The Mercenary Read online

  “I have been looking forward to meeting you. Unfortunately, these are difficult circumstances.”

  Mueller felt the slap’s sting as a prelude to a bruising night. He said what he would repeat many times, in those and similar words: “I am an American diplomat. I demand to speak with my embassy.”

  2 GREENWICH VILLAGE

  Two Days Later

  THE MOMENT ALEKSANDER GARIN OPENED the front door of his West Village walk-up, he knew that his wife was gone. He stood in the vestibule, attaché case in hand, and he felt the dark silence of the empty apartment. Her coat was missing, her purse not where she usually placed it, and there was an envelope pinned to the corkboard where she knew he would see it—the care of a person making sure to tie up loose ends. She had written his name in her big, loopy script.

  He moved into the small living room and dropped the envelope on the round dining table. He was reluctant to open it but also eager to know what she’d written, those opposing feelings tugging at him at the same time.

  It was snowing outside again. Through the casement window he could hear plows scraping the pavement on their rumbling way down the quiet street. A week earlier they had celebrated his birthday at his favorite restaurant in Little Italy, and he’d commented that the neighborhood had changed, the old places now drawing patrons from the suburbs, but they had still enjoyed the meal, sharing a bottle of Chianti, and they’d made love when they got home. It had been a brave effort to hold on to their intimacy, but when they finished, they lay apart on the bed. They fell asleep without talking.

  The next day, he’d gone to work, as usual. When he left the apartment, she was at the round table writing an outline for an article she was pitching to editors, and she hadn’t looked up to say goodbye even though, as previously planned, she would be off to visit her parents in Los Angeles for the weekend. She had returned from Los Angeles on the Sunday night red-eye, missing him before he left for the office, but she’d been waiting for him in the kitchen when he got home Monday night. They had talked, and then the argument had begun. It started with a small thing, as all their arguments did, and he couldn’t remember what had taken them down the path of blame and recrimination, but once there, they were unable to stop. Heated emotion eventually exhausted them and, just before going to bed, she had said it was over.

  * * *

  “SOPHIE?” HE DIDN’T expect her to answer, but he thought it advisable to confirm she was gone before he read her note. He lifted it, holding it like an unwanted gift. She had written Aleksander on the envelope, addressing him as she occasionally did, but only when she was being formal, or serious, or when Alek wouldn’t get his attention. She had used Aleksander in their marriage vows, in heated arguments, and once when he’d been hit by a taxicab.

  He opened the envelope. When he finished reading, he refolded the stationery and placed it back in the envelope and laid it on the table, as if that was where it belonged. He made himself a gin martini and drank half. Looking up, he happened to see his reflection in the beveled wall mirror above the breakfront. He was a little stunned, a little tired, but there was no surprise on his face and no sadness in his expression. He knew that would come later. After all, the end of a relationship was a kind of death, and sadness accompanied death. He finished the martini and made another.

  Things between them had not been good for some time. His hours were long, his absences unpredictable, and his work a black box that he didn’t discuss. When they’d first met, he had laid out the reasons why he would be a terrible partner, but she had ignored his warning, believing she could change him. They had discovered the challenges of day-to-day living in the first months of marriage—lost weekends, urgent calls, and the mystery of his sudden out-of-town trips. What had seemed acceptable in the fresh blush of romance became unbearable in marriage. He believed that she cherished him, and she said she did, and there was a time when his privacy was safe from reproach. They had loved, made love, enjoyed the fullness of their feelings, and seized carefree moments. God, how he had wanted a normal life with her.

  Garin turned away from the mirror. He walked to the bedroom and switched on the light. Everything was in order. The bed perfectly made, each vacation photograph squared on the wall, fluffed bed pillows arranged as she liked them. It was an odd thing, he thought, to leave the room in perfect order at the moment of her flight. There was a part of her he’d come to discover that needed predictability, order, safety. His work had none of that. When they understood this, they both knew the marriage was doomed. For a long time they refused to admit they’d made a mistake. He had known her as well as he’d known any person, but now, seeing her gone, he wasn’t sure he’d known her at all.

