The Mercenary

by Paul Vidich

  For Ryder, Juniper, and Leo

  He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know… and another life running its course in secret.

  —Anton Chekhov “The Lady with the Dog”(translated by Constance Garnett)

  1 RED SQUARE

  GEORGE MUELLER KNEW THAT THE night ahead would be about stamina. Stamina for waiting, for worry, and stamina for fear. He understood that he had to be ready for the moment, when everything would suddenly change and he would be a man on the run. He wouldn’t get off that roller coaster until the mission succeeded or his luck ran out. Hardened nerves, cold resolve, and a tolerance for nausea were things he would have to possess if he was going to get through the night. He had memorized his route through Moscow and took care to anticipate what could go wrong, knowing that he was no longer a young case officer who could jump off a cliff and hope to find his wings on the way down.

  Five minutes after four o’clock in the evening, December 31. Mueller noted the time and date for the report he’d later write. The Agency’s new rules made it important to document an operation, and failure to do so was a poor mark on any case officer’s career, but date and time were important to Mueller for an entirely personal reason. At sixty-three, he was a few months from voluntary retirement. He didn’t want to end his storied career with a failed mission.

  The cable from Headquarters that came into Moscow Station had been succinct. The walk-in Soviet intelligence officer who had approached Mueller, throwing an envelope in the open window of his car when he was stopped at a traffic light, was potentially the most valuable Soviet asset to ever offer his services to the CIA. Recruiting the man known only as GAMBIT took precedence over all other activity in Moscow Station.

  Knowledge of GAMBIT’s existence was limited to Mueller and John Rositske, his deputy chief of station, who was at the wheel of the Lada. They were next in line to exit the embassy parking lot, and they waited for the marine guard to raise the barrier for the lead car. Neither of the junior officers in the Lada—Ronnie Moffat, who sat in the back next to Mueller, or Helen Walsh, in the front—knew the details of the night’s operation, nor did the case officers in the decoy car being waved through.

  Mueller lit a Prima and cracked open his window. The top floor of the embassy’s French Empire façade was singed with dusk’s streaking light, turning the pale stucco an ochre red. Its height set it apart from neighboring Georgian homes along Tchaikovsky Street. Soviet militia stood in guard shacks on both ends of the embassy, using their telephones to call out the comings and goings of embassy staff to nearby KGB surveillance teams. Mueller’s eyes moved to the left, beyond the militia’s shack, toward two parked Volga sedans, exhaust pluming into the bitter cold. Across the street at the bus stop he saw two Russians in quilted-cotton jackets and shabby wool caps drawn over their foreheads sharing a bottle of holiday vodka. KGB? he wondered. Or members of the million-man-strong army of Russian alcoholics?

  Gusting wind drove a light snow across the wide boulevard, which was empty of traffic at that hour as Muscovites left work early to celebrate the new year. Streetlamps went on one after another, illuminating the embassy like perimeter lights along a prison wall. Moscow was a city of elaborate privileges for foreigners with hard currency, but to Mueller and the other CIA officers in Moscow Station, it was a denied area—a dangerous place of provocations and surveillance. Mueller alone knew his destination that night. Two vertical chalk marks the day before on a postal box by the tobacco kiosk outside Kievskaya Metro Station had told him the meeting would go on.

  Mueller was tall, and his knees hit the back of the small car’s front seat. He wore a bulky Russian overcoat that he’d purchased at a flea market, a pair of thick-soled shoes, and an old fox shapka. He struck a match and relit the Prima, cupping his hands against the breeze coming in his window, and exhaled pungent tobacco smoke.

  Mueller had joined the Agency out of the OSS and witnessed firsthand the burgeoning bureaucracy’s reliance on new technologies, but he understood that spy satellites and code-breaking algorithms didn’t substitute for the intelligence that came from the solitary man who gathered secrets at the risk of his life. Mueller’s hair was gray and thinner, his lower back kept him from a good night’s sleep, and he started his morning with a regimen of pills, but he admitted to no one that he was too old to play at the young man’s game. He had circled his retirement date, but he had done that before, and there was no certainty he’d follow through this time. The job had defined him, shaped him in ways he hadn’t expected, and he found it hard to imagine life on the outside. Doing what? Quietly writing a memoir? Fishing? Reading Shakespeare? Looking for ways to stay relevant?

