Excerpt
Red Traitor
1
KGB Headquarters, Moscow
4 July 1962
The summer sunlight slanted through the heavy net curtains of General Orlov’s office. The room was uncomfortably hot and smelled oppressively of floor polish. Vasin glanced around the table at the colleagues who had, like him, been abruptly summoned. Pushkov, the veteran KGB rezident who had won notoriety in the service by organizing the poisoning of Ukrainian nationalists and other collaborators after the war in Paris and Berlin. Ignatenko, the pudgy communications man with permanent dents in his flabby temples from his hours spent in headphones. Vasin’s team of crack spy catchers, all melting in their chairs like ice cream on a hot sidewalk.
Nobody spoke.
Pushkov took a slim file marked top secret from a neat pile in front of him and used it, irreverently, to fan his face. There was a thumping clamor as the boss bustled in, flushed and irritable, as though it were they who had kept him waiting, not the other way around. Orlov took his place at the head of the table.
“Schultz has something for us,” grunted Orlov without preamble. Ignoring the men in the room, he fixed his attention on the papers he had brought with him and began reading them with aggressive attention.
Vasin might have guessed. Boris Ignatyevich Schultz, the chief watcher on Vasin’s surveillance team. Also--Vasin’s instructor at the KGB school. Also--the best surveillance man in the business. Typical of Schultz, after all these fruitless months, to catch some kind of breakthrough on his night shift. And bloody typical of Schultz to call the head of the Special Cases Department--Orlov--rather than report to Vasin, his immediate superior.
Schultz was a skinny, stooped man with a cadaverous face and a dapper clipped mustache. He entered the conference room and winced at the sight of his colleagues as if at a roomful of particularly unpromising student spies. A young sergeant followed in his wake, lugging a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder in both arms. As the kid busied himself with plugging in the machine, Schultz settled his lanky body into a chair next to Orlov’s, folding into himself like a telescope.
“Telephone box on the corner of Malaya Bronnaya Street.” Schultz’s voice was reedy but commanding. “This morning. Just before six. Listen.”
Schultz turned the dial that set the machine in motion. An electronic purr, then the rattling clicks of the number being dialed and connected.
“Yes? . . . I am listening.”
“Daria Vladimirovna? Forgive me for calling so early. I wanted to catch you before you left for work.”
Colonel Oleg Morozov’s voice was unmistakable.
“There is no Daria Vladimirovna here. You have the wrong number.”
“My apologies, citizen.”
Schultz switched off the machine and made a grimace that might have been a smile. Vasin felt his pulse quickening.
“Morozov made no follow-up call, Boris Ignatyevich? To another number?”
“No follow-up call, Colonel Vasin.” Schultz eyed his former pupil down the table with the tiniest nod of approval. Vasin, perhaps you are not such a total idiot, the old man’s look said. Vasin pressed on.
“Our target gets up at dawn to make a single call to a wrong number from a phone box. A number he has never called from home, I presume? A number . . .”
“So who picked up?” Orlov spoke over Vasin. “Do we have an address? Have we got her in custody yet?”
Schultz made a small moue before answering.
“Comrade General. The number is listed to Dmitry Ulyanov Street Forty-Two. The Hotel Ulaanbataar. That line is installed in the loading bay of the kitchens, in fact. But . . .” Schultz, with the invincible confidence of the elderly, raised a hand before Orlov could interrupt him. “At six in the morning the place is full of deliverymen. At least eight trucks came in between five thirty and six thirty, according to the watchman, each with one driver and at least one loader. Many kitchen staff and members of the hotel administration passed the area. We have not been able to find any witnesses who saw anyone using the phone.”
“An untraceable contact. A cutout.” Orlov clasped his hands together and flexed his shoulders as though limbering for a boxing match. “Which means what, Schultz? Tell us, please.”
“We have him, General. Morozov has contacted his controllers at the CIA. Activated himself. Or is acknowledging a contact. Over the past nine months of surveillance in Moscow, he has not put a foot wrong. We assume that Morozov has been under orders not to break cover till he has something important to report. So now . . .”
“Now we must do what? Colonel?” Orlov’s head snapped toward Vasin. The other team members followed the General’s lead, obediently looking to him for an answer.
“Now we arrest him, sir.” Vasin straightened in his chair.
“No, Vasin.”
Of course. Vasin should have known better. There was never a correct answer to the boss’s rhetorical questions.
“Sorry, sir. First we must find out who he is working with.”
“That is correct, Colonel Vasin. When you pull a weed, you do it by the root, not the leaves.”
In the security forces of the glorious Soviet Motherland, everything must be connected to something else. Inside one spy must be the lead to another spy lurking inside him, like an endless set of matryoshka dolls.
Alone with Vasin after his colleagues shuffled out, Orlov made no move to rise. The General instead sat like a malevolent fungus, glaring down the conference table at his protégé. His small eyes danced with barely suppressed glee.
