The Mercenary Read online

  “Whatever I’m paid to do. Contract work.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “White papers,” he said dismissively.

  “On?”

  “Counterintelligence,” he snapped.

  Rositske smiled. “Who thought a guy with a desk job was the right man to run a covert operation in Moscow?”

  Mueller placed a restraining hand on Rositske’s arm. “John.”

  “No,” Rositske said. “I want to know the answer.”

  Garin leaned back in his chair, exciting a creak. “I am quite certain of my qualifications.”

  “What are those qualifications, besides speaking the language?”

  “Talk to GAMBIT. He seems to know.”

  “Zyuganov was compromised,” Rositske snarled. “How does a spectacular failure qualify you?”

  Garin stood. “I don’t need this.” Garin had known men like Rositske, who wore their toughness with a superior attitude. Men who believed difficult intelligence problems were better solved with brute force than the puppet strings of psychology. “I am happy to leave this problem in your capable hands.”

  “Sit down,” Mueller said. He turned to Rositske. “I’d like a minute alone with Alek.”

  * * *

  GARIN’S CUP HAD been refilled. He stirred in the four sugars in the same slow counterclockwise motion, and when he was satisfied the sugar was dissolved, he sipped, looking over the cup’s lip at Mueller.

  “He’ll be a problem going forward,” Garin said.

  “He doesn’t know anything about you.”

  “As it should be. What do you know?”

  Mueller made sure the conference room door was closed. “I know you left the Agency. I know General Zyuganov was executed. I’ve heard the rumors. Ambitious men distance themselves from failures to protect their careers.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “You never get used to it. If you say you do, then you’re fooling yourself.”

  Garin said nothing.

  “How’s Sophie?”

  “It’s over. We’re finished.”

  “No one tells you that side of the work,” Mueller said. “Never having an ordinary life. There is nothing ordinary about this work. The best of us burn out, drink too much, or leave.”

  “Don’t lecture me.”

  Mueller looked at Garin. “Why did GAMBIT ask for you?”

  “I said I don’t know. This job came out of nowhere. Three days ago I got a call at midnight and I was on a plane forty-eight hours later. I was handed my visa when I landed in Paris.” He looked at Mueller. “Things haven’t changed, have they?”

  “When were you blown?”

  “Carter’s term. Revolutionary Guards had taken the embassy in Tehran. Then General Zyuganov was lost. I was undercover with the Second Chief Directorate, gathering shit on Moscow Station. Then the leak happened.”

  “Their side or ours?”

  “We never knew.”

  “Were there grudges? Is GAMBIT a lure to reel you in?”

  “There are always grudges. They lost assets in Washington. Networks were rolled up. It was a bad time for them. Maybe they’re smarter now.”

  “You’re a risk.” Mueller’s eyes drifted to the hallway, where Agency staff getting off the elevator pretended not to be aware of the two men sitting in the Bubble. “But you’re an outsider. That qualifies you.” Mueller leaned forward. “I was compromised by someone inside Moscow Station. Black lights showed a phosphorescent chemical on my hands when I was picked up. My guess—METKA. I was tagged, probably here in the embassy.” Mueller met Garin’s eyes. “And there’s another reason why you’re suitable for this assignment.” He slid a black-and-white photograph across the table. “Talinov.”

  Garin studied the official portrait—the grim, unsmiling lieutenant colonel with his chest of medals and a high-crown cap with a single red star. Garin remembered the slightly ascetic face. Thinking eyes, thin lips, and a long, beaked nose that gave him a predatory visage. It was a face that was hard to forget.

  “He interrogated me,” Mueller said. “He knows we’re working an asset, and he knows the asset is senior. His questions were vague and speculative, but he found the package I was carrying—money, camera, radio transmitter. He knows enough to make your job dangerous.”

  Mueller paused. “GAMBIT will reach out. Check a postal box on your way here in the morning and look for his chalk mark. I’ve arranged a desk on the second floor. You’ll be working in the consular section as a temporary, non-diplomatic liaison to Helsinki Watch. You are on your own. This is the last time you come to the seventh floor, understand?”

