Palace of Treason (41 page)

Nate wanted her to focus. “Zyuganov will be furious with you for having identified the traitor ahead of him,” he said.

Dominika shrugged. “What can he do?”

“You forget the last time Zyuganov was upset with you,” said Nate. “I was there. I seem to remember a Spetsnaz killer, a nasty-looking knife, and a lot of bandages.”

“It is different now,” said Dominika. “Zyuganov could not risk such games.” She put her hand on Nate’s arm. “Just be sure to get the general out. Do not fail me.”

Dominika’s flash precedence message from the Athens
rezidentura
requesting the immediate recall to Moscow of GRU Lieutenant General Mikhail Nikolaevich Solovyov on suspicion of espionage hit the Center like a bomb. Those few senior officers on the restricted list who days before had read the latest TRITON report knew Captain Egorova—who was not cleared and who
had not
read TRITON’s reporting—was absolutely correct and consequently had scored a tremendous counterintelligence coup. The added benefit was that Solovyov had been unmasked as a result of a straight CI investigation, which automatically protected TRITON as the source.

This brilliant officer was a hero, and nothing less, they all said. The director, ministers, and President Putin himself all wanted to see her when she returned, and rumors of promotion to the rank of major began circulating. Egorova would stay in Athens for a few days to wrap up her interviews, but really to keep an eye on Solovyov and create the illusion of a routine investigation winding down, so he would respond to the recall without suspicion. Once the general was behind bars in Moscow, official praise could be heaped on Egorova.

Zyuganov had trouble focusing on a printed copy of Egorova’s cable because the paper shook in his hand. His professional standing had been expanding, his position with the Kremlin was becoming stronger each day, especially in the matter of the Iranian shipment. And Putin had telephoned him personally on the encrypted
Kremlovka
line after the action against the French: He had seen police forensic photographs of Mme Didier, the Russian traitor, and the two DGSE security men in the ruined apartment. A hysterical Élysée had lodged a howling protest, and the DGSE had withdrawn its officers from Moscow. A phlegmatic Putin breathed one word over the phone,
Maladyets,
well done. Zyuganov swelled up like a toad with pride.

But the glow of these recent successes was now eclipsed by Egorova’s triumph in Greece, a triumph that specifically reduced his stature. No one in Headquarters was talking about anything but that pneumatic prostitute. In the privacy of his office, Zyuganov had gone into a paroxysm of silent rage, convinced that Egorova was working to ridicule, denigrate, and mock him. She had her eye on his present job, he was convinced, and she would see to it that his chance at becoming deputy director was derailed. Zyuganov’s bat-cave soul swelled with thoughts of murder.

He stewed at his desk, working things out. An accident, even one properly staged, would now be too coincidental. The notion of Egorova defecting
to a Western service a day after exposing another traitor would be ridiculous. If Egorova simply disappeared, failed to return to Moscow, the theories, rumors, and suppositions would multiply by the dozen. Then an idea came to him, a crawly idea from under a damp log, with the promise of chaos, deceit, and misdirection to insulate him from detection and Putin’s ire. He pushed the button on his phone.

Eva sat down in front of him as she had done before. Zyuganov slid a file across the desk, Egorova’s personnel file. Photo, service record, training in
Sistema
hand-to-hand fighting, Sparrow School. Eva breathed the pages, nostrils flaring, memorizing the spoor. She finished reading, closed the file, and gave it back. She didn’t need notes; she wouldn’t forget. Zyuganov pushed another smaller photo, passport sized, to Eva. It was a visa photo of Madeleine Didier. Zyuganov leaned forward, held Eva’s eyes, and whispered.

“Strangle her and leave this under her body,” said Zyuganov, pointing at the snap. “No gun, no knife; use electrical cord. And take her clothes.”

A hot
jeton
of comprehension in Eva’s brain fell into the slot and she made the connection: Egorova’s death would look like a reciprocal action by the French service to avenge Didier. She looked at Zyuganov for confirmation that she had it right.

