understand jealousy. What difference did anyone else’s success or failure make? But then, Petrov had realized long before that he didn’t have feelings the way other people did. He wasn’t exactly a psychopath. He wasn’t inclined toward cruelty. But he’d suffered no remorse about shedding his identity and taking on another. He didn’t miss his parents or friends or his old life. If he had to give up this new life, he wouldn’t miss it either. And though he’d never killed, he was sure he could if the SVR ordered him to do so.
Julianna rested a hand on his leg. The move would have been flirty from another woman. “You don’t believe?”
Petrov read the man’s letter again, decided he did. Not because of what the American said. But because he had set out his motives in bullet points. Such inartfulness could only be real. “I do. Anyway, what I think doesn’t matter. You want me to run him, I’ll run him.”
On that score, the orders were clear. Petrov would give up his other agents. From this point forward, Grad would be his only responsibility. Proof the SVR believed in this man.
“It’s the oldest story, what he’s doing,” she said. “Read the Bible.”
“You know what the Bible says about women like you?” He pushed her hand off his leg.
“You’re a cold fish, Anton.”
“Who’s Anton? My name’s Adam.” Petrov was already looking forward to this job.
Grad’s letter had set the time and place for their first meeting. Prince William Forest, a Virginia park close by the FBI training center at Quantico. Petrov disliked the location. What if an overzealous trainee went for an early morning hike? But he couldn’t change it. So on a Tuesday, just after sunrise, he parked and made his way into the forest. The ground was level, and the trail easy to follow, but after a few minutes he found himself huffing. Julianna was right. Too many long nights stuffing himself with Oreos as he sat typing code on his laptop. He promised himself he would start to work out, lose his gut. Tomorrow.
The American was where he’d promised, the third tree marked with a yellow blaze along Quantico Creek. Petrov stopped beside him. He was trim, in his mid-fifties, salt-and-pepper hair. The photos in the file hadn’t conveyed his power. Even standing still, he radiated a coiled energy.
“Do you know where I can find the green trail?” Petrov said.
The man hesitated, like he might pretend not to understand. Though he must know he had no choice.
“Down this way. I can show you.”
After a few minutes, the trail opened into a small picnic area, empty now. They sat at a splintery table, staring at each other, as the jays and finches twittered around them. Petrov couldn’t deny this moment thrilled him. He would have to establish control over a man who was used to giving orders rather than taking them. Build trust with a man who was betraying his country.
He started simply. “We’ve accepted your offer.” He unfolded a paper from his pocket, slipped it across the table. An alphanumeric string, nothing else. “Your account is set, as you’ve asked. Five hundred thousand in it to start. Another two hundred fifty thousand on the tenth of every month. It’s yours without restriction, but we recommend you tell us if you want to bring it back here. We can help.” In fact, the SVR had no plans to let the American touch the money. He would trap himself if he tried. If he made a fuss, the SVR would find a way to move it for him.
“I don’t.”
The answer confirmed Petrov’s belief that the money wasn’t the real motive. “Next. As a rule, we’ll contact each other electronically. Nothing fancy. Your people look hard at encrypted communications anywhere near Washington. The better the encryption, the harder they look. We’ll use standard Gmail and Hotmail accounts with simple codes, keywords you won’t forget. When we have information to pass, we can use short-range encrypted wireless links. Or flash drives. Simple handoffs—you leave it in a newspaper at a Starbucks, I pick it up. No cutouts.”
“That seems risky. Physical handoffs.”
“You know how many people have clearances at your level in Washington? Tens of thousands. Active surveillance is reserved for suspects. You’re not a suspect. You’re not going to be. From now on, you don’t contact our people in Washington. Never. Not for any reason. I handle you. If you feel pressure, if someone’s watching, something’s wrong, you tell me. We’ll figure out what to do. If you come across something important, time-sensitive, we have to know right now? Me again.”
“Don’t want to share the credit?”
“You’re too valuable to be run through our usual channels.�
��
“Is this the part where you tell me how important I am? I’m helping both our countries?”
“Would that make you happy?”
The man smiled. “What if I call, you don’t answer? What if I wake up one day, see on CNN that the FBI has arrested you?”
“The FBI doesn’t know I exist. They won’t unless you tell them. But—” Petrov slid across another piece of paper. “Two emergency phone numbers, two email contacts.” One email and one number went to Julianna in Madrid, though the American didn’t need to know her name. The other two were monitored continuously in Moscow. “A simple code for emergencies. Even if I’m gone, we can have you out of the United States in four hours.”
“And spend the rest of my life in Russia? I don’t think so.”
Petrov didn’t bother to argue. If the man was confronted with what the FSB and SVR called trudnyy put’—the hard way—he might reconsider. Until then, better to steer him from such unpleasant thoughts. “Memorize this paper and destroy it.”
The man stared at the paper for a minute and then pushed it back.
“You’re sure you’ll remember.”
“It’s only my life.”
“Tell me, then.”
The man did. Perfectly. “Now, do I have the honor of knowing your name?”
“Adam Petersen.”
“You can do better than that.”
Petrov slid over his Maryland driver’s license.
“This is real?”
“Come to Clarksburg, you’ll see where I live.”
The American handed back the license. “Why show me that? No diplo protection for you, my friend. If I’m fake, you’ve just given yourself up.”
“If you’re fake, there’s a hundred FBI agents watching us. And I wouldn’t get back to my car anyway. Do I look like I have the skills to hide in the forest?”
The man grinned. “I thought Russians were tough.”
The Deceivers Page 13
