Palace of Treason (55 page)

“Understood, Chief; we’ll make sure the team knows,” said Nate into the phone. “We’re leaving Glover Park and moving north on Wisconsin. She’s driving moderately through light traffic. It’s too early to predict direction. Maybe she’s taking him home. I’m assuming he lives in Virginia?”

Benford’s muffled voice asked a question to someone in the room. “Correct. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, off Beulah Road,” said Benford. “Nathaniel, that these two are moving on the street past midnight in the same evening of a busted clandestine meeting with the now-defunct Russian
rezident
is, for us sentient nonlawyers, a significant suggestion of guilt. We have no way to know how Angevine assesses his situation, especially in the
context of proof.
He may be confident or panicked. It is therefore your only job to stay close and not let him out of your sight. If they go to a bar at this late hour take a table beside them. If he goes to the men’s room, use the stall next door. If they go to his home, set up outside, making sure he cannot slip out the back door. Call it in and we’ll make sure the Vienna police do not shoot you. Am I clear?”

Vikki was muttering to herself as she followed Angevine’s directions on what turns to make. Wisconsin Avenue was nearly empty. Seb was sitting in the passenger seat with Agatha—a three-quarter-length dressmaker’s dummy—on the floor between his legs. Vikki used the padded torso to design stripper outfits and showgirl headdresses; Agatha had a featureless, smooth, white plastic head. A coat was buttoned around the torso, and a beige plastic bag stretched over the head had been taped tightly around the neck. Vikki had complained when Angevine wrenched and twisted the metal stand out of the bottom of the dummy, but he told her she wouldn’t be
making
dresses any longer—she would be
wearing
Chanel in Paris by Christmas, to which she replied “bullshit” but secretly hoped so.

He obviously knew where he wanted to go—he had cased this route ahead of time. An animated Angevine told her to go through Tenley Circle, then take Albermarle into American University Park, a neighborhood of streets in a tight grid square, with parallel alleys running behind houses. Vikki saw three sets of headlights follow at a respectful distance turn for turn. Angevine told her not to worry about them, and made her repeat exactly what she was to do when he exited the car. This was it. He barked at her to turn right, then quickly left onto Murdock Mill Road, a short one-way street that they entered the wrong way. As the following cars’ headlights disappeared for a second around the double corner, Angevine tapped Vikki on the arm and she pulled the emergency brake to slow the car. Angevine shouldered the door open, jumped out, and ran into the shadows of an alley, skidding to a stop behind a row of garbage cans. He crouched and held his breath.

For a terrified amateur on her first time, Vikki nailed it. She released the brake and kept going without a check in speed, steering straight while she reached over, pulled the door shut, grabbed Agatha off the floor, propped her up on the passenger seat, and clapped Angevine’s discarded hat on the dummy’s head.
Who’s the dummy?
thought Vikki, bitterly, now on her own and once again in the headlight glare of cars behind her. She continued east on Butterworth, around Westmoreland Circle to Dalecarlia, which would take her via Canal Road and Chain Bridge into suburban Virginia. Her instructions were to drive to Angevine’s town house and straight into the attached
garage. Vikki was to spend the night in the house with all the curtains drawn. She was to undress and stash Agatha in a junk closet in the finished basement. In the morning she could return to her house, leaving the FBI to wonder how and exactly when Angevine had disappeared into thin air.

Three cars back, Nate’s instincts were jangling off the hook. The stair-step route through AU Park was bullshit, illogical. That prick was planning something and Nate asked Vannoy to tell the car with the eye to close up and watch out for a car escape. He didn’t know whether Angevine even knew how to bail out of a moving vehicle under surveillance, but it was important that the lead unit regularly verified that two people were in the car. Nate was on the phone to Benford passing updates. Fileppo and Proctor were in the second vehicle, giving the rest of the team unmitigated shit, and Vannoy told them to shut the fuck up and take the eye. They immediately reported that there were two people in the car—the woman and the tall man with a hat.

