could also look forward to a promotion, he told himself. After all, he'd broken the man earlier than promised. That ought to make the Chairman happy.
Vatutin caught him between meetings. He found Gerasimov in a pensive mood, staring out his window at the traffic on Dzerzhinskiy Square.
'Comrade Chairman, I have the confession,' Vatutin announced. Gerasimov turned.
'Filitov?'
'Why, yes, Comrade Chairman.' Vatutin allowed his surprise to show.
Gerasimov smiled after a moment. 'Excuse me, Colonel. There is an operational matter on my mind at the moment. You do have his confession?'
'Nothing detailed yet, of course, but he did admit that he was sending secrets to the West, and that he has been doing so for thirty years.'
'Thirty years-and all that time we didn't detect it?' Gerasimov noted quietly.
'That is correct,' Vatutin admitted. 'But we have caught him, and we will spend weeks learning all that he has compromised. I think we will find that his placement and operational methods made detection difficult, but we will learn from this, as we have learned from all such cases. In any event, you required the confession and now we have it,' the Colonel pointed out.
'Excellent,' the Chairman replied. 'When will your written report be ready?'
'Tomorrow?' Vatutin asked without thinking. He nearly cringed awaiting the reply. He expected to have his head snapped off, but Gerasimov thought for an infinity of seconds before nodding. 'That is sufficient. Thank you, Comrade Colonel. That will be all,'
Vajutin drew himself to attention and saluted before leaving.
Tomorrow? he asked himself in the corridor. After all that, he's willing to wait until tomorrow?
What the hell? It didn't make any sense. But Vatutin had no immediate explanation, either, and he did have a report to file. The Colonel walked to his office, pulled out a lined pad, and started drafting his interrogation report.
'So that's the place?' Ryan asked. 'That's it. Used to be they had a toy store right across from it, over there. Called Children's World, would you believe? I suppose somebody finally noticed how crazy that was, and they just moved it. The statue in the middle is Feliks Dzerzhinskiy. That was a cold bloody piece of work-next to him Heinrich Himmler was a boy scout.'
'Himmler wasn't as smart,' Jack observed. 'True enough. Feliks broke at least three attempts to bring Lenin down, and one of them was pretty serious. The full story on that never has gotten out, but you can bet the records are right in there,' the driver said. He was an Australian, part of the company contracted to handle perimeter security for the embassy, and a former commando of the Aussie SAS. He never performed any actual espionage activities-at least not for America-but he often played the part, doing strange things. He'd learned to spot and shake tails along the way, and that made the Russians certain that he was CIA or some sort of spook. He made an excellent tour guide, too.
He checked the mirror. 'Our friends are still there. You don't expect anything, do you?'
'We'll see.' Jack turned. They weren't being very subtle, but he hadn't expected that they would. 'Where's Frunze?'
'South of the embassy, mate. You should have told me that you wanted to go there, we'd have hit it first.' He made a legal U-turn while Ryan kept looking back. Sure enough, the Zhiguli-it looked like an old Fiat-did the same, following them like a faithful dog. They went past the American compound again on the way, past the former Greek Orthodox church known to embassy wags as Our Lady of the Microchips for all the surveillance devices it surely contained.
'What exactly are we doing?' the driver asked.
'We're just driving around. The last time I was here, all I saw was the way to and from the Foreign Ministry and the inside of a palace.'
'And if our friends get any closer?'
'Well, if they want to talk with me, I suppose I might oblige,' Ryan answered.
'Are you serious?' He knew Ryan was CIA.
'You bet.' Jack chuckled.
'You know I have to do a written report on things like that?'
'You have your job. I have mine.' They drove around for another hour, but nothing happened. That was to Ryan's disappointment, and the driver's relief.
They arrived the usual way. Though the crossing points were shuffled at random, the car-it was a Plymouth Reliant, about four years old, with Oklahoma tags-stopped at the Border Patrol control booth. There were three men inside, one of whom appeared to be asleep and had to be roused.
'Good evening,' the Border Patrolman said. 'Could I see some identification, please?' All three men handed over driver's licenses, and the photographs matched. 'Anything to declare?'
'Some booze. Two quarts-I mean liters-for each of us.' He watched with interest as a dog sniffed around the car. 'You want us to pull over and pop the trunk?'
'Why were you in Mexico?'
'We represent Cummings-Oklahoma Tool and Die Pipeline and refinery equipment,' the driver explained. 'Mainly large-diameter control valves and like that. We're trying to sell some to Pemex. The sales stuff is in the trunk, too.'
'Any luck?' the Border Patrolman asked.
'First try. It'll take a few more. They usually do.'
The dog handler shook his head negatively. His Labrador wasn't interested in the car. No smell of drugs. No smell of nitrates. The men in the car didn't fit the profile. They looked fairly clean-cut, but not overly so, and had not chosen a busy time to make the crossing.
'Welcome back,' the patrolman said. 'Safe trip home.'
'Thank you, sir.' The driver nodded and dropped the car into drive. 'See ya.'
'I don't believe it,' the man in the back said, once they were a hundred meters away from the control point. He spoke in English. 'They don't have the first idea of security.'
'My brother's a major in the Border Guards. I think he'd have a heart attack if he saw how easy that was,' the driver observed. He didn't laugh. The hard part would be getting out, and as of now they were in enemy territory. He drove right at the posted speed limit while local drivers whizzed by him. He liked the American car. Though it lacked power, he'd never driven a car with more than four cylinders and didn't really know the difference. He'd been in the United States four times before, but never for a job like this, and never with so little preparation.
All three spoke perfect American English, with a prairie twang to coincide with their identification papers- that's how they all thought of their driver's licenses and Social Security cards, even though they could hardly be called proper 'papers.' The odd thing was that he liked America, especially the easy availability of inexpensive, wholesome food. He'd stop at a fast-food place on the way to Santa Fe, preferably a Burger King, where he'd indulge his love for a charcoal-cooked hamburger served with lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. That was one of the things Soviets found most amazing about America, the way anyone could get food without standing in a block- long line. And it was usually good food. How could Americans be so good at difficult tasks like food production and distribution, he wondered, and be so stupid about simple things like proper security? They just didn't make any sense at all, but it was wrong-dangerous-to be contemptuous of them. He understood that. The Americans played by a set of rules so different as to be incomprehensible? and there was so much randomness here. That frightened the KGB officer in a fundamental way. You couldn't tell which way they'd jump any more than you could predict the behavior of a driver on a highway. More than anything else, it was that unpredictability that reminded him that he was on the enemy's ground. He and his men had to be careful, had to keep to their training. Being at ease in an alien environment was the surest route to disaster-that lesson had been pounded home all the way through the academy. There were just too many things that training could not do. The KGB could scarcely predict what the American government would do. There was no way they could be prepared for the individual actions of two hundred-plus million people who bounced from decision to decision.
That was it, he thought. They have to make so many decisions every day. Which food to buy, which road to take, which car to drive. He wondered how his countrymen would handle such a huge load of decisions, forced upon you every day. Chaos, he knew. It would result in anarchy, and that was historically the greatest fear of
