Red Star Rising

foreign national suborned or willing to inform or spy upon his country. Both were sourced from the same KGB field station concealed behind the numeric code 68. The next communication was a reaction from CENTER to the alerting field station allocating the word AMBER as a case code. It included the word “struggle,” which at first confused Charlie until he remembered being told by Natalia when they were together in Moscow and he was learning the Russian language to be occasionally used colloquially to mean “search,” which appeared as search several more times in messages not only to and from Moscow but to and from a wider spread of field stations, some numerically coded-72, 48, 10, and 58-and others under a variety of worded identifications: AJAX, TROJAN, OMEGA, and MARS. In several, another recognizable tradecraft term, sleeper, appeared apparently as a supposition or a suggestion. A sleeper was a committed spy not actively engaged in day-to-day espionage but left buried-sleeping-until the reason or decision arose to wake him to begin work.

Increasingly Charlie came to believe he was looking at a surprisingly simple-although still totally incomprehensible-pattern: rapidly escalating, frustrated KGB alarm confirmed by an equally sharp rise in the secrecy and readership restrictions throughout the KGB and FSB hierarchy. Over the last eighteen months available to him, the access limitation appeared to have been confined to six recipients, with the topmost authorizing and questioning participant identified by the code word ONE, written in words, not numerals, on every your Eyes Only exchange. Throughout the exchanges there were six code series included, which, from experience, Charlie knew to refer not to people but to actual espionage operations.

It was just past three in the morning when Charlie finally straightened, cramped and gritty eyed, from the thirty-two pages finally restored to their specific envelopes, minimally satisfied with what he hoped to have established. By listening in to American intelligence radio traffic, most likely between CIA field stations and their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the KGB had discovered a Russian mole to whom they’d allocated the code name AMBER, but which possibly had been changed to ICON. That American asset appeared to be operating from within KGB ranks itself and, judging from the rising priority-toward the end verging on panic-of those involved in the hunt for him had as recently as 2006, a period of roughly eighteen years since his first location, had still not been found. And who, over those eighteen years, had disclosed or participated or had information about at least six, maybe more, Russian intelligence operations.

And everything contributed absolutely nothing to any understanding without his knowing or being able to break the concealing codes. Worse, even. If he were even half right in his interpretation, it raised a dozen more questions instead of providing one single answer.

With whom had Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin tried to trade the gold lode he believed he had found? The most obvious answer was the CIA, to keep their asset protected. But according to Irena, her lover would not have betrayed his country. Could one of the wilder speculations about the embassy murder be true after all, that Ivan had been trying to sell the information to the British but had been stopped and killed by pursuing FSB at his moment of contact? No, rejected Charlie at once. He knew, as an indisputable fact, that Ivan had not been killed in the embassy grounds but elsewhere before being dumped where he had been found. And he surely wouldn’t have been sent from London-unless, of course, as an intended sacrifice-as totally blind as he had been, if Oskin’s approach had been to the sister service MI6? Not such an easy assurance here because MI6 only cooperated with MI5 if there was some beneficial advantage and MI5 operated on the same imbalanced principle: and if MI6 had had an asset like Ivan Oskin they certainly wouldn’t have shared him. But they would have definitely tried to discover his killer, which would have involved David Halliday, even if the rest of their investigatory team had been covert. And despite-or perhaps because of-the chaos within the embassy Charlie was convinced he would have detected some sort of awareness from the contact he’d had with Halliday. Why were the FSB so anxious to close the murder investigation down with a bullshit story of Oskin being a member of a drug- smuggling gang and Sergei Pavel being assassinated in gangland retribution? It might just be conceivable that the FSB had linked the disappearance over the past near fortnight of one of its own Lubyanka operatives with the embassy murder and wanted to resolve an awkward international problem. Still they, or the uniformed militia, would surely have wanted to find Pavel’s killer? Was he right in believing the material lying on the table before him was about a Russian or KGB defector to the CIA? From what he knew at that moment, there couldn’t be any other conclusion. The CIA would unquestionably have killed Oskin instead of paying him off if they believed he knew the identity of their deeply embedded ICON. But they wouldn’t have killed him before getting what Oskin had taken from KGB and FSB records. And that still left Pavel’s murder unexplained. What connection with anything was there in the CIA’s attempt to get involved but cut the Russians out of the link-up? If the Agency had killed Oskin, they’d surely want to distance themselves from everything about it.

Their own spy in the embassy! Charlie felt a jump of irritation that the possibility of a connection hadn’t occurred to him before now. There most definitely was a hostile source whose activities had reduced the British legation to a laughingstock by remaining undiscovered despite every single person within it being interrogated by the best and most experienced mole hunters in the British service. And Oskin’s information was of another undetected spy. Could that be beyond a coincidence-the phenomena he distrusted-and be in some way part of the same enigma? But how? And why? The spy within the KGB had remained undiscovered for eighteen years. The hunt for the British embassy mole hadn’t yet been running for eighteen weeks. The connection could only be coincidence, nothing else. Or could it?

Circles within circles, blocking his mind until he was incapable of thinking or rationalizing anything, Charlie decided. As an incalculable number of KGB and FSB minds had seemingly been blocked for eighteen years and the minds of Paul Robertson and his mole-hunters remained blocked.

Which could be an answer to so much! One, Charlie remembered, that he’d actually suspected days ago! Creating for himself yet another circle, Charlie confronted his earlier speculation that while not knowing what it was an answer to, the constantly unremitting avalanche of apparently unrelated facts and events was creating an impenetrable mental fog through which it was impossible for him and a lot of other people to focus upon what they were trying so desperately to see! And then he remembered the cliche that had escaped him when the idea had first come to him. No one was being able-or allowed-to see the wood from the trees because of the ever and constantly growing forest in front of them.

“The code-breakers and analysts have managed to get some way further than you, while at the same time completely agreeing and confirming every one of your interpretations. But by any assessment not far enough,” declared Aubrey Smith, when Charlie finished enumerating his overnight impressions from the Russian intelligence archives.

“How much further have they got?” asked Charlie.

“Station code names, which we had on record in our own archives,” enlarged the Director-General. “The first mentioned, 68, is-or rather was-Beirut. It was changed to MARS, during the civil war there, so we’ve got a double confirmation. The KGB field station in Cairo is 72, Teheran is 58. Athens is TROJAN.”

“All Middle East, where Oskin worked,” identified Charlie.

“The connection’s been made here, too. And the fact that Oskin was fluent in the languages in the region.”

“Could it have any connection with the Islamic terrorism we’re facing?” questioned Charlie. “A sleeper operation conceived a very long time ago, coming to fruition now.”

“Not from non-Islamists,” rejected Smith.

“He and Irena were actually based in Cairo,” Charlie pointed out.

“Also flagged up here,” assured Smith. “We’ve managed, as well, to identify three of the six operations itemized in Oskin’s stuff. OPERATION MIDAS was a KGB effort to penetrate the banking links between America and Saudi Arabia. OPERATION OSCAR was to get, through KGB nominees, control of two Greek tanker companies which would have given Moscow a limited window into world oil movements. They tried to extend that oil monitor with OPERATION BORE, which was targeted from Beirut after its code change to MARS, by infiltrating tanker companies worldwide.”

“You’re talking past tense?” questioned Charlie.

“That’s how they got into our archives, the tanker operations particularly: Lloyds of London was an obvious priority infiltrating objective because of its insurance records. All three operations were discovered and blown once we got involved.”

“Discovered?” queried Charlie.

“The lead, against all three, came from the CIA.”