The Mercenary Page 5

  Garin didn’t see the prostitute at first. He felt a presence on the sidewalk when he was outside his apartment block, but she was there when he looked a second time. She wore high heels, a fur scarf, and gaudy red lipstick, and she had wide eyes that invited him to join her. Of course he was tempted, and of course he knew the last thing he should do is let himself be fooled by a local prostitute. He smiled at her air kisses but shook his head.

  Garin stood at his ninth-floor apartment door. The hallway was quiet, but he knew that even at a late hour there would be curious, or frightened, neighbors who would crack open their doors at a hint of trouble.

  Garin placed his hand high on the doorjamb and found the single strand of hair still in place. He’d fixed it with egg white in the morning, and it had held fast. He undid the mortise lock, turned the key to open the bolt, and entered.

  He’d been billeted in temporary housing arranged by a nice woman in the embassy’s personnel department. The small apartment was dark when he entered. The embassy had provided used furniture from storage—a white cotton sofa with wine stains from someone else’s party, unmatched dining chairs, chipped plates, and a greasy saucepan.

  There was nothing personal about the apartment, nothing that made it belong to him. He preferred it that way. It would be easier to leave it. There was nothing to attach to, and when he left, it would all stay behind. The blank walls and empty windows didn’t depress him. They were a reminder that he was there to sleep, and when his work was done, he would move on. Nothing in the apartment would help investigators establish who he was.

  The refrigerator had moldy cheese, four dozen eggs, and three beers, and he took one. He undressed in the dark and drew a bath. Electricity for the water heater shut off at 9:00 P.M., so the water was cold, almost shocking, but he slipped into the porcelain tub until only his head was above water. This too was a test he gave himself. His chest tightened, and his member shriveled, ridding him of fatigue and urges. He thought briefly of the prostitute, but then he closed his mind to concentrate on all that he needed to accomplish by May 28. As he did, his thoughts drifted back to the night he lost General Zyuganov, trying to find the conducting threads of that labyrinth.

  He opened his eyes and stepped out of the tub. He was cadaver white, and his hands were wrinkled like a newborn’s, but his mind was sharp. He began his handwritten note to Mueller at the small desk that faced the dark Moscow skyline. This note, and the ones that followed, would later serve Mueller when he assembled his account, but when Garin put his pen to paper, shaping his thoughts, he had no intention of creating a self-conscious record.

  Every time you get a walk-in, he wrote, he is observed, doubted, and interrogated until there is a good answer to the question: Why is this man turning against his country? In GAMBIT’s case, it is a combination of things. Money is important, but he’s not just trading secrets for a bank account—at least that’s not the whole picture. He has a five-year-old son who suffers seizures. He needs medicine for the boy, but the medicine he needs is only available in the West. After three vodkas, I saw another side of him. He is opinionated about the Soviet Union. The more he drank, the darker his humor became, and I saw a disillusioned man, maybe even a desperate one. He talked at length about growing up in the provinces, and he was proud that he was the first in his family to earn a commission in the Soviet Army, and then privileged to enter Frunze Military Academy. He believes in the greatness of Russia, but he has contempt for the Communist Party and the Soviet system. His litany of complaints went on for twenty minutes: corruption, red tape, the queues, empty shelves, filth in the public bathrooms, police rudeness, and the impossibility of getting proper medical care for his son. And he resents his privileged Moscow colleagues who hold his peasant background against him. He went on about the miseries his family suffered under Stalin.

  Garin looked up from the page. Then he added a final sentence: He occasionally uses French words, which I assume he picked up when he was stationed in Belgium.

  He set aside his report to Mueller and opened his spiral notebook. He had begun to record his activities. His notes were brief, often no more than reminders, and he made little effort to expunge names or references that could compromise his work if the diary fell into the wrong hands. It was a way of talking to himself. He wrote down concerns and opinions that he was not comfortable sharing with Mueller: What I disliked about John was his obviously colored hair with the gray roots clearly visible. There is something annoyingly vain about a middle-aged man unwilling to accept his age. I don’t trust him.

