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“You will join me for dinner, yes?” Deriabin said.
Tucker considered refusing for about a millisecond, then nodded.
As soon as they sat down, a portly woman he took to be the housekeeper started carrying in food, generous platters of herring, black bread, sausages and sauerkraut, blinis and piroshki. Hearty but simple fare.
Tucker glanced around. The cottage, too, was comfortable but modest, with white plastered walls, exposed rough beams and sturdy country furnishings. A KGB safe house? he wondered. Or a sign of the Navigator’s reduced fortunes? Yet how diminished could Deriabin’s position be when he’d been able to arrange not only to get a message out, but also for the CIA plane to over-fly and land in Russian territory?
The old man poured a glass of vodka for each of them. The toast, the first of many that night, was perfunctory enough, if ironic.
“To your good health, Mr. Tucker.”
Tucker considered reciprocating, but in the other man’s case, the wish seemed a little belated and beside the point. He lifted his glass and nodded, then followed the old man as he threw it back.
They directed their attention to the food, but Deriabin ate little, picking at it for a few minutes before setting his fork aside and lighting a cigarette. “You will excuse me, please. The food, I assure you, is excellent. And perfectly safe,” he added, reading Tucker’s mind. “Unfortunately, my appetites are no longer what they once were. Liver cancer, my doctors tell me. I gather I have a few weeks. Three months, at best. But we must live for the moment, no?” He refilled their glasses, raised his briefly, then downed it in one gulp.
Over the next few hours, Tucker watched the bottle slowly drain, doing his part to keep up with the old man. Deriabin seemed coherent, despite his obvious illness and the amount of drink he’d consumed. Like most men with unfettered power, he seemed to have lost the art of two-way conversation, requiring only an audience. Tucker was content to give him one, and Deriabin rambled on about myriad subjects both philosophical and trivial without ever zeroing in on the heart of the matter—why he had made contact. Tucker decided to let the hand play itself out. Having taken up the dare and come, he was at the old man’s disposition. All he had to do was keep his cool and see where things went.
When the dishes had been cleared away, they sat alone and uninterrupted. For a while, a television droned in another room, where, it seemed, the housekeeper and driver were watching a dubbed version of Jurassic Park. Pretty appropriate, Tucker thought as he listened to the dinosaur across the table from him rehash the good old days, when the struggle between the Soviet and American empires had dominated the international landscape.
The bottle was nearly empty when Deriabin threw out what seemed at first to be no more than a drunkard’s complaint. “Women!” he grumbled. “Why is it so impossible to put a good mind and a good ass in one package, eh? Tell me that.”
No reply was expected. Tucker let the man rant.
“Every woman with half a brain they ever sent up to me had a face like a potato and legs like tree stumps! And the decent-looking ones? The mental capacity of pickled herring—although,” Deriabin added, arching a grizzled eyebrow, “there’s good eating in that, just the same, eh?”
He chuckled at his own humor, but it quickly turned into a strangled cough. His yellowed skin grew darker as he gasped and pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve. He was wearing a heavy hand-knit sweater, despite the warmth of the summer night. Tucker averted his gaze as he spit into the phlegm-stained square.
When he finally recovered, Deriabin squinted at him through a blue haze of smoke. “Anyway, this has been my problem. But you,” he said, waggling a bent, tobacco-stained finger, “you have been very lucky, eh, you sly wolf? How did you manage this?”
“Manage what?”
“To keep that woman at your side all those years. What was her name?”
Tucker frowned. Patty? Why would he—
“You know,” Deriabin insisted, “the blonde. Small, very attractive, from the pictures I saw. Clever, too, I’m told.” He snapped his fingers impatiently, struggling for a name. “The lovely widow.”
Tucker’s blood froze. Mariah. He forced his gaze to remain steady on the old man. “Can’t think which one you mean. Got a few good-looking ones kicking around the place,” he added wryly, tilting his glass.
The Navigator’s jaundiced eyes narrowed. Then he tipped back his own glass. Tucker watched it drain. How a man with a diseased liver could consume that much vodka defied all logic.
The tumbler dropped back to the table. “It only proves my point,” Deriabin rasped. “You get more beautiful women than you can even remember, while my people never send me one who doesn’t look like she was suckled on lemons instead of mother’s milk.”
Nothing more was said on the subject as they worked their way through what remained of the bottle and the night. At 2:00 a.m. the driver knocked on the door to let them know it was time to leave for the uncharted airstrip on the outskirts of Moscow where the Company plane had been cleared to land and wait for Tucker’s predawn departure.
Deriabin went along for the ride. As soon as they pulled onto the tarmac, the driver jumped out, but the Navigator remained in place behind the car’s opaque tinted windows. Tucker felt the rear of the car dip and rise as the driver opened the trunk and removed something. His guard went up, but when the lid of the trunk slammed, he saw through the rear window that the driver had only unloaded a wooden crate.
