“You do not trust him?”
“No, Comrade Chairman. Excuse me; I did not mean to give that impression. But the less he knows, the less he might ask questions or inadvertently ask things of his personnel that might tip matters off, even innocently. We choose our Chiefs of Station for their intelligence, for their ability to see things where others do not. Should he sense that something is happening, his professional expertise might compel him at least to keep watch—and that might impede the operation.”
“Freethinkers,” Andropov snorted.
“Can it be any other way?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked reasonably. “There is always that price when you hire men of intelligence.”
Andropov nodded. He was not so much a fool as to ignore the lesson.
“Good work, Colonel. What else?”
“Timing is crucial, Comrade Chairman.”
“How long to set something like this up?” Andropov asked.
“Certainly a month, likely more. Unless you have people already in place, these things always take longer than you hope or expect,” Rozhdestvenskiy explained.
“I shall need that much time to get approval for this. But we will go forward with operational planning, so that when approval comes, we can execute as rapidly as possible.”
Execute, Rozhdestvenskiy thought, was the right choice of words, but even he found it cold. And he had said when approval comes, not if, the colonel noted. Well, Yuriy Vladimirovich was supposed to be the most powerful man on the Politburo now, and that suited Aleksey Nikolay’ch. What was good for his agency was also good for him, especially in his new job. There might be general’s stars at the end of this professional rainbow, and that possibility suited him as well.
“How would you proceed?” the Chairman asked.
“I should cable Rome to assuage Goderenko’s fears and tell him that his tasking for the moment is to ascertain the Pope’s schedule for traveling, appearances, and so forth. Next, I will cable Ilya Bubovoy. He’s our rezident in Sofia. Have you met him, Comrade Chairman?”
Andropov searched his memory. “Yes, at a reception. He’s overweight, isn’t he?”
Rozhdestvenskiy smiled. “Yes, Ilya Fedorovich has always fought that, but he’s a good officer. He’s been there for four years, and he enjoys good relations with the Dirzhavna Sugurnost.”
“Grown a mustache, has he?” Andropov asked, with a rare hint of humor. Russians often chided their neighbors for facial hair, which seemed to be a national characteristic of Bulgarians.
“That I do not know,” the colonel admitted. He was not yet so obsequious as to promise to find out.
“What will your cable to Sofia say?”
“That we have an operational requirement for—”
The Chairman cut him off: “Not in a cable. Fly him here. I want security very tight on this, and flying him back and forth from Sofia will raise few eyebrows.”
“By your order. Immediately?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked.
“Da. Yes, at once.”
The colonel came to his feet. “Right away, Comrade Chairman. I will go to communications directly.”
Chairman Andropov watched him leave. One nice thing about KGB, Yuriy Vladimirovich thought, when you gave orders here, things actually happened. Unlike the Party Secretariat.
COLONEL ROZHDESTVENSKIY took the elevator back down to the basement and headed for communications. Captain Zaitzev was back at his desk, doing his paperwork as usual—that’s all he had, really—and the colonel went right up to him.
“I have two more dispatches for you.”
“Very well, Comrade Colonel.” Oleg Ivan’ch held out his hand.
“I have to write them out,” Rozhdestvenskiy clarified.
“You can use that desk right there, comrade.” The communicator pointed. “Same security as before?”
“Yes, one-time pad for both. One more for Rome, and the other for Station Sofia. Immediate priority,” he added.
“That is fine.” Zaitzev handed him the message form blanks and turned back to his work, hoping the dispatches wouldn’t be too lengthy. They had to be pretty important for the colonel to come down here even before they were drafted. Andropov must have a real bug up his rectum. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was the Chairman’s personal gofer. It had to be kind of demeaning for someone with the skills to be a rezident somewhere interesting. Travel, after all, was the one real perk KGB offered its employees.
