Both exposed moles, a senior diplomat and a mid-level consular official, had been quietly picked up and taken back to Washington.
They had resigned their positions, and no arrests had been forthcoming. In spite of hard evidence of damning leaks—espionage against the United States—the current presidential administration, already reeling from scandals, was keeping a lid on the whole affair.
“I hear your girlfriend, the SECSTATE, is coming to town,” teased Sinclair.
“Padilla? Yeah, I have to attend the ball in her honor at the ambassador’s residence. As I think about it, what rotten luck for her to handpick me, pluck me out of the Activity and force me into six months’ worth of attaché training. Just to establish my cover! I mean, half a year to establish a cover,” said Bennings, shaking his head.
“A good cover is a wonderful thing.”
“Yes, except all defense attachés are assumed to be spies. So my cover in Russia is ‘American spy.’ I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around that.”
“Everyone at the embassy thinks you’re spying on the Russians, not them. We’re ferreting out American traitors, my friend, on the deep down-low. What we’re doing here is historic. I mean, for Secretary of State Padilla to not even trust her own counterintelligence people in Diplomatic Security but to go to the president to authorize using us instead… that tells you just how sensitive and important this whole business is. Do you know that the SAD doesn’t know about this op?”
“What?” asked Kit, shocked.
“We’re both working under a secret presidential ‘Finding.’ The DCI had this shoved down his throat by your friend Padilla, is what I heard.”
Kit whistled softly. “Padilla has a set of brass ones. It’s no secret she hates the director of Central Intelligence.”
“Screw them all,” said Sinclair bitterly.
“I don’t do what I do for the pricks in D.C., that’s for sure. And I don’t like working counterintelligence ops, but it felt damn good to catch those traitors,” said Bennings. “So I guess the six months of attaché training was well spent.”
“Becoming an attaché helped smooth out some of your rough edges, Bennings. Now you get to go to fancy balls, wear your prissy uniform, and suck up to a lot of creeps like the ambassador.”
Bennings broke into a big smile. “You damn well know I didn’t want to become a defense attaché.”
“You’re an assistant attaché, junior.”
“You’re jealous because we attachés are always having to throw cocktail parties for the idiots we’re spying on and we get to flirt with their hot dates.”
“You serve watered-down drinks, right?” asked Sinclair.
“Russian champagne. Which can also be used as paint remover.”
Bennings yawned, then rubbed his eyes, as if trying to shake off fatigue. Sinclair stole a look at his partner, and his voice softened. “How’s your mom doing?”
“Well… not too good,” said Bennings.
“But your sister lives with her, right? Taking care of her.”
“Yeah. They kind of take care of each other.”
“I know you’re pulling double duty—the embassy all day and then out with me for half the night. But if Rufo is the third little birdie singing to the Russians—and I think she is—I won’t be going home, but at least you will.”
At exactly ten on the dot, Bennings and Sinclair watched Sergei Lopatin, a handsome, confident dark-haired man in his late twenties, as he entered Rufo’s apartment building. The men used laptops and earbuds to watch and listen in via the bugs and cameras Sinclair had already planted. Video showed Rufo and Lopatin go through their usual routine in her apartment: the couple drank a bottle of red wine while listening to soft Russian pop as he quizzed her on the boring details of her life since they last met.
Rufo’s eyes sparkled, her smiles beamed cherubic, a glow of happiness engulfed her; even on the laptop screen she looked like a person in love. As for Lopatin, Bennings couldn’t help suspecting it was just an act, as Herb Sinclair had been suggesting.
Twenty minutes of drink and chat later, the heavy petting began, and then five minutes later they made the short trek into her bedroom.
This part of the evening didn’t interest Bennings—his job was to follow Lopatin when he left the apartment—but he kept an earbud in one ear as he thought about his mother and sister and wished he was with them to help. His mom was no slouch with computers, but that had been before her nervous breakdown. She either got sloppy and gave up her personal information in a phishing scam or maybe a Web site she trusted had been hacked and her data had been stolen. Either way, she had been aggressively targeted, and he felt a strong need to set things right.
At 2:17 A.M. Bennings stood in shadows watching as Sergei Lopatin emerged from Julie Rufo’s apartment building. Tailing the Russian on foot, without assistance, was not ideal, but Bennings had performed similar tasks dozens of times all over the world.
But there would be no footwork tonight; a shiny black Mercedes with tinted windows squealed around the corner and stopped just as Lopatin reached the curb. The Russian hopped in and was gone in moments. Sinclair was not to attempt to follow.
Bennings started walking toward the nearest Metro station. Fourteen minutes and three blocks later, Sinclair stopped his van next to him, and Bennings piled in.
Neither man looked happy.
“That car had ‘mob’ written all over it,” said Bennings.
“Maybe, but my money is on our friends in the FSB, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or one of the other intelligence services. Sloppy for them to pick him up right in front of her place.”
“How is she passing him the information? What have we missed?” asked Bennings, frustration evident in his voice.
“I hate to tell you, but you’re going to have to tail her to and from work. Maybe he slipped her a cell phone or a netbook we don’t know about. Maybe she’s using a dead drop along her route to the embassy.”
“Just what I need… less sleep.” Bennings templed his fingers together, thinking. “Okay, but I can’t start this morning. I have a breakfast meeting with Viktor Popov.”
“The ex-KGB warhorse?” KGB stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, the former main intelligence agency of the old Soviet Union. Kit nodded. “I see him once a week. Makes me look like a real defense attaché, collecting information about the Russian’s nonlethal weapons program. I’m supposedly here in Moscow to get secrets from Russians, remember?”
“Be careful with Popov. People trying to get something from that old spy bastard usually get dead.”
Dennis Kedrov, the big blond Russian chief henchman of Viktor Popov’s American operations, stood under camouflage netting as the sound of heavy equipment rumbled around him. All vehicles and equipment at the site were shrouded with similar camouflage, as was the heavy equipment currently doing the digging.
Smoke from a Turkish cigarette clenched between his teeth curled up into his eyes. He squinted, ignoring the smoke, and settled into a putting stance while holding a collapsible travel putter. He took two short practice strokes, then putted a yellow golf ball right into a Styrofoam coffee cup lying on its side in the dirt four feet away.
He took a final puff, then flicked the cigarette aside, smiling. He sat on a folding hunter’s chair, poured a small shot of vodka from a silver flask, and knocked it back. An ice chest served as a desk for his laptops. He was uplinked directly to satellites and stayed in secure communications with Popov and other members of the specialized teams assembled for the current operation—a complex, brilliant scheme and a stellar example of Russian maskirovka: the use of deception and deceit, a technique employed by the Russians ever since they defeated the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan 120 miles south of present-day Moscow. Although originally used in terms of military operations, it was a concept long-embraced and used by Russians in everyday affairs.