Flight of the Raven (6 page)

When the actors had finally taken their curtain calls, Julie gathered up her coat and turned to leave. Unable to keep her eyes from flicking to Rozonov’s seat, she was surprised to see that it was empty. When had he left? She looked for him in the lobby and in the crowd lingering on the wide sidewalk in front of the theater. But he was gone. For the moment she was safe, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

She was heading for one of the taxis pulled up at the curb when she caught sight of one of Madrid’s more incongruous sights. Down on the next block was a McDonald’s. The well-known golden arches were a reminder that she’d skipped dinner in order to make the early performance. Unexpectedly they also brought forth a wave of longing for something familiar in this foreign city. She had always scorned Americans who traveled halfway around the world to eat Yankee junk food. Now, after her disturbing encounter with the Russian, she craved the comfort of a Big Mac with fries and a Coke. Turning from the line of cabs, she started off down the street toward the brightly lit windows.

She wasn’t the only one heading toward the American restaurant. Surrounded by a crowd of men and women, she didn’t notice a shadow detach itself from the shelter of a store entrance and follow several paces behind her.

A number of conversations around her still focused on the play and the death at the end. Julie didn’t want to think about death or anything else unpleasant tonight, so she quickened her steps. The steps of the man who was following also quickened, but she was oblivious. A short gray-haired
viejo
held the door open for her, and she nodded her thanks before stopping to look around.

The foot-high menu over the counter was a delightful mixture of Spanish and English. When the food arrived, she looked around for a table. Most of the seats were occupied, since Madrilenos usually didn’t even think of having dinner until after nine.

Seeing that a spot near the door had just been vacated, she made a beeline for it. At the next table a young couple with Boston accents were discussing their afternoon’s shopping expedition to the plush mall at Madrid Dos. The sense of familiarity about this place and its occupants was just the kind of reassurance she needed after her earlier encounter with Rozonov. She felt insulated and safe—almost as though she were back home already.

As she bit into a french fry, she closed her eyes and sighed. It was almost as good as she’d anticipated. Before she realized it, she’d eaten half the bag. She was just reaching for the Coke when the woman at the next table stood up and grabbed her arm. Julie looked up in alarm.

“What?”

“That man.” The woman gestured excitedly. “It happened so fast. He just cut your purse off the back of your chair.”

Automatically Julie turned and felt the strap. It was no longer taut from the weight of the bag, but dangling loosely. In the next moment she looked with a feeling of sick dismay toward the door of the restaurant. It had just slammed closed.

The husband of the blond woman was already out of his seat. He reached the door, pulled it open, and vanished. People at other tables had become aware of the incident.
“El hombre huerto su monedro,”
she heard a large woman explaining excitedly in the corner. The news buzzed from table to table, now in Spanish, now in English. Everyone was looking curiously in her direction. Other women who had casually hung shoulder bags on the backs of their chairs transferred them to their laps or jammed them between their feet on the floor.

The husband was back in a few moments, shaking his head apologetically. “I ran down to the end of the block in both directions, but I think the fellow disappeared before I got to the sidewalk.”

“You poor thing,” the wife murmured solicitously to Julie. “Is there anything we can do?”

She shook her head and sank back into her seat.

The manager, a distressed look on his rounded face, bustled up and began apologizing profusely in rapid Castilian.

Julie stared at him, still disoriented. She could feel the french fries she’d eaten congealing in her stomach. She knew from the half-dozen distressed travelers who showed up at the embassy daily that this sort of thing was common.

Silently she cursed her stupidity and tried to remember exactly what she had transferred to the black kid evening bag before going out.

“Did anyone see the incident?” the manager asked the crowd.

The American woman began to give a description of the thief. It could have fitted a dozen Spaniards in the room.

Julie wasn’t really listening. What a fitting end to an upsetting evening. And then a new and more frightening thought struck her. Did her encounter with the Russian at the theater have anything to do with this? She fervently hoped not and tried to reassure herself that the theft was an unfortunate coincidence.

