He checked the caller ID and then quickly answered. “Staci, is everything okay?” Bennings immediately felt a little self-conscious, standing there in front of a full-length mirror looking very nonmilitary; it was like his sister wasn’t calling on a phone from thousands of miles away but had just walked in on him while he was pretending to be Iggy Pop.
After apologizing for the call, she quickly filled him in about the identity theft. “I’m so sorry to interrupt anything, but Mom insisted, and I…”
“I’m glad you called, that’s why I gave you the phone. Listen, I’m busy right now, but you remember my friend Jen Huffman, right?”
“Yes. How is she?”
“Ask her that yourself when she calls you. Tell her everything, give her whatever she needs. Trust her like she’s one of the family, because that’s what she is.”
“Sounds great.”
“She’s a magician with this kind of stuff. We’ll make everything right, I promise.”
Staci exhaled audibly. “I have to say that’s a big relief.”
“Give the phone to Mom, and I’ll say hi to her real quick.”
“She’s fallen asleep in the chair.”
Kit bit his lip. “At eight o’clock in the morning?”
“I’ll tell her you said you love her.”
“I do love her. And I love you too, Staci. And say hello to that fiancé of yours.”
“His name is Blanchard. When are you going to start using it?”
“Maybe when he’s my brother-in-law. But what kind of first name is Blanchard?” asked Kit, smiling.
“What kind of first name is Kitman?”
“I shortened it to Kit, remember? But if you shorten Blanchard, you get Blanch. ‘Hey everybody, meet Blanch. Great guy with a woman’s name from a Tennessee Williams play!’ Got to go, Sis,” said Kit with a smile to his voice.
“Stay safe, big Brother.”
The tunnel ran between Bennings’s five-story walk-up concrete-block apartment building to an identical building next door. Identical, in fact, to thousands of other apartment buildings in Moscow. At two feet deep by three feet wide, the crude underground passageway had taken engineers six months to secretly build, the same six months that Bennings had to spend in the Pentagon’s Defense Attaché System training program.
Bennings manually pulled himself along the tunnel while lying on a flat cart that rolled on small sections of plastic rail. The four- or five-times-a-week ritual was an exercise in blind faith and total surrender. He hated it. Undercover operators don’t generally remain successful due to blind faith and total surrender.
He climbed up through the trapdoor into a ground-floor apartment of his neighboring building, a unit decorated in goth musician chic and that faced away from his real apartment. Hidden timers controlled the lights, TV, and water usage, to give the appearance to any utility snoops that someone actually lived there. But to be extra careful, Bennings grabbed his Fender Stratocaster, the same electric guitar he had played as a so-so lead guitarist in a high school blues band called Chord on Blue. He plugged into a small Marshall amp, sank into the secondhand sofa, turned up the volume, and started playing a bad rendition of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Cold Shot.”
Thirty seconds into the song, the old lady who lived next door began pounding on the wall. He turned the volume down and finished up the tune. Practicing his blues guitar licks for only three minutes wasn’t improving his shoddy musicianship, but it helped establish with certainty that a human being lived in the apartment, and in Moscow, this was no small thing. Bennings also simply loved to play, and even three minutes a day, even a frustrating three minutes of wrong notes and missed chords, helped to lighten his mood.
He switched off the amp. After checking concealed security cameras that showed the hallway outside the apartment door to be empty, he slid on a pair of very dark sunglasses, adopted a slack posture, and with a bouncy walking gait unlike his own, disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER 3
Bennings rode the Metro to Chistye Prudy station. The only way to be certain he wasn’t being followed required time and patience. He spent over an hour using elaborate countersurveillance moves to ensure there were no shadows on his tail. All the walking gave him ample opportunity to call Jen Huffman in the States and ask her to help out his sister with the identify-theft issue. Jen had spent several years with the NSA monkeys at Fort Meade before transferring to USSOCOM, the United States Special Operations Command. She was a bona fide cyber-wizard.
Bennings changed into sweats and switched wigs in a grungy public squat toilet next to a KFC. He turned his shoulder bag inside out, and the red bag became black. He stashed his rock-and-roll clothes in the bag, and then stepped out into the cool Moscow spring evening. He grabbed a couple of greasy piroshki to go from a kiosk on Marosejka.
After another ride on the Metro and some judicious walking, he found himself pretending to peruse a menu inside the TGI Friday’s restaurant on Tverskaya in the city center. Right away he spotted Julie Rufo, his target for the night, and her dinner date.
Bennings strolled back outside and crossed the street. He pretended to window-shop while finishing off a piroshki, as the perpetually insane chaos called Russian traffic played its never-ending street dramas, such as five cars trying to simultaneously occupy the space of one. Conducting foot surveillance with only one person and not an entire team was outlandish but had so far worked fairly well here in Moscow.
Bennings felt tired but good. He enjoyed operating on the edge, with a lot of risk involved. And while he preferred functioning as an intelligence collector and not a counterintelligence spy-catcher going after his own people, he was well suited to accomplish the task. His day job as a defense attaché was a necessary charade, for it gave him access to many of the most sensitive areas of the U.S. embassy. But working undercover with a lot riding on the outcome was what got his blood pumping. His “night job” of uncovering moles in the American embassy was the real reason he’d been sent to Moscow.
His Russian cell phone vibrated with an incoming text. Bennings checked it and then moved to the curb. He never took the same route twice when going to meet Sinclair, and they never met at the same place. If he ever led a tail to Herb Sinclair, arguably the most successful American spy who ever operated in Moscow, it would most likely cost the man his life. Which is why the U.S. government spent the money to construct the secret tunnel connecting Bennings’s apartment to a sterile one.
Herb Sinclair was a CIA Special Activities Division “illegal,” a deep-cover American spy operating without official cover. As a defense attaché, Bennings held diplomatic immunity; Sinclair had no such thing.
Looking without appearing to look, Bennings held out his arm at 45 degrees to the ground, the Russian gesture for those trying to hail a taxi or hitch a ride, and a panel van pulled over. He quickly got in and closed the door.
“She’s having dinner in the TGI Friday’s across the street with one of the embassy marines,” said Bennings in perfect Moscow-accented Russian as Sinclair pulled into traffic. They always spoke Russian as part of good operational security.