The Innocents Club

Chapter Four

Frank Tucker sat in his windowless office, feet on his desk, reading files that were mildewed and yellow with age. He’d been at it three hours, and his eyes felt scoured. His nose had long since blocked in protest over the barrage of mold spores, and his head ached from lack of sleep and the concentrated effort of reading the musty Russian documents. But his brain was racing.

He set down the file in his hand. As he stretched, the worn, cloth-covered swivel chair under him shrieked in protest at the shift of his great frame. Hands clasped behind his head, he stared at the random punctures on the ceiling’s gray acoustic tiles, pondering again how it was that he, personally, had been selected to receive this carefully selected record of KGB mischief and misdeeds.

History is a moth-eaten fabric, full of holes—a vast tapestry of change whose underlying pattern is obscured by official secrecy and necessary lies. A thousand untimely ends and unaccountable triumphs are doomed to remain mysteries forever, their solutions locked away in the memories of shadowy operators who die unconfessed.

Some clues lie buried in the dusty files of the world’s great clandestine agencies, where the harsh light of public scrutiny never falls. But as each regime gives way to the next, furnaces are lit and burn bags are consumed by flame—incriminating evidence lost forever.

Most, but not all, Tucker thought, glancing at the tattered files around him.

Of all the secret agencies, none hid more mysteries than the yellow and gray stone walls of the KGB’s old Moscow headquarters. It was from behind the heavy steel doors of Lubyanka that a message had originated in late June, marked for delivery to one semi-burned-out official of the American CIA. It was that message, delivered late one night, a week earlier, that had sparked Tucker’s quick, clandestine trip to the Russian capital.

He’d been driving home by a circuitous route along quiet back roads. It was nearly midnight, but day and night tended to lose meaning in his underground office, where not much happened and few people dropped by. Tucker spent his time these days poring over old agency files, responding to Freedom of Information requests from historians, journalists and the generally curious. He culled cover names, sources and other sensitive data from the files, deciding which could safely be declassified and released, and which had to remain closed to protect ongoing operations.

He had no clock to punch, no strenuous deadlines to meet. He simply worked alone until his eyes grew too bleary to read any longer. Then he returned to his empty house and prayed for sleep. Taking the longest possible route was his way of decompressing, releasing tension like a ball of string unwinding on the road behind him.

On that particular cool, starlit June night, the suburban back roads of Virginia were deserted when Tucker brought his Ford Explorer to a stop at an intersection in McLean, just a couple of miles from the agency. As he waited for the light to change from red to green, a dark sedan materialized out of nowhere, pulling alongside him. The driver got out and knocked at his passenger-side window.

Instantly on alert, Tucker sized him up—medium height and build, sandy hair. Fit-looking under his dark wind-breaker. Young—thirty, tops, he decided.

Tucker pressed a button on his armrest to lower the opposite window. With his other hand, he reached down between the seats and came up with a nine-millimeter surprise. If the stranger was a cop or a fed, Tucker could produce a carry permit for the gun. If this was a hit, the guy might as well know right off Tucker wasn’t going down without a fight.

The blue eyes in the window widened. “I mean you no harm, Mr. Tucker,” he said. His tongue was tripping on the words in his rush to get them out. The vowels were clipped, the consonants weighted with a heavy Slavic burr.

“You know my name,” Tucker said. “I should know yours.”

“It is not important.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“I am only a courier.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I have a message for you. Please?” The man raised a brown manila envelope in his trembling hand.

“Who’s it from?”

“I cannot say. You take it, please?” He started to pass the envelope through the window, but Tucker raised the gun until it was aimed right between the young man’s eyes.

“Hold it right there,” he said. “I don’t want that.”

Obviously, this wasn’t the anticipated response. “But…but, it is for you!” the courier sputtered.

“Do I look like I was born yesterday?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll believe me when I say I know a blackmail play when I see one. Where’s the camera?” Tucker glanced around. The road was dark and quiet as death. If there were professional watchers out there, they were good. Still, the whole thing stank to high heaven. If he accepted the envelope, he was damn sure the next visit he got would be from this fellow’s friends, threatening to expose him as a double agent. Then, another wary thought occurred to him. His own side? Could CIA security or the FBI be looking to jam him up for some reason?

“There is no camera. I swear it,” the messenger said fervently.

“Just the same, I don’t want that thing.”

“It is important. I am instructed to give it to no one but you.”

“You know where I work?”

“I am guessing you are employed at the C-I-A in Lan-ge-ley, Virginia,” the stranger said with heavily accented precision. “Am I correct?”

“Deliver it to me there, then.”

“Are you mad? I cannot walk into that place!”

Tucker considered the situation, then nodded toward the intersection. The light had changed from red to green, then back again. “There’s a 7-Eleven store up ahead. Follow me, and you can hand it over inside.” In front of a witness, he thought, and the store security cameras.

The courier shook his head. “If I do that, I am a dead man.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

The other man sniffed, as if such a threat was beneath his dignity to ponder now that he’d recovered from the initial shock of having the gun thrust in his face. “It is not you I am worried about, Mr. Tucker, nor your colleagues. My own people are another matter.”

