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  Strangely, none of them talked about what they did or what they encrypted, inbound or outbound. The clerks were pretty mindless. Perhaps they were recruited with those psychological factors in mind—it would not have surprised him. This was an agency designed by geniuses for operation by robots. If someone could actually build such robots, he was sure they’d have them here, because you could trust machines not to diverge too greatly from their intended path.

  Machines couldn’t think, however, and for his own job, thinking and remembering were useful things, if the agency was to function—and function it must. It was the shield and the sword of a state which needed both. And he was the postmaster of sorts; he had to remember what went where. He didn’t know everything that went on here, but he knew a lot more than most people in this building: operation names and locations, and, often enough, operational missions and taskings. He generally did not know the proper names and faces of field officers, but he knew their targets, knew the code names of their recruited agents, and, for the most part, knew what those agents were providing.

  He’d been here, in this department, for nine and a half years. He’d started in 1973, just after graduating from Moscow State University with a degree in mathematics, and his highly disciplined mind had gotten him spotted early on by a KGB talent scout. He played a particularly fine game of chess, and that, he supposed, was where his trained memory came from, all that study of the games of the old grandmasters, so that in a given situation he’d know the next move. He’d actually thought of making chess his career, but though he’d studied hard, it wasn’t quite hard enough, it seemed. Boris Spassky, just a young player himself then, had annihilated him six games to none, with two desperate draws, and so ended his hopes of fame and fortune . . . and travel. He sighed at his desk. Travel. He’d studied his geography books, too, and in closing his eyes could see the images—mainly black-and-white: Venice’s Grand Canal, London’s Regent Street, Rio de Janeiro’s magnificent Copacabana beach, the face of Mt. Everest, which Hillary had climbed when he himself had just been learning to walk . . . all those places he would never get to see. Not him. Not a person with his access and his security clearances. No, KGB was very careful with such people. It trusted no one, a lesson that had been learned the hard way. What was it about his country that so many tried to escape from it? And yet so many millions had died fighting for the rodina. . . . He’d been spared military service because of his mathematics and his chess potential, and then, he supposed, because of his recruitment to #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. Along with it came a nice flat, fully seventy-five square meters, in a recently finished building. Military rank, too—he’d become a senior captain within weeks of his majority, which, on the whole, wasn’t too bad. Even better, he’d just started getting paid now in certificate rubles, and so was able to shop in the “closed” stores for Western consumer goods—and, best of all, with shorter lines. His wife appreciated that. He’d soon be in the entry level of the nomenklatura, like a minor czarist prince, looking up the ladder and wondering how far he might climb. But unlike the czars, he was here not by blood but by merit—a fact that appealed to his manhood, Captain Zaitzev thought.

  Yes, he’d earned his way here, and that was important. That’s why he was trusted with secrets, this one for example: an agent code-named CASSIUS, an American living in Washington; it seemed he had access to valuable political intelligence that was treasured by people on the fifth floor, and which was often seconded to experts in the U.S.-Canada Institute, which studied the tea leaves in America. Canada wasn’t very important to the KGB, except for its participation in the American air-defense systems, and because some of its senior politicians didn’t like their powerful southern neighbor, or so the rezident in Ottawa regularly told his superiors upstairs. Zaitzev wondered about that. The Poles might not love their eastern neighbor either, but the Poles mostly did what they were told—the Warsaw rezident had reported with unconcealed pleasure in his dispatch the previous month—as that union hothead had found out to his discomfort. “Counterrevolutionary scum” had been the term used by Colonel Igor Alekseyevich Tomachevskiy. The Colonel was thought to be a rising star, due for a posting to the West. That’s where the really good ones went.

  TWO AND A half miles across town, Ed Foley was first in the door, with his wife, Mary Patricia, just behind him, leading Eddie by the hand. Eddie’s young blue eyes were wide with a child’s curiosity, but even now the four-and-a-half-year-old was learning that Moscow wasn’t Disney World. The culture shock was about to fall like Thor’s own hammer, but it would expand his horizons a bit, his parents thought. As it would theirs.

