by John Weisman
He found himself on the wide sidewalk in front of the old Red Army staff headquarters. To his right stood a 1930s, Art Deco police station. Behind and to his left, in the middle of a small plaza, was a statue of Field Marshal Suvorov, the greatest of the imperial Russian generals and one of the most successful tacticians who’d ever lived. It was Suvorov who had invented the dictum “Train hard, fight easy.”
On the roof of the building just beyond Suvorov’s statue was the old vizir site. Involuntarily, Sam glanced up to see if it was still active. He was too far away to be certain.
He sensed no untoward activity. The radar screen in his head clear, Sam turned right and walked east, slaloming his way past half a dozen blue-and-white police cars parked provocatively up on the sidewalk, impeding pedestrian traffic. A pair of cops, their chins tucked into the high collars of thick bulletproof vests, stomped booted feet as they patrolled a fifty-foot beat between the police cars and the sandbagged doors of the station, submachine guns hung around their necks.
The increased police presence in the streets made Sam nervous. Sure, the cops were deployed to guard against more terrorist attacks. But their very presence made his own work a lot more difficult. Sam turned the corner, heading against the traffic flow on Samarskij Lane. Abruptly, he cut behind the station and turned into the park.
Ed Howard had described the site as a hollowed-out tree just north of the police station. Sam scanned the vista. There was a ragged line of leafless poplars. Beyond them, across the snow-covered parkland, lay a bottle-shaped pond.
Idly, Sam took the path that paralleled the tree line, his eyes probing for Howard’s dead drop. He made his first pass without result. He turned, pulled a cigarrito from the tin, stopped to light it—which gave him half a minute to take a closer look at the poplars—then ambled back the way he’d come.
Nothing. He made his way back to Samarskij Lane, turned north, walked as far as the edge of the pond, where the lane merged with Olimpiskij Prospekt, then stopped. Frankly, he was getting nervous. There was almost no one else in the park. A lone man, poking at trees, was bound to attract attention.
Sam turned north again and strolled along the prospekt, trying to put himself inside Howard’s head. If this was his dead drop, where would he locate it?
He paused and looked back to the south. Certainly, nowhere near the police station. Too much chance of being discovered in flagrante delicto. That ruled out the poplar trees. He panned his gaze west. The pond was bordered by a wide pathway, flanked by a smattering of birches and some evergreens. Nah: too much open space. You wanted someplace you could pass quickly, insert your package, and move on.
Sam’s eyes kept moving. In the northwest corner of the park stood the Red Army Museum. Directly north of where he stood was an unmarked, L-shaped street—more of a lane, actually. A row of removable cast-iron stanchions blocked each end of the L, where the twenty-meter-wide band of asphalt merged with the prospekt. No doubt it had been built as an athlete staging area during the Olympics.
Between the apex of the lane and the museum’s back entrance, a path meandered in a wavy sine curve. Just below the path, roughly half the distance to the museum, stood a square, green-painted steel shed perhaps twenty-five feet on each side. It was a utilitarian structure—probably used to house and maintain tractor-drawn lawn mowers and other park equipment. A small grove of mature birch trees stood between the front of the shed and the pathway.
Sam turned. From where he stood, it appeared that the shed was almost directly north of the back side of the police station. He walked between the stanchions, his boots making deep prints in virgin snow. At the top of the lane he veered onto the path leading to the museum.
As he walked, Sam said aloud, “Good tradecraft, Ed.” It was good tradecraft, too. Now Sam had what the instructors at the Farm call cover for status—he had a reason to be on the path. He was going to visit the museum.
He slowed down as he came up on the maintenance shed. It was shielded from the path by one-two-three-four-five-six-seven trees. He passed the first, then the second. He stopped at the middle tree. It had been pruned. Sam squinted. The cuts were recent, too. Certainly, the work had been done within a month or so. Quickly, he scanned all seven birches. The middle tree—number four—was the only one that had been touched.
Sam examined the pruning. The work was all on one side of the tree. Two of the lower branches had been cut back extensively. The stubs were very short—less than an inch. Just above them, a third cut had been made. But the pruner hadn’t been so careful. The stub stuck out almost three inches from the tree trunk.
