“During my watch, all dispatches come in from field to my desk. My job is to maintain security, to be sure proper procedures followed, and then I forward to action officers upstairs. Or to United States—Canada Institute sometimes,” Oleg said, gesturing to Ryan.
Jack did his best not to let his mouth fall open. This guy really was an escapee from the Soviet counterpart to CIA’s MERCURY. This guy saw it all. Everything, or damned near. He’d just helped a gold mine escape from behind the wire. Son of a bitch!
Kingshot did a somewhat better job of concealing his feelings, but he let his eyes slip over to Ryan’s, and that expression said it all.
Bloody hell.
“So, do you know the names of your field officers and their agents?” Kingshot asked.
“KGB officer names—I know many names. Agents, the names I know very few, but I know code names. In Britain, our best agent is code-named MINISTER. He give us high-value diplomatic and political intelligence for many years—twenty years, I think, perhaps more.”
“You said KGB has compromised our communications,” Ryan observed.
“Yes, somewhat. That is agent NEPTUNE. How much he give, I am not sure, but I know KGB read much of American naval communications.”
“What about other communications?” Jack asked immediately.
“Naval communications, that I am sure. Others, I am not sure, but you use same cipher machines for all, yes?”
“Actually not,” Alan told him. “So, you say British communications are secure?”
“If broken, I do not know it,” Zaitzev replied. “Most American diplomatic and intelligence information we get come from Agent CASSIUS. He is aide to senior politician in Washington. He give us good information on what CIA do and what CIA learn from us.”
“But you said he’s not part of CIA?” Ryan asked.
“No, I think he is politician aide, helper, member of staff—like that,” Zaitzev said rather positively.
“Good.” Ryan lit up a smoke and offered one to Zaitzev, who took it at once.
“I run out of my Krasnopresnenskiye,” he explained.
“I should give you all of mine. My wife wants me to quit. She’s a doctor,” Jack explained.
“Bah,” the Rabbit responded.
“So, why did you decide to leave?” Kingshot asked, taking a sip of tea. The reply nearly made him drop the cup.
“KGB want to kill Pope.”
“You’re serious?” It was the more experienced man who asked that question, not Ryan.
“Serious? I risk my life, my wife life, my daughter life. Da, I am serious,” Oleg Ivanovich assured his interlocutors with an edge on his voice.
“Fuck,” Ryan breathed. “Oleg, we need to know about this.”
“It start in August. Fifteen August it start,” Zaitzev told them, spinning out his tale without interruption for five or six minutes.
“No name for the operation?” Jack asked when he stopped.
“No name, just dispatch number fifteen-eight-eighty-two-six-six-six. That is date of first message from Andropov to rezidentura Rome, and number of message, yes? Yuriy Vladimirovich ask how get close to Pope. Rome say bad idea. Then Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy—he is main assistant to chairman, yes?—he send signal to rezidentura Sofia. Operation go from Sofia. So, operation -six-six-six probably run for KGB by Dirzhavna Sugurnost. I think officer name is Strokov, Boris Andreyevich.”
Kingshot had a thought and rose, leaving the room. He came back with Nick Thompson, a former detective superintendent of the Metropolitan Police.
“Nick, does the name Boris Andreyevich Strokov mean anything to you?”
The former cop blinked hard. “Indeed it does, Alan. He’s the chappie we think killed Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge. We had him under surveillance, but he flew out of the country before we had enough cause to pick him up for questioning.”
“Wasn’t he under diplomatic cover?” Ryan asked, and was surprised by Thompson’s answer.
“Actually not. He came in undocumented and left the same way. I saw him myself at Heathrow. But we didn’t put the pieces together quickly enough. Dreadful case it was. The poison they gave Markov was horrific stuff.”
“You eyeballed this Strokov guy?”
