Fidelity (8 page)

15

H
IGHLAND
P
ARK
at eleven thirty in the evening would not have been Kay's first choice to meet a potential recruit. It was secluded enough, in a distant corner of not-quite-gentrified Brooklyn, close to an hour on the subway from Manhattan, nearly as long by cab. Compared to Central Park's enormity, or even Prospect Park's greenery, it was not very large, a bare sliver of shrubbery interrupting the city's concrete edifices. The area surrounding it was middle- and lower-­middle-class, a far cry from the slums Kay had grown used to during her time in Baltimore, but equally distant from the tourist-thronged neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.

Not, of course, that anyone had asked her. A bare month with the squad, and so far mostly she had been trusted with nothing more than routine work, most of her daily efforts going towards digesting the immense, the seemingly infinite amount of information required to bring her up to speed as a counterintelligence Agent. Likely she wouldn't have been tapped for this duty, either, except that one of the other members of the squad had been sick with the stomach flu.

“We need you for something, Kay,” Marshall informed her earlier that afternoon, walking briskly out of Jeffries's office after a long chat. Marshall had a reputation, like everyone else in Jef
fries's squad, for quiet excellence, for a cool and distinguished competence that did not draw attention to itself. He was also considered, within the office, to be one of the best handlers of assets—next to Jeffries herself, of course, although her position generally kept her out of the nitty-gritty of casework. Kay could see why Marshall was so highly regarded; he was amiable and good-natured but also gave the impression of a person who watched you carefully and closely, and remembered what he had seen.

“Of course,” Kay said, there being nothing else to say. “What for?”

“I'm going to be meeting with a developmental recruit tonight, and we need you to fill in on the surveillance.”

Not much information to go on there, and Kay knew that none would be forthcoming. A recruitment could take place over the course of weeks or months or even years, the process slow and torturous, like reeling in an oversized fish. Sometimes many meetings were required to convince a target of the wisdom of assisting the FBI with their operations. It took a deft hand with the right combination of stick and carrot to cultivate a recruitment in place, or RIP, the standard Bureau term for a double agent.

It also took a team of professionals assisting that deft hand. Kay and Wilson and the rest of the squad that had been assigned to assist Marshall had spent the hours beforehand prepping, in thorough detail, every aspect of the meeting: where in the park the meeting would take place and where the nearest exits were; where the members of the surveillance team would set up; and even the location of the nearest hospital in case something went terribly and unexpectedly wrong. One thing that was not discussed, for reasons of operational security, was the identity of the asset himself. It was not mentioned, and Kay did not ask.

Kay's part in the matter was a simple one, or seemingly simple. She and Wilson were posted in an unmarked car just outside of the main exit, tasked with keeping their eyes open, making sure that no member of the opposition had cottoned to their operation and was following close behind. Far from riveting, but Kay was enjoying herself all the same. It was the first time since joining the counterintelligence squad that she was out in the field. And for all that she often felt herself a step behind her colleagues, she felt more than confident in her surveillance skills, courtesy of her time in Baltimore.

And perhaps that was what alerted her to them: the long hours spent in grimy surroundings observing Rashid Williams and men like Rashid Williams. It was a warm September evening, still gripped tightly in an Indian summer, but the two boys lounging by the entrance of the park had their hoodies pulled up all the same, obscuring their faces, obscuring everything but two pairs of grim, voracious-seeming eyes. They shared a smoke, passing it back and forth between them warily, staring at the night and the things hidden within it.

“Anything about that seem strange to you?” Kay asked.

Wilson had worked counterintelligence for going on twenty years: a good Agent and a good team member. His attention was occupied on the interior of the park, on Marshall sitting on a wooden bench, patiently waiting for his contact to show up. “How so?”

Kay smiled grimly. “You've been working this so long, you can't smell regular old crime when you get a whiff of it? That's their second cigarette,” Kay explained, “and if you had two anyway, why bother to share? Unless you want an excuse to stay where you are.” Kay rolled down the window and inhaled deeply of the night air. “That ain't just tobacco, either.”

“What are you getting at?” Wilson asked, turning to stare
at Kay full on. “I don't know how they do it in Baltimore, but here in the big leagues we don't get so worried about a couple of kids smoking a dime bag outside of a public park, leastways not enough to interrupt an ongoing operation.”