  “How many people know about GAMBIT?”

  “Rositske. Me. Now, you.”

  “Was he the leak?”

  Mueller looked away. “John is a good case officer, but as you saw, he is a man shaped by his experiences, and he plays his chess game one move ahead. That’s not good enough.” Mueller wrote down two phone numbers in Washington, DC, and pushed the paper across to Garin. “Contact me by pouch or, if necessary, encrypted telephone. You’ll work for Helen Walsh, who is our MI6 liaison operating as commercial counselor with the State Department. She’s not in the loop—keep it that way. Ronnie will get you what you need.”

  Mueller stood. The meeting was over. He gathered his files and stuffed them in his attaché case. “You will need to make Rositske your ally. He controls staffing and money. You may not like each other, but this operation won’t succeed unless you work together. He is subtler than he appears, and you, I suspect, are more violent than you make out.”

  Mueller stuffed an arm into his big winter overcoat and hefted his garment bag. At the door, he turned to Garin. “Life rarely offers second chances. Don’t squander this one.”

  Later, on the plane home, Mueller made a note in his diary, a random entry that he consulted when he wrote up his account of the whole episode: Meeting didn’t go well. I knew him in the past. Moody. Sullen. Drank too much. When his mood improved and his drinking slowed, he did good work. He was never good with authority or women. Let’s see what happens.

  * * *

  IT SURPRISED NO one when a memo announced that Aleksander Garin had joined the staff as Consular Officer, Human Rights. The news was largely ignored by harried staff, who struggled with the urgent political demands of the Soviet Union’s long war in Afghanistan. Great political significance accompanied America’s attack on the Soviet Union’s treatment of ethnic minorities, gypsies, artists, intellectuals, writers, and Jews, but he was met with mild indifference when he introduced himself as the new man. Garin was happy with their response. The best cover was to be visible. Men without purpose attracted attention. All he had to do was draw attention to a purpose that distracted the observer from his real work. Garin’s visit to the seventh floor on his first day was noted but ignored. Every newcomer to the embassy was required to visit Moscow Station and be lectured on KGB surveillance, life in Moscow, and the danger of Russians wanting to befriend Americans.

  The process of establishing his cover could have been a protracted, but Garin had no time for that. In full view of his supervisor, Garin joined a fast crowd of junior staff. He put himself forward as the slightly older, amicable fellow who shook hands, remembered names, and could be counted on to tell a good story. People found it easy to like him and easy to dismiss him—another overqualified consular officer doing missionary work. They let off steam after work in bars friendly to the city’s diplomatic corps or in private apartments. He became a gregarious drinker, and he made sure to fit in, often going in the company of Ronnie Moffat, who became his sidekick. A few nights of loud, boisterous drinking quickly established a notoriety that got around. Smart, well-spoken, until he’d had too much to drink. Then he developed a kind of stupidity, the sort found in men who drank too much and, being unaware of themselves, began to speak loudly and make inappropriate advances. He was aware of the impression he was creating, and for a meticulous man who had thos
e tendencies, he easily acquired the reputation of a dissolute malcontent.

  It was that way in the embassy as well. He arrived late for meetings and told anyone willing to listen that he’d been taken off a distribution list or had not gotten a response to his memo. Helen Walsh’s secretary didn’t return his calls and admonished him when he arrived late. With time, even Helen, who covered for him and indulged his lapses, began to avoid him. He arrived with goodwill and quickly squandered it. Little by little he was politely laughed offstage and became a man in whom no one took much interest. He ate alone in the cafeteria. He became a solitary figure who belonged to the sad class of ambitious, middle-aged men politely excluded from the mainstream—an eager runner at tryouts banished from the team. That’s when the rumor started. Although he was newly arrived, he would be gone soon.