He nodded.

It was intensely interesting to Zyuganov, one sort of monster, to see Eva, a derivative miscreation, put her head back and laugh, with the sound of a bag of cleavers bouncing down a flight of stairs.
Voskhititel’nyy,
delicious.

Benford had traveled incognito to Berlin to approach the SBE, the
Spezialle Bundestatigkeiten-Einheit
, the Federal Special Activities Unit, a discreet civilian intelligence outfit of twelve officers that reported directly to the office of the president. No one outside the German president’s office was aware of the SBE, which was charged with managing operations that were either so sensitive or so politically risky that it was preferable the larger federal intel services like the BND or BfV not be involved.

Smelling baked bread as he walked through the pleasant Mitte neighborhood to Robert Koch Platz, Benford entered the unguarded front door of the
Bibliothek der Akademie der Künste
, the Library of the Academy of Arts, and rode the shuddering elevator to the disused fourth floor, where the offices of the SBE were concealed behind a plain door enigmatically labeled “
Werkzeug
,” Utility. He was greeted by Herr Dieter Jung, the chief of the SBE, a man of average height and thinning hair, with a large nose and round glasses, who was skeptical, perceptive, and droll beyond his fifty years. It was also clear to Benford that Herr Jung was a consummate politician. Perfunctory introductions to a handful of SBE officers were made—two were attractive women in their thirties—and Benford was given coffee and cake.

Without preamble, Benford outlined the requirement and asked Herr Jung for assistance in aiding a technical team to gain unescorted access to the Wilhelm Petrs factory on Puschkinallee in Alt-Treptow, southwest of the river. He omitted most of the technical details, but he did tell Jung that this operation had the potential to set the Iranian nuclear program back five years. Benford airily said he needed a discreet escort for the team to and from the facility.

“I’m sure you do,” sniffed Jung in fluent English, lighting a cigarette and then delicately picking a speck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “But it’s out of the question.”

Benford pressed, invoking Euro-Atlantic amity and the NATO alliance. Herr Jung was a picture of Olympian detachment, sitting with his arms
crossed over his chest. Benford plunged on, now bringing in the Berlin airlift, John F. Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, and David Hasselhoff. Stony silence, but slight wavering. Benford made to get up from his chair but paused, and then quietly suggested that he could share reporting on Russian intelligence activity in Germany.

“That information would be of mild interest,” said Jung distractedly as he looked out a window.

Benford knew that despite SBE’s protected status, Jung always needed operational successes to justify budgets, maintain presidential favor, and improve his prospects of promotion out of this library attic and into a Minister’s office. He leaned forward and summarized a specific report detailing the recent SVR recruitment of a male Bundestag member from the Green Party, a recruitment based chiefly on the parliamentarian’s weekend predilection for steam baths and birch branches.

“An interesting lead,” said Jung, twirling a pencil, “if true.” But Benford knew he was hooked.

The two attractive female SBE operatives were assigned as liaison officers for the team, which consisted of the whip-thin tech Hearsey and the two PROD engineers Bromley and Westfall. Marty Gable was included, primarily to manage operational equities, which essentially meant he would handle the two SBE officers, Ulrike Metzger and Senta Goldschmidt, to ensure no flaps occurred.

In the very early hours of a chilly fall morning, the SBE officers drove the CIA team to the closed rear gate of the Petrs factory and watched as Hearsey leaned over the lock in the sally door and fiddled for two minutes before straightening up and easing it open. A wave, and the German officers were gone—they would wait around the corner in the van until the team signaled for a pickup.

Hearsey opened the inner employee door to the main factory building in ninety seconds, and the four proceeded silently through an entrance hall. Bromley and Westfall wore backpacks and each dragged a large, wheeled, black canvas duffel bag.

“No cameras?” asked Gable.

Hearsey shook his head. “German employees’ union won a national lawsuit to have security cameras taken out of all canteens and break rooms. EU privacy laws. Not bad.”

“Guards, alarms?” whispered Gable.

