SUNDAY
TWENTY-ONE
IF THE CIA HAD DEFINED (McGARVEY’S) CAREER, THEN KGB GENERAL VALENTIN IL LEN BARANOV HAD DEFINED (HIS) LIFE WITHIN THE COMPANY.
If it hadn’t been for Elizabeth’s hero worship of her father, Rencke would not have begun his quest, as he thought of it. He stood on one leg just inside his office in the computer center, staring at his monitors. The lavender displayed as wallpaper on the screens had darkened since the last time he’d checked. His programs were chewing on data, and what they were finding was being evaluated as ominous.
The swing shift operators knew that he was here, but no one had stopped by to say hello. He had no friends here. Only the McGarveys. “A friend of mine. His name is Otto Rencke. You haven’t seen him, have you?” Mac had said that to him, and Otto could feel his presence. He wished that Mac were here now. He wished that he could talk to Mac, tell him what was so bothersome. But Otto didn’t know what the problem was himself, except that the walls seemed to be closing in on all of them. It was lavender, and the color was getting stronger. He took off his jacket and sat down at one of his monitors. Louise hadn’t wanted him to leave. But she understood the necessity for him. One step at a time. Ten months ago Elizabeth had begun a biography of her father.
It was obvious even then that he would be named DCI. She and Otto both thought that an accouting was important. She decided to begin with his career in the CIA because it was the definition of his life. She would go back later and find out about his life in Kansas, and about her grandparents, whom she’d never known, and about her aunt and nephews in Utah, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. If the CIA had defined her father’s career, then KGB general Valentin Illen Baranov had defined her father’s life within the Company. It was at Otto’s suggestion that she had begun there. He had showed her how to enter the CIA’s computerized archives, and then how to get into the underground caverns at Fort A.P. Hill, south of Washington in the Virginia countryside, where the old paper records were stored. He showed her how to read between the lines by paying special attention to the promulgation pages and budget lines in each classified file. The first was a list of everybody who had a need-to-know in the operation, and the second was a detailed summary of where the money to pay for it came. He who holds the purse strings as well as the operational strings is the actual power to be reckoned with. He showed her how to cross-reference personnel files with operational files to look for the anomalies. John Lyman Trotter, Jr.” for instance. He’d become DDO and a friend to Mac. But he turned out to be a traitor, lured into General Baranov’s circle. In hindsight the signs had been there.
Trotter had spent more money than he’d earned. His name was on more promulgation pages than his early positions should have allowed for. As an operations officer this was before he’d become DDO he had personally signed off on too many budgetary requests. But the old KGB general had been a master of the game. Starting in the days after Korea and through the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crises, he had developed and run CESTA and Banco del Sur, the most fabulously successful intellgence networks anywhere at anytime in history. They’d been administered from the Soviet Union’s embassy in Mexico City, which was cover for the largest KGB operational unit in the world outside of Moscow. Through a vast network of field agents and governmental connections, General Baranov knew just about everything that went on in the entire western hemisphere during those years. From Buenos Aires to Toronto, and from Santiago to Washington, he had his ear to the most important doors.
Insiders like Trotter were the frosting on the very rich cake. By feeding Trotter accurate information that sometimes was actually damaging to the Soviet Union, in exchange for even more important details about the inner workings of America’s intelligence establishment, Baranov made his prize mole a hero on the Beltway. By making sure that key operations Trotter had backed succeeded as if they were planned by angels, his mole’s stock rose to astronomical levels.
All that could have been seen, should have been seen, from the almost reckless abandon with which Trotter flitted from one desk to the next; from one super success to another. Never mind the occasional star agent who was burned while a dozen not-so-hot field officers succeeded.
Never mind that Trotter’s rise through the ranks was at the expense of some very capable, even brilliant men and women. If they became disenchanted with a system that seemed to reward ass kissing and apparent legerdemain over good, solid and imaginative intelligence work, then all the better for BaranoVs plans. The general was a great success, until in the end Kirk McGarvey had unraveled the entire house of cards. When it was over, Baranov lay shot to death in a KGB safe house outside of East Berlin, and Trotter lay dead in a CIA safe house in West Berlin. Both assassinations were carried out by McGarvey. And that was the end of the story. A lesson to be learned. The field officer who developed a peripheral awareness, a skill necessary in order to preserve his life, should not lose the skill once he was recalled to a desk assignment. No place was safe. Hadn’t they learned that lesson before? Rencke focused on the monitor in front of him.
Streams of data crossed the screen so fast it was impossible to focus on any one item. They were telephone intercepts that the National Security Agency was supplying him from the Moscow exchange over the past six months. So far his program had come up with a few bits and pieces, each item deepening the lavender. In August Dr. Anatoli Nikolayev disappeared from Moscow after stealing sensitive, though unnamed, files from the KGB’s paper archives at Lefortovo. Nikolayev had worked in the KGB’s Department Viktor during the Baranov years.
Around that same time, retired general Gennadi Zhuralev had been found a suicide in his Moscow apartment. Zhuralev had worked as deputy operations officer for General Baranov.
By October the SVR, with help from Interpol, thought it had found Nikolayev in Paris. But then the leads dried up. Nikolayev knew the city very well. He’d spent a lot of time there working for Baranov.
The fact that one old man could not be found by the combined efforts of the Russian SVR, Interpol and presumably the French intelligence service, or at the very least, the French police, meant that Nikolayev had not simply wandered off. The old spy had gone to ground, using his tradecraft skills. Rencke had become a skeptic under McGarvey’s tutelage. He did not believe in coincidences. McGarvey was hired as interim DCI until his Senate confirmation hearings. His daughter went looking down his history to write his biography, focusing her energies on General Baranov. And things suddenly began to happen. An old Baranov man goes walkabout after snatching some files that make the SVR nervous. Another old Baranov man turns up dead. Now the Senate hearings were dredging up ancient history, opening old wounds, exposing old cesspools, revealing desperate Cold War battles that were best left undisturbed. Rencke had started to look over his shoulder as soon as his programs began to shift to lavender. A dead man was seeking revenge. It was spooky. The accident with his car had been no accident. He’d done no work on his front wheels, as he told Security.
Someone had tried to kill him, and he wanted to give them room to try again. Neither had the helicopter explosion in the VI been an accident. Rencke drew a triangle on a sheet of paper. McGarvey’s name was at one of the points, Baranov’s at the second and NikolayeVs at the third. Mac was on his way back from the Virgin Islands with Mrs. M.