  Then he added another random thought: The child will complicate things. He underlined the passage. He knew that it was always the human element that was hardest to predict and most difficult to accommodate. A spy took terrible risks, but a spy with a family was a different challenge. Garin needed to better understand Petrov’s character—his fears, needs, moods, and family loyalty—in order to unlock his complex psychology. Petrov was managing a three-dimensional world, lying to Garin in ways that Garin didn’t yet know, lying to his wife certainly, and possibly lying to himself. Garin knew that a traitor lived under tremendous pressure and if he wasn’t handled properly, he had the potential to spontaneously combust.

  He’s on the fence, Garin wrote. Let’s see if he goes through with this.

  He dated the entry. There were ninety-five days until Border Guard Day.

  Garin woke at dawn and composed a report for Rositske on his Remington manual typewriter. He had an obligation to keep Rositske informed, and it was that requirement that helped him communicate with a man he preferred to keep in the dark. He knew that the report would be encrypted and sent to Langley, and eventually Mueller would read it. He didn’t write anything that contradicted what he said in his handwritten note, but he added answers to questions he knew would be on senior minds at Headquarters. The report would go to the head of the SE Division, the DCI, and, if Mueller was correct, the Oval Office, where the president had taken an interest in GAMBIT.

  He claims he has access to top secret documents held in a classified library used by Sergei Churgin in his role as deputy chairman of the Committee for State Security, Garin wrote. Churgin is a front-runner to head up the KGB if his boss succeeds Chernenko as chairman of the Presidium. He is testing his power by having different institutes send him reports on their military technology research. Information comes into the classified library from places around Moscow, including the Scientific Research Institute of Radio Engineering. GAMBIT has exploited a gaping hole in the security system. He can sign out documents so long as he returns them by 6 P.M. Backpacks, attaché cases, bags, coats, and jackets are searched when officers leave the building at night so he works inside. He copies documents during the day, and at night he photographs the documents in a small closet near his office.

  It gave Garin a sense of power to think of his readers, and like a good actor who played to his audience, he exaggerated where necessary. He has seen schematics of stealth aircraft designs with details on speed, radio frequencies, weapons capabilities, avionics, and look-down radar systems. Desk bureaucrats who demanded unreasonable quantities of intelligence had always rankled Garin, and when he reread his report, he underlined the last three words.

  Garin thought intelligence bureaucrats were a special class of coward, eager to claim credit for successful missions they had little to do with and quick to flee from catastrophes that stemmed from their failure to understand how much could be asked of men in the field.

  He is under a lot pressure, Garin wrote. He can only be pushed so far.

  Then he made his demand of Rositske—an aggressive request, more than he needed, but this was the time to ask. Soviet identity documents and passports for GAMBIT, his wife, and his child. Perfect forgeries were needed with the names GAMBIT had provided. Plane tickets—two sets, one for the Finnish border and another for Uzhgorod. Safe passage at the border needed to be arranged. Garin would do what he had failed to do for Zyuganov. And money. He conside
red Petrov’s demand. It was a reasonable sum, in light of the intelligence he was providing and the risks he was taking.

  7 THE SECOND MEETING

  GARIN FOUND PETROV AT THE plywood table, sitting in the dim winter light that came through the administrative office’s one dirty window. He had an open bottle of vodka and a half-empty glass. Their eyes met, and Garin knew something was on Petrov’s mind.

  “I’m sure you have an excuse for being late. Spare me your lies.” Petrov pushed a glass across the table. “The idiots forgot the zakuski. I told them they’d have hell to pay if I didn’t get laid because my drama queen girlfriend refused to warm up without eating first.”

  Petrov made a generous pour in Garin’s glass. “Were the photographs good?”

