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“Been a long time, Kolya,” muttered the bootblack in Spanish. “How are you?”

The Russian leaned forward to point out where he wanted more polish.

“Not so good. I think there are problems.”

“Tell me.”

“Two months ago I had to raid an apartment here. Denounced as a CIA postbox. I managed to make one call; the man had time to run. But how did they know? Has someone been taken—talked?”

“Possibly. Why do you think so?”

“There’s more, and worse. Two weeks ago, just before my postcard, an officer came through from Moscow. I know he works in Analysis. His wife is East German, they were visiting. There was a party, he got drunk. He boasted there had been arrests in Moscow. Someone in the Defense Ministry, someone in Foreign Affairs.”

To Monk the news was like a kick in the face from the brogues to which he was applying a final shine.

“Someone at the table said something like: ‘You must have a good source in the enemy camp.’ The man tapped the side of his nose and winked.”

“You must come out, Kolya. Now, this night. Come across.”

“I can’t leave Ludmilla and Yuri. They are in Moscow.”

“Get them back here, my friend. Any excuse in the world. This is Soviet territory for ten more days. Then it becomes West German. They will not be able to travel here after that.”

“You are right. Within ten days, we come across, as a family. You will take care of us?”

“I’ll handle it personally. Don’t delay.”

He handed the bootblack a fistful of East Marks, which could be stored for ten days, then exchanged for valuable deutsche marks. The cleaner rose, nodded his thanks, collected his gear, and shuffled away.

The two watchers across the square heard a voice in their ears.

“We are complete. Arrest is on. Go, go, go.”

The two gray Czech Tatras came around the corner into Opera Square and raced to the curb beside the café. From the first car three men burst onto the sidewalk, shouldered two pedestrians out of their way, and grabbed one of the café customers in the front row. The second car ejected two more men, who held the rear door open and stood guard.

There were varied cries of alarm from the customers as the customer was picked up bodily and hurled into the rear of the second car. The door slammed and it roared away on screeching tires. The snatch squad threw themselves back into the first car and followed. The whole operation lasted seven seconds.

At the end of the block Jason Monk, a hundred yards from the assault, watched helplessly.

¯

“WHAT happened after Berlin?” asked Sir Nigel Irvine.

Some of the diners were picking up their credit cards and leaving to return to work or pleasure. The Englishman lifted the bottle of Beychevelle, noted there was nothing in it, and gestured to the waiter for a replacement.

“Are you trying to get me drunk, Nigel?” asked Jordan with a wry smile.

“Tut-tut. I’m afraid we’re both old enough and ugly enough to take our wine like gentlemen.”

“Guess so. Anyway, I’m not often offered Château Beychevelle these days.”

The waiter offered the new bottle, got a nod from Sir Nigel, uncorked, and decanted.

“So, what shall we drink to?” asked Jordan. “The Great Game? Or maybe the Great Foul-Up,” he added bitterly.

“No, to the old days. And to the clarity. I think that’s what I miss most, what the youngsters don’t have. The absolute moral clarity.”

“I’ll drink to that. So, Berlin. Well, Monk came back madder than a mountain lion with his ass on fire. I wasn’t there, of course, but I was still talking with guys like Milt Bearden. I mean, we went back a long way. So I got the picture.

“Monk was going around the building telling anyone who would listen that the Soviet Division had a high-placed mole right inside it. Naturally, it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Write it down, they said. So he did. It was a pretty hair-raising document. It accused just about everyone of blithering incompetence.

“Milt Bearden had finally managed to squeeze Ames out of his Soviet Division. But the guy was like a leech. In the interim the director had formed a new Counter-intelligence Center. Inside it was the Analysis Group and within that the USSR Branch. The branch needed a former Directorate of Operations case officer; Mulgrew proposed Ames, and by God he got it. You can guess whom Monk had to address himself to with his complaint. Aldrich Ames himself.”

“That must have been a bit of a shock to the system,” murmured Irvine.

“They say the devil looks after his own, Nigel. From Ames’s point of view it was the best thing that he handle Monk. He could trash the report and did. In fact he went further. He counter-accused Monk of baseless scaremongering. Where was the proof for all this, he said.

