Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  “Your chief company enforcer?” she said.

  “And a very good one too,” he replied. “Though we don’t call them that these days.”

  “Strange name for an enforcer—Salvador,” she said.

  “Saviour? Yes, it is, isn’t it. But it makes a kind of sense.” He smiled at her again. “In this upside-down world, at any rate.”

  Part Three

  Chapter 23

  ALONE IN A RENTED apartment, in a foreign city, Vladimir slumped in a scruffy armchair he had bought for forty dollars from a refugee Somali at a flea market in the underground car park around the corner on West Eighty-eighth Street.

  After his meeting with Anna, he felt cut off from his own side now, as well as from the Americans. She had driven a wedge of anxiety into his routine.

  As the deputy chief of the KGB residency in New York, he had position, if less actual influence than some of his junior officers. The most ambitious of them had linked their positions in the intelligence service to the ministries and the big state energy giants, all now overseen by the KGB back home. But he had missed out, or, as he more truthfully acknowledged, had felt less motivation for the fruits of greed and power than some of his subordinates. He was still trying to work for Russia.

  He reflected that while he had never had the political will—or maybe it was lust—to extend his power beyond the job, at least he was good at his job.

  His own department was called Line X by Moscow Centre. Line X had produced the best, most prolific, and most profitable information in the past two years from its agents in America, outstripping all the other KGB operations. The Main Adversary, as America was still known at Moscow Centre, continued to produce a regular flow of greedy, or dysfunctional, or merely bored agents who possessed the highest security clearances—Flash and even Critical, as the Americans called them. They were sources who were happy to take the Russian dollar in exchange for, mostly technological, secrets. Line X was the KGB department responsible for technological espionage.

  These Russian dollars came from the Kremlin-controlled energy companies; companies that provided a quarter of the world’s natural gas and had the world’s largest oil reserves. Control over them had made the KGB far more powerful than it had ever been during the Cold War. Russia itself might be little changed, but under Vladimir Putin, the KGB was no longer a state within a state. It had become the state, and consequently commanded the state’s money. At the KGB’s New York residency, and at the KGB residency in Washington, D.C., money was almost no object when there was a potential American agent to acquire.

  The foreign service of the KGB, the SVR, to which Vladimir was attached, was the elite of the country’s intelligence power. SVR officers were paid far better than they had been in the Cold War, when the most a successful officer stationed abroad could expect were a few foreign-denominated goods to take back home at the end of his service. Now, under Putin’s regime, the intelligence services were awash with cash, siphoned off as they liked from the state energy companies, all of which were now run either by Putin’s KGB cronies or by businessmen who took their orders from the Kremlin.

  Corruption had increased proportionately, of course, and Vladimir rued that. Corruption was inefficiency. The favoured officers at the KGB residence in New York, he knew, now creamed off fat percentages from their company backers in the motherland, in return for under-the-counter favours on American soil that only an intelligence officer could perform.

  In person and as a spy station, the employees and the residency itself now had far more money than had ever been available. In the new cold war against the Main Adversary, operations against America’s political, industrial, and intelligence institutions were now at full throttle on the Russian side, and he, Vladimir, had been highly commended for his recruitment of American agents in the past year.

  But still, as he sat now on the scruffy armchair in the darkness, at this moment he had other things on his mind. He realised he wanted to stay sitting in the chair and drink away his dissatisfaction with the present. He sat without seeing, and as so often in the past, he tried to concoct in his imagination a better future. And he bleakly wondered if that had been his mistake all along.

  Walking in darkness over to the cupboard that was screwed badly to the wall and getting looser, he rummaged blindly for the bottle of vodka that was normally there. He found it, shook it in the darkness next to his ear, and heard the splash that told him there was little more than a mouthful left.

  He replaced it, picked up his coat and hat from the hook on the inside of the door, and, still without switching on the light, went to the window and surveyed the street four floors below. It was lit in bands where the streetlamps traced by the angled fall of the snow washed their glow onto the wet tarmac.

  On a freezing night like this, any watcher would be in a car—he was confident about that. But there were none idling their engines anywhere within his field of vision.

  He left the apartment for the walk down the four flights of stairs to the street. The lift was broken again. But he didn’t mind the walk. It suited his mood to be slow.

  The two questions since his meeting with Anna were continually playing across his mind. Had she been sent—assigned—to meet him by the Americans? Or was their meeting in the bookshop a genuine coincidence?

  Either way, he was wishing it had never happened. He felt himself drawn towards her once again. The embers of his feelings towards her, that stretched back to school days and which he had long assumed were cold ashes, had sprung to life almost immediately.

  His mind told him one thing about their meeting, and his heart another. His mind told him—loudly and clearly—that the meeting had been a setup.

  But what he desperately wanted in his loneliness and loss was to believe the demands of his heart. And his need for that was stronger than his logical mind. He realised he was caught in a trap, knowing one thing and believing entirely the opposite.

