The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  ‘Russia has become expensive. They have two jobs.’

  ‘So who’s the old guy?’ Ben asked.

  ‘His name is Valentin Korolenko.’

  Ben picked up the photo and angled it toward the ambient light.

  ‘Korolenko is KGB and then FSB,’ she continued. ‘In KGB he is Fifth Directorate. He retire as general in charge of all foreign national prisoners in USSR. He keep this position in Russian Federation after Soviet world collapse. When Korean 747 land on Sakhalin Island, Korolenko is KGB officer in charge of prisoner distribution.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Ben.

  ‘I think someone pay him to stop you. Korolenko and his men By kovski and Soloyov are assets.’

  ‘Who would that someone be?’ Ben asked.

  ‘This I do not know.’

  A business card fluttered from the envelope onto Akiko’s lap. ‘What is “Fidelity”?’ she asked, examining it.

  ‘That is my company. I uncover husbands who cheat. There is much cheating in new Russia.’

  ‘You’re a private detective?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We will hire you,’ said Akiko, checking with Ben for his opinion. He nodded.

  ‘If Bykovski knows I help you, he will kill you for pleasure.’

  ‘According to you, he’s going to kill us anyway,’ Ben said. ‘We’ve got nothing to lose.’

  ‘I could not help Sergei.’ Her voice was subdued. ‘Do you also want to end up with back full of ice daggers?’

  ‘They took you by surprise, there was nothing you could do. But you can help us. We’re in this country operating alone. We need an insider.’

  ‘You need to go home.’

  ‘As we said, that’s not an option for us.’

  ‘Take photographs.’ She leaned across Akiko and pulled the latch, opening the door.

  Ben and Akiko gathered up the pictures and got out of the car.

  ‘What would your guide have told them before he died?’ Luydmila asked through the window. ‘What did he know?’

  ‘He knew that we were going to Ulan-Ude,’ Akiko said.

  ‘What is in Ulan-Ude?’

  ‘Another camp,’ said Ben.

  ‘You want to grow old? Catch plane home,’ said Luydmila. Her window rolled up and she drove off.

  October 3, 1990

  Paris, France. General Korolenko sat in a public park by the River Seine and waited. The air was cool but not yet cold, especially for a man used to Siberian winters. Few leaves remained on the trees, but some golden stalwarts were still attached to twigs and branches. Across the square, breakfast was being served and the aromas of brioche and café au lait tantalized his senses. So this was Paris. It was soft, but nonetheless pleasant, and reminded him somewhat of Leningrad. He watched the Parisians going about their day, heading to work, oblivious to the global struggles. What would it be like to be so blissfully unaware, so untouched by world events? Would a life spent in ignorance be better, or worse?

  At home, in Moscow, the world was crumbling, falling down around everyone’s ears, while that fool Gorbachev systematically dismantled everything, throwing open the doors and letting in the decay. There was nowhere to hide, unless you had American dollars. No one was being paid. Toilet paper was worth more than roubles. The KGB was tumbling, the Red Army in disarray. The world Korolenko knew was rushing to its own destruction.

  The money had been shoved under the door of his apartment in a fat envelope: $50,000 together with the open-ended round-trip airline ticket to Paris on Air France. The people who had done that were brazen. If something like that had happened even a year ago, Korolenko would have fully expected to have been arrested, interrogated and shot. But now the First Directorate was more worried about the future than the present. There was no security guard on the door in the lobby, and his was a building set aside especially for high-ranking Party members. A note came with the money. On it was written a date and a time. Brazen didn’t do this justice. It was utter lunacy, a sign of the times.

  Korolenko watched a man walk slowly into the park. He tossed dried breadcrumbs on the grass from a bag in his hand. Birds flew down and swarmed at his feet. He finally emptied the bag and took a seat beside the general.

  ‘I loathe pigeons,’ the man said. ‘Just take a look at the statue. Covered head to toe in shit.’

  Korolenko glanced at the standing bronze figure in the center of the park, an eighteenth-century man carrying an armful of books. A local scholar, he assumed, the deeds that had earned him a place in this park lost to history.

