“Ed Foley, John. How’s Moscow?”
“Pleasant. What gives, Ed?” John asked. The DCI didn’t call from D.C. on a secure line to exchange pleasantries.
“Get over to the embassy. We have a message we want you to deliver.”
“What sort?”
“Get to the embassy. It’ll be waiting. Okay?”
“Roger. Out.” John killed the phone and walked back inside.
“Anything important?” Chavez asked.
“We have to go to the embassy to see somebody,” Clark replied, simulating anger at the interruption of his quiet time of the day.
“See you tomorrow then, Ivan and Domingo,” Kirillin saluted them with his glass.
“What gives?” Chavez asked from thirty feet away.
“Not sure, but it was Ed Foley who paged me.”
“Something important?”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Who drives?”
“Me.” John knew Moscow fairly well, having learned it first on missions in the 1970s that he was just as happy to forget about, when his daughters had been the age of his new grandson.
The drive took twenty minutes, and the hard part turned out to be persuading the Marine guard that they really were entitled to come inside after normal business hours. To this end, the man waiting for them, Tom Barlow, proved useful. The Marines knew him, and he knew them, and that made everything okay, sort of.
“What’s the big deal?” Jack asked, when they got to Barlow’s office.
“This.” He handed the fax across, a copy to each. “Might want to take a seat, guys.”
“Roger that, Domingo,” his boss agreed. They were reading a hastily laundered copy of the latest SORGE dispatch.
“We got us a source in Beijing, ’mano.”
“Hang a big roger on that one, Domingo. And we’re supposed to share the take with Sergey Nikolay’ch. Somebody back home is feeling real ecumenical.”
“Fuck!” Chavez observed. Then he read on a little. “Oh, yeah, I see. This does make some sense.”
“Barlow, we have a phone number for our friend?”
“Right here.” The CIA officer handed over a Post-it note and pointed to a phone. “He’ll be out at his dacha, out in the Lenin Hills. They haven’t changed the name yet. Since he found out he was the target, he’s gotten a little more security-conscious.”
“Yeah, we’ve met his baby-sitter, Shelepin,” Chavez told Barlow. “Looks pretty serious.”
“He’d better be. If I read this right, he might be called up to bat again, or maybe Grushavoy’s detail.”
“Is this for real?” Chavez had to wonder. “I mean, this is
“Well, Ding, you keep saying that international relations is two countries fucking each other.” Then he dialed the phone. “Tovarisch Golovko,” he told the voice that answered it, adding in Russian, “It’s Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich. That’ll get his attention,” John told the other two.
“Greetings, Vanya,” a familiar voice said in English. “I will not ask how you got this number. What can I do for you?”
“Sergey, we need to see you at once on an important matter.”
“What sort of matter?”
“I am the mailman, Sergey. I have a message to deliver to you. It is worthy of your attention. Can Domingo and I see you this evening?”
“Do you know how to get here?”
Clark figured he’d find his way out to the woods. “Just tell the people at the gate to expect two capitalist friends of Russia. Say about an hour from now?”
“I will be waiting.”
“Thank you, Sergey.” Clark replaced the phone. “Where’s the piss-parlor, Barlow?”
“Down the hall on the right.”
The senior field intelligence officer folded the fax and tucked it into his coat pocket. Before having a talk about something like this, he needed a bathroom.
CHAPTER 42 Birch Trees
They drove into the sunset, west from the Russian capital. Traffic had picked up in Moscow since his last real adventure here, and you could use the center lane in the wide avenues. Ding handled navigation with a map, and soon they were beyond the ring roads around the Russian capital and entering the hills that surrounded the city. They passed a memorial which neither had ever seen before, three huge-
“What the hell is that?” Ding asked.
“This is as close as the Germans got in 1941,” John explained. “This is where they stopped ’em.”
“What do you call those things?” “Those things” were immense steel I-beams, three of them welded at ninety-degree angles to look like enormous jacks.
“Hedgehogs, but in the SEALs we called ’em horned scullies. Hard to drive a tank over one,” Clark told his younger partner.
“They take their history serious here, don’t they?”
“You would, too, if you stopped somebody who wanted to erase your country right off the map, sonny. The Germans were pretty serious back then, too. It was a very nasty war, that one.”
“Guess so. Take the next right, Mr. C.”
Ten minutes later, they were in a forest of birch trees, as much a part of the Russian soul as vodka and borscht. Soon thereafter they came to a guard shack. The uniformed guard held an AK-47 and looked surprisingly grim.
“The houses don’t look too bad,” Chavez observed.
“Built by German POWs,” John told him. “Ivan doesn’t exactly like the Germans very much, but he does respect their workmanship. These were built for the Politburo members, mainly after the war, probably. There’s our place.”
It was a wood-frame house, painted brown and looking like a cross between a German country house and something from an Indiana farm, Clark thought. There were guards here, too, armed and walking around.
“You are Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich?”
“Pass, you are expected,” the guard told them.
It was a pleasant evening. The sun was down now, and the stars were making their appearance in the sky. There was also a gentle westerly breeze, but Clark thought he could hear the ghosts of war here. Hans von Kluge’s panzer grenadiers, men wearing the
Golovko was there, standing on the sheltered porch by the furniture, dressed casually. Decent shirt, but no tie. He wasn’t a tall man, about halfway between Chavez and himself in height, but the eyes always showed intelligence, and now they also showed interest. He was curious about the purpose of this meeting, as well he might be.