Sam stepped back and looked at the trees again. Seven trees. The middle tree had been pruned.
The middle tree. It was tree number four no matter which direction he counted from. Number four. Number four. His mind raced. Four—a-b-c-d.
D was the fourth letter of the alphabet. D. And the letter D, in Morse code, was long-short-short. Letter D—long-short-short. Letter D was the emergency call out signal for Sam’s fateful meeting with Pavel Baranov. Was it reaching? Maybe. But as Howard had said during the short face-to-face at Rand Arthur’s house, in the spy’s trade there are no coincidences.
From the way the pruning had been done, it was obvious Howard had completed this dead drop before he’d left for the United States. The defector’s trip had been as well planned out as was his subsequent escape from Washington. But what was Howard’s true purpose? The only thing Sam knew for certain was that Howard’s clues were for Sam and Sam alone. Of their ultimate intention, Sam had not a clue.
There are no coincidences. His heart pounding, Sam left the pathway and walked up to the tree. On the far side, inconspicuous but unmistakable, the bark had been peeled back, the area beneath it hollowed out, and the bark strip resecured with dark, unnoticeable tacks.
Don’t rush. Work smoothly. His pulse racing, Sam pulled the flap, reached inside, and discovered something small and cold. He removed the object and dropped it into a pocket. He replaced the bark strip, then walked away toward the museum.
Sam’s fingers examined the packet. It was small. It was wrapped in some kind of thick plastic. There was tape.
He very much wanted to pull the package out of his pocket and take a look. But that was impossible right now. Right now he had to depart the area safely; extract unnoticed.
Sam made his way along the pathway to the broad rear courtyard of the Army Museum. There was an exit doorway to his left. Cutting through buildings with multiple entrances was basic denied area tradecraft. He stepped over a mound of plowed snow, edged between the parked cars, and made his way to the door. A sign taped to the gunmetal gray entrance instructed him to use the front unless he was a staff member. So much for that idea.
He turned right, walking along the windowless rough-hewn stone rear wall of the museum. As he turned the corner, a Zil coupe passed him. Sam let it go by. Had the driver seemed unduly interested in him? Sam wasn’t sure. But he wasn’t going to take any chances either. Not now. He double-checked to make sure he was alone and unobserved. So far, so good. Suddenly Sam’s head snapped backward, as if in anticipation of a huge sneeze. Sam’s right hand flew into his trouser pocket. It emerged with a balled-up handkerchief. Sam shook the white linen like a flag, put it to his face, and sneezed hard. He brought his left hand up, blew his nose, and then returned the handkerchief—which now contained the false mustache—to his pocket.
Newly clean-shaven, he turned the comer onto Sovietsky Armii Street and stood for a few seconds, monitoring the traffic.
Sam checked his watch. It was almost a quarter of eleven. There was going to be precious little time for countersurveillance on Mar’inoj Rošci Lane. He saw a No. 13 trolley bus making its way up the one-way avenue and jogged north so he could intercept it and climb aboard at the next stop.
CHAPTER 15
SAM APPROACHED 2 Mar’inoj Rošci Lane from the north. There were, in fact, more than half a dozen separate streets and lanes in this nei
ghborhood, all with that very same name. Only the prefix numbers—1 Mar’inoj Rošci, 2 Mar’inoj Rošci, and so on—differed. The same sort of repetitive pattern appeared in every section of the city. It was one of Moscow’s more maddening topographical traits.
Sam left the trolley bus at 10:58 six blocks north of his target. His mental sonar, radar, and FLIR19 were all fully operational. He made his way past the Satirikon Theater, walked three streets east, then turned south, his boots crunching on frozen slush as he followed the chain-link perimeter of a deserted vegetable canning factory on whose puke-colored wall was spray-painted a six-foot-high hammer and sickle under which, in crude Cyrillic, was scrawledFUCKING JEWS OUT OF THE MOTHERLAND.
He paused, checking for pings, and, sensing none, peered east. Half a kilometer beyond the deserted factory, Sam could make out the railroad tracks of one of the commuter lines that brought workers into Moscow from the northern suburbs, and a few hundred meters beyond that, where a broad, six-lane highway traversed the railway, sat the Sputnik memorial and the Rizhskaya metro stop.