  ‘Are you wearing a wire?’ the man asked.

  ‘Do you wish to check?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Ordinarily, Korolenko would have had a man beaten for impertinence like this. But he was hoping that the money he’d received was just the beginning, and he didn’t want to jeopardize it. He stood up, removed his coat, lifted his shirt out of the top of his pants and turned around slowly.

  ‘You pass,’ said the man. His face was pointed and pinched and reminded Korolenko of a ferret. He wore sunglasses. It wasn’t sunny.

  The man spoke into his shirtsleeve and then said, ‘Sit, General, you’re making me nervous.’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘To take a meeting a couple of thousand of your red Ivan buddies would kill for to take your place.’

  A second man walked into the park. Korolenko recognized him immediately. He was stunned. It was the assistant director of the CIA.

  The man with the sunglasses stood, walked some distance away and appeared to patrol the park’s entrance.

  ‘Major General Korolenko of the Fifth Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti,’ Garret said in Russian. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘And you, Assistant Director Garret.’

  ‘Good. As we know each other, there’s no need to exchange business cards.’

  ‘You have a Leningrad accent,’ said Korolenko. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  The general took a deep breath and exhaled to steady his nerves. What was this all about?

  ‘You have your money, obviously. I recommend that you open an account with a bank in Berne. Hank over there can provide you with the name of a good one. Stuffing envelopes of cash under your door comes with attendant risks.’

  ‘Which brings me naturally to my first question. Why would you want to pay me money?’

  ‘You have something we want, of course.’

  ‘Whatever it is, what makes you think that I would give it to you?’

  ‘Because your country’s sinking into a quagmire, General. Your only security will be to have a certain amount of, shall we say, liquidity.’

  ‘You seem certain of yourself, Assistant Director.’

  ‘It comes with the job, if you do the job well enough.’

  Garret glanced across at Hank, who was speaking into his sleeve again. The two men made eye contact and Garret received a nod.

  ‘General,’ Garret continued, ‘you are the man in charge of all foreign national prisoners?’

  ‘You know this already.’

  ‘I can make you a rich man if you’re prepared to continue doing your job.’

  ‘That was my intention regardless, to keep working for the good of the Soviet Union.’

  ‘The wealth aspect is a problem though, isn’t it, General? All the perks and special considerations you’ve come to expect as one of the elite are going to dry up, if they haven’t already. When was the last time you were paid? The USSR will cease to exist within the foreseeable future. Give it six months, a year at most. It has already begun.’

  Korolenko chose not to respond.

  ‘How secure are your prisoners?’

  ‘They’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘When the USSR falls, what will happen to all your foreign national prisoners held in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan? What will happen when all these ’stans turn their backs on Moscow?’

 
‘That won’t happen.’

  ‘Open the barn doors and all your horses will run.’

  Korolenko was intrigued. ‘Which foreign nationals in particular, Assistant Director?’

  ‘The ones recovered when a certain 747 was forced down.’

  Korolenko worked hard to keep the surprise out of his face. He wanted to swallow and he could feel the vein pulsing in his temple.

  ‘What 747?’ he asked.

  ‘There was more than one?’

  ‘It crashed into the Sea of Japan and everyone on board was lost.’

  ‘You can be a rich man, General, or not. The choice is yours.’

  Korolenko hadn’t survived a lifetime in the KGB not to have learned when to take and when to give. The man called Hank was circling the park’s entrance, scanning the overlooking apartments.

  ‘When did you know?’ Korolenko finally asked.

  ‘More than twenty low-level agents were killed within the Eastern Bloc from October to December in 1983. Your client intelligence services cleaned out all the sleepers. There was only one common link.’

  Korolenko knew instantly who Garret was talking about. ‘Congressman McDonald.’

  ‘You might as well have printed an announcement in TASS.’

  Korolenko managed to keep a lid on his anger. Those stupid Tartars in the First Directorate had caught Andropov’s paranoia, and in the process they’d shown the CIA their hand.

