The Falstaff Enigma (18 page)

"Looks like they are putting out a dragnet," David
said. "Let's move." David bolted from the room, this time following Austin, who was headed for the back door.

As the pair emerged into the alley, Austin ceded his lead to David, who headed for the nearest door on the opposite side of the alley. It opened easily as the pair burst into the small lobby of yet another apartment building. They did not see the KGB officer who had been leaning against the wall at one end of the alleyway.

David arrived at a revolving door at the front of this building and gave a palm down sign for Austin to wait. The Mossad spy pushed the door around on its central hinge and stopped its motion when his quarter of the door was open to the street. He peered down the sidewalk and caught the emission of light produced by the tip of a cigarette as air rushed through the tobacco and into the lungs of a man in an overcoat. Another KGB agent. David went back inside. "It's covered. We’re going to the roof." As the pair ran for the staircase David stopped next to a floor-to-ceiling coat cabinet that had about an inch between it and the wall. He pulled out the pistol taken from the unconscious KGB agent and slid it behind the cabinet. He knew that it could only do more harm than good.

Austin reached the roof of
the four story building first. He had run up the stairs three at a time. David was close behind. They ran across the roofs, heading in the direction from which the two men on the street had been walking, and away from the cigarette smoker. They had four buildings to go, all of uniform height with only an inch or two between them. They reached the final building and looked down onto the street below. No one. David ran to his left and looked over the edge. The man with the cigarette was still down at the other end of the block.

Austin heard the creak of a door. It was the one from which they had emerged moments earlier. Both men went to one knee and remained still. A single silhouette walked out onto the roof. But the night was overcast and dark. The KGB man strained to hear a sound, pick up a movement, turning in all directions several times. He knew he had a fifty-fifty chance and chose the direction in which one of the roofs was only three stories high. He was wrong.

"Now use the fire escape," whispered David. It was only a ladder that ran down the side of the building next to the hallway windows. The analyst climbed down as quickly as he could, jumping off the fourth lowest rung. David was right behind him and ran to the corner immediately after reaching the pavement. The KGB smoker was nowhere to be seen.

“Follow me by three meters,” David
commanded. He began a quick walk across the intersection. Austin followed and both men made it across unseen. They broke into a half jog, half walk, needing only to place distance between themselves and the KGB dragnet. David allowed himself a smile.

"Put your arms over your heads," said the man as he stepped from behind a corner. "Do it
right now, comrades.” A pistol was raised in his right hand as he flicked a cigarette butt out of his left hand.

Both men dropped their bags and raised their arms.

The analyst's cell was five feet by seven feet and eight feet high. A single fluorescent tube was built into the ceiling. The walls were bare concrete and the floor had only a thin, worn rug covering it. He sat on the end of the immovable bunk, next to the door. Adjacent to the other end of the bunk was a small toilet with a wash basin above it on the wall. If you sat on the toilet, you had to lean forward to keep the back of your head from hitting the basin. He noticed that there was no toilet paper.

The two men had been driven to this place in blindfolds immediately after their arrest. Neither the KGB nor the two spies had spoken. Austin was not sure where David was now. He only knew that both had gotten out of the car when they arrived. He had been taken directly to this cell and had been waiting for thirty minutes now. He could only think of dying in front of a firing squad.

The door opened. A guard walked in and ordered Austin to stand. The American guessed the guard's height at six feet three and weight at two-twenty, although the man was far more beefy than muscular. Austin did as he was told. The guard placed a hood over the analyst's head and led him by the wrist through several corridors to a chair in the middle of a small room.

Austin sat down and felt the cold fingers of another man grab his right hand and place his right index finger in an ink tray. The analyst was fingerprinted within five minutes.

Austin suddenly felt heat emanating from several spots in front of his face. His wrists were strapped to the chair. The hood was removed, revealing a bank of six bright lights in a semi-circle four feet in front of his face.

"I will ask you a series of questions and you will answer them concisely and will say the complete and total truth." The voice was neither high pitched nor low pitched; rather it was the type of neutral tone heard from a newsman. The Russian was flawless; this interrogator was well educated. "What is your name?"

"Andrei Olegnila.''

"Your full name."

"Andrei Ivanovich Olegnila." Austin was forced to bow his head to shade his eyes from the lights.

"Age?"

"Forty."

"
Birthdate?"

"October 20, 1942."

"Birthplace?"

"Moscow."

"What is your job?"

