Palace of Treason (6 page)

To Nate’s perceptive eye, the relationship between Forsyth and Gable was a pragmatic alliance tempered by years of working together. Forsyth was the senior, but there was never a thought of him ordering Gable to do anything. Gable knew what to do; if he disagreed he’d say so, then follow instructions. Gable acknowledged that Forsyth sometimes thought he was undiplomatic, but they both knew that golden-boy Forsyth had at various times in his career himself gotten into serious bureaucratic trouble by speaking his mind, once memorably to a member of Congress visiting Rome Station on an endless string of summer recess Congressional delegations—they were called fact-finding trips for the benefit of the taxpayers—during which Forsyth noted that she was three hours late for her Station briefing, pointedly looking at the half dozen Fendi, Gucci, and Ferragamo shopping bags carried by her chief of staff. Gable had not been present, a small blessing, but Forsyth was in the penalty box for a year after that.

Nate saw mutual respect, knew there was loyalty, guessed at comradely affection. The COS and his DCOS watched each other’s backs; they naturally sensed what the other was thinking, and they knew what came first: operations, which informed everything they did. Everything. Nate did not know it, but Forsyth and Gable had argued with Chief of Counterintelligence Simon Benford over the issue of Nate’s intimacy with Dominika. In
the Agency it was an infraction of the highest order: Previously other officers had famously slept with assets and been separated from the service. But even as Forsyth scolded, and Gable threatened, and Benford raved, Forsyth convinced Benford to give young Nash a break. It was not because Nate had handled MARBLE, DIVA, and LYRIC flawlessly; it was not because they recognized in Nash an exceptional internal ops talent; in the end, it was a veteran assessment that the greater good was being served by ignoring for the moment the lesser transgression. But they would never let Nate know.

The TALON recording of the meeting suddenly was interrupted by three woman’s screams, high, strident, one after the other.

“Fuck’s that?” said Gable. The screams repeated over the sound of LYRIC’s voice.

“Peacocks,” said Nate. “Two of them came out of the woods and started calling. Scared the shit out of us.”

“Peacocks! Jesus wept,” said Gable.

Forsyth started laughing. “Make sure you tell Headquarters about the birds when you forward the digital file. The suits will think you brought a woman to the debriefing for the general.”

“Not a bad idea, but where would Nash find a woman?” said Gable.

They were gathering up papers when Gable told Nate to sit back down. Forsyth waited by the soundproof door, his hand on the latch. They would not talk about LYRIC, refer to him or the case, or even mention the cryptonym, outside this Lucite-walled room. No exceptions: Moscow Rules. The case was already in compartmented, Restricted Handling channels in Headquarters. Not more than fifty people at Langley read incoming LYRIC cables.

“As much as it pains me to admit it,” said Gable, “I want you to know I think you did a fucking great job when LYRIC walked in.”

Nate shifted a little in his seat. Gable was not one to give out compliments.

“I would have thrown the pukey old man out of the walk-in room. You followed your instincts, nailed your hunch, and we got a platinum case on the books. Good job.” At the door Forsyth smiled.

“Now comes precision, now comes focus. I want you to run this agent as tight as a bar hostess in Vientiane,” said Gable.

“I’m not sure I get—”

“I’ll explain it to you when you graduate high school,” said Gable.

“I’ll look forward to it,” said Nate.

“That don’t mean you can skate,” said Gable, “especially at the start of this tour. You haven’t done squat on your own power since you got here. I’m watching you, Nash.”

Forsyth chuckled. “Nate, I think Marty’s trying to tell you he likes you,” said Forsyth. He popped the latches on the ACR door.

“Jesus wept,” said Nate. A moment of silence, and then the sound of Forsyth’s laughter boomed down the hallway.

During their previous time in Helsinki, DCOS Gable had watched over young Nate, had kicked him in the ass, and had taught him valuable lessons: Always protect your agent, never trust the flatland cake eaters at Headquarters, make the hard operational decisions, and don’t worry about the fucking politics.

