by Robert Moss
‘Two?’ Nikolsky echoed. The loss of an Illegal was about the worst thing that could happen, after the loss of a cipher clerk. For the service that captured one, it was like a score in the center of the dart board. ‘By the Mexicans?’
‘Under American direction, obviously. Well, we put our splendid Ambassador Dobrynin to work. He invited you-know-who to lunch, and explained that this unfortunate episode could pose a serious threat to detente between our two great countries. It worked like a charm. A call went out from the Secretary’s office to Mexico City, and our Illegals were put on the next plane to Washington. They were delivered direct from the airport to our Embassy, fixed up with new travel documents and, whoosh, straight back to Moscow on an Aeroflot flight. So you see, you needn’t fuss about Hansen. Dealing with the Americans is like — how do they put it? — like shooting ducks in an incubator?’
‘Like shooting fish in a rain barrel,’ Nikolsky corrected him, unconvinced.
*
Drinov planned the meet with Hansen like a military operation. Six members of the Residency, including Kostya, were assigned to mount covering surveillance. The route that Nikolsky and Drinov himself would follow was plotted out in fantastic detail. It was supposed to end at a safe house in Glen Cove, not far from the Ambassador’s residence.
None of this would have counted for much except for the fact that Bitov, the cipher clerk, was taking turns at supervising the battery of scanners that were used to monitor police and FBI radio transmissions. As a radio ham, Bitov was a natural; he took considerable delight in searching for unknown frequencies in between the recognized wave bands. He had the fortune to stumble on a previously unknown FBI wavelength that day, and the signal was unmistakable. But his timing was off. By the time he discovered that the FBI were out in unusual force in Glen Cove, and put out a message to abort the meeting, Drinov was already sitting down to kill a bottle or two with Hansen and Nikolsky.
Drinov was right about one thing. In that era of detente and mutual understanding, there was no question of expulsions. The State Department forwarded a formal protest, which was not made public. However, someone had to take the fall for a bungled operation , and that was certainly not going to be the head of KR Line. Drinov filed a report in which he stated, in lacerating language, that Nikolsky had failed in his duties as a KGB officer, in allowing himself to be duped by a man who had obviously been planted by the American authorities. The Resident, who countersigned Drinov’s report, said somewhat apologetically, ‘It’s not the end of the world. Anyway, you’ve had longer than most. Your tour should have finished already.’
*
‘“If you want to tell the truth,”’ Nikolsky quoted, ‘“keep your horse at the door and one foot in the stirrup.”‘ He had just recounted the story of his final encounter with Drinov, which had ended with Feliks spitting on the floor.
‘Who said that?’ Sasha asked.
‘Oh, it’s an old Armenian proverb. The Armenians are very smart. You should always look out for them. Look at Askyerov. I’ll bet he’s part Armenian. He has to be.’
‘What will you be doing in Moscow?’
‘Temporarily unassigned,’ Nikolsky said cynically. ‘There’s going to be an inquiry. Drinov has seen to that. Oh, well, at least I won’t have to live in that white elephant in the Bronx.’
Sasha had just received notification that he would be moving uptown to the recently completed Soviet complex in Riverdale. He’d managed to put off the move for months and months. Now the blow had been softened. They had jammed so much radio equipment into the top floors — up on that hill, they were ideally situated for electronic intercepts — that some of the families were being moved out into nearby residential blocks. Sasha’s apartment was in a red brick building with a shoe repair store on the ground level. At least he wouldn’t be stuck behind the metal grilles and closed-circuit cameras of the Sovplex itself.
‘The first thing I’ll do,’ Nikolsky said as he poured himself another drink, ‘is go to the Theatre Romen.’ He burst into a rendition of a gypsy song, horribly off-key.
He broke off and said with unusual solemnity, ‘Sasha, you’ll know where to find me. If ever you need anything, anything at all —’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Sasha said carefully, ‘there is something.’
‘Just tell me her name.’
‘It’s a member of your Committee. His name is Topchy. Did you ever hear of him?’
‘I don’t think so. Ukrainian, I suppose.’
