Jack Ryan 5 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin (9 page)

“Good morning, Comrade Colonel,” a voice said from five meters away.

“And to you, Comrade Academician,” Misha greeted his fellow regular. His hands were wrapped tightly around his bundle of branches while he waited for the sweat to begin. It didn't take long—the room temperature was nearly one hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit. He breathed carefully, as the experienced ones did. The aspirins he'd taken with his morning tea were beginning to work, though his head was still heavy and the sinuses around his eyes swollen. He swatted the branches across his back, as though to exorcize the poisons from his body.

“And how is the Hero of Stalingrad this morning?” the academic persisted.

“About as well as the genius of the Ministry of Education.” This drew a painful laugh. Misha never could remember his name . . . Ilya Vladimirovich Somethingorother. What sort of fool could laugh during a hangover? The man drank because of his wife, he said. You drink to be free of her, do you? You boast of the times you've fucked your secretary, when I would trade my soul for one more look at Elena's face. And my sons' faces, he told himself. My two handsome sons. It was well to remember these things on such mornings.

“Yesterday's Pravda spoke of the arms negotiations,” the man persisted. “Is there hope for progress?”

“I have no idea,” Misha replied.

An attendant came in. A young man, perhaps twenty-five or so and short. He counted heads in the room.

“Does anyone wish a drink?” he asked. Drinking was absolutely forbidden in the baths, but as any true Russian would say, that merely made the vodka taste better.

“No!” came the reply in chorus. No one was the least interested in the hair of the dog this morning, Misha noted with mild surprise. Well, it was the middle of the week. On a Saturday morning it would be very different.

“Very well,” the attendant said on the way out the door. “There will be fresh towels outside, and the pool heater has been repaired. Swimming is also fine exercise, Comrades. Remember to use the muscles that you are now baking, and you will be refreshed all day.”

Misha looked up. So this is the new one.

“Why do they have to be so damned cheerful?” asked a man in the corner.

“He is cheerful because he is not a foolish old drunk!” another answered. That drew a few chuckles.

“Five years ago vodka didn't do this to me. I tell you, quality control is not what it used to be,” the first went on.

“Neither is your liver, Comrade!”

“A terrible thing to get old.” Misha turned around to see who said that. It was a man barely fifty, whose swollen belly was the color of dead fish and who smoked a cigarette, also in violation of the rules.

“A more terrible thing not to, but you young men have forgotten that!” he said automatically, and wondered why. Heads came up and saw the burn scars on his back and chest. Even those who did not know who Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov was knew that this was not a man to be trifled with. He sat quietly for another ten minutes before leaving.

The attendant was outside the door when he emerged. The Colonel handed over his branches and towel, then walked off to the cold-water showers. Ten minutes later he was a new man, the pain and depression of the vodka gone, and the strain behind him. He dressed quickly and walked downstairs to where his car was waiting. His sergeant noted the change in his stride and wondered what was so curative about roasting yourself like a piece of meat.

The attendant had his own task. On asking again a few minutes later, it turned out that two people in the steam room had changed their minds. He trotted out the building's back door to a small shop whose manager made more money selling drink “on the left” than he did by dry-cleaning. The attendant returned with a half-liter bottle of “Vodka”—it had no brand name as such; the premium Stolychnaya was made for export and the elite—at a little over double the market price. The imposition of sales restrictions on alcohol had begun a whole new—and extremely profitable—part of the city's black market. The attendant had also passed along a small film cassette that his contact had handed over with the birch branches. For his part, the bath attendant was also relieved. This was his only contact. He didn't know the man's name, and had spoken the code phrase with the natural fear that this part of the CIA's
Moscow
network had long since been compromised by the KGB's counter-intelligence department, the dreaded Second Chief Directorate. His life was already forfeit and he knew it. But he had to do something. Ever since his year in
Afghanistan
, the things he'd seen, and the things he'd been forced to do. He wondered briefly who that scarred old man was, but reminded himself that the man's nature and identity were not his concern.