  * * *

  GARIN HAD BEEN in Moscow four weeks when he found GAMBIT’s signal: two vertical chalk marks on a postal box. He had left his apartment before nine, as he did every day, taking a route that passed by the tobacco kiosk outside Novokuznetskaya Metro Station. He was careful to avoid the neighborhood haunts of his previous Moscow life, and that morning he crunched across the rutted snowbanks into swirls of bus exhaust.

  The chalk marks were where he’d been told to look. White chalk on the side of a red postal box. There was a note with the details of a meeting waiting for him in the lobby of a building.

  Garin entered the metro station. He stopped to light a cigarette, failing until he turned his back to the wind, and then he casually looked for the single surveillance officer who had sporadically followed him during his first weeks in Moscow, but he was gone.

  4 VVEDENSKOYE CEMETERY

  GARIN STOOD OUTSIDE THE CEMETERY’S iron gate, having stopped to purchase a red rose from a peddler whose only business was to sell twenty-kopek plastic flowers to the occasional visitor. Garin, feeling generous, had placed a fifty-kopek coin in the old woman’s hand and received a startled reaction.

  He entered the cemetery holding the artificial rose in his right hand and the day’s paper under his arm. He moved along the narrow stone path that lay under a canopy of frost-stiffened branches. Even at noon, the winter sun was low on the sky and cast long shadows on the rows of untended graves.

  Garin looked for the man who, like him, would be carrying a red rose. The cemetery was an old, neglected place with a few mausoleums built for dignitaries who had died before the October Revolution, and newer crypts of simpler socialist design. He glanced at the names on the graves and saw pithy inscriptions on several that had meant something to the dead or to the one who had paid for the crypt. Everywhere there was a light dusting of snow. On the path ahead, footsteps of another visitor were being filled with gently falling powder, which also covered the graves’ names, and when he thought he was at the right spot, he wiped away the snow.

  But a young woman in a black shearling coat, who stood a few meters away, had no doubt about the deceased’s identity. She was tall, with raven hair, a leather handbag, dark glasses, a scarf wrapped around her head, and a cigarette in her mouth, which she threw to the ground before saying, without turning her head, “General Zyuganov.”

  Garin saw a rose in her hand, but it was white not red. He’d assumed he was meeting a man, but he couldn’t recall whether he had been told to expect a man or had simply assumed that GAMBIT was a man. And the rose was wrong. He waited for her to ask the time, and in the moment that followed, he recognized her rudeness and the annoying Russian insistence on one-word answers, and then too, when she added, “The traitor,” he heard in her voice the casual sarcasm that passed for polite conversation in Moscow.

  She stood at the neighboring crypt. “Maria Yudina,” she said, seeing Garin’s interest. “The pianist.”

  It was not until the winter sun had sunk a few degrees, touching the treetops, and the cold had begun to numb his fingers, that Garin knew that the woman wasn’t there to meet him—and she wasn’t going to leave. She had lit another cigarette, and taken one long, nervous draw, releasing smoke from the corner of her mouth, when she glanced at Garin. Their eyes met, but she quickly looked away. Silence lingered between them.

  “The gate closes shortly,” he said. “You might want to be gone before you’re locked in. The guard sleeps off his vodka lunch. It will be hours before he comes back. You’ll freeze to death.”

  She nodded and smiled.

  “Muggers know the guards leave at noon,” Garin said. “They prey on visitors like you.”

  She shot a sideways glance. “This is Moscow. There is no crime here.”

  “That’s a nice leather handbag you’ve got. It would fetch a good price.”

  She clutched her bag protectively.

  “People are the same everywhere,” Garin said. “The same appetites, the same diseases cured by the same medicines, attracted to the same fine leather bags. There was crime before the Party, and there will be crime when it’s gone.”

  She gasped. “Only a foreigner would speak like that.”

  “Or a thief,” he said. “Don’t worry, I have no interest in your bag, as nice as it is, and I can see that it is well made.” He looked again at his watch, cursing the meeting time that had already passed. “It’s a three-minute walk to the gate. If you leave now, you’ll still get there before the guard locks up. You’re not dressed like a person who wants to climb the fence.”