  “Yes. We had them looked at. They are what we had hoped they would be.”

  Ten days had passed since their first meeting. Contact between them had settled into a sort of routine. Garin avoided the neighborhoods he’d walked during his previous Moscow life, and he altered his route to the postal box. He’d entered the apartment lobby after seeing a single vertical chalk mark on the postal box by the tobacco kiosk, and he had retrieved the exposed film from the envelope wedged behind the steam radiator. Garin added a horizontal chalk mark to indicate he’d left a package. His envelope held ginseng root, and then a week later, he’d left a month’s supply of clonazepam tablets for the boy’s seizures. He also filled Petrov’s wife’s requests: a portable CD player, jazz recordings, and ABBA’s last album. And then Garin had seen two underscored vertical chalk marks—Petrov’s signal that it was urgent they meet.

  “Then you have competent experts,” Petrov said. “Weapons of mass destruction have an obvious appeal.”

  “How much more is there?”

  “A lot. The rest I will bring with me when we cross the border.” He slowly placed his glass on the table. “Maybe I trust you, but I don’t trust the deskmen in Langley.”

  Garin felt the man’s agitated mood, so he let Petrov do the talking. He saw that he’d been drinking while waiting. One-fifth of the bottle was gone.

  “And this too bothers me,” Petrov growled. His eyes suddenly locked on Garin. “Traitors live in the ninth circle of hell. Traitors are below rapists, below child molesters. I see worry in your eyes, and the way you treat me with condescension to keep me happy and get me to talk. Shithead. What do you think? You think it’s easy?”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Question for question. You wouldn’t be so calm if you were sitting in my chair.” He glared. “I don’t even know your name, but here I am, confessing my sins.” Petrov’s eyes had drifted off but came back. “Traitor to what? State? Conscience? Family?” His smile was indignant. “Don’t worry, I’m not backing out. You’ve got my name. There is a point beyond which there is no return, and as much as your friends in Langley need me, I know I’m expendable if things don’t go as they want.” He leaned back, and his expression became wiser. “Point of no return. Familiar? I wouldn’t know to quote it, but in the days of samizdat, Kafka was popular, and someone I know gave me his journals as a joke. Well, now the joke is on me.”

  Petrov fingered his empty glass and then poured himself another short shot of vodka, ending the pour at an imaginary line. He raised it, examining the clear alcohol. He threw it back, taking it all at once.

  “Here in the Soviet Union,” he said, his voice quieter and more philosophical, “if you are arrested, for whatever reason, but particularly for state crimes—” He drew a cutting finger across his neck. “But it could be for any reason, and it’s usually a case of simple luck if you survive. You die in interrogation, or you freeze to death in your cell. You die under the fists of the guards. A favorite pastime among the guards at Solovki Prison Camp is forcing naked prisoners to stand at the edge of a steep drop in bitter-cold weather until they lose balance and fall. Prisoners succumb to disease, hunger, despair. Prisoners lose their will to live, and sadistic guards take up their cudgels. But the traitor in this unlucky group—his arrest comes with a certain outcome. And the men who put the pistol to his head are often his colleagues.”

  Petrov drew in a breath. “There are many miserable ways to die if you are arrested, some of them cruel, some absurd, but the man arrested for being a traitor knows how he will go.”

  Garin didn’t have to wait to hear what was really on Petrov’s mind.

  “Someone in Directorate A suspects classified documents are being copied. Things are now uncomfortable—maybe even dangerous.”

  “How do you know?” Garin asked.

  “How! It’s obvious.” Petrov slammed his knife blade into the plywood. “For weeks I took reports from the library on the fifth floor of DOM2, and I would copy them on the machine on the seventh floor of DOM1. Now there are new rules. I must sign out documents. There is always a man who looks at my badge and copies down what I am taking. What’s worse is the copier. I had copied the original and returned them, then waited until after work, when no one was around, to film the copies in a closet. Now, every copy I make has to be logged, time stamped, and returned, and if not returned, a written explanation must be given. It’s a new security procedure. Someone suspects something.”

