But still, as he sat now on the scruffy armchair in the darkness, at this moment he had other things on his mind. He realised he wanted to stay sitting in the chair and drink away his dissatisfaction with the present. He sat without seeing, and as so often in the past, he tried to concoct in his imagination a better future. And he bleakly wondered if that had been his mistake all along.
Walking in darkness over to the cupboard that was screwed badly to the wall and getting looser, he rummaged blindly for the bottle of vodka that was normally there. He found it, shook it in the darkness next to his ear, and heard the splash that told him there was little more than a mouthful left.
He replaced it, picked up his coat and hat from the hook on the inside of the door, and, still without switching on the light, went to the window and surveyed the street four floors below. It was lit in bands where the streetlamps traced by the angled fall of the snow washed their glow onto the wet tarmac.
On a freezing night like this, any watcher would be in a car—he was confident about that. But there were none idling their engines anywhere within his field of vision.
He left the apartment for the walk down the four flights of stairs to the street. The lift was broken again. But he didn’t mind the walk. It suited his mood to be slow.
The two questions since his meeting with Anna were continually playing across his mind. Had she been sent—assigned—to meet him by the Americans? Or was their meeting in the bookshop a genuine coincidence?
Either way, he was wishing it had never happened. He felt himself drawn towards her once again. The embers of his feelings towards her, that stretched back to school days and which he had long assumed were cold ashes, had sprung to life almost immediately.
His mind told him one thing about their meeting, and his heart another. His mind told him—loudly and clearly—that the meeting had been a setup.
But what he desperately wanted in his loneliness and loss was to believe the demands of his heart. And his need for that was stronger than his logical mind. He realised he was caught in a trap, knowing one thing and believing entirely the opposite.
He turned to the left out of the apartment block and saw the desultory Christmas lights still strung around the entrance to the seedy hotel next door. He noted the tramp with the tatty coat and blackened hands, like a burn victim, he thought, and who seemed to suck the intermittent heat from the hotel lobby whenever the automatic doors hissed open. He observed the various aimless or purposeful passersby who came at him through the snow that now fell with increasing force.
In truth, nothing was any different than it had been before the meeting. Nothing, essentially, was any different anywhere, he thought. New York, Moscow—there seemed to him suddenly no difference between the two, except perhaps in the details of their veneer. And in the past twenty years, since the Soviet Union had collapsed, Moscow had caught up a lot even in that respect.
He looked up and back again along both sides of the street, but he realised he didn’t know who he was looking for—his own side or theirs. Maybe they were just the same too.
He took a taxi uptown through Manhattan, via the Henry Hudson, and then had it drop him half a mile from the KGB residency in Riverdale. He walked a long, roundabout route, which he varied each time he came here, but stopped spontaneously at a bar on Mosholu Avenue, where he ordered a coffee, not vodka. He observed who entered and left with his usual, artful disinterest and talked to a couple of women in their thirties who were sitting at the bar, finally buying them cocktails and a frozen vodka for himself. They were single, and he was tempted to drown himself in them for the evening.
But after an hour he said his good-byes, took a phone number from the more persistent of the two, and left. He walked the remaining eight blocks, careful to note that he was alone, and entered the building with his January key.
There were two night staff there, who watched television, he noted, when they should have been checking the SIGINT machines, but otherwise the place was his own. Everyone, it seemed, was away until January 13, apart from essential staff. He walked up some stairs and entered his cramped office.
There were piles of papers and notes from before the Russian New Year, when he had last been there—reports of private conversations at the UN, suggestions from eager officers looking for promotion, complaints.
As deputy director, his own and his chief’s wider family consisted of over two hundred people, including the diplomatic representatives as well as actual intelligence staff. The Russian delegation at the UN was several hundred strong, of whom seventy-three individuals were from the various branches of the Russian intelligence services.
It was of these seventy-three that Vladimir was the clandestine deputy chief. His diplomatic status with the Russian UN delegation concealed his real job as chief of Line X, the intelligence arm of S&T, the KGB Science and Technology Department.
Line X was not just historically by far the most successful department. He had continued and expanded its role. Each year since 2000, American technological secrets stolen by Line X through its American agents had contributed over five billion roubles to the Russian economy. Secrets obtained from Russian operatives and their American agents right across the territory of the Main Adversary now accounted for just under half of all Russian weapons systems, which were adapted from this theft.
None of these great technological leaps, however, had been filtered by his political masters in Moscow through to the civilian economy. Russia was an intelligence state, not a country with its citizens at heart.
And since Putin had come to power in the year 2000, Line X funding had increased dramatically. In the past two years alone, right up to this moment when the world hovered on the brink of economic crisis, funding had increased sixfold. Putin’s orders, transmitted by him personally as president the year before to all intelligence department heads at the Washington embassy, had been that “all efforts are to be directed at recruitment, in the defence establishments, in the space exploration centres, in the defence-related technical companies and in the private intelligence companies.”
The latter, these private intelligence outfits, had blossomed across America’s intelligence since 9/11.
Recruitment of American agents, Putin had demanded, was to have no limits, financial or otherwise. Russia’s newfound wealth was to be the source of a greater intelligence assault on the Main Adversary than the KGB had ever dreamed of in Soviet times.
Vladimir picked up a dirty coffee cup at the back of his desk and, turning it upside down, read the week’s encryption keys that were disguised as a circular manufacturer’s stamp on the base. Then he entered his computer.
He picked out five code names—simple words buried in a long report about a meeting with the delegation from Equatorial Guinea at the UN in the week before Christmas—and wrote down the names as they appeared for January, in capital letters: SOIL, RAINFALL, METAL, EROSION, and ZERO. Of these, he guessed only one could help him in his current task, but he was prepared to contact two or three in case he needed to widen the net.
“Erosion” was a thirty-seven-year-old Columbia University graduate and addictive gambler who sat on the Intelligence Procurement Committee in Washington—one of several that handed out contracts to private intelligence companies—albeit in one of the lowlier positions. He was Vladimir’s most prized possession.