‘I know he was in Moscow a few years ago.’ God, how long was it since Professor Levin had told him the story of his father’s death? ‘He’s a colonel at least. He could be a general by now.’ As my father would have been.
‘Topchy. Well, I’ll ask around. Any special reason?’
‘It’s something personal, Feliks.’
‘Good enough. Now really, General, why are you fucking a cow? Nalivay!’
*
It was a season of partings. At his next meeting with the agent code-named Ibrahim, the West African Ambassador informed Sasha that he, too, was returning to his own country.
They were jogging around the lake in Central Park. They passed a band of teenage kids with a big box radio that blasted Sasha’s eardrums, and a lone fanatic on a bench with a reflector, trying to get a tan under the thin February light.
‘What’s ahead for you, George?’ Sasha asked when they were back on a deserted stretch.
The African was in peak condition. He breathed smoothly and evenly, through his nostrils.
He announced as calmly as if they were reading a script by a Victorian fireside, ‘I’m going to take over the government.’
Afigbo had it all planned. The existing regime had made itself unpopular because of the flagrant corruption of its ministers — one of whom was said to have equipped his residence with a solid gold bathtub — and their highly visible dependence on the United States. Younger officers were restless.
‘If I don’t do it, we’ll get some lieutenant nobody ever heard of,’ he remarked. ‘Or maybe a sergeant, like in Sierra Leone.’
The African was well versed in the theory of the coup d’état. He had read the masters of the subject: Lenin and Curzio Malaparte. And he had already had some practical experience. ‘You want a minimum number of people involved,’ he told Sasha. ‘The key thing is that the population should remain passive, and that power should be concentrated in a handful of targets. All we have to do is secure the palace, the main barracks, the airport, and the radio station, and the capital will belong to us. That means the country as well. It’s not like the Soviet Union.’
Afigbo said this with a wry smile, but for an instant, Sasha, who had read Lenin too, found himself wondering: Isn’t it?
The African had a modest list of things he wanted the Soviets to provide, mostly cash to pay off some of the army commanders. Sasha promised to press his case. He also decided that he would qualify his report. There was no way of telling how long a man like George Afigbo would stay loyal to his benefactors once he had power in his own hands.
*
All of Tom Regan’s life was in his face. The skin was loose and crinkled and bunched like a pair of leather gloves that didn’t fit right, apart from a raised white scar above his right eye that dated back to his early days in the organized crime division. The web of broken capillaries gave a purplish tinge to his cheeks. His eyes were wary; this was not someone with exaggerated expectations concerning his fellowmen. His hair, what was left of it, was cut severely short. ‘Mr Regan, he likes a clean neck,’ his old Italian barber — the only barber he knew in the city who would still cut his hair for a buck fifty — used to say. That was right. Tom Regan liked a clean neck.
He was lightly dressed against the arctic winds that were cutting through the New York streets, in a gabardine coat with a thin wool lining. He was a Chicago man; the cold was in his bones. He grew up in a little box house on a treeless street in a blue-collar neighborhood, and remembered h
is father, who worked in a rolling mill, as an angry giant who would come home mad drunk and take the strap to whichever of his nine children he could catch. The war was Tom Regan’s way out, and after the war, the army helped to pay his way to a law degree, which he needed for only one reason. The kids he grew up with dreamed about being cops or firemen or engine drivers; the only thing he ever wanted to be was an FBI Agent. His boyhood hero was Matthew Purvis, the man who got Dillinger.
For six years now, they had had him working in Soviet CI. He would have rather been back chasing Mafia hoods. But he was a brick agent; he did the job he was assigned. And because he was a brick agent, he didn’t go much for the briefings on ideology or for intricate theorizing about double and triple agents. What interested him was M.O. and, above all, human failings. These Soviets weren’t supermen. They got drunk, they fouled up, and their wives were compulsive shoplifters. They used call girls; Regan had just been looking into a neat little racket that the Cuban service had going at the UN. They flew in hookers from Havana and fixed them up with Cuban press credentials so they could go trawling the delegates’ lounges looking for interesting pick-ups. This caused major embarrassment when it was discovered that the Soviets were the biggest customers. No, the Russians weren’t ten feet tall. They probably even had kids who didn’t understand them. Like he had.
