Palace of Treason

32

Benford was late for his own meeting. He had been at a briefing downstairs in PROD on the progress of the W. Petrs seismic-isolation floor on its surreptitious water odyssey through continental Russia to Iran. The German SBE had alerted Berlin Station that the massive machinery had left the factory. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in concert with CIA had been tracking it via a third-generation INDIGO EYE optical imaging satellite that from its elliptical polar orbit two hundred miles up could read the name on the square stern of the barge that was plowing through the lakes north of Saint Petersburg, then southeast, down the Volga on its way to the Volga River Delta at Astrakhan to the Caspian Sea.

In a darkened room Benford was shown projected photos of the massive cargo, shrink-wrapped in white vinyl, covered across its girth with a dun-colored tarp, and secured Gulliver-style with dozens of interlaced straps. An insufferable imagery analyst from NGA with bullfrog eyes explained that orbital drift known as precession — Benford’s glare stopped him from explaining Kepler’s Third Law — meant that the bird’s observational corridor would be pushed westward with each subsequent orbit. That meant, the self-satisfied analyst continued, that the low earth-orbiting INDIGO EYE would lose the barge once it entered the Caspian. Benford continued staring at this unpleasant person, who hurriedly added that coverage accordingly would be assumed by a stealthy SOLAR FIST surveillance drone launched from the US Air Force base at Incirlik, Turkey, which could transit the five hundred kilometers of Azeri and Iranian airspace undetected and loiter over the fetid Caspian, making lazy eights at an altitude of twenty kilometers, for five days.

At the end of the session, the goggle-eyed briefer — How appropriate that an imagery officer has bug eyes, thought Benford — smugly offered that drones would replace operations officers in five years. Benford stiffened. PROD officers in the room fell silent. “Thank you for your unsolicited comment,” said Benford to the briefer. “No doubt you can look down a man’s pants with your drones from a great height. But your drones cannot divine what he intends to do with his prick, with whom, and when.”

He left and hurried to the alchemist’s cave he called his office. Sitting in chairs around a desk mounded with papers were his trusty savants in CID, Margery Salvatore and Janice Callahan. Benford sat down and scowled at them. They knew not to speak. Benford was a man possessed, knowing that a mole reporting to the Russians was inside the CIA.

“Pardon my language,” said Benford, “but fuck. Since we became aware of the mole in CIA, we have curtailed the OSI double agent operation to deny this TRITON a channel to the Russians. In so doing, we aspired to flush TRITON out into the open, and into personal contact with SVR rezident Zarubina. From DIVA’s reporting we know that this has happened, but alas, fucking FBI coverage of Zarubina has revealed nothing. She is cautious on the street, aborts when she doesn’t like the vibe, and is unpredictable. It is damn difficult to cover her discreetly.”

“Let’s shut her down with heavy coverage on the street,” said Janice. “Make her make a mistake.”

“Might work,” said Margery. “But if they see too much pressure it’s as likely the Center will put TRITON on ice until they dispatch the illegal to the United States to begin handling him.”

“At which time the case goes underwater and TRITON works undisturbed for thirty years,” said Janice. She had handled agents in communist Eastern Europe whose actuarial life expectancy as spies was eighteen months.

“Janice is depressingly correct,” said Benford. “We have a narrowing window during which TRITON is still being met by a Russian intel officer whom we can follow. Zarubina uses aggressive countersurveillance; she regularly manipulates FBI coverage into traps.”

“In all the years, in all the cases, there’s always been the unpredictable, minute element that changes the course of an operation, breaks a mole hunt, anchors a recruitment,” said Margery. “We need that now.”

“Here is a penny, Margery,” said Benford, sliding a coin through the detritus on his desk. “Throw it in the wishing well out front of the building.”

“Margery, save that penny,” said Chief/ROD Dante Helton, walking into Benford’s office. He lifted a stack of files off a chair and dragged it to sit beside Margery. “Simon, look at Moscow 2584, just came in.”

Benford sighed. “Dante, I appreciate you taking time to attend this gathering, which began about twenty minutes ago.”

Dante pointed at Benford’s monitor. “Look at it right now.”

Benford found the cable, brought his half glasses down off his head, and leaned in, reading. “Hannah Archer had her first personal meeting with DIVA in Moscow at the Sparrow Hills site.” said Benford, turning to look at the three. “Janice, your protégé performed splendidly again.” He read on. “What is more, DIVA provided… holy fucking shit.”

Benford put his finger on the monitor, reading slowly. “Thirty-eight degrees, ninety-two minutes north, seventy-seven degrees, zero three minutes west,” he said, finally turning again to look at each of them.