Gable was fifty-something, a knuckly, leather-faced, crew-cut case officer who carried a Browning Hi Power in a Bianchi belt-loop holster, and had made his bones in every backwater capital in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He had recruited sweating, chittering equatorial ministers, passing a bottle of Ugandan scotch back and forth inside a sweltering Land Rover. He had debriefed a Burmese four-star while holding a roll of toilet paper and watching for blue-scaled pit vipers in the buffalo grass as the general squatted, stricken with dysentery. And Gable had carried his agent out of the Andean jungle in a tropical downpour—the first ever penetration of the Shining Path in Peru—after the case went bad.

The three of them—the senior, placid Forsyth; the china-smashing Gable; and the resolute Nate—were each of a different grade and temperament, but in traditionally rank-neutral CIA they were a crew, bound by the rigors of past operations and the unacknowledged brotherhood of working together in their clandestine world. And now Nate had his assignment to Athens and they were back together. All except Dominika, who was unaccounted for, out of contact.

In Helsinki, Gable had coached him while Nate recruited Dominika, a spectacular success for a junior CIA officer. But Gable also quickly sensed that Nate and his agent had been intimate. “Are you fucking nuts?” he had raved at Nate. “You’re jeopardizing her life, your agent’s life.” Nate had tried
backpedaling until Gable shut him up. “Don’t fucking deny it,” said Gable. “Your only job is to protect her, not because you love her, not because it’s regulations. You fucking do it because she agreed to produce intel for you and put her life in your hands to do it. And you sacrifice everything to make sure she stays alive. Nothing is more important.” Nate remembered the words even as he thought about Dominika, somewhere in Moscow.

Then–Chief of Station Tom Forsyth, also around fifty, tall and slim, with salt-and-pepper hair perpetually tousled by reading glasses pushed up and on top of his head, had agreed with his deputy. But unlike the swift ass-kicking promised by Gable, Forsyth had called Nate into his wood-paneled Helsinki Station office and delivered an hour-long high mass of agent-handling rules so nuanced, so brilliantly clear, that Nate hadn’t moved in his chair. Preserving the intel flow was his duty, Forsyth had said; it’s why he was a case officer, and if he couldn’t control personal urges, well maybe they should have another discussion about what Nate might like to do for the rest of his life. Not daring to breathe, Nate looked at his hands. He raised his head, looking for permission to speak. Forsyth nodded.

“Tom, what if my being with her is what she
wants
. What if it makes her a better spy?”

Forsyth pushed his glasses on top of his head. “It’s not without precedent, giving agents what they want,” he said. “We’ve fed agents’ heroin habits to keep them reporting. I remember a porn-addicted Chinese minister who wouldn’t make meetings unless we had the fuck films rolling when he walked into the safe house. And the shoes, boxes of them, for the Indonesian president’s wife. Jesus she tried on every pair, with me on my knees, working the shoe horn. But we’re not talking about that, not exactly.” Forsyth swiveled in his chair.

“A million years ago, my first tour, I recruited a code clerk from the Czech Embassy in Rome,” Forsyth said. “Cute little thing, shy, couldn’t go out on her own. Cipherines, they called them, had to have an accompanying escort all the time: an older woman, an embassy wife.

“We had an Italian support asset—young guy, sold stereos, but looked like a movie star. Over the space of six months, he seduced the older lady, so every time the two women came out on Saturday afternoon, the escort would sprint up the Via Veneto to get to Romeo’s apartment, leaving our little flower alone. And I was there. Took another six months, but she started
bringing out copies of cable traffic, intel service details, counterintelligence stuff, correspondence with Moscow, some pretty good East Bloc intel—back then Headquarters was nuts for it. Fucking Cold War.”

“How did you recruit her?” asked Nate. “Sounds like she would have been terrified.”

Forsyth spun back in his chair. “It took a while; we walked in the park a lot. I heard about the older brother in the army a hundred times. Started talking about her life, and her dreams—she was twenty-four for Christ’s sake. When she began talking about her work at her embassy, about her code books, it was done, my first recruitment. But it didn’t last.”

Nate waited: Forsyth wasn’t done. “We were both kids. We had been sleeping together, it’s how I closed the deal,” said Forsyth, looking at Nate evenly. “I had genuine feelings for her, but I also told myself a lovesick girl would do more for me. I got emotionally involved and I took my eye off the ball. And she tried smuggling out a reel of crypto tape to surprise me and they stopped her at the front door. Romeo’s girl told him the whole story. Czechs caught her and sent her home, maybe prison, maybe worse. We never heard.”