Tucker frowned. “Your own people? Oh, I see. You want to defect, is that it? Or are you just in sales?”

“I am a patriot!” the other man said indignantly. “It is why I do this. But perhaps my colleagues are mistaken. Perhaps you are not the man they take you for. In which case, Mr. Tucker, I will bid you good-night.”

“Hold it right there.”

Tucker studied him for a moment, as well as the thin envelope. Then, he reached into his pocket, withdrew a penknife, pausing to wipe the handle on his shirtsleeve before handing the knife over by the key ring attached to one end.

“Open this and use the blade to lift the flap. But do it carefully, hear? You’re going to reseal the envelope afterward.”

“I must not open it.”

“Why? Some danger in that?”

“No, but—”

“Do it.”

The young man hesitated, then sighed heavily. Opening the penknife, he inserted the blade under the flap, separating it gingerly, leaving just enough gum in place to allow it to be closed once more.

“Now, spread the edges and show me what’s inside,” Tucker said.

No money. No fat wad of smuggled documents. Just a single sheet of paper that seemed to be covered with handwriting.

Tucker nodded. “Okay. Seal it back up again.”

The other man licked the flap and pressed it shut. “You will take it now?”

“I want my knife back first.”

The courier handed it through the window. Tucker took it with his handkerchief, transferring both to his left hand. Then, as the Russian started to pass in the envelope, Tucker’s right hand clamped around his wrist.

“What are you doing?” the courier protested.

Tucker jabbed the other man’s thumb with the tip of the knife. Not much—a pinprick, really, just enough to draw blood. Hardly enough to justify the stream of Russian obscenities that exploded from the other man’s mouth. Yanking the man’s arm downward, Tucker pressed the bloody thumb firmly against the flap, making a seal across the re-closed edges. Then, he released him.

The Russian jammed his thumb into his mouth. “What the hell you are doing that for?” he cried, grammar failing him in his fury.

Tucker closed the knife carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief and dropped them both into the door pocket beside him. Only then did he take the envelope. “Sorry,” he said. “Personal insurance. Now I have your fingerprints on my knife and your DNA on the envelope.”

“If my people find out—”

“As long as you don’t try playing games with me, your people will never know. You have my word on that. Now, what else? Do I need to get in touch with you again?”

“No, I have done my part. The next step is up to you.”

“Meaning…?”

“Read the letter. You will know what you are to do. Good evening, Mr. Tucker.”

With that, the Russian turned away in a huff, still nursing his injured thumb, climbed back in his car, jumped a red light and sped away through the empty intersection. Tucker took note of the red diplomatic plates as the car disappeared into the night. Curiouser and curiouser.

His eyes dropped to the blank brown envelope. He turned it around in his hand, then laid it on the seat beside him, keeping the blood-smeared flap on top, away from the upholstery.

As the light at the intersection changed from red to green once more, Tucker punched in a number on his console-mounted cell phone, picked it up and made a U-turn, heading back toward Langley.

A fingerprint on the knife allowed them to identify the courier from visa files. His name was Gennady Yefimov, a recently arrived third secretary at the Russian embassy in Washington—a junior flunky, albeit one already suspected of being part of the embassy’s intelligence Rezidentura. His late-night rendezvous with Tucker pretty much confirmed it.

The source of the message was another kettle of fish altogether. The note was in Russian, but the signature was a single English word: “Navigator.” It was a taunt, this use of the secret code name given to the Russian spymaster by his own adversaries in tribute to the man’s ability to navigate Moscow’s treacherous political waters. Even after the fall of communism, the Navigator had remained in place, thriving, by all accounts, when so many others had foundered and sunk.

That he knew and used his own Western code name was a galling reminder of the mole the Navigator had run for years inside Langley, a disgruntled petty functionary in the counterintelligence division. The mole had finally been caught, but not before his betrayals had cost the lives of dozens of Company assets in Russia.

Tucker had never seen the Navigator’s face, except in one grainy, long-range surveillance photograph, nor had he ever heard the man’s voice. Just the same, he knew his real name as well as he knew his own. For as long as Tucker had been in the business, Georgi Deriabin, aka the Navigator, had been the dream target of the entire Western intelligence alliance. As head of the KGB—later FSB—First Chief Directorate, he’d held overall responsibility, both before and after the Soviet breakup, for every aspect of Moscow’s intelligence activities abroad. Compared to other sources of information on Russian agents, operations and long-term strategies, Deriabin was the frigging motherlode.

Or would have been, until recently. He’d be in his late seventies now, and rumors of ill health had begun to surface. Recently, the CIA’s Moscow Station had floated the possibility that the Navigator had finally been shuffled out. Like J. Edgar Hoover in his day, however, the Navigator was said to possess incriminating files on everyone who might be a threat to him. When rumors began to spread of his eclipse at long last, there were those in Moscow Station who suspected he’d been arrested, possibly even executed. But if the Navigator really was the source of the note delivered to Tucker by the nervous courier, it had obviously been a mistake to write the man off too early.

