“That’s what I thought too. And I knew Tony wouldn’t isolate Deacon Cather unless he was sure he could get away with it. And he’d want it written down in a formal memo, so he could use it to cover himself if Cather somehow survived . . . whatever it was. So I’ve been hitting Pinky’s lockbox almost every day for the last month—”
“Why take that risk? And why cover for Cather? He’s a grown-up.”
“I know how you feel about him. I know Cather promised to bring you back in, and then he never called. I do think he meant what he said, and I think he’s left you out in the cold right now because he knows he’s under some sort of a shadow and doesn’t want you dragged into it. Anyway, there’s no way in the world that Deacon Cather is a mole.
If
there is a mole at all, which I doubt. Mariah Vale is using this as a way to step all over the operational side, that’s all. She hates it when anybody at Clandestine Services actually goes out and
does
things in the real world. If she had her way, everybody in Clandestine would sit around in the Bubble listening to Yanni and visualizing world peace. Anyway, this memo turned up two weeks ago. When I saw it, all I could think of was to warn you—”
“Me? Why?”
“You were,
are
one of his Cleaners. If Mariah Vale was trying to hobble Cather, then she’d start by pulling in all his Cleaners and running them through the ringer. Porter always said, in any audit one way to find out what the target is trying to protect is to find out what sectors he never seemed to be interested in at all. So what he did with the Cleaners Unit would be one way to help build up a total picture of what Cather was thinking and doing, and when. You know the drill: find the mole by finding out what the enemy knows and when he knew it and work backward through the possible sources of that information. Look for points of intersection, contact opportunities, travel itineraries that might coincide with major tactical shifts in the opposing intelligence operations. Watch for our sources going silent or doubling and run that backwards to see if that coincides with something the mole might have done, a trip he might have taken. Build up a complete map of the mole’s influence and you will eventually get him. That’s how MI6 finally got Philby and how we got Ames. That’s exactly what Vale is doing. She’s already called in Dewey Strickland and Javier Souza and Miles Terry—”
“I thought Miles Terry was on the
Orpheus
?”
Mandy winced at the mention of the ultrasecret floating CIA prison disguised as a hospital ship that Porter Naumann had set up for Cather a couple of years back, using the Burke and Single banking house as a cover for the operation.
“He is. Or was. The
Orpheus
was in the eastern Med, off Rhodes. They sent a Sea King to take him off. He was pretty ticked because they had just taken on a new houseguest.”
“Houseguest? You mean a
defector
?”
“That’s the rumor. One of the old Moscow Center guys. Spent fifteen years as a
Rezident
in D.C. They didn’t name him but Pinky had made a note beside the decryption. ‘Y. Kirensky’—mean anything?”
“You don’t mean
Yitzak
Kirensky! Christ, he’s famous. He’s one of the biggest old thugs in Moscow Center! Don’t tell me he came in?”
“Yes. I think that was the name. He must be pretty old by now. He came in to the station officer in Athens. They got him onto the
Orpheus
the same day. The guy had some kind of pacemaker, and it was malfunctioning. Kirensky, he was pretty fragile and seemed anxious to talk. Miles felt they were right on the edge of a—”
“Man,” said Dalton, thinking of the Yurchenko defection in 1985, “I really hate defectors. They’re either making stuff up to justify a huge payout and an estate in Maryland or they’re part of some Confusion Op.”
“This guy seems legitimate. He had already given them some material on Russian negotiations with the Iranians about nuclear technology. Langley cross-checked it with other sources, and the data was solid. Could only have come from someone high up in the Kremlin.”
“How do you
know
all this stuff?”
“I’m a sneaky little minx. And it all goes through Pinky’s lockbox.”
Pinky was Stennis Corso. He was called Pinky only behind his back. Tony Crane’s XO was a small, round seal-like man with slicked-back blond hair and tiny ears, very shy, definitely pink, who could not bear to be touched and who washed his soft, pudgy pink hands obsessively, perhaps with good reason.
