Call to Treason

THIRTY-NINE

Yuri and Svetlana Krasnov might have imagined their own fate. They possessed the genetic Russian quality of dissatisfaction, inherited from their peasant parents. What they could never have imagined was the destiny of their son.

The young couple moved to the United States during the Cold War. They lived in Arlington, Virginia, and worked in the Soviet embassy. She was a stenographer, and he was a translator. Svetlana was also a cryptographer and helped to interpret intercepted military and governmental communiqués. Yuri translated messages from American-born spies. One morning, three months after arriving, they were approached by a CIA officer. He offered them a chance to work with the Agency. The agent wanted to know who was giving them intelligence so that the CIA could distribute disinformation to the Kremlin. In exchange, when it came time for the Krasnovs to be rotated back to the Soviet Union — after eighteen months, to make sure they did not become overly comfortable with the American way of life — they would be given asylum if they chose to stay. If their collaboration were ever discovered, the Krasnovs would immediately be taken into protective custody and relocated.

The couple had learned a great deal about the United States since moving here. They liked what they saw. What’s more, they had a six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son and wanted them to grow up in a land of opportunity. A land without breadlines or restrictions on what they could say and think.

The Krasnovs were found out seven months later. A floater agent, one assigned to spy on spies, read a mole’s report and resealed it before it was turned over to Yuri for translation. The deception was discovered. The Krasnovs fled. The family was relocated to Wisconsin and given the new last name Brown, chosen by Svetlana. She was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip.

Young Fayina and her brother Vladilen grew up American, and no one could have been more of a patriot than Vlad. He joined the marines as soon as he turned eighteen and proved to be remarkably skilled with the M-14. His proficiency was the result of the years he had spent hunting with his father in the woods. Implicitly, the elder Brown wanted to be ready in case the KGB ever came looking for them. Fortunately, the collapse of the Soviet Union made that unlikely.

Vlad was so good with weapons that the Marines appointed him to a special reaction team at the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan. As part of his assignment he was sent to Camp Foster, Okinawa, to train with the new Designated Marksman Rifle. The DMR was an urban combat rifle. Before being certified, Vlad had to be able to make a moving head shot from two hundred yards and hit a stationary thumbnail-size object from the same distance.

He placed number one at the base, and among the top 1 percent of all Marine marksmen nationwide. Shortly before the Iraq War, Captain Vlad Brown was reassigned to special duty at the White House. Along with two other men, Vlad spent his nights on the roof with infrared glasses, watching for potential attackers. His DMR was worn across his back in a loose leather sling. He could have the rifle unshouldered and aimed in less than three seconds. His orders were to report any suspicious movement within three hundred yards of the White House. Vlad wore a three-ounce video camera on his left shoulder, where it would not get in the way of his DMR. The camera relayed images to Secret Service On-site Command based in the West Wing. If the SSOC determined a threat was real, Vlad would be ordered to neutralize it.

The post was quite a journey for the son of Russian defectors, unthinkable a quarter century before. The young man took some ribbing because of his very Russian name, but not too much. That was the one area where Vlad Brown was self-conscious and extremely sensitive. Though the captain passed the monthly psych evaluations, which were required for armed individuals with presidential access, his fellow marksmen sensed his name was an area to avoid. There were some things team members picked up on that psychologists did not.

Vlad was rarely called to the White House during the day. Marksmen required seven or eight hours’ sleep to be their sharpest and, besides, he did not like to be out much during the day. After seven months on the job, his eyes were accustomed to night, his body to the pleasant night air, his ears to the sounds of the evening and early morning. He did not want to do anything to upset that balance.

But the president’s chief of staff said it was important, so Captain Brown put off going to sleep, called up a staff car, and had himself driven from the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I to the White House. Upon arriving, he went directly to the SSOC office and was introduced to Darrell and Maria McCaskey of Op-Center. The former Russian citizen felt an immediate empathy with Mrs. McCaskey. Obviously, she was not a native to these shores.