Nate didn’t say anything. Cars on the boulevard outside were honking at something.

“My chief in Rome didn’t fire me,” said Forsyth, “and twenty years later I’m not going to fire you … yet.” They stared at each other for ten seconds, then Forsyth pointed to the door. “Go out and start stealing secrets. Protect DIVA. Run her professionally. It’s ultimately your decision.”

Colonel Alexei Zyuganov had neither the sophistication nor, frankly, the inclination to win Egorova’s loyalty. Personal relationships were not important. No one knew his early history; no one knew anything about his childhood. His father, a prominent
apparatchik,
had disappeared in the early sixties, at the tail end of the Khrushchev purges. His mother was Ekaterina Zyuganova, a well-known figure in the old KGB. Ekaterina had sat on the KGB Executive Council, then as KGB liaison officer in the Secretariat of the Central Committee, and finally on the Collegium of the KGB. Short, mustached, bosomy, with fantastic upswept hair, Ekaterina had worn the
Orden Krasnoy Zvezdy,
the Order of the Red Star, awarded for her “great contribution to the defense of the USSR in war and peacetime and for ensuring public safety” until things changed and it no longer was
modnyi,
fashionable, to continue wearing the red ceramic device.

Nineteen-year-old Alexei was brought into the Service by
bonna,
maternal patronage, but failed to make an impression in various low-level assignments. Bad tempered, at times irrational, and occasionally prone to displays of violent paranoia, Alexei was going nowhere in the bureaucracy: Everyone knew it, but supervisors’ instincts for self-preservation prevented them from recommending he be cashiered. No one dared defy Madame Zyuganova; Ekaterina protected her son with implacable determination. Then Zyuganov disappeared from the corridors of Headquarters: Momma finally had found sonny boy an assignment for which he was singularly qualified.

Zyuganov was read in as one of four subcommandants of the Lubyanka prison, a formal KGB position title sufficiently anodyne to discourage public scrutiny, with no paperwork or records required. In reality he had joined the small staff of present-day Lubyanka interrogators, experts in
chernaya rabota,
black work: liquidations, torture, and executions. They were the successors of the
Kommandatura,
the coal-black department of the NKVD, which was the instrument of Stalin’s purges and had eliminated White Russian émigrés, Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and, in twenty-eight
consecutive nights in the spring of 1940, seven thousand Polish prisoners in the Russian forest of Katyn. In four years Zyuganov was promoted as Lubyanka’s second chief executioner and, when the chief executioner—a patron and protector—faltered, he had reveled in the career high of putting a bullet behind his boss’s right ear. Zyuganov had found a home.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an end to unrestricted wet work. Part of the KGB morphed into the modern SVR; the Lubyanka cellars closed and the building now belonged to the internal service, the FSB. Zyuganov could have made the lateral move to SVR Department V, colloquially still referred to as the
Otdel mokrykh del,
the department of wet affairs, as one of the “wet boys,” but his mother, Ekaterina, knew better and wanted to forfend his future. She had by that time stepped down from her last position in the Collegium, and a cushy if inconsequential retirement assignment to Paris as
zampolit,
a political advisor to the
rezident,
had been arranged. Mother’s last act from Headquarters had been to place Zyuganov as third chief in Line KR, the counterintelligence department. Alexei would be safe there and could work his way up. It was all she could do for her murderous little boy.

The psychopathy of not feeling pity, mixed with innate aggression fueled by sadism, leavened by the utter inability to relate to others’ emotions, had been singularly well suited to Zyuganov’s ingenue career in the cellars. With the passing of the Lubyanka salad days, when an executioner could be as busy as he wished, the post-Soviet era was a definite disappointment. Things had picked up with President Putin, however. Splashy overseas operations—Yushchenko in Ukraine, Litvinenko and Berezovsky in the United Kingdom—had settled the hash of noisy exiles, and domestic troublemaking journalists and activists—Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Markelov, and Baburova—had been obliterated. But for every one of these high-publicity actions there were dozens of lesser bugs that needed quiet squashing: independent provincial administrators, military logistics managers who did not tithe sufficiently to Moscow, uppity oligarchs who needed a reminder of how Russia worked now. All these and more eventually found themselves in the basement medical wings of either Lefortovo or Butyrka prisons.

