“No, nothing like that.” Sorokin smiled weakly at what he hoped was the other man’s joke. “I’m talking about information.”
“What kind of information?”
Sorokin spread his hands. “How about the relocation timetables and sites for three motor rifle divisions?”
Ushenko snorted. “And what good are those to me? What am I supposed to do, sell them to the Americans? Or the Germans? I’m no traitor.”
“No, no. Of course not.” Sorokin lowered his voice. “But you could find other buyers — some of those entrepreneur friends of yours, for example. Moving that many soldiers means big transportation and big construction contracts. Surely a little advance word of that in the right ears could be worth quite a lot.”
The Ukrainian’s own ears seemed to perk up at that. “Go on.”
And so Sorokin did. In the end it took nearly an hour of heated argument and furious bargaining, but he got his truckloads of food. And all for only forty thousand rubles apiece. Plus a few photocopied folders of Ministry of Defense documents.
Alex Banich strode briskly out of the mammoth ministry building and climbed straight into a blue Mercedes waiting for him at the curb. A parking permit prominently displayed on its dashboard identified it as belonging to the New Kiev Trading Company. His driver, a fair-haired young man named Mike Hennessy, tipped his cigarette out the car window and pulled out onto the New Arbat Road, narrowly dodging an oncoming truck. Both men ignored the blaring horns behind them. Russian drivers were used to living dangerously and driving badly. Defensive driving would have been out of character.
“So how’d it go, boss?”
Banich grinned. “Not bad. We’ll clear a cool ten thousand per load, plus…” He pulled the papers he’d been given out of his jacket. “Sorokin gave me a little present that’ll keep some of Langley’s gophers happy and busy for a few more weeks,”
The information on Russian troop movements would help keep Washington’s picture of the still-strong Russian Army up to date. Best of all, the documents represented a chink in Pavel Sorokin’s armor. His decision to trade one package of relatively low-grade state secrets now would make it that much easier to persuade him to sell more important data later on.
Hennessy matched his smile. “So this guy still thinks you’re plain old Nikolai Ushenko, purveyor of fine foodstuffs?”
“Not a chance.” Banich stuffed the papers back inside his jacket. “He’s convinced I’m Nikolai Ushenko, a spy on the side. But since he thinks I’m only working for a bunch of get-rich-quick Ukrainian businessmen, trading me a few secrets doesn’t bother him much.”
Hennessy nodded. Most Russians still thought of their Commonwealth partners like Ukraine as partly owned subsidiaries of their own republic. Even men in the security services and the armed forces viewed their sister states’ efforts to build independent military and intelligence units with something approaching paternal amusement. That made Banich’s choice of a cover identity positively inspired. Many post-communist Russians still viewed American CIA agents as potential villains for spy thrillers or suspense films — crafty, dangerous, and devious. But Ukrainian spies? Well, they made perfect cutup characters for the new sitcoms pouring out of Moscow’s film and TV studios. Nobody really took them seriously.
And that was a weakness Alex Banich was fully prepared to exploit.
A childhood spent with émigré Ukrainian grandparents and years in the CIA’s intensive language training program let him shift fluidly and easily from English to colloquial Russian to flawless Ukrainian — all in the same sentence. He could pass himself off as anyone from a greedy wheeler-dealer to a stern, self-righteous soldier or policeman. Ten years of successful assignments throughout Eastern Europe had honed his acting and language abilities to a razor’s edge. There were nights when he even dreamed in Russian. All in preparation for what should have been the pinnacle of his active-duty career: assignment as the senior field operative for the CIA’s Moscow Station.
Banich’s grin slipped to one side, becoming a wry smile aimed at his own misplaced ambition. Driven by an unrelenting need to be “the best,” he’d worked hard, sweated blood, and wrecked his marriage to get to Moscow. And for what?
The hard-line communists he’d grown up hating were gone — in prison, dead, or learning how to be good little capitalists. The once-mighty USSR was just as dead. Its successor states seemed too busy trying to survive to cause much trouble for the world. And Moscow Station, once viewed as the CIA’s most challenging posting, was now seen by many as little more than a dirty and cold backwater.
The real action was supposed to be somewhere else to the east or west — in Europe’s great capital cities or in bustling Tokyo. The Agency’s congressional minders were constantly pushing for more data on the French, the Germans, and the Japanese, not the Russians. For Washington’s trendy power elite, nuclear missiles and tank divisions were out. Trade balances and subsidy levels were in.
The effects showed up whenever Langley allocated its annual operations budget and made personnel assignments. Year by year, Moscow Station’s share of both got smaller and smaller.
Banich shook his head. He didn’t see how much further the Agency could shrink its operations here. Not and expect his networks to gather significant amounts of useful information. The Soviet Union’s self-destruction may have made spying inside its former territories easier, but it certainly hadn’t made it any cheaper. These days Russians didn’t pass military or political secrets to America because they hated communism. Communism was dead. Now they sold them — sold them for the money to buy extra food, more heat, or to cover gambling debts or stock market losses.
The shortsighted nature of the continuing cutbacks mandated by Congress gnawed at him every time he risked losing a valuable source by haggling too hard over a price. For all their internal problems, Russia and its partner republics still possessed a formidable stockpile of nuclear warheads, accurate ICBMs, and huge arsenals of conventional weapons. And behind the array of fledgling parliaments and elected presidents, Banich knew there were still dangerous men in high places who harbored imperial ambitions for their nations. Such men should be watched, not ignored.
Unfortunately most of Washington’s policymakers were shortsighted by their very nature. Nations they didn’t view as a near-term threat to America’s security and issues that didn’t threaten their electoral prospects tended to drop off their screens. The usual rule of thumb was: out of congressional sight and interest, out of budget.
Hennessy’s voice summoned him back to more immediate concerns. “I checked your messages while you were inside taking Sorokin to the cleaners.”
“Oh?” Banich leaned forward from the backseat, unable to resist the opening even in his somber mood. “Anything pressing?”
The younger man winced. His boss rarely punned, but when he did they were always awful.
“Sorry.”
“Uh-huh.” Hennessy floored the Mercedes, flashing through a crowded intersection narrowly ahead of a surge of oncoming traffic. “Seriously, Kutner wants to see you back at the embassy, yesterday and not tomorrow… if you get my drift.”
“Yeah.” Banich pondered that in silence. The chief of station, Len Kutner, rarely interfered with field operations in progress. Instead, he passed judgment on proposed ops and then ran interference for them against second-guessing by the “goody two-shoes” — the embassy’s State Department regulars. Something fairly important must be in the wind. Something Banich was suddenly sure he wouldn’t like at all.