He resumed his route. The streets were largely deserted. Even the normally busy ones adjacent to the Satirikon had been strangely empty. Sam walked south on 4 Mar’inoj Rošci Street, turned west onto 3 Mar’inoj Rošci Lane, then veered south again on 2 Mar’inoj Rošci Street. Obviously, nobody was paying off the city workers in this neighborhood, because the streets had not been plowed. The sidewalks were slippery and the cars unlucky to have been trapped curbside were encrusted in sooty ice shells.
From the time he’d departed the trolley bus, the weather had taken a sudden and definite turn for the worse. The skies were overcast. Oppressive pewter gray clouds had moved in from the east, roiling so low they formed a drab drop ceiling above the apartment blocks and rusting factory roofs. In the space of half an hour, the city had been plunged into an unnatural midday dusk that gave it a grim, forbidding, Stali-nesque aura.
The cold, always pervasive, was now tinged with a bitter, frozen dampness that made Sam remember how much he detested Moscow winters. No wonder Russians drank the way they did.
11:27. Sam hunched his shoulders against the cold, shoved his gloved hands as deep into his pockets as he could, and turned onto 2 Mar’inoj Roši Lane.
The building Sam wanted—number 31—was on the left side of the street, about sixty-five yards south of where he was. Eyes moving, he noted that every vehicle on the street was either snow-covered or ice-coated. Sam brushed the plastic-wrapped object in his pocket with the tips of his gloved fingers. Yes, it would have been nice to get out here before ten so he could find a safe spot and surveil the location for a full two hours to make sure he wasn’t going into a trap. But the trade-off had been worth it.
Maybe. He’d only know for certain when he opened the packet.
Sam crossed the street and scanned the windows of the five-story building opposite number 31. Only clear glass—he could see inside virtually every apartment. No gauzy curtains or black netting to hide surveillance cameras. He turned his attention to the target building itself. It was light-colored brick and stood five stories high, just like every other building on the block. The boxy design probably dated from the late 1950s or early ‘60s. More than two dozen satellite television dishes faced the sky, bolted beneath old-fashioned louvered windows. They gave the place a contradictory, techno-ancient appearance.
What struck Sam most was how unremarkable it all was. This was an anonymous building in an anonymous neighborhood. It was most certainly working class.
This fact in particular gnawed on Sam. Ed Howard was most definitely not the working-class type. The reports Sam had read thanks to Michael O’Neill’s ingenuity indicated Howard had a large, well-appointed dacha northwest of the city, and an in-town pied-à-terre only a short walk from his office at Lubyanka.
So what was this place? And what had Howard used it for? The possibilities were infinite, and almost all of them unpleasant.
The rendezvous could be a setup. The FSB wasn’t above that sort of thing, and the compromising of a former CIA chief could prove valuable in the current and often prickly liaison negotiations between the two intelligence services.
SHORTLY after Sam had returned from Moscow, a Soviet intelligence officer named Stanislav Borisovich Gusev had been caught monitoring a sophisticated electronic eavesdropping device that the Russians had somehow managed to secrete in a seventh-floor conference room at the State Department. It was a huge scandal. First of all, the Russians had hidden the bug inside the chair-rail molding on the wall. Which meant they’d been in the conference room enough times to obtain photos of the molding, and paint samples so they could turn out a piece of molding with the bug, cut out a section of molding, and insert their section—all without being discovered.
Second, the bug had been in place for more than a year. The only reason Gusev got caught was that he got careless. Because he enjoyed diplomatic immunity and therefore had State Department-issued plates on his car, Gusev habitually parked in one of the numerous no-parking zones within a block or two of State Department headquarters, where it was inevitably ticketed by DC traffic officers. His activity pattern escaped the FBI gumshoes at Buzzard Point.20 But it was caught by a sharp special agent in the Counterintelligence Division of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, who took the time to chart the position of Gusev’s car when it received each of its sixty-two parking tickets. All, she discovered, had been written within two blocks of Main State. Sixty-two appointments in thirteen months was some kind of record, especially because the diplomatic list identified Gusev as a junior-grade cultural attaché. Then the DSS agent checked the diplomatic visitors’ log, only to find that Gusev had never actually entered the building.