  Petrov sank in his chair, morose. “I have gone over and over in my mind why there has been this change. It is highly unusual. There is one logical explanation. Of course, there may be an illogical explanation—it’s a matter of chance—but I am a logical man, and I look for the logic in things. The copies on our machines are given a unique signature—time, date, number. If such a copy were sent to your people, because I had photographed it, and if the signature, or even a copy of the copy, found its way back to Lubyanka, KGB security would know to monitor that one copy machine.”

  Garin gazed at Petrov, absorbing the implications of Petrov’s suspicions. Fading light from the dying sun darkened Petrov’s face and made it hard for Garin to gauge the man’s worry.

  “It’s possible,” Petrov said, “there is a mole in your headquarters?”

  “Five people know of you,” Garin said. “They are all trusted senior men.”

  “Yes, but how many experts have seen the documents as part of an evaluation? They would be a different group—military scientists, engineering staff given pieces and asked to verify what I photographed. We both know that is the logical explanation.” Petrov looked at Garin. “You look surprised, but you shouldn’t be. You don’t think there is my counterpart inside the CIA? Passing secrets back? We recruited several. Believe me. Now there may be another.”

  Petrov placed several film canisters on the table. “There won’t be more of these, for now. I have to be careful. Everything else I have I will bring with me when I cross the border.”

  Petrov’s grim expression softened, and his voice calmed. “There may be a way to use this to our advantage.” He looked at the bare table. “This is when it would be good to eat something. My mind works better on a full stomach. But the shitheads forgot.”

  He leaned across the table. “Here is what I think. You don’t know—why would you—Chernenko is dying. He was dying when he was made chairman after Andropov died a year ago, but his end is near. Rivals are at work to position themselves when he goes, and there is a lot of jockeying between the Second and Fifth Chief Directorates. The old guard is getting older, even at the middle level, and we’ve had our fill of ancient Stalinists. Rival deputies are fighting. The rumor is that the next chairman of the Presidium will be the head of the KGB, like Andropov was. Senior men in the First Chief Directorate are aligning under Deputy Chairman Churgin, head of Directorate S, the illegals program.

  “My boss is ambitious. Perhaps you have heard his name—Dmitry Posner. Speaks perfect English and has cultivated his foreign credentials and contacts, and rivals have noticed his dishonesty. He is too intellectual and too well-spoken, and he smokes Marlboros while the rest of them choke on Primas. I don’t like him, he doesn’t like me, and his rivals have their knives ready
.” Petrov smiled his contempt. “He’s not Russian like me.”

  Petrov leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know if he suspects me or if it’s just that he doesn’t like me. Yesterday, he called me into his office and asked why I was making so many copies. He is a careerist, but he’s smart, which makes him dangerous.

  “He heard my answer, but I could see that he wasn’t satisfied. We have never been alike, and he has never shown much interest in my work, but now he wants to see everything I do. I suspect my name is on a long list of people who are possible suspects. It doesn’t look good for him if one of his deputies is on the suspect list, and it makes it even more important for him to be vigilant. His career goes up if he exposes a man under him, but his career sinks if someone in another directorate proves security in Posner’s group was lax, and his career crashes if he comes under suspicion. Hundreds of people are suspects at this point. Hundreds of people use that copier. Posner himself has made copies when his assistant was sick—lowering himself to secretarial work. The investigation is tedious, and the process of elimination will be difficult. No one wants to make a mistake, grab the wrong man, and leave the traitor in place. No one wants to find out that their deputy, or the man in the office next door, is the mole.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I think Posner wants to get rid of me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s acting strangely. He’s worried about something.” Petrov pushed forward an invitation with the embossed seal of the United States of America from Ambassador Thomas Propper and his wife to attend the fiftieth-anniversary gala at Spaso House.