James P. Hogan (28 page)

McCain stared incredulously. “Escape committee? You’re joking!”

Scanlon gave a satisfied nod of his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face. “Yes indeed, now, that’s put a different tune in your fiddle, hasn’t it? I hope ye’ve a conscience in you, Earnshaw, because it’s shame ye should be feelin’.”

“Who’s on this committee?”

“Ah, come on, now. You know the rules. I’ve given you my tip. It’s Koh that you need to be talking to.”

The Soviet embassy in Kensington was an eleven-story gray stone building of solid, uncluttered lines, built in the last ten years, standing in a walled enclosure of well-tended lawns and shrubbery behind a thick screen of trees. Inside the same compound, an adjacent apartment building of similar size housed most of the Soviet diplomatic personnel stationed in London. Despite such comforts as the swimming pool, sauna, gymnasium, and tennis courts that life within the compound offered, Anita Dorkas was more than grateful to live outside, a privilege that a
Novoye Vremya
correspondent enjoyed.

For one thing it meant that she and Enriko could usually manage to skip the dreary weekly Party meetings that were obligatory for everyone else, and live their private lives away from the stultifying cloistered existence led by those within – most of whom knew no more about the world outside than they were permitted to see on supervised tours made in groups. But more important, it enabled them to escape the omnipresent web of informants competing to discover anything derogatory. The wives were notorious for courting mutual confidences in order to curry favor with the chiefs by disclosing what they had learned, while two men would spend the night drinking together and then race to file reports on each other the next morning. The privilege existed to allow Enriko, in his capacity as a KGB case officer responsible for recruiting sources among British nationals and foreign residents, to operate more freely, since the embassy itself was under constant surveillance by the British; the irony of it was that the same convenience made it easier for Anita to conduct her own extramural dissident activities, too.

As was her habit on days when she was on duty, she took the tube to Holland Park station and walked from there. Enriko was using the car that day, anyway, to go to Hatfield for a luncheon interview with the chairman of a British industrial association. The Englishman prided himself on his political astuteness and was flattered at the suggestion of being quoted in a restricted-circulation newsletter that Enriko had assured him was read daily by the top Soviet leaders. Enriko would insist on making a small payment, of course, because “… our accounting procedures require it.” In time, as what had ostensibly begun as a friendship based on common business interests deepened, Enriko would ask for gradually more demanding favors and the payments would get bigger, until one day the victim would wake up to find himself way out of his depth. Then the high-pressure business would begin. There were four basic vulnerabilities that led people into being recruited, Enriko sometimes said, quoting an American acronym that the CIA taught their people: “MICE” – Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. In the case of the soon-to-be-recruited British industrialist, clearly it was Ego.

The gate attendant waved her on through, and she entered the marble foyer of the embassy building through the main entrance. An elevator took her up past nine floors of regular embassy rooms and offices to the tenth, where she emerged into the windowless anteroom of the London Residency of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which handled all operations abroad. As with its counterparts in Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome, Brasilia, Bangkok, New Delhi, and elsewhere, it existed solely for the purpose of subversion and information gathering. Anita’s special key opened the outer steel door. The security officer on duty checked her ID via a remote viewpanel and opened the second door, three feet beyond the first, from inside. She entered, nodding a good-morning to him in his guardpost as she passed, and went through into the central corridor of the lower level.

The thing that most people noticed immediately upon entering the Residency for the first time was the sepulchral quiet pervading the place. It was because the outer walls, floors, and ceilings of the building’s entire top two floors were all double to ensure soundproofing, with electronic noise beamed through the spaces between to frustrate listening devices. The few windows were formed from a one-way-opaque glass that was also soundproof and impervious to all known types of eavesdropping equipment. A whole social order based on treachery, deceit, mistrust, and paranoia, Anita thought to herself. How was it possible to avoid becoming embroiled in it along with everyone else?