  “The gate,” she said, bristling, “closes for me at the same time that it closes for you.” She nodded at him. “You keep looking at your watch. Perhaps you are the one who is worried about the gate.” She suddenly turned. “Izvinitye.” Excuse me. She stepped forward so she was beside him. “If you don’t mind.”

  He stepped back. She brushed away twigs that had fallen on General Zyuganov’s crypt, tidying the grave of debris fallen from trees in the last storm. She placed her white rose on the top of the crypt, aligning it respectfully.

  “Even traitors need to be remembered,” she said.

  Her voice was brusque but polite, a soft, stern voice. She contemplated the general’s framed photograph fixed to the stone. A memory. She removed her mitten and ran her fingers over the name cut into the marble. Her eyes closed, and her lips moved soundlessly.

  Then she stepped back and used her knuckle to wipe a tear. Abruptly, she pulled her mitten onto her hand and whispered, “A traitor to the Party.” Her expression was once again cold and remorseless.

  She nodded at the adjacent grave. “Like her.” Faded flowers and a field of spent candles had turned Maria Yudina’s grave into a shrine. “We honor our heroes and our artists, but not our traitors.”

  “You knew him?” Garin asked, nodding at Zyuganov’s portrait.

  “What do you think?” she snapped. “I’m standing here.” She looked at Garin. “And what brings you to this spot?”

  Garin used the moment to put his mind around an answer that wouldn’t seem obviously false. He stepped forward to Maria Yudina’s grave and laid his plastic rose among the others along the foot of the vault. “I’ve heard the stories. I came to see for myself.”

  Garin had placed his plastic flower when he heard the sharp crack of a twig breaking nearby and a cough, and he saw that the woman beside him was suddenly agitated. She looked nervously toward a gap between two ponderous mausoleums, but when he followed her eyes, he saw nothing.

  “A man,” she whispered in an urgent voice. “I must leave. It is not good to be seen here. It is better that you let me go ahead, and better still that we not be seen together. And the best thing is to forget that we met. It would be the kindest thing, if you have any respect for the man in this grave. Good day.”

  She didn’t wait for his response and began to walk quickly down the path. She was gone in a moment, having turned a corner and disappeared between two mausoleums. Garin saw only her long striding footprints in the snow and heard, farther off, the sounds of her footsteps.

  How quickly one becomes aware of silence even in so silent a
place as a cemetery.

  Another cough. The man who had driven her off emerged from his hiding place. He was a big man who walked lightly and gave the impression of bulk without weight. He looked at Garin with an intense agitation, and his hand was shoved in his pocket as if holding a weapon. He didn’t look like a KGB officer. He looked like a professor, or somebody’s father, a well-dressed, well-fed man graying at the temples who had an air of uncertainty about him and a look of trepidation.

  Garin hesitated. Was this a KGB officer sent to chat him up and then “Amerikanets! Ostanovis!”? The hand on the shoulder, the other motioning for backup to make the arrest? Garin took in the man all at once, judging the threat and wondering if the woman had been part of an elaborate ruse. But then the stranger revealed a red rose under his right arm. He approached slowly, and when he stood beside Garin, he placed the flower at the base of General Zyuganov’s crypt.

  “Any chance you know the time?” the man asked.

  “It’s past midnight.”

  “Finally.”

  Garin met GAMBIT’s eyes. The two men took each other in, cautious, tentatively curious. Strangers joined by conspiracy.

  “Who was she?” GAMBIT asked.

  “A grieving woman. She couldn’t take a hint.”

  GAMBIT grunted. “This place isn’t safe now.” Quiet for a moment. His eyes darted between the marble mausoleums. “Come,” he said. He directed Garin toward the exit. “You plan for everything, but you can’t count on bad luck. I have another spot. We can talk without an audience.” He nodded at Zyuganov’s grave. “My wife’s idea to meet here. She said no one would guess.” He paused. “You’re alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surveillance?”

  “I lost them in Arbatskaya Metro Station.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it was only her?”

  “Are you worried about her?”

  “I worry about whatever I want to worry about. We’ll take my car.”