Long Shot

10

The shopping center was a fashion rainbow. After decades of living in a drab communist world, where utilitarian clothes matched black and gray skies and hopeless faces, Tallinn had charged into the modern world. It had become a place where clothing mattered and it was permissible for a woman to be beautiful. The mall was lined with shops that featured the latest in women’s wear, and business was brisk even at the early hour. Clothing was coming in and going out of the loading docks on wheeled racks that darted through the corridors. Despite her personal anxiety, Anneli Kallasti could not suppress a surge of excitement as she went inside with Swanson, beneath the painted gazes of mannequins dressed like strutting peacocks.

Rags occupied a lot of space in a far corner, from which it had access from several directions. The signs were modest, but the prices were not. Large brown easy chairs were scattered about, with magazines on tables, to help husbands wait while their ladies tried on different outfits and were tended with care by professional seamstresses and the sales staff.

Swanson told the woman at the cash register in front that he had an appointment with the owner, and Anneli repeated the request in Estonian. They were pointed to a hallway cluttered with racks of garments. The door at the end opened and a willowy blonde sailed out on a big smile, calling out loud enough for others to hear, “Kyle! You are a scoundrel for not calling me earlier! And Anneli, too! How delightful to see you again. Both of you get in here.” She threw her arms around Kyle and leaned close enough to whisper, “I’m Calico.”

She hustled them into the office and shut the door, then turned to Anneli, and her character changed. “Oh, you poor girl. You poor thing,” Calico said as she wrapped the bewildered girl close to her in a hug. “You poor, poor thing. You are safe now. You are safe.” The tight, protective wall that Anneli had built around her emotions since the previous afternoon burst at the outpouring of sympathy, and the two women clung together, crying. Calico stroked the girl as if comforting a kitten.

She was tall, even taller in her stylish heels, and wore a soft cotton dress of Spanish blue that touched two inches above the knees. A gold wedding band twinkled on her left hand. She let the weeping Anneli cry for two full minutes before releasing her and guiding her to a sofa. Calico sat beside her, still holding her hand, but turned to business.

“We don’t have much time. I want to get Anneli under cover as fast as possible. A bit more advance warning would have been helpful.”

“There was no time. It is what it is.” He had skimmed the office while the women were in consolation mode and noticed that beside the trappings of a busy business in the clothing trade, there were no personal mementoes, family pictures, diplomas or certificates on the walls or the shelves. “Who are you?”

“My name is Jan Hollings, and I was given only a short brief by our people here and from Helsinki last night. Your reputation is that you are a package of problems, Swanson. You like to work alone, even if it screws everybody else.”

Kyle took another chair and leaned forward. “I get results. Plus, Anneli here was worth my trip to Narva. She is a brave and very intelligent kid who has already figured out that we are with the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Anneli finished dabbing her eyes with a paper tissue. “Are you with the CIA, too, Mrs. Hollings?”

Calico gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Call me Jan, and yes, I am. Does that bother you, dear?”

The dark-haired girl’s lips were in a tight line and her eyes were pools of determination. “No. Not at all. Will you help me find my boyfriend?”

“I cannot promise that we will be successful, but I can promise that we will try to find Brokk, and we have a lot of tools. Will you help us find him?”

“Yes! Anything you want, I will do! I must find him.”

Swanson choked back a laugh. Calico was slick. She had signed up Anneli as a new recruit in less than five minutes, a catch who was going to pay large dividends with her language skills, intimate knowledge of the Estonian culture and the people, and a hatred for the Russians that flamed white hot.

He studied Anneli. She was ready to move on. “Okay, then. I’m going to leave you with Jan. I have to get back to the States.”

The girl jumped to her feet with a look of alarm. “When will you come back? When will I see you again?” The thought of losing her security blanket was startling.

“In this business, who knows? I hope so. You take care of yourself, and I will keep tabs on how you’re doing.” That was a lie. He did not plan to ever return to Estonia. “Good luck.”

She launched herself at him and began crying again. Calico watched the interplay between them and would include it in her report. The girl genuinely admired Swanson, who, although kind, did not return the affection. He just wanted out of there. Anneli gave him a kiss on the cheek, and disengaged. “Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”

“I hope we find Brokk. I liked him,” Kyle said. He gave her hand a final squeeze and walked out. He had ten minutes to get back to the hotel and meet the shitbird colonel, Thomas Markey.

“Mister Swanson.” The hotel concierge greeted him in the spacious lobby as Kyle was heading for the breakfast buffet restaurant. “Your guests have already arrived.”