She passed the large General Programs room, with twenty-odd work booths at which a number of case officers were already busy drafting reports, translating documents, and formulating operational plans. The important work of the case officers was considered to be not the obtaining of restricted information and documents – although this was valuable enough – but the discovering, cultivating, and eventual recruiting of “agents of influence”: politicians, government officials, journalists, academicians, and the like – persons able to influence policy-making and public opinion. For the mission of the KGB was still what it had always been: to preserve and expand the power of the Soviet Communist Party oligarchy throughout the world by essentially clandestine means.

Across the corridor, on the far side-of a wood-paneled outer room furnished with antique cabinets, a sofa, leather-backed chairs, and a conference table, was the office of the Resident, Major General Dimitri Turenov. Beyond that were two more offices. The first was shared by two of the line chiefs: the chief of Line X – the KGB field term for Directorate T, which collected foreign scientific and technological data – and the chief of Line N (Directorate S), which was responsible for supporting “illegals” – Soviet-bloc nationals infiltrated into other countries under various identities. The next office belonged to both the chief of Line KR (Directorate K), whose task was countering British counterintelligence, and the internal-security officer, who looked after the embassy’s protection, the guarding of important Soviet visitors to the country, and recapturing defectors. Opposite these was the larger office shared by the chief of the American Group, who compiled dossiers on resident American businesspeople, scientists, technicians, servicemen, and others who had come to their attention as potentially useful; the chief of a similar group that watched West Europeans; and the active-measures officer, who handled covert operations and orchestrated disinformation and propaganda campaigns among the British news media.

Halfway along the corridor she came to the stairway and elevator connecting the tenth and eleventh floors. Halfway up the stairs she met Ivan, one of the case officers, and Anatoli on their way down. Anatoli was one of the technicians who monitored local British police and counterintelligence-service radio frequencies. If, for example, a sudden increase in British surveillance communications activity occurred just before an agent from the Residency was due to meet with one of his contacts, the agent would be signaled by radio to abort the appointment.

“Good morning,” Anita said to them.

“Did Enriko come in with you?” Ivan asked.

“I’m afraid not. He’ll be out until the afternoon. Is it important?”

“Popovechny wanted to talk to him. He asked me to mention it if I saw him, that’s all.”, Lt. General Vadim Popovechny was the Residency’s second-in-command and also the head of Line PR, specializing in political intelligence. He was dedicated, ambitious, and injected the ideal measure of toughness into the place to complement Turenov’s more intellectual and sophisticated management style.

“Any idea what it’s about?” Anita asked.

“Sorry, no.”

“Where’s he gone?” Anatoli inquired.

“Hatfield, I think he said.”

“Oh well, see you later, anyhow,” Ivan said.

“Yes. Maybe at lunch.”

“See you later,” Anatoli said.

The eleventh floor contained the electronics-surveillance officer’s domain, which included an enormous room packed with radio and microwave receivers, recorders, computers, terminals, and equipment that communicated with satellites via antennas on the roof. Next to that were the Technical Operations and Photography labs, and then the Translation Office, which Anita entered. Grigori and Eva were already there. Anastasia had a dental appointment and wouldn’t be in until later, she remembered, and it was Viktor’s day off. “Good morning,” she said.

“Hello, Anita,” Grigori answered. He was in his late twenties, and had come out from Moscow fairly recently to spend a couple of years familiarizing himself with overseas routine before becoming active in the field.

Eva, cheerful and freckle-faced, was both physicist and linguist, and had taught English at the Foreign Intelligence School of Moscow University’s Institute for International Relations. She looked around from the screen that she was working at and grinned. “Hi. Say, I like the coat. Is it new?”

Anita took her coat off, held it up for Eva to see, then hung it on the rack inside the door. “I got it a couple of days ago in Queensway. On sale, too.”

“I love the color. And that collar has such a stylish look.”

“Oh, Viktor worked late and finished the Chalmers article, so you don’t have to worry about it,” Grigori informed her. “It’s all filed and logged.”

