The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (9 page)

Simon Wantree had never visited Russia, even as a tourist. When his Aeroflot flight from London landed at the newly renovated Terminal F at Sheremetyevo International Airport north of Moscow, Wantree experienced a giddy joy. He felt he was stepping back in time, to a period when espionage, (which is what he styled his work to be, in his own imagination), was more dash than drudgery.

The 50-minute drive in heavy traffic along the Leningradskoe Highway broke the spell for him, an endless parade of grim, gray housing blocks with dreary balconies hung with laundry as dingy as the walls. English prisons were probably more welcoming.

The battered taxi deposited him at the foot of the steep granite steps of the Slavyanka Hotel on Suvorovskaya Square, about two miles north of the Kremlin. The Stalinist-era Slavyanka was imposing, like a government office—which, in a sense, it was.

The heavy-set taxi driver charged him $40 for the trip, complaining that the traffic had caused him to lose valuable time and that Wantree should bear the cost. The driver insisted on being paid in dollars or euros, not rubles.

Colonel Marchenko had selected the Slavyanka for Wantree mainly because it was inexpensive, but also because it was still run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, a fact that caused Marchenko considerable wry amusement. This fact was apparent to Wantree when he entered the building. Russian soldiers were everywhere, along with scruffy-looking students from Germany and Poland. Wantree was unnerved by the unkempt exuberance of the place; modern Russia was, if anything, more chaotic than the old USSR. He calmed himself by reflecting that there was nothing on his person or in his luggage to give away the true purpose of his visit.

Wantree soon found that his 30-euro-a-night room did not have a bathroom and that the public bath at the end of the corridor did not have hot water. The freezing tap water from the
lavabo
next to his bed was a rusty brown, the color of stale tea. He used it to shave and he cut himself. His room, more a cell, really, did have Wi-Fi. Wantree was able to send a message by email to Colonel Marchenko to tell him he had arrived. While waiting for a reply, he took a swim in the frigid indoor pool in the hotel basement, substituting that for a shower.

A platter of fatty cold cuts on display at the entrance to the hotel’s restaurant was buzzing with flies. It was so unappetizing that Wantree opted to explore the neighborhood for more tasty fare. A city block from the hotel, he was distracted by the enormous Central Armed Forces Museum and its collection of obsolete military equipment, not including anything, regrettably, made after the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949.

After wandering around the neighborhood for twenty minutes, he found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the Dostoevskaya metro stop, the newest in the city. He let the waiter bring him a plate of half a dozen excellent
pelmeni
, portions of ground pork and onion wrapped in thin, unleavened dough and boiled, like a dumpling. He followed this with a dish of herring and potatoes, washed down with vodka. He had more vodka after his meal and arrived back at the Slavyanka pleasantly drunk.

Colonel Marchenko had responded to his email when he checked his computer, indicating that he would come to the hotel the following morning around 10 AM.

In order to reduce the risk of their emails being detected, Jacques LeClerc and Wantree had agreed that they would each access a dummy MSN Hotmail account LeClerc had set up before Wantree left England. Each of them had the password and would leave messages in the
Drafts
folder, unsent.

When Wantree had read LeClerc’s message, he would delete it, write his response, and save it, too, in
Drafts
. That way, no email traffic was actually sent over the Internet. The emails were simply saved internally within the account to which both men had access. They were read there, and then deleted, unsent. Such a system could not alert tracking devices because there was nothing to track.

When he was through checking for Marchenko’s emailed response, Wantree noticed there was a new message in
Drafts
. It was from LeClerc and read “Expect client rep to join you in Moscow later this week. M has been advised.” The more the merrier, Wantree thought, as he deleted it. He would ask Marchenko about it. He drafted no reply to LeClerc.

***

The retired KGB colonel was waiting for him the next morning in a stuffed armchair in the lobby. Wantree spotted him at once. Marchenko was a flamboyant figure, with a military bearing his civilian clothes could not disguise—dark eyes under a stern brow; a neatly clipped mustache. It occurred to Wantree that Jacques LeClerc was likely no match for him, physically or intellectually. He approached the Russian.

“So, Mr. Wantree, you are English, are you not?” The colonel did not extend his hand or get up from his chair.

“English indeed, and a military man like yourself,” Wantree said jauntily. He immediately regretted the boast.

“Ha!” Marchenko roared. “I am glad to know it! Then we will work well together!”

“I meant I served as a civilian technical advisor to my government,” Wantree said.

“I take your meaning. To be frank, I had forgotten that the British maintained the kind of—capability—to which you refer. You were always a small part of NATO, and NATO is another acronym for USA.”

“We are a proud nation, like Russia.”

“You will take a coffee with me?”

Wantree nodded. Marchenko raised his hand and snapped his fingers with a crack like a dry tree limb breaking. A waiter came scurrying over and Marchenko spoke to him peremptorily. Then he sat back and studied Wantree.

“I am not enthusiastic about Monsieur LeClerc’s plan to have you make an inspection,” Marchenko said when the two espressos arrived. “It complicates matters, and it weakens security.”

“I am discreet.”

“That may be. But now I learn that LeClerc is sending someone else. This is unacceptable.”

“I too was surprised by this. I just learned of it myself. I was not involved in your negotiation with Jacques LeClerc,” Wantree said. “He simply hired me the way the buyer of a used car might hire a mechanic to check out the vehicle before sale. I am merely a technician.”