  “Uh-huh,” Ed Foley said on his first look. An embassy consular officer had lived here before, and he’d at least made an effort to clean the place up, no doubt helped by a Russian domestic—the Soviet government provided them, and diligent they were . . . for both their bosses. Ed and Mary Pat had been thoroughly briefed for weeks—nay, months—before taking the long Pan Am flight out of JFK for Moscow.

  “So, this is home, eh?” Ed observed in a studiously neutral voice.

  “Welcome to Moscow,” Mike Barnes told the newbies. He was another consular officer, a career FSO on the way up, and had this week’s duty as the embassy greeter. “The last occupant was Charlie Wooster. Good guy, back at Foggy Bottom now, catching the summer heat.”

  “How are the summers here?” Mary Pat asked.

  “Kinda like Minneapolis,” Barnes answered. “Not real hot, and the humidity’s not too bad, and the winters are actually not as severe—I grew up in Minneapolis,” he explained. “Of course, the German army might not agree, or Napoleon, but, well, nobody ever said Moscow was supposed to be like Paris, right?”

  “Yeah, they told me about the nightlife,” Ed chuckled. It was all right with him. They didn’t need a stealthy Station Chief in Paris, and this was the biggest, ripest plum assignment he’d never expected to get. Bulgaria, maybe, but not the very belly of the beast. Bob Ritter must have been really impressed by his time in Tehran. Thank God Mary Pat had delivered Eddie when she had. They’d missed the takeover in Iran by, what, three weeks? It had been a troublesome pregnancy, and Mary Pat’s doc had insisted on their coming back to New York for the delivery. Kids were a gift from God, all right. . . . Besides, that had made Eddie a New Yorker, too, and Ed had damned well wanted his son to be a Yankees and Rangers fan from birth. The best news of this assignment, aside from the professional stuff, was that he’d see the best ice hockey in the world right here in Moscow. Screw the ballet and the symphony. These fuckers knew how to skate. Pity the Russkies didn’t understand baseball. Probably too sophisticated for the muzhiks. All those pitches to choose from . . .

  “It’s not real big,” Mary Pat observed, looking at one cracked window. They were on the sixth floor. At least the traffic noise wouldn’t be too bad. The foreigners’ compound—ghetto—was walled and guarded. This was for their protection, the Russians insisted, but street crime against foreigners wasn’t a problem in Moscow. The average Russian citizen was forbidden by law to have foreign currency in his possession, and there was no convenient way to spend it in any case. So there was little profit in mugging an American or Frenchman on the streets, and there was no mistaking them—their clothing marked them about as clearly as peacocks among crows.

  “Hello!” It was an English accent. The florid face appeared a moment later. “We’re your neighbors. Nigel and Penny Haydock,” the face’s owner said. He was about forty-five, tall and skinny, with prematurely gray and thinning hair. His wife, younger and prettier than he probably deserved, appeared an instant later with a tray of sandwiches and some welcoming white wine.

  “You must be Eddie,” the flaxen-haired Mrs. Haydock observed. That’s when Ed Foley noticed the maternity dress. She was about six months gone, by the look of her. So the briefings had been right in every detail. Foley trusted CIA, but he’d learned the hard way to verify everything, from the names of people living on the same floor to whether
the toilet flushed reliably. Especially in Moscow, he thought, heading for the bathroom. Nigel followed.

  “The plumbing works reliably here, but it is noisy. No one complains,” Haydock explained.

  Ed Foley flipped the handle and, sure enough, it was noisy.

  “Fixed that myself. Bit of a handyman, you see,” he said. Then, more quietly, “Be careful where you speak in this place, Ed. Bloody bugs everywhere. Especially the bedrooms. The bloody Russians like to count our orgasms, so it seems. Penny and I try not to disappoint.” A sly grin. Well, to some cities you brought your own nightlife.

  “Two years here?” The toilet seemed to run forever. Foley was tempted to lift the tank cover to see if Haydock had replaced the plumbing hardware inside with something special. He decided he didn’t have to look to check that.