“Door alarm on the main office door only. Not even a watchman. Not so many secrets to a seismic isolation floor,” said Hearsey.

They walked down a corridor past a cold café that still smelled of coffee and rolls, and stopped before turning the corner of the hallway.

“They leave the factory floor unguarded?” asked Gable.

“Not quite,” said Hearsey. “Final hurdle.”

Hearsey put his mouth next to Gable’s ear. “Last stretch of corridor before the factory floor,” he whispered. “Motion-detection sensor at the end.”

Gable watched as Bromley and Westfall took a series of telescoping plastic tubes out of their packs and quickly fit them together in a frame six feet square, over which they stretched an opaque gauzy fabric that they clipped at intervals around the frame.

“Stay close together,” whispered Hearsey, holding one side of the frame up in front of him while Westfall held the other. Bromley, grinning, stepped up to Gable, put her arm around his waist, pulled him close, and eased in tight behind the two others. They all had done this before, Gable noted. Bunched together, arms around shoulders as if in a rugby scrum, bent behind the gauzy barrier, they rounded the corner and started shuffling slowly down the corridor, medieval siege troops approaching the castle wall, air full of arrows.

“Slow,” whispered Hearsey to Westfall.

“The barrier absorbs infrared, microwave, ultrasonic. No Doppler if you move slowly,” whispered Bromley, squeezing Gable’s ribs and smiling at him.
As close to tech foreplay as you’re going to get
, thought Gable.

Then they were past the sensor and into the factory. It was a cavernous assembly hall that was dimly lighted by single orange safety bulbs in cages set high on the ceiling. A colossal bridge crane, motionless on its rails, loomed over their heads. There was no sound, no movement in the plant. The occasional headlights of a vehicle moving down Puschkinallee—not many passed at two in the morning—would wash over the floor-to-ceiling glazed windows that ran the entire length of the west side of the hall.

The bulbs created diffuse pools of light in the otherwise darkened plant. Sections of honeycomb panels rested on cradles in the center of the hall—floor assemblies being fitted and tested. Farther down along the white-painted brick walls were thick polymer blocks suspended from square
aluminum frames by heavy-gauge springs—shock dampeners. At the end of the hall, on stainless-steel shelving gleaming in the orange overhead light, were scores of numbered plastic trays. In each tray lay five four-foot-long aluminum struts side by side, a small piezoelectric cell affixed to one end of each.

They walked silently in single file past the plastic trays, comparing lot numbers, verifying the project code and shipping designator labels, all provided by DIVA from Moscow. The duffel-bag wheels thumped softly in the still factory. Bromley took digital photos of the shelves with a miniature camera using an invisible infrared flash. These aluminum beams, nestled in trays in this immaculate German factory, would eventually support the eighty-thousand-square-foot floor of the cascade hall in the uranium enrichment facility buried in the Iranian desert in the shadow of the Natanz Mountains. Gable picked one of the struts out of a box.

“Don’t look like much,” he said.

Bromley took an identical strut out of the duffel. “Trade you. This one is the devil’s matchstick—forty percent white phosphorus.” They started unpacking the bags.

An hour later, Gable and Hearsey made a last quiet security check. It was otherworldly that no sound—no whir of machinery, no click of cooling metal, no ticking of clockwork—was generated in such a place. Hearsey tapped Gable’s arm and moved slowly forward in the gloom, keeping an eye on the striped tape markings on the spotless floor delineating safe walking lanes through the elephant graveyard of floor components, milling machines, aluminum blanks, and component bins.

Bromley was finishing repacking her bag. “You get everything done?” asked Hearsey.

Bromley nodded. “Westfall and I decided to keep the replacement beams together rather than spread them out. Looking at all those beams convinced us to concentrate the WP. We want to create a big hot spot right away.”

“Once the fire starts, what about suppression?” said Gable. “The Iranians gotta think about that.”

Westfall shook his head. “White phosphorus burns underwater, and when enough of the aluminum catches, there’s not enough foam in Iran to put it out.”