  She had taken some clothes, and when he checked her jewelry box, he saw that she had taken a pair of heirloom earrings and her pearl necklace. There were empty hangers in the closet, and her rolling suitcase was missing.

  He opened his desk drawer and felt underneath. Tape fixed the hidden manila envelope to the bottom. She hadn’t found his documents, or hadn’t looked. He removed the envelope and confirmed that the seal was unbroken. He tossed it on the bed.

  Garin moved to the kitchen and stood at the sink, looking out into the dark, snowy night. He drank a glass of water and saw his reflection in the mirrored smokiness of the window. His hand was trembling. The glass fell, shattering in the porcelain sink, and a shard pierced his palm. He bled out the cut under the faucet’s cold water.

  Suddenly, the telephone rang, startling him. On the second ring, he lifted the receiver.

  “Sophie?”

  “Alek Garin, please.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m James Slattery. I am with the Agency. I’m calling on a secure line. Are you alone? Can we talk?”

  “I’m alone.”

  “I’m calling at the request of the deputy director. Sorry to bother you at this hour. There has been a problem in Moscow. Your name came up. We have a request for you.”

  Garin’s eyes came off the snow falling out the window. His silence was a sort of consent.

  “Is there anything that will keep you from flying out of JFK the day after tomorrow?”

  Garin closed the faucet and put pressure on his cut, cradling the phone against his neck. Sophie’s sudden departure and the surprise call combined to create a surreal sense of displacement. He knew he couldn’t live alone in the apartment. Memories in the familiar place would be a terrible reminder of their failure. His mind went over the half-dozen ties that would prevent him from going. “When do I have to decide?”

  “Now, actually. On this call. It’s an urgent matter. The Air France flight leaves at five P.M. We can have a car pick you up Wednesday afternoon. The driver will brief you.”

  “How long?”

  “Stopover in Charles de Gaulle for a further briefing. From there, you will fly to Sheremetyevo. You’ll be in Moscow in seventy-two hours.”

  “How long will I be gone?”

  “We’re not sure at this time. Weeks, certainly. Months, perhaps.”

  “The money?”

  There was a pause. “We are prepared to deposit twice your usual fee in the account you’ve used in the past.”

  The offer surprised him, not simply because of its size but because the amount implied the seriousness of the matter, and possibly also the risks. One day earlier, the danger would not have appealed to him.

  He looked around the apartment. This was to have been his new life, but there had never been an end to work’s demands, and never enough money. Contract jobs paid well enough, but they were unpredictable. He’d stuck with it because the work had never been just about the money. He had a figure in mind—the amount he needed to start over in another city.

  Garin wrote two numbers on the notepad that hung by the wall telephone. He gave Slattery the larger number and was prepared to accept the lower, but that wasn’t necessary. When the call ended, Garin placed the handset in its cradle and considered all that would now follow.
/>   Garin entered the bedroom and lifted the manila envelope, tearing the seal. His American passport was the logical choice for the job—the name matched his driver’s license, and it was the name on his marriage certificate—but there was also good reason to use the name that appeared on his Soviet passport and his birth certificate. He looked at both passports, considered where he was going, the risk of being stopped at immigration, and made his choice.

  3 MOSCOW STATION

  SHEREMETYEVO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’S WEATHER WAS unseasonably warm the morning that Garin stepped off Air France 1744. Winter fog was deep and gray on the tarmac, and it turned aircraft into ghost machines. His overnight flight from Paris was the last to land before air traffic controllers announced a ground stop. Passengers walked in the light mist from the plane’s remote location to the new terminal under the watchful eyes of armed border guards. Garin was alert to the surveillance, becoming for the moment another fatigued passenger happy to get out of the rain.