Angevine had seen four or five cars pass his alleyway, and none of the cars had slowed, no one looked to the side—they had missed his escape. Now he needed time. It was all up to Vikki (and Agatha) to keep the ball rolling. He checked his watch. Nearly 2:00 a.m. He would have to hike out of the neighborhood, but the metro would be running by 5:00 a.m. He’d get to Union Station and grab the MARC to BWI—if they discovered he was missing they’d shut down Dulles and National airports first, then think about Baltimore/Washington International later. By then he’d be on the first foreign flight to anywhere—Mexico City, Costa Rica, Toronto; he’d buy tickets to his first stop with his credit cards and true-name passport, leave a trail, then disappear after a second flight into the European Union. He could get to Paris without a trace. Paris was the place: He spoke the language, knew the city, had relatives there. He had cash, and could eventually buy a black-market alias French identity document. And the Russian Embassy, a modern concrete-and-glass fortress near the Bois de Boulogne on the Boulevard Lannes in the sixteenth, would welcome him with open arms, especially if he arrived with the name of the CIA source inside the Russian Service. It was imprinted in his money-grubbing memory:
Dominika Vasilyevna Egorova.

Angevine did not intend to retire in exile in some overheated defector’s apartment in Moscow, like Kim Philby, or Ed Howard, or Edward Snowden, minded by dour FSB watchdogs, cooked for by a headstrong battle-ax, and
serviced every ten days by third-tier slatterns with acne between their breasts and skin tags on their necks. No, thank you. All he required of the Russians was a retirement payout and access to his foreign account, which, by his conservative estimate, was somewhere around five million dollars. Money in hand, he would then disappear: A little house with a terrace shaded by flowering vines on one of the Aeolian Islands; maybe a penthouse on Avenida Atlantica along Copacabana Beach; or maybe a stone mansion on a hill in Tuscany, surrounded by his own vineyard. A girlfriend or two—those Brazilians girls were blazingly hot—but Angevine couldn’t see Vikki fitting in. He wondered whether she would realize that when she tapped him on the arm to signal his rollout, it was the last time they’d touch. Well, she got the BMW.

As he walked down alleys, sticking to the shadows and thinking about the girls in his future, Angevine randomly and suddenly remembered how Gloria Bevacqua, the sow who had stolen the top operations job out from under him, had mocked him the morning of the announcement.
Chicks dig you, Seb,
she had smirked at him, and in his fury he had been launched on this, this
utterly insane,
this
utterly destructive
journey with the Russians, and now he was walking footsore and sick with worry in the night, a fugitive. He had narrowly escaped from those galloping night stalkers in the park, but there was no guarantee he’d even make it through the airport. He was not sorry for what he had done, but he felt sorry for himself. A sob caught in his throat and he cried silently as he walked.
Chicks dig you, Seb,
echoed in his head, the big spy, the big man. He wondered what Zarubina was reporting back to Moscow—probably that he was caught and arrested. They’d be amazed to see him surface in Paris. He brightened as he imagined how he’d coolly tell the Russian Embassy receptionist to telephone upstairs to the
relevant office
to inform them that TRITON was in the lobby.

Vikki had also been crying, gripping the wheel of her little car wondering whether she was going to jail for leading five ominous FBI cars behind her on a prolonged goose chase into the vastness of suburban Virginia, to give Seb time to get away. She might have been able to plead ignorance—he had lied to her, misled her, she didn’t have anything to do with anything—but the stiff-backed presence of the dressmaker’s dummy with the floppy hat propped on the seat next to her would be proof of her complicity. Vikki contemplated pulling into the next strip-mall parking lot and walking back
to the cars and telling them everything she knew, which wasn’t much. She wasn’t guilty. With the instincts of a professional stripper, Vikki somehow knew Seb would never send for her to meet him in Paris. But she couldn’t hurt him. In any case, the decision quite unexpectedly was made for her.

A drunk pulling out of an all-night fast-food drive-thru crossed two lanes of Route 123 in Vienna and narrowly missed Vikki’s car, thanks partly to her violent swerving and locking of brakes. Behind her, Fileppo and Proctor likewise screeched to a stop, both of them braced for the thoracic thump of metal when cars collide. They slid to a stop inches from Vikki’s rear bumper, but the kettledrum crunch came when the G car in position two collided with the rear of Fileppo’s car, subsequently pushing them heavily into Vikki’s car. The chain-reaction shock wave was transmitted through bumper and frame, with the result that featherweight Agatha was catapulted forward into the windshield, then backward against the seat and headrest, snapping off her plastic head, now hatless, which bounced and landed on the rear window shelf, where it rocked back and forth, a Cold War commemorative bobblehead. Vikki put her face in her hands.
This is all the time you’re going to get, Seb,
she thought. Proctor and Fileppo walked up to Vikki’s car. Fileppo leaned into the window, asked if she was all right, and told her to turn off her engine. She put her forehead on the steering wheel and closed her eyes

