An American Spy

3

Words have a nasty habit of catching in the imagination; they spread like hepatitis. This is why, from the beginning, her father had resisted any attempt to name his secret department. Most of the United Nations member states didn’t even know-officially, at least-that it existed, particularly America and Russia, both of whom had threatened to veto his 2002 draft proposal for an independent UN intelligence agency. So Yevgeny hadn’t proposed it at all. Instead, he’d tracked a few like-minded diplomats from Germany, Kenya, Luxembourg, Iceland, Bangladesh, Portugal, and Ghana. They found bureaucratic loopholes to fund the anonymous department, and when he passed them important intelligence, it was up to them to take it to the floor of the General Assembly.

Upon hiring Alexandra, he opened up his records to her and answered every question she posed to the fullest of his ability. For example, he explained that, from the very beginning, organization had been a problem. The Icelandic ambassador to the UN wanted him to use a Brussels office that his country had corralled for its own use. The Portuguese representative countered with his own office in Geneva. As others made their own suggestions, it quickly became apparent that each diplomat wanted personal oversight, and probably planned to bug the prospective office. So Yevgeny had to take care of it himself.

He had always had a greater enthusiasm for, and a far better grasp of, technology than his children, and in 2003 it came to his rescue, allowing him to decentralize the fledgling department. He hired two secretaries and gave them laptops. Each month they moved separately to different apartments within a network of safe houses spread throughout Europe, traveling by car or train, so that no one would have to run a computer through security checks. The two secretaries synced their laptops daily via two encrypted remote databases, sharing reports culled from agents with whom they were in continual contact. Yevgeny remained physically separate from the secretaries, though he received daily reports through his BlackBerry, and with that information made decisions he could relay back.

According to Yevgeny, it had been an agony to set up, but once the system had been established, it ran smoothly enough. Reports were fed to him, and he decided what to do with the information. A report, say, on the Portuguese dispute with Spain over the borders of Olivenca could be given to the Bangladeshi representative to put before the General Assembly, while a report concerning the hazardous Bangladesh-India border region could be handed to Portugal. In the ideal workings of his anonymous agency, all information could be made public simply by giving it to the country with no stake in its release.

By 2006, however, he was overwhelmed. It was inevitable, as his staff of primary agents grew from fifteen to twenty-eight, and his secretarial pool doubled to four. His BlackBerry beeped with fresh information throughout the day, and he was soon faced with a backlog of sensitive information he could no longer keep track of. This was why he approached Alexandra.

She’d been divorced for four months, and though her career in the London office of Berg amp; DeBurgh, specializing in intellectual property, had been going well (“rising star” had been used to describe her), she’d never made a secret of the fact that the job, like her marriage, hadn’t been satisfying in a long time. I’ve been running in place for five years, Nana.

So come work for me.

She’d taken a week to make her decision, and her yes came with one stipulation. No manipulation, no dishonesty. I’m an equal partner, or I’m not there at all.

Of course I’ll be honest with you, Little One. You’ll take over when I’m gone.

Don’t bet on it, she warned, then tested him. Why did you come to the UN?

When others had asked this question-when she, too, had asked-he’d always replied with idealistic vagaries. It was the new millennium, you understand? It was time to stop serving one nation’s petty interests and turn to the world at large. Alexandra knew him too well to have ever believed that public relations line. Now, he looked sadly at her and said, I did it to save my life. My life was the reason. That, and your brother. A pause, and then slowly he began to tell her the story.

When Milo came to them, he was fifteen years old and American to the core. His foster parents had died in a car accident, and Yevgeny brought him to Moscow to live with them, provoking weeks of family chaos. Alexandra and Natalia-and even their mother, Ekaterina-hadn’t even known of his existence. Remember what he was like? Yevgeny asked. A holy terror, but if I’m going to be honest, I’ll have to admit that those three years he was with us, from 1985 to 1988, marked the beginning of my move away from Mother Russia, toward the UN.