  When it was his turn at immigration, he presented his American passport and forged visa to a stern, middle-aged officer with bloodshot eyes, a loosened necktie, and a mysterious badge on his uniform. He looked twice at Garin’s visa, matching photo to face, comparing the likenesses with the inscrutable expression of immigration officers everywhere, looking for a single reason to doubt the documents. Garin followed the example of other passengers, who did as they were told, moving from one queue to the next, until they extracted their bags from the carousel’s conveyer belt. He opened his bag for the customs agent, who poked through his underwear and then waved him through to the glass lobby.

  The embassy driver sent to collect Garin stood beyond a roped perimeter that held back eager parties waiting to greet arriving travelers. Garin nodded at his handwritten name on the driver’s card and let the driver take his duffel bag.

  Garin didn’t talk on the drive in. His mind was preoccupied by the view from the car’s window. The dense fog had lifted enough for him to see landmarks he thought he’d never see again—the brutalist architecture of grim apartment blocks, wispy coal smoke that rose straight into the air, and the sameness of the cars. How many times had he driven this route, the exact drive? There was something illusory about time and space that in the moment made him feel as if he’d never left the Soviet Union. The low visibility darkened his mood and reminded him of the morning he had been forced to flee. It still haunted him that he hadn’t seen, or chose to ignore, the obvious dangers. His wishful thinking had blinded him to the treachery of men he trusted, and it was only when he’d gotten out that he had time to reflect on what had gone wrong. On instinct, he looked behind and saw a black Volga following.

  “They’ve been there since we left the airport,” the driver said, catching Garin’s eye in the rearview mirror.

  Nothing has changed, he thought. But things were different. He was older, with a scar on his neck, another name, and a new assignment.

  * * *

  GARIN WAS SIX feet, and slender for his age, which made him appear younger than he was, and his knees hit the front seat. After thirty-six hours of airport lounges and coach travel, he was exhausted, and he looked it. His cheeks had the rugged shadow of a hiker just back from a four-day trek. It was a masculine face but not a tough face, and fatigue had darkened his preoccupation. His slacks had lost their crease, his shirt was gray with perspiration, and his wide tie was loosened at the neck and fell across his chest like a lanyard. When he saw the embassy, he tightened the necktie’s knot and swept back his hair.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” Ronnie Moffat said when Garin stepped from the car at the embassy’s side entrance. “I’ll bring you up.” She hustled Garin past the marine guard.

  Moscow Station was a cramped suite of rooms on the seventh floor. Bricked-up windows gave the vestibule they entered from the elevator a claustrophobic feeling. The small room served as a kind of air lock in which non-Agency personnel were allowed to read classified material. They moved toward a door without a handle or keyhole and no opening except a peephole for those inside to see who wanted to enter.

  “Listening devices were found in the beams,” Ronnie said, noting his wandering eyes. “Two years ago, an electric typewriter had to be quarantined. We found a KGB microprocessor under the typewriter’s keypad that recorded each stroke and sent the data to the power cord, which transmitted it wirelessly.”

  She swiped her badge against the electronic wall pad, causing the door to swing open automatically, and they entered a long, crowded area of cubicles and cramped offices. Overnight cipher clerks transcribed and decrypted coded messages from Headquarters, working reverse shifts to accommodate the time difference. Little had changed, Garin thought, as he stepped into Moscow Station, calibrating what he remembered against what he saw.

  Ronnie pointed to a conference room that was encased in inch-thick Plexiglas. “Secure conversations take place there. We call it the Bubble.”

  “Aleksander Garin,” she announced, opening the conference room door.

  George Mueller sat at one end of a long conference table, and next to him was another man Garin did not recognize. Garin nodded at each one, but he settled on Mueller. Mueller’s right eye was a purpled spider web, which gave him the look of a man who had been on the losing end of a fistfight, and his left hand was splinted and bandaged. Mueller’s overcoat draped a chair, and his bulky garment bag leaned against the wall. An airplane ticket, his black diplomatic passport, and an open file lay in front of him on the table.