She heard another voice talking into a phone. “Simon,” the voice said, “he used a JIB head, a goddamn homemade jack-in-the-box, and rolled out. Best guess is AU Park; no reason to have gone through there except for an escape. Probably forty minutes ago. Two cars are going back to sweep search the area, but if he’s in a cab or in the metro, he’s gone.” Vikki looked up from the steering wheel and saw a young man with dark hair with a phone to his ear. He was listening carefully. He thumbed the phone off and turned to the other two guys—all three of them younger than she would have expected, but with grim faces. The first young guy said, “Everyone stays put until a special agent gets here. None of us has arrest authority.” Nate leaned into Vikki’s window.

“You okay?” Nate smiled.

Vikki nodded.

“Just off-the-record, you have any idea where your boyfriend is headed?” Nate had just potentially violated Vikki’s rights.

“Dude, chill,” said Fileppo. Proctor nodded. They knew about this legal shit.

“We’ve fucked this up several times, man,” said Proctor. “Don’t do it this way.” Nate ignored them and looked at Vikki.

“I don’t know what you know, or what he told you, or what you think,” said Nate, “but if he gets away, a woman about your age is going to die by being fed alive, feet first, into a crematorium.”

Fileppo looked at Nate, surprised. “C’mon, miss,” he said, forgetting himself. “You can’t let that happen.”

“Not you too,” said Proctor. “Shut the fuck up, both of you.”

Vikki looked up at the three of them. “He said he’s going to Paris. That’s all I know,” Vikki said, contemplating for the first time in her career the irony of her stage name at the Good Guys Club—Felony.

The morning after his escape, Angevine stood on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Paris. Traffic on Boulevard Lannes was Gallic insanity: Two lanes of the broad and normally graceful avenue became, during
pointe du matin
—morning rush hour—an untidy, four-lane mass of blue exhaust, honking horns, and overwrought Parisians. His escape had gone off without a hitch: No alerts had arrived at Baltimore/Washington International. He had compulsively decided to risk a direct flight from BWI to Amsterdam, and immediately went to the Central Station and took the high-speed Thalys train to Paris Nord. In the borderless European Union—thanks to the Schengen Agreement of 1995—there were no internal passport controls anywhere. The only record of his travel would be his name on the flight manifest from the Baltimore flight, but after arrival in Amsterdam, he was gone, disappeared. And based on other defectors’ escapes over the decades, CIA moreover would assume he was already in Moscow.

Arriving in Paris, Angevine went directly to his aunt’s dormer apartment on the top floor of the building at 11 Quai de Bourbon on the Île Saint-Louis, the lozenge-shaped island in the River Seine upstream of and connected to the larger Île de la Cité. His widowed aunt was his late father’s sister, deaf and addled, but most important, the crone had a different last name. There would be no hotel-registration cards, no tracing him to this apartment. The apartment was cluttered but comfortable, bookshelves bursting with papers and ceramic figures. It smelled like cats and cabbage. From the grimy windows of the spare bedroom he could look out onto the Right Bank and, just over the trees, see the mansard towers of l’Hôtel de ville, city hall. Angevine listened to the hourly bells in Notre Dame Cathedral: He was home again—at least it felt that way—and he could
operate
here. And he wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow the astonished Russians changed his cryptonym from TRITON to LAZARUS.

That’s what he had thought. Now he was on the sidewalk, nursing a bruised bicep, and looking back through the barred gate at a beefy embassy
guard with no neck who had frog-marched him out of the consular section, past amused Frenchmen waiting for their visas, and out the gate with a shove. Angevine felt like screaming at the ape—they had no idea the mistake they were making—but people in a line outside the gate were staring, and he didn’t want to attract attention. He had bellowed at the startled receptionist inside too, repeating his last name, spelling it, demanding to see someone with authority, claiming to have a professional connection to Madame Zarubina in Washington, DC. This all meant nothing to the young receptionist—she was the wife of a junior vice consul—but she was familiar with the type of
bezumtsy,
the madmen who often appeared in the visa office, drawn by the allure of a foreign embassy and convinced they were engaged in undefined but important missions involving, typically, either outer-space travel or spy work. The receptionist pressed the button under the counter while taking down the man’s local telephone number to placate him until the guard appeared from a side door to throw him out.

