“Dressed like a foreigner—how?”
“Her coat is usually Western. You can tell from the cut and the cloth. She is pretty, as I have said, and she—”
“Go on,” the interrogator said.
“The signal is that I put my hand on her rump. She likes it, I think. Often she presses back against my hand.”
The interrogator hadn’t heard that detail before, but he immediately deemed it the truth. Details like that one were never made up, and it fitted the profile. The female contact was an adventuress. She was not a true professional, not if she reacted like that. And that probably—almost certainly— made her a Russian.
“How many times have you met her like this?”
“Only five. Never the same day of the week, and not on a regular schedule, but always on the second car of the same train.”
“And the man you pass it to?”
“I never see his face, not all of it, I mean. He is always standing with his hand on the bar, and he moves his face to keep his arm between it and me. I have seen some of it, but not all. He is foreign, I think, but I don’t know what nationality.”
“Five times, and you have never seen his face!” the voice boomed, and a fist slammed down on the table. “Do you take me for a fool!”
The courier cringed, then spoke rapidly. “He wears glasses; they are Western, I am sure of it. He usually wears a hat. Also, he has a paper folded, Izvestia, always Izvestia. Between that and his arm, you cannot see more than a quarter of his face. His go-ahead signal is to turn the paper slightly, as though to follow a story, then he turns away to shield his face.”
“How is the pass made, again!”
“As the train stops, he comes forward, as though to get ready to leave at the next station. I have the thing in my hand, and he takes it from behind as I start to leave.”
“So, you know her face, but she does not know yours. He knows your face, but you do not know his . . .” The same method that this one uses to make his pickup. That’s a nice piece of fieldcraft, but why do they use the same technique twice on the same line? The KGB used this one too, of course, but it was harder than other methods, doubly so on the Metro’s crowded, frantic rush-hour schedule. He was beginning to think that the most common means of transferring information, the dead-drop, wasn’t part of this line. That, too, was very curious. There should have been at least one dead-drop, else the KGB could roll up the line—maybe . . .
They were already trying to identify the source of the leak, of course, but they had to be careful. There was always the possibility that the spy was himself (or herself?) a security officer. That was, indeed, the ideal post for an intelligence agent, since with the job came access to everything, plus foreknowledge of any counterintelligence operations under way. It had happened before—the investigation of a leak had itself alerted the spy, a fact not discovered until some years after the investigation had been terminated. The other really odd thing was that the one photographic frame they had was not of a real diagram, but rather of a hand-drawn one . . .
Handwriting—was that the reason that there were no dead-drops? The spy could be identified that way, couldn’t he? What a foolish way to—
But there was nothing foolish here, was there? No, and there wasn’t anything accidental either. If the techniques on this line were odd, they were also professional. There was another level to this, something that the interrogator didn’t have yet.
“I think that tomorrow, you and I will ride the Metro.”
Colonel Filitov woke up without a pounding in his head, which was pleasure enough. His “normal” morning routine was not terribly different from the other sort, but without the pain and the trip to the baths. He checked the diary tucked away in the desk drawer after he dressed, hoping that he’d be able to destroy it, as per his usual procedure. He already had a new blank diary that he’d begin with when this one was destroyed. There had been hints of a new development on the laser business the previous day, plus a paper on missile systems that he’d be seeing the following week.
On entering the car, he settled back, more alert than usual, and looked out the window during the drive into work. There were a number of trucks on the street, early as it was, and one of them blocked his view of a certain piece of curb. That was his “data-lost” signal. He was slightly annoyed that he couldn’t see where it was, but his reports were rarely lost, and it didn’t trouble him greatly. The “transfer successful” signal was in a different place, and was always easy to see. Colonel Filitov settled back in his seat, gazing out the window as he approached the spot . . . there. His head turned to track on the spot, looking for the mark . . . but it wasn’t there. Odd. Had the other marker been set? He’d have to check that on the trip home tonight. In his years of work for CIA, several of his reports had been lost one way or another, and the danger signal hadn’t been set, nor had he gotten the telephone call asking for Sergey that would tell him to leave his apartment at once. So there was probably no danger. Just an annoying inconvenience. Well. The Colonel relaxed and contemplated his day at the Ministry.
This time the Metro was fully manned. Fully a hundred Second Directorate men were in this one district, most dressed like ordinary Moscovites, some like workmen. These latter were operating the “black” phone lines installed along with electrical service panels throughout the system. The interrogator and his prisoner were riding trains back and forth on the “purple” and “green” lines, looking for a well-dressed woman in a Western coat. Millions of people traveled the Metro every day, but the counterintelligence officers were confident. They had time working for them, and their profile of the target—an adventuress. She was probably not disciplined enough to separate her daily routine from her covert activities. Such things had happened before. As a matter of faith—shared with their counterparts throughout the world— the security officers held that people who spied on their homeland were defective in some fundamental way. For all their cunning, such traitors would sooner or later connive at their own destruction.
And they were right, at least in this case. Svetlana came onto the station platform holding a bundle wrapped in brown paper. The courier recognized her hair first of all. The style was ordinary, but there was something about the way she held her head, something intangible that made him point, only to have his hand yanked down. She turned and the KGB Colonel got a look at her face. The interrogator saw that she was relaxed, more so than the other commuters who displayed the grim apathy of the Moscovite. His first impression was of someone who enjoyed life. That would change.
He spoke into a small radio, and when the woman got on the next train, she had company. The “Two” man who got on with her had a radio earpiece, almost like a hearing aid. Behind them at the station, the men working the phone circuit alerted agents at every station on the line. When she got off, a full shadow team was ready. They followed her up the long escalator onto the street. Already a car was here, and more officers began the surveillance routine. At least two men always had visual contact with the subject, and the close-in duty rotated rapidly among the group as more and more men joined in the chase. They followed her all the way to the GOSPLAN Building on Marksa Prospekt, opposite the Hotel Moscow. She never knew that she was being followed, and never even attempted to look for evidence of it. Within half an hour, twenty photographs were developed and were shown to the prisoner, who identified her positively.
The procedure after that was more cautious. A building guard gave her name to a KGB officer who admonished him not to discuss the inquiry with anyone. With her name, a full identity was established by lunchtime, and the interrogator, who was now running all aspects of the case, was appalled to learn that Svetlana Vaneyeva was the child of a senior Central Committee member. That would be a complication. Quickly, the Colonel assembled another collection of photographs and reexamined his prisoner, but yet again he selected the right woman from a collection of six. The family member of a Central Committee man was not someone to—but they had identification, and they had a major case. Vatutin went to confer with the head of his directorate.