Guests? Kyle asked himself. Probably the two CID bird-dogs are with the big guy. The room was long and comfortable, and a few customers were eating and reading newspapers or fiddling with their portable computers through the hotel’s free Wi-Fi. A steaming covered buffet table was along the near wall. At the very back, beside the kitchen’s swinging doors, four men were at two tables. The CID types were in front, quiet and as inconspicuous as a pair of concrete gargoyles. Behind them were two other suits, and one waved to him. Kyle poured a cup of coffee at the buffet, went over and took a chair at their table. No one offered a handshake.

“I am Deke Cooper, the local chief of station. This is Colonel Tom Markey, U.S. Army.” Cooper was a short, slim man with an old-style crew cut that was going gray.

“Why are we meeting in a public place right by the kitchen doors?” Swanson watched a waiter burst through the swinging portals carrying a tray for the hot table.

“Elite spook tradecraft, my boy. With all of the noise and pot-banging and shouts in that kitchen, eavesdropping is impossible. Anyway, it’s good to finally meet you, Swanson. Everything go well with Calico? She’s one of our best. Like you, she is a legitimate business executive who has established an incredible network. Trots all over Europe, even into Russia.”

“We are talking about confidential matters in front of this colonel?” Kyle was puzzled. The man might be an army officer, but he was still an outsider.

Deke Cooper laughed. “Set your mind at ease, pal. We are the CIA, but we don’t have any secrets left, thanks to Mister Snowden and other traitors over the years. Truth be told, we probably have not had a real secret since about 1956. The colonel has more than the necessary clearances, and Calico is his wife.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Kyle muttered and drank some coffee. “I’m going to get something to eat.” He needed to buy some time to think, so he went to the buffet and grew hungry as he went down the line. He loaded up and went back to the table. More coffee.

After a few bites, he said, “Colonel, she introduced herself as Jan Hollings. Not the same last name as you.”

“For the sake of her job, she didn’t take my last name.”

“So how can I help the U.S. Army today?” he asked after tasting a warm slice of local bread.

“Ivan Strakov,” replied ColonelMarkey. “My old enemy, Ivan Strakov.” The voice was soft but filled with purpose. He had intelligent brown eyes, a militarily correct posture, and a thick wave of sandy hair. “You are going to debrief him during the coming weeks, and I want you to let me know what he says. Through back channels, of course.”

Swanson ate some eggs that had been scrambled with cheese and a mild spice. He shot a glance at Cooper. “Sorry, Colonel, I can’t do that. I don’t know what you have been told about me, but it’s wrong.”

“You work for the CIA, Mister Swanson. Deke has cleared my request.”

Kyle swallowed the food and chased it with coffee. Then he pushed back a bit from the table and checked the surroundings before speaking. The kitchen roar was continuing. “Now, guys, that is technically correct, but not exactly accurate. Things have gone off track. I do work with the CIA, but I am neither a spy nor an analyst, and Deke is not my boss. The only person to whom I answer is Martin Atkins, the deputy director for clandestine services, back at Langley. I do specific special assignments on rare occasions, and that is all. This whole thing of coming to visit Estonia was a surprise to me, and I don’t like surprises. I will be going back to the States as soon as possible.”

Cooper did not lose his good mood. “You are flying to Brussels later today and will dance with Ivan. That’s firm. After that, who knows?”

Kyle snorted and went back to the food. “I know what happens next, Deke. Brussels is the end of the line for me. After I corroborate Ivan’s story, then he is all yours. Stick him full of truth serum or shove apples up his ass to make him talk. I don’t care. I have to get back to work.”

The colonel shot him a long look. “I know more about Ivan Strakov than you do, Swanson.”

“No argument there, Colonel Markey. You probably do. I only knew him for a few weeks many years ago when he was just a sergeant, little more than a grunt with a rifle. I still am bewildered that he tabbed me to talk with when he defected.”

The colonel finally showed some emotion. “What if I tell you that Strakov wasn’t a sergeant at the time, Swanson. Young Ivan was already an intelligence officer on assignment to evaluate and report on your Scout/Sniper program. I saw that you guys called him ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ The reason he could not shoot up to your standards is because he was never trained as a sniper at all. He was sent to join your course as a spy; he milked you like a cow.”