“Good,” Anita said. “I don’t like dealing with that heavy technical material, anyway.” She sat down at her own terminal, activated it, and entered a call to the classified section of the computer records for the file she had saved yesterday. “It’s going to be a hot day.”

“I was thinking of going for a swim in the compound at lunchtime,” Eva said.

“Sounds like a good idea. Maybe I’ll join you.” Anita produced her magnetic key and inserted it in her desk to open the drawer containing the original documents that she had been working from. She was about to say something further, then stopped and frowned down at the drawer as the lock failed to disengage. Either it was faulty, or her key had been invalidated – all the electronic locks in the building could be reprogrammed remotely from the Security Office downstairs. An instant later a message on her screen announced:
ILLEGAL
ACCESS
CODE
.
REQUEST
DENIED
.

Anita stared perplexedly at the screen. Then she realized that Maria Chorenkov, the section’s supervisor, was standing in the doorway of her office adjoining the Translation room. “Comrade Dorkas, would you step this way, please,” she said. She was a tall, straight-bodied woman with a sharp face, thin-rimmed spectacles, and graying hair tied in a bun, who always wore thick, utilitarian stockings and drab tweedy clothes. Her voice just at this moment fitted the image. Confused, Anita followed her into the office. Behind her, Eva and Grigori exchanged apprehensive glances.

“You won’t be needing access to the records, since you will no longer be working with this section,” Chorenkov told her without preliminaries when the door was closed. “You are being transferred downstairs to the Secretariat, effective immediately. Collect your personal belongings, please. And thank you for your help during the time you have been with us.”

Anita was flummoxed. “But this is so sudden. I don’t understand…”

“All I know is that I have direct instructions from General Popovechny.”

“He gave no reason?”

“Not to me. And I didn’t ask.”

“But… Could I speak with him, please?”

“That is impossible. He will be out until tomorrow.”

Anita collected her personal belongings, mumbled a bewildered farewell to Grigori and Eva, and went back downstairs to report to the Secretariat, which provided the Residency’s clerical services. She was given the job of searching through British newspapers, magazines, specialist journals, and the public dataservice for references to certain listed topics. All the information was freely available in the public domain; it gave her the uneasy feeling that her security clearance had been suspended.

But by lunchtime she was telling herself that she had overreacted. The mundane work had to be done, after all, and somebody had to do it. Maria Chorenkov’s brusqueness and insensitivity had been typical. Tomorrow there would be a simple explanation. By midafternoon she had just about recovered from the shock, when Colonel Felyakin, the internal-security officer, called her into his office.

“You are scheduled for leave tomorrow, I see,” he said.

“Yes,” Anita replied.

“I hope you haven’t made any important plans, because it will be necessary to change your arrangements,” he told her. “A couple of people from Moscow will be here, and one of the things they want to look into involves you and your husband. Apparently there has been an administrative mix-up over the dates and durations of some of the postings, and we’d like to get it straightened out. Can you manage that all right?”

“Why, yes… I suppose so.”

“Thank you. Shall we say ten o’clock? Oh, and your husband also. I’ve checked, and he is due in tomorrow, anyway.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“And make sure you have your passports. We’ll need to check the dates and visas in them.”

“Yes. Ten o’clock tomorrow,” Anita repeated mechanically.

“Excellent.”

By evening Anita’s imagination had turned her fears into certainty. Somehow they were on to her, Enriko called to say he had been detained during the afternoon and would be going straight back to the embassy for an evening appointment with the Line KR chief, Colonel Shepanov. The solitude aggravated Anita’s nervousness. She paced restlessly about the apartment, smoking more cigarettes than she was accustomed to and fussing with knickknacks and ornaments that didn’t need rearranging. She poured herself a drink and sat staring unseeingly at the television for an hour, searching back in her mind over the events of the past few weeks for a hint of anything that might have gone wrong or something indiscreet that she might have said. She could find nothing, but that didn’t really amount to much. The biggest danger in this kind of business was having to depend on other people.