Though unreservedly loyal to Benford, Margery had long predicted his sudden descent into eccentric senescence — the time had come, apparently. Margery had proposed displaying Benford in his dotage for a fee in the ground floor library as a way to raise money for CIA Family Day.

“Stop what you’re thinking, Margery,” said Benford. “DIVA got this from her deputy in KR, Pletnev. I think she’s doing the Sparrow thing with him. She’s got starch, that woman.” Benford extracted a Washington, DC, map book from under a pile of newspapers, triggering a small avalanche of them onto the floor. No one moved to gather them up.

“Zarubina requested overhead imagery of these coordinates,” said Benford, flipping the pages of the book. The Russians case sites the same as we do. Downtown DC, Meridian Hill Park, in Columbia Heights, between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets.” Benford found the page and looked at it.

“Margery, you are a prophet, a Sybil, a haruspex. Zarubina just gave us her site where she’s next going to meet TRITON.”

Seb Angevine had met Zarubina five times since he had gotten back in contact, and he emphatically didn’t like being out on the street with her. Too exposed. He didn’t know shit from tradecraft, but had to admit she picked some pretty cool, out-of-the-way places — urban lanes, alleys, courtyards — that he didn’t even know existed. But he recoiled at the risks of meeting out in the open with the known SVR rezident, and he was jackrabbit nervous the whole time, usually waiting and watching from a concealed position, checking to see she arrived alone, ready to beat feet if there was trouble. Zarubina knew he was doing it, and once had gotten all grandmothery on him, the way she did, and had hugged him and said he was a dear to be concerned about her. Fuck you, he thought, I’m concerned about my balls.

It was the money that kept him coming back. The Russians were paying big bucks now, meaty cash bundles in a backpack, plus hefty alias account deposits in foreign banks. Zarubina told him they had passed the two-million-dollar mark. Angevine knew they were feeding his ego and his venality, but they were welcome to manipulate him all the way to the teller’s window. Zarubina didn’t let up, she was relentless. And after five meetings, despite the grandmotherly exterior the imaginative Angevine saw the ancient Soviet venom of show trial and gulag, of politburo and mass graves in birch forests.

Things were going great with Vikki, thank God. She refused his suggestion to quit stripping, but they had taken some nice vacations together, and he was picking up her rent and expenses. The sex was great too, athletic and bendy. Thinking he had built up some frigging equity with her, Angevine once coyly suggested she get one of her girlfriends from Good Guys to come over for a three-way, but she’d had a fit and wouldn’t see him for a week. What’s the big deal? he thought. He had bought her a pair of gold earrings at Market Street Diamonds on M Street, and they had make-up sex, but she was still pissed at him.

Seb was using his position as a “senior” in CIA to read ops traffic he otherwise would have no access to. Lots of it. He never downloaded anything, never copied anything — too many forensic computer and print run checks all the time. Zarubina had been impressed that he was taking photographs of cables off his internal CIA computer screen and had given him a remarkable miniature camera — a Chobi Cam from Japan — that was as big as an India rubber eraser and weighed half an ounce. It had better resolution than his iPhone (which wasn’t allowed in Headquarters anyway).

“Of course Line T has better cameras” Zarubina sniffed — “but this one is available immediately.” Meaning that the Japan-made minicam bestowed deniability for the SVR were Angevine ever caught.

“Put it on video mode, dear,” said Zarubina, “and scroll your screen as fast as you can. We can retrieve the images.” His thumb on the “page down” key, Angevine was now photographing a cascading blur on his monitor of so many cables, memos, and briefing papers that he didn’t even know what he was passing. They worked with three cameras — nicknamed Alpha, Beta, and Gamma — swapping them in rotation each meeting. They were emptying the vault.

At the last meeting Zarubina had sweetly reminded him that they still needed him to look for the CIA-run mole in Moscow. Angevine, for the third time, had explained that there was a small percentage of cases that were so restricted that readership was limited to three people. Intelligence produced by these cases was so thoroughly edited for source protection reasons that the name, gender, and nationality were unknowable. Sugary Zarubina asked him to keep trying.

It was at another weekly deputies meeting with the hated Gloria Bevacqua that Angevine discovered the way around the compartmentation firewalls into the identities of restricted assets. In the middle of one of her feckless perorations, the sow tangentially complained about the red tape in the Office of Finance that she said maintained a roster of true names used for making deposits into the alias bank accounts of agents, a bureaucratic requirement for federal monies allocated to intelligence sources. It was an unintended gap in the system. No one even registered Bevacqua’s comments, except Angevine. As deputy director of Military Affairs, Angevine found he qualified for access to that top secret finance database — all he needed was to reference a military reporting case to cover his request for the database. It was dangerous: It would leave a trail, but it could be done, once.

