Mirror Image

CHAPTER TWO

Keith Fields-Hutton burst into his room in the newly renovated Rossiya Hotel, tossed his key on the dresser, and ran into the bathroom. On the way, he stooped and grabbed two curled pieces of fax paper that had fallen from the dresser-top machine he'd brought with him.

This was the part of his job he hated the most. Not the danger, which was at times considerable; not the protracted hours of sitting in airports waiting for Aeroflot flights that never came, which was typical; and not the long weeks of being away from Peggy, which were most frustrating of all.

What he hated most were all those goddamn cups of tea he had to drink.

When he came to Moscow once a month, Fields-Hutton always stayed at the Rossiya, just east of the Kremlin, and took long breakfasts in their elegant café. It gave him time to read the newspapers from front to back. More importantly, constantly draining his teacup gave Andrei, the waiter, a reason to come over with refills and three, four, or sometimes five fresh tea bags. Attached to the string of every bag was a label that bore the name Chashka Chai on the outside. Inside each tag was a circular spot of microfilm which Fields-Hutton pocketed when no one was looking. Most of the time, the maître d' was looking, so Fields-Hutton had to recover the film when other patrons came into the restaurant, distracting him.

Andrei was one of Peggy's finds. His name came from a list of former soldiers, and she later learned that he had originally intended to make money working in a West Siberian oil settlement. But he was wounded in Afghanistan and, after back surgery, he could no longer lift heavy gear. After Gorbachev, he could no longer afford to live. He was the perfect man to shuttle data between deeply buried operatives whose names he didn't know, whose faces he never saw, and Fields-Hutton. If Andrei was ever caught, only Fields-Hutton was at risk… and that came with the territory.

Despite what many people outside the intelligence community believed, the KGB hadn't collapsed with the fall of Communism. To the contrary, as the new Ministry of security, it was more pervasive than ever. The agency had simply changed from an army of professionals into an even larger force of civilian freelancers. These operatives were paid for each solid lead they turned in. As a result, veterans and amateurs alike were looking everywhere for spies. Peggy called it a Russian version of Entertainment Tonight, with stringers everywhere. And she was right. The quarry was foreigners instead of celebrities, but the goal was the same: to report on furtive or suspicious activities. And because so many businesspeople assumed there was no longer a threat, they stumbled into trouble by helping Russian associates exchange rubles for dollars or marks, by bringing in jewelry or expensive clothes for the black market, or by spying on rival foreign companies doing business here. Instead of being prosecuted, foreign prisoners were typically allowed to buy their way out of trouble. Fields-Hutton joked that the ministry spent less time protecting national security than it did overseeing commerce. Japanese manufacturers alone paid Russian agents hundreds of millions of rubles a year to watch for competitors who might be keeping too close an eye on their activities in Russia. It was even rumored that the Japanese had put over 50 million rubles into the failed presidential bid of Interior Minister Nikolai Dogin to help protect the country from an influx of foreign investors.

The spy business was alive and well, and after seven years British agent Fields-Hutton was still in the thick of it.

Fields-Hutton had graduated from Cambridge with an advanced degree in Russian literature and a desire to become a novelist. The Sunday after his graduation, he was sitting in a coffeehouse in Kensington— reading Dostoevsky's Note from the Underground, as it happened— when a woman in an adjoining booth turned around and asked, "How would you like to learn more about Russia?" She laughed, then said, "A great deal more?"

That was his introduction to British Intelligence, and to Peggy. Later, he learned that DI6 has a long association with Cambridge, going back to World War II and Ultra, the top-secret project to decipher the legendary German Enigma Code.

Fields-Hutton went for a walk with Peggy and agreed to a meeting with her superiors. Within a year, DI6 had set him up as a comic book publisher who was buying stories and art from Russian cartoonists for publication in Europe. That gave him a reason to make constant trips with large, well-stocked portfolios and stacks of magazines, as well as videocassettes and toys featuring characters the Russians had designed. From the start, Fields-Hutton was amazed at how the gift of a superhero mug or bath towel or sweatshirt won him favors from airline employees, hotel workers, and even the police. Whether they turned around and sold the items on the black market or gave them to their kids, barter was a powerful tool in Russia.

