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OLD Gennadi had been picking mushrooms in those woods for years. In retirement he used nature’s cost-free crop as a supplement to his pension, either taking them fresh to the best restaurants of Moscow or drying them in bunches for the few delicatessens that remained.

The thing about mushrooms is, you have to be out early in the morning, before dawn if possible. They grow in the night and after dawn the voles and squirrels get at them or, even worse, other mushroom pickers. Russians love mushrooms.

On the morning of July 24 Gennadi took his bicycle and his dog and rode from the small village where he lived to a forest he knew where they tended to grow thickly on summer nights. Before the dew was gone, he expected to have a good basketful.

The forest he chose was just off the great Minsk Highway where the trucks rolled and growled west toward the capital of Belarus. He rode into the wood, parked his bicycle by a tree, took his rush basket, and set off through the wood.

It was half an hour, with his basket half full and the sun just rising, that his dog whined and headed into a clump of shrubs. He had trained the mutt to sniff out mushrooms, so clearly he had found something good.

As he neared the spot he caught the sweet sickly odor. He knew that smell. Had he not smelt it enough, years before as a teenage soldier all the way from the Vistula to Berlin?

The body had been dumped, or had crawled there and died. It was a scrawny old man, massively discolored, eyes and mouth open. The birds had had the eyes. Three steel teeth glinted with dew. The body was stripped to the waist but an old overcoat was in a heap nearby. Gennadi sniffed again. In that heat, it told him, several days.

He pondered for a while. He was of the generation that recalled civic duty, but mushrooms were still mushrooms, and there was nothing he could do for the fellow. A hundred yards away through the forest he could hear the rumble of the trucks on the road from Moscow to Minsk.

He finished filling his mushroom basket and pedaled back to his village. There he put his crop out to dry in the sun and reported to the small and ramshackle
selsovet
, the local council office. It was not much, but it had a phone.

He dialed 02 and the call was taken by the police central control office.

“I’ve found a body,” he said.

“Name?” said the voice.

“How the hell should I know? He’s dead.”

“Not his, idiot, yours.”

“Do you want me to hang up?” said Gennadi.

There was a sigh.

“No, don’t hang up. Just give me your name and your location.”

Gennadi did so. The control office quickly checked the place on the map. It was just inside the Moscow City Region—Oblast—in the extreme west but still in Moscow’s jurisdiction.

“Wait at the
selsovet.
An officer will come out to see you.”

Gennadi waited. It took half an hour. When he came he was a young inspector from the uniformed branch. There were two other militiamen and they came in the usual yellow-and-blue Uzhgorod jeep-type vehicle.

“You the one who found the body?” asked the lieutenant.

“Yes,” said Gennadi.

“All right let’s go. Where is it?”

“In the woods.”

Gennadi felt quite important riding along in a police jeep. They dismounted where Gennadi suggested and set off in single file through the trees. The mushroom picker recognized the birch where he had left his bicycle, and his trail from there on. Soon they smelled the odor.

“He’s in there,” said Gennadi, pointing to the clump. “He doesn’t half stink. Been there awhile.”

The three policemen approached the body and examined it visually.

“See if there’s anything in the trouser pockets,” said the officer to one of his men. To the other, “Check out the greatcoat.”

The one who had drawn the short straw held his nose and ran his spare hand through both trouser pockets. Nothing. With his toecap he turned the body over. There were maggots underneath. He checked the rear trouser pockets and stood back. He shook his head. The other threw down the overcoat and did the same.

“Nothing? No ID at all?” asked the lieutenant.

“Nothing. No coins, handkerchief, keys, papers.”

“Hit and run?” suggested one of the policemen.

They listened to the rumble from the highway.

“How far to the road?” asked the officer.

“About a hundred meters,” said Gennadi.

“Hit-and-run drivers move on fast. They don’t lug the victim a hundred yards. Anyway, ten yards would do in all these trees.” To one of his men the lieutenant said:

“Walk up to the highway. Check the shoulder for a smashed-up bicycle or a wrecked car. He might have been in a pile-up and crawled here. Then stay there and flag down the ambulance.”