“I am giving you some files for safekeeping,” the Navigator said.
The driver opened the back door of the car on Tucker’s side and lifted the lid of the box for inspection.
“What’s in them?” Tucker asked.
“Not a bomb, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Wasn’t worried about that,” he replied truthfully. The aircraft crew would pass the crate through metal and chemical scanners before they would agree to load it. He could see them through Deriabin’s window, watching the car. Wondering what the hell was going on, obviously.
“At least, not a bomb of the traditional variety,” Deriabin added, striking a match and cupping his hands to light another cigarette. He straightened creakily, inhaling the smoke deeply, as if the predawn breeze coming in through Tucker’s open door was too rich a mixture for his compromised system to handle. “You will find they make interesting reading.” He nodded to the driver, who closed the crate and walked over to the plane, handing it off to one of the American crewmen.
“Why are you turning these papers over to us?” Tucker asked.
“Not ‘us,’ Mr. Tucker. I am turning them over to you.”
“Fine. Me. Why?”
“Because you have time to give them the attention they deserve. You are underused these days, I’m told.”
“If you know that, then you know they could easily be taken off my hands the minute I get back.”
“That would be a great pity and a great mistake. Take my word on this, my friend, even if you are disinclined to believe most of what I say. No one else will have as much interest in these files as you. No one else will ensure that what they contain is properly handled.”
Deriabin extended his emaciated hand. Again, Tucker worried about crushing the brittle bones under that transparent skin, but the old man’s grip was firm.
“This will be goodbye for me,” Deriabin said. “Only remember this, my friend—no man on earth desires as passionately as a Russian. Beware the one who desires too much.”
On the flight back, Tucker had been too exhausted and too drunk to give that or anything else much thought. It was only the next day, picking through the files, that he recalled the Navigator’s words. Who was “the one who desires too much”? he wondered.
Foreign Minister Zakharov, he presumed now. It seemed clear from the content of the files that Deriabin was determined for some reason to derail the man’s ambition by any means necessary—even treason. Zakharov’s rise to power had been nearly as ruthless as Deriabin’s own, but Tucker was aware of no evidence the two men had ever been rivals before now. So what had changed?
Then there was the old man’s apparently drunken commentary on women. His pointed reference to Mariah had been anything but haphazard, Tucker knew. It was to demonstrate the man knew where Tucker was most vulnerable. That, however debilitated the Navigator might seem, he had no compunction about manipulating that vulnerability for his own purposes. And that he was confident Tucker would act on the information in the files.
Well, maybe, Tucker thought grimly. But not necessarily in the way Deriabin expected. Because the linchpin in the Navigator’s scheming, he now knew, was the death in Paris nearly thirty years earlier of an impoverished American author. And if it were up to Tucker, that episode could bloody well remain shrouded in lies.
But it wasn’t up to him.
After Mariah’s call from Los Angeles, he realized the decision might already be out of his hands. Although fame had eluded Ben Bolt in life, it had grown exponentially in the years since his death, pretty much guaranteeing that someone, sooner or later, would stumble on the truth. If not this Urquhart character, then someone else.
Now it was time for damage control.
Still shaken by the eerie timeliness of Mariah’s call, and by hearing her voice for the first time in weeks, Tucker gathered the musty folders abruptly and got to his feet. If they hadn’t called him upstairs by now, to hell with them. He’d go and collect her letter.
Or not.
A rap sounded on his door and the Operations deputy strode in without waiting for a response. “Hey there, Frank,” Jack Geist said breezily.
Tucker nodded. “Jack.”
“Don’t get up on my account.” Geist dropped his lanky frame into a chair on the other side of the desk, giving the cramped office a smug once-over as his legs sprawled out in front of him. “See you got back safe and sound from your trip. Would’ve called you up first thing, but things have been a little wild today.”
“I figured.”
“You heard about this Kurdish business?”
Tucker nodded and sat down again. He was out of the loop, but he wasn’t brain-dead. He’d been in the game long enough to know that any situation making headlines would have the front office running to stay ahead of the breaking-news wave. The morning papers said the Turkish crisis had heated up overnight, with rebel Kurds massing for imminent confrontation with government forces.
“I gather the Russians have sent forces southward through Armenia,” he said.
The deputy grimaced. “Bastards just can’t resist mixing into it, can they?”
“They’ll say they’re looking to protect the country’s soft underbelly in case the situation spills across borders.”
“That’s what they’re saying, all right. Situation’s turning into a bloody circus. The Russians, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Cyprus—all getting their knickers in a twist. And, of course, the usual charges that we’re behind everything, orchestrating the situation for our own nefarious ends.”