  ‘So the CIA has known the truth almost from the start, and yet you did almost nothing about it.’

  ‘Did nothing? General, we did everything in our power to go along with it. Taking down KAL 007 was like shooting yourselves in the foot. You helped us win the war.’

  And suddenly Korolenko saw it all clearly. ‘It was planned.’

  ‘What was planned?’

  ‘The plane wasn’t sent into Soviet skies to gather intelligence, but to change world opinion.’

  ‘A suicide mission? For public relations purposes? Well, if that were true, no one could claim we didn’t have commitment.’

  Korolenko was shocked. ‘The Soviet Union will be gone within a year, two at most, and the United States will be your country’s friend. Friends look after each other. And we’ll pay a lot of money in order to cement a very special personal friendship with you.’

  Korolenko watched the pigeons strutting around in circles, the larger ones bullying the smaller birds for any remaining crumbs. The world was moving in a new direction. In many important ways, McDonald had been right about his so-called One World conspiracy.

  ‘Your President Bush is going to war in the Gulf. He is an oilman. I don’t think the Muslims there will welcome him.’

  ‘I don’t think they have much choice.’

  ‘Is this the start of a new world order?’

  ‘Maybe, General, maybe. Things are happening pretty fast on this President’s watch—the Berlin Wall coming down, the rise of democracy in your neck of the woods, the end of wars of adventure . . .’

  The words ‘a new world order’ clearly meant nothing to the CIA assistant director. Korolenko grunted. The world was indeed changing and here was an opportunity to profit from it. The irony of this capitalist way of thinking wasn’t lost on him.

  ‘How much money would you pay? And what would I be required to do?’

  ‘You would receive a bonus payment of another $50,000 simply for coming on board. And then, every year for the foreseeable future, you’d receive $300,000 indexed to the US rate of inflation. This would be paid into your Swiss bank account on the proviso that your prisoners remain safely tucked away. As I said, we’re going to pay you to keep doing what you’ve been doing. We’re not asking you to spy on your country. We’re not asking you to compromise your integrity. But what we are asking you to do is in Russia’s interest.’

  ‘And America’s.’

  ‘Of course, General. This isn’t Adopt an Orphan Week. What we’re asking is in both our national interests, Moscow’s and Washington’s. Both sides would be extremely embarrassed if these ex-passengers suddenly turned up. They would make liars out of all of us, but especially of the Soviet Union, of Russia.’

  ‘When will you need an answer, Assistant Director?’

  Garret glanced at his watch. ‘I leave the park and you sort out the contact and billing arrangements with Hank over there. Or you leave here with an uncertain future. Choice is yours.’

  February 9, 2012

  NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland. Lana didn’t particularly want to share with Sherwood, but partners is partners. She leaned against the wall with her arms folded while he reviewed her written report sent off to Whittle and, through him, Hank Buck at the CIA. He made no comment on it and moved on to the additional material on her HP PC, kneading one of his biceps as he paged down through the transcripts of Curtis Foxx’s psych evaluations.

  ‘The guy was clearly a basket case,’ he concluded.

  ‘He didn’t start out that way. The intercept with KAL 007 drove him too far.’

  ‘What’s to say he wasn’t already on the slippery slope prior to 007?’

  ‘Because his first date with a psychologist is September 8, 1983, a week after the downing.’

  ‘Like I said, he could have been predisposed.’

  ‘Here’s a guy who comes top of everything. He aces every aspect of training, gets every commendation in the book, wins medals, rescues people from certain death. Then, within a week of the 007 incident, he can no longer fly, or wants to fly, and he’s in a deep and meaningful with hard liquor.’

  ‘It’s not clear. Half these shrink reports have been redacted. On a few of these pages, all that’s left are ands and buts.’

  ‘You don’t think that says anything?’

  ‘The censorship? Jesus, if we looked for a conspiracy every time the censor drew his marker . . .’

  Sherwood was right and Lana knew it. Many of the documents they accessed had whole chapters and sections blacked out. Standard procedure.