  “Twenty-nine months. Seven to go. It’s a lively place to work. I’m sure they told you, everywhere you go, you’ll have a ‘friend’ handy. Don’t underestimate them, either. The Second Directorate chaps are thoroughly trained. . . .” The toilet ran its course, and Haydock changed his voice. “The shower—the hot water is pretty reliable, but the spray pipe, it rattles, just like the one in our flat. . . .” He turned the faucet to demonstrate. Sure enough, it rattled. Had someone worked on the wall to loosen it? Ed wondered. Probably. Probably this very handyman with him.

  “Perfect.”

  “Yes, you will get a lot of work done in here. Shower with a friend and save water—isn’t that what they say in California?”

  Foley managed his first laugh in Moscow. “Yeah, that’s what they say, all right.” He gave his visitor a look. He was surprised that Haydock had introduced himself so early, but maybe it was just reverse-English tradecraft to be so obvious. The business of espionage had all manner of rules, and the Russians were rule-followers. So, Bob Ritter had told him, toss away part of the rulebook. Stick to your cover and be a dumbass unpredictable American every chance you get. He’d also told the Foleys that Nigel Haydock was one guy they could trust. He was the son of another intelligence officer—a man betrayed by Kim Philby himself, one of the poor bastards who’d parachuted into Albania into the waiting arms of the KGB reception committee. Nigel had been five years old then, just old enough always to remember what it was like to lose your father to the enemy. Nigel’s motivation was probably as good as Mary Pat’s, and that was pretty damned good. Better even than his own, Ed Foley might admit after a few drinks. Mary Pat hated the bastards as the Lord God Himself hated sin. Haydock wasn’t the Station Chief here, but he was the head bird-dog for the SIS’s operation in Moscow, and that made him pretty good. The CIA’s Director, Judge Moore, trusted the Brits: after Philby, he’d seen them go through SIS with a flamethrower hotter than even James Jesus Angleton’s fly rod and cauterize every possible leak. In turn, Foley trusted Judge Moore, and so did the President. That was the craziest part of the intelligence business: You couldn’t trust anybody—but you had to trust somebody.

  Well, Foley thought, checking the hot water with his hand, nobody ever said the business made much sense. Like classical metaphysics. It just was.

  “When’s the furniture get here?”

  “The container ought to be on a truck in Leningrad right now. Will they tamper with it?”

  Haydock shrugged. “Check everything,” he warned, then softened. “You can never know how thorough they are, Edward. The KGB is a great bloody bureaucracy—you don’t know the meaning of the word until you see it in operation here. For example, the bugs in your flat—how many of them actually work? They’re not British Telecom, nor are they AT&T. It’s the curse of this country, really, and it works for us, but that, too, is unreliable. When you’re followed, you can’t know if it’s an experienced expert or some bloody nimrod who can’t find his way to the loo. They look alike and dress alike. Just like our people, when you get down to it, but their bureaucracy is so large that there’s a greater likelihood it will protect the incompetent—or maybe not. God knows, at Century House we have our share of drones.”

  Foley nodded. “At Langley, we call it the Intelligence Directorate.”

  “Quite. We call ours the Palace of Westminster,” Haydock observed, with his own favorite prejudice. “I think we’ve tested the plumbing enough.”

  Foley turned off the faucet and the two men returned to the living room, where Penny and Mary Pat were getting acquainted.

  “Well, we have enough hot water anyway, honey.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Mary Pat responded. She turned back to her guest. “Where do you shop around here?”

  Penny Haydock smiled: “I can take you there. For special items, we can order from an agency in Helsinki, excellent quality: English, French, German—even American, for things like juices and preserved foods. The perishables are Finnish in origin, and they’re generally very good, especially the lamb. Don’t they have the finest lamb, Nigel?”

  “Indeed it is—as good as New Zealand,” her husband agreed.

  “The steaks leave something to be desired,” Mike Barnes told them, “but every week we get steaks flown in from Omaha. Tons of them—we distribute them to all our friends.”

  “That is the truth,” Nigel confirmed. “Your corn-fed beef is superb. I’m afraid we’re all quite addicted to it.”

  “Thank God for the U.S. Air Force,” Barnes went on. “They fly the beef into all their NATO bases, and we’re on the distribution list. They come in frozen, not quite as good as fresh at Delmonico’s, but close enough to remind you of home. I hope you guys brought a grill. We tend to take them up on the roof to cook out. We import charcoal, too. Ivan just doesn’t seem to understand about that.” The apartment had no balcony, perhaps to protect them from the diesel smell that pervaded the city.