It was at that point that the FBI finally realized something untoward might be going on and started surveilling Gusev. Two weeks later, they caught him sitting on a park bench across from Main State, holding a small radio monitor that was broadcasting the proceedings of a meeting in the seventh-floor conference room two hundred or so yards away. Despite his vehement protests, Gusev’s monitor was confiscated.
Immediately thereafter, following a lot of undiplomatic publicity (not to mention blanket television coverage), Gusev was booted out of the country. Ever since, Moscow had been looking for an “equalizer,” and Sam, having been declared persona non grata by Moscow once before, was an ideal candidate for public ignominy.
Or, it could be a honey trap. The Russians had a history of trying to compromise their adversaries by setting them up with women. Sam’s CIA mentor, Donald Kadick, who had served in Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union during the early days of the Cold War, had once told Sam about the time the ploy had been tried on him.
Kadick had been on his way to a white-tie-and-decorations embassy reception in Warsaw. Dressed like a dandy, he’d walked onto the elevator in his apartment building. The doors shut. One floor below, an elegant woman swathed in a thick sable fur coat and the high-heeled, up-to-the-knee boots fashionable in the mid-1960s joined him. She nodded in his direction. Kadick amiably nodded back.
Just as the doors opened on the ground floor, the woman jettisoned her fur coat. She was wearing nothing beneath it. She threw herself on Kadick and kissed him passionately just in time for her performance to be captured by the six Polish government cameramen who were waiting in the lobby.
Before Sam left for Moscow, a terminally ill Don Kadick had taken him to the Metropolitan Club for what turned out to be their farewell dinner. Cancer was eating away at the old Brahmin’s body. Kadick’s decades-old bespoke suit hung from the retired case officer’s shrunken frame. Frail and watery-eyed, he walked with the aid of a knobby stick that he brandished as he spoke. But the man’s will was as indomitable as ever. And he hadn’t lost his sense of humor—or irony. Over perfect martinis Kadick related the Warsaw story. “The moral is simple, Samuel,” he’d said with mock severity. “Never, ever, get on an elevator with a naked Polish woman.”
11:29. The keypad was on the left side of the battered security door. Sam noted screwdriver scars around the metal casing. He punched the numbers 8-2-6 and waited for the electric buzz that would signal the lock had been unlatched.
Silence.
He punched the sequence a second time. Again, there was no reaction.
Sam had visited places like this before. He took hold of the doorknob, twisted, and pushed the steel door open. It was yet another reality of Moscow life. People got tired of punching buttons with their arms full of groceries. So they disabled the security locks on the front doors of their apartment houses—and then they complained bloody murder when the burglary rate went sky-high.
Apartment III-? would be on the fourth level. At least Irina’s place had a number. Most of the apartments in Moscow didn’t. Ask where someone lived, and it was more than likely you’d be told, “We’re the second door on the right, on the first-floor landing off the third stairwell, far left-hand side of the inner courtyard.”
Sam walked into the dingy, narrow foyer. To his right a cluster of cheap metal mailboxes were bolted to the wall. About half of the covers had been pried open. This was definitely not the kind of place Ed Howard would have sought out to live.
But it would have been a perfect safe house.
Now, that made sense. An anonymous apartment on an anonymous block of working-class apartment houses. An out-of-the-way place to stash things for safekeeping. To be honest, Sam had done something similar. During his tour in Paris he’d rented a safe-deposit box using one of his Agency aliases—a German businessman named Koch. He stored documents that he felt uneasy about keeping in his flat (DST had the habit of breaking into diplomatic residences), as well as a handgun, a sterile21 Belgian Browning Hi-Power complete with a suppressor.
Sam hadn’t even wanted the damn thing. The weapon had been a gag gift from an old Marine colleague of his from Vietnam who worked in the Agency’s Paramilitary Division, performing what was euphemistically known as “special action.” The pistol had initially been bought in Europe for use at one of the CIA’s high-risk stations. Once it was appropriated by the Paramilitary Division, it had been modified with a threaded barrel and a suppressor and all of the weapon’s identifying marks had been erased.
