Palace of Treason (35 page)

“Now that you mention it, getting chummy with the president is a contact sport,” said Margery. “We could jeopardize her continued access and
well-being if he loses interest in her and sidelines her. Even Vladimir’s wife, Putina, eventually got the heave-ho.”

“The prospect of DIVA becoming a favored confidante to the president is enormous,” said Benford.

“ ‘Favored confidant.’ Simon, what’s that mean exactly?” said Dante. “You want DIVA to seduce the president?”

“Calm yourselves,” said Benford. “We will exploit what we can with due consideration to protecting our clandestine reporting source.” He glowered around the small office. It’s why he liked these officers; they gave him shit. He began again, his clockwork mind driving without pause the pinions and keys and ratchets in his brain.

“Let’s review. One: We know that the Russians have begun receiving truncated reports from someone code-named TRITON. Two: The Russians do not yet know TRITON’s identity. Three: TRITON has reported to the Center that CIA has recruited a GRU source on military/scientific intelligence, and has provided
our internal
cryptonym—LYRIC. Four: SVR
Rezident
Yulia Zarubina continues to meet a transparent Air Force double agent to enable intel exchanges with TRITON. Five: A recently recruited SVR source was suddenly recalled from Caracas. That agent’s status is unknown.” He looked around the room.

“Does anyone outside CIA know the LYRIC crypt?” asked Margery. They all knew internal cryptonyms were sacrosanct, but they also knew that they were often mentioned in interagency settings.

“With the wide readership of LYRIC’s reporting, and the frequent community meetings about his intelligence, it is possible, perhaps likely, yes, that the LYRIC cryptonym is known outside this building,” said Benford.

“And DIVA has reported that this TRITON is using the US Air Force double-agent operation as a conduit to Zarubina?” said Helton.

“Correct. I hope to learn more about how this is done when we speak to her,” said Benford.

“Okay,” said Helton. “But that means TRITON could be in the military, here in Langley, in the White House, on the NSC, on the Hill, or an aerospace contractor in California.”

“Also correct,” said Benford. “The hunt for this mole would by necessity begin on quite a broad scale. Manpower constraints would be a consideration.”

“We could be working on this for months,” said Margery, imagining the task forces, the damage assessments, the production reviews. A mess.

“Years,” said Benford.

Helton looked at Margery. “That’s not the worst of it,” he said. “If the Caracas recall is because of TRITON, that would suggest he’s inside this building. The recruitment is too new; that case wasn’t known outside Headquarters.”

“Well, unless we hear that our Caracas agent is on a meat hook in Butyrka prison, we won’t know,” said Margery.

“And we do not have the luxury of time,” said Benford, fidgeting with a pencil on his desk. “If TRITON is among us, and well-placed, and reading material across distinct disciplines—military, political, scientific, geographic—he could hamstring the entire operations directorate.”

“And kill scores of agents,” said Margery. She had worked in China operations in the early years and knew the list of agents “not returned, no contact, presumed compromised” by heart. She still thought of some of them occasionally. They all did.

Benford looked over Helton’s shoulder at Janice Callahan, sitting quietly with mahogany legs crossed, arms outstretched along the back of the couch.

“Anything to add?” said Benford.

“Obviously,” said Janice, “we have to find this unpleasant traitor as soon as possible.” Benford’s fuming silence was more appalling than his usual red-faced rants.

“Thank you, Janice,” Benford said with elaborate irony. “How do we do it?” There was that
tick-tock
silence in the room, the second before the thermobaric vapor cloud ignites.

Janice lifted one leg and examined her shoe. “It might be easier than we think,” she said. Benford stilled an impulse to rise from behind his desk, pull his hair, and gyrate. He instinctively cut Janice—all of these friends—some slack: Janice too had walked down dripping alleyways in rusty iron cities with the footsteps echoing behind her.

“How. Do. We. Do. It?” said Benford.

“Starve a cold and feed a fever,” said Janice, looking at him through her lashes and flashing her trademark smile.

“Starve a cold and feed a fever?” said Benford quietly. “Please have the goodness to explain to me why you are quoting the Farmer’s Almanac.” Helton turned in his chair, smiling. He had the scent, just a whiff, and waited for Janice to explain.

“Simon, if TRITON cannot use the Air Force DA op to get his info to Zarubina—if we starve the cold—he’ll get so anxious about his money, or his stroked ego, or whatever motivates him—we feed those fevers—he’ll have to risk meeting Zarubina face-to-face.”

“And we’ll have a chance at getting a look at him,” said Margery.

“Zarubina is no pushover,” said Helton. “She’ll be difficult to trip up on the street.”

“Easier than trying to dig TRITON out of the long grass once he’s been assigned an illegals handler,” said Janice. “We all read DIVA’s SRAC message. The Russians are getting ready to assign a clean illegal to meet him. We’ll never find him then.”

They all looked at one another. An illegal would mean big trouble. Since the beginning of espionage, a foreign spy with civilian cover, posing as a native-born citizen of the host country with a meticulously prepared legend, speaking fluent, colloquial language, and living an unremarkable life with a humdrum job, had been the perfect faceless solution to handle a sensitive asset in enemy territory. No official status. No diplomatic installation. No intelligence-service connection. No profile for the mole hunters to search for. And everyone in the room knew the Russians prepared and deployed illegals better than anyone.