  The marine guard raised the barrier. Mueller met Rositske’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and he confirmed that it was time to go operational. John Rositske was Mueller’s physical and personality opposite—shorter, heavier, Catholic, and a man who liked to talk even when it was wise to shut up. He had joined the Agency when it was no longer an exclusive club for eager young minds from the Ivy League. He was in his early forties, coming to the end of his two-year tour, a burly man with a big voice and an outsize confidence. He had red hair and a West Texas tan, which had paled in the long Russian winter, and his eyes, lively and kind at times, were grim coals and relentlessly skeptical on the job. He’d picked up his gruff voice as a teenager working weekends as a ranch hand, and it had served him well during his two tours in the Mekong Delta commanding a marine platoon. He’d led forty-two men on a risky night helicopter assault, which had earned him a Bronze Star and left half of his men dead.

  Rositske lowered his window for the marine guard, who checked his State Department ID and glanced in the car.

  “What’s that?” The guard pointed his flashlight at a cardboard box on the back seat.

  Ronnie showed off covered porcelain dishes holding a holiday dinner: aspic, pirozhki, chicken with potato sloyami, and meat patties. She was prepared to give the address of the New Year’s party they were attending, and she also had an explanation, if one was needed, to account for the compressed air canister at her feet.

  “Ready,” Rositske said after they’d been waved through. Rositske tapped the gas pedal twice to make sure the notoriously unreliable product of Soviet engineering didn’t stall, and he moved the stick shift with his knuckled fist. “Rock and roll, gentlemen. Moscow Rules.”

  There was only one rule in Moscow anyone could remember, but the plural had survived. Trust no one. Assume every taxi driver, every drunk on a bench, each traffic policeman, and every shy girl in a bar looking for companionship worked for the KGB.

  Rositske turned onto Tchaikovsky Street, and in his rearview mirror he saw two black Volgas pull away from the curb. “Tics. Far left side.” He kept to the speed limit, making the second right turn into a neighborhood of narrow streets and once-elegant homes, and he continued at that speed, slowing only to make another right turn and then a left, altering course, and with each turn he confirmed the Volgas still followed. He knew their advantage—high-powered cars equipped with encrypted radio transmitters.

  “Next turn.”

  Ronnie threw a blanket off her lap and pulled a deflated, life-size sex doll from the floor, arranging it on the seat, slumped forward. Mueller tested his door handle, rehearsing in his mind a sequence of moves.

  Suddenly, the Lada sped up, accelerating into a right turn, and Rositske followed with another immediate right turn, and then a third. As he came out of the last turn, he pulled hard on the hand brake, slowing the car without its brake lights glowing red.

  “Now!”

  Mueller pulled the handle, opening the door, and he rolled onto the pavement, hitting hard. His momentum brought him to his feet, and in a split second he had tak
en cover between a stunted bush with prickly thorns and a parked car. Mueller pressed against the car, gulping air, and he looked at the accelerating Lada. The inflated life-size doll was propped in his seat, the glowing tip of a Prima dangling from her mouth and a fox shapka on her head. Technical Services in Langley had come up with the trick. They purchased the doll and two back-ups in a Washington, DC, sex shop and shipped them to Moscow Station via diplomatic pouch.

  Mueller saw the two Volgas speed past unaware of the deception and breathed deeply to prepare himself to go dark. He looked at his watch: 4:17 P.M.

  * * *

  MUELLER MOVED ALONG the dark street, keeping to the center of the sidewalk, and passed through circles of light cast by widely spaced streetlamps, just an older man carrying a cloth bag with his holiday meal. He had three hours until his rendezvous with GAMBIT, and while it had once seemed like an unnecessarily long interval, he was glad he had the time to dry-clean himself.