  He turned to the left out of the apartment block and saw the desultory Christmas lights still strung around the entrance to the seedy hotel next door. He noted the tramp with the tatty coat and blackened hands, like a burn victim, he thought, and who seemed to suck the intermittent heat from the hotel lobby whenever the automatic doors hissed open. He observed the various aimless or purposeful passersby who came at him through the snow that now fell with increasing force.

  In truth, nothing was any different than it had been before the meeting. Nothing, essentially, was any different anywhere, he thought. New York, Moscow—there seemed to him suddenly no difference between the two, except perhaps in the details of their veneer. And in the past twenty years, since the Soviet Union had collapsed, Moscow had caught up a lot even in that respect.

  He looked up and back again along both sides of the street, but he realised he didn’t know who he was looking for—his own side or theirs. Maybe they were just the same too.

  He took a taxi uptown through Manhattan, via the Henry Hudson, and then had it drop him half a mile from the KGB residency in Riverdale. He walked a long, roundabout route, which he varied each time he came here, but stopped spontaneously at a bar on Mosholu Avenue, where he ordered a coffee, not vodka. He observed who entered and left with his usual, artful disinterest and talked to a couple of women in their thirties who were sitting at the bar, finally buying them cocktails and a frozen vodka for himself. They were single, and he was tempted to drown himself in them for the evening.

  But after an hour he said his good-byes, took a phone number from the more persistent of the two, and left. He walked the remaining eight blocks, careful to note that he was alone, and entered the building with his January key.

  There were two night staff there, who watched television, he noted, when they should have been checking the SIGINT machines, but otherwise the place was his own. Everyone, it seemed, was away until January 13, apart from essential staff. He walked up some stairs and entered his cramped office.

  There were piles of papers and no
tes from before the Russian New Year, when he had last been there—reports of private conversations at the UN, suggestions from eager officers looking for promotion, complaints.

  As deputy director, his own and his chief’s wider family consisted of over two hundred people, including the diplomatic representatives as well as actual intelligence staff. The Russian delegation at the UN was several hundred strong, of whom seventy-three individuals were from the various branches of the Russian intelligence services.

  It was of these seventy-three that Vladimir was the clandestine deputy chief. His diplomatic status with the Russian UN delegation concealed his real job as chief of Line X, the intelligence arm of S&T, the KGB Science and Technology Department.

  Line X was not just historically by far the most successful department. He had continued and expanded its role. Each year since 2000, American technological secrets stolen by Line X through its American agents had contributed over five billion roubles to the Russian economy. Secrets obtained from Russian operatives and their American agents right across the territory of the Main Adversary now accounted for just under half of all Russian weapons systems, which were adapted from this theft.

  None of these great technological leaps, however, had been filtered by his political masters in Moscow through to the civilian economy. Russia was an intelligence state, not a country with its citizens at heart.

  And since Putin had come to power in the year 2000, Line X funding had increased dramatically. In the past two years alone, right up to this moment when the world hovered on the brink of economic crisis, funding had increased sixfold. Putin’s orders, transmitted by him personally as president the year before to all intelligence department heads at the Washington embassy, had been that “all efforts are to be directed at recruitment, in the defence establishments, in the space exploration centres, in the defence-related technical companies and in the private intelligence companies.”

  The latter, these private intelligence outfits, had blossomed across America’s intelligence since 9/11.

  Recruitment of American agents, Putin had demanded, was to have no limits, financial or otherwise. Russia’s newfound wealth was to be the source of a greater intelligence assault on the Main Adversary than the KGB had ever dreamed of in Soviet times.

  Vladimir picked up a dirty coffee cup at the back of his desk and, turning it upside down, read the week’s encryption keys that were disguised as a circular manufacturer’s stamp on the base. Then he entered his computer.

  He picked out five code names—simple words buried in a long report about a meeting with the delegation from Equatorial Guinea at the UN in the week before Christmas—and wrote down the names as they appeared for January, in capital letters: SOIL, RAINFALL, METAL, EROSION, and ZERO. Of these, he guessed only one could help him in his current task, but he was prepared to contact two or three in case he needed to widen the net.

  “Erosion” was a thirty-seven-year-old Columbia University graduate and addictive gambler who sat on the Intelligence Procurement Committee in Washington—one of several that handed out contracts to private intelligence companies—albeit in one of the lowlier positions. He was Vladimir’s most prized possession.

  He encoded a message for Erosion, requesting an immediate meeting, in the next twenty-four hours it would be understood, and then he sent it by text on a cell phone registered to an electrical store in Annapolis owned by a third-generation Russian and long-term “illegal” by the name of Stan Riker.

  The other two code names he had chosen out of the five, along with their contact information, Vladimir kept with him, against regulations, as he left the residency and walked towards the river.

  The taxi he found eventually dropped him on the far side of the river, and he walked from there to Fourth Street, where there was another bar, other single, lonely people. It was a bar he’d never visited, and he didn’t waste time. He went through to the back and found a pay phone.