It was a bad neighborhood, the Fifth Precinct, Regan was thinking as he rammed his car into a narrow space. Full of gays and drop-outs and Chinese gangs and kids, like his daughter Sandy, who were going to break their hearts before they ever got what they wanted out of life. He had argued with Sandy not to move out of the family place in Westchester. But no, she was going to be an actress, or a model, or something, and she had to be where the action was. He sensed that she was ashamed of what he did. The kids she mixed with put Che Guevara’s hairy face on the wall and thought that Mr Hoover was some kind of a Nazi. Still, he hadn’t completely lost her. It was she who had called him to stop by for a drink. Regan had forgotten it was his birthday. He usually did.
Regan locked the car and stomped heavily across the street. There was a man, a big fellow, coming out of Sandy’s building. He didn’t look like one of her crowd. He was carrying a newspaper and wearing the kind of comfortable brown double-breasted overcoat that is described in New York as British Warm. The man walked into the cone of light from a streetlamp, and Regan stopped dead at the edge of the street. He knew that face.
He had first seen it in a visa photograph submitted by the Soviet Mission to the State Department and sent on to his office to be checked out two, maybe three years before. He had seen it in a score of pictures since, pictures taken at the Coliseum, at the beach in Far Rockaway, in the restaurant at the UN. Tom Regan was very good at faces. But the name was still eluding him as he started up the stairs to Sandy’s apartment. Well, it wouldn’t take two minutes to find out. The Soviet was definitely operational, identified as probable GRU. They hadn’t managed to nail him for anything yet. Regan had put a surveillance team on him quite a few times, but the Russian knew his stuff. He always gave them the slip, except once, when they were able to tail him out to a Chinese restaurant in Queens. The Soviet must have sensed something, because he turned right around and went back to Manhattan the way he had come. If he had been going to a clandestine meet, he managed to abort it in good time, because they didn’t spot his contact although they sat outside the restaurant for a full hour.
Now, what was a Soviet intelligence officer doing in Sandy’s grotty building in SoHo?
‘You just made my day,’ Tom Regan announced to his daughter. ‘Tell me about your neighbors.’
*
Tom Regan was right. It didn’t take long to run down the file on Alexander Sergeyovich Preobrazhensky — no wonder that name wasn’t on the tip of his tongue! — and to confirm that he was tentatively identified as a major in Soviet military intelligence, known to associate with Luzhin and others in the Residency. It took longer to work out who Preobrazhensky was visiting down in SoHo. Sandy knew only a few of the people in the bulding. It sounded like there was a pretty high turnover. There were some students from Columbia, a couple of gays who ran a boutique on Christopher Street, a photographer. The photographer sounded promising; Abel had used the same cover.
Regan arranged for a stakeout. Within a week, he was examining a nice eight-by-ten blowup. There was the Russian leaving the building and there, framed in the doorway, was a pretty, dark-haired girl waving good-bye.
‘I want everything there is on her,’ Regan instructed the team he had assembled in his new office in the Federal Building. He had preferred the rathole round the corner from the Soviet Mission. ‘Family. Employers. Personal Habits. Political Affiliations,’ he rapped out the headings. ‘Let’s get on it.’
Two days later, Regan went in to see Murphy, the division chief. ‘Elaine Frances Warner.’ He summarized the facts that his men had assembled. ‘Twenty-seven years old, currently unattached. Father, Lev Israelyan, son of Naftaly. Born Odessa, nineteen-oh-nine.’
‘They’re Soviets?’ Murphy interjected.
‘Russian Jews,’ Regan corrected him. ‘The family emigrated before the revolution and changed the name. The father made a pile in the garment business.’
‘So what have we got here? A Line EM operation?’ The EM Line people in the KGB Residency handled operations involving the Soviet émigré community. They were always trawling around for people of Russian descent who could be pressured into carrying out espionage assignments.
‘Could be,’ Regan responded. ‘Except that Preobrazhensky isn’t KGB, he’s GRU. Also, we’ve checked out the other members of the family. There’s nothing adverse on any of them, except that the IRS ran a couple of audits on the father and the mother collects parking tickets like some people collect postage stamps. The father’s retired to Florida. He goes to Israel once a year and stays at the King David Hotel.’
