The air was a cold reminder of reality, but the sun was rising, and the sky was beautifully clear. He turned right and walked off. There was an alley half a block away, and a sewer grate that he could use. His cigarette would be finished just as he got there, yet another thing that he’d practiced. Now, if only he could get the film out of the cassette and exposed to sunlight . . . Damn. He slipped off his other glove and rubbed his hands together. The courier used his fingernails to get the film. Yes! He crumpled the film and put the cassette back into his pocket, and—
“Comrade.” The voice was strong for a man of his age, the courier thought. The brown eyes sparkled with alertness, and the hand at his pocket was a strong one. The other, he saw, was in the man’s pocket. “I wish to see what is in your hand.”
“Who are you?” the courier blustered. “What is this?” The right hand jerked in the pocket. “I am the man who will kill you, here on the street, unless I see what is in your hand. I am Major Boris Churbanov.” Churbanov knew that this would soon be false. From the look on the man’s face, he knew that he had his colonelcy.
Foley was in his office ten minutes later. He sent one of his men—actually a woman—out on the street to look for the signal that the dump had been made successfully, and his hope was that he’d simply goofed, that he’d overreacted to a commuter who was trying too hard to get to work. But . . . but there was something about that face that had said professional. Foley didn’t know what, but it had been there. He had his hands flat on the desk and stared at them for several minutes.
What did I do wrong? he asked himself. He’d been trained to do that, too, to analyze his actions step by step, looking for flaws, for mistakes, for . . . Had he been followed? He frequently was, of course, like all Americans on the embassy staff. His personal tail was a man he thought of as “George.” But George wasn’t there very often. The Russians didn’t know who Foley was. He was sure of that. That thought caught in his throat. Being certain about anything in the intelligence business was the surest route to disaster. That was why he’d never broken craft, why he never deviated from the training that had been drilled into him at Camp Peary, on the York River in Virginia, then practiced all over the world.
Well. The next thing he had to do was predetermined. He walked to the communications room and sent a telex to Foggy Bottom. This one, however, went to a box number whose traffic was never routine. Within a minute of its receipt, a night-watch officer from Langley drove to State to retrieve it. The wording of the message was innocuous, but its meaning was not: TROUBLE ON THE CARDINAL LINE. FULL DATA TO FOLLOW.
They didn’t take him to Dzerzhinskiy Square. KGB headquarters, so long used as a prison—a dungeon for all that happened there—was now exclusively an office building since, in obedience to Parkinson’s Law, the agency had expanded to absorb all its available space. Now the interrogations were done at Lefortovo Prison, a block from the Sputnik Cinema. There was plenty of room here.
He sat alone in a room with a table and three chairs. It had never occurred to the courier to resist, and even now he didn’t realize that if he’d run away or fought the man who’d arrested him, he might still be free. It wasn’t the idea that Major Churbanov had had a gun—he hadn’t—but simply that Russians, in lacking freedom, often lack the concepts needed for active resistance. He’d seen his life end. He accepted that. The courier was a fearful man, but he feared only what had to be. You cannot fight against destiny, he told himself.
“So, Churbanov, what do we have?” The questioner was a Captain of the Second Chief Directorate, about thirty years old.
“Have someone develop this.” He handed over the cassette. “I think this man is a cutout.” Churbanov described what he’d seen and what he’d done. He didn’t say that he’d rewound the film into the cassette. “Pure chance that I spotted him,” he concluded.
“I didn’t think you ‘One’ people knew how, Comrade Major. Well done!”
“I was afraid that I’d blundered into one of your operations and—”
“You would have known by now. It is necessary for you to make a full report. If you will accompany the sergeant here, he’ll take you to a stenographer. Also, I will summon a full debriefing team. This will take some hours. You may wish to call your wife.”
“The film,” Churbanov persisted.
“Yes. I will walk that down to the lab myself. If you’ll go with the sergeant, I’ll rejoin you in ten minutes.”
The laboratory was in the opposite wing of the prison. The Second Directorate had a small facility here, since much of its work centered on Lefortovo. The Captain caught the lab technician between jobs, and the developing process was started at once. While he waited, he called his Colonel. There was as yet no way to measure what this “One” man had uncovered, but it was almost certainly an espionage case, and those were all treated as matters of the utmost importance. The Captain shook his head. That old war-horse of a field officer, just stumbling into something like that.
“Finished.” The technician came back. He’d developed the film and printed one blow-up, still damp from the process. He handed back the film cassette, too, in a small manila envelope. “The film has been exposed and rewound. I managed to save part of one frame. It’s interesting, but I have no idea what it actually is.”
“What about the rest?”
“Nothing can be done. Once film is exposed to sunlight, the data is utterly destroyed.”
The Captain scanned the blow-up as the technician said something else. It was mainly a diagram, with some caption printed in block letters. The words at the top of the diagram read: BRIGHT STAR COMPLEX #1, and one of the other captions was LASER ARRAY. The Captain swore and left the room at a run.
Major Churbanov was having tea with the debrief team when the Captain returned. The scene was comradely. It would get more so.
“Comrade Major, you may have discovered something of the highest importance,” the Captain said.
“I serve the Soviet Union,” Churbanov replied evenly. It was the perfect reply—the one recommended by the Party. Perhaps he might leap over the rank of lieutenant colonel and become a full colonel . . .
“Let me see,” the chief debriefer said. He was a full colonel, and examined the photographic print carefully. “This is all?”
“The rest was destroyed.”
The Colonel grunted. That would create a problem, but not all that much of one. The diagram would suffice to identify the site, whatever it was. The printing looked to be the work of a young person, probably a woman because of its neatness. The Colonel paused and looked out the window for a few seconds. “This has to go to the top, and quickly. What is described in here is—well, I have never heard of it, but it must be a matter of the greatest secrecy. You comrades begin the debrief. I’m going to make a few calls. You, Captain, take the cassette to the lab for fingerprints and—”
“Comrade, I touched it with my bare hands,” Churbanov said ashamedly.
“You have nothing to apologize for, Comrade Major, your vigilance was more than exemplary,” the Colonel said generously. “Check for prints anyway.”
“The spy?” the Captain asked. “What about interrogating him?”
“We need an experienced man. I know just the one.” The Colonel rose. “I’ll call him, too.”
Several pairs of eyes watched him, measuring him, his face, his determination, his intelligence. The courier was still alone in the interrogation room. The laces had been taken from his shoes, of course, and his belt, and his cigarettes, and anything else that might be used as a weapon against himself, or to settle him down. There was no way for him to measure time, and the lack of nicotine made him fidgety and even more nervous than he might have been. He looked about the room and saw a mirror, which was two-way, but he didn’t know that. The room was completely soundproofed to deny him even the measure of time from footsteps in the outside corridor. His stomach growled a few times, but otherwise he made no sound. Finally the door opened.
The man who entered was about forty and well dressed in civilian clothes. He carried a few sheets of paper. The man walked around to the far side of the table and didn’t look at the courier until he sat down. When he did look at him, his eyes were disinterested, like a man at the zoo examining a creature from a distant land. The courier tried to meet his gaze impassively, but failed. Already the interrogator knew that this one would be easy. After fifteen years, he could always tell.