The Fall of Moscow Station (12 page)

Kathryn Cooke wondered if the man wasn't suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. She had known many subordinates who endured that. The White House had been sending her case officers into war zones at a rapid clip for more than a decade now, and more than a few had been forced to fire weapons in anger. But any severe, prolonged stress could lead a man down that same road and there was no question that the commander in chief's job included a daily serving of that. If Rostow had joined that particular club, Cooke was sure the man's stress evaporated only when he could finally escape into the oblivion of sleep, and then only on the few nights it wouldn't follow him into his dreams. Her own time struggling to justify to herself the condition her orders had imposed on her people had left Cooke with her own theory as to why so many presidents had affairs. The world thought such dalliances were about power and indulgence. Cooke was sure they were seeking new forms of stress relief.

She wondered whether the paper in Rostow's hand would send the man off in search of some.

IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR

MOSCOW 76490

1. FURTHER TO REF. RED CELL OFFICER STRYKER ADMITTED TO RUSSIAN EMBASSY BERLIN 1115 HOURS MORNING OF 26 SEPTEMBER. EMBASSY STAFF INITIALLY DENIED THAT CIA DEFECTOR MAINES WAS PRESENT BUT RELENTED AFTER STRYKER PRESENTED CONTRARY EVIDENCE.

2. STRYKER WAS ESCORTED TO EMBASSY ROOF AND INTERVIEWED FOR TEN MINUTES BY SENIOR RUSSIAN OFFICIAL LATER IDENTIFIED AS DIRECTOR GRU ARKADY LAVROV. LAVROV WAS EVASIVE ABOUT ANY ROLE PLAYED IN MAINES' DEFECTION AND INTIMATED THAT MAINES HAD REQUESTED ASYLUM. STRYKER CAREFULLY SUGGESTED THAT LAVROV ENTERTAIN A DEAL FOR MAINES' EXTRADITION, BUT HE REFUSED.

3. MAINES WAS ESCORTED TO EMBASSY ROOF AFTER LAVROV'S DEPARTURE, WHERE STRYKER INTERVIEWED HIM FOR TEN MINUTES. MAINES ADMITTED IDENTIFYING RUSSIAN GENERAL STEPAN STRELNIKOV (RET) AS A CIA ASSET TO PROVE BONA FIDES BUT CLAIMED HE HAD NOT BELIEVED THE RUSSIANS WOULD EXECUTE HIM.

4. MAINES ADMITTED THAT HIS RUSSIAN HANDLERS WERE NOT PAYING HIM COMMENSURATE WITH HIS EXPECTATIONS. STRYKER SUGGESTED THAT MAINES CONSIDER RETURNING TO CONUS IN RETURN FOR COMMUTATION OF PRISON SENTENCE. MAINES REFUSED AND MADE A COUNTEROFFER, PROMISING TO NAME NO FURTHER ASSETS IN RETURN FOR A FULL PARDON FROM POTUS FOR ALL OFFENSES COMMITTED AND FIFTY MILLION US DOLLARS. MAINES SET A DEADLINE OF TWENTY-THREE HOURS LOCAL TIME FOR STRYKER TO ARRANGE THE DEAL AND TOLD STRYKER TO STAND IN FRONT OF RUSSIAN EMBASSY BERLIN WEARING A RED JACKET TO SIGNAL THE DEAL WAS ACCEPTED. IF DEAL IS NOT ACCEPTED, MAINES PROMISED TO REVEAL NAMES OF ALL RUSSIAN ASSETS IN A BID TO GAIN AS MUCH GOODWILL WITH HIS RUSSIAN HANDLERS AS POSSIBLE.

5. STRYKER EXPRESSED HER DISPLEASURE AT MAINES' ACTIONS BUT PROMISED TO INFORM USG OF MAINES' PROPOSAL.

6. REGARDS. END OF MESSAGE.

Rostow stared at the cable report in his hand and read it twice before looking up. “Having trouble keeping the house in order?”

Cooke ignored the dig. “Defectors are an occupational hazard, but a rare one.”

“Rare?” Rostow asked, disbelieving. “Last I heard, the intelligence community's had a few dozen moles since '47.”

“Moles, yes,” Cooke replied. “Defectors, not so many. There's a difference.”