The officer used his mobile phone to call for an investigator, photographer, and medical expert. What he saw could not be a natural causes. He also asked for an ambulance but confirmed that life was extinct. One of the policemen set off through the trees for the road. The others waited, moving away from the stench.

The plainclothes trio came first, in a plain buff Uzhgorod. They were waved down on the highway, parked on the shoulder, and walked the rest of the way. The investigator nodded at the lieutenant.

“What have we got?”

“He’s over there. I called you because I can’t see how it could be natural causes. Badly knocked about and a hundred yards from the road.”

“Who found him?”

“The mushroom picker over there.”

The detective walked over to Gennadi.

“Tell me. From the beginning.”

The photographer took pictures, then the doctor pulled on a gauze mask and made a quick examination. He straightened up and pulled off his rubber gloves.

“Ten kopecks to a good bottle of Moskovskaya, it’s a homicide. The lab will tell us more, but someone knocked the shit out of him before he died. Probably not here. Congratulations, Volodya, you just got your first
zhmurik
of the day.”

He used the Russian police and underworld slang for a “stiff.” Two orderlies from the ambulance came through the wood with a stretcher. The doctor nodded and they zipped the corpse into a body bag before taking it back to the road.

“Are you finished with me?”
asked Gennadi.

“No chance,” said the detective. “I need a statement, at the station.”

The policemen took Gennadi back to their precinct house, the headquarters of the Western District three miles down the road toward Moscow. The body went further, into the heart of the city, to the morgue of the Second Medical Institute. There it was put in a cold chest. Forensic pathologists were few and far between and their workload was overwhelming.

Yemen, October 1985

JASON Monk infiltrated South Yemen in mid-October. Though small and poor, the People’s Republic had a first-class airport, formerly the military base of the Royal Air Force. Big jets could and did land there.

Monk’s Spanish passport and supporting United Nations travel documents excited thorough but finally unsuspicious attention at Immigration, and after half an hour, clutching his all-purpose suitcase, he was through.

Rome had indeed informed the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization program that Señor Martinez was coming, but gave him a date which postdated Monk’s actual arrival by a week. The Yemeni officers at the airport did not know that. So there was no car to receive him. He took a taxi and checked in at the new French hotel, the Frontel, on the spit of land joining the rock of Aden to the mainland.

Even though his papers were good and he expected to run into no real Spaniards, he knew the mission was dangerous. It was black, very black.

The great majority of espionage is carried out by officers inside an embassy and technically posing as embassy staff. They thus benefit from diplomatic status if anything goes wrong. Some are “declared,” meaning they make no bones about what they do, and the local counterintelligence people know and accept this, though the real job remains tactfully unmentioned. A big station in hostile territory will always try to maintain a few “undeclared” officers whose cover jobs in the trade, culture, chancery, or press section remain unblown. The reason is simple.

Undeclared officers have a better chance of not being tailed out on the street, and therefore being freer to service dead drops or attend covert meetings than those always being followed.

But a spy working outside diplomatic cover cannot benefit from the Vienna Accords. If a diplomat is exposed he can be declared persona non grata and expelled. His country will then protest its innocence and expel one of the other nation’s diplomats. The tit-for-tat dance having been gone through, the game resumes as before.

But a spy going in “on the black” is an illegal. For him, depending on the nature of the place where he has been caught, exposure can mean terrible torture, a long spell in a labor camp, or a lonely death. Even the people who sent him in can rarely help him.

In the democracies there will be a fair trial and a humane jail. In the dictatorships there are no civil rights. Some have never even heard of them. South Yemen was like that, and the United States did not even have an embassy there in 1985.

In October the heat is still fierce and Friday is the day of rest when no work is done. What, thought Monk, will a fit Russian officer do on a blazing hot day off? Have a swim was a reasonable idea.