"Farmer."

"Where?"

"The People's Collectiv
e in Krivoy Rog, Ukranian SSR."

"Why are you in Moscow?"

"My friend and I are on vacation. Why were we arrested?"

"What is your friend's name?"

"Mikhail Smetlova."

"His age?"

"I don't know. Late forties, early fifties maybe. Why are we here?"

"He works with you?"

"Yes."

"You work together as spies for whom?"

"Spies?" Austin's voice became tense and excited. It was genuine emotion but Austin did not fight it, feeling that it was appropriate for the occasion. "This is insane, we are farmers and loyal to the Soviet Union."

"America?"

"What? No."

"Britain?"

“I do not understand this.” Austin started shaking his head.

"Why did you make contact with Vladimir Ustinov?"

"I do not know who this person is." Austin felt the pain sharply, the muscles in his arm convulsing involuntarily for a brief moment. He had been shocked. It was mild.

"I repeat, who do you work for?"

"Please, please. I do not understand why you are doing this."

The questions continued for twenty more minutes
, interspersed with mild shocks. Austin stuck to his story. When the interrogation ended the threat was made. "You will return here in one hour. At that time wires will be attached to your testicles and the power will be tripled. The pain will exceed anything you can imagine. Ask yourself if lying is worth this." The man's vocal tone was chillingly lower.

Austin was hooded and returned to his cell. It
seemed far colder than before. Austin could not be sure if the torture he would soon undergo would be worse than the mental torture he endured as the man’s words played through his brain. He was as white as a sheet.

Forty minutes later the cell door opened. Two men walked in.

"No, please. I am innocent. Why do you do this?" Austin knew the words were wasted. The two men appeared to him as automatons.

"Be silent," said the smaller man. Austin had not seen or heard either man before. "The interrogations are over. We are escorting you home."

Each man supported Austin under a shoulder as the analyst stood. His knees buckled.
Death in Russia. My family will never even know
. The two men held the American up. The man under Austin's right shoulder used his right hand to put a hood over the analyst's head.

"I'm sorry," the man said. "This is only a necessary formality." Both men walked as
quickly as possible, virtually carrying the panicked analyst.

Within minutes,
all three men were in the back of a mid-sized sedan. They did not remove Austin's hood.

The hood was finally removed and Robert Austin found himself standing in the middle of a large living room. The furniture was anything but modest. A Louis XIV sofa and two chairs were the centerpieces. One chair had been moved a few feet and faced a fireplace that emitted the soft glow of a dying fire. Shadows danced slowly on the walls, giving way to the inevitable onslaught of lamplight. Austin breathed deeply, allowing calm to enter his body for the first time in hours. But why? He was still in the custody of the KGB and this could only be a ploy to make him talk.
Why?

An arm mo
vement broke Austin's thoughts. He suddenly noticed the head he had been looking at for a minute. The man was seated in the Louis XIV chair, his back to Austin, his face to the fire. The gray hair was familiar. The fake gray hair.

"Mikhail?" asked the analyst.

David Margolis shot up from his seat. "Andrei, thank God." David stepped over to the analyst and pointed to his ear with his left hand while shaking Austin's right hand. Austin understood; their conversation was certainly being listened to.

"How are you?"
the Mossad agent asked.

"I'm all right now but I was shocked – electrocuted – during an interrogation only a little over an hour ago. They think we are spies."

"I know. I was also electrocuted, probably right before you. They threatened to do worse if I did not tell them about a man named Ustinov."

"Were you here?"

"No. Two men drove me here from another building in a blindfold. You must have come from the same place."

"Why is this happening?"

Both men froze as the sound of clapping cut into the conversation. A short, slightly overweight man walked into the room. He was bald, with only a hint of gray hair forming an uncompleted ring from ear to ear. His face had little color, but bore the lines and bags of years of institutionalized pressure. His eyes were brown and had an academic's detachment; introspective.

Austin looked at the man and remembered an economics professor he had at Yale. For the first time, he noticed the bookshelves along the back wall. About half of the books were in German or English. Austin concluded that the man was a professor.

“You play your charade very well for men who are not actors," continued the short man, who was rapidly approaching his sixtieth birthday. "Where's my hospitality? Please, please, sit down, sit down." He waved his hand, palm up, at the sofa. "But be kind to her. She is the finest sofa east of Berlin. Or so my wife always tells me." He moved the chair David had been using back around so that it faced the sofa and sat down.