  Mueller moved from shadow to shadow in his bulky overcoat with the slack step of a Party apparatchik returning to his one-room apartment to eat dinner alone. His cloth bag held a fresh orange, parsley potatoes, herring, walnut rogaliki, and a small bottle of plum brandy. Under his pensioner’s dinner was tightly wrapped brown paper of the sort used by butchers, and inside a T-50 miniature camera fitted into a ball-point pen, film cartridges, a tiny burst radio transmitter, and a thick stack of rubles. The cloth bag swung at his side as he walked and from time to time he blew on his gloved hands for warmth. The falling temperature stung his cheeks.

  Mueller made his way along grim streets and through drab apartment blocks dotted with lights, beacons of joy for families gathered to celebrate a secular holiday that the Communist Party had elevated over Christmas. He crossed the Moscow River at Borodinski Bridge and then doubled back on Kalininskiy Bridge, headed toward Moscow Center. He was alert to movements in his peripheral vision, but he resisted the temptation to look. He had learned not to meet another person’s eyes. If he looked, he knew the stranger would look away. Muscovites kept to themselves, and they knew to mind their own business.

  But coming to the end of the second bridge, Mueller happened to stop to light another cigarette. As he shielded his match against the wind, he glanced around. If the KGB were there—on foot or in a car—they had mastered the art of being invisible, and that was the fear of some case officers in Moscow Station. It had been a bad season. A dozen of the Station’s best assets had been arrested, their networks rolled up, and years of patient work wiped out. Everyone had a theory for the loss. Rositske believed the KGB’s new ghost surveillance was a ploy to demoralize Moscow Station. Teams of KGB would wait beyond the visual horizon for hours, giving the appearance there had been a break in surveillance, and then suddenly they would converge in cars or on foot, when the case officer was confident he was dry-cleaned and could go operational.

  Rositske advised Mueller not to take an operational role that required a young man’s reflexes and a chess master’s mind. At sixty-three, Mueller had his best years behind him, but the evening’s success depended on more than fitness—it depended on GAMBIT’s trust, and Mueller alone had that.

  Mueller flicked his cigarette over the edge of the bridge and watched it fall to the river’s pack ice. He fixed his eyes on Kalinin Prospekt in the distance and beyond that the metro station. Ready, he thought.

  The Arbatskaya Metro Station entrance was empty of the usual crowd, and he joined the few people moving down to the platform level. He let himself be pushed by a big, bustling woman who smiled until she got a better look at his face. Mueller was alert to watchful militia teams nearby and the footsteps of passengers rushing to beat the metro’s closing doors. He moved through the vaulted lobby, becoming another submissive Soviet Russian who knew to keep to himself. He shuffled his worn shoes to give the appearance of a diminished older man, someone the militia would judge to be a person of little interest. In this way Mueller passed through the station, emerging on the street at a separate entrance. He glanced back. Clean. It was time.

  * * *

  MUELLER ENTERED KARL Marx Prospekt on the northwest corner of the Kremlin. Cold darkness lay across Red Square, and he slapped his gloves to warm his hands and prepare for what lay ahead. Not since he’d parachuted behind Nazi lines at night in Occupied France had he been this nervous.

  He moved clockwise around the medieval fortress and entered the open square, where the enormous clock and bells of Spasskiy Tower inside the Kremlin wall announced the time. A horizontal band of snow obscured the spire’s red star.

  Mueller saw the honor guard goose-stepping out of an archway in the wall, proceeding to Lenin’s Tomb on their hourly rotation. He gazed across the scattered pedestrians who crossed the square, hunched against the wind, trying to stay warm. Mueller looked for a man like himself, dressed in a tired overcoat and shapka, holding a cloth bag in his right hand. GAMBIT had set the time and place of their brush pass, thinking—Mueller assumed—that an open place with people to overwhelm the militia’s watching eyes would be a good spot to converge. This was an amateur’s mind at work, and Mueller knew that GAMBIT’s choice could put them both at risk.

  In spite of the bad weather and the late hour, groups of visitors looked toward Lenin’s dark granite mausoleum. Tourists from the provinces and a few foreigners endured the cold to catch the changing of the guard, while others had taken up positions to watch the evening’s fireworks display.

  “Smoke?”