Defendants would be remanded to Colonel Zyuganov after extended sessions in the procurator’s office, denying scattershot accusations of fraud, or bribery, or tax evasion. This is when trouble would start. Whispered rumors in Yasenevo held that once Colonel Zyuganov inhaled the bloom of the clammy drains in those desperate subbasements he changed—literally and figuratively—insisting on taking over and directing the interrogations personally, but only after having buttoned the vintage Red Army field tunic he favored while working: a brown-speckled coat, stiff and cracking with blood, reeking of pleural or vitreous or cerebrospinal fluids, all grudgingly spilled by enemies of the State.

They were already guilty—Zyuganov’s head swam with impatience to inflict pain, he could taste it—and his instructions were to extract a confession—
prisvoenie,
embezzlement;
vzyatochnichestvo,
bribery;
khuliganstvo,
hooliganism;
nizost’,
turpitude; whatever—by means of increasingly vigorous levels of physical discomfort: Levels One through Three. There occasionally were accidents—
when they would not listen, or refused to comply
—and Zyuganov’s vision would clear in time to see guards wheeling broken bodies out of the interrogation theater on gurneys draped with rubber sheets. Zyuganov couldn’t help that: Instruments sometimes slipped, arteries were nicked, and dislodged hematomas would cause the brain to swell.

Occasionally, a prisoner’s real or imagined potential for embarrassing, resisting, threatening, thwarting, or plotting against President Putin made him or her
inconvenient.
Colonel Zyuganov would receive the vintage “VMN” code-word call on the prison administrator’s
Kremlovka
line direct from the commissariat of the president. VMN,
Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya,
Supreme Degree of Punishment, from the old Article 58 of Stalin’s state penal code. It meant that the citizen should disappear, and that Zyuganov could indulge himself during an interrogation. He could splinter the bones of the legs and pelvis of a prisoner with a heavy baton—bendy steel reinforcing bars worked best—then walk around to the head of the table, sit on a low stool, stick his face close, and breathe in the shivering groans, watch the rolling eyes, and listen to the silver thread of spittle hit the slippery tile floor.

A year earlier there had been official trouble—recriminations—during the interrogation of two
Chornye Vdovy,
two Chechen Black Widow suicide bombers. The women had been arrested as they were boarding a bus
in Volgograd; the bombs around their bellies had not detonated. A directive from the Kremlin secretariat—essentially instructions from the president himself—took primacy away from the internal security service, the FSB, and
by name
designated SVR Colonel Zyuganov, veteran KGB and Lubyanka executioner, responsible for the women’s interrogation. Zyuganov’s swamp-water heart nearly burst with pride: He would not fail the president.

As chief of Line KR, Zyuganov knew counterintelligence information was urgently needed: the Chechens’ cutouts, bomb-making confederates, and urban safe houses had to be identified. His impatience to extract the info, more to please his leader than to protect and preserve the Motherland, put a ragged edge on his already ragged soul.

At the start of the first session, the stronger of the two girls—Medna was her name, she was dark, thin, vital—spat on Zyuganov’s vintage Red Army tunic. This was a serious infraction, massive impertinence. The scaly rage that lived in Zyuganov’s intestines roared up and out of his mouth. Before he could stop himself, he dogged the knurled handle of the high-backed garrote chair Medna had been strapped to one turn too far, and the mechanism that had been slowly choking her instead collapsed her trachea with an audible pop, obstructing her airway and resulting in a noiseless, blue-faced death in thirty seconds.
Shit,
thought Zyuganov—one potential source of tactical intelligence was gone. That
suka,
that bitch, had cheated him.