The receptionist told her husband about this latest fruitcake over lunch of
blanquette de veau,
a silky, milk-white veal stew, at the nearby Brasserie Alaux on the Rue de la Faisanderie. The husband had heard the name Zarubina before, though he couldn’t recall what it had been about, except it had something to do with
them
upstairs. When dealing with
them,
it always paid to be careful. After lunch, the vice consul retrieved the fruitcake’s scrawled name and number from his wife’s notepad and went upstairs to the grilled day gate of the
rezidentura
and pressed the bell. There was no movement in the corridor for half a minute, then the sounds of footsteps. The clunky matron Zyuganova—it was whispered throughout the embassy that she had been a favorite of Andropov’s who had brought her with him from the KGB when he became general secretary of the Party—stood silently, looking at him through the screen.
A real Bolshevik, this one,
thought the young vice consul;
not many of them left.
In a brief sentence he explained what he was doing there, and handed her the scrap of paper through the mail slot.

“In case it is something important,” he said, bowing a little at the waist.

“Thank you, comrade,” said Zyuganova, with a face that betrayed nothing.
Who is she calling comrade?
thought the vice consul as he headed for the stairwell.

Zyuganova wrote the number in a steno pad, then took the original note to the
rezident,
who characteristically did not like discussing operational
matters with this woman, this cast-iron Soviet throwback
apparatchik
—he had been saddled with her as
zampolit,
a political advisor from the Center—but he listened as she said the fruitcake visitor had mentioned Zarubina, and they had all heard about her death in Washington—gossip got around faster than intel reports—so it was probably important. Ekaterina Zyuganova smoothed her elaborate upswept hair last in style during the Khrushchev era, and argued that quick action was of the essence: The Paris
rezidentura
should attempt to contact this American and meet with him as soon as possible. She did not mention that she knew everything about TRITON and the mole hunt after talking to her son, nor did she raise the importance of all this to Alexei, who would be vindicated, exonerated, and restored if the American mole was identified.

The Paris
rezident
didn’t like any of it. He was thinking of his own equities, and was nervous about the counterintelligence pressures he had been feeling lately on the street from the DST, the French internal service. He saw danger signals everywhere: No one knew what had happened in Washington, whether it was a flap and an arrest, but when someone like Zarubina dies, it probably wasn’t good news. Now an unvetted madman miraculously appears in Paris, asking for contact with SVR. He wasn’t buying it; this probably was a trap—the Americans were aggressive, probably in league with the French. He smelled ambush, provocation, a dispatched double agent.

Zyuganova recognized the signs of timorous careerism in the
rezident,
sweating behind his desk, but she was determined to spur Yasenevo to action: If the Paris
rezident
would not act, they could at least send a telegram to Moscow, with the details of the fruitcake’s appearance, to let them decide. As a concession to her seniority and vestigial influence in Yasenevo, they drafted an urgent cable to the Center together. It might be as long as a day before Moscow responded. Zyuganova waited an hour, then called her son on the Vey-Che line and told him the whole story.

“I am coming to Paris,” Zyuganov said. He wanted TRITON’s Paris number.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Zyuganova snapped. “You have been instructed to remain at work. You may not travel.” She knew the perilous position sonny boy was in, and the importance—
the necessity
—of obeying orders and coming out of this affair in one piece. Survival in SVR was
not easy: Ekaterina knew how the
chudovishche,
the monster, dormant under the surface, could, with terrifying speed, emerge and devour miscreants. During her forty years in the Service she had followed the rules and spouted the cant, out-Heroding Herod from her seats on the Collegium of the KGB, on the staff of the Central Committee, and in the office of the chairman of the Party.