Tucker nodded. The truth was less tidy than anybody’s simplistic explanations would have it, but it didn’t change the fact that once again, policy wonks like Geist here had gotten themselves caught on the horns of their own short-sightedness. It had probably seemed like a good idea after the Gulf War to enforce a no-fly zone to protect Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq. Except now that they no longer had Baghdad to worry about, the Iraqi Kurds were free to come to the aid of their unhappy brethren living across the border in Turkey, launching a full-scale assault on the weakest link in the NATO chain.
“Kind of makes you long for the good old black hat– white hat days of the cold war, doesn’t it, Jack?”
“No kidding. Look, I gotta get back upstairs real quick. National Security Council’s meeting this afternoon, and we’re trying to come up with a position that doesn’t absolve the bloody Turks, who are anything but blameless, but doesn’t piss them off so much they take their ball and go home.” Geist laced his fingers across his flat belly and tipped his chair back on two legs. “So where are we on this Navigator business? Learn anything useful over there?”
He fixed Tucker with the dramatic, piercing stare that was infamous inside the agency for setting younger, less experienced operatives off on uncontrollable fits of stammering. The effect was lost on Tucker, who could out-glower anyone—although he did consider pointing out that the furniture in this crummy office was strictly ancient government surplus and probably not up to the physics of two-legged rocking.
He decided against it. Geist was an ambitious hotshot looking for quick glory, the first to claim credit when an operation went right, and to distance himself when one went sour. If he ended up ass-over-teakettle, it’d be nice payback for the open cynicism he’d shown when he heard that a has-been like Tucker had been handed a personal message from the Navigator.
It was no surprise that, rather than call a meeting of the small committee that had vetted Tucker’s trip to meet the Navigator, Geist had nominated himself to drop in alone for a debriefing. He was hedging his bets—still downplaying the business internally, but determined to stay on top of things in case there was any chance of a major payoff.
“We’ve got about fifteen hundred pages’ worth of what looks to be the genuine article,” Tucker said carefully. “Originals, not copies. I can do the initial examination myself. Eventually, I’ll need a couple of computer people, Russian-language capable, to log it all in and create a secure database I can cross-reference and run against our own files.”
One of Geist’s eyebrows rose. “That all? Sure you don’t want us to take one of the Crays offline and dedicate it to this little assignment?”
Tucker ignored the sarcasm. “I could do it manually, but it would take time. I get the sense we don’t have that long. There’s a reason the Navigator chose to give us these particular documents out of all the millions inside Moscow Center. Sooner we know what all’s in them, sooner we’ll know why.”
“Did he give any hint where they’re coming down on support to Iraq or the Kurds?”
Bloody Geist, right on schedule, Tucker thought. Man suffered from chronic, extreme tunnel vision, never seeing past his immediate interests.
“He never mentioned the Kurds,” he said evenly, walking a fine line between overplaying or underplaying his hand. He didn’t want anyone he couldn’t control looking over his shoulder until he knew how much damaging information was in the files.
The key, he realized as he studied the deputy’s rumpled shirt and the bags under his sleep-deprived eyes, was to reinforce the notion there was nothing here that bore on Geist’s current problem. Once Geist was satisfied of that, he’d be out the door, hurrying to put himself back at the center of the high-profile crisis du jour. Jack Geist wasn’t the type to let a little thing like a door opening into an old enemy’s inner sanctum distract him from those areas in which he felt he could shine.
Still balancing on the chair’s rear legs, Geist two-fingered the mottled yellow manila file Tucker had set apart from the others. It was a nice fake from a guy who, Tucker happened to know, didn’t read a word of Russian. A good thing, too, since the name spelled out on the spine, albeit phonetically and in Cyrillic script, was “Benjamin Bolt.”
“Have you got the slightest reason to believe there’s anything important here?” Geist inquired, flipping disdainfully through the pages.
Tucker suppressed the urge to yank the file out of his hands, but there was little chance Geist would recognize what he was looking at. Geist had come up the ranks through a series of mostly Middle East–station assignments. The Soviet collapse, combined with the recent agitation of tin-pot dictatorships like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya, had fallen on his career like manna from heaven.
“I’ve done a preliminary flip-through,” he said. “It’s a mixed bag of old KGB operations—external agents, a few internal dissidents who were ‘disappeared’ into the Gulag.”
“Sounds like ancient history. KGB’s dead.”
“Not dead. Not even dying. Regimes come and go in Russia, but the security service is forever. New guys come to power, think they’ve lopped off its head, but it just grows two more. Been that way for centuries. The Navigator, more than anyone, knows that. That’s how he managed to survive as long as he did.”
“No doubt. But I think we’ve got the situation pretty much in hand these days, Frank. There’ve been a lot of changes since you were on the old Soviet desk—operations you’re not aware of, new sources we’re running over there. Hell, we’ve even got some cooperative bilateral programs going with our new Russian friends.”
