Palace of Treason

40

The morning after his escape, Angevine stood on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Paris. Traffic on Boulevard Lannes was Gallic insanity: Two lanes of the broad and normally graceful avenue during pointe du matin — morning rush hour — became an untidy, four-lane mass of blue exhaust, honking horns, and overwrought Parisians. His escape had gone off without a hitch: No alerts had arrived at Baltimore-Washington International. He had compulsively decided to risk a direct flight from BWI to Amsterdam, and immediately went to the Central Station and took the high-speed Thalys train to Paris Nord. In the borderless European Unionq — thanks to the Schengen Agreement of 1995 — there were no internal passport controls anywhere. The only record of his travel would be his name on the flight manifest from the Baltimore flight, but after arrival in Amsterdam, he was gone, disappeared. And based on other defectors’ escapes over the decades, CIA moreover would assume that he was already in Moscow.

Arriving in Paris, Angevine went directly to his aunt’s dormer apartment on the top floor of the building at 11 Quai de Bourbon on the Île Saint-Louis, the lozenge-shaped island in the River Seine upstream of and connected to the larger Île de la Cité. His widowed aunt was his late father’s sister, deaf and addled, but most important, the crone had a different last name. There would be no hotel registration cards, no tracing him to this apartment. The apartment was cluttered but comfortable, bookshelves bursting with papers and ceramic figures. It smelled like cats and cabbage. From the grimy windows of the spare bedroom he could look out onto the Right Bank and, just over the trees, see the mansard towers of l’Hôtel de ville, city hall. Angevine listened to the hourly bells in Notre Dame Cathedral: He was home again — at least it felt that way — and he could operate here. And he wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow the astonished Russians would change his cryptonym from TRITON to LAZARUS.

That’s what he thought. Now he was on the sidewalk, nursing a bruised biceps, and looking back through the barred gate at a beefy embassy guard with no neck who had frog-marched him out of the consular section, past amused Frenchmen waiting for their visas, and out the gate with a shove. Angevine felt like screaming at the ape — they had no idea the mistake they were making — but people in a line outside the gate were staring and he didn’t want to attract attention. He had bellowed at the startled receptionist inside too, repeating his last name, spelling it, demanding to see someone with authority, claiming to have a professional connection to Madame Zarubina in Washington, DC. This all meant nothing to the young receptionist — she was the wife of a junior vice consul — but she was familiar with the type of bezumtsy, the madmen who often appeared in the visa office, drawn by the allure of a foreign embassy and convinced they were engaged in undefined but important missions involving, typically, either outer space travel or spy work. The receptionist pressed the button under the counter while taking down the man’s local telephone number to placate him until the guard appeared from a side door to throw him out.

The receptionist told her husband about this latest fruitcake over lunch of blanquette de veau, a silky, milk-white veal stew, at the nearby Brasserie Alaux on the Rue de la Faisanderie. The husband had heard the name Zarubina before, though he couldn’t recall what it had been about, except it had something to do with them upstairs. When dealing with them, it always paid to be careful. After lunch, the vice consul retrieved the fruitcake’s scrawled name and number from his wife’s notepad and went upstairs, to the grilled day-gate of the rezidentura, and pressed the bell. There was no movement in the corridor for half a minute, then the sounds of footsteps. The clunky matron Zyuganova — it was whispered throughout the embassy that she had been a favorite of Andropov’s who had brought her with him from the KGB when he became general secretary of the Party — stood silently, looking at him through the screen. A real Bolshevik, this one, thought the young vice consul, not many of them left. In a brief sentence he explained what he was doing there, and handed her the scrap of paper through the mail slot.

“In case it is something important,” he said, bowing a little at the waist.

“Thank you, comrade,” said Zyuganova, with a face that betrayed nothing. Who is she calling comrade? thought the vice consul as he headed for the stairwell.

Zyuganova wrote the number in a steno pad, then took the original note to the rezident, who characteristically did not like discussing operational matters with this woman, this cast-iron Soviet throwback apparatchik — he had been saddled with her as zampolit, a political advisor from the Center — but he listened as she said the fruitcake visitor had mentioned Zarubina, and they had all heard about her death in Washington — gossip got around faster than intel reports — so it was probably important. Ekaterina Zyuganova smoothed her elaborate upswept hair last in style during the Khrushchev era, and argued that quick action was of the essence: The Paris rezidentura should attempt to contact this American and meet with him as soon as possible. She did not mention that she knew everything about TRITON and the mole hunt after talking to her son, nor did she raise the importance of all this to Alexei, who would be vindicated, exonerated, and restored if the American mole were identified.

The Paris rezident didn’t like any of it. He was thinking of his own equities, and was nervous about the counterintelligence pressures he had been feeling lately on the street from the DST, the French internal service. He saw danger signals everywhere: No one knew what had happened in Washington, whether it was a flap and an arrest, but when someone like Zarubina dies, it probably wasn’t good news. Now an unvetted madman miraculously appears in Paris, asking for contact with SVR. He wasn’t buying it, this probably was a trap — the Americans were aggressive, probably in league with the French. He smelled ambush, provocation, a dispatched double agent.

Zyuganova recognized the signs of timorous careerism in the rezident, sitting sweating behind his desk, but she was determined to spur Yasenevo to action: If the Paris rezident would not act, they could at least send a telegram to Moscow, with the details of the fruitcake’s appearance, to let them decide. As a concession to her seniority and vestigial influence in Yasenevo, they drafted an urgent cable to the Center together. It might be as long as a day before Moscow responded. Zyuganova waited an hour, then called her son on the Vey-Che line and told him the whole story.

