“Mansdorf actually gave us his own cipher book to copy. They changed it after the war, of course, and so we got little more in the way of their private mail later on, but they never changed their cipher system, and the chaps at GCHQ have occasional success listening in. Good man, Dieter Cardinal Mansdorf. Never got recognized for his service, of course. Died in ‘fifty-nine, I think.”
“So how do we know that the Romans don’t know about this operation already?” Not a bad question, Charleston thought, but he’d long since considered that one.
“It is being held very closely, our defector tells us. Hand-delivered messages, not going out on their machine ciphers, that sort of thing. And a bare handful of people involved. The one important name we do know is a Bulgarian field officer, Boris Strokov, colonel in the DS. We suspect he’s the chap who killed Georgiy Markov just up the road from my office.” Which Charleston considered an act of lese-majeste, perhaps even executed as a direct challenge to the Secret Intelligence Service. CIA and KGB had an informal covenant: Neither service ever killed in the other’s capital. SIS had no such agreement with anyone, a fact that might have cost Georgiy Markov his life.
“So, you think he might be the prospective assassin?”
C waved his hands. “It’s all we have, George.”
“Not much,” Hendley observed.
“Too thin for comfort, but it’s better than nothing. We have numerous photos of this Strokov fellow. The Yard was close to arresting him when he flew out of Heathrow—for Paris, actually, and from there on to Sofia.”
“Perhaps he was in a hurry to leave?” Hendley suggested.
“He’s a professional, George. How many chances do such people take? In retrospect, it’s rather amazing that the Yard got a line on him at all.”
“So, you think he might be in Italy.” A statement, not a question.
“It’s a possibility, but whom can we tell?” C asked. “The Italians have criminal jurisdiction to a point. The Lateran Treaty gives them discretionary jurisdiction, subject to a Vatican veto,” Charleston explained. He’d had to look into the legalities of the situation. “The Vatican has its own security service—the Swiss Guards, you know—but however good the men are, it’s necessarily a thin reed, what with the restrictions imposed on them from above. And the Italian authorities cannot flood the area with their own security forces, for obvious reasons.”
“So, the PM has saddled you with an impossible task.”
“Yes, again, George,” Sir Basil had to agree.
“So, what can you do?”
“All I can really come up with is to put some officers in the crowd and look for this Markov fellow.”
“And if they see him?”
“Ask him politely to depart the area?” Basil wondered aloud. “It would work, probably. He is a professional, and being spotted—I suppose we’d ostentatiously take photographs of him—would give him serious pause, perhaps enough to abandon the mission.”
“Thin.” Hendley thought of that idea.
“Yes, it is,” C had to agree. But it would at least give him something to tell the Prime Minister.
“Whom to send?”
“We have a good Station Chief in Rome, Tom Sharp. He has four officers in his shop, plus we could send a few more from Century House, I suppose.”
“Sounds reasonable, Basil. Why did you call me over?”
“I was hoping you’d have an idea that’s eluded me, George.” A final sip from the snifter. As much as he felt like some more brandy for the night, he demurred.
“One can only do what one can,” Hendley sympathized.
“He’s too good a man to be cut down this way—at the hands of the bloody Russians. And for what? For standing up for his own people. That sort of loyalty is supposed to be rewarded, not murdered in public.”
“And the PM feels the same way.”
“She is comfortable taking a stand.” For which the PM was famous throughout the world.
“The Americans?” Hendley asked.
Charleston shrugged. “They haven’t had a chance to speak to the defector yet. They trust us, George, but not that much.”
“Well, do what you can. This KGB operation probably will not happen in the immediate future, anyway. How efficient are the Soviets, anyway?”
“We shall see” was all C had to say.
IT WAS QUIETER HERE than in his own house, despite the nearby presence of the motorway, Ryan thought, rolling out of bed at 6:50. The sink continued the eccentric British way of having two faucets, one hot and one cold, making sure that your left hand boiled while the right one froze when you washed your hands. As usual, it felt good to shave and brush and otherwise get yourself ready for the day, even if you had to start it with Taster’s Choice.