“Janice is right. Terminate the Air Force double agent op,” said Helton. “They’ll scream bloody murder, but you can go over OSI’s head and get some general to spike it.”

“And our boy will have a dilemma,” said Margery. “Without the DA op, TRITON has three choices: Find another anonymous way to commit treason, stop spying, or come out of the closet and deal with Zarubina in person on the street.”

“And we make that nice old lady in the
rezidentura
come out and play, we elevate her heart rate a little, and we see,” said Janice.

“I’ll do this myself,” said Benford, already thinking about the possibilities. “The Air Force is going to be enormously unhappy. And Major Thorstad will no longer have to endure the rigors of espionage. He will have to content himself with watching his videotape movie collection at night.”

Janice got up from the couch and twitched her dress into place. “It’s Blu-ray and streaming video now, Simon,” she said. “VHS is gone.”

“Gone? What are you talking about?” said Benford.

Seb Angevine sat in the black SUV returning to Headquarters after a meeting at AFOSI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. He was lost in thought as the vehicle sped north on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, the budding trees that lined the Potomac a blur. An hour ago, he’d had to suppress his panicked reaction when he was informed by a thin-lipped Air Force colonel that SEARCHLIGHT, the double agent operation featuring Major Thorstad, had been terminated on the orders of the deputy chief of staff for Intelligence of the Air Staff.

The colonel explained that, despite the operation’s solid start and hopeful results in engaging with Russian intelligence, the decision to terminate the DA op was made because SVR requirements levied on Major Thorstad increasingly were zeroing in on classified programs and technology that could under no circumstances be approved as feed material. The potential tactical gains from dilatory contact with the Russians were eclipsed by the significant potential intelligence losses. Major Thorstad was to break contact and rebuff any attempts at recontact by SVR.

The working-level OSI planners and counterintelligence officers fumed: Their golden DA op was being canceled; it was rampant risk aversion. A notebook was thrown to the floor, and the word “chickenshit” was muttered by one person as he stormed out of the room. Red-haired Major Thorstad stood up to tell his colleagues that even though the decision from the Pentagon (he used the term “big house”) was disappointing, strategic considerations took precedence. It had been an honor to have been involved in the operation, he said, and he was convinced that the continued collective
efforts of the Air Force and the US Armed Forces would amply defend our national security in the future. He sat down when an unidentified voice said, “Blow it out your ass, Ginger.”

Angevine had nodded at the OSI officers on his way out, keeping his composure. This was a catastrophe. Without the periodic exchange of chicken feed, he had no ready way to pass information to SVR. And if he could not pass information to the Russians, they would not pay him. He needed the money. And he still had a score to settle: He had to look at that
goinfre,
that hog Gloria Bevacqua, the new head of operations, during executive committee meetings, choking on the outrage of her having his job. His job.

He had to decide on a course of action. He had to balance the extreme risk of getting out on the street to meet Zarubina against his continuing—and increasing—need for money. Buoyed by the three Russian payments, Angevine had already splurged a little and bought a new Audi S7 (fifty-seven grand) and a Breitling Chronomat 41 wristwatch (twelve grand), and made reservations for a dive vacation to Belize (five grand). His government salary at the SIS-Three level simply wasn’t going to cut it.
Merde.

Getting to the Russians would be like stumbling through a minefield. He couldn’t walk in or throw a package over the fence: The white-stone Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue and the four-story Russian Consulate on Tunlaw Road were under constant FEEB surveillance from lookouts scattered throughout the neighborhood. He couldn’t call in: Russian Embassy phone lines—dozens of them—were monitored around the clock. He couldn’t knock on an apartment door: Only selected high-ranking Russian diplomats—such as Zarubina—lived outside the embassy compound, but those apartments were covered, including the Russian ambassador’s downtown beaux arts mansion on Sixteenth Street NW.

What about a bump, on-the-fly contact on the street? A supermarket, bookstore, restaurant? Too risky. FBI surveillance of known and suspect SVR officers was random and rotated from target to target, making it hard to plan. Angevine knew this threadbare coverage was a result of agency cuts mandated during the annual congressional budget drama. The FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Division (FCI) could field only reduced surveillance coverage and otherwise had to depend on limited technical means to get an inkling of which Russian intel officers were active, when they were operational, and with whom they were interacting. Down deep, the FCI
experts grimly knew SVR was aware of exactly how little was arrayed on the street against them—Moscow could read the US budget news in the newspapers too. The Russians knew exactly how weak the Americans were.

A slim advantage for him. Still, thought Angevine, you could not predict when or on whom FCI surveillance would deploy. Consequently, trying to make public contact with any Russian was to spin a loaded cylinder and play roulette. He brooded the rest of the day, then drove downtown to the Good Guys Club on Wisconsin Avenue to watch the dancers, get a beer, and try to think.