“Thank and praise the Lord God Almighty.” Orlov’s voice was a deep, emphatic hiss. The General had once studied for the priesthood, Vasin remembered, and kept his face blank. “The Director has been asking about PLUTO.”
PLUTO--the suspected traitor in the heart of the Soviet security establishment. Orlov’s obsession, and Vasin’s daily nightmare. At the end of his last assignment, in the secret nuclear city of Arzamas-16, Vasin had invented an American spy. The case had been a mess, and Vasin had to bend--break--many rules to stop a misguided zealot obsessed with stopping a nuclear holocaust. He regretted nothing. But to get out with his skin intact, Vasin had made the lunatic an American spy. It had seemed so neat, back then, to pin an invented sin on a dead man. More, Vasin had emerged with glory. Special Cases’ new top spy catcher.
But now that Vasin’s spy report had been duly logged, his fantasy had become official fact. And spies, real or not, need a handler. Which was why General Orlov had chosen Vasin to track down PLUTO. Connect your imaginary spy to a real one: the insoluble puzzle that Orlov had handed to his new favorite. Go on, Vasin, join the damn dots. Good luck. So for the last nine months Vasin had been chasing this ghost, chasing rumors, watching for the slightest hint that Colonel Oleg Morozov was in fact the fabled PLUTO.
“So now, finally, I can tell the Director that we have a breakthrough. Uncovering PLUTO will lead us to the next link. We find out what information he is passing to the Yankees. We find out who is supplying him that information. But most important, we find out who Morozov’s krysha is. You understand me, Vasin?”
Krysha--literally, a roof. Criminal slang for protector. Vasin felt the world swim before his eyes. Yes. He understood exactly what Orlov meant. Or rather, who. The next link of the chain of treachery that Orlov imagined led ever upward, right into the very highest reaches of Soviet power.
“Morozov’s protector, sir?” Vasin’s mouth had gone dry. “A senior officer with whom he may be personally associated?”
“Precisely, Vasin. Perhaps Morozov is somebody’s family friend. Perhaps he goes to barbecues at the dacha of some big pine cone. Goes on hunting parties with the top brass. Have you come across anyone like that, Vasin, since Morozov has been under your expert eye?”
He felt Orlov’s eyes drilling into him. Oh yes--both men knew precisely who Orlov had in mind. Colonel Morozov’s old pal, his dacha and hunting-party host. His personal friend and mentor, his boss and protector. None other than General Ivan Serov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Better known as the GRU, the KGB’s chief institutional rival. Serov--Orlov’s great bureaucratic rival. And, for reasons Vasin could not begin to understand, Orlov’s personal enemy.
Vasin saw his boss’s logic clearly enough. Use Morozov to get some dirt on the man’s protector, Serov. Maybe some fatal dirt. What a thing it would be for Orlov to have the head of the rival service on the hook.
A few months before, Vasin had watched a new American film--part of a closed session for the exclusive benefit of kontora officers only, rather than for the general public--about a mad nineteenth-century sea captain who chased a phantom white whale around the seas of the world. Orlov was that captain, Special Cases was his ship--and his unfortunate first mate, destined to pursue the skipper’s obsession to the ends of the earth, was Vasin.
“We have observed such an association, sir. As you know.” Vasin’s voice had become a whisper. “You believe that Comrade General Serov may be involved in the activities of the traitor Morozov?”
“If not involved, then perhaps Serov has been misguidedly covering for his friend? Either could be plausible. Our business admits no loose ends. You find a guilty man, Vasin.”
Vasin summoned the courage to speak into Orlov’s scorching gaze.
“You mean--find Serov guilty, sir?”
For a moment Vasin feared that his chief would swell and burst like an overripe puffball. But no. Orlov, always unpredictable, instead leaned back in his chair and raised his palms to the heavens with something like a chuckle.
“We follow the evidence, of course. The evidence of our own eyes and ears. The evidence in Morozov’s eventual confession. Vasin. You have two loose ends to tie, one at the beginning of the Morozov story and another at the end. This began with a story of yours about the traitor in Arzamas . . .”
Something in Vasin tightened whenever Orlov referred to the Arzamas spy being “his” story, “his” case. There were moments when Vasin wondered if the old reptile suspected that the espionage charge had been a figment of his imagination. But his boss continued smoothly, counting off the points on his hand.
“In turn, that led to a quest to find your spy’s controller. As soon as we catch Morozov, prove that he is PLUTO, then we find who is next. Who he is linked to. Upward, downward, sideways.”
Orlov stood, walked down the length of the table, and put a confiding hand on Vasin’s shoulder. The General’s voice was low and soft in Vasin’s ear.
“My Sasha. Two loose threads, one man. God’s sake, Vasin. I gave you good people. Time to bring this the damn case home. Quickly.”
