Palace of Treason (5 page)

But as the steel was honed, as Nate accumulated experience and concentrated on operations, there was the remaining ache, the one that wouldn’t fade. It had been more than nine months since DIVA went back inside; she had not agreed to resume operations with them, furious at being manipulated into the spy swap. Nate had agonized every day, every week, waiting for her sign-of-life signal. CIA Headquarters waited patiently for her to change her mind, waited for the alert on the worldwide SENTRY phone system she would make when outside Russia. Her call would instantly dispatch handlers to meet her in whatever city she designated. But the call had not come—they hadn’t heard from her, didn’t know whether she was working, or in prison, or alive or dead.

Soon after DIVA’s recruitment, Nate had committed the unthinkable operational transgression by sleeping with her. Risking everything. Risking her, his agent’s life. Risking a career that kept him whole and independent, risking the work that defined him. But her blue eyes and edgy temper and wry smile had blinded him. Her ballerina’s body was matchless and responsive. Her passion for her country and her rage at those who coveted power had him in awe of her. And he could still hear the way she said his name—
Neyt.

Their lovemaking had been drastic, clutching, urgent, guilty. They were professional intelligence officers and both knew how badly they were behaving. Typically, Dominika didn’t care. As a woman, she desired him outside the limits of the agent–case officer relationship. Nate could not—would not—commit to such an arrangement, for he worried about his standing, about operational security, about tradecraft. The irony of the situation was not lost on either of them: The hidebound Russian was more willing to break the rules to feed their passion than was the informal, loose-limbed American. But until she reappeared, until he knew she was still alive, Nate had a new Russian to handle.

Nate slid down the rocky embankment, raising a cloud of dust. Dirt filled his shoes and he cursed. He was in the pine and scrub forest of the hill country around Meteora, Greece, the region of towering rock monoliths hundreds of
feet tall, the largest of which were topped by squat monasteries. He looked at the GPS compass in his TALON, the tablet-sized handheld device just deployed to overseas stations from the Directorate of Science and Technology, and slanted left through the trees. There were only six TALON sets in use globally, and the S&T boys had sent one of the first ultralight units to Nate in Athens Station because of the shit-hot agent he was handling. In several hundred meters he intersected the mountain stream—milky turquoise and running fast—which he followed for another hundred meters.

Around a sharp bend in the stream he saw the man he had come three hundred kilometers from Athens to meet, after an epic surveillance detection route. Three vehicle and two disguise changes later, his countersurveillance team signaled that he was black. Eyes burning from the colored contacts, gums sore from the cheek expanders, scalp itchy from the Elvis wig, Nate removed the last disguise, ditched the car, and made his way to the meeting site, forcing himself to focus. Their smelly walk-in, Lieutenant General Mikhail Nikolaevich Solovyov of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, now code-named LYRIC, stood on the elevated opposite bank, holding a fishing rod. Cigarette hanging from his lip, LYRIC did not acknowledge Nate, but continued casting his fly into the water. Cursing again, and feeling like a first-tour rookie, Nate looked for a shallow stretch in the brook where he could cross. He concentrated on stepping on the slippery rocks to cross the stream.

LYRIC had stopped casting and was observing Nate’s progress with grumpy disapproval. Tall and ramrod straight, LYRIC had a round head with a high forehead, and thin white hair combed back tightly over his skull. The ironic mouth beneath the straight nose was small and thin-lipped, soft and pursed, not like the rigid, two-star rest of him. As Nate made it across the stream and clambered up the bank, the general took the cigarette out of his mouth, pinched the hot ash end off, and ground it under his shoe. The stub of filter went into his coat pocket, the habit born of a thousand parade-ground inspections.

LYRIC checked his watch—early on he had actually suggested to Nate that they synchronize watches until the young officer showed him the clock in his TALON device, slaved to the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, which displayed twenty-four international time zones, and was accurate to two seconds per decade. LYRIC had huffed and never suggested synchronizing watches again.

“If you had not arrived in the next five minutes,” said LYRIC in Russian, “I was prepared to abort the meeting.” His voice was a deep bass note from inside his chest.

“
Tovarishch,
General. I’m glad you waited,” said Nate in fluent Russian, knowing the “comrade” form of address still used in the army would please him. He also knew the agent would have waited half the night for him. “This remote site makes timing difficult.”

“This site offers excellent security, with admirable access and egress routes,” said LYRIC, putting down his fishing rod. It was he who had first proposed the Meteora meeting site.

“
Konechno,
of course,” said Nate, trying not to antagonize the old soldier. Keep the agent happy, start him talking about the secrets he has in his head. He casually tapped the screen of the TALON, activating the recording device. “I’m glad you had time to meet. We appreciate your unique insights.” LYRIC’s lofty general officer’s ego was immovable, fueled by years of Soviet bluster and Slavic certainty that the enemy was at the gate, and foreigners were plotting against the
Rodina
at every turn. Washington’s bilateral reset policy with Moscow had run aground on these very same xenophobic rocks, never mind that the State Department had misspelled the Russian word for “reset.”

“I am glad your superiors find my information of use,” grumped LYRIC. “At times it seems they underestimate its value.” Nate, not for the first time, noted that LYRIC overlooked the fact that he had volunteered to CIA, that he had been a walk-in.

The afternoon light was low in the pines. They sat on the riverbank watching the sun sparkle off the rapids. The general, an old campaigner, pulled a package of butcher paper out of his pack and unwrapped a dozen chunks of lamb he had bought in a nearby village. Two sprigs of wild oregano lay atop the meat. Nate watched fascinated, delighted, as LYRIC gathered dry tinder, scraped a small flint, and started a fire. “GRU survival kit,” said LYRIC offhandedly, handing Nate the steel. “The best. Magnesium.”

