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 notes 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 emigre 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 emigre 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.
