The Ransom of Black Stealth One

NINE

Once a month, though on no set schedule, Sasha spent an evening isolated in his basement workshop and quietly briefed the cat. Like most men in the intelligence community, he had heard rumors of his own existence—had even known when believers first dubbed him “Sasha”—for years. Before Ivan the Terrible distinguished himself by getting noisily trapped in Sasha’s garbage can one night in 1982, the solitary self-briefings had always heightened Sasha’s sense of alienation. An agent run by any government could at least depend on a case officer to hear his troubles. In this sense, Sasha was not an agent at all, but very much an operative.

He had long ago given up the notion of sharing his secret with any human, but Ivan the Terrible, grown from a scrawny young delinquent into a sleek gray tiger-stripe torn, was a cat who knew how to listen without making value judgments. Sasha had found himself whispering to the cat one night across a pair of ruled yellow pads and an open tin of Chicken of the Sea, and his self-briefing went uncommonly well, and Ivan seemed to enjoy the attention even after the tuna was gone. While stirring the ashes of his notes that night, Sasha had resolved to pick up one of the latest CCI bug-finders. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that his basement would be bugged, but a commercially available Mantis unit would remove all doubt about audio bugging. To be exposed while talking with a house cat, after years of flawless espionage, was the kind of cosmic joke that inevitably would be retold throughout spookdom. Sasha went to considerable trouble so that he could talk espionage to that cat because, by God, it worked.

On this evening, Sasha finished his old business and then, after scribbling on the left-hand pad, proposed his next move. “Scenario: I tell them about the swap and give them the Regocijo site, too,” he murmured to Ivan, who merely flexed a forepaw and watched the pencil intently. Perhaps it reminded him of a mousetail. “That gives them one intact aircraft, if they’re competent. But”—he moved the pencil to the other pad—“that eventually could narrow the search pattern for me.”

That second pad contained only a list of names, a list that had narrowed by necessity over the years. The list included all, and only, the men who could have passed all of those messages over embassy walls. The length, and the complications, of that list had been Sasha’s initial reason for these monthly self-briefings; with a memory that was less than absolutely perfect, he knew he must refresh it by writing and updating that list periodically, with careful rethinking on the validity of each name, then destroying his notes. The idea of keeping such files in the house on paper or hard disk was more than horrifying: it was obscene. Sasha felt no comfort knowing that the list of names, once over a page long, had become easier to remember. For the list could not grow longer, only shorter, as men died or left the field on which this global game was played.

The fundamental problem for Sasha, as a player, was that CIA had two moles in Dzerzhinsky Square. Only their case officers knew their identities. Neither was aware of the other’s existence in the KGB, but either of them might one day gain access to the KGB file on Sasha. In which case, CIA and NSA would soon know everything in that file. Therefore, with the list now truncated to less than a dozen, it was absolutely crucial that every morsel of Sasha’s revelations be known to a select list—each of whom might be taken for Sasha.

Some of those names made him smile. Helms, who’d been hounded out of the top slot: no longer on the list, but he’d been on the early ones. No matter that it was ridiculous to even consider it; for a time, Helms could have done what Sasha was doing.

Charles Foy, whose entry into the middle echelons of NSA had been thought political, years before. But Foy had risen by shrewdness and tenacity—and he’d known every secret Sasha had exposed. Definitely still on the list. And Foy’s deputy, Sheppard? Impossible to know with certainty, but Sheppard might have had access to every datum over the years. He belonged on the list. Aldrich, however, had come into NSA too late to have access to the early stuff. Sasha mildly regretted keeping that name off the list.

Colby, up through the ranks and stepping on toes as he climbed, first a protege of Helms but finally his nemesis. No longer on the list. Too bad; some people on both sides might once have bought that one.

Randolph: a long and checkered career in CIA, one of the few who’d gone through the ranks to the very top. It could be Abraham Randolph still. Weston, next down the line, had been around the Company almost as long as Randolph and might be slightly more believable. Weston could have divulged thousands of critical items. What a useful irony that the man who had made a pastime of searching for Soviet moles in the CIA could still be Sasha himself! Unruh, privy to most of Weston’s operations, was as unlikely as Sheppard but still a possibility.

And Maule and McEachern in CIA, as well as Elerath and Vasilik in NSA: two now near retirement, the other two still candidates for a few more years. And who could tell when an embolism or a drunk driver might shorten the list at random?

“Can’t do it, Ivan; at least four candidates who don’t yet have the need to know. And in three cases there’s no compelling reason why they ever will.” The cat yawned and tucked its forepaws under its breast. “Play it close to the vest, hm? You’re right, I can’t let them narrow the search any further. The Blue Sky craft is better than nothing.”

He continued to stare at the cat, which closed its eyes and began to purr. It did not show interest when he began to scribble again, lining out, rewriting, speaking disjointed phrases now and then.

It bestowed only a bored glance when Sasha, tapping on the pad, said, “Scenario: I report Black Stealth One as described by witnesses to be a flying wing, a vertol at that, with some means of becoming literally invisible. No more, no less. I tell them it must meet those criteria to be the real thing. Everybody on the list has the need to know those details, even those of us who haven’t actually seen it.”

Ivan and Sasha traded a long glance, and Ivan blinked first. “So the welcoming committee will know it’s paying for a gold brick. As for the poor bastard who’s doing all the flying: at the least, he won’t get the ransom money. Without the devil’s own luck, he won’t get back at all.

“Well, it can’t be helped, Ivan. I can’t divulge any more because if I burn myself over this, I can’t be in place later. You understand that by now, surely.”

It may have been some faint noise; or perhaps the unusual note of supplication in the man’s voice. For whatever reason, the cat flowed up and across the table, springing unhurriedly from table to workbench to shelving, where he sat peering at a mousehole with iron-clad patience.

“All right, you don’t understand. I can accept that,” Sasha said, tiring of this parodied conversation, yet unwilling to abandon it. He studied Scenario Two briefly, then sighed and gathered the paper pieces of his alter ego for ritual cremation.

He turned before kneeling at the furnace. “Let me tell you something, Ivan,” he said to the back of the cat’s head. “There are times, these days, when I’m not sure I understand either.”