So it was with a mixture of alarm and anger that Zyuganova greeted her son when he appeared at her apartment in the fashionable Parisian suburb of Neuilly a day later. He was ill-dressed in a cloth coat and baggy pants, and he was unshaven. His eyes had that certain glassiness the mother recognized as the augury of one of his Lubyanka moods, unpredictable and vicious. The Center had already sent an advisory to the
rezidentura
that Zyuganov was headed for Paris—he had departed from Vnukovo airport with his civilian passport, violating the restrictions of the ongoing investigation set by SVR inspectors. The Center instructed the Paris
rezidentura
to escort Zyuganov—if he appeared at the embassy—immediately to the airport and put him on the next flight back to Moscow. He wasn’t officially a fugitive, but unless he returned immediately, Zyuganova knew, he would be ruined, whatever the outcome with TRITON. She resolved to save her son by turning him in.

Zyuganov was no longer thinking clearly, much less rationally. He was aware only of an animal need to uncover the name of the mole, and if skipping out of the country against orders and dangerously flitting into a possible American intelligence ambush was the only way to do it, then that is what he was going to do. His mother stood in the middle of her tasteful apartment speaking to him with that Central Committee tone of voice that, depending on the point she wanted to make and the height of her emotion, varied from a steely monotone to a full-throated bellow. She was bellowing at him now, furious at his stupidity, furious that her forty-something-year-old son had disobeyed her, had disobeyed the State.
Govniuk!
Shit for brains.

Ekaterina walked to the side table in the living room and picked up the telephone. Security from the nearby embassy on the other side of the Bois would be here in two minutes, to escort her son back home, stuffed in a wicker laundry basket if necessary. She identified herself to the telephone operator and asked to be transferred to the
rezident.
That’s the last thing she
remembered clearly. Zyuganov came up behind his mother, swung his fist, and hit her on the side of the neck. She groaned, dropped the telephone, and fell to the parquet floor. Shaking her head, she looked up and saw what countless prisoners in the cellars had seen—the freezing glower of a butcher at midnight—but what no mother wants to see reflected in the face of her
mal’chik,
her baby boy. Zyuganov ripped the phone out of the wall.

Ekaterina heaved herself to her feet and staggered into her bedroom holding her neck—another telephone was on the night table. Zyuganov was behind her and pushed her violently onto the bed. Ekaterina screamed at him, called his name, tried to break through the psychotic tantrum that blazed in his eyes. Her diminutive son leaped on her and his fingers brushed across a garment in plastic fresh from the
teinturier,
the dry cleaner, and he wrapped the billowing film around her head, once, twice, and strained it tight under her chin. Zyuganov’s tooth-baring grimace was inches from his mother’s face, and he watched her eyes go wide, and her open mouth sucked in plastic, and her head shook side to side, desperately trying to get oxygen. He pressed down on top of her and held on tight until her heaving slowed, her legs stopped kicking, and the familiar shudder—well known to Zyuganov—passed through her, and she stared at him through her shroud. He rolled off her, then went through her pockets. Too easy: He had TRITON’s phone number. He knew he had to get out of the apartment immediately. He rummaged in drawers on his hurried way out.

As he walked away from the building, Zyuganov saw a Russian Embassy Peugeot pull up—the diplomatic plates on the car and the bullet heads of the occupants were unmistakable. They’d find his mother, but they could not positively connect him to that. The French police would want to question him. But it wouldn’t matter, he told himself irrationally. He would return triumphant to Moscow with proof that Egorova was in the pay of CIA, and he would be vindicated, congratulated, promoted. Wild thoughts of bringing TRITON back with him—a gift for Putin’s trophy wall—caromed in his head.

Zyuganov walked quickly past the shops and apartment buildings along Rue de Longchamp to the Pont de Neuilly metro and cleared the area. As he rode rocking into the center of Paris—he planned to call TRITON from one of the phone-card-operated booths in the Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann—his distracted mind skipped over the vinyl long-play
record of his memory. Events had come in a rush: The traitor Solovyov had disappeared; Egorova was a guest of Putin; the Washington meeting with TRITON had imploded; Zarubina was dead; TRITON appeared in Paris, asking for contact; his mother had called; he had come to Paris; and he had resolved outstanding issues with her. By tonight he would be talking to TRITON, and could return to Moscow triumphant. Troubles with Putin would evaporate, and recriminations involving Yevgeny would fade away.

What he didn’t know was that the president of the Russian Federation had his own timetable.