“The upshot was, there was an internal inquiry. Not on the existence of a mole, but on Monk.”

“A sort of court-martial?”

Carey Jordan nodded bitterly.

“Yeah, I guess so. I would have spoken for Jason, but I wasn’t in very good graces myself around that time. Anyway, Ken Mulgrew chaired it. The outcome was they decided Monk had actually made up the Berlin meeting to advance a fading career.”

“Nice of them.”

“Very nice of them. But by then the Ops Directorate was bureaucrats wall to wall, apart from a few old warriors serving out their time. After forty years we’d finally won the Cold War; the Soviet empire was crashing down. It should have been a time of vindication, but it was all bickering and paper pushing.”

“And Monk, what happened to him?”

“They nearly fired him. Instead they busted him down. Gave him some no-no slot in Records or somewhere. Buried him. Not wanted on voyage. He should have quit, taken his pension, and gone. But he was always a tenacious bastard. He stuck it out, convinced that one day he would be proved right. He sat and rotted in that job for three long years. And eventually he was.”

“Proved right?”

“Of course. But too late.”

Moscow, January 1991

COLONEL Anatoli Grishin left the interrogation room and withdrew to his own office in a black rage.

The panel of officers who had carried out the questioning were satisfied they had it all. There would be no more sessions of the Monakh Committee. It was all on tape, the whole story right back to a small boy falling ill in Nairobi in 1983 up to the snatch at the Opera Café the previous September.

Somehow the men from the First Chief Directorate knew that Monk had been disgraced among his own people; busted, finished. That could only mean he had no more agents. Four had been the total, but what a four they had been. Now one was left alive, but not for long, Grishin was certain.

So the Monakh Committee was over, disbanded. It had done its job. It should have been a matter for triumph. But Grishin’s rage stemmed from something that had come out of the last session. One hundred yards. One hundred miserable yards. …

The report of the watcher team had been adamant. On his last day of freedom Nikolai Turkin had made no contact with enemy agents. He had spent the day inside the headquarters, taken his supper in the canteen, then unexpectedly walked out and been followed to a large café where he ordered coffee and had his shoes cleaned.

It was Turkin who had let it slip. The two watchers across the square had seen the shoeshine boy do his job and shuffle away. Seconds later the KGB cars, with Grishin beside the driver of the first car, had come around the corner. At that moment he had been just one hundred yards from Jason Monk himself on Soviet-ruled territory.

In the interrogation room every eye on the panel had swiveled around to stare at him. He had been in charge of the snatch, they seemed to be saying, and he had missed the biggest prize of all.

There would be pain, of course. Not as persuasion but as punishment. This he swore. Then he was overruled. General Boyarov had told him personally that the chairman of the KGB wanted a speedy execution, fearful that in these rapidly changing times it might be refused. He was taking the warrant to the president that day and it should be carried out the following morning.

And times
were
changing, with bewildering speed. From all sides his service was under accusation from scum in the newly liberated press, scum whom he knew how to deal with.

What he did not then know was that in August his own chairman, General Kryuchkov, would lead a coup d’état against Gorbachev, and it would fail. In revenge, Gorbachev would break the KGB into several fragments; and that the Soviet Union itself would finally collapse in December.

While Grishin sat in his office that day in January and brooded, General Kryuchkov laid the execution warrant for the former KGB Colonel Turkin on the president’s desk. Gorbachev lifted his pen, paused, and laid it down again.

The previous August Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Now American jets were pounding the life out of Iraq. A land invasion was imminent. Various world statesmen were seeking to intercede, proposing themselves as international brokers of peace. It was a tempting role. One of them was Mikhail Gorbachev.

“I accept what this man has done, and that he deserves to die,” said the president.

“It is the law,” said Kryuchkov.

“Yes, but at this moment ... I think it would be inadvisable.”

He made up his mind and handed the warrant back, unsigned.

“I have the right to exercise clemency, and I do so. Seven years at hard labor.”

General Kryuchkov left in a rage. This kind of degeneracy could not go on, he vowed. Sooner or later he and others of like mind would have to strike.

