The Take by Christopher Reich (26)

Vassily Borodin stared at the image of the business card Valentina Asanova had sent.

The firm’s name meant nothing to him. There were dozens of such firms in every major world capital. Spying was a fully privatized industry.

He put down his phone, ruing the interruption in his work. On his desk a fan of dossiers was scattered, all neatly numbered and labeled. The information inside constituted his proof. Old-fashioned, hard proof in the form of damning papers from banks, corporations, and government ministries.

He thought of the effort required to assemble it and a wave of fatigue overtook him. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. The rain had continued unabated since the day before. His view gave north to the center of the city. When the air was clear and the sun shining, he had a direct view of the new business district and could count the Stalin skyscrapers set in a ring around the city. Today, the rain made it impossible to see anything except the dirt caked on his window.

He looked once again at the business card and questioned his decision to send Valentina Asanova to Paris. Was he getting himself into more trouble or doing what any patriot would? He sat straighter. He had never been a man who shirked his duty. He would never have succeeded in the old regime, when devotion to the Communist Party demanded a uniform, unwavering, and often blithely ignorant obedience. He was a man of his time, doing what any smart, ambitious, and patriotic man of his time should do.

It had all begun with a rumor of a clandestine meeting that had taken place almost thirty years in the past. Borodin, a major at the time, had been quick to dismiss it. A man in his position trafficked in hearsay at his peril. Then, a year later, a second source, independent from the first, repeated it. This time with a crucial detail added. The meeting had taken place at a dacha north of Moscow in the month of September, days after the momentous visit. More importantly, the dacha belonged to General Ivan Truchin, one of the first high-ranking officers to denounce the old Soviet regime.

The smart response was to say “Nonsense” or “Rubbish” and slam the door on such dangerous talk. But Borodin was at heart distrustful. It was in his nature to ask “What if?” or, better, “Why not?” Where others sought out the good in people, he was inclined to seek the ill, or at least the duplicitous. He was nothing more than the product of his training.

Though barely a teenager when the alleged meeting had taken place, he remembered the time well. It was the era of glasnost and perestroika. The West termed the words “opening” and “restructuring.” Borodin preferred “capitulation” and “destruction.”

The great Soviet ship launched amid blood and tumult in 1918 by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin and his band of Bolshevik revolutionaries was sinking. Chaos reigned. It was every man for himself. Even the rats were fleeing the ship.

Borodin searched for his phone and for the thousandth time—no, the ten thousandth—looked at the picture. There they were, the biggest threats Mother Russia had ever known, all standing within feet of one another. Gorbachev, Reagan, and the worst of the three.

And so a meeting of this nature was possible. Perhaps more so because no one would have had reason to suspect that anyone would show an interest in such an unimportant man.

Borodin had put out feelers to get a stronger sense of the rumor’s veracity. Again, he had been careful not to betray an unhealthy interest. If anyone inquired, he could respond with a clear conscience that he was only doing his job. Anything more could quite literally be fatal.

He had reached out to veterans of the secret world long retired. He had couched his questions elliptically and with purposeful vagueness. Do you remember a time when something unexpectedly went wrong with one of your operations? Did you ever feel as if someone were thwarting your efforts? Perhaps the suspicion that an invisible hand was hindering progress? Or if not hindering it, doing too little to help?

The answers had trickled in over the course of a year. In no instance had any of the retired officers pointed a finger at who might have been responsible. Certainly, no names had been mentioned. They, too, knew how to be purposefully vague.

Still, it had been enough.

By then, Borodin had risen to the rank of colonel. His seniority granted him unfettered access to the SVR’s archives. He needed no one’s permission to examine the case files involved, nor was he required to leave something so damning as a signature that might later attest to his interest. Under no circumstance did he reveal his intentions to even his most trusted colleagues.

One by one, he had drawn the operational records. He was patient. He allowed time to pass between his inquiries. A month or two went by between trips to the archives. (The SVR was, and remained, hopelessly backlogged in transferring its paper files to digital.) One by one, he had corroborated the veterans’ statements.