That caustic American teenager, in perfect Russian he’d picked up in no time at all, had called their father a KGB hypocrite. What are you-blind? You’re a criminal. You talk about the proletariat, but all you do is oppress the proletariat. You’re not even aware of your crimes. You’re stuck in a smug, petit bourgeois cocoon.

He sounded just like his mother, Yevgeny admitted.

Only once the boy had returned to America for college could Yevgeny ask himself if any of it was true. Even Ekaterina admitted that the boy wasn’t entirely wrong.

So, said Alexandra, based on a teenager’s sense of hypocrisy you changed your life?

Oh, no. It was a start, but it took more.

During the nineties, as the KGB transitioned to the FSB, Yevgeny retained his colonel’s rank and pay by playing all sides. The Yeltsin government wanted him out, but the other old men in the ranks wanted him to stay, because if he went, they were sure to follow. Then, in a fit of self-serving pragmatism, he made a deal with the young government to tie his old comrades to the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev. By 1998, his position in the FSB was secure, but he had gained a clique of enemies who, in early 2000, placed a bomb under his car. That day, Ekaterina decided to drive herself to the GUM shopping center.

Alexandra had been in London by then, a few years into her law career. She heard the news by telephone, then read it on the BBC World News Web site.

You were devastated, she said.

Of course I was. But this is the part you don’t know, so listen.

It took Yevgeny four months to track the five men responsible for her murder. Two he arrested, and the other three he killed himself.

She recoiled before catching herself-he was being honest, after all. I had no idea.

I made sure you had no idea.

That should have finished things, and for a while Yevgeny convinced himself that it had, but slowly, week by week, he grew sicker. The doctors found nothing wrong beyond his continual intake of vodka and whisky, but by the end of the year he could hardly leave the house.

Where was I then? she asked.

You were busy. And I wasn’t going to trouble you, because I knew something that the doctors didn’t know. I knew that my prodigal son had been right. Remember what he said? You’re not even aware of your crimes. He was right. I wasn’t aware of them, but my body was, and it was committing slow suicide.

The United Nations had been a remedy of sorts, and though his old colleagues sniggered about the quicksand of bureaucracy that would certainly engulf him, he felt himself, with each successful move, becoming stronger.

With each good deed? she asked cynically.

Good deeds are a matter of perspective, Little One. If you can convince yourself that what you’re doing is good, then all of you will believe it, and maybe it will be good.

So Alexandra joined her father’s house of good deeds, a shadow organization lacking even a name (though for convenience they sometimes called it the Library among themselves), and shared duties with her father. Her job lay at some crossroads between the four secretaries, the now forty-two field agents, and Yevgeny himself, for she sometimes helped him decide to whom to deliver nuggets of information. This unstable job description had been his idea, because she needed to learn about all aspects of the craft if she ever, eventually, had to step into his shoes. That she didn’t want to step into his shoes seemed beside the point.

On the Monday that Sebastian Hall’s disappearance became news, Alexandra called on Deputy Assistant Commissioner Meredith Kaye in a Hampstead pub. Earlier in the year, Yevgeny had brought sensitive information to the Metropolitan Police concerning a smuggling ring, information that the Albanian government hadn’t been interested in sharing. So when Alexandra pressed about the disappearance, Kaye hesitated only a moment before telling her about Gephel Marpa of Free Tibet, and that he’d had no reason to be staying at a hotel in a city where he lived.

“What does he say?” asked Alexandra.

“That he was escaping an argument with his wife.”

“You think he was there to meet with Sebastian Hall?”

“Maybe,” Kaye said, sipping rum and Coke, “but if so, there’s no sign they ever met. There is, however, every reason to believe that Sebastian Hall is a false name.”

“It is, Meredith. His name is Alan Drummond. American.”

The deputy assistant commissioner leaned back, wrists pressed against the edge of the bar. “Well, I’m glad I acquiesced to a drink.”