He waited till the end of his nighttime meeting with Zarubina before mentioning it, to amp up the drama. “It’s a one-time deal,” he had told her. “And it’s going to cost a million.” Zarubina took Beta from him and handed him Gamma, the camera that at the next exchange would have the true names of CIA’s most sensitive foreign assets, including any Russian names. CIA penetration operations in Moscow would be over. Zarubina patted Angevine on the shoulder, called him a wonder, and without hesitation said that the dollars, or euros, or krugerrands, or blood diamonds, whatever he wanted, would be deposited instantly on receipt of camera Gamma at the next meeting. Angevine literally licked his lips.

“I’ll see you at RUSALKA, site Mermaid, in two weeks,” said Zarubina, patting his arm. “Take care, TRITON.” She returned to the rezidentura to draft the thunderclap cable that would galvanize the Center. Images of her sitting behind the SVR director’s desk in Yasenevo, the direct Vey Che phone to the Kremlin at her elbow, flashed behind her eyes.

Bozhe, another nail-curling evening of his sweat dripping on her face and his chest hairs in her mouth. Dominika lay in her bed after Yevgeny had left, listening to her heart beating. His latest gossip from KR had nearly made her vomit with the shock. In two weeks TRITON would be delivering a list of assets’ names — her name certainly included — to Zarubina. Benford could not protect her. The wolves were drawing close. Dominika strangely felt no fear, simply a rising determination to survive, for the sole purpose of destroying Their corrupt world.

She had two weeks to live. That realization, and Putin’s silky invitation to the seaside mansion on the Gulf of Finland, finally had been the trigger to feverish thought that morphed into a plan — impossible, suicidal — that she knew she would carry out: Ruin the piyavki, the leeches that attached themselves thick on the belly of the country. She would do it, if it was her last act. She could feel the urgency in her chest. She punched in two SRAC messages and went for a drive to transmit them to one of the sensors, thinking about blond Hannah. Pass the word, sestrenka, my little sister.

The two SRAC messages from DIVA hit Moscow and Athens Stations and Langley insanely hard, “like the deaf ring a church bell,” said Gable. Benford was on the secure phone to both Stations, issuing instructions like a man possessed, which he was. He asked for Forsyth’s concurrence to bring Nate back to Washington: He needed a street operator to manage his nascent plan to prevent — at all costs — TRITON from making the meeting with Zarubina and passing that name. He drafted the SRAC message replies to DIVA himself, and ordered Hannah to load them into the sensor system.

COS Moscow Throckmorton, inflated with the urgency of the crisis, telephoned Benford that he would personally make the rendezvous with DIVA to tell her to stand down. “This requires gravitas, a senior hand,” he said to Benford.

“Vern, you will do nothing of the sort,” raved Benford, knowing that this red-assed baboon would lead half the FSB to the meeting. “You let Archer do this. It’s why she’s out there. Am I clear?” He got a mumbled assent.

The SRAC messages were being exchanged rapidly now. DCOS Schindler had to forego her afternoon gin-rocks to drive past sensor three to unload DIVA’s fractious reply — the famous message 37:

Hannah was sitting at her little desk in the Moscow Station enclosure, munching on a pastrami sandwich from the embassy cafeteria. The Russian cafeteria cooks managed to mangle most of the American items on the menu with the addition of inexplicable ingredients — pickle relish in the lasagna or blanched walnuts in the mac and cheese — but for some reason produced a delectable pastrami sandwich. Perhaps the Slavic love affair with salamis, sausages, pickled beef, cured hams, and peppered salt pork fat stirred them to treat pastrami the right way. The sandwich was rich with cheese and scallions and vinegary coleslaw. A plastic condiment cup of peppery orange khrenovina relish came with the sandwich — the cooks behind the cafeteria counter called the sauce vyrviglaz, yank-out-the-eye — but Hannah didn’t even open the container. The last thing she needed was to begin feeling the volcano effects of khrenovina in the fourth hour of tonight’s SDR. This was a screamingly critical meeting, a make-or-break, as a tense-sounding Benford had explained to her over the secure phone.

“Hannah, talk her down off whatever messianic high she’s on,” Benford hissed over the phone. “For fuck’s sake, she will not jeopardize herself in this way. I don’t care how you do it, lie to her, tell her the maritime assets are not available, tell her the site is compromised — shit, tell her I had a heart attack and am in intensive care. The last may not be an untruth in twelve hours.”

“I don’t give it that long,” said Hannah, trying for a combination of confident airiness and reassuring familiarity. Shouldn’t have said it.

“Hannah Emmeline Archer,” said Benford, after a systole-thumping silence. How did he know my middle name, and why was he using it like Daddy used to? “I have always appreciated your youthful enthusiasm. I commend your performance in Moscow. But from today, do not endeavor to make a joke unless I specifically indicate that you should do so by saying ‘be funny.’” Just like Daddy, thought Hannah. Her sandwich was half eaten, and would remain so.