Not that Zaitzev got to travel. Oleg Ivanovich knew too much to be allowed in a Western country. After all, he might not come back—KGB always worried about that. And for the first time, he wondered why. That was the kind of day it had been. Why did KGB worry so much about possible defections? He’d seen dispatches openly discussing the troublesome possibility, and he’d seen officers who had been brought home to “talk” about it here in The Centre and often never returned to the field. He’d always known about it, but he’d never actually thought about it for as much as thirty seconds.
They left because—because they thought their state was wrong? Could they actually think it was so bad they would do something so drastic as betray their Motherland? That, Zaitzev belatedly realized, was a very big thought.
And yet, what was KGB but an agency that lived on betrayal? How many hundreds—thousands—of dispatches had he read about just that? Those were Westerners—Americans, Britons, Germans, Frenchmen—all used by KGB to find out things that his country wanted to know—and they were all traitors to their mother countries, weren’t they? They did it mainly for money. He’d seen a lot of those messages, too, discussions between The Centre and the rezidenturas discussing the amounts of payment. He knew that The Centre was always niggardly with the money it paid out, which was to be expected. The agents wanted American dollars, British pounds sterling, Swiss francs. And cash, real paper money—they always wanted to be paid in cash. Never rubles or even certificate rubles. It was the only money they trusted, clearly enough. They betrayed their country for money, but only for their own money. Some of them even demanded millions of dollars, not that they ever got it. The most he’d ever seen authorized was £50,000, paid out for information about British and American naval ciphers. What would the Western powers not pay for the communications information in his mind? Zaitzev thought idly. It was a question with no answer. He did not really have the ability to frame the question properly, much less consider the answer seriously.
“Here you go,” Rozhdestvenskiy said, handing over the message blanks. “Send them out at once.”
“As soon as I get them enciphered,” the communicator promised.
“And the same security as before,” the colonel added.
“Certainly. Same identifier tag on both?” Oleg Ivanovich asked.
“Correct, all with this number,” he replied, tapping the 666 in the upper-right corner.
“By your order, Comrade Colonel. I’ll see to it right now.”
“And call me when they go out.”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel. I have your office number,” Zaitzev assured him.
There was more to it than the mere words, Oleg knew. The tone of his voice had told him much. This was going out under the direct order of the Chairman, and all this attention made it a matter of the highest priority, not just something of routine interest to an important man. This wasn’t about ordering pantyhose for some bigwig’s teenage daughter.
He walked to the cipher-book storage room to get two books, the ones for Rome and Sofia, and then he pulled out his cipher wheel and laboriously encrypted both messages. All in all, it took forty minutes. The message to Colonel Bubovoy in Sofia was a simple one: Fly to Moscow immediately for consultations. Zaitzev wondered if that would make the rezident’s, knees wobble a little. Colonel Bubovoy could not know what the numerical identifier meant, of course. He’d find out soon enough.
The rest of Zaitzev’s day went routinely. He managed to lock up his confidential papers and walk out before six in the evening.
LUNCH AT CENTURY HOUSE was good, but British-eccentric. Ryan had learned to enjoy the British Ploughman’s Lunch, mainly because the bread was so uniformly excellent over here.
“So, your wife’s a surgeon?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, eye cutter. She’s actually starting to use lasers for some things now. She’s hoping to be a pioneer in that stuff.”
“Lasers? What for?” Harding asked.
“Some of it’s like welding. They use a laser to cauterize a leaky blood vessel, for instance—they did it with Suslov. Blood leaked inside the eye, so they drilled into the eyeball and drained out all the fluid—aqueous humor, I think they call it—and then used lasers to weld shut the leaky vessels. Sounds pretty yucky, doesn’t it?”
Harding shuddered at the thought. “I suppose it’s better than being blind.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when Sally was in shock-trauma. The idea of somebody carving up my little girl didn’t exactly thrill me.” Ryan remembered how fucking awful that had been, in fact. Sally still had the scars on her chest and abdomen from it, though they were fading.
“What about you, Jack? You’ve been under the knife before,” Simon observed.