“In Baltimore we don't get out of bed for anything less than a fresh corpse sitting on a half ton of heroin,” she said, “but since we're already out here I might as well let you know that
those
two gentlemen”—she pointed at the men, who had just thrown aside their joint—“are about to try and rob
that
gentleman”—pointing now towards Marshall.

Wilson looked for a long time at the two potential troublemakers, cursed, then leaned into his walkie-talkie. “Touissant, you there?”

Touissant was posted in a copse of trees close to where the meet was to take place. Kay could not see him, of course—the purpose of the dark clothes and the lack of movement—but he was there. “Yup.”

“You clock those two coming in from the east entrance?”

Brief pause. “I do now.”

“Malloy thinks they're trouble.”

“I think she's right,” he said, and a spare second later Kay saw him move out from his hiding spot: a big man, the largest in the squad, white teeth smiling but not friendly. After he took a few steps into the park itself, the two potential muggers looked at him, looked at each other, then turned and backtracked the way they had come. Touissant returned to his position, and a few minutes later their target, or so Kay assumed, walked swiftly from the direction of the subway and towards his meeting with Marshall.

“That was sharp, Malloy,” Wilson said, not quite grudgingly.

Kay bit back a smile and returned to inspecting the night. Crisis averted.

16

G
ENERALLY SPEAKING
,
Tom had found, it was not a very difficult thing to take apart a person's life: it was like pulling apart a warm roll at a nice restaurant.

They gave you a target; some background information, date of birth, education, marital status, a few pictures taken from a distance or, more recently, scraped off of Facebook. If it was possible, Tom liked to do the first bit of surveillance himself; of course, he had any number of underlings on his payroll but he had always found it useful to begin the operation on his own, rather than have his initial understanding of the target filtered through another person's eyes. After two decades in the business Tom had developed a sort of sixth sense for sin: he could sit down with someone for five or ten minutes, watch them out of the corner of his eye, ask them a few friendly questions, excuse himself and tell you with virtual assurance about drink, drugs, gambling debts, a pretty girl that his wife did not know about, perhaps a pretty boy.

Tom scratched at the garbled fat of his buttocks through his jeans, took a nip of vodka against the cold, wedged himself into his car seat. His size was the only thing that had ever kept him from being an absolutely first-class surveillance man. He had everything else required: cold, discerning eyes, a memory like a
steel trap, the ability to ignore boredom, to concentrate for endless hours narrowly on one particular point or individual. But he could do nothing about his size, and people tended to remember a six-foot-three completely bald man sitting on a bench across from their apartment. On the other hand, his size had been an advantage on those rare though not unheard-of occasions when he was called upon to do more than watch. He was over forty now, and some of his muscle had turned to fat—but not all of it. There had been a time when he had a reputation as a bruiser, and he still suspected, if it was necessary, he could remember which end of the gun to point.

His real name was Lev Telstei, although it had been a very long time since anyone had called him that. Sometimes late at night, alone in his bedroom as the clock face turned round its usual path, he would say it softly to himself—“Lev Telstei, Lev Telstei, Lev Telstei”—but never very loudly, never above a whisper. It had a strange ring to it these days, like a lyric from an all-but-forgotten song.

Most of Tom's life was no different from that of any other American citizen. He owned a small store near Brighton Beach, a step up from a bodega, his pride insisted, although grim-eyed honesty admitted it was not a very large one. Still, it did not run itself, and at any given moment most of Tom's time was dedicated to all the many tasks required to keep his cover business operating: payroll and inventory, that sort of thing. Over the years he had acquired a trustworthy enough staff, but still, it was a rare day that did not see him behind the counter for at least a few hours, making sure things were running properly. His wife had died some years back, an Illegal like himself, the two of them set up with each other shortly before being shipped out to New York. It was more of a business arrangement than a love affair, but it was an amicable one, at least. He had been in a
state of modest despair for some six months after her death, and still missed her sometimes, though faintly and without any great passion. Tom was an unsentimental sort, as much a part of his personality as it was a skill developed over long years working at his real job.

There were innumerable nuances and subtleties to the spy business, but most nations used the same rough structure. Within their embassies were embedded legal resident spies. These individuals were entitled to the same protection as other diplomats, and could not be prosecuted but only expelled back to their country. Although the FBI worked diligently to ascertain the identities of these individuals, and generally succeeded, they were still useful in coordinating or assisting in operations.