The dry-cleaning shop catered mainly to foreigners, providing service to reporters, businessmen, and a few diplomats, along with the odd Russian who wished to protect clothing purchased abroad. One of these picked up an English overcoat, paid the three rubles, and left. She walked two blocks to the nearest Metro station, taking the escalator down to catch her train on the Zhdanovsko-Krasnopresnenskaya line, the one marked in purple on the city maps. The train was crowded, and no one could have seen her pass the cassette. In fact, she herself didn't see the face of the man. He in turn made his way off the train at the next station, Pushkinskaya, and crossed over to Gor'kovskaya Station. One more transfer was made ten minutes later, this one to an American who was on his way to the embassy a little late this morning, having stayed long at a diplomatic reception the previous night.

His name was Ed Foley; he was the press attaché at the embassy on Ulitsa
Chaykovskogo. He and his wife, Mary Pat, another CIA agent, had been in
Moscow
for nearly four years, and both were looking forward to putting this grim, gray town behind them once and for all. They had two children, both of whom had been denied hot dogs and ball games long enough.

It wasn't that their tour of duty hadn't been successful. The Russians knew that CIA had a number of husband-wife teams in the field, but the idea that spies would take their children abroad wasn't something that the Soviets could accept easily. There was also the matter of their cover. Ed Foley had been a reporter with the New York Times before joining the State Department—because, as he explained it, the money wasn't much different and a police reporter never traveled farther than
Attica
. His wife stayed home with the children for the most part—though she did substitute-teach when needed at the Anglo-American School at 78 Leninsky Prospekt—often taking them out in the snow. Their older son played on a junior hockey team, and the KGB officers who trailed them around had it written up in their file that Edward Foley II was a pretty good wingman for a seven-year-old. The Soviet government's one real annoyance with the family was the elder Foley's inordinate curiosity about street crime in their capital, which was at its worst a far cry from what he had written about in
New York City
. But that proved that he was relatively harmless. He was far too obviously inquisitive to be any kind of intelligence officer. They, after all, did everything possible to be inconspicuous.

Foley walked the last few blocks from the Metro station. He nodded politely to the militiaman who guarded the door to the grimly decorous building, then to the Marine sergeant inside before going to his office. It wasn't much. The embassy was officially described in the State Department's USSR Post Report as “cramped and difficult to maintain.” The same writer might call the burned-out shell of a
South Bronx
tenement a “fixer-upper,” Foley thought. In the building's last renovation, his office had been remade from a storage room and broom closet into a marginally serviceable cubicle about ten feet square. The broom closet, however, was his private darkroom, and that was why the CIA station had had one of its people in this particular room for over twenty years, though Foley was the first station chief to be housed there.

Only thirty-three, tall but very thin, Foley was an Irishman from
Queens
whose intellect was mated to an impossibly slow heart rate and a pokerface that had helped him earn his way through Holy Cross. Recruited by CIA in his senior year, he'd spent four years with the Times to establish his own personal “legend.” He was remembered in the city room as an adequate, if rather lazy reporter who turned out workmanlike copy but never would really go anywhere. His editor hadn't minded losing him to government service, since his departure made room for a youngster from
Columbia
's
School
of
Journalism
with hustle and a real nose for what was happening. The current Times correspondent in
Moscow
had described him to his own colleagues and contacts as a nebbish, and rather a dull one at that, and in doing so gave Foley the most sought-after compliment in the business of espionage: Him? He's not smart enough to be a spy. For this and several other reasons, Foley was entrusted with running the Agency's longest-lived, most productive agent-in-place, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, code name C
ARDINAL
. The name itself, of course, was sufficiently secret that only five people within the Agency knew that it meant more than a red-caped churchman with princely diplomatic rank.

Raw C
ARDINAL
information was classified Special Intelligence/Eyes Only-Δ, and there were only six Δ-cleared officials in the entire American government. Every month the code word for the data itself was changed. This month's name was S
ATIN
, for which less than twenty others were cleared. Even under that title, the data was invariably paraphrased and subtly altered before going outside the Δ fraternity.