  Mueller was aware of the man before he heard his voice, but what unsettled him was the question in English. He turned to face an Interior Ministry militiaman wearing a high-crown cap with the seal of the USSR. He had the stern, self-assured face of a man aware of his authority. Mueller gave no hint that he understood, and his eyes opened slightly. Confusion. The militiaman pumped two fingers to his lips.

  Mueller obliged, hitting the red pack of Primas on his sleeve, offering a loosened cigarette.

  “Spasibo.”

  Mueller continued toward the Monument to Minin and Pozharsky in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral’s candy-striped domes. Mueller had gone a few steps when he saw the man he knew must be GAMBIT. The time was right, the spot agreed, and the man carried a cloth bag in his right hand. He was dressed like Mueller, so they could pass as doubles—two older men who looked alike on a vector to cross paths by the benches. If all went as planned, they would exchange bags in their brief moment of contact and separate. Only the most vigilant observer would notice that the cloth bags had been switched, Mueller carrying another man’s dinner and GAMBIT carrying camera, film, radio, and rubles. The brush pass would happen in the blink of an eye.

  “Amerikanets!”

  Mueller cursed his luck. The militiaman was having fun with him because the night was cold and there was no one else to harass. He continued toward the monument and considered whether to abort.

  “Ostanovis!” Halt.

  Mueller’s world got very small. His choices were usurped by the sudden appearance of a black Volga that emerged rapidly from a side street by the GUM department store. A second Volga entered the square farther away, its wheels skidding on the thin covering of fresh snow, swerving wildly until its driver regained control and headed for Mueller. Third and fourth cars swept in from behind St. Basil’s. Tourists and foreigners gathered at Lenin’s Tomb looked at the four vehicles that raced toward the old man with his cloth bag.

  Mueller stood perfectly still. It would be a fool’s errand to run. Plainclothes officers emptied from their cars and advanced on him in a tightening circle. Fuck! It was as if they had known he would be there. Mueller considered GAMBIT, now drawing the attention of a militiaman, and in that moment, he prepared himself mentally for the diversion he knew he must create.

  He sprinted toward a narrow opening in the encircling net in a hopeless bid to escape. He was easily apprehended, but he continued to put up heroic resistance, cursing the men holding his arms. He continued his indignant objections until th
e officer pinning his arm kneed his lower back. A second blow struck the back of his skull. His head began to spin, and he dropped to the pavement. He breathed deeply to shake off the nauseating pain and gather his thoughts. His glove was pulled off and his palm grazed with a handheld black light, revealing dim, amber fluorescence.

  “Mr. Mueller.”

  A pair of polished black leather boots filled Mueller’s field of vision, and he raised his eyes. As he did, he glimpsed the shapka-capped man with his cloth bag by the Monument to Minin and Pozharsky. The man passed a few more benches and turned for a second, watching the commotion. He looked toward Mueller, a quick glance to take in the scene, and then turned again, walking away, beginning to hurry.

  The officer standing over Mueller was of average height with bony cheeks scarred with pockmarks, calm eyes, and a gaunt frame that made him look menacing. Mueller recognized the high-crown gray cap of a KGB lieutenant colonel. Mueller had not met the officer, but he knew the face from Moscow Station’s files. Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Talinov, first deputy to the head of the Second Chief Directorate. Mueller knew he was a brutal man who had been trained by the Soviet system to be a tool of repression. He was known to be precise and quick in his methods—like a good butcher.

  Talinov removed the contents of Mueller’s cloth bag and handed them to the KGB officer at his side—the orange, the plum brandy, herring, parsley potatoes, and finally the walnut rogaliki, briefly savoring the dessert’s candied aroma. He complimented its perfection with a knowing nod.

  Talinov removed the brown paper package from the bottom of the bag. He undid the twine, unfolded the paper, and looked at the contents. He presented his discovery to his prisoner like an offering.

  “Dolboyob.” Fuckhead.

  Talinov removed his stitched leather glove by pulling one finger at a time, until his long, delicate pianist’s hand was open to the cold. He slapped Mueller’s cheek with the glove.