Corso contained in his formidable mind almost all of the secret histories of London Station going back to the Cold War. He was the station’s chief archivist and also its resident expert on the Balkans and any issues that touched on the Adriatic and the Aegean. This required the talents of a Princeton historian, which he had been, as well as an ability to calmly consider the tactics and strategies of the region’s worst people without anger or prejudice, seeing them in the clear—a priceless asset to a CIA station.
He was therefore London Station’s most valuable analyst, so critical that his latent pedophilia, never acted upon once he had left Cambridge and apparent now only in the care he took to conceal it, was, if not overlooked, then at least tacitly tolerated. Still, the Minders kept an eye on him.
“That’s a serious security weakness in London Station. What if you get taken up by the Reapers? They’d have the Agency by the—”
“Now, that’s the odd part, come to think of it. We’ve been monitoring the Russians here, as always, and they’re not doing much of
anything
: no KGB thugs pretending to read the catalogues at the Tate Modern, no velvety Slavs cruising the fetish clubs looking to snap up another ambassador’s ADC, not even the usual god-awful Trade and Commerce bun-fights that they used to throw to try and cuddle up to embassy sources. I mean, when you think of it, that’s all pretty strange, isn’t it? Even the Reapers, who are usually active in London, they’ve all been woolly bah-lambs for months now.”
“They’ve just shaken up the Kremlin,” said Dalton. “Putin’s nailing down his base. Once he’s got that done, they’ll be back out in force. He wants to rebuild the USSR. I’m afraid these are the early days of Cold War Two.”
“Yes, so am I. I hope the new guy is up to it. If he’s another Jimmy Carter, Putin will have his googlies for cuff links. Anyway, we’re wandering. I figured you were Mariah Vale’s next victim, and from what I was hearing—”
“Hearing? About
me
? Hearing from whom?”
“Issadore Galan. He was worried about you. He got in touch with me—”
Dalton sat back, staring at her.
“How? When?”
“After Chicago, when Cather didn’t bring you to D.C. and you went back to Venice. He took one look and figured you were running off the rails. He contacted me—”
“How?”
“Sent me an invoice from Spink and Son, on Southampton Row. The gold coin people. I don’t owe Spink and Son anything. But the invoice amount looked like it could be a time marker. And he was there.”
“Christ, Mandy, it could have been anyone. There could have been a Reaper crew in a white van ready to take you right off the curb.”
“I know. But I told you, they haven’t been active lately—”
“They’d have made an exception for you—”
“Dear boy, you flatter me. Anyway, the invoice was for a set of Venetian florins, so I sort of made the connection. And I was right.”
“How’d Galan get into London without Portcullis tagging him?”
“I asked. The old dwarf just smiled. I think he has a crush on me, by the way, although from what I hear he’s no threat. Anyway, we set up a two-way system, which I’ll explain later, and he kept me informed about you and how you were swooning around Venice, pining for that Florentine ninny-hammer—”
“I’m aware of your feelings about Cora, okay? The point, please.”
“The point is, when I realized you were probably going to get picked up by Mariah Vale’s evil minions, I sent the cigarette case to Galan.”
“You couldn’t just pick up the phone? Or get Galan to say something?”
“I wasn’t going to mention the Glass Cutters to Galan, was I? And I wanted it to be something only you could figure out. Without employing any method that Vale could intercept. I don’t think she’s corrupted FedEx . . . yet.”
“Galan put your cigarette case on Brancati’s desk.”
“Did he? Why not just give it to you? I guess he just likes being Byzantine. Or he doesn’t like to do anything behind Brancati’s back. The point is, you’re here, and now we have to do something—”
“
We?
What do we have to do? Why us?”
“Micah, dear boy, do you
really
think Cather’s some sort of mole?”
“Look, Mandy, whatever Cather is—and, no, I don’t think he’s a mole—this is not our problem. You’re an officer at London Station, a long way from Langley, and I’m as good as off the roster entirely. And, not to be too petty, I don’t owe Deacon Cather a damn thing.”