“Not much,” Rostow scolded. “After Snowden practically burned Fort Meade to the ground, I would've thought that you people would've locked Langley down tight. But no, you've got not just a mole, but a
defector
, and somebody in your shop or Langley or the Bureau will leak it to the
Post.
Half the country will think I can't protect national security, and the other half will hail Maines as a hero and call me an unethical tyrant who likes killing children with drones. And that's assuming Maines doesn't leak it himself. It used to be that defectors had the decency to at least slink off and spend their golden years hiding out in a slum somewhere. Now they literally wrap themselves in a flag and get on the cover of
Wired.
So now my entire domestic agenda running into the election season is going to get blown out of the papers because one of your people ran off and will start spewing classified information to the press any day now.” He tossed the Maines cable across the Resolute desk toward her.

I suppose you want leaking classified information to remain your prerogative
, Cooke thought.

“You know,” Rostow continued, “the last time the director of national intelligence was in this room, he threatened to resign if I didn't promote you. I agreed on the one condition that you never set foot in my office again.”

“I wouldn't know about any of that, Mr. President,” Cooke said, certain that a refusal to be baited would do more to upset the man than any retort she could conjure up.

“He didn't tell you?”

“It wouldn't have made a difference if he had,” Cooke said. “I'd still be here. I volunteered to come.”

The president frowned. “Why?”

“Alden Maines was one of mine when I was CIA director,” Cooke replied. “I promoted him. I put him in the position where he had access to the information he's giving to the Russians. So I want to deal with the problem. The DNI shouldn't have to take the political heat for this.”

“You want me to take Maines's deal,” Rostow said.

“I can't recommend a decision one way or another,” Cooke reminded him. “I can only explain what we think are the opportunities and implications of decisions.”

“Not much difference,” Rostow groused.

“Sir, if I may?” The words erupting out of the speakerphone on the Resolute desk were polite, making them a mismatch for the tone of the voice.

“What was your name again?” Rostow frowned.

“Jonathan Burke, sir.”

“Mr. Burke is the chief of CIA's Red Cell,” Cooke said in Jon's defense. “He's also one of the two officers who recovered the Iranian nuclear warhead last year.”

Rostow froze. “You were in Venezuela?”

U.S. Embassy

Berlin, Germany

“I was,” Jon confirmed, trying to keep his voice as neutral as he could manage.
And you almost got me killed.
He would've known better than to say it even without Kyra's coaching. “Sir, I believe that this isn't just about preserving our operations in Moscow. There's a larger problem here.”

“Which is?” Rostow asked. The condescension had drained from his voice.

“I've been looking at Strelnikov's biography. You have a copy in your file.” He heard some rustling of paper and he suspected that Cooke had had to help the president find the right page. “Note that Strelnikov was a liaison officer to the Serb Army in '99.”

“I see it,” Rostow said. His irritation was entirely lost on Jon.

“That was the year the Serbs shot down one of our F-117 Nighthawks,” Jon explained. “We know some of the wreckage was sold to the Chinese, but the Serbs were in Russia's pocket. We've got pictures of Serb military escorts walking Russian generals around the crash site. The Serbs wouldn't have sold so much as a screw to the PLA without Russian approval. Then, three years ago, the PLA sent an experimental stealth plane against the USS
Abraham Lincoln
during the Battle of the Taiwan Strait.”

“The ‘Assassin's Mace,' ” Cooke said, her voice quieter. The deputy DNI must have been sitting across the desk from the president, putting her farther away from the speakerphone's mic.

“The stealth technology wasn't the only interesting bit,” Jon said. “After the Navy shot the plane down, U.S. and Taiwanese engineers reconstructed the wreckage they were able to pull out of a crater on Penghu Island. The engines were similar to the design found in the Russian T-50, which is a fifth-generation fighter. The PLA has struggled with sophisticated engine design. They couldn't have developed that engine without help.”

“Any evidence that they bought 'em?” Rostow asked.

“The engines were too badly damaged to confirm whether the Chinese built them, but there was no question that the design was a major advance for them,” Jon confirmed. “Now look at the bio, five lines further down.”

“Senior Military Attaché, Caracas, Venezuela,”
Rostow read off the page, more curious than annoyed now. “The back half of the last decade.”

“That was the same period when Hugo Chávez was forging partnerships with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranians, and with the Russians. Chávez bought four billion dollars in Russian weapons during that period . . . fighter planes, naval vessels, small arms, you name it. Chávez was Russia's biggest weapons customer in 2011. And last year, we recover an illegal warhead that Tehran and Caracas built together on Venezuelan soil. The engineers at Los Alamos National Labs tore it apart and found that it was a two-stage fusion-boosted design . . . much more sophisticated than any of the plans peddled by A. Q. Khan, the North Koreans, or any of the other candidates likely to sell blueprints to the mullahs. The Iranians only figured out how to enrich uranium to weapons-grade a decade ago. They couldn't have developed that kind of warhead on their own.”