She thought back over how she must have appeared as she entered the restaurant. She’d probably looked like an easy mark. Certainly she’d been lulled into a false sense of security by the nostalgia of the setting, and she was paying the price. But right now, unless she wanted to borrow cab fare from this American couple, she was going to have to call Paula or Fitz. “Can I use your telephone?” she asked the hovering manager in Spanish.

“Sí. Sí, señorita.”

Chapter Four

“G
ood morning, sir,” the uniformed guard at the checkpoint greeted him.

The Raven’s only acknowledgment was a curt nod. In the Soviet chain of command, dour demeanor was the rule when dealing with underlings. And if there had been any tendency to relax, everything had tightened up like a shoe factory struggling to meet a suddenly doubled quota when Bogolubov had appeared on the scene.

After signing the log, the Raven waited until the guard clicked the lock on the heavy door. Once he had stepped inside, it closed behind him with the sound of steel meeting steel. It had often crossed his mind that if someone happened to drop a nuclear bomb on Madrid, this would be the safest place in the city. But with the guard outside dead, there wouldn’t be any way to get out again.

The room was filled with half a dozen noisy Teletype machines spewing out pages of Cyrillic text. Five of them monitored sensitive but ordinary diplomatic communications. But one machine was for top-secret material. It was a newer Western-made model that had been on the U.S. export prohibited list. But that hadn’t prevented its acquisition via an agreeable Middle Eastern exporting firm and its subsequent modification in a Moscow electronics lab. The U.S.-made hardware was more reliable than anything manufactured at home, the Raven reflected. But when it did break down, spare parts were a bitch.

However, that wasn’t his problem. He was more interested in the data than the terminal. It was on this line that he had picked up a lot of the information he’d passed on to the Falcon. Until nine months ago his personal code of honor had restricted the exchange to material that wouldn’t damage his country’s own national security. That meant he’d stayed away from almost anything with military ramifications. But then he’d gotten a hint of something that could change the whole balance of world power.

At first he had thought it was simply part of the extensive Soviet propaganda effort, the most effective tool of which was disinformation. Moscow had always prided itself on the creative use of half-truths and fabrications that were close enough to facts to sound plausible. The technique was used on every front. When Arkady Shevchenko had defected, he’d been smeared as an alcoholic and a womanizer to discredit his disclosures. After the accidental release of cyanide in Bhopal, India, TASS had rushed in to inform the world that the U.S. was testing deadly poison gas on a guinea pig community. And Moscow had even tried to scare black and oriental athletes away from the Los Angeles Olympics with a hate flier purportedly prepared by the Ku Klux Klan. At its most successful, this war of words had toppled whole governments. Even when the lies didn’t stand up to scrutiny, they cost the West millions of dollars to counteract the libel.

The Raven stepped over a snake pit of heavy extension cords and cables, heading for the Western-made machine against the wall. Though the noise level always gave him a headache, at least it wasn’t like the comms center in KGB headquarters, where the operators lost fifty percent of their hearing within five years. But the clatter here, he reminded himself, was a mixed blessing. It meant that there was no one assigned to the room who might be looking over his shoulder.

Quickly he began scanning the output of the last twenty-four hours for the information he hoped to pass to the Falcon. He was looking for references to material classified under the project name Topaz. The access was so tight, he doubted that even a dozen men knew the significance of the word.

He’d always harbored a grudging respect for the power of a successful disinformation assault. But under Topaz the trickery promised to escalate from shaping opinion to manipulating the spending of U.S. defense dollars. The first Topaz reference on this communication link nine months ago had aroused his curiosity. The weeks had crawled by as he’d doggedly chipped slivers of information from the monolithic bureaucracy. Even though he still didn’t have the whole story, what he’d learned made his blood run as icy as the Volga River in the dead of winter.