"L
et me introduce myself. My name is Anatoly Borskov. And you?" he asked David, who was the closer of the pair.

"Mikhail Smetlova."

Borskov smiled and shifted his eyes to Austin.

"Andrei Olegnila."

"Well, gentlemen, I suppose I too would play out the game if were in your situation. You may not know who I am, but I hope to prove to you during this evening that I know why you are here and I want us to work together." He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a reaction. He got only blank stares. "Well then, where to begin? I know, let me play a tape for you."

Borskov walked over to a cabinet against the wall opposite the sofa. Inside was a reel-to-reel tape deck. He pressed one button and the reels began turning.

"What did he tell you?"

"Your original missing man was killed. He thought a KGB team was responsible but he didn't know why."

The sound quality was poor, but both David and Robert instantly recognized the conversation they had after they left the Ostankino Cafe earlier in the evening. Borskov played the entire conversation until the point when both men entered the building in a useless attempt to outrun the KGB.

"Your scientist friend was right on all counts. It was a KGB hit team that killed both General Timenko and Marshal Vazhnevsky. Oh, do not worry, this was recorded from a hotel room with what is called a parabolic microphone, by the two men who brought you here. Natural
ly, I trust them with my life."

Borskov removed the two reels and tossed them into the fire. "Now you don't need to worry any more. There are no copies of that."

He walked back to the cabinet and picked up two manila folders that were on top of the tape machine. He removed a pair of reading glasses from his pocket and put them on. "Let's see, who do we have first," said the KGB officer as he lifted the top folder into the lamplight. He opened it and began to read.

"Robert Steven Austin.
Birthdate: March 2, 1947. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Your father was a marketing executive for the company Proctor and Gamble and your mother was a housewife. Your father died of a heart attack in 1975 and your mother now lives with her sister in Tampa, Florida.

"You graduated at the top of your high school class, were active in social clubs and played baseball and basketball. You attended Yale University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics. You also studied Russian – in which you have capably demonstrated your fluency. You then attended the University of Chicago and over the next five years you were able to earn both a Master's and a Doctorate in economics. You were well known among the faculty for your staunch defense of pure capitalism. You belonged to a club named 'Young Libertarians' and your mentor was Milto
n Friedman. Your doctoral dissertation was entitled 'Empirical Evidence and the Monetary Framework Since 1940' in which you virulently questioned the efficacy of governmental involvement in the economy at any level."

Borskov shifted his gaze to Austin's face. "Very curious, Mr. Austin. Despite your obvious feelings against government, you go to work for the Western World's largest. You learn Russian even though it is the language of a country that is antithetical to your beliefs. You are quite an anomaly, Mr. Austin, but I am not quite sure whether these two facts are to be pitied or admired." The KGB man returned his gaze to the file.

"You paid for your graduate education by working as a stockbroker, first for a small Chicago company, Swain and Company, Inc., then with the big firm of Merrill Lynch. When you graduated you not only had paid for all of your education but had also saved about $50,000.

"After receiving your degree, you went to work for that same company as an analyst of defense related companies in your country. You did very well at this, being paid over $
250,000 per year the last years there. That put you in the top one percent of income earners in your country. Four years after graduating from Chicago – for reasons that nobody knows – you accepted a large reduction in salary to work for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Your reports on our weapons system are legendary, at least here in the Soviet Union, for their erudite nature. There is much speculation that you somehow developed contacts among defense coordinators here.

"To be the man to catch you spying in Moscow would be of great personal advantage to me, as you can guess, Mr. Austin. But soon you will understand why I will instead protect your presence here with my life – because you two are my salvation."

The two men remained silent. Austin tried to hide his astonishment but feared that he was failing at this endeavor.

"As for your current personal status, you are mar
ried. Your wife, Lynn, is 33. Your most recent file update is coded six – we code all incoming reports from one to six; one is trivial and six is most important – and is very disturbing. You have been listed as a possible defector to our side and your photograph has been distributed to all the field offices of the CIA and all the State Department's embassies. No reason known. Also, your wife is missing. No one knows where she’s gone, only that a large sum of money was withdrawn from one of your bank accounts. My guess now is that you took care of her before beginning whatever odyssey it is that brought you here."

Austin was elated. Lynn was still safe and he was strangely certain that she could remain safe for at least another month. He worried that the fat man, who already knew the highlights of his life, could read him like a book.

