There was the building. Ed headed for the curb, jostling over the potholes as her hand gripped the parcel. As she grabbed the door handle, her husband patted her on the leg. Good luck, kid.
“Foleyeva just got out of the car and is headed to the side entrance,” the radio squawked. Vatutin smiled at the Russification of the foreign name. He debated drawing the service automatic in his belt, but decided against it. Better to have his hands free, and a gun might go off accidentally. This was no time for accidents.
“Any ideas?” he asked.
“If it was me, I’d try a brush-pass,” one of his men offered.
Vatutin nodded agreement. It worried him that they’d been unable to establish camera surveillance of the corridor itself, but technical factors had militated against it. That was the problem with the really sensitive cases. The smart ones were, the wary ones. You couldn’t risk alerting them, and he was sure that the Americans were alerted already. Alerted enough, he thought, to have killed one of their own agents in that railyard.
Fortunately, most Moscow apartments had peepholes installed in them now. Vatutin found himself grateful for the increase in burglaries, because his technicians had been able to replace the regular lens with one that allowed them to see most of the corridor. He took this post himself.
We should have put microphones on the stairwells, he told himself. Make a note of that for the next time. Not all enemy spies use elevators.
Mary Pat was not quite the athlete her husband was. She paused on the landing, looking up and down the stairwell and listening for any sound at all as her heart rate slowed somewhat. She checked her digital watch. Time.
She opened the firedoor and walked straight down the middle of the corridor.
Okay, Misha. I hope you remembered to set your watch last night.
Last time, Colonel. Will you for Christ’s sake take the breakout signal this time, and maybe they’ll do the debrief on the Farm, and my son can meet a real Russian hero . . . ?
God, I wish my grandfather could see me now . . .
She’d never been here before, never done a pass in this building. But she knew it by heart, having spent twenty minutes going over the diagram. The CARDINAL’s door was . . . that one!
Time! Her heart skipped a beat as she saw the door open, thirty feet away.
What a pro! But what came next was as cold as a dagger made of ice.
Vatutin’s eyes widened in horror at the noise. The deadbolt on the apartment door had been installed with typical Russian workmanship, about half a millimeter out of line. As he slipped it in preparation to leap from the room, it made an audible click.
Mary Pat Foley scarcely broke stride. Her training took over her body like a computer program. There was a peephole on the door that went from dark to light:
—there was somebody there
—that somebody just moved
—that somebody just slipped the door lock.
She took half a step to her right and rubbed the back of her gloved hand across her forehead. She wasn’t pretending to wipe sweat away.
Misha saw the signal and stopped cold, a curious look on his face that began to change to amusement until he heard the door wrenched open. He knew in an instant that the man who emerged was not his neighbor.
“You are under arrest!” Vatutin shouted, then saw that the American woman and the Russian man were standing a meter apart, and both had their hands at their sides. It was just as well that the “Two” officers behind him couldn’t see the look on his face.
“Excuse me?” the woman said in excellent Russian.
“What!” Filitov thundered with the rage only possible to a hung-over professional soldier.
“You”—he pointed to Mrs. Foley—”up against the wall.”
“I’m an American citizen, and you can’t—”
“You’re an American spy,” a captain said, pushing her against the wall.
“What?” Her voice contained panic and alarm, not the least amount of professionalism here, the Captain thought, but then his mind nearly choked on the observation. “What are you talking about? What is this? Who are you?” Next she started screaming: “Police—somebody call the police. I’m being attacked! Somebody help me, please!”
Vatutin ignored her. He had already grabbed Filitov’s hand, and as another officer pushed the Colonel against the wall, he took a film cassette. For a flicker of time that seemed to stretch into hours, he’d been struck with the horrible thought that he’d blown it, that she really wasn’t CIA. With the film in his hand, he swallowed and looked into Filitov’s eyes. . “You are under arrest for treason, Comrade Colonel.” His voice hissed out the end of the statement. “Take him away.”
He turned to look at the woman. Her eyes were wide with fear and outrage. Four people now had their heads out of doors, staring into the hall.
“I am Colonel Vatutin of the Committee for State Security. We have just made an arrest. Close your doors and go about your business.” He noted that compliance with his order took under five seconds. Russia was still Russia.
“Good morning, Mrs. Foley,” he said next. He saw her struggle to gain control of herself.
“Who are you—and what is this all about?”
“The Soviet Union does not look kindly upon its guests stealing State secrets. Surely they told you that in Washington—excuse me, Langley.”
Her voice trembled as she spoke. “My husband is an accredited member of the U.S. diplomatic mission to your country. I wish to be put in contact with my embassy at once. I don’t know what you’re jabbering about, but I do know that if you make the pregnant wife of a diplomat lose her baby, you’ll have a diplomatic incident big enough to make the TV news! I didn’t talk to that man. I didn’t touch him, and he didn’t touch me—and you know it, mister. What they warned me about in Washington is that you clowns love to embarrass Americans with your damned-fool little spy games.”
Vatutin took all of the speech impassively, though the word “pregnant” did get his attention. He knew from the reports of the maid who cleaned their apartment twice a week that Foleyeva had been testing herself. And if—there would be a larger incident over this than he wanted. Again the political dragon raised its head. Chairman Gerasimov would have to rule on this.
“My husband is waiting for me.”
“We’ll tell him that you are being detained. You will be asked to answer some questions. You will not be mistreated.”
Mary Pat already knew that. Her horror at what had just happened was muted by her pride. She’d performed beautifully and knew it. As part of the diplomatic community, she was fundamentally safe. They might hold on to her for a day, even two, but any serious mistreatment would result in having a half-dozen Russians shipped home from Washington. Besides, she wasn’t really pregnant.
All that was beside the point. She didn’t shed any tears, showed no emotion other than what was expected, what she’d been briefed and trained to show. What mattered was that her most important agent was blown, and with him, information of the highest importance. She wanted to cry, needed to cry, but she wouldn’t give the fuckers the satisfaction. The crying would come on the plane ride home.
16.
Damage
Assessment
IT says a lot about the man that the first thing he did was to get to the embassy and send the telex,” Ritter said at last. “The Ambassador delivered his protest note to their Foreign Ministry before they went public on the arrest ‘for conduct incompatible with diplomatic status.’ ”
“Some consolation,” Greer noted gloomily.
“We ought to have her back in a day or less,” Ritter went on. “They’re already PNG’d, and they’re going on the next Pan Am flight out.”
Ryan squirmed in his chair. What about CARDINAL? he wondered. Jesus, they tell me about this superagent, and a week later . . . They sure as hell don’t have a Supreme Court over there that makes it hard to execute people.
“Any chance we can do a trade for him?” Jack asked.
“You are kidding, boy.” Ritter rose and walked to the window. At three in the morning, the CIA parking lot was nearly empty, only a loose handful of cars sitting among the piles of plowed snow. “We don’t even have anybody big enough to trade for a mitigation of sentence. No way in hell they’ll let him out, even for a chief of station, which we don’t have.”
“So he’s dead and the data is lost with him.”
“That’s what the man’s saying,” Judge Moore agreed.
“Help from the allies?” Ryan asked. “Sir Basil might have something hopping that can help us.”