The scheme had been to trick the U.S. Defense Department into wasting billions of dollars by making the Western forces believe they had captured the nerve gas antidote Quadrozine. The Western commanders had snapped up the first part of the bait when they’d started making decisions based on “stolen” Soviet documents. The next phase of the operation had involved letting rebel forces in Afghanistan capture a Russian tank with syringes of the supposed antidote stashed inside. The Pentagon chiefs had been elated with the discovery and were now reconstructing their entire defense system around it. Now Moscow was getting ready to put the next step—whatever it was—into operation.

He was so damn close to finding out the critical details. Yet, at the same time, he felt as though a noose were being lowered around his neck and slowly tightened. Sometimes in the middle of the night he could feel the rough hemp choking off his windpipe. The hunters were closing in, and his survival instinct urged him to abandon the search and defect. But the very reasons why he had begun this double life kept him coming back to the deafening clatter of the communications room every morning. If he could hold on till he got one more break, he’d really earn the welcome he knew the Falcon had waiting for him.

Of course, he did have something. On a trumped-up trip back to Moscow, he’d photographed an initial planning memorandum that should stir up a bit of doubt in the Pentagon. That film was now sitting innocently with the other photographic equipment in his apartment. It would have been in the Falcon’s hands by now except for the tragedy at the San Jeronimo. The fact that they’d identified his contact made his situation even more desperate. The only stroke of luck was that he hadn’t actually been seen with the dead man.

So how was he going to get that film to the Falcon now? And what if it came to a choice between getting the proof out or saving himself?

He had reached the bottom of the pile of classified messages and was about to signal the guard to let him out when a piece of informal traffic addressed to General Dwayne Brewster at Torrejon Air Force Base caught his eye. It was from one of the general’s colleagues at the Pentagon and advised him of a surprise upcoming visit by the inspector general’s staff. There was nothing of particular importance in the communiqué except that it used the caution “Don’t put this one in your file.”

That was one of the phrases he and the Falcon had used for identity verification back when his every action hadn’t been subject to examination under a microscope.

He looked down at the white fanfold paper in his hand. The choice of words could be coincidental. Yet somehow he didn’t think so. This was coming in on the line that he had warned the Falcon his government was reading. Using the Soviet’s tap to send a message back to him was a form of poetic justice that would appeal to the director of the Peregrine Connection.

After taking a precautionary glance at the door, he turned his back to it and pulled out a standard-issue KGB pen that contained a miniature camera. First he pulled the pocket clip forward to activate the hidden mechanism. Then he held the instrument over the communiqué and clicked the point return button twice before returning the pen to the breast pocket of his suit.

The Raven picked up the stack of routine output he retrieved daily from the room and glanced around once more, assuring himself that everything was in order. Then he ran the buzzer alerting the guard that he was ready to return to his desk job.

* * *

T
HERE WAS SO MUCH
KGB work to take care of that Aleksei often came to the office on Saturdays to deal with the normal duties of his cover job as cultural attaché. But he wasn’t the only one. A fair number of staffers had to put in weekend time. He was just going over the schedule of a Ukrainian folk dance troupe which would be arriving in Barcelona next month, when the phone rang. He wasn’t surprised that it was a summons from Bogolubov. When Aleksei entered the upstairs office, the general was sitting forward glaring at Feliks Gorlov and Georgi Krasin. “Well, Aleksei Iliyanovich, you seem to be the only one capable of following orders,” he observed.

Aleksei took his seat without comment. A compliment from the general was like a two-edged blade. You never knew when you were going to get the other side of it.

“You schoolboys,” he addressed the other two professionals in the room. “If you don’t do a better job on your homework, your next diplomatic assignments are going to be in Nicaragua and El Salvador.”

Georgi covered his cringe by pretending to straighten his steel-frame glasses. Gorlov merely inspected his carefully manicured nails.

“But we’ll discuss your shortcomings later. Right now I want to show you what Rozonov bagged last night at the theater where I sent him to make some observations.”