'Out,' said Bob.
He went back to his car and drove to the motel. His room had been expertly tossed and everything replaced neatly, including the cap on his toothpaste tube. But they'd been here, he could tell. They were watching him.
He undressed, showered and turned the lights out. It would be more comfortable in here than out there.
He went to breakfast at a Denny's the next morning, went for a little walk, watching the campers struggle to stay unseen, and precisely at
1100, put his longdistance call through to London.
'Mallory here.'
'Jack.'
'Howdy, Gunny.'
'Any luck?'
'Well, yes and no.'
'Shoot.'
'This Fitzpatrick is more rumor or innuendo than actual operator. The Brits know he operated here around that time, but that info came late, from decoded radio intercepts after he'd gone on to his next duty station, wherever the hell that was. But there was no way of covering him through their regular ways of watching, which means he didn't operate out of an embassy or a known cell.'
'Is that strange?'
'As in, very strange.'
'Ummmm,' said Bob.
'So they have no photos. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody really knows who he was, whether he was a recruited Irishman or a native-born Russian citizen. They do say that when the Russians go abroad, they tend more than not to impersonate Irishmen, because there's a correspondence between the accents. In other words, a Russian can't play an Englishman in England or an American in America, but they've got a good record of playing an Irishman in England or America. The Russian phonetic ah sound is very similar in tongue placement to the ac of the classic Irish accent.'
'So they think he's Russian?'
'Ah, they can't say for sure. That seems to be the best possible interpretation. The file has been dead for nearly fifteen years. Poor Jim had to drive all the way out to a records depository to even find the goddamn thing.'
'I see.'
'They only have some radio transmissions and some defector debriefings.'
'What would they be?'
'Ah, a guy came over in seventy-eight and then another came over in eighty-one, both low-level KGB operatives, in political trouble, afraid they were going to get an all-expenses-paid TDY to the gulags. They gave up everything they had: a funny thing, you know, the Russians are all worried about confusing issues so they 'register' work names, code names, the like, they got so many agencies, they want to make sure nobody uses the name and things get all fouled up. The work name
'Robert Fitzpatrick' was one item in the registry that both these guys gave up. But here's the odd part.'
'Okay.'
'According to these guys, to both of 'em, he wasn't in the First Directorate. That's the KGB section that specializes in foreign operations, recruitments, penetrations, that sort of thing.'
'The straight-up spies.'
'Yeah, you know, hiring informants, getting pictures, running networks, working out of embassies, that sort of thing. The usual KGB deal.'
'So what was he?'
'According to these clerks, the work name 'Robert Fitzpatrick' was the property of GRU.'
'And what was that?'
GRUis Russian military intelligence.'
'Hmmm,' said Bob again, unsure what this information could possibly mean.
'He was army?' he finally asked.
'Well, yes and no. I asked Jim too. It seems GRU was uniquely tasked with penetration of strategic targets. That is, missiles, nuke delivery systems, satellite shit, that whole shebang. All the big atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, like Klaus Fuchs, all them guys--they were GRU. This guy Fitzpatrick would be interested--I mean, if he existed, if he was Russian, if this, if that--he'd be doing something that was global, not local. He'd be trying to get inside our missile complexes, bomb plants, research facilities, the satellite program, anti-missile research.'
'Shit,' said Bob, seeing the thing just twist out of his control.
'Man, I don't know crap about that and I'm much too old to learn.'
'Plus you got your other problem, the Soviet Union broke up, all these guys went who-knows-where. Some are still working for Russian GRU, some are working for KGB or other competing organizations with different agendas, some for the Russian mafia, some for all these little republics. If it was hard to understand then, it don't make no sense now.'
