subsidiaries of their own republic. Even men in the security services and the armed forces viewed their sister states’ efforts to build independent military and intelligence units with something approaching paternal amusement. That made Banich’s choice of a cover identity positively inspired. Many post-communist Russians still viewed American CIA agents as potential villains for spy thrillers or suspense films — crafty, dangerous, and devious. But Ukrainian spies? Well, they made perfect cutup characters for the new sitcoms pouring out of Moscow’s film and TV studios. Nobody really took them seriously.
And that was a weakness Alex Banich was fully prepared to exploit.
A childhood spent with emigre Ukrainian grandparents and years in the CIA’s intensive language training program let him shift fluidly and easily from English to colloquial Russian to flawless Ukrainian — all in the same sentence. He could pass himself off as anyone from a greedy wheeler-dealer to a stern, self-righteous soldier or policeman. Ten years of successful assignments throughout Eastern Europe had honed his acting and language abilities to a razor’s edge. There were nights when he even dreamed in Russian. All in preparation for what should have been the pinnacle of his active-duty career: assignment as the senior field operative for the CIA’s Moscow Station.
Banich’s grin slipped to one side, becoming a wry smile aimed at his own misplaced ambition. Driven by an unrelenting need to be “the best,” he’d worked hard, sweated blood, and wrecked his marriage to get to Moscow. And for what?
The hard-line communists he’d grown up hating were gone — in prison, dead, or learning how to be good little capitalists. The once-mighty USSR was just as dead. Its successor states seemed too busy trying to survive to cause much trouble for the world. And Moscow Station, once viewed as the CIA’s most challenging posting, was now seen by many as little more than a dirty and cold backwater.
The real action was supposed to be somewhere else to the east or west — in Europe’s great capital cities or in bustling Tokyo. The Agency’s congressional minders were constantly pushing for more data on the French, the Germans, and the Japanese, not the Russians. For Washington’s trendy power elite, nuclear missiles and tank divisions were out. Trade balances and subsidy levels were in.
The effects showed up whenever Langley allocated its annual operations budget and made personnel assignments. Year by year, Moscow Station’s share of both got smaller and smaller.
Banich shook his head. He didn’t see how much further the Agency could shrink its operations here. Not and expect his networks to gather significant amounts of useful information. The Soviet Union’s self-destruction may have made spying inside its former territories easier, but it certainly hadn’t made it any cheaper. These days Russians didn’t pass military or political secrets to America because they hated communism. Communism was dead. Now they
The shortsighted nature of the continuing cutbacks mandated by Congress gnawed at him every time he risked losing a valuable source by haggling too hard over a price. For all their internal problems, Russia and its partner republics still possessed a formidable stockpile of nuclear warheads, accurate ICBMs, and huge arsenals of conventional weapons. And behind the array of fledgling parliaments and elected presidents, Banich knew there were still dangerous men in high places who harbored imperial ambitions for their nations. Such men should be
Unfortunately most of Washington’s policymakers were shortsighted by their very nature. Nations they didn’t view as a near-term threat to America’s security and issues that didn’t threaten their electoral prospects tended to drop off their screens. The usual rule of thumb was: out of congressional sight and interest, out of budget.
Hennessy’s voice summoned him back to more immediate concerns. “I checked your messages while you were inside taking Sorokin to the cleaners.”
“Oh?” Banich leaned forward from the backseat, unable to resist the opening even in his somber mood. “Anything pressing?”
The younger man winced. His boss rarely punned, but when he did they were always awful.
“Sorry.”
“Uh-huh.” Hennessy floored the Mercedes, flashing through a crowded intersection narrowly ahead of a surge of oncoming traffic. “Seriously, Kutner wants to see you back at the embassy, yesterday and not tomorrow… if you get my drift.”
“Yeah.” Banich pondered that in silence. The chief of station, Len Kutner, rarely interfered with field operations in progress. Instead, he passed judgment on proposed ops and then ran interference for them against second-guessing by the “goody two-shoes” — the embassy’s State Department regulars. Something fairly important must be in the wind. Something Banich was suddenly sure he wouldn’t like at all.
The two uniformed Russian militiamen standing close to the embassy compound’s main entrance weren’t there on any kind of guard duty. They were just trying to cadge whatever warmth they could from the heated U.S. Marine sentry box right behind the gate. It had been chilly even with the sun high overhead. Now, with night drawing closer and thick black storm clouds piling up in the east, the outside temperature was slipping toward the freezing mark. Some pessimistic forecasters were even predicting Moscow’s first brief snowfall by early morning.
Banich was still crossing the street when one of the marine guards recognized him and opened the gate.
The tallest of the two Russian cops stopped blowing on his ungloved hands long enough to sketch a quick wave. “Hello, Mr. Banich.” His English was pretty good.
“Hi, Pyotr. What’d you and Mischa do to wind up on night duty this close to the river? Screw your sergeant’s grandmother?”
Both men laughed. They were part of the crime-prevention detail assigned to patrol streets near the embassy. Russia’s capital needed all the U.S. aid and investment it could attract, and having American diplomats routinely mugged didn’t strike anyone in Moscow as a particularly good advertisement for the city’s charms.
Banich stepped through the gate and headed for the huge red brick chancery building.
“Hey, Mr. Banich?”
He half turned. “Yes?”
“Got any investment advice for us?”
Banich paused for a moment, pretending to fumble for the right, poorly pronounced Russian words. “Of course. Buy low… and sell high.”
He left them chuckling behind him.
The whole incident had been recorded, of course. Probably by a hidden mike monitored in one of the apartment houses across the street from the embassy. Russia’s Federal Investigative Service didn’t have all the resources or powers of the old KGB, but it still existed to protect the new state from foreign spies. And foreign spies tended to work out of foreign embassies.
FIS surveillance was one of the reasons Banich always carefully changed his outward appearance before coming back from a stint as Nikolai Ushenko. It usually only took a quick stop at the downtown apartment he rented under Ushenko’s name. The Ukrainian’s thick, fur-lined jacket, brown sweater, and American-made blue jeans were gone, replaced by a blue London Fog raincoat, dark gray suit, white shirt, and red silk tie. The stylish pair of horn- rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a splash of after-shave, and a dab of Jack Daniel’s or wine completed the transformation from plain-spoken, shrewd rustic to lazy, fun-loving, junior-grade diplomat.
When he first arrived in Moscow, Banich had spent more than a month thoroughly playing his part as a mediocre deputy assistant economic attache firmly committed to doing as little real work as possible. While apparently evaluating sales and investment opportunities for U.S. firms, he’d led FIS watchers on a dizzying round of factory tours, boring business conferences, and marathon pub crawls. The whole booze-tinged process had been well worth it. Day by day, the team of agents tailing him had dwindled, with man after man pulled off to follow more promising suspects — or to nurse long-term hangovers. Now they hardly bothered to keep tabs on him at all.
That technique wouldn’t have worked six or seven years before. The KGB would never have allowed a foreign official, especially an American, to wander at will though Moscow and the surrounding countryside. But the KGB had been torn apart for its complicity in the August 1991 coup. And the fragment tasked with counterespionage, the FIS, spent a lot of its time and resources spying on itself; trying to sniff out the faintest whiff of a renewed hard-line threat to Russia’s elected government. Rumor said the splintered agency’s morale and effectiveness were still at an