"In the interest of time, I will skip the analyses of your works and the psychological profile," continued Borskov. "It's all rather voluminous and extremely boring. KGB psychoanalysts tend to be behaviorists, which makes them unimaginative at best. They spend ten pages saying that you are a normal man with strong convictions who would be a poor choice for blackmail. You call it 'bureaucracy’.

"There is, however, one fact I did not mention earlier because it will n
ow make a dramatic introduction. Your roommate for one year while at Chicago was one David Michael Margolis." Borskov closed the folder and put it underneath the second folder. He opened the new one on top.

The two Westerners continued their reticence. Margolis wanted to know how much information the KGB had on him and Austin was eager to hear more about what his ex-roommate had done since college.

"David Michael Margolis. Birthdate: August 7, 1948. Born and raised in Skokie, Illinois. Your father and mother emigrated from the Soviet Union to America in 1937. Your father spent World War II in the U.S. Army in the Quartermaster Corps doing the paperwork necessary for the United States to ship weapons and material to his homeland. When he returned in 1945 to Skokie, he worked as a butcher until 1954, when he became an insurance salesman. He was moderately successful and had an above average income until his retirement in 1981. He is now living off his investments, the American Social Security system and monthly checks of $300 sent by you, Mr. Margolis. Your father is now heavily involved in the affairs of his synagogue." Both Austin and Margolis were struck by the depth of knowledge the KGB had on David's family. "Your mother was a housewife all her life and never caught the same degree of religious fervor as either you or your father.

"After a stellar performance in high school, you attended Northwestern University and graduated – once again – Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Political Science. You went directly to business school at the University of Chicago. You received a Master's degree in business with a major in finance and began working for the huge company, International Telephone and Telegraph, known simply as ITT.

"You did very well. That is one big difference between us and the West: here you never would have advanced so fast at your young age because here we value experience as an integral part of wisdom. But here we revere the aged, we do not spurn and ridicule them.” Borskov's tirade was designed to provoke a response but was unsuccessful. "You were placed in a sales group that traveled throughout communist Europe. You specialized in arranging hard-currency financing for the products and services sold by ITT. You worked closely with three banks: Citicorp, Barclay's and Union Bank of Switzerland. You routinely flew to Geneva, London and New York to work out complicated financial deals with various bankers such as Jean Lavousier of UBS and William Penhurst of Barclay's and many others I could name.

“
During this time, you married a Russian woman, had a son five months later, and, to your credit, took full advantage of the connections you had built to get her an exit visa to America. But you continued your career with ITT.

"After three years, you were chosen to head a sales group of three men based in Moscow. This was in January, 1978. You were well respected both here and within ITT. You were a '
fasttracker,' as they say in America, being groomed for bigger responsibility. Under your brief tenure, sales increased 35 per cent and when you abruptly resigned you were close to finalizing three multi-million-dollar deals that just as abruptly fell through.

"During these years you maintained a studio apartment in Manhattan and in 1978 had a very nice apartment in Moscow courtesy of ITT. Your social life consisted mainly of seeing business contacts and associates but you s
pent what time you could with your new wife and child. Until, that is, you were divorced as abruptly as you were married. Not long after that, they relocated to Israel while you stayed in New York.” Borskov paused and looked at Margolis. “Interesting that this was done with your consent.” The KGB officer was thinking through the situation – trying to understand the man across from him.

Borskov returned to the file.
"On March 10, 1978, you received a telephone call from David Stein. He was an old friend you grew up with in Skokie and at that time was a captain in the Israeli Army. That evening at twenty-one hundred you met for dinner at Sardi's and he made an offer on behalf of Mossad."

"You bastards had me followed in New York," said the Mossad agent, his voice at a high volume, his face flushed.

Borskov nodded slowly. "Followed and your phone bugged. The KGB is a huge worldwide network and one that I'm afraid has lost control over itself."

Suddenly Borskov returned his gaze to the folder on his lap. He had provoked a response but did not wan
t it to become a confrontation. "You resigned in July and moved to Israel to work for Mossad and, presumably, to be close to your son. The rest of the file should please you, because we have not yet penetrated Mossad and we have little detail about what you have achieved. What is known is that you have risen to some prominence within Mossad and you probably coordinate intelligence gathering somewhere outside of Israel, namely here in the Soviet Union. We have had several reports over the past few years of sightings of you inside our country in cities like Kiev, Odessa, Kursk and Sevastopol.