Marchenko took this in, holding the espresso cup delicately in his large hand.

“Tell me what you will require to authenticate the device.”

“I will need to see it of course, preferably in one place, and I will need time to test circuits.”

“In one place? What do you mean?”

“LeClerc told me that the physics package was kept in a different location from the electronics.”

“That has changed,” Marchenko said. “All the materials are ready to be assembled at a special site. I have also undertaken the precaution of having my own technical advisor check the circuits and other components.”

“That will simplify my work considerably,” Wantree said. “He will have told you that I will want especially to examine the core. Oxidation and flaking, and so forth.”

Marchenko made an impatient motion with his hand.

“The Soviet Union was the greatest military state in the history of mankind, excepting perhaps the Romans, or the armies of Hannibal,” Marchenko said slowly. “Do you have any idea how carefully we tested and maintained in constant readiness all our matériel?”

“Then you also know that plutonium is a remarkably unstable metal.”

“I hardly think so. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of nearly 25,000 years.”

“That is not what I meant,” said Wantree peevishly. “When exposed to damp air, it forms oxides and hydrides that bubble up off the metal with huge increase in volume, much as rust does on exposed iron, except that in this case these materials can flake off and spontaneously ignite in oxygen. Even in pristine condition, if stored anywhere near the other components, plutonium rots them with gamma rays. When your device was part of the Soviet arsenal, it received almost constant maintenance and care.”

“Of course I know it, because I myself provided that maintenance,” Marchenko said sharply. “And I have continued to provide it, nursing this mechanism almost as I would a grandchild.”

The two men sat for some minutes without speaking. Wantree had no wish to further provoke a man whose cooperation Jacques LeClerc had already promised him. He realized that it had been a mistake to come without LeClerc to undertake precisely the kinds of negotiations that were necessary to secure Marchenko’s cooperation. Fighting for access was not part of his brief.

“Did you bring your own tools?” Marchenko said at last.

“No. It seemed a foolish and also a needless risk. Anyway, all I need for the first visit is my own pair of eyes.”

“Your
first
visit?”

“I imagine it will take more than one, but I may be wrong,” Wantree said timidly.

“This other man,” Marchenko said. “This consultant LeClerc wants to send me in addition to you, do you know when he arrives in Moscow?”

“I’m afraid not. I do not even know his name.”

“He’s an Arab,” Marchenko said, almost spitting out the words. “Al-Greeb, Yasser al-Greeb.”

***

The slight man with the stained carpetbag left the No. 7 train from Almaty and slipped anonymously into the vast marble reaches of the Paveletsky train station in south central Moscow. Though the trip had taken 90 hours, Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb felt refreshed and alert. Ever since his imprisonment in 2005 by Jordan’s Mukhabarat, every day he had control over his life and movements seemed like a gift to him from Allah. Even the surly old woman snoring and cursing in the seat next to him had failed to irritate him.

The business that brought him to Moscow would take no more than an hour or two, and the round-trip travel time amounted to almost eight days. Far from being bothered by this, Al-Greeb took this as a measure of the care with which he approached his work and another opportunity to push away from infidel mispriorities. The Western obsession with time seemed absurd to him. He would happily have traveled the distance from Almaty by camel had it sharpened the quality of his service to Allah.

He was traveling with a Kazakh identity card rather than a passport, which allowed him unlimited travel within the Russian Federation without the scrutiny sometimes invited by a passport.

Without leaving the station for the open air above, Al-Greeb traveled six miles north by underground to Komsomolskaya Square, an historic central nexus of the city now seedy with pickpockets, the homeless, and the poorer visitors from the steppes of central Asia. He inhaled the familiar smells of poverty, less pungent here in the cooler summer climate of Moscow than they were in Pakistan and Jordan, yet recognizable and welcoming. He blended in.

Al-Greeb purchased green onions and a crust of unleavened bread from a street vendor and sat for a time by the fountain, eating. He found a hostel catering to Kazakhs and residents of the eastern regions of Russia, rented a bed in a garage-like dormitory ripe with stinking men, and made arrangements by pay telephone to meet with Colonel Marchenko the following day at the Slavyanka Hotel.

Yasser al-Greeb was 34 years old. Though 5 feet 9 inches tall, he was somewhat above average height in the crowds of vitamin and nutrient-starved Russians. His skin was a darker olive than that of most natives of the southern Mediterranean and he had a lean, muscular build, weighing in at 160 pounds. His thinning jet-black hair was slicked straight back from a sloping forehead, a crooked, bony fin of a nose, and sunken cheeks. His irises were so dark that his pupils were almost invisible. Though he was a natural boxer and could adopt an aggressive posture when challenged, he was generally not the sort of person whose demeanor suggested that one give him wide berth on a sidewalk. Yet there was something about him that invited caution; dense as it was with thieves, no one bothered him in the precincts of Komsomolskaya Square.

The following morning was a fine one, sunny, the crisp Moscow air warmed to a balmy 70 degrees. Though he could have taken a short subway ride to reach the hotel, Al-Greeb began walking west from his hostel just north of Moscow’s inner ring road. He made the three-mile trek in less than an hour. Colonel Marchenko and Simon Wantree were waiting in the same corner of the lobby where they had shared coffee the previous morning.