“It’s not
about
Cather, you manky git. This audit has derailed Clandestine. Until the DD gets cleared, our whole operational arm is crippled. With men and women in the field. In wartime. Don’t you care about that?”
“Yes, of course I do. But, like I said, I’m on the outside looking in.”
“We’ll see about that. Do you have any money?”
“Yes, pretty much the whole budget from the Chicago thing.”
“Zowie! So, we are in funds, my sweet?”
“
We?
What happened to all
your
money. Isn’t your family—”
Mandy’s mood changed a bit, a look of sadness flitting across her face like the shadow of a swift flying overhead.
“Not anymore, my lad, I’m cut off. Poppy’s gone off us Yanks since that bun-fight in Iraq. Gave me a bloody ultimatum, he did, the old teapot. Quit the Company or be thrust into the outer darkness to wither and die.”
“What did you say?”
Mandy made a show of looking about the booth, under the table.
“I’m here, am I not? In the sinfully silky flesh?”
“But penniless?”
“For the nonce. I have the Agency pittance, sufficient to sustain a kind of grinding penury—rather like a monk but with silks and garters. Anyway, yes, I do mean
we
. So, Micah, my darling lad, hero of the hour, last hope of the West, will you do it? Will you help me? For the motherland—”
“The
motherland
? You were born in Knightsbridge, Mandy. You’re only an American citizen because your mother was from Santa Fe.”
“Yes, so in my heart I’m really a Girl of the Golden West. Come on, Micah, please don’t make me beg. Pleading’s bad for my complexion.”
Here she rolled out one of her famous up-from-under looks. Dalton always felt that look of hers in his lower belly. Many lesser men, when exposed to it without a welder’s mask on, had simply burst into flames.
Nevertheless, Dalton wanted very much to say no.
It looked as if the Agency was once again ripping itself apart over internal security issues, as it had in roughly five-year cycles from the fifties to long after 9/11. Everybody at Clandestine knew the horror stories: the Jewels cipher machines being compromised by U.S. Marines at the Moscow embassy; Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner firing eight hundred and fifty experienced intelligence officers in the Far East and Asia in 1978, in the process deliberately wrecking Clandestine Services; Iran-Contra and the disastrous long-term effects of the Church Commission; the fallout at the NSA and the CIA from the FBI’s Power Curve investigation; Howard and Pelton in 1985, which set them up for the Poison Pill gambit the KGB pulled off with the defection of Vitaly Yurchenko later that year, a Confusion Op worthy of Viktor Fitin himself.
The Yurchenko “defection”—he gave his CIA debriefing team the slip in November of 1985 and turned up back at his old desk in Moscow a Hero of the Revolution—resulted in the exposure, grotesque torture, and eventual execution of fifty-six high-value CIA sources in Russia and across the Soviet domain while sowing mass confusion and distrust throughout the entire espionage structure of the West. The Yurchenko affair created lasting rifts between the CIA and MI6, the French DGSE, the Syrians, the Mossad, the German BND, not to mention the FBI, the RCMP, and the NSA.
Bill Clinton, a man with a ferocious ideological antipathy for the Agency, took advantage of the general condemnation of the CIA in this period, along with what he called the “Peace Dividend,” to gut its budget by thirty percent, to cull seasoned staffers from almost all the foreign stations, to forbid any Agency contact with what he called “unsavory sources” abroad, and to harry the CIA’s very best Middle Eastern and Indonesian agents into forced retirement. Then, in 1995, as a kind of coup de grace, Clinton instructed Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick to forbid the FBI from exchanging intelligence with the CIA, or, for that matter, over the cubicle partition between the law enforcement side of the FBI and the intelligence-gathering side of the same damned agency, creating the infamous “wall” that effectively blinded the U.S. intelligence community just as militant Islam was on the rise.