Palace of Treason (45 page)

There was more, but Yevgeny’s pilot light was on, and Dominika led him coquettishly into her tiny bathroom, where she hosed him down with the handheld shower like a draft horse and played a sexy game with the soap bar and rubbed him dry, then took him into the bedroom and turned her mind off and raked his back with her nails and put her heels on his furry butt, and closed her eyes and felt the sweat on his face drop onto her forehead and lips.

She almost started crying then, thinking about Nate and how they had
quarreled, and how things had gone wrong with LYRIC, and something started in her mind, a wispy thought that she couldn’t catch yet, so she filed it away and timed her faked orgasm to Yevgeny’s barnyard finish—she went with the side-to-side tossing head and a big groan—after which he collapsed onto the bed with a ham-hock leg still cocked across her. When his breathing slowed, Dominika started pulling the string again.

“It did not escape Zarubina’s notice that you were called again to the Kremlin to be congratulated,” said Yevgeny, still breathing hard. “You know, Zarubina is going to be the boss someday, and she’s got her eye on you. You’re set,” said Yevgeny, patting Dominika’s buttocks. “Just don’t forget your friends.”

Udranka sat incongruously atop the armoire in the corner of the bedroom, swinging her legs. It really is too much, isn’t it? But you don’t have to like it, she said, you just have to do it.

The summons came from the president’s secretariat two days after her return, but the car that had been sent for her careened past the Kremlin Borovitskaya Gate and continued another kilometer into the swanky Tverskoy District, past the display windows on Tverskaya filled with the sorts of shoes, clothes, and leather goods that do not exist in Mother Russia outside the MKAD ring road, and pulled into a broad, immaculate alleyway marked
SHVEDSKIY TUPIK
, Swedish Blind alley. Building No. 3 was a modern eleven-story brick-and-glass high-rise, incongruous amid the Soviet baroque buildings in the neighborhood, and clearly someplace special judging by the Federal Guard Service security booth outside the main entrance.

An aide was waiting to take Dominika up in a soundless elevator with no buttons. The doors opened to a luxurious living room with parquet floors and elaborate moldings on the walls and ceiling. At the end of the room President Putin was standing at a sideboard, talking on a telephone. He was dressed in a khaki sports shirt under a leather vest with zippered pockets. Three other people—two men and a woman—were on nearby brocade couches and chairs, all of them sitting in a funky yellow cloud. Dominika
walked across the parquet, her heels clicking on the wood. She remembered what Gable had said about wearing heels the next time she saw the president. She wore a dark navy suit with dark tights. As usual, her hair was up in the regulation service style. The people had stopped talking and were watching her cross the room, ballerina smooth and statuesque. Enveloped in his usual Arctic blue, President Putin put down the telephone, shook hands, and then took her arm to walk Dominika away from the guests and back toward the waiting aide and the still-open elevator doors. In her heels, Dominika was taller by a head.

“Captain, thank you for coming,” Putin said. “I congratulate you on another fine piece of work.” Putin’s cupid-bow mouth moved slightly, perhaps indicating pleasure, or even mirth. “It seems like Athens is lucky for you.” His eyes locked onto hers, and Dominika, not for the first time, wondered if he could read her mind.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” said Dominika, the only possible response in this insane moment.

“I regret I have to leave shortly; otherwise I would offer something and introduce you to some people,” said Putin, nodding to the group on the couches and chairs. “I am hosting a conference at the state complex at Strelna for the next ten days. Do you know the Constantine Palace?”

“I visited as a child with family from Saint Petersburg,” said Dominika, remembering the magnificent baroque palace and formal neoclassical gardens stretching to the sea. The grander Peterhof and Oranienbaum Palaces were on the same stretch of coast, south of Petersburg.

“Of course. Your family was from there,” said Putin.
Yes,
thought Dominika,
my grandmother hid in a well as the Bolsheviks burned the house.

“Well, you are overdue for another visit,” said Putin. He was inviting her. But surely not as the only guest?
What do I do, Forsyth? Benford?

“One of the cottages is prepared for a private gathering, people you should be introduced to,” said Putin, gesturing for the aide to escort her back to the lobby. “You already know Govormarenko.”

Sure, the energy-czar pig who’s helping you siphon off profits in the Iran deal,
thought Dominika.
God grant there is no hot tub in the gym.
“You’re too kind, Mr. President. I may take advantage and visit relatives in the city at the same time.” She shook Putin’s hand—dry and firm—and stepped into the elevator.

“Make sure the captain’s name is at the gate,” said Putin to the aide. The elevator doors closed but Dominika could still feel his eyes on her.

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, 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 for five days over the fetid Caspian, making lazy eights at an altitude of twenty kilometers.

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 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 into 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 your 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 protégée 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 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 Line 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 the 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 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 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, 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, which, 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 Line 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.