“Marv’s pretty original for an old guy,” Al observed. Dr. Marv Greene was forty-two.
Candi laughed. “His secretary thinks he’s pretty original, too.”
“He should know better than to fool around with somebody at work,” Gregory said seriously. He winced a moment later.
“Yeah, honey.” She turned to look at him, and they both laughed. “How tired are you?”
“I slept on the flight.”
“Good.”
Just before reaching around her, Gregory crumbled the Twinkie wrapper and tossed it on the floor, where it joined about thirty others. He flew around quite a bit, but Candi had a sure cure for jet lag.
“Well, Jack?” Admiral Greer asked.
“I’m worried,” Ryan admitted. “It was pure dumb luck that we saw the test. The timing was cute. All of our recon birds were well below the optical horizon. We weren’t supposed to notice—which is hardly surprising, since it’s a technical violation of the ABM treaty. Well, probably.” Jack shrugged. “Depends on how you read the treaty. Now you get into the ‘strict’ or ‘loose’ interpretation argument. If we pulled something like this, the Senate would go nuts.”
“They wouldn’t like the test that you saw.” Very few people knew how far along Tea Clipper was. The program was “black.” More classified than top secret, “black” programs simply did not exist.
“Maybe. But we were testing the aiming system, not an actual weapon.”
“And the Soviets were testing a system to see if it was—” Greer chuckled and shook his head. “It’s like talking metaphysics, isn’t it? How many lasers can dance on the head of a pin?”
“I’m sure Ernie Allen could give us an opinion on that.” Jack smiled. He didn’t agree with Allen, but he had to like the man. “I hope our friend in Moscow can deliver.”
12.
Success and
Failure
ONE of the problems with surveillance of any individual is that one must determine how he or she spends an ordinary day before one can establish what resources are needed for the operation. The more solitary the person or the activity, the harder it generally is to keep a covert eye on him. Already, for example, the KGB officers trailing Colonel Bondarenko hated him thoroughly. His daily jogging routine was an ideal activity for a spy, they all thought. He ran about entirely alone on city streets that were largely vacant—vacant enough that everyone out at that time was undoubtedly known to him by sight, and vacant enough that he would immediately notice anything out of the ordinary. As he ran around the residential blocks in this part of Moscow, the three agents assigned to keep an eye on him lost visual contact with him no less than five times. The sparse trees they might hide behind were bare of leaves, and the apartment buildings stood like tombstones on flat, open land. In any of those five times, Bondarenko might have stopped to retrieve something from a dead-drop or could have made one himself. It was more than frustrating, and added to this was the fact that this Soviet Army Colonel had a service record that was as immaculate as a field of freshly fallen snow: exactly the cover that any spy would contrive to acquire for himself, of course.
They spotted him again turning the corner for home, his legs pumping vigorously, his breath marked in the air behind him as small clouds of vapor. The man in charge of this part of the case decided that half a dozen “Two” officers would be needed just to shadow the subject for his morning runs. And they’d have to be here an hour earlier than he was expected to run, enduring the dry, bitter cold of the Moscow dawn. People from the Second Chief Directorate never considered themselves fully appreciated for the hardships of their job.
Several kilometers away, another team of three was quite satisfied with their subject. In this case, an eighth-floor apartment in the building opposite the subject’s was obtained—the diplomat who lived there was abroad. A pair of telephoto lenses was focused on Misha’s windows, and he was not a man who troubled to lower his shades or even to adjust them properly. They watched him go through the morning routine of a man who’d had too much to drink the night before, and that was familiar enough to the “Two” men who watched in heated comfort from across the street.
Misha was also sufficiently senior at the Defense Ministry that he rated a car and driver. It was an easy thing to reassign the sergeant and to substitute a shiny young face fresh from the KGB’s counterintelligence school. A tap on his phone recorded his request for an early pickup.
Ed Foley left his apartment earlier than usual. His wife drove him over today, with the kids in the back of the car. The Soviet file on Foley noted with amusement that she kept the car on most days to run the kids around and generally socialize with the wives of other Western diplomats. A Soviet husband would keep the car for his own use. At least she wasn’t making him take the Metro today, they observed; decent of her. The militiaman at the entrance to the diplomatic compound—he was really KGB, as everyone knew— noted the time of departure and the occupancy of the car. It was slightly out of the ordinary, and the gate guard looked around to see if Foley’s KGB shadow was here today. He wasn’t. The “important” Americans got much more regular surveillance.
Ed Foley had a Russian-style fur hat, and his overcoat was sufficiently old and worn that it didn’t look terribly foreign. A wool scarf clashed slightly with it, protecting his neck and hiding his striped tie. The Russian security officers who knew him by sight noted that, as with most foreigners, local weather was the great equalizer. If you lived through a Russian winter, you soon started dressing and acting like a Russian, even to the point of looking slightly downward when you walked.
First the kids were dropped off at school. Mary Pat Foley drove normally, her eyes flicking back and forth to the mirror every three or four seconds. Driving here wasn’t all that bad, compared to American cities. Although Russian drivers could do the most extraordinary things, the streets weren’t terribly crowded, and having learned to drive in New York City, she could handle nearly anything. As with commuters all over the world, she had a route composed of indirect shortcuts that avoided the handful of traffic bottlenecks and saved a few minutes each day at the cost of an extra liter or two of benzin.
Immediately after turning a corner, she moved expertly to the curb and her husband hopped out. The car was already moving as he slammed the door shut and moved off, not too quickly, toward the side entrance of the apartment block. For once Ed Foley’s heart was beating fast. He’d done this only once before and didn’t like it at all. Once inside, he avoided the elevators and bounded up the eight flights of stairs, looking at his watch.
He didn’t know how his wife did it. It pained his male ego to admit that she drove so much more precisely than he did, and could place her car at any spot she wished with an accuracy of five seconds, plus or minus. He had two minutes to get to the eighth floor. Foley accomplished it with seconds to spare. He opened the fire door, and anxious eyes scanned the corridor. Wonderful things, corridors. Especially the straight, bare ones in high-rise apartment buildings. Nowhere for people to lurk with their cameras, with a bank of elevators in the middle, and fire stairs at both ends. He walked briskly past the elevators, heading toward the far end. He could measure the time with his heartbeats now. Twenty yards ahead, a door opened, and a man in uniform came out. He turned to set the lock on his apartment door, then picked up the briefcase and headed toward Foley. A passerby, if there had been one, might have thought it odd that neither man moved to avoid the other.
It was over in an instant. Foley’s hand brushed against CARDINAL’s, taking the film cassette and passing back a tiny rolled slip of paper. He thought he noted a look of irritation in the agent’s eyes, but nothing more than that, not even a “Please excuse me, Comrade,” as the officer continued toward the elevators. Foley walked straight into the fire stairs. He took his time going down.
Colonel Filitov emerged from the building at the appointed time. The sergeant holding the door of his car noted that his mouth was working on something, perhaps a crumb of bread caught between his teeth.
“Good morning, Comrade Colonel.”
“Where’s Zhdanov?” Filitov asked as he got in.
“He took ill. An appendix, they think.” This drew a grunt.
“Well, move off. I want to take steam this morning.”