For Grishin the news was the last blow of a miserable day. All he could do was ensure that the slave camp to which Turkin would be sent was of a kind and of a regimen that he could never survive.

In the early 1980s the camps for political prisoners had been moved from the too-accessible Mordovia further north to the region around Perm, Grishin’s own birthplace. A dozen of them were scattered round the town of Vsesvyatskoye. The best-known were the hellholes of Perm 35, Perm 36, and Perm 37.

But there was one very special camp reserved for traitors. Nizhni Tagil was a place that caused a shudder even among the KGB.

However harsh the guards were, they lived outside the camp. Their brutalities could only be sporadic and institutional: the reduction of rations, an increase of labor. To make sure the “educated” criminals lived with the real facts of life, they were mixed inside Nizhni Tagil with a cull of the most vicious and violent of all the
zeks
in all the camps.

Grishin ensured that Nikolai Turkin was sent to Nizhni Tagil, and under the heading “regimen” on his sentencing form he wrote Special—ultra strict.

¯

“ANYWAY,” sighed Carey Jordan, “I guess you recall the end of that unlovely saga.”

“Much of it. But remind me.” He raised a hand and to the hovering waiter said. “Two espressos, if you please.”

“Well, in the last year, 1993, the FBI finally took over the eight-year mole hunt. They claimed later they cracked it all themselves inside eighteen months, but a lot of elimination work had already been done, though too slowly.

“To give credit, the Feds did do what we should have done. They pissed on privacy and got covert court orders to examine the banking records of the few remaining suspects. They forced the banks to come clean. And it worked. On February 21, 1994—Jesus, Nigel, will I always remember that date?—they picked him up, just a few blocks from his house in Arlington. After that it all came out.”

“Did you know in advance?”

“Nope. I guess the Bureau was smart not to tell me. If I’d known then what I know now I’d have got there before them and killed him myself. I’d have gone to the chair a happy man.”

The old Deputy Director Ops stared across the restaurant, but he was actually staring at a list of names and faces, all long gone.

“Forty-five operations ruined, twenty-two men betrayed—eighteen Russians and four from the satellites. Fourteen of them executed. And all because that warped little serial killer-by-proxy wanted a big house and a Jaguar.”

Nigel Irvine did not want to intrude upon private grief, but he murmured, “You should have done it yourself, in-house.”

“I know, I know. We all know now.”

“And Monk?” asked Irvine. Carey Jordan gave a short laugh. The waiter, now wishing to clear away the last table in the empty restaurant, shimmered by waving the bill. Irvine gestured that it be placed in front of him. The waiter hovered until a credit card was placed upon it, then went off to the cash register.

“Yes, Monk, Well, he didn’t know either, That day was Presidents’ Day, a federal public holiday. So he stayed at home, I guess. There was nothing on the news until the following morning. And that was when the damn letter arrived.”

Washington, February 1994

THE letter came on the 22nd, the day after President’s Day, when mail deliveries resumed.

It was a crisp white envelope and from the frank Monk could see it was sent from the mail room at Langley and addressed to his home, not his office.

Inside it was another envelope bearing the crest of a U.S. Embassy. On the front was typed: Mr. Jason Monk, c/o Central Mail Room, CIA Headquarters Building, Langley, Virginia. And someone had scrawled “over.” Monk turned it over. On the back the same hand had written: “Delivered by hand to our embassy, Vilnius, Lithuania. Guess you know the guy?” As it bore no stamp, the inner envelope had clearly come to the States in the diplomatic pouch.

Inside this was a third envelope, of much inferior quality, with fragments of wood pulp visible in the texture. It was addressed in quaint English “Please”—underlined three times—“pass forward to Mr. Jason Monk at CIA. From a friend.”

The actual letter was inside this. It was written on paper so frail that the leaves almost fell apart at the touch Lavatory paper? The flyleaves of an old, cheap paperback book? Could have been.

The writing was in Russian, the hand shaky, written with an uncertain point in black ink. At the top it was headed:

Nizhni Tagil, September, 1993.