He didn’t tell the others about what – really, who – he was counting on most in Moscow: Dancing Bear.
CHAPTER TWENTY:
Moscow
It was noon when Doug Robb, aka Steve Penn, walked across the glittering marble lobby of the Four Seasons in Moscow and registered, giving his profession as “Private Investor.” He had flown all night on Lufthansa from San Francisco via Frankfurt. The lobby was crowded with people on the make from all corners of the globe, like the five young Qatari princes in jeans and t-shirts with their veiled wives and elder daughters. They mingled easily with elegant members of the Russian elite, sporting their leather coats and bodyguards and tall, long-legged blonds.
Those Russians were the new nomenklatura, the immensely privileged, immensely wealthy few, victors of the so-called “open lottery” that transferred the resources and industries that had once – in theory at least – belonged to all the Russian people. Instead, they were sold off at bargain basement prices to a favored few: billion-dollar industries going for a fraction of their real worth, massive fortunes created overnight. It was known that Russian President Kozlov got a piece of just about every deal that came down the pike.
With the scandalous help of compliant institutions, like Germany’s huge Deutsche Bank, Russia’s new billionaires were converting their ill-gotten rubles into hard currencies to be parked in safer havens abroad. Trophy real estate holdings in places like Palm Beach and Belgravia and Gstaad were particularly prized. That huge capital flight was a major reason that Russia, with a population more than twice that of France, had a gross domestic product only one quarter that of the Gallic state.
Moscow changed with every visit, thought Steve as he took the elevator to the 14th floor. His room looked out over the 18th-century spires and domes of the Kremlin and across the new cityscape of Moscow – a forest of towering cranes and skyscrapers, glitzy restaurants and apartment buildings and expressways – and enormous traffic jams. A brownish pall of smog hung over the city.
It was such an amazing contrast to the Soviet capital that he’d first come to almost thirty years ago as a twenty-three-year-old agent for the CIA. This was long before he’d met Maya. It was his first overseas posting, and was considered a plum assignment. It was due largely to his grandmother who’d been born in Kiev and immigrated to Seattle. She brought Steve to speak Russian even before he learned English.
He’d been assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow under cover as an agricultural attaché. His wife, Marilyn, had come with him and found the Soviets and their capital superb subjects for her watercolors. Those were exciting times. With his policies of glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev was sabotaging the foundations of the old Soviet Union. It was as if spring had suddenly come to a land frozen for decades in glacial silence.
His mission was to learn what was really going on under the surface, to find out whether real change was on the way and what form it would take. His team’s first major breakthrough came when they used Moscow’s decrepit sewer system to gain access to cables transmitting the most highly classified Soviet military messages.
His main efforts, however, were to maintain contact with the few valuable human intelligence sources who had been developed by his predecessors. He was also to generate and then run new ones, as he had with Maya Chertkova. It was an extremely difficult task: as an American diplomat he was under surveillance every time he left the embassy. Breaking free of his shadows to retrieve information from a dead drop, or to actually speak directly with one of his sources, was an extremely time-consuming and fraught endeavor. Much more perilous, of course, for the Russian source, than for Steve, who enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
As the station chief in Moscow explained to him, “In the event the KGB discovers what you’re up to, just remain cool. You can expect to be picked up, held for a few hours of relatively civilized questioning during which you reveal nothing. You’ll then be released to the custody of one of our embassy officials who will maintain you have nothing to do with the agency. And finally, the Soviets will order you to leave the country. The likely fate of your Soviet source, on the other hand, will be quite different. If they are lucky, they’ll be sentenced to some freezing shithole in Siberia from which few ever return. If they are not lucky, they’ll get a bullet in the back of the neck in the basement of the Lubyanka.”
Steve remembered that advice now, returning to Moscow as an agent running his own minuscule spy team. He could forget about diplomatic immunity. He was also going to confront not just the Russian secret police, but America’s vast intelligence network as well; both of which who would view him as an enemy to be tracked down and eliminated.
He unpacked, showered, and took a taxi from the hotel. Out of habit, he changed cabs three times, exiting one to flag down another going in the opposite direction. He was alert to cars and faces in the crowd, to patterns that most people would miss. The last taxi deposited him on Petrovka Street in front of TsUM, one of Moscow’s most elegant department stores. It was built in a six-story Gothic Revival style, and had been refurbished to befit the ostentatious tastes of the new generation of Russians and foreigners who flocked to its counters and restaurants.
He took the elevator to the sixth floor, then got out and took the staircase immediately on his right, went down one floor and waited. Finally satisfied that no one was following him, he went to the pay phone in the back of the store’s cafeteria and made a call. He let the phone on the other end ring three times; then hung up and repeated the same process again. After a snack in the cafeteria, he took a cab to the sprawling State Tretyakov Gallery. He’d spent a lot of time there during off hours with his wife Marilyn when he’d first come to Moscow, wandering through its galleries, savoring the finest collection of Russian art anywhere in the world. He returned to the hotel at six and had an early dinner, reading a selection of the daily newspapers.
The weather was at the top of the headlines. It was the fourth day in a row that Moscow residents had reported unusually thick smog and the smell of burning, “with some complaining of ashes falling from the sky.” The environmentalist group Greenpeace claimed that the smog was a result of forest fires in Siberia. Other environmental groups blamed climate change. Typically, the government had released no health warnings in relation to the smog, although some Muscovites had chosen to wear protective masks when outdoors.
The Russian government was brushing off the threat of climate change just like Stokes and his gang, Steve thought. Man was destroying himself and evidence of it was everywhere. Some philosopher had presented the theory that, although there are an infinitesimally great number of planets in the universe that could theoretically support life, we’ve so far seen absolutely no sign of intelligence out there because every potentially sophisticated civilization annihilated itself by war or wanton destruction of its own biosphere – as we now seem on the verge of doing.
The next day was Saturday; there was still a shroud of smog over the city. Again taking a circuitous route, Steve went to Sokolniki Park, rented a bicycle, and rode along one of the shaded paths. He stopped by an old cast-iron bench under an elm tree. He sat down, unfolded a newspaper, and felt underneath one of the slats until he retrieved a small black box taped to the bottom. There was a piece of paper inside with the number “2” written on it.