Alexandra pretended to be surprised by surveillance camera blackness around Drummond’s escape and listened with some trepidation to the CCTV chronicle of his walk and subway ride over to Hammersmith, but Kaye never mentioned the young hoodlum who wandered into the hotel-perhaps she knew it had been Alexandra or, she thought hopefully, the street camera had just been malfunctioning. They did that a lot. All Kaye said was “We’re checking license plates-assumedly he grabbed a car.”

This told her that Drummond had, in fact, followed her directions to Hammersmith before finding his own route out of the city.

Kaye said, “One more odd thing. Another guest in the hotel, a woman named Gwendolyn Davis, arrived on Friday, then checked out Saturday morning, even though she had reserved three nights. That in itself isn’t so strange, but as a matter of course we ran her papers and came up with… well, with nothing. Her American passport looks legitimate, but we’ve got no record of her entering the country. If she’s been living here a while, we have no record of her renting a place, driving a car, or anything.”

Freddy didn’t sleep over again, but they talked regularly, carefully avoiding promises. When she left town on Wednesday, though, she made the mistake of promising to call him when she got back to town. “When’ll that be?” he asked, but she didn’t have an answer for him.

From the Marylebone apartment in London, and, from Wednesday, the fourth-floor El Raval studio in Barcelona (where she’d come to talk with an agent who’d bought information from a Basque turncoat), she gathered source intelligence on New Scotland Yard’s investigation into the disappearance of Sebastian Hall. She also listened to her father share occasional tidbits from his old sparring partner, Erika Schwartz.

On Saturday morning, she took an express train to Geneva and used spare keys to get into her father’s apartment, five floors above the BHI bank on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, overlooking the harbor. She spent only a few weeks a year here, shuttling more often between Library-owned residences in London, Hong Kong, and Mexico City. Before going out again, she showered and changed, then did some work, first sending orders for two agents-one in Tokyo, the other in Kampala-to withdraw from their jobs. Each was being watched by the local police. She directed them to the Lisbon and Bologna safe houses, so the secretaries could debrief them fully.

She’d arranged dinner with an intelligence officer from the U.S. consulate who had, in the past, been friendly. Over plates of salad and foie gras de canard at the Brasserie Baloise, however, she watched the signs of his friendliness contract.

“So I asked around,” he said finally. “This guy, Drummond, was canned months ago. Whatever he’s doing, you can’t pin it on us.”

“I’m not trying to pin anything on you, Steve. I just wonder why Scotland Yard is looking for him, and why he was traveling on a passport connected to an art heist.”

Steve popped a liver-smeared toast into his mouth and chewed loudly. He was one of those Americans, the ones who couldn’t help but do everything loudly. “I wish I could help you, Alex. Really.” Then he leaned back, laying one arm over his stomach.

His face said little, but his body had spoken volumes from the moment he entered the restaurant, and she knew that while what he was saying might be technically true-he really might wish he could help her-the bigger truth was that there was an elephant in the room that he was desperate not to draw attention to. She said, “They told you to stay away from it, didn’t they?”

He suddenly noticed his defensive posture and turned his hands palms up. “They? Is that the conspiratorial They? I asked about him and just came up cold.”

There-the skin pulling back at the temples-now he was lying. “Okay, Steve. Forget about it.”

He smiled, perhaps from relief, and grabbed another toast. “Alex, don’t tell me this has to do with United Nations fiscal oversight. Every time we talk, you’re asking about something that has nothing to do with your office.”

“Of course not,” she said, winking. “I work for al Qaeda.”

Afterward, when she reported to Yevgeny, the old man said, “I think it’s time to talk to Milo. I’m flying out tomorrow.”

“It was time to talk to Milo a week ago. I don’t know why you waited.”

“You should come. Just a few days. Public service, and a little time with Milo’s family. I know Tina would love to meet you.”

“Another time,” she said.

“Did you know he’s looking for a job?”

“No, Nana. I didn’t. Have you made your pitch yet?”

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d just take the position,” he said, so she hung up.