Foley took the film cassette from his pocket and locked himself in the darkroom. He could go through the developing process drunk and half-asleep. In fact, a few times, he had. Within six minutes, the job was done, and Foley cleaned up after himself. His former editor in
New York
would have found his neatness in
Moscow
surprising.

Foley followed procedures that had been unchanged for nearly thirty years. He reviewed the six exposed frames through a magnifying glass of the type used to inspect 35mm slides. He memorized each frame in a few seconds, and began typing a translation on his personal portable typewriter. It was a manual whose well-worn cloth ribbon was too frayed to be of use to anyone, particularly the KGB. Like many reporters, Foley was not a good typist. His pages bore strikeovers and X-outs. The paper was chemically treated, and you couldn't use an eraser on it. It took nearly two hours for him to finish the transcription. When done, he made a final check of the film to guarantee that he hadn't left anything out, nor made any serious grammatical mistakes. Satisfied, but with a tremor that he never quite got over, he crumpled the film into a ball and set it in a metal ashtray, where a wooden kitchen match reduced the only direct evidence of C
ARDINAL
's existence to ashes. He then smoked a cigar to disguise the distinctive smell of burning celluloid. The folded typescript pages went into his pocket, and Foley walked upstairs to the embassy's communications room. Here he drafted an innocuous dispatch to
Box 4108
,
State Department
,
Washington
: “Reference your 29 December. Expense report en route via pouch. Foley. Ends.” As press attaché, Foley had to pick up a lot of bar bills for former colleagues who held him in contempt that he didn't bother returning; he had to do quite a few expense reports for the cookie-pushers at Foggy Bottom, and it amused him greatly that his press brethren worked so hard at maintaining his cover for him.

Next he checked with the embassy's courier-in-residence. Though little known, this was one aspect of life at the
Moscow
post that hadn't changed since the 1930s. There was always a courier to take the bag out, though nowadays he had other duties, too. The courier was also one of four people in the embassy who knew which government agency Foley really worked for. A retired Army warrant officer, he had a DSC and four Purple Hearts for flying casualties out of
Vietnam
battlefields. When he smiled at people, he did so in the Russian way, with the mouth but almost never the eyes.

“Feel like flying home tonight?”

The man's eyes lit up. “With the Super Bowl this Sunday? You're kidding. Stop by your office around four?”

“Right.” Foley closed the door and returned to his office. The courier booked himself on the British Airways 5:40
P.M.
flight to Heathrow.

The difference in time zones between
Washington
and
Moscow
virtually guaranteed that Foley's messages reached D.C. early in the morning. At six, a CIA employee walked into the State Department mail room and extracted the message forms from a dozen or so boxes, then resumed his drive to
Langley
. A senior field officer in the Operations Directorate, he was barred from any further overseas duty due to an injury sustained in Budapest—where a street hoodlum had fractured his skull, and been locked up for five years by the irate local police. If only they'd known, the agent thought, they'd have given him a medal. He delivered the messages to the appropriate offices, and went to his own office.

The message form was lying on Bob Ritter's desk when he got to work at
7:25
. Ritter was the Agency's Deputy Director for Operations. His turf, technically known as the Directorate of Operations, included all of the CIA's field officers and all of the foreign citizens they recruited and employed as agents. The message from
Moscow
—as usual there was more than one, but this one counted the most—was immediately tucked into his personal file cabinet, and he prepared himself for the
8:00
brief, delivered every day by the night-watch officers.

“It's open.” Back in
Moscow
, Foley looked up when the knock came at the door. The courier stepped in.

“The plane leaves in an hour. I have to hustle.”

Foley reached into his desk and pulled out what looked like an expensive silver cigarette case. He handed it over, and the courier handled it carefully before tucking it into his breast pocket. The typed pages were folded inside, along with a tiny pyrotechnic charge. If the case were improperly opened, or subjected to a sudden acceleration—like being dropped to a hard floor—the charge would go off and destroy the flash paper inside. It might also set fire to the courier's suit, which explained his care in handling it.