“Come on in, Mike,” Foley said.
“Morning, Ed.” Russell was under six feet, and he needed to watch his eating by the look of his waist. But he was a good guy with codes and comms, and that was sufficient for the moment. “Quiet night for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, just this.” He fished an envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it over. “Nothing important, looks like.” He had also decrypted the dispatch. Even the ambassador wasn’t cleared as high as the head of communications. Foley was suddenly glad for Russian racism. It made Mike that much less likely to get turned. That was a scary thought. Of all the people in the embassy, Mike Russell was the one guy who could rat everyone out, which was why intelligence services always tried to corrupt cipher clerks, the underpaid and spat-upon people who had enormous information power in any embassy.
Foley took the envelope and opened it. The dispatch inside was lower than routine, proof positive that CIA was just one more government bureaucracy, however important its work might be. He snorted and entered the paper into his shredder, where rotating steel wheels reduced it to fragments about two centimeters square.
“Must be nice to get your day’s work done in ten seconds,” Russell observed, with a laugh.
“Wasn’t like that in Vietnam, I bet.”
“Not hardly. I remember once one of my troops DF’d a VC transmitter at MAC-V headquarters, and that was one busy night.”
“Get him?”
“Oh yeah,” Russell replied with a nod. “The locals were seriously pissed about that little dink. He came to a bad end, they told me.” Russell had been a first lieutenant then. A Detroit native, his father had built B-24 bombers during World War II, and had never stopped telling his son how much more satisfying that had been than making Fords. Russell detested everything about this country (they didn’t even appreciate good soul music!), but the extra pay that came with duty here—Moscow was officially a hardship posting—would buy him a nice place on the Upper Peninsula someday, where he’d be able to hunt birds and deer to his heart’s content. “Anything to go out, Ed?”
“Nope, not today—not yet, anyway.”
“Roger that. Have a good one.” And Russell disappeared out the door.
It wasn’t like the spy novels—the job of a CIA officer was composed of a good deal more boredom than excitement. At least two-thirds of Foley’s time as a field officer was taken up with writing reports that somebody at Langley might or might not read, and/or waiting for meets that might or might not come off. He had case officers to do most of the street work, because his identity was too sensitive to risk exposure—something about which he had to lecture his wife on occasion. Mary Pat just liked the action a little too much. It was somewhat worrying, though neither of them faced much real physical danger. They both had diplomatic immunity, and the Russians were assiduous about respecting that, for the most part. Even if things should get a little rough, it would never be really rough. Or so he told himself.
“GOOD MORNING, Colonel Bubovoy,” Andropov said pleasantly, without rising.
“Good day to you, Comrade Chairman,” the Sofia rezident replied, swallowing his relief that Rozhdestvenskiy hadn’t lied to him. You could never be too careful, after all, or too paranoid.
“How go things in Sofia?” Andropov waved him to the leather seat opposite the big oak desk.
“Well, Comrade Chairman, our fraternal socialist colleagues remain cooperative, especially with Turkish matters.”
“Good. We have a proposed mission to undertake and I require your opinion of its feasibility.” The voice stayed entirely pleasant.
“And what might that be?” Bubovoy asked.
Andropov outlined the plans, watching his visitor’s face closely for his reaction. There was none. The colonel was too experienced for that, and besides, he knew the look he was getting.
“How soon?” he asked.
“How quickly could you set things up?”
“I will need to get cooperation from our Bulgarian friends. I know who to go to—Colonel Boris Strokov, a very skillful player in the DS. He runs their operations in Turkey—smuggling and such—which gives him entree into Turkish gangster organizations. The contacts are very useful, especially when a killing is necessary.”
“Go on,” the Chairman urged quietly.