  “Your car is ready to take you to the airport,” Ronnie said.

  “When I’m done here,” Mueller replied, and then he looked at Garin. “Sit down. You keep looking at my face. You’ve never seen the KGB’s handiwork? It could be worse. I’ll have it looked at in Washington.” He nodded. “Yes, I’ve been declared persona non grata and expelled. This is my deputy, John Rositske.”

  “Long trip?” Rositske said.

  “No more than usual.” Garin met Mueller’s eyes without acknowledging that they knew each other. He turned to Rositske. “Just the two of you?”

  “For now,” Mueller said. “Surveillance?”

  “One car. They dropped back when we crossed the bridge.”

  “Immigration?”

  “No trouble.”

  Garin saw Rositske stare at him like a bored house cat watching a sparrow through a window. “What?”

  “Your name?” he said. “I drew a blank when your name came through on the cable from Headquarters. I read that you’re a native Russian speaker. That surprised me. I’m familiar with all the case officers in the division who work on Soviet affairs. I’ve never come across your name. How is that possible?”

  “I don’t work in the SE Division.” Garin took a measure of the two men opposite. He flattened his accent to rid it of clues of who he was or where he was from, and he gave an account of the phone call and the details of his departure from New York, leaving out only personal details that weren’t germane. Garin had mastered the art of separating life and work. He spoke about the trip with the calm of a man who long ago had surrendered his will to the sudden demands of unpredictable covert work. “I was told there’s a mess to clean up.”

  “We don’t have a mess,” Rositske said in his Texas drawl.

  “There was another breach,” Mueller interrupted. “The KGB knew I would be in Red Square.” Mueller folded his hands on the table solemnly. He nodded at late-arriving staff coming through the peephole entrance door. “That’s why we are in here. It’s just the three of us for now.”

  Coffee was brought in. Garin took his black with four sugars that he measured carefully, stirring slowly counterclockwise, and then he drank it all at once. He listened to Mueller describe the Station’s loss of MOBILE, PANDER, and two others he didn’t identify.

  “We can’t afford another loss,” Mueller said. He described the few details they had on the man known only as GAMBIT. “He took a terrible risk when he slid the note into my car. I�
�m a known intelligence officer who is watched by the KGB. He was visibly nervous in our first meeting but clearly aware of what he is doing. He refused to give me his name or his position. But he knew a lot about me, and he had knowledge of our operations, so I assume he is high-ranking KGB or GRU. He brought excerpts of military weapons specifications to prove his value. The Pentagon confirmed the documents are authentic. They are eager to get their hands on his intelligence. The Soviets are building weapons that we haven’t figured out how to design.”

  Mueller adjusted his splint. “GAMBIT asked me to be his handler, but I said that was impossible. I’m too visible. He was adamant that he didn’t want a randomly assigned handler. He also doesn’t speak English, so he wants a Russian speaker. In our first meeting, he threw out several names. I got the impression that he’s been planning this for some time. Before I was blown, we agreed on communication protocols—drop points, signals, meeting places—and he gave me the person he wanted to be his handler—the man who handled General Zyuganov.” Mueller looked at Garin. “That must be you.”

  Garin didn’t respond. “What does he want?”

  “Money.”

  “They all want money. What else?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far.”

  “Defect?”

  “Yes, he’ll probably want to be brought out.”

  Garin clapped his hands slowly twice. “Perhaps we can have a band play farewell when he boards Aeroflot and waves goodbye.” Garin leaned forward and growled, “You have never exfiltrated a KGB officer from Moscow.” Garin grunted his skepticism. He went for his coffee, but he put down the cup when he saw that it was empty.

  “You’re not with the Agency, are you?” Rositske said.

  “I left.”

  “What have you been doing?”