Ann’s path was a random one, or seemingly so. Her driving took her on and off the main road twice before she settled down to the final part of the trip. At seven-fifteen she pulled into the parking lot of the small store and went inside.
The FBI was down to two cars now, so skillful had the subject been at evading the surveillance. Every random turn she made had forced a car off her tail—it was assumed that she could identify any car seen more than once—and a frantic call had been sent out for additional vehicles. She’d even chosen the convenience store with care. It could not be watched from anyplace on the road itself; traffic flow would not permit it. Car number ten went into the same parking lot. One of its two occupants went inside, while the other stayed with the vehicle.
The inside man got the Bureau’s first real look at Ann, while she bought some donuts and decided to get some more coffee in large Styrofoam cups, plus some soft drinks, all of them high in caffeine content, though the agent didn’t take note of that. He checked out right behind her with a paper, and two large coffees. He watched her go out the door, and saw that a man joined her, getting into the car as naturally as the fiancé of a woman who liked to drive her own car. He hustled out of the door to his car, but still they almost lost her.
“Here.” Ann handed over a paper. Bob’s picture was on the front page. It had even been done in color, though the picture quality from the tiny license frame was not exciting. “I’m glad you remembered to wear the wig,” she observed.
“What is the plan?” Leonid asked.
“First I will rent you a new car to get you back to the safe house. Next I will purchase some makeup so that all of you can alter your complexions. After that, I think we will get a small truck for the border crossing. We’ll also need some packing crates. I don’t know about those yet, but I will by the end of the day.”
“And the crossing?”
“Tomorrow. We’ll leave before noon and make the crossing about dinnertime.”
“So fast?” Bob asked.
“Da. The more I think about it—they will flood the area with assets if we linger too much.” They drove the rest of the way in silence. She went back into the city and parked her car in a public lot, leaving Leonid there as she crossed the street and walked half a block to a rental car agency right across the street from a large hotel. There she went through the proper procedures in less than fifteen minutes, and soon thereafter parked a Ford beside her Volvo. She tossed the keys to Bob and told him to follow her to the interstate, after which he’d be on his own.
By the time they got to the freeway, the FBI was nearly out of cars. A decision had to be made, and the agent in charge of the surveillance guessed right. An unmarked state police vehicle took up the coverage on the Volvo while the last FBI car followed the Ford onto the highway. Meanwhile five cars from the early part of the morning’s surveillance of “Ann” raced to catch up with “Bob” and his Ford. Three of them took the same exit, then followed him along the secondary road leading to the safe house. As he matched his driving to the posted speed limit, two of the cars were forced to pass him, but the third was able to lay back—until the Ford pulled to the shoulder and stopped. This section of the road was as straight as an arrow for over a mile, and he’d stopped right in the middle of it.
“I got him, I got him,” a helicopter observer reported, watching the car from three miles away through a pair of stabilized binoculars. He saw the minuscule figure of a man open the hood, then bend down and wait for several minutes before closing it and driving on. “This boy is a pro,” the observer told the pilot.
Not pro enough, the pilot thought, his own eyes locked on the distant white dot of a car’s roof. He could see the Ford turn off the road onto a dirt track that disappeared in the trees.
“Bingo!”
It had been expected that the safe house would be isolated. The geography of the area easily lent itself to that. As soon as the site was identified, an RF-4C Phantom of the 67th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing lifted off from Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas. The two-man crew of the aircraft thought it was all something of a joke, but they didn’t mind the trip, which took less than an hour. As a mission, it was simple enough that anyone could have done it. The Phantom made a total of four high-altitude passes over the area, and after shooting several hundred feet of film through its multiple camera systems, the Phantom landed at Kirtland Air Force Base, just outside Albuquerque. A cargo plane had brought additional ground crew and equipment a few hours earlier. While the pilot shut down his engines, two groundcrewmen removed the film canister and drove it to the trailer that served as an air-portable photolab. Automatic processing equipment delivered the damp frames to the photointerpreters half an hour after the plane had stopped moving.
“There you go,” the pilot said when the right frame came up. “Good conditions for it: clear, cold, low humidity, good sun angle. We didn’t even leave any contrails.”
“Thank you, Major,” the sergeant said as she examined the film from the KA-91 panoramic camera. “Looks like we have a dirt road coming off this highway here, snakes over the little ridge . . . and looks like a house trailer, car parked about fifty yards—another one, covered up some. Two cars, then. Okay, what else . . . ?”
“Wait a minute—I don’t see the second car,” an FBI agent said. :
“Here, sir. The sun’s reflecting off something, and it’s too big to be a Coke bottle. Car windshield, probably. Maybe a back window, but I think it’s the front end.”
“Why?” the agent asked. He just had to know.
She didn’t look up. “Well, sir, if it was me, and I was hiding a car, like, I’d back it in so’s I could get out quick, y’know?”
It was all the man could do not to laugh. “That’s all right, Sarge.”
She cranked to a new frame. “There we go—here’s a flash off the bumper, and that’s probably the grille, too. See how they covered it up? Look by the trailer. That might be a man there in the shadows . . .” She went to the next frame. “Yep, that’s a person.” The man was about six feet, athletic, with dark hair and a shadow on his face suggesting that he’d neglected to shave today. No gun was visible.
There were thirty usable frames of the site, eight of which were blown up to poster size. These went to the hangar with the UH-1N. Gus Werner was there. He didn’t like rush jobs any more than the people in that trailer did, but his choices were as limited as theirs had been.
“So, Colonel Filitov, we now have you to 1976.”
“Dmitri Fedorovich brought me with him when he became Defense Minister. It simplified things, of course.”
“And increased your opportunities,” Vatutin observed.
“Yes, it did.”
There were no recriminations now, no accusations, no comments on the nature of the crime that Misha had committed. They were past that for the moment. The admission had come first as it always did, and that was always hard, but after that, once they’d been broken or tricked into confessing, then came the easy part. It could last for weeks, and Vatutin had no idea where this one would end. The initial phase was aimed at outlining what he’d done. The detailed examination of each episode would follow, but the two-phase nature of the interrogation was crucial to establishing a cross-referencing index, lest the subject later try to change or deny particular things. Even this phase, glossing over the details as they went, horrified Vatutin and his men. Specifications for every tank and gun in the Soviet Army, including the variations never sent to the Arabs—which was as good as giving them to the Israelis, therefore as good as giving them to the Americans—or even the other Warsaw Pact countries, had gone out to the West even before the design prototypes had entered full production. Aircraft specifications. Performance on both conventional and nuclear warheads of every description. Reliability figures for strategic missiles. Inside squabbling in the Defense Ministry, and now, entering the time when Ustinov had become a full voting member of the Politburo, political disputes at the highest level. Most damaging of all, Filitov had given the West everything he knew of Soviet strategy—and he knew all there was to know. As sounding board and confidant for Dmitri Ustinov, and in his capacity as a legendary combat soldier, he’d been the bureaucrat’s eyepiece onto the world of actual war-fighting.