Beneath this network were a select group called, simply, “Illegals.” Unknown, or at least undeclared, to their host country, they went about their business creating fictitious lives, as bartenders and cabdrivers, as businessmen and oil magnates, as housewives and hookers. For years and sometimes decades they burrowed into their cover stories, appearing to any outside observer to be no different from your next-door neighbor. All the while, of course, they were intimately involved in intelligence operations, trying to recruit potential targets or running surveillance. In practice, every side had an incentive to keep their people alive, and these days should an Illegal get arrested he was most likely to be swapped for a counterpart, the modern equivalent of a prisoner exchange. But not always: in the worst-case scenario an Illegal with his cover blown would find himself living out the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary.

Beneath even these Illegals were individuals cultivated to support them: a ring of small-time criminals, thugs, drug dealers, prostitutes and general lowlifes whom Tom had quietly and faithfully assembled during his nearly two decades in New York.
A few of the brighter and more senior ones might have had some idea that there was more to Tom than his cover as a minor criminal and fixer, although none could have pointed to any evidence of his being an SVR Illegal, and of course remained blissfully unaware of the existence of his superiors. Compartmentalization, after all, was one of the most critical requirements of the trade. No person should ever know anything about any other, or about any other operation with which he or she is not directly related. To do otherwise was to risk destroying the entire chain because of one weak link.

Tom sighed and scratched himself again and went to light a cigarette, remembering only after he had checked both of his front pockets that he had given up smoking six months earlier and made do with a stick of gum that he chewed through a snarl.

Tom had been born in Odessa back when it was still part of the Soviet Union and was trained by the KGB in all the different aspects of intelligence work: how to set up a network, how to recruit and train other agents, how to pass information without alerting U.S. intelligence, how to navigate the dangerous and dimly lit world of international espionage. And finally, how to kill: with a rifle or a pistol, with poison, with a length of twine or a piece of pipe or a bit of sharpened metal or his oversized hands.

When he had first stepped off the plane almost twenty years earlier he had thought himself properly trained to accomplish anything that would be required of him, and had soon realized how wrong he was. It had been Pyotr Andreev who had given him the master class in spycraft; who had made him, if Tom said so himself, as good at his job as anyone on earth; who had taught him to blend in seamlessly with American society, to operate inside it like a fish in water. To set up an organization of people you could control but must never trust; to use that organization
to surround a target; to bend that person into the direction you required them to bend.

Yes, more than anything else, Pyotr had taught Tom to corrupt, to pervert—but there was only so much even a master like Tom could do with someone as morally blameless, not to say dull, as Kay Malloy. She went to work, she went home, she went back to work. Sometimes she met a friend for dinner. That was about as exciting as it got. These idealistic types, these young crusaders, they could be tough. Driven by work or advancement, lacking that happy hedonism that, generally speaking, made Tom's job so easy. A month now his men had been tailing her, searching quietly for some vulnerability to seize on, some way into her life. She did not do drugs; she did not gamble. She did not drink to excess—at least, she did not drink in such a fashion that made her act foolishly. She had not yet taken a man home to her bed—not that that alone would help them much in these days of frivolity. But at least it would have been something, some tangible trace of humanity to lock onto. Alas for both of them, he secretly thought, Kay's life consisted of work, sleep and an occasional visit to an aged relative.

Well, they were not always easy, were they? If they were all easy, then anyone could do Tom's job, and then Pyotr would not value him so highly. It was a source of pride for Tom, he could quietly admit to himself but no one else, that a man like Pyotr saw fit to leave large aspects of his operations in Tom's hands. Within the SVR, Pyotr was a figure of dark legend, his name whispered rather than spoken aloud. Most often he was referred to by one of his nicknames, the “gray man” or the “gray suit,” both meant to indicate a certain vagueness, as if he could be seen only from the corner of your eye or in twilight. He was there but he was not there. He was the guy behind the guy behind the guy.

The
chop-chop-chop
of an engine snapped Tom out of his reverie, and a moment later a motorcycle made its way noisily into a parking spot across the street. A man got off it—­unhelmeted, Tom noted casually, his eye for transgression as keen as ever. He had long hair and a handsome face and a worn leather jacket. He hooked his fingers into his pockets and strutted into a neighboring bar, and Tom did not think he was imagining the drunken roll to his gait.

Tom smiled. It was easy to break a person by their vices, but it was very nearly as easy to break them by their virtues. Kay Malloy was not a drunkard, not a gambling addict, not corrupt, not promiscuous or a fool. But she was a loyal sister, and in the end that would be enough.