From the street the club was marked by a neon sign on an otherwise plain brick front of a narrow row house built in the 1820s—just a hint of its former elegant federalist façade remained—in a now-dilapidated commercial district of pizza-slice kitchens and sushi takeout, grocery stores and nail salons. He left the pigeon-and-asphalt world as he pushed into the club, leaving for the time being the dilemma of his stalled career as a Russian mole. The single-room club—
Who was he kidding,
Angevine thought,
it’s a strip joint
—was narrow but deep. Angevine nodded to the jaw breaker sitting on a stool by the front door and headed for the back of the room. The place was tight even on a weekday: all three small elevated dancing stages, spaced evenly down the room, were in action. Angevine weaved between the long tables and bench seats filling the length of the room. Each elevated stage had a Lucite floor illuminated from below in soft white light—decadent Weimar Berlin shadows were cast on the bodies of the girls—a Lucite pole refracting light up its length, and a full-length mirror on the wall. The only other lights in the club came from the tracked overhead spots in red, orange, and brilliant white. The stages were lit brighter than any movie set, and the names of the dancers scrolled endlessly on an LED ticker tape above the bar. Multiple speakers filled the club with stripper rock from the 1980s and ’90s.

Angevine sat down near the back and ordered a beer and one of the small sandwiches available during happy hour, this one a surprisingly good hamburger on toast. One of his favorite dancers was finishing up on stage two and would be rotating to stage three, which was closest to him. She had seen him from down the room, with the acuity of all working girls who dance naked in front of strangers. Angevine appraised her under the spotlights for the hundredth time— she did something to him, those green eyes. And that body didn’t hurt.

Sitting at the table next to Angevine was a portly man with a big head and an epic comb-over sweating in a shapeless suit—had to be some slumming GS-15 from HHS or HUD—accompanied by a nervous, blinking younger man. Fatso’s neck bulged out over a cheap blue shirt collar with what looked like a miniature-palm-tree pattern.
Definitely HHS,
thought Angevine. The stripper lights in the ceiling over stage three caught the worn sheen of the shoulders and elbows of his dark suit coat as he hung it off the back of his chair.

Angevine’s dancer (he liked to think of her as his), whose stage name was Felony, stepped up onto stage three and made an elaborate show of cleaning the full-length mirror behind her with a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a paper towel, bending straight-legged at the waist to wipe the lower half of the glass. This was preliminary Kabuki for every new girl: The mirrors were covered in handprints and lipstick kisses after each set.

Porky Pig at the next table laughed at Felony’s mirror-cleaning routine and pointed at her buttocks and G-string. Not done.
Worse than HHS,
thought Angevine.
He could even be IRS.
Porky elbowed his scrawny companion as “Hotel California” came on and Felony hoisted herself on the Lucite pole halfway up its length, then started sliding headfirst to the floor slowly, infinitely slowly, as smoothly as any mechanical lift. Earthbound again, Felony began dancing for Porky, who had stopped pointing and grinning and was now staring and swallowing. Angevine watched his face shining under the lights as Felony spun on the pole and laid down a cloud of scent—White Shoulders eau de cologne.

Near the end of the set another Eagles song, “James Dean,” came on and Felony turned on the afterburners. Angevine, astonished, watched the fat guy get up and start dancing like Boris Yeltsin, hunching his shoulders and shaking bunched fists. He began bellowing what sounded like “
Cheymes Dyeen
.” The bouncer at the door all the way at the other end of the club started to get off his stool, but Felony waved him off. The young companion pulled at Fatso’s arm, and he sat down. After her set, Felony shimmied into her merry widow, discreetly shifting her breasts to fill the cups, and went over to sit between the two men. Off-duty dancers always worked the crowd to soften them up for bigger tips in the next set.

Angevine could see the younger man doing most of the talking, but Felony kept a long-nailed hand on the inside of Fatso’s thigh, pretty far above
the knee. She had an instinct about who the important one was. After the requisite five-minute “meet and greet” and a not-so-discreet tip of a folded bill stuffed between her breasts by Porky Pig, the two got up, shrugged on suit coats, and left the club.

Felony came over to Angevine, who stood, and she shook his hand—the stripper world was regulated by an idealized protocol of respect and chivalry (and men keeping their hands to themselves). Angevine bought her a ginger ale for champagne prices and smiled at her. “Great dancing, as always,” he said. He knew the girls seldom accept outside dates with customers, so there was no pressure. Besides, she couldn’t stay too long at any given table.

“Those two guys were Russians,” Felony said, jerking her head sideways. “From their embassy up Wisconsin. The fat guy didn’t speak much English, so he brought the little guy along. Gave me a twenty.”

Angevine looked up at her sharply. “How do you know they were Russians?” he said over the music. The Russian Embassy compound was two-tenths of a mile up Wisconsin Avenue in the next block. His scalp started creeping over his skull. Felony reached into her stocking top and handed him a calling card:
S. V. Loganov, Minister-Counselor, Embassy of the Russian Federation.

“That’s the fat guy; did you see him dancing?” said Felony, pointing at the card with the nail of her little finger. “But the little guy gave it to me, like he didn’t know what to do, whether he should or not.” She looked up at the LED sign. “Got to get changed. You staying around?” Angevine looked at her blankly, lost in thought.