Thompson nodded. “Oh, yes. He might have noticed me. I wasn’t being all that careful under the circumstances. He’s the one who killed Markov. I’d stake my life on it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I chased murderers for near on twenty years, Sir John. You get to know them in all that time. And that’s what he was, a murderer,” Thompson said with total confidence. Ryan could remember his father being like this, even on frustrating cases when he knew what he needed but couldn’t quite prove it to a jury.
“The Bulgarians have a sort of contract with the Soviets,” Kingshot explained. “Back in 1964 or so, they agreed to handle all the ‘necessary’ eliminations for the KGB. In return, they get various perks, mostly political.”
“Strokov, yes, I’ve heard that name before. Did you get a photo of the chap, Nick?”
“Fifty or more, Alan,” Thompson assured him. “I’ll never forget that face. He has the eyes of a corpse—no life in them at all, like a doll’s eyes.”
“How good is he?” Ryan asked.
“As an assassin? Quite good, Sir John. Very good indeed. His elimination of Markov on the bridge was expertly done—it was the third attempt. The first two would-be assassins bungled the job, and they called Strokov in to get it right. And that he did. Had things gone just a little differently, we would not have realized it was a murder at all.”
“We think he’s worked elsewhere in the West,” Kingshot said. “But very little good information. Just gossip really. Jack, this is a dangerous development. I need to get this information to Basil soonest.” And with that, Alan left the room to get to a secure phone. Ryan turned back to Zaitzev.
“And that’s why you decided to leave?”
“KGB want kill innocent man, Ryan. I see plot grow. Andropov himself say do this. I handle the messages. How can man stop KGB?” he asked. “I cannot stop KGB, but I will not help KGB kill priest—he is innocent man, yes?”
Ryan’s eyes looked down at the floor. “Yes, Oleg Ivan’ch, he is.” Dear God in heaven. He checked his watch. He had to get this information out PDQ, but nobody was awake at Langley yet.
“BLOODY HELL,” Sir Basil Charleston said into his secure phone. “Is this reliable information, Alan?”
“Yes, sir, I believe it to be entirely truthful. Our Rabbit seems a decent chap, and a rather clever one. He seems to be motivated exclusively by his conscience.” Next, Kingshot told him about the first revelation of the morning, MINISTER.
“We need to get ‘five’ looking into that.” The British Security Service—once known as MI-5—was the counterespionage arm of their government. They’d need a little more specific information to run that putative traitor down, but they already had a starting point. Twenty years, was it?
What a productive traitor that fellow had to be, Sir Basil thought. Time for him to see Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Charleston had spent years cleaning up his own shop, once a playground for the KGB. But no more, and never bloody again, the Knight Commander of the Bath swore to himself.
WHOM DO I TELL? Ryan wondered. Basil would doubtless call Langley—-Jack would make sure of that, but Sir Basil was a supremely reliable guy. Next came a more difficult question: What the hell can I/we do about this?
Ryan lit another smoke to consider that one. It was more police work than intelligence work…
And the central issue would be classification.
Yeah, that’s going to be the problem. If we tell anybody, the word will get out somehow, and then somebody will know we have the Rabbit—and guess what, Jack? The Rabbit is now more important to the CIA than the life of the Pope.
Oh, shit, Ryan thought. It was like a trick of jujitsu, like a sudden reversal of polarity on the dial of a compass. North was now south. Inside was now outside. And the needs of American intelligence might now supersede the life of the Bishop of Rome. His face must have betrayed what he was thinking.
“What is amiss, Ryan?” the Rabbit asked. It seemed to Jack a strange word for him to know.
“The information you just gave us. We’ve been worrying about the safety of the Pope for a couple of months, but we had no specific information to make us believe his life was actually at risk. Now you have given that information to us, and someone must decide what to do with it. Do you know anything at all about the operation?”
“No, almost nothing. In Sofia the action officer is the rezident, Colonel Bubovoy, Ilya Fedorovich. Senior colonel, he is—Ambassador, can I say? To Bulgarian DS. This Colonel Strokov, this name I know from old cases. He is officer assassin for DS. He do other things, too, yes, but when man need bullet, Strokov deliver bullet, yes?”