More importantly, he had been able to spot a common thread. Over and over, the same name had appeared in each file. Earlier, he had been a deputy case officer. Later, he had acted as the case officer in charge. And later still, as a divisional chief.

The conclusion was inescapable.

Still, he had lacked the incontrovertible evidence necessary to make such a monstrous accusation. He had only come upon it later, after learning that his newest agent in the U.S. capital had a brother who toiled as an archivist at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Again, he had chosen misdirection to guard against detection. There had been no stealing of classified case files. Instead, it had been Borodin’s idea to have him search a little known corner of the archives: the CIA’s commendation reports, many of which dealt with the awarding of medals to foreign agents in place. It was common practice for espionage agencies the world over to present their operatives, or “Joes,” a medal along with a written commendation during clandestine meets with a case officer, if only to take back both afterward. Spies were by definition insecure and unbalanced. A medal, a commendation, a promotion in imaginary rank, boosted their morale immeasurably.

And so it was that the archivist had found the letter.

The buff-colored envelope had been sitting in a box three floors below ground (sector R, row 51) in the section dedicated to Russian Operations 1990–1995. From there, the letter had made its way to Borodin’s agent and onward to Prince Abdul Aziz, only to be stolen during a random robbery.

Or had it been random after all?

Borodin looked at the photograph one last time.

Of course it was not random, he said to himself, barely suppressing the desire to slam a fist on the table.

With a calming breath, he brought his attention back to the business card. Swiveling in his chair, he turned toward his desktop computer and logged into the SVR’s intranet. He did not use his own name but that of a fictitious agent he’d created when he’d begun his inquiries, Nikolai Beria. A sharp-eyed historian might recognize the family as that of the founder of the NKVD, Joseph Stalin’s dreaded secret police and predecessor of the KGB.

Borodin accessed the service’s international intelligence registry and entered the name Valentina Asanova had given him. The registry contained names, aliases, and, when possible, physical descriptions of all individuals known to work for a foreign intelligence agency. The names included both overt employees like contract staff for the Central Intelligence Agency or the British Foreign Office and covert operatives who had been identified but not exposed. Currently, the registry contained names from over seventy nations.

The name Simon Risk(e) brought up no hits.

There was a Simeon Rosak, age fifty-seven, former paratrooper with the Israeli Defense Forces, now listed as an analyst with the Mossad. There was a Simon Rhys-Davies, age twenty-seven, graduate of McGill University, currently a minor official in the Canadian foreign ministry. And a Simone Risen, age forty-four, employed by the DGSE, the French intelligence agency.

But no Simon Riske, with or without an e.

Borodin logged out of the registry. He hadn’t expected a hit. If the man was an agent, he was using an alias, though with the installation of facial-recognition software at nearly all international transport hubs as well as the widespread adoption of biometric passports, it was becoming increasingly difficult for covert operatives to move about unnoticed. These systems relied on the precise mapping of an individual’s physiognomy—the distance between a man’s eyes, for example, or the width of their lips—which no disguise could alter. An agent could make his eyes green or blue. He might wear a mustache or shave his head. He might use makeup to appear seventy or forty. But once the topography of his face had been captured, his days of moving freely were over, no matter what he called himself.

To amuse himself, Borodin pulled up his open-source web browser and Googled the man’s name. Several Facebook accounts showed up, a LinkedIn page, and a mention in a British automotive journal. He checked them in turn, finding little of interest. As Riske’s business card listed him working for a London-based investigative firm, he paid particular attention to the article discussing the sale at auction of a vintage Ferrari restored by a garage in London owned by a Simon Riske…with an e. There was no further mention of the man, nor was there a photograph. He moved the cursor to close the page, his finger poised to click. He looked at the article again, his eye spotting the words “American born.” For a second, less even, a spark of suspicion fired in his brain, much like the shock one receives when walking across a carpet in socks. But like that shock, the spark was short-lived and he discounted it.

He closed the article, then phoned the agent in charge at the Russian embassy in London.

“Find out everything you can about a firm named Special Protective Services and Investigations,” he said. “I want something by morning.”