The second Chechen prisoner clearly was terrified. Her name was Zareta, and she was thinking about the day a middle-aged woman came to her parents’ house in the capital city of Grozny, spoke quietly to her mother, then took Zareta into the bedroom for an hour of mesmerizing, overwhelming, hypnotizing conversation.
That recruitment afternoon had been the beginning,
she thought,
and now this is the end.
Through the sour hood over her head she could hear shoes squeaking on floor tiles around her and the click of a snap hook on the wire that bound her wrists behind her back. Her legs shook with fright and she breathed hard into the cloth hood. A ratchet sound began and her arms were hoisted behind her, higher than her waist, forcing her to lean forward, her shoulder tendons screaming. If they had been conversational, Zyuganov could have told Zareta that
strappado
—suspension by the arms—was used by the Medici family in Florence as early as 1513. But Zyuganov didn’t have time to chat.

Screaming into the hood, Zareta could not immediately identify what was being done to her—it sufficed to know only that her body was engulfed in pain, serious pain that was elemental, sharp, and electric, beneath her skin, deep in her vitals. Her legs shook and she felt her urine on the floor under her bare feet. Then the questions in Russian began; each was repeated by a female voice in accented Chechen. In thirty minutes, Zareta had stuttered the names of the woman who recruited her and the head and number two of her training cell, as well as the location of two training camps in Chechnya, one in Shatoy, seventy kilometers south of the capital at the end of the P305, and another east of Grozny, in Dzhalka, off the M29.

It was infinitely more terrifying not to be able to see, not to be able to anticipate each assault on her nervous system. She screamed out the name of the young man who assembled the suicide vests in Volgograd, and that of the boy who had strapped the tape-wrapped explosive sausage around her waist, snug under her breasts. He had smiled at her through his beard. If he wasn’t dead already, she had just killed him.

The woman’s voice came to her again, in the strange accented Chechen, asking about Black Widow operations in Moscow. Zareta knew one name and one address, but was determined not to betray these last colleagues. The Chechen voice was replaced by the Russian voice, reedy and harsh—it barely sounded human. Even though bent over double, Zareta could feel the person next to her. Someone slapped her on the back of the head. She felt fingers fiddling with her hood and it was roughly whisked off. The sudden white light of the laboratory made her wince, but it was nothing compared to what was in front of her, a foot away. Zareta screamed for three minutes, seemingly without taking a breath.

Medna’s body was upright in the high-backed chair. She sat regally, hands wired to the armrests, head held upright by a strap around her forehead. Her face was a mass of purple bruises. She stared at Zareta through half-closed lids, her mouth barely open. Dried blood trails on either side of her mouth and nostrils completed the war-paint look. The real horror, the Zyuganov touch, was that Medna sat in the chair with her legs delicately crossed, as if at the theater, with the little toe of the foot closest to Zareta’s face snipped off. Zyuganov clapped his hand over Zareta’s mouth to stifle the paroxysm of screams.

“Look at her,” Zyuganov said. “She’s telling you to live.” He grabbed a
handful of Zareta’s black hair and shook her head. “Live, and survive, and return to your parents. You have been deceived and used by these animals. All I require is one name and one address. Then we are done.” As if to demonstrate, he lowered Zareta’s arms until she could stand upright and wobbly, unclipped the hoisting rope, and snipped the wire off her wrists. She bowed her head, unable to look at the ruined envelope of her friend, unwilling to contemplate her own surrender.

She looked up at Zyuganov and hesitated, then whispered the name of the controller in Moscow and the address of an apartment in a high-rise building in the southern Moscow suburb of Zyablikovo. Zyuganov nodded and clasped Zareta’s face and squeezed her cheeks, a “that’s a good girl” gesture. He then walked to a stainless-steel table against the wall. Zareta, the busty matron who spoke Chechen, and the uniformed prison guard in the corner of the room all watched as he pulled a large gray handgun from under a towel, turned, and walked back to them. Zyuganov raised the pistol—an MP412 REX revolver loaded with devastating .357 magnum cartridges—and shot the already-dead Medna in the left temple from a foot away.

Zareta looked at Zyuganov with horrified disbelief. The guard held his hand over his mouth. The matron had turned away, clasping her stomach, and was vomiting on the floor. The hydrostatic shock of the bullet had tipped Medna and her chair over and the blood left in her body was spreading out in a black lake over the white tiles, migrating slowly toward the large central drain.
Normal’no,
just right, thought Zyuganov. This was just the kind of ogre’s party he liked.