Kyle Swanson stopped eating and listened with growing incredulity as Markey gave him unexpected information, with Deke Cooper offering occasional side comments. After ten minutes, the breakfast adjourned and they all trooped up to Kyle’s suite for privacy. The two CID investigators stood guard in the hallway outside.

Markey said that he had been Strakov’s “mirror.” Their careers had roughly run in parallel, on opposite sides of the strategic aisle, and they had parried frequently in both official and social settings. Ivan and Tom knew each other, but were not friends.

“I never bought the story that he died in some little plane crash in Lake Baikal. Discarded that as soon as I heard about it. Ivan would never have taken such a chance. In that part of Russia, in this season, he would have been traveling aboard a transport with multiple engines. So I thought from the get-go that he was playing another one of his games.” The American colonel was looking from the hotel window as he spoke, as if watching spring bloom in Estonia. He was a worried man.

“Swanson, you know now that I am posted here in Tallinn, right? The official title is as a senior fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence?” The officer seemed to be growing nervous, talking to the window. “Have you wondered why that vital organization is located in this little burg of a country, right in the armpit of Russia?”

“No. I had other things on my mind. Tell me about it.”

Deke Cooper of the CIA took over. “The short version is that after the collapse of communism, Estonia was left with nothing. It had one point two million people and still had to do more than ninety percent of its trade with Russia. It was little more than a beggar state at the time. Estonia had one foot still in the nineteenth century, and one in the twentieth and both feet stuck in the mud. So the country made the radical move of betting the farm on the twenty-first century, and has since become an economic Baltic Tiger.”

Swanson said, “I couldn’t tell that over in Narva. That place is Russian to the core.”

Colonel Markey found a chair. “It is, but the country as a whole is leaving Narva behind. This is now one of the most wired places in Europe, and any kid who reaches high school without having developed his or her own app or start-up tech company is considered a slow learner, a social pariah and will probably never get laid. The Estonian government saw early on that computer science was the future. They built an infrastructure to support it, and now a lot of kids call their homeland ‘e-Stonia.’ Skype was not invented here by accident.”

Swanson saw the pieces coming together. “And that makes the boys in Moscow uncomfortable?”

“Better believe it. Back in 2008, there was a monster cyber-war hacking attack against Estonia, one of the biggest ever. It was of Russian origin, of course, although the Kremlin never admitted guilt. Everything over here was infected, spammed, or was virused like a plague. All it really did was make the Estonians work harder and get better at the game.”

“Was Ivan Strakov part of that attack?” Kyle asked.

The colonel nodded. “Yeah. It was his baby. He was deep in the background, but I recognized his shadow and fingerprints. He done it, Sherlock, which is another reason that I don’t trust that sonofabitch as far as I can throw a piano.”

“And where do I fit into this picture? Like I told you both, I am not a spy. I am not a trained interrogator. I do other things.” Swanson was dizzy with this new information. “I plan to swing by Brussels, do the thing with Ivan, then go home and tend to my own business. Nothing you have said, while surprising and interesting, indicates that I should do otherwise.”

Deke Cooper moved around, stretched, then folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned against a wall. “Fact is, Swanson, that the secret called Ivan Strakov has already leaked. Maybe he left a trail of bread crumbs, or a note, or who the hell knows, but the lid is already off of his defection. Moscow knows he has gone over to the other side, and Europe, NATO and Washington will not be able to contain it. Social media will have it within forty-eight hours. Think Snowden, man. Old Ivan is about to become a global celebrity.”

Now the colonel finally showed some emotion. “Even if everything he tells us is true, Kyle, somebody has to be willing to call bullshit. This is a chance for you to get some payback on him. Deke and the alphabet agencies will do all the donkey work of the interviews and follow-up, but you could be on the inside, because he wants you there. For some reason we cannot decipher, he needs you once again. The whole thing is much too hinky for me, because Ivan Strakov is not a cowboy; everything he does has a reason. What I want from you is gut feelings. Get me the right information, and I’ll stop him.”

“Or what?”

“Or we go to war, probably.”

“Another cyber-war between Russia and Estonia?”

“No, Kyle.” The colonel’s face grew tense. “Real war. Russia against NATO, which includes the United States.”

Swanson snapped a humorless laugh. “You guys want me to spy on the spy, then report straight to you instead of to my real boss at the CIA. Nothing wrong with that, Colonel, except it is borderline treason and I could end up in some supermax prison. Thanks for the chance to help save the world, but Deke and his boys are much more qualified for that sort of thing, so I pass. Get somebody else to carry that water. I’m going home.”