This one is sicker than most, Vatutin thought wryly. He was a touch too cynical to believe all the folderol that the new crop of “Two” people got today in Training-and-Orientation. He remembered the nostalgic stories of the men who’d trained him almost thirty years before—the good old days under Beriya . . . Though his skin had crawled to hear those madmen speak, at least they were honest about what they did. Though he was grateful that he had not become like them, he didn’t delude himself by believing that Filitov was mentally ill. He was, in fact, a courageous man who had chosen of his own free will to betray his country. An evil man, to be sure, because he had violated the rules of his parent society, he was a worthy adversary for all that. Vatutin looked into the fiber-optic tube that ran into the ceiling of Filitov’s cell, watching him as he listened to the sound pickup from the microphone.
How long have you been working for the Americans? Since your family died? That long? Nearly thirty years . . . is it possible? the Colonel of the Second Chief Directorate wondered. It was an awesome amount of time. Kim Philby hadn’t lasted nearly so long. Richard Sorge’s career, though brilliant, had been a brief one.
But it made sense. There was also homage to pay to Oleg Penkovskiy, the treasonous GRU Colonel whose capture was one of “Two’s” greatest cases—but now poisoned by the thought that Penkovskiy had used his own death to elevate the career of an even greater spy . . . whom he himself had probably recruited. That was courage, Vatutin told himself. Why must such virtue be invested in treason! he raged at himself. Why can they not love their Motherland as I do? The Colonel shook his head. Marxism demanded objectivity of its adherents, but this was too much. There was always the danger of identifying too closely with one’s subject. He rarely had the problem, but then he had never handled a case like this one. Three times Hero of the Soviet Union! A genuine national icon whose face had been on the covers of magazines and books. Could we ever let it be known what he had done? How would the Soviet people react to the knowledge that Old Misha, Hero of Stalingrad, one of the most courageous warriors of the Red Army . . . had turned traitor to the Rodina? The effect on national morale was something to be considered.
Not my problem, he told himself. He watched the old man through the hi-tech peephole. Filitov was trying to eat his food, not quite believing that it was time to eat, but not knowing that his breakfast—all meals were the same, for obvious reasons—had been only ninety minutes before.
Vatutin stood and stretched to ease the ache in his back. A side effect of this technique was the way it disrupted the lives of the interrogators themselves. His own schedule was wrecked. It was just past midnight, and he’d gotten a bare seven hours of sleep in the past thirty-six. But at least he knew the time, and the day, and the season. Filitov, he was sure, did not. He bent back down to see his subject finishing off his bowl of kasha.
“Get him,” Colonel Klementi Vladimirovich Vatutin ordered. He walked into the washroom to splash some cold water on his face. He peered into the mirror and decided that he didn’t need to shave. Next he made sure that his uniform was perfectly turned out. The one constant factor in the prisoner’s disrupted world had to be the face and image of his interrogator. Vatutin even practiced his look in the mirror: proud, arrogant, but also compassionate. He was not ashamed of what he saw. That is a professional, he told himself of the reflection in the mirror. Not a barbarian, not a degenerate, but only a skilled man doing a difficult, necessary job.
Vatutin was seated in the interrogation room, as always, when the prisoner came in. He invariably appeared to be doing something when the door opened, and his head always had to come up in semisurprise as though to say. Oh, is it time for you again? He closed the folder before him and placed it in his briefcase as Filitov sat in the chair opposite his. That was good, Vatutin noted without looking. The subject doesn’t have to be told what he must do. His mind was fixing upon the only reality he had: Vatutin.
“I hope you slept well,” he told Filitov.
“Well enough,” was the answer. The old man’s eyes were clouded. The blue no longer had the luster that Vatutin had admired in their first session.
“You are being properly fed, I trust?”
“I have eaten better.” A weary smile, still some defiance and pride behind it, but not as much as its wearer thought. “But I have also eaten worse.”
Vatutin dispassionately gauged the strength in his prisoner; it had diminished. You know, the Colonel thought, you know that you must lose. You know that it is only a matter of time. I can see it, he said with his eyes, looking for and finding weakness under his stare. Filitov was trying not to wilt under the strain, but the edges were frayed, and something else was coming loose as Vatutin watched. You know you’re losing, Filitov.
What is the point, Misha? part of him asked. He has time—he controls time. He’ll use all he needs to break you. He’s winning. You know that, despair told him.
Tell me, Comrade Captain, why do you ask yourself such foolish things? Why do you need to explain to yourself why you are a man? asked a familiar voice. All the way from Brest-Litovsk to Vyasma we knew we were losing, but I never quit, and neither did you. If you can defy the German Army, certainly you can defy this city-soft slug of a chekist!
Thank you, Romanov.
How did you ever get on without me, my Captain? the voice chuckled. For all your intelligence, you can be a most foolish man.
Vatutin saw that something had changed. The eyes blinked clear, and the weary old back straightened.
What is sustaining you? Hate? Do you so detest the State for what happened to your family . . . or is it something else entirely . . . ?
“Tell me,” Vatutin said. “Tell me why you hate the Motherland.”
“I do not,” Filitov replied. “I have killed for the Motherland. I have bled for the Motherland. I have burned for the Motherland. But I did not do these things for the likes of you.” For all his weakness, the defiance blazed in his eyes like a flame. Vatutin was unmoved.
I was close, but something changed. If I can find what that is, Filitov, I will have you! Something told Vatutin that he already had what he needed. The trick was to identify it.
The interrogation continued. Though Filitov would successfully resist this time, and the next time, and even the time after that, Vatutin was drawing down on the man’s physical and emotional energy. Both knew it. It was just a matter of time. But on one issue both men were wrong. Both thought that Vatutin controlled time, even though time is man’s final master.
Gerasimov was surprised by the new FLASH dispatch from America, this one from Platonov. It arrived by cable, alerting him to an Eyes-Only-Chairman message en route in the diplomatic pouch. That was truly unusual. The KGB, more than other foreign-intelligence agencies, still depended on one-time-pad cipher systems. These were unbreakable, even in a theoretical sense, unless the code sequence itself were compromised. It was slow, but it was sure, and the KGB wanted “sure.” Beyond that level of transmission, however, was another protocol. For each major station, there was a special cipher. It didn’t even have a name, but ran directly from the rezident to the Chairman. Platonov was more important than even CIA suspected. He was the rezident for Washington, the chief of station.
When the dispatch arrived, it was brought directly to Gerasimov’s office. His personal code clerk, a captain with impeccable credentials, was not called. The Chairman deciphered the first sentence himself, to learn that this was a mole warning. The KGB did not have a stock term for a traitor within its own ranks, but the higher ranks knew the Western word.
The dispatch was a lengthy one and took Gerasimov fully an hour to decode, cursing all the while at his clumsiness as he deciphered the random transpositions in the thirty-three-letter Russian alphabet.
An agent-in-place inside KGB? Gerasimov wondered. How high? He summoned his personal secretary and ordered the files on Agent Cassius, and Ryan, I.P., of CIA. As with all such orders, it didn’t take long. He set Cassius aside for the moment and opened the file on Ryan.