Rostow cocked his head. “Two cases of technology transfer.”

“Both of which depended on prior events at which Strelnikov was present,” Jon noted.

“So Strelnikov was an arms dealer—” Rostow began.

“Not just an arms dealer,” Jonathan cut in. “A strategic military
technology
dealer. My theory is that he was selling research and materials that hostile countries need to build next-generation weapons that they couldn't build on their own for another decade or longer.”

The Oval Office

Rostow sat back in his Gunlocke chair, crossed his arms, and looked down at the paper. “Even if that's right, he couldn't have done it on his own, or at least without a lot of people looking the other way.”

“I would agree,” Jon said. “It's one thing to sell some guns and old tanks. Plenty of Russian officers did that after the Soviet Union fell apart. Moscow didn't even know what it had in the warehouses. But stealth tech and nuclear weapons designs? That stuff goes missing or shows up in some other country and very important people start getting unhappy and asking questions. And they sure don't put the thief in charge of their Foundation for Advanced Research unless they're happy with his track record and want to expand his efforts.”

“Then Strelnikov got to the Foundation, saw what they were working on, and it scared him enough to come to us,” Cooke added. “But Maines burned him before he could give up the really good stuff.”

“Mr. President,” Jon continued. “Selling guns . . . that's just about money. Selling technology is about balance of power. When Vladimir Putin set up the Foundation back in 2012, he said its purpose was to get Russian weapon R and D back on par with ours. But if the part of its raison d'être is getting other Russian military allies on par with us, then we have a more serious problem . . . and General Strelnikov's death leaves Maines as our best source of information on General Lavrov's current operations. Anything Maines knows about Lavrov's dealings could be critical.”

Rostow looked at the phone, replied nothing, then looked away. He pushed himself back from the desk, crossed his hands in his lap. “And you're sure about this connection with Arkady Lavrov?” he asked.

“We have a high level of confidence in that assessment,” Cooke concurred. “The woman who met with Lavrov on the roof of the Russian Embassy was Jon's partner, Kyra Stryker. She was the other officer who recovered the Iranian warhead last year, by the way.” That bit of news heightened Rostow's discomfort. She wished that Jon and Kyra could have seen it. “NSA says that Lavrov signed Strelnikov's travel orders to Berlin. Then Lavrov flew to Berlin the day before Strelnikov left, requesting emergency counterterrorism meetings with the German Federal Intelligence Service . . . some crap story about Chechen rebels trying to smuggle arms through Berlin. Given Lavrov's connections, he probably could have faked that if he needed cover for the trip.”

Rostow nodded, almost unconsciously. Cooke studied the commander in chief's face, trying to divine some clue as to his thoughts.
He's actually taking CIA seriously.
It was a rare thing.

But Rostow's face hardly moved and Barron could do nothing but listen to the white noise coming from the phone speaker as Jon held his peace four thousand miles away. Rostow stared down at his desk for a full five minutes, saying nothing.

The president finally looked up. “No.”

“Sir?” Cooke asked.

“No deal. No pardon, no money, no nothing,” Rostow said. “Maines can enjoy life in Moscow until the Russians off him or he can come home and take his chances.”

Jon was smart enough not to protest over the phone. Cooke took her time assembling her thoughts and finding the most politic way to tell Rostow what she thought of the young president's decision.

“Mr. President, Jon was correct when he said we can tell you about the implications of decisions, and it's my duty to tell you now the implications of the one you've just made. Sir, if we don't make this deal with Maines, people will start dying in short order, ours and theirs. The FSB or the GRU will begin arresting Russians working for us, one after another, and they will be executed, without exception. We will be forced to try to exfiltrate as many as we can, but we will fail to save most of them. We won't have the time, the people, or the resources, so we will be forced to improvise. But we will be operating on Russian soil and the Russians have, without question, the most efficient, skilled, and ruthless counterintelligence operation in the world. So our creativity will fall short, and some of our people will be captured and arrested. They will be paraded on Russian television and photographed for Russian newspapers. The secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation will be forced to negotiate for their release. No matter what we do, our operations in Moscow will be gutted for years to come and the United States will be humiliated on a global stage.” Cooke finally stopped speaking. Jon was afraid to add anything at all.