“Comrade Chairman, such an operation will not be simple. Without a means of getting a gunman into the private residence of the target, it will mean making the attempt at a public appearance, at which there will necessarily be many people. We can tell our gunman that we have the means of getting him away, but that will be a lie, of course. From a tactical point of view, it would be better to have a second man present, to kill him immediately after he takes his shot—with a suppressed weapon. For the second killer, escape is far easier, since the attention of the crowd will be on the first gunman. It also alleviates the possible problem of our gunman talking to the police. The Italian police do not have a good public reputation, but this is not, strictly speaking, true. As our rezident in Rome can tell you, their investigative arms are quite well organized and highly professional. Thus, it is in our interest to have our gunman eliminated at once.”
“But won’t that suggest the involvement of an intelligence service?” Andropov asked. “Is it too elegant?”
Bubovoy leaned back and spoke judiciously. This was what Andropov wanted to hear, and he was ready to deliver it. “Comrade Chairman, one must weigh one hazard against another. The greatest danger is if our assassin talked about how he came to be in Rome. A dead man tells no tales, as they say. And a silenced voice cannot give out information. The other side can speculate, but it is merely speculation. For our part, we can easily release information through the press sources we control about Muslim animosity toward the head of the Roman church. The Western news services will pick it up and, with proper guidance, we can help shape the public understanding of what has taken place. The United States and Canada Institute has some excellent academicians for this purpose, as you know. We can use them to formulate the black propaganda, and then use people from the First Chief Directorate to propagate it. This proposed operation is not without risk, of course, but, though complex, it is not all that difficult from a conceptual point of view. The real problems will be in its execution and in operational security. That’s why it’s critical to eliminate the assassin immediately. The most important thing is the denial of information to the other side. Let them speculate all they wish, but without hard information, they will know nothing. This operation will be very closely held, I presume.”
“Less than five people at present. How many more?” Andropov asked, impressed at Bubovoy’s expertise and sangfroid.
“At least three Bulgarians. Then they will select the Turk—it must be a Turk, you see.”
“Why?” Though Andropov figured he knew the answer.
“Turkey is a Muslim country, and there is a long-standing antipathy between the Christian churches and Islam. This way, the operation will generate additional discord between the two religious groups—consider that a bonus,” the Sofia rezident suggested.
“And how will you select the assassin?”
“I will leave that to Colonel Strokov—his ancestry is Russian, by the way. His family settled in Sofia at the turn of the century, but he thinks like one of us. He is nashi,” Bubovoy assured his boss, “a graduate of our own academy, and an experienced field operator.”
“How long to set this up?”
“That depends more on Moscow than Sofia. Strokov will need approval from his own command, but that is a political question, not an operational one. After he gets his orders… two weeks, perhaps as many as four.”
“And the chances of success?” the Chairman asked.
“Medium to high, I should think. The DS field officer will drive the killer to the proper place, and then kill him a moment after the mission is accomplished, before making his escape. That is more dangerous than it sounds. The assassin will probably have a pistol, and it will not be a suppressed weapon. So the crowd will be drawn to the sound. Most people will draw back, but some will leap forward into danger, hoping to detain the gunman. If he falls from a silent bullet in the back, they will still rush in, while our man, like others in the crowd, draws back. Like waves on the beach,” Bubovoy explained. He could see it all happening in his mind. “Shooting a pistol is not as easy as the cinema would have us believe, though. Remember, on a battlefield, for every man killed, two or three are wounded and survive. Our gunman will get no closer than four or five meters. That’s close enough for an expert, but our man will not be an expert. And then there’s the complicating factor of medical care. Unless you’re shot through the heart or brain, skilled surgeons can often reach into the grave and pull a wounded man back out. So, realistically, it is a fifty-percent operation. The consequences of failure, therefore, must be taken into account. That is a political question, Comrade Chairman,” Bubovoy concluded, meaning that it wasn’t his ass on the line, exactly. At the same time, he knew that mission success meant general’s stars, which, for the colonel, was an acceptable gamble with a huge upside and little in the way of a downside. It appealed to his careerism as well as his patriotism.