For security’s sake the original source who had had that dinner in New York with his FBI ex-classmate had not been re-contacted. He might have given a better description of Major Solomin even helped compose a portrait. He could even be back in Yemen, in a position to point the man out. But the assessment had been that he was also a braggart who talked too much.

Finding the Russians was no problem. They were all over the place, and evidently allowed to mix pretty freely with the West European community, something that would have been unheard of back home. Maybe it was the heat or the sheer impossibility of keeping the Soviet military advisory group pinned into their compounds day and night.

Two hotels, the Rock and the new Frontel, had inviting pools. Then there was the great sweep of sand with its foaming breakers, Abyan Beach where the expatriates of all nationalities were wont to swim either after work or on their day off. Finally there was a big Russian PX-style commissary up in the town where non-Russians were allowed to shop—the USSR needed the foreign currency.

It was quickly clear that the Russians on display were almost all officers. Very few Russians speak a word of Arabic, and not many more know English. Those that do would have attended a special school, i.e., be officers or officer material. Private soldiers and NCOs would be unlikely to have either language and therefore could riot communicate with their Yemeni pupils. Thus, noncommissioned ranks would likely be confined to mechanics and cooks. Orderlies would be locally recruited Yemenis. Russian noncoms could not afford the prices of the Aden watering holes. Officers had a hard currency allowance.

Another possibility was that the American from the U.N. had found the Russian drinking alone at the bar of the Rock. Russians like to drink, but they also prefer company, and the ones around the pool at the Frontel were definitely in an impenetrable group. Why did Solomin drink alone? Just a fluke that night? Or was he a solitary who preferred his own company?

There was a possible clue here. The American had said he was tall and muscular with black hair but almond-shaped eyes. Like an Oriental, but without the flat nose. The language experts at Langley put the name somewhere in the Soviet Far East. Monk knew Russians are irretrievably racist, with an open contempt for
chorni—
blacks—meaning anyone not pure Russian. Perhaps Solomin was tired of jibes about his Asiatic features.

Monk haunted the commissary—the Russian officers were all living as bachelors—the pools, and the bars after dark. It was on the third day, strolling along Abyan Beach in boxer shorts with a towel over his shoulder, that he saw a man come out of the sea.

He was about six feet tall with heavily muscled arms and shoulders; not a youth, but a very fit fortyish. The hair was black as a raven’s wing, but there was no body hair save beneath the armpits when he raised his hands to squeeze the water from his hair. Orientals have very little body hair; black-haired Caucasians usually a lot.

The man strolled up the sand, found his towel, and plonked himself down facing the sea. He pulled on a pair of dark glasses and was soon lost in thought.

Monk slipped off his shirt and walked toward the sea like a bather coming for his first swim. The beach was reasonably crowded. It was natural enough to choose a vacant spot a yard from the Russian. He took his wallet and wrapped his shirt around it. Then his towel. He kicked off his sandals and made a mound of them all. Then he looked around in apprehension. Finally he glanced at the Russian.

“Please,” he said. The Russian glanced at him. “You stay for a few more minutes?” The man nodded.

“The Arabs do not steal my things, okay?”

The Russian nodded again and went back to staring at the ocean. Monk ran down the beach and swam for ten minutes. When he came back, dripping, he smiled at the black-haired man.

“Thanks.” The man nodded for a third time. Monk toweled off and sat down.

“Nice sea. Nice beach. Pity about the people who own it.”

The Russian spoke for the first time in English.

“What people?”

“The Arabs. The Yemenis. I haven’t been here long but already I can’t stand them. Useless people.”

Behind the black glasses the Russian was looking at him but Monk could read no expression through the lenses. After two minutes he resumed.

“I mean, I’m trying to teach them to use basic tools and tractors. To increase their food, to feed themselves. No chance. Everything they break or smash up. I’m just wasting my time and the United Nations’ money.”

Monk was speaking good English but with a Spanish accent.

“You are English?” asked the Russian at last. It was his first contribution.