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Topmost was triumph. Through the summer the counterintelligence people of both First and Second Chief Directorates had delivered him the three traitors in quick succession.
First had come the diplomat, Kruglov, exposed by a combination of his First Secretaryship at the embassy in Buenos Aires and his purchase of an apartment for twenty thousand rubles shortly after his return.
He had confessed everything without hesitation, babbling away to the panel of officers behind the table and the turning spools of the tape machine. After six weeks he had nothing left to tell and had been consigned to one of the deep cells where the temperature, even in summer, rarely rose above one degree. There he sat and shivered, awaiting his fate. That fate was contained in one of the sheets on the colonel’s desk.
July had brought the professor of nuclear physics to the cells. There were few enough scientists of his ilk who had ever lectured in California and the list quickly came down to four. A search of Blinov’s apartment at Arzamas-16 had revealed a small vial of invisible ink poorly concealed in a pair of rolled-up socks in a closet.
He too had confessed all and quickly, the mere sight of Grishin and his team with the tools of their trade being enough to loosen his tongue. He had even revealed the address in East Berlin to which he had written his secret letters.
The raiding of that address had been given to a colonel of Directorate K in East Berlin, but unaccountably the tenant of the address had escaped, walking through the newly open city into the West an hour before the raid.
Last, in late July, had come the Siberian soldier, finally nailed by his rank in the GRU, his posting inside the Defense Ministry, his service in Aden, and intensive surveillance during which a raid had been made on his flat to discover that one of his children, hunting for Christmas presents, had once discovered Daddy’s little camera.
Pyotr Solomin had been different, resisting amazing pain and snarling defiance through the agony. Grishin had broken him eventually; he always did. It was the threat to send the wife and children to the hardest of strict-regime camps that did it.
Each of them had described how he had been approached by the smiling American, so eager to listen to their problems, so reasonable with his proposals. That caused the other emotion in Grishin’s mind, sheer rage at the elusive man he now knew to be called Jason Monk.
Not once, not twice, but three times this impudent bastard had simply walked into the USSR, talked to his spies, and walked out again. Right under the KGB’s noses. The more he knew about the man, the more he hated him.
Checks had been made, of course. The passenger list of the Armenia for that cruise had been gone through, but no pseudonym sprang to mind. The crew vaguely remembered an American from Texas who wore Texan clothes of the type described by Solomin from their meeting at the Botanical Gardens. It was probable Monk was Norman Kelson, but not proved.
In Moscow the detectives had had more luck. Every American tourist in the capital on that day had been checked via the records of visa applications and Intourist group tours. Eventually they had homed in on the Metropol and the man who had had the so-convenient stomach upset that made him miss the Zagorsk Monastery tour the same day that Monk had met Professor Blinov in Vladimir Cathedral. Dr. Philip Peters. Grishin would remember the name.
When the three traitors had confessed to the panel of interrogators the full volume of what this one American had persuaded them to hand over, the KGB officers were pale with shock.
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sp; Grishin shuffled the three papers together and made a call on his office phone. He always appreciated the final penance.
General Vladimir Kryuchkov had been elevated from head of the First Chief Directorate to chairman of the whole KGB. It was he who had placed the three death warrants on the desk of Mikhail Gorbachev that morning in the president’s office on the top floor of the Central Committee building in Novaya Ploshad for signature, and he who had sent them, duly signed, to Lefortovo jail, marked “immediate.”
The colonel allowed the condemned men thirty minutes in the rear courtyard to appreciate what was going to happen. Too sudden, and there was not time for anticipation, as he had often told his pupils. When he descended the three men were on their knees in the gravel of the high-walled yard where the sun never shone.
The diplomat went first. He seemed traumatized, mumbling, “Nyet, nyet,” as the master-sergeant placed the 9mm Makarov to the back of his head. On a nod from Grishin, the man squeezed the trigger. There was a flash, a spray of blood and bone, and Valeri Yureyvitch Kruglov slammed forward onto the gravel.
The scientist, raised a committed atheist, was praying, asking Almighty God to take his soul into safekeeping. He hardly seemed to notice what had happened two yards from him, and went facedown like the diplomat.
Colonel Pyotr Solomin was last. He stared up at the sky, perhaps seeing for the last time the forests and waters, rich in game and fish, of his homeland. When he felt the cold steel at the back of his head, he pulled his left hand across his body and held it up toward Colonel Grishin by the wall. The middle finger was raised rigid.
“Fire!” shouted Grishin, and then it was over. He ordered burial that night, in unmarked graves, in the forests outside Moscow. Even in death there must be no mercy. The families would never have a spot upon which to place their flowers.
Colonel Grishin walked over to the body of the Siberian soldier, bent over it for several seconds, then straightened up and strode away.
When he returned to his office to compile his report, the red light on his phone was flashing. The caller was a colleague he knew in the Investigation Group of the Second Chief Directorate.
“We think we are closing in on the fourth one,” said the man. “It’s down to two. Both colonels, both in counterintelligence, both in East Berlin. We have them under surveillance. Sooner or later we’ll get our break.
When we do, you want to know? You want to be in on the arrest?”
“Give me twelve hours,” said Grishin, “just twelve hours and I’ll be there. This one I want; this one is personal.”
Both the investigator and the interrogator knew a seasoned counterintelligence officer would be the hardest to crack. After years on Line K, he would know how to spot counterintelligence when directed against himself. He would leave no invisible ink in rolled-up socks, purchase no apartments.
In the old days it had been easy. If a man was suspected he was arrested and grilled until a confession was extracted or a mistake could be proved. By 1990 the authorities insisted on proof of guilt, or at least serious evidence, before the third degree was resorted to. Lysander would leave no evidence; he would have to be caught red-handed. It would need delicacy, and time.
Moreover, Berlin was an open city. The East was still technically the Soviet sector, but the Wall was down. If spooked, the guilty party could fly the coop so easily—a fast drive through the streets to the lights of the West and safety. Then it would be too late.
CHAPTER 10