‘Could be sleepers,’ Murphy commented. He set about lighting up one of his fat greenish cigars. Regan never could stand their smell. You’d think, now that Murphy was division chief, he could go upmarket a bit.
‘Brothers? Sisters?’ Murphy pursued.
‘One sister, Barbara. She’s just had a baby. The husband is a commodities broker.’
Murphy grunted. ‘That could be worth looking into,’ he said. ‘A broker told me the Soviets stopped selling gold a few weeks back. Anyone on the inside could have made a killing.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Regan. He had six hundred dollars in his savings account, when he last bothered to look.
‘What does this Elaine Warner do, anyway?’
‘This is the interesting bit. She calls herself a freelance writer, but from nine to five she’s working in the library at the X-Tech corporation.’
‘Looks like you hooked a big one, Tom,’ Murphy said. He lolled back comfortably in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. It was well known that X-Tech did classified work for the Pentagon. ‘We’ve got a friend over at X-Tech, haven’t we? Charlie whatsisname.’
‘Charlie Macdonough,’ Regan helped him out. Charlie had worked in CI until leaving for greener pastures.
‘Well, go buy Charlie a drink.’
‘I already did. Charlie knew the girl slightly. He says she’s well liked around the office, and nobody’s ever criticized her work. He says she doesn’t have access to sensitive stuff, but he’ll keep his eye on her. He wanted to know if he should tell his boss about the Soviet. That would get her fired, of course, unless the head of the company is willing to play along with us. I told Charlie to keep his mouth shut for the time being.’
Murphy’s grunt suggested approval. ‘What do you figure this Elaine’s motivation is, if they didn’t get her through the father? Is she political?’
‘Not unless you count being a registered Democrat.’ Regan grinned. ‘Oh, she made a contribution to the ACLU once. That’s about it. She’s in with quite a few media types, but she doesn’t write about politics
.’
‘Money then?’
‘She’s had a couple of bounced checks, and the credit card company put a stop on her once. But she pays her rent, and there’s always daddy to turn to. I doubt if it’s money.’
‘So what’s the bottom line?’
‘Have a look at this.’ He pushed a photograph across the desk. It was one of the pictures taken in the past two days. It showed a strikingly attractive girl in a leotard doing aerobics in front of a window. It had been taken with a telephoto lens.
‘Holy shit,’ Murphy said appreciatively. ‘Is this the one?’
Regan nodded.
‘She’s quite a looker.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What are you trying to tell me, Tom?’
‘This is just gut instinct. I could be wrong. But maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence. My feeling is, this Soviet is hooked on the girl.’
Murphy chewed this over, along with his cigar. ‘So Preobrazhensky could be vulnerable,’ he said at last.
‘Maybe.’
‘But it’s worth a shot.’
Regan wouldn’t go beyond another, ‘Maybe.’ He added, ‘His wife and kid are back in Moscow.’ He didn’t need to spell out the rest. If they were looking at Preobrazhensky as a possible defector, this could be bad news. He might not be willing to sacrifice his family. But if they were looking for leverage to make him ready to work as an agent-in-place for the FBI, it might help.
‘Have we got the girl’s phone tapped?’ Murphy asked.
‘Sure.’
‘Okay. Maintain twenty-four-hour surveillance on both of them. Follow up all your leads. We ought to hit one of them, probably the girl, damn soon.’
*
New York was a hunting ground for the CIA as well as the FBI. After all, the United Nations was international territory, off-limits to the Bureau — according to the rulebook — but not to the Agency, which had a special division, called Foreign Resources, or FR, to trawl the delegates’ lounges. In Manhattan, the two agencies tried to ignore each other’s existence, even though their operatives were often rubbing shoulders in the same crowded East Side saloons. When a fight over turf became unavoidable, there was a joint committee in Washington that sorted things out. But it was weighted down with organization men, and when Tom Regan wanted to ask for something from the Agency, he preferred to turn to one of his poker buddies.
