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Why, he would have been asked, did you not report the approach immediately, on first contact, to the commanding colonel of the GRU in Aden, and why did you allow the American who contacted you to escape? Those questions were unanswerable.
So Solomin was either going to stay mum about the whole thing, or he was on the team. The letter indicated the latter.
In the USSR all mail coming in from or heading out to abroad was intercepted and read. Ditto all phone calls, cables, faxes, and telexes. But internal Soviet mail, by its sheer volume, could not be unless sender or recipient were under suspicion. The same applied to mail within the Soviet bloc, and that included East Germany.
The East Berlin address belonged to a subway driver who worked as a postman for the agency and was well paid for it. Letters arriving at his apartment in a run-down building in the Friedrichshain district were always addressed to Franz Weber.
Weber had actually been the previous tenant of the flat and was conveniently dead. If the subway driver had ever been challenged, he could plausibly have sworn that there had been two letters already, he could not understand a word of Russian, they were addressed to Weber, Weber was dead so he had thrown them away. An innocent man.
The letters never had a return address or surname. The text was banal and boring: Hope this finds you well, things here are fine, how are your studies in Russian coming along, I hope we shall renew our acquaintance one day, all best wishes, your pen pal Ivan.
Even the East German secret police, the Stasis, could have deduced from the text only that Weber had met a Russian on some kind of cultural exchange fest and they had become pen pals. This sort of thing was encouraged anyway.
Even if the Stasis had deciphered the hidden message in invisible ink between the lines, it would have indicated only that Weber, deceased, had been a rat who had got away with it.
At the Moscow end, once the missive had been dropped in a mailbox, the sender became untraceable.
Once he had received a letter from Russia, the subway motorman, Heinrich, sent it over the Wall into the West. How he did it sounds weird, but much stranger things happened in the divided city of Berlin during the Cold War. In fact his method was so simple that he was never caught. The Cold War ended, Germany was reunited, and Heinrich retired to a very comfortable old age.
Before Berlin was divided by the Wall in 1961 to prevent the East Germans escaping, it shared an all-city subway system. After the Wall, many tunnels between East and West were blocked off. But there was one stretch where the East German section of the system became an elevated rail and rattled across a stretch of West Berlin.
For this transit from East across a bit of the West and back into the East, all windows and doors were sealed. East Berlin passengers could sit and look down on a piece of West Berlin, but they could not get there.
Up in the cab, all alone, Heinrich would ease down his window and at a certain point, using a catapult, shoot a projectile like a small golf ball out into a derelict bomb site. Knowing Heinrich’s work roster, a middle-aged man would be walking his dog there. When the train had rattled out of sight, he would pick up the golf ball and bring it to his colleagues at the CIA’s enormous West Berlin Station. Unscrewed, the ball revealed the tightly furled onionskin letter inside.
Solomin had news, and it was all good. After repatriation there had been intensive debriefing and then a week’s leave. He had reported back to the Ministry of Defense for reassignment. In the lobby he had been spotted by the deputy defense minister for whom he had built the dacha three years earlier. The man had been promoted to First Deputy Minister.
Although he wore the uniform of a Colonel General, with enough medals to sink a gunboat, the man was really a creature of the apparat who had come up the political ladder. It pleased him to have a rugged combat soldier from Siberia in his entourage. He was delighted with his dacha, completed under schedule, and his aide-de-camp had just retired on health (consumption of vodka) grounds. He raised Solomin to Lieutenant-Colonel and gave him the post.
Finally Solomin, at considerable risk, gave his own residential address in Moscow and asked for instructions. Had the KGB intercepted and deciphered the letter he would have been done for. But as he could not approach the U.S. Embassy, Langley had to be told how to approach him. He should have been supplied with a much more sophisticated communications package before leaving Yemen, but the civil war intervened.
Ten days later he got a traffic violation final-notice demand. The envelope bore the logo of the Central Traffic Office. It was posted in Moscow. No one intercepted it. The demand and the envelope were so well forged that he nearly rang the Traffic Office to protest he had never gone through a red light. Then he saw the sand trickling out of the envelope.
He kissed his wife as she left to take the children to school, and when he was alone painted the demand notice with the enhancer from the small flask he had smuggled back from Aden in his shaving kit. The message was simple. The following Sunday. Midmorning. A café on Leninsky Prospekt.
He was on his second coffee when an anonymous figure passed by, struggling into an overcoat against the chill blast outside. From the empty sleeve a single pack of Russian Marlboros dropped onto Solomin’s table. He covered it with his newspaper. The overcoat left the café without looking back.
The pack appeared to be full of cigarettes, but the twenty filters were a block, glued together and with nothing smokable beneath them. In the cavity were a tiny camera, ten rolls of film, a sheet of rice paper describing three dead drops with directions for how to find them, and six types of chalk mark, with their locations, to indicate when the drops were empty or needed servicing. Also a warm personal letter from Monk beginning, “So, my hunter friend, we are going to change the world.”
A month later Orion made his first delivery and picked up more rolls of film. His information came from the deepest heart of the Soviet arms-industrial complex, and it was priceless.
¯
PROFESSOR Kuzmin checked over the transcript of his notes on the postmortem of Cadaver 158 and made a few annotations in his own hand. He was not even going to ask his overworked secretary to do a retype; let the mutton-heads down at Homicide work it out for themselves.
He had no doubt that Homicide was where the file would have to go. He tried to be merciful to the detectives, and where there was some doubt he would sign off the deceased as an “accidental” or “natural causes” if he could. Then the relatives could collect and do what they wished, or, in the event of an unidentified body, it would remain in the morgue for the statutory time required b
y law. He would alert Missing Persons, and if they could not come up with an ID, the body would eventually go to a pauper’s grave, courtesy of the mayor of Moscow, or to the anatomy classes.
But 158 was a homicide, and there was no way of getting around it. Short of a pedestrian being hit by a truck at full gallop, he had seldom seen such internal damage. One single blow, even by a truck, could not have achieved it all. He supposed being trampled on by a herd of buffalo might produce the same effect, but there were few buffalo in Moscow and in any case they would stamp on head and legs as well. Cadaver 158 had been beaten many times by blunt objects between the neck and hips, both sides.
When he had finished his notes he signed and dated them, August 3, at the bottom and put them in his out tray.
“Homicide?” asked his secretary brightly.
“Homicide, John Doe Desk,” he confirmed. She typed out the buff envelope, put the file inside, and placed the package beside her. On her way out that evening she would give it to the porter who lived in a cubbyhole on the ground floor, and he would in due course give it to the van driver who took the files to their various destinations around Moscow.
In the meantime Cadaver 158 lay in the icy darkness minus his eyes and most of his innards.