He stripped the oregano leaves and threaded the chunks of lamb onto the woody stems, then pressed the oregano onto the meat, and handed one kebab—he called it
shashlik
—to Nate. Together they grilled the meat over the open flame, chuckling, trying not to burn their fingers. When the meat was charred deep brown—LYRIC examined Nate’s
shashlik
critically—a
lemon was cut to be squeezed over the sizzling kebabs, eaten with alternating bites of raw scallion.

“I used to cook like this for my children on leave,” LYRIC said, turning his skewer sideways to bite a piece of lamb. “It is good to share food now with you.” He looked down at the fire. In a rush, Nate registered that this relationship was fueled by more than revenge for Russian beastliness. It was more than an intelligence operation, more than the start of a priceless penetration of Moscow’s vast military tech transfer establishment. This old man needed human contact, kind consideration, metaphysical needs somehow to be addressed while CIA debriefed him like a rubber squeeze toy.
Will he survive,
thought Nate,
or will he end up like Korchnoi?
He gritted his teeth at the memory, mouthing a silent vow to keep him safe.

“General, it is an honor to share this food. And it is a privilege to know you,” said Nate. “Our work is just beginning, but it has been spectacular.”

“Then let’s get to work,” said LYRIC, straightening and avoiding Nate’s eyes. “Turn on that infernal machine of yours while I brief you.” They sat on a log and LYRIC talked nonstop, a palette of variegated subjects, precisely remembered, meticulously ordered, the baritone words measured, unstoppable. Important points were signaled by a raised finger, an arched eyebrow. Occasionally there would be a personal digression, the grieving, lonely old man would be briefly revealed, then the ramrod general would resume the debriefing.

Nate was thankful for the TALON balanced on his knee—there was no way he could have kept up by taking written notes. LYRIC was still a new asset, so he let him orate; the stuff was pure gold anyway. Tech-transfer operations, thrust-vector research, the new PAK FH stealth fighter, target-acquisition radar on the BUK SA-11 used by Ukrainian separatists. Specific military reporting requirements were being codrafted with the Pentagon, and Nate would have to handle the general’s steely pride and galloping ego when the time came to direct him to actively collect specific intelligence.

“Your superiors in Langley must plan ahead,” lectured LYRIC, looking over at Nate. He fired up a cigarette and clicked his lighter shut. “Right now they are exulting and wallowing in the initial deluge of my information. Those who crave credit are preening before a mirror. There is excitement, a rush to standardize production of finished intelligence, the inevitable
debate about how to handle the new source.” LYRIC tilted his head up in contemplation, pausing as if giving dictation.

“You and your chief in the station in Athens properly should rebuff any attempts by Langley to assume control of the case. If you need ammunition, you have my permission to tell them the agent—what is my cryptonym by the way?—refuses handlers from Washington. Do not tell them I refuse to speak to anyone
but you
—that is one of the hallmarks of an operations officer fabricating a case. Simply say that I want only locally assigned handlers with superb area knowledge.” LYRIC looked over at Nate as if he were a clerk in a Dickensian counting house.

“I am your case officer,” said Nate. “And you met the deputy chief of Station, who can act as backup.”

“A pity he speaks no Russian.” LYRIC sniffed, looking down and flicking ash off his sleeve.

“I’m sure Gable deplores not speaking Russian as much as you regret having so little English,” said Nate. It was time to touch the brakes, lightly, and bleed some speed off LYRIC’s ego. The old man looked up sharply at Nate, wordless, then smiled faintly and nodded. Message understood, a page in the agent-handler dance card turned, respect given and received.

“And my cryptonym?” asked LYRIC, once again the curmudgeon spy.

“BOGATYR,” lied Nate, who had no intention of telling the bombastic LYRIC his compartmented CIA crypt.
Bogatyr,
the mythical Slavic knight of the steppes around LYRIC’s birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod.

“I like it,” said LYRIC, breaking down his finished cigarette and slipping the filter into his pocket.

“What kind of bullshit is that?” said Gable. He and Nate and COS Tom Forsyth were sitting in the ACR, the acoustically controlled room-within-a-room inside Athens Station. They sat hunched around the conference table, Nate’s TALON in front of them, connected to a laptop. Nate had been translating highlights of his two hours in the Meteora woods with LYRIC.

“BOGATYR,”
said Nate, “like a Russian samurai. He’s got a heroic image of himself. I made it up on the spot.”

Gable shook his head. “Okay,” said Forsyth, already five steps ahead. “Keep him happy, keep him talking. A general officer can be tough to handle. Delicate balance. Headquarters is strong on the case. Traces confirmed everything about him; LYRIC’s the real deal, and the intel so far is giving the air force wet dreams.”

When Forsyth spoke, Nate listened. He knew Forsyth’s record was every bit as spectacular as Gable’s—but different. While Gable was killing snakes with a tire iron, Forsyth had been drinking wine in Warsaw with a well-known Russian stage actress—coincidentally the mistress of a Soviet Northern Fleet admiral—who had photographed the fleet’s readiness and deployment schedules for the coming year in her boyfriend’s office bathroom. Forsyth had given her the palm-sized Tessina camera months earlier and she brought the microcassette of film out past customs wrapped in a condom hidden where only her gynecologist would have thought to look. Forsyth had accepted it with aplomb. Gable and Forsyth: Natural-born operations officers, and they both knew what they were talking about.