The note said Deriabin wanted to meet with Tucker in Moscow—nobody but Frank Tucker—and it said he would make the meeting well worth the trouble. And so, after a small committee had vetted the plan and decided there was little to lose—except, Tucker knew they were calculating, one jaded officer whose best years seemed behind him—he’d flown to Moscow. If the operation had blown up in his face, they’d have simply written him off, issued some plausible cover story and saved the price of his pension.

But Tucker had come back, alive, well and carrying a crate of files whose contents remained to be determined. Not to mention the reason why the Navigator had decided to hand them over in the first place.

Chapter Five

Mariah had her hotel-room key card in one hand and the other on the door handle, ready to leave. She was wearing her serviceable, goes-anywhere-but-a-gala-opening black Donna Karan suit. Her plan was to run over to the Arlen Hunter Museum, get the lay of the land and meet with the rest of the security contingent for the Romanov opening, chase back, change into the Chinese-mandarin silk number, then return in time for the 6:00 p.m. ribbon-cutting and reception.

But she hesitated at the door, her conversation with Chap Korman spinning through her mind. The bizarre allegation that her father had been murdered was patent, provable nonsense. But what about the claim that the manuscript she’d found had been stolen?

From whom? And why would Ben steal someone else’s work? Writer’s block? Not likely. In the nine short years before his death at the age of twenty-eight, her father had produced five novels, dozens of short stories and countless poems, not to mention several volumes of personal journals. You couldn’t have shut the man up if you’d tried.

So why was this Professor Urquhart claiming the manuscript she’d found in the storage locker, the one Ben had titled Man in the Middle, was stolen? And, more to the point, Mariah thought, why did she know that it couldn’t be?

Something niggled at the back of her brain, telling her the manuscript had to be Ben’s work. She just couldn’t think what it was. The harder she tried to zero in on it, the more elusive it became, like trying to pick up mercury.

This was ridiculous. She had no time for this nonsense. God knew she had more pressing problems to think about. A teenage daughter on the verge of rebellion. This awkward role she’d been cast in, playing temptress to lure a possible double agent. The prospect of meeting her father’s former lover.

Just the same, Urquhart’s claims would drive her crazy until she knew the basis for them.

She did a quick mental calculation, cutting her afternoon turnaround times even tighter. Spinning on her heel, she rushed back into the room, tossed her purse and key card on the bed, then rummaged in drawers and closets until she found a Los Angeles telephone book. After a quick call to Courier Express, she pulled out her personal address book, picked up the phone and dialed out again.

It took three tries before she located someone at Langley who could tell her where Frank Tucker was hanging his hat these days. Every time she looked, he seemed to have retreated farther and farther away from the mainstream of agency operations. She was relieved to finally hear his gruff voice pick up.

“Tucker.”

“Frank! You’re there! I thought I was going to have to send out a search party.”

“Mariah? Where are you? Lindsay said you’d gone to L.A.”

“I did. I am—there, I mean. That’s where I am. In Los Angeles.” She paused to quell the fluster that had suddenly turned her into a stammering fool, then started again. “You’ve been talking to Lindsay?”

“A little while ago. I called to let Carol know I was back.”

“Back from where?”

“I was away for a couple of days.”

A non-answer if ever she’d heard one. It was like pulling teeth, talking to him sometimes. “You’ve changed offices again. What’s going on?”

“They needed my cubbyhole upstairs for some summer intern, so they gave me a broom closet down in the basement.”

“The basement? Good Lord! Why do you let them do that to you? With your service—”

“I’ve got no complaints. Suits me fine.”

Mariah slumped down onto a chair and leaned forward, elbow on the round glass table next to the bed, forehead in the palm of her hand. “Frank,” she said wearily, “it’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“To come out from that rock you’ve been hiding under.”

He said nothing for a moment, and she sensed she’d crossed an invisible line. She had known this man for eighteen years, ever since he’d first recruited her. There was no question they were bound to one another by something beyond mentoring, beyond professionalism, beyond friendship. They’d been through good times together, and sad. She’d known his wife; he’d known her husband. Once, she might have been able to talk to Frank about anything. Now, there was that invisible line.

Beyond this point there be dragons.

When he finally did respond, it was only to change the subject. “What’s this about you covering the Zakharov visit? How did you get dragged into that?”

“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. Why should he always get to define the placement of the line? “You first. This trip of yours—where did you go?”

“That’s a long story.”

“I see. Holding out on me? You didn’t happen to go to Florida by any chance, did you?” she asked playfully, trying to draw him out of the tight, defensive corner in which he seemed to live full-time these days.

“No,” he said curtly.

Oops. She’d hit a nerve. Not surprising. Patty Bonelli had been at his side a long time, after all, and without her now, he seemed totally adrift, his last tether cut. It wasn’t right or fair. He was solid, hardworking, capable. A good man, who looked as though he could carry the weight of the world on those broad shoulders of his—and had, professionally and personally, for years and without complaint. She was one of the few who knew the full price Frank had paid for that blind, stoic fidelity. Now he seemed to have closed himself off completely, to her, and maybe to everyone else, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”