  With a black-market telephone card obtained by the geeks in Communications, he called a contact, a friend, a KGB officer stationed in Geneva—one of the few people on his own side he believed he could trust. What he asked for, using the old code name for her that he hoped still worked, was a back bearing on Anna—any recent sightings, hearsay, and rumour—anything that might help him make his judgement before they met again in a week’s time.

  Chapter 24

  ON THE MORNING AFTER the revelation of Mikhail’s identity, Burt and Anna alone discussed the details of her plan to contact him. It was straightforward, and beautiful, Burt said, in its simplicity.

  The dagger would be sent to the Russian cultural centre in Washington, D.C., purporting to come from an elderly émigré who wished to know its provenance and value. There was a box number to reply to, and a peremptory request to return the dagger, whether the cultural centre could be of any help or not.

  If Burt was surprised by Anna’s easy agreement to continue with her original plan, with his and his watchers’ oversight, he didn’t show it. For herself, Anna understood Burt’s adoption of her idea completely. It was the best way, that was all, maybe the only way to take the step into Mikhail’s awareness.

  Burt had his people in the capital run a routine check on all the staff at the cultural centre, in the course of which it was established that Mikhail was actually in residence, and not on vacation or travelling for work.

  When that information was nailed down, Burt and Anna sat alone, working on the message to accompany the dagger. At Burt’s insistence she wrote it in her own hand, to be typed later. She chose an awkward and old form of Russian to couch her request, in the make-believe that this émigré was an older person who had been in the West for many decades. At Burt’s direction, the address she gave to Mikhail for his reply was mailbox no. 3079 at a mail office on Fifty-fifth Street.

  On one of his occasional trips from the apartment, Burt had set up the arrangement, and she realised that this was the element Burt loved most, to be an operative himself again, on the streets, as he had been in his youth.

  Burt then asked one of the bewildered guards to find a typewriter—secondhand from a flea market, he insisted, but make sure it worked—and in the interests of the security around Mikhail, he personally typed her words and personally handed it to the fake UPS driver to make the delivery. Finally, the dagger itself had been bound in cardboard and bubble wrap.

  “I’m having the mailbox watched,” Burt informed her. “But it’s not anyone from here—someone who’s out of the whole Mikhail loop.”

  She wondered why he didn’t trust even the closest of his employees with the information, but she sensed he was right. Like her, Burt wanted nothing to impede the smooth reception of Mikhail’s contact with her.

  “Why watch it at all?” she said. “Either he leaves something, or he doesn’t. Watching won’t change that.”

  “It’s just to ensure that nobody opens that box apart from us,” he said. “By accident or not,” he added.

  And she saw the sense in that too.

  “And then what?” she asked him. “If he makes a drop?”

  “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll bring whatever he leaves straight here. Nothing happens without you.”

  But maybe something can happen without you, she thought.

  After lunch, Burt had checked that the package had safely arrived, accepted and signed for by a receptionist at the cultural centre, and he was in an even more jovial mood than usual, though none of his staff at the apartment knew the reason for his elation.

  For them, it was a time of waiting, as they believed, for Anna’s meeting with Vladimir. Anna retired to her room to rest. But once there, she began to work out her own mission, her plan that, once again, had to be unknown to Burt.

  In the evening, they all ate supper—Burt, Anna, Marcie, and Logan—and there was the desultory feeling of nothing happening among all of them but Burt.

  After supper Logan suddenly suggested, in front of them all, that he and Anna go to the movies.
There was nothing going on, he reasoned. With the usual security, surely a visit to the movie theatre was a good way to relax. But he didn’t suggest that Marcie accompany them.

  It was completely unexpected and, Burt said, all the more welcome for that reason. They could go to see a matinee in the next few days, he said, but only if she wished to.

  It was the first moment of near freedom she would have had since the last day with Little Finn at the house in France, back in August.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “Sometime in the next few days I’d love to, Logan. Maybe a walk would be better, though, rather than sitting in the theatre.”

  And so, the next morning, Logan, Anna, and six watchers walked “for miles in the damn cold,” as Larry complained afterwards. She and Logan stopped and drank coffee and watched the watchers as they stamped their feet outside the café, trying to look like normal people who happened to be standing in subzero temperatures in a New York street in January.

  Meanwhile, inside the café, Anna found she was more relaxed than she’d been for a long time.

  Deemed a success by Burt, the exercise was repeated the following day, to the consternation of the watchers, and then on the third day after the dagger had been sent, she agreed this time to accompany Logan to the movies.

  Logan had asked her this time in a way that carried a suggestion of something more than just time spent in her company. She had consulted Burt about this developing relationship and about the wisdom of accompanying Logan on what looked remarkably like a date.

  Burt took her alone into one of the many small ops rooms in the apartment that was vacant.

  “If you’re all right about Logan, I want to ask you something,” he said.