With all the magazines and toys he carried, it was easy to hide the microfilm— sometimes wrapped around the staple of a comic book, other times rolled inside a hollow claw on the hand of a Tigerman action figure. Ironically, the comic book operation had taken on a life of its own, and British Intelligence was actually collecting a handsome royalty from the licenses. The organization's charter prohibited money-making ventures— "This is, after all, the government," Winston Churchill once told an agent who wanted to sell a code-breaking toy. However, then— Prime Minister John Major and the Parliament agreed to let the comic book profits go to social programs to help the families of slain or disabled British operatives.

Though he had come to love the comic book business, and decided he would become a novelist when he retired— with more than enough material for realistic thrillers— Fields-Hutton's real job with British Intelligence was to keep an eye on both foreign and domestic construction projects in Eastern Russia. Secret rooms, hidden bugs, and sub-subbasements were still being built and, when found and eavesdropped on, they provided a wealth of intelligence. His present contacts— Andrei and Leon, an illustrator who lived in an apartment in St. Petersburg— provided him with blueprints and on-site photographs of all the new buildings going up and renovations taking place on old ones within his territory.

After leaving the bathroom, Fields-Hutton sat on the edge of the bed, took the tea-bag tags from his pocket, and tore them open. Carefully, he removed each circular piece of microfilm and slipped them in turn into a highpowered magnifier— which, he told customs, he brought to look at transparencies of paintings for cover art. ("Yes, sir, I have many more Grim Ghost baseball caps than I need. Of course you can have one for your son. Why don't you take some for his friends as well?")

What he saw in one of the photographs could be related to a small article he'd noticed in today's newspaper. The picture showed tarpaulins being rolled into a service elevator at the Hermitage. Pictures taken on successive days showed large crates of artwork being brought in as well.

That shouldn't have aroused any suspicion. Construction was taking place throughout the museum to modernize and expand it in honor of the city's tercentenary in 2003. Moreover, the art museum was right on the Neva River. It was possible the walls were being lined with tarpaulin to protect the artwork from moisture.

But Leon had faxed him two sheets, and according to the entirely symbolic Captain Legend comic strip on the first sheet, the superhero had flown to Hermes' World— that is, Leon had gone to the Hermitage— a week after the photos were taken. He reported that no construction using tarpaulin was taking place on any of the three floors in any of the three buildings. As for the crates, though artwork was always being loaned to the museum, no new pieces had gone on display, nor had any new exhibits been announced: with sections closed off for the modernization, exhibit space was at a premium. Fields-Hutton would have DI6 check to see if any museums or private collectors had shipped anything to the Hermitage recently, though he doubted they'd find anything.

Then there were the hours of the workers who brought the tarpaulins and crates to the elevators. According to Leon's strip, the men— the Hera's World slaves who brought the weapons and food to a secret base— went downstairs in the morning and didn't come back until early in the evening. He had been watching two in particular, who came there day after day and whom he would follow if DI6 thought it might help. Though they could very well be working on renovations, it was also possible they were simply using those to mask secret activity taking place underground.

All of which dovetailed with the accident reported in this morning's newspaper, and also described in Leon's second fax page. Yesterday, six museum employees heading home from work had skidded off the Kirovsky Prospekt into the Neva River, where all of them drowned. Leon had gone to the crash site, and his rough cover sketch for Captain Legend told him more than the two-inch article had reported. It showed the hero helping slaves from a rocket that had crash-landed in a pool of quicksand. The color notation for the smoke rising from the quicksand said "Green." Chlorine.

Were the men gassed? Was the truck that hit them off the bridge sent to do just that to cover the fact that the men were murdered?

The accident might be a coincidence, but intelligence work couldn't afford to overlook any possibility. The signs pointed to something unusual going on in St. Petersburg, and Fields-Hutton wanted to find out what it was.

Faxing Leon's artwork to his office in London, Fields-Hutton included a note that ordered them to advance him twenty-seven pounds— meaning they were to look at page seven of today's Dyen— and that he was going to St. Petersburg to meet with the artist about this cover design.

"I think we're onto something here," he wrote. "My feeling is, if the writer can come up with a connection between the pool of quicksand and the underground mines of Hera's World, we'll have ourselves a fascinating story line. I'll let you know what Leon thinks."

After receiving an okay from London, Fields-Hutton packed his camera, slender vanity kit, Walkman, and artwork and toys into a shoulder bag, hurried to the lobby, and took a taxicab two miles to the northeast. At the St. Petersburg Station on Krasnoprudnaya he bought his ticket for the four-hundred-mile ride, then settled in on a hard bench to await the next train leaving for the ancient city on the Gulf of Finland.