Secret Service Agent Stephen Kearns — the son of Greek immigrants — offered Vlad a seat in the small office. He declined. Mrs. McCaskey was standing, and the officer would not sit in her presence. Her husband introduced himself to Vlad. He looked as tired as the marine captain felt.

“Thank you for coming,” McCaskey said. “Captain Brown, we are investigating the assassination of William Wilson at the Hay-Adams Hotel. I assume you’ve heard about it?”

“I have, sir.”

“We understand from Agent Kearns that you wear a small video camera equipped with night-vision capabilities,” McCaskey said. “We would like to look at the images from that night.”

“We believe the individual we are seeking walked past the park, past your observation post,” Mrs. McCaskey added.

“Agent Kearns, do you have any objection?” Vlad asked. Because of the cooperative arrangement between the Secret Service and the marines, dual releases were required before a third party could examine White House security tapes.

“Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey have been cleared by the office of the chief of staff,” Kearns informed him.

“Then you have my permission, sir,” Vlad told the Op-Center officer.

“Thank you,” McCaskey said.

Agent Kearns had booted the digital videodisc on which the images were stored. The SSOC officer swung the monitor toward the McCaskeys. The couple must have friends in high places to have been given access to these images. Few people even knew they existed.

The image was time-coded and bookmarked in five-minute chunks. Kearns jumped directly to the times the McCaskeys wished to see. Vlad stood back while Darrell and Maria bent very close to the monitor and to each other. There was something touching about it.

A woman walked past the screen.

“Hold on!” Darrell McCaskey said. “Can you hold the image and enlarge it?”

Agent Kearns obliged. A blurry green image of a woman filled the screen. She was walking away from the hotel toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Mr. McCaskey pointed at the monitor with his pinkie. He traced what appeared to be a faint smudge of dress beneath the woman’s long jacket.

“See the line under the hem?” McCaskey asked his wife excitedly.

“Yes,” Mrs. McCaskey said.

“What do you think?”

“That could be satin,” she replied.

“Sir, if you give me a minute, I’ll extrapolate the color information and sharpen the image,” Kearns said.

“Please do,” Mr. McCaskey said.

No one spoke as the computer did its job. Though the image was entirely in tones of green, the image processor was capable of matching a color to each particular shade. The saturation of green corresponded to the comparative brightness of a color. By removing the green and matching the remaining light intensity to a color, the image could be accurately colorized. At the same time, the computer scanned the picture to differentiate between legitimate information and pictorial noise such as blurred motion, video snow, and other artifacts. It removed these flaws by replicating information from adjoining pixels.

Within two minutes, the woman looked as if she had posed for a profile picture in daylight. The McCaskeys studied it for a minute, then asked Agent Kearns to print the image. He obliged. He handed the eight-by-ten to Mr. McCaskey.

“Do you recognize the individual?” Kearns asked.

“Yes,” Mr. McCaskey replied. “Gentlemen, you have been of immeasurable assistance. Thank you.”

Mrs. McCaskey smiled. It was formal but sincere. For Vlad, it was worth coming back to work. One day, when his assignment ended and the pressure of his job was behind him, Vlad hoped to find a woman like that. A woman with poise, intensity, and beauty.

The captain returned to his car and driver. Vlad had to admit it was encouraging how people from four nations had just worked together to solve the death of someone from a fifth country. There was probably a lesson in that for the United Nations and the world in general. But he was too tired to search for it. And maybe it was not worth analyzing. As Yuri used to say with a dismissive wave of his hand, “It’s politics. My keeshkee cannot take it anymore.”

Maybe the Krasnov gene pool and intestines were averse to chaos in general. It was lunch hour, and Vlad found the traffic disturbing. It was thick with growling buses, limousines, and Washingtonians who honked at tourists who slowed as they passed each familiar landmark. Vlad shut his tired eyes, and the comfort of darkness returned. Along with a troubling realization.

He shared a love of nighttime with someone else. Someone whose values were the antithesis of his own: the assassin.

Vlad nudged this thought from his mind. It was way beyond his pay grade. Besides, the gene pool that disliked chaos also gave him something else. Something with which there was no debating. A part of him that did not want to think about this: his keeshkee.