“And the mullahs will be running around like raccoons in a room full of disco balls,” said Gable. The two techs looked at each other, trying to remember whether raccoons were indigenous to Iran.

Westfall double-counted the beams they had substituted to verify that the numbers matched. Checking the photos she had taken, Bromley made sure the plastic trays were aligned with the edges of the shelves as they had been when they came in.

Hearsey checked his watch. “Ten minutes early. Let’s wait by the door.” The duffel wheels thrummed in the night air as they made their way back. The team sat on the floor, backs against the wall, listening for the sound of the van pulling up outside the gate.

Gable wanted a cigar, but he knew he’d have to wait. “One thing bothers me,” he said to Hearsey. “Say these turkeys put the floor in, but before they get the centrifuges installed, there’s a quake and the strain gauges spark and ignite our beams, and the whole thing goes off too early. We can’t put a delay timer in the control panel—the Persians would find that. We can’t fuck with the software—they’re gonna rewrite all the code themselves. We can’t control the timing, so, what, we just hope for the best in this clambake?”

“Yeah, essentially we’re taking a chance. Lots of discussion about that back home,” said Hearsey. “We get a big quake too early, they have a fire in an empty room. It’ll slow them up, but they’ll just dig a new hole for Hall D.”

“It’s still a good chance,” said Westfall. “We tried to calibrate for that. The strain gauges won’t spark with tremors, or even with minor quakes in the two-point-oh-to-three-point-oh range. We need a bigger event, with sustained S waves.”

Gable put his head back and looked at the dim overhead safety lights. “Okay. And what happens if there’s no quake for five years? Iran gets the bomb?”

“Unlikely in that part of the world,” said Westfall. “Nationally, they average five shocks a day—little ones, all over the country. Statistically, they have a good S wave event every seventeen months. That’s why they want the floor, and that’s our window.”

Bromley looked over at Gable, knowing what he was thinking, feeling defensive about the covert action. “It’s not perfect,” she said. “No one’s saying it is. But we have no other way of getting something inside their program.
If it works, we get a cascade crash and meltdown. Everything inside the Natanz fence line will be hot for twenty-five thousand years. It’s worth the risk … At least, it is to me.”

Gable looked at her earnest face, the light catching the braces as she spoke. Kid had guts. And was claustrophobic. And came up with a technical operation to send white phosphorus into Iran. She was all right.

They quietly left the hall five minutes later. They waited in the interior courtyard of the plant, hugging the wall in the predawn shadow of the building’s overhang. Incongruously—at least, it was incongruous for the exhausted CIA technical team—a bird chirped in a tree somewhere beyond the factory walls. The sound of an engine grew louder, a vehicle stopped outside the sliding metal gate, and the pedestrian sally port opened. SBE officer Ulrike Metzger stuck her head in the door and waved them forward. She was an ash-blonde and dressed as if she had just come off her favorite corner on Oranienburger Strasse, wearing fishnet stockings, stiletto heels, and a tight leopard-print jacket beneath which could be seen a sliver of the black, lacy cups of a bustier. Gold hoop earrings caught the reflection of the streetlights above the courtyard wall. She waved again to hurry them up.

They piled into a black VW Routan idling at the curb with only its sidelights on. Bromley and Westfall climbed into the third rear seats, slinging their tool kits ahead of them. Gable and Hearsey got into the rear seats, and Ulrike slid the rear door closed, then climbed in beside Senta Goldschmidt, the driver, another blonde dressed just as outlandishly as the first. From behind, Gable could see her purple jacket in raw Thai silk worn with a popped collar over which dangled antique chandelier earrings with amethyst drops. The van was swirling with three or four competing fragrances: the women’s perfumes, one sandalwood, the other roses; someone’s peppermint body wash; and pine air freshener coming from a plastic dispenser stuck on the dashboard. Gable could hear Bromley—she was allergic to everything—wheezing in the rear seat. He cranked his window down an inch.