“You two cut a fine figure out there,” Moore said.
“We’re defined by our social graces,” Ryan said pompously. He kissed Doris on the cheek. “If your dance card isn’t filled, put my name on it.”
“Thanks for asking, Howard, but I have a feeling that Evangeline and I are going to be deserted tonight,” Doris said. She seemed resigned.
Ryan shot Moore a questioning look. His assistant was worried. “Why don’t you and Doris go back to our table and have another glass of wine,” Ryan told his wife. “Tom and I will join you ladies in a couple of minutes.”
“Don’t strand us here, Howard,” Evangeline warned, and she and Doris headed back to the table. She did not share her husband’s love for intrigue.
“This better be good,” Ryan told his assistant.
“It’s much worse than that, Howard. Believe me,” Moore said. “My car is in front. I suggest we go for a ride.”
Ryan was annoyed. He wanted to see the President again, but Moore’s obvious agitation was worrisome. They walked outside, got into the assistant DDO’s car, and pulled away, merging with traffic on 14th Street.
“I just came from Langley,” Moore said. “Parley Smith caught me as Doris and I were leaving the house. He must have missed you by only a couple of minutes.”
Smith was chief of the CIA’s archives section where the agency’s most highly classified records and historical documents were stored. He was working on deep background for Ryan’s follow-up report to the President on sending an envoy to Tarankov.
“What has he come up with?” Ryan asked.
“We’ve got trouble, Howard,” Moore replied. “Not just the DO, but the entire agency. If this breaks, the remainder of our careers will be spent on the Hill answering some tough questions that’ll make the Iran Contra fiasco look like a tempest in a teacup.”
He stopped for a red light and looked over at Ryan. “What’s the worst thing you can think of that could happen to us in this operation? The absolute worst piece of information.”
“Don’t play games, Tom. Lay it out for me.”
“Tarankov is ours. Or was.”
Ryan was stunned. “What are you talking about?”
“In the seventies his code name was CKHAMMER,” Moore said. The CK digraph was an old CIA indicator that the code named person was a particularly sensitive Soviet or Eastern bloc intelligence source.
“He spied for us?” Ryan asked, thunderstruck. “While he was in the missile service. His parents ran into trouble with the KGB, and were sentenced to ten years in a Siberian gulag. They were friends of the Sakharovs. Our Moscow COS at the time, Bob Burns, assigned a case officer to see if Major Tarankov could be turned. He was, and until he was transferred out of the service he apparently provided us with some pretty good information.”
“Then we have the bastard,” Ryan said triumphantly. “We’ll get a message to him to back off, or we expose what he was to the Russian people. It’ll ruin him.” Ryan had another thought. “Do we have proof? Photographs? Documents? Signatures?”
“Presumably, but it’s all worthless, because there’s more.”
“What more can there be?” Ryan demanded. “The son of a bitch was a spy. His people can’t trust him. Hell, we’ll even offer him political asylum. We can dump him in Haiti, or maybe Panama where he’d be out of everyone’s hair.”
“Money. A lot of it. Moscow station had an open checkbook for a few years back then, because of the SDI thing. Word was that the Russians were way ahead of us on research. Parley is still digging, but he thinks that rumor may have gotten started on the basis of false information Tarankov sent us.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Over a nine year period we gave Tarankov, and a supposed network of spies under his direction, more than seventy million dollars. All of it black, none of it authorized by, or even known about on the Hill or the White House.”
“He used the money to buy that goddamned train.”
“It would appear so.”
“Nothing has changed—”
“We can’t send an envoy to Tarankov. He’d just laugh in our faces. Imperialist bastards who tried to buy Russia for seventy million. It would backfire on us. It would set our foreign policy back a hundred years.”
They came around the corner on K Street a block from the National Press Club.
“We have to move very carefully, Howard,” Moore said. “Tarankov must be arrested and put on trial as soon as possible. Before the June elections.”
“Our involvement will come out in any trial.”
“It won’t matter,” Moore interjected. “As long as we’re not involved with him now we can deny everything. Tarankov will come out sounding like a desperate man clutching at straws.”
“The President wants to send me as the envoy.”
“You’ll have to convince him differently. We cannot be seen interfering in Russian internal affairs. It would do us a great deal of damage.”
Ryan had another thought. “Who else knows about this?” “Nobody. And Parley had the good grace not to mention sending this upstairs to the director’s office.”
“Murphy has to be told.”
“That’s your job, Howard.”
Damned right, Ryan thought. “And your job is to keep a lid on this thing. I want you to convince Parley that I mean business. If so much as a hint of this comes out of his office I’ll nail his ass to the barn door.”
“Of course.”
“Where’s the file at this moment?”
“In my safe.”
“I want it on my desk at eight sharp. I’ll see the general at nine. He’s due back from New York sometime tonight.”
CIA Headquarters
It was a few minutes before nine when the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Lawrence Danielle called Ryan’s office. “We’re here, are you ready?”
“I’m on my way,” Ryan said. “Has Technical Services scanned his office?”
“They just left.”
He checked his pocket watch, buttoned up his coat and took the Tarankov file recovered in a d.d.o. eyes only gray folder with a blue border on each page up to the seventh floor. He’d had a sleepless night worrying about what he would to have to face this morning. And reading the material Moore had brought over, he decided that his assistant had not exaggerated.
Ryan’s specialty, among others, was turning negatives into pluses. This time, however, he was out of ideas except one, and that was when the play got too hot you always handed the ball over to someone else. It was one of his axioms for survival.
Roland Murphy was having coffee at his desk while he watched the 9:00 a.m. news reports from CNN and the three major news networks on a multi-screen TV monitor, as he did every morning. He was a large man with prize-fighter’s arms and dark eyebrows over deep set eyes. He was one of the toughest men ever to sit behind that desk, and no one who’d ever come up against him thought any differently.
With him were the aging, but still effective, Danielle who’d been in the business for more than thirty years; the dapper dresser Tommy Doyle, who was Deputy Director of Intelligence; and Carleton Patterson, the patrician New York lawyer whom Ryan had recommended to take over as general counsel.
Murphy’s eyes strayed to the file folder. “Has something happened overnight, Howard?”
“In a manner of speaking, General,” Ryan said, closing the door. “I suggest that you ask not to be disturbed, and that you shut off the tape recorder.”
Murphy’s eyebrows rose, but he called his secretary and told her to hold everything until further notice, then opened a desk drawer and flipped a switch. “We’re clean and isolated,” he said. “You have our attention.”
Ryan sat down in the empty chair and laid the file folder on the edge of Murphy’s desk. Nobody made a move