“Simon, you picked me for this assignment,” said Hannah. “You didn’t make a mistake. I’ll talk to her.”

“Thank you, Hannah,” said Benford. “The appropriate benediction is the one case officers in our service have said to one another for more than sixty years. Good hunting.” There was a pause. “And God bless,” said Benford, the agnostic misanthrope who prayed before his own triptych of lying, cheating, and stealing. The connection ended with the hollow, rushing-water noise of the secure line.

Nearly time to kick off. She had budgeted eight hours for the SDR — the meeting was for eleven — and she had to get this balls-on right. Get black, stay black, and no mistakes. No such thing as an abort tonight. Hannah came back to her desk, reviewed the SKLAD site report and photographs, looked over the SDR route that she had plotted months ago and which had been reviewed and approved first by COS (not that he ran SDRs), then at Headquarters. She could run it in her sleep. She was dressed in dark slacks and a cable knit sweater, and she swapped her flats for woolen socks and low rubber-soled boots. She sanitized her pockets, emptying cell phone, house keys, and wallet into the credenza above the desk. She took only the small diplomatic identification booklet issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry and her car keys.

It was too cold to go with her hard-shell outer jacket — after sunset it was turning seriously frosty — so Hannah slipped on a heavy Russian-cut, black coat wool-lined, with black wool collar and cuffs and big buttons down the front. Once clear of the embassy and into her SDR, Hannah would tie a dark scarf on her head babushka-style, to break the profile and hide her blonde hair. She slipped the sausage-shaped thermal scope into an inside pocket of her coat. Final check, ready to go. Dominika, you have to listen to me, Hannah thought. It’s my job to keep you in one piece.

Hannah squeezed past two modular desks and knocked on the plastic sliding door to COS’s office for a quick word before she kicked off her run. Per Benford’s instructions, she had been unwaveringly deferential to the fustian Vern Throckmorton, despite the growing evidence of his incompetence and his chronic failure to realize what a mooncalf he was. He realized that Hannah was in his Station per Benford’s direct orders and at first did not challenge Hannah’s ops plans. Increasingly however, Throckmorton began conflating Hannah’s successes with his management of the Station, and he had become obstreperous. Hannah patiently dealt with him and did not complain to Benford, thus sparing COS the bureaucratic equivalent of a rigid sigmoidoscopy with a triangular endoscope. It might still come to that, thought Hannah. This crash dive with DIVA is giving COS a woody — he wants to be a hero.

“He’s gone,” said a voice from the other end of the trailer. DCOS Irene Schindler was standing in her office, having slid the door open. Hannah turned and walked the length of the room toward her.

“Irene, will you tell him I had to kick off before he got back? I’ll leave the box of tissues on the rear shelf of my car in the parking lot to signal you guys thumbs-up when I get home.” Schindler leaned against the frame of the door and blinked. She’s half toasted, thought Hannah.

“He went to meet DIVA,” Schindler said.

“What do you mean he went to meet DIVA?” said Hannah. A shocky wave ran up her back, over the crown of her head, and down her arms.

“He said what DIVA needed was plain talk. He was—”

“Irene, shut the fuck up,” said Hannah. “How was he going to get to the site? He doesn’t even know where it is. What car is he driving? What route is he taking?”

Schindler put up her hand. “He read the site report. He has his own route. He’s been doing this for years,” said Schindler.

“Irene, I have to go,” said Hannah, now in a panic. “Listen to me. You have to get on the secure phone to Benford. His number is on my desk. Listen! Tell him what happened. Tell him I’m going to try to beat COS to the site, to warn DIVA away. Are you listening?”

Schindler nodded. Hannah looked at her, took two steps up to her, inside Irene’s aerosolized gin bubble, and took her by the shoulders. She could feel the balsa wood bones under her hands. Hannah fought for control, resisted the impulse to shake her head off her shoulders.

“Irene, you have to do this immediately,” Hannah whispered. “We have to protect DIVA, you and me, okay? You used to do this shit right. Dude, dredge up whatever you have left and help me.” Hannah looked in her eyes. “I’ve got to go.” She kept her hands on Schindler’s shoulders for a second more.

“Get your hands off me,” said Irene. “I have to make a phone call.”

Put lean pastrami slices in a hot skillet and quickly toss until the edges are slightly crispy. Cover with asiago cheese and grilled scallions and cover with a lid until the cheese melts. Pile the pastrami on grilled country bread spread with mustard and topped with vinaigrette-based coleslaw. Drizzle Khrenovina sauce (processed slurry of tomatoes, horseradish, garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, sweet bell pepper, vinegar, and sugar) on top.