Kingshot was already in the kitchen when Jack got there. Funny how people slept late on Sunday but frequently not on Saturday.
“Message from London,” Al said by way of greeting.
“What’s that?”
“A question. How would you feel about a flight to Rome this afternoon?”
“What’s up?”
“Sir Basil is sending some people to the Vatican to suss things out. He wants to know if you want to go. It’s a CIA op, after all.”
“Tell him yes,” Jack said without a moment’s thought. “When?” Then he realized he was being impetuous again. Damn.
“Noon flight out of Heathrow. You ought to have time to go home and change clothes.”
“Car?”
“Nick will drive you over,” Kingshot told him.
“What are you going to tell Oleg?”
“The truth. It ought to make him feel more important,” Al thought aloud. It was always a good thing for defectors.
RYAN AND THOMPSON left within the hour, with Jack’s bags in the “boot.”
“This Zaitzev chap,” Nick said out on the motorway. “He seems rather an important defector.”
“Bet your ass, Nick. He’s got all kinds of hot information between his ears. We’re going to treat him like a hod full of gold bricks.”
“Good of CIA to let us talk to him.”
“It’d be kinda churlish not to. You guys got him out for us, and covering the defection up was pretty slick.” Jack couldn’t say too much more. As trusted as Nick Thompson was, Jack couldn’t know how much clearance he had.
The good news was that Thompson knew what not to ask. “So, your father was a police officer?”
“Detective, yeah. Mainly homicide. Did that more than twenty years. He topped out at lieutenant. Said captains never got to do anything more than administrative stuff, and dad wasn’t into that. He liked busting bad guys and sending them to the joint.”
“The what?”
“Prison. The Maryland State Prison is one evil-looking structure in Baltimore, by Jones Falls. Kinda like a medieval fortress, but more forbidding. The inmates call it Frankenstein’s Castle.”
“Fine with me, Sir John. I’ve never had much sympathy for murderers.”
“Dad didn’t talk about them much. Didn’t bring his work home. Mom didn’t like hearing about it. Except once, a father killed his son over a crab cake. That’s like a little hamburger made out of crab meat,” Jack explained. “Dad said it seemed like a shitty thing to get killed over. The father—the killer—copped right out, all broken up about it. But it didn’t do his son much good.”
“Amazing how many murderers react that way. They gather up the rage to take a life, then afterwards they are consumed by remorse.”
“Too soon old, too late smart,” Jack quoted from the Old West.
“Indeed. The whole business can be so bloody sad.”
“What about this Strokov guy?”
“Different color of horse, entirely,” Thompson replied. “You don’t see many of those. For them it’s part of the job, ending a life. No motive in the usual sense, and they leave little behind in the way of physical evidence. They can be very difficult to find, but mainly we do find them. We have time on our side, and sooner or later someone talks and it gets to our ear. Most criminals talk their own way into prison,” Nick explained. “But people like this Strokov fellow, they do not talk—except when he gets home and writes up his official report. But we never see those. Getting a line on him was plain luck. Mr. Markov remembered being poked by the umbrella, remembered the color suit the man was wearing. One of our constables saw him wearing the same suit and thought there was something odd about him—you know, instead of flying right home, he waited to make sure Markov died. They’d bungled two previous attempts, you see, and so they called him in because of his expertise. Good professional, Strokov. He wanted to be completely sure, and he waited to read the death notice in the newspapers. In that time, we talked to the staff at his hotel and started assembling information. The Security Service got involved, and they were helpful in some ways but not in others—and the government got involved. The government was worried about creating an international incident, and so they held us up—cost us two days, I reckon. On the first of those two days, Strokov took a taxi to Heathrow and flew off to Paris. I was on the surveillance team. Stood within fifteen feet of him. We had two detectives with cameras, shot a lot of pictures. The last was of Strokov walking down the jetway to the Boeing. Next day, the government gave us permission to detain him for questioning.”