“I am coming to Paris,” Zyuganov said. He wanted TRITON’s Paris number.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Zyuganova snapped. “You have been instructed to remain at work. You may not travel.” She knew the perilous position sonny boy was in, and the importance — the necessity — of obeying orders and coming out of this affair in one piece. Survival in SVR was not easy: Ekaterina knew how the chudovishche, the monster, dormant under the surface could, with terrifying speed, emerge and devour miscreants. During her forty years in the Service she had followed the rules and spouted the cant, out-Heroding Herod from her seats on the Collegium of the KGB, on the staff of the Central Committee, and in the office of the chairman of the Party.

So it was with a mixture of alarm and anger that Zyuganova greeted her son when he appeared at her apartment in the fashionable Parisian suburb of Neuilly a day later. He was ill-dressed in a cloth coat and baggy pants, and he was unshaven. His eyes had that certain glassiness that the mother recognized as the augury of one of his Lubyanka moods, unpredictable and vicious. The Center had already sent an advisory to the rezidentura that Zyuganov was headed for Paris — he had departed from Vnukovo airport with his civilian passport, violating the restrictions of the ongoing investigation set by SVR inspectors. The Center had instructed the Paris rezidentura to escort Zyuganov — if he appeared at the embassy — immediately to the airport and put him on the next flight to Moscow. He wasn’t officially a fugitive, but unless he returned immediately, Zyuganova knew, he would be ruined, whatever the outcome with TRITON. She resolved to save her son by turning him in.

Zyuganov was no longer thinking clearly, much less rationally. He was aware only of an animal need to uncover the name of the mole, and if skipping out of the country against orders and dangerously flitting into a possible American intelligence ambush was the only way to do it, then that is what he was going to do. His mother stood in the middle of her tasteful apartment speaking to him with that Central Committee tone of voice that, depending on the point she wanted to make and the height of her emotion, varied from a steely monotone to a full-throated bellow. She was bellowing at him now, furious at his stupidity, furious that her forty-something-year-old son had disobeyed her, had disobeyed the State. Govniuk! Shit for brains.

Ekaterina walked to the side table in the living room and picked up the telephone. Security from the nearby embassy on the other side of the Bois would be here in two minutes, to escort her son back home, stuffed in a wicker laundry basket if necessary. She identified herself to the telephone operator and asked to be transferred to the rezident. That’s the last thing she remembered clearly. Zyuganov came up behind his mother, swung his fist, and hit her on the side of the neck. She groaned, dropped the telephone, and fell to the parquet floor. Shaking her head, she looked up and saw what countless prisoners in the cellars had seen — the freezing glower of a butcher at midnight — but what no mother wants to see reflected in the face of her mal’chik, her baby boy. Zyuganov ripped the phone out of the wall.

Ekaterina heaved herself to her feet and staggered into her bedroom holding her neck — another telephone was on the night table. Zyuganov was behind her and pushed her violently onto the bed. Zyuganova screamed at him, called his name, tried to break through the psychotic tantrum that blazed in his eyes. Her diminutive son leaped on her and his fingers brushed across a garment in plastic fresh from the teinturier, the dry cleaner, and he wrapped the billowing film around her head, once, twice, and strained it tight under her chin. Zyuganov’s tooth-baring grimace was inches from his mother’s face, and he watched her eyes go wide, and her open mouth sucked in plastic, and her head shook side to side, desperately trying to get oxygen. He pressed down on top of her and held on tight until her heaving slowed, her legs stopped kicking, and the familiar shudder — well known to Zyuganov — passed through her, and she stared at him through her shroud. He rolled off her, then went through her pockets. Too easy: He had TRITON’s phone number. He knew he had to get out of the apartment immediately. He rummaged in drawers on his hurried way out.

As he walked away from the building, Zyuganov saw a Russian Embassy Peugeot pull up — the diplomatic plates on the car and the bullet heads of the occupants were unmistakable. They’d find his mother, but they could not positively connect him to that. The French police would want to question him. But it wouldn’t matter, he told himself irrationally. He would return triumphant to Moscow with proof that Egorova was in the pay of CIA, and he would be vindicated, congratulated, promoted. Wild thoughts of bringing TRITON back with him — a gift for Putin’s trophy wall — caromed in his head.

Zyuganov walked quickly past the shops and apartment buildings along Rue de Longchamp to the Pont de Neuilly metro and cleared the area. As he rode rocking into the center of Paris — he planned to call TRITON from one of the phone-card-operated booths in the Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann — his distracted mind skipped over the vinyl long-play record of his memory. Events had come in a rush: the traitor Solovyov had disappeared; Egorova was a guest of Putin; the Washington meeting with TRITON had imploded; Zarubina was dead; TRITON appeared in Paris, asking for contact; his mother had called; he had come to Paris; and he had resolved outstanding issues with her. By tonight he would be talking to TRITON, and he could return to Moscow triumphant. Troubles with Putin would evaporate, and recriminations involving Yevgeny would fade away.

What he didn’t know was that the president of the Russian Federation had his own timetable.

Boil peeled pearl onions and sliced mushrooms in water and butter until glossy and soft. Cover cubed veal, rough-cut onions, carrots, celery, and bouquet garni with water, bring to a boil, then simmer until the veal is fork-tender. Strain the meat, reserve the broth, and discard the vegetables and bouquet. Make a roux, incorporate the broth, and boil until the sauce thickens. Add pearl onions, mushrooms, cream, salt, pepper, and veal, and continue simmering. Temper egg yolks and whisk into the stew, but do not boil. Add lemon juice and serve with potato puree or white rice.