  “What about going to work?” Foley asked.

  “Better to take the metro. It really is great,” Barnes told him.

  “Leaving me with the car?” Mary Pat asked, with a hopeful smile. This was going exactly to plan. That was expected, but anything that went well in this business came as something of a surprise, like the right presents under the Christmas tree. You always hoped Santa got the letter, but you could never be sure.

  “You might as well learn how to drive in this city,” Barnes said. “At least you have a nice car.” The previous resident in this apartment had left behind a white Mercedes 280 for them, which was indeed a nice car. Actually, a little too nice at only four years old. Not that there were all that many cars in Moscow, and the license plates surely marked it as belonging to an American diplomat, and thus easy to spot by any traffic cop, and by the KGB vehicle that would follow it most places it went. Again, it was reverse-English. Mary Pat would have to learn to drive like an Indianapolis resident on her first trip to New York. “The streets are nice and wide,” Barnes told her, “and the gas station is only three blocks that way.” He pointed. “It’s a huge one. The Russians like to build them that way.”

  “Great,” she observed for Barnes’s benefit, already dropping into her cover as a pretty, ditsy blonde. Around the world, the pretty ones were supposed to be the dumb ones, and blondes most of all. It was a hell of a lot easier to play dumb than to be smart, after all, Hollywood actors notwithstanding.

  “What about servicing the car?” Ed asked.

  “It’s a Mercedes. They don’t break much,” Barnes assured them. “The German embassy has a guy who can fix anything that goes bad. We’re cordial with our NATO allies. You guys soccer fans?”

  “Girls’ game,” Ed Foley responded immediately.

  “That’s rather coarse of you,” Nigel Haydock observed.

  “Give me American football any time,” Foley countered.

  “Bloody foolish, uncivilized game, full of violence and committee meetings,” the Brit sniffed.

  Foley grinned. “Let’s eat.”

  They sat down. The interim furniture was adequate, something like you’d find in a no-tell motel in Alabama. You could sleep on the bed, and the bug spray
had probably done for all the crawly things. Probably.

  The sandwiches were okay. Mary Pat went to get glasses and turned on the taps—

  “Recommend against that one, Mrs. Foley,” Nigel warned. “Some people come down with stomach complaints from the tap water. . . .”

  “Oh?” She paused. “And my name’s Mary Pat, Nigel.”

  Now they were properly introduced. “Yes, Mary Pat. We prefer bottled water for drinking. The tap water is good enough for bathing, and you can boil it in a pinch for coffee and tea.”

  “It’s even worse in Leningrad,” Nigel warned. “The natives are more or less immunized, they tell me, but we foreigners can get some serious GI problems there.”

  “What about schools?” Mary Pat had been worried about that.

  “The American-British school looks after the children well,” Penny Haydock promised. “I work there myself part-time. And the academic program there is top-drawer.”

  “Eddie’s starting to read already, isn’t he, honey?” the proud father announced.

  “Just Peter Rabbit and that sort of thing, but not bad for four,” an equally pleased mother confirmed for the rest. For his part, Eddie had found the sandwich plate and was gnawing through something. It wasn’t his treasured bologna, but a hungry kid is not always discriminating. There were also four large jars of Skippy’s Super Chunk peanut butter packed away in a safe place. His parents figured they could get grape jelly anywhere, but probably not Skippy. The local bread, everyone said, was decent, if not exactly the Wonder Bread that American children had been raised on. And Mary Pat had a bread-maker in their cargo container, now on a truck or train between Moscow and Leningrad. A good cook, she was a positive artist at baking bread, and expected that to be her entrée into the embassy social set.

  NOT ALL THAT far away from where they sat, a letter changed hands. The deliverer was from Warsaw, and had been dispatched by his government—actually, by an agency of his government to an agency of the recipient government. The messenger was not all that pleased by his mission. He was a communist—he had to be in order to be entrusted with such a task—but he was nonetheless a Pole, as was the subject of the message and the mission. And that was the rub.