Watching the deputy’s smug self-assurance, Tucker’s thoughts flashed on the Navigator sitting across from him, the dwindling bottle of vodka between them. Lifting his glass at one point, Deriabin had offered a raspy toast. “To friendship between nations. Of course,” he added, “there are no friendly intelligence agencies, are there, my friend? After all, where would we be without our enemies?”
Geist closed the manila folder. “You say these are old ops?”
“Pretty much. Doesn’t mean some of the players aren’t still in place.”
“You saying he gave us active sources? Now, why the hell would he do that?” The deputy’s voice dripped disbelief, and he pushed the file away. “I’m having a lot of trouble buying that this isn’t some whopping disinformation ploy designed to waste our time. What do you want to bet this Navigator character wants us looking the other way while his people are busy on some new scheme?”
“No argument.”
“You agree?” Geist sounded surprised.
“That this could be nothing but a bunch of irrelevant junk, manufactured to distract us for God knows what purpose? It’s possible. Unlikely, though.”
“Why unlikely?”
“Because of the source.”
“The source is Georgi goddamn Deriabin. Right? You did meet him? He’s not dead, like Moscow Station was thinking?”
“Met him face-to-face for five hours.”
“Guy’s got cheek, I’ll give him that,” Geist said, shaking his head and leaning back on his precarious perch again. “Forty years he’s worked against us, now I’m supposed to believe he wants to make nice? Give me a break.”
“I’m just telling you how I read it.”
“How you read it?”
Tucker found himself once more the object of that practiced, thousand-yard stare. Seconds ticked by, the silence broken only by the drumming of the deputy’s fingers. He had the impression he was supposed to be quaking in his boots, worrying about whether his own loyalty was suspect.
He waited it out, knowing that if Geist sniffed any hint of anxiety, he’d take the files away and either bury them or pass them over to someone else. Tucker couldn’t let that happen. He needed to maintain control. Impress Geist with the files’ potential so he’d get the time he needed, but not get him so worked up that he’d panic and set up some kind of task force.
“So, what’s the deal?” Geist said finally. “Deriabin looking to walk? Cold war glory days are over, so now he wants us to set him up in a Miami Beach mansion?”
“Nope.”
“Then what?”
What, indeed? Tucker frowned, wishing he had an easy answer. “He wants to leave a legacy, I think. I don’t know exactly what, but I can tell you this—he’s dying.”
The chair legs finally dropped to the floor. “Say what? He tell you that?”
“Yeah, but even if he hadn’t, I would’ve known. His skin’s the color of that folder there.”
The deputy’s eyes strayed back to the mottled yellow file on the desk. “No kidding.”
“Liver cancer, apparently. He says they’ve given him three months, max.”
Geist’s right hand rotated in an impatient, forward-rolling notion. “And so—?”
“I think he’s looking to settle a score before he kicks off.”
“And he wants us to help him to do it?”
“That’s my guess.”
“So, what’s in it for us?”
Tucker hesitated. This was the tricky part. He was pretty sure part of the Navigator’s plan was to undermine the presidential ambitions of Foreign Minister Zakharov. But who stood to benefit from that? Russia? America? International peace and stability? Some unknown protégé to whom the dying old man was preparing to hand his torch of secret power?
Tucker didn’t know. He only knew who had the most to lose if this wasn’t handled carefully. But how could he tell the deputy director of the CIA that he’d burn these files and the evidence they contained before he’d let any harm from them rain down on the woman whose name the bloody Navigator had known would be the key to forcing his cooperation?
“Just give me a little more time, Jack. I’ll do you up a full report.”
“How much time are we talking?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Done,” Geist said abruptly. He got to his feet.
Tucker watched him head for the door. He knew he should leave well enough alone, but he couldn’t. “One more thing,” he said. “Why was Mariah Bolt assigned to cover the Zakharov visit?”
Geist paused at the door, frowning. “That’s pretty much ‘need to know,’ buddy. She doesn’t work for you anymore.”
“I know that.”
“And so? You got some proprietary interest there? That’d be tough, since I hear she’s seeing that hotshot TV anchorman…what’s his name?”
“Paul Chaney.”
“Right, Chaney. So…?”
Tucker shrugged. “I’m just curious why an analyst gets sent out in the field.”
“I had a little job needed doing, and she was the best person for it. Anyway,” the deputy said briskly, pulling open the door, “this is awesome work, Frank, getting your hands on this stuff. Truly awesome. I’ll need that memorandum on my desk soon as possible, though. You’ll get right on it, won’t you, big guy?”
He winked and pointed his finger in a stagy “you-the-man!” gesture, then was gone before Tucker had a chance to respond with the contempt the performance deserved.
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