  ‘What I’d like to know,’ Sherwood said into the silence, ‘is how any of this is bringing us closer to finding that tape?’

  ‘It’s bringing me closer to having an understanding. You said it yourself, Miller: KAL 007 happened so long ago. Why all the continuing cloak and dagger? I’d like to know why, too. A lot of people thought it was a CIA mission that went wrong.’

  ‘Who cares if it was? Intelligence cluster fucks happen every day of the week.’

  ‘269 people died. You’re a sensitive flower, aren’t you?’

  ‘Let me remind you, we’re not paid to know why. In this instance, we’re being paid to find.’

  Lana cocked her head to the side. ‘You’ve got buddies in the CIA, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, so . . . ?’

  ‘Ever heard of a Mr Hank Buck?’

  ‘Do you have any idea how many people are employed by the CIA?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. And anyway, I believe the number’s classified.’

  ‘So that’s a no, you don’t know him?’

  ‘That’s a no.’

  Lana’s phone rang. The screen told her the call was from Saul Kradich.

  ‘Saul,’ she said, picking up.

  ‘I’ve found a couple of things that might interest you. Wanna come up?’

  ‘I’ve got Agent Sherwood with me,’ she said, giving her partner a smile.

  ‘You know, Lana, people judge you by the company you keep. Come on up anyway.’

  Kradich swiveled in his seat as they walked in. ‘So, Sherwood,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you. Is that a holster under your armpit or a wet patch?’

  ‘Still wearing that stupid hat, I see,’ Sherwood replied.

  Lana ignored the alpha male crap and sat down. ‘Hi, Saul. What you got?’

  ‘I sent you a bunch of stuff from the Chosa Besshitsu radar facility at Wakkanai. Any of it useful?’

  ‘Interesting for background, but nothing particularly significant—unless I missed it.’


  ‘I kept the search between September and October 1983—to keep it tight with the 007 event. I didn’t want to bury you with megabytes of files. But I’ve been tooling around, doing some random sampling, and this popped up.’

  He leaned forward and tapped the control screen. Up on the wall appeared a decrypted facsimile from a colonel commanding the 6920th Electronic Security Squadron.

  ‘Can you make it out?’ asked Kradich when he saw Lana squinting at the panels.

  ‘Having trouble. Can you enlarge?’

  Kradich tapped his panel and the fax filled the wall.

  She read the message aloud. ‘“Lieutenant Colonel Moore advises that encrypted recording from low-level array for 830901-181030Z-185030Z has been reported unaccounted for.”’ Lana’s mouth dropped open.

  ‘It’s your missing tape,’ said Kradich. ‘The night of the shootdown and then the time—thirty minutes from 18:10 GMT to 18:50 GMT. The 6920th Electronic Security Squadron is letting the NSA know that the tape is gone.’

  Lana peered at the scanned sheet of paper. The fax had been sent on 20 September, 1983. There was a signature at the bottom of the decryption, acknowledging receipt. ‘Who signed for it? Who belongs to that scrawl on the bottom of the paper?’

  ‘Oh, this is the bit you’re really gonna love,’ said Kradich, tapping his panel.

  Sample signatures appeared onscreen, a name beneath each. All of the signatures matched the one on the fax.

  ‘Shit . . .’ Lana murmured. ‘Is that the Roy Garret?’

  ‘The one and only governor of New Mexico and presidential hopeful.’

  ‘Sergeant Yuudai Suzuki was the radar operator on duty the night the plane was shot down fifty miles away,’ said Lana, thinking aloud, her suspicion confirmed. ‘He saw what really happened and co-opted the tape.’

  ‘And what really happened?’ asked Sherwood.

  ‘KAL 007 didn’t crash and break up with all passengers and crew killed, but landed or ditched safely.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ sneered Sherwood. ‘That’s the only possible logical outcome.’

  ‘It’s one explanation for why everything about KAL 007 is still classified,’ Kradich reasoned. ‘There must’ve been people in the NSA back then who knew the truth. There were sixty-one US citizens aboard that plane. If they weren’t killed, they were taken captive and held prisoner.’