A Shadow in Moscow, page 17
Nothing more escaped as she crashed into me, grabbed me close, and squeezed all the air out of me. With three older brothers, Sonya is someone to get used to. I have and I love her.
“You can do this and you’re not alone.”
She was talking about simply living life, and for the first time I believed she might be right. Just as Mr. Olivers was right. The why matters most—maybe both in living and in spying. And, held tight within Sonya’s arms, I realized I didn’t need Dmitri’s help, but I still needed Sonya. I needed all my friends and my parents. I needed to fight for them and I needed to protect them. And that meant, if Mr. Olivers accepted me, complete commitment to the game once it began.
That’s when I started sleeping and eating again.
Fairly certain I missed the mark somehow, I also began to strategize what my second attempt might entail. Nevertheless, I still checked the bench each and every day. And yesterday, sitting there smoking my Prima, I realized my note hadn’t specified which side of the bench. Perhaps a reply was taped to the other end weeks ago and I missed it.
So I devised a new plan. I twisted from side to side, as if releasing a kink in my back, then dropped my bag to my feet. Bending to reach into it, I searched for my pack of Primas again. Digging around in my bag gave me a few seconds to scan the underside of the bench. Nothing. I sat up, lit my next cigarette, and stewed for a few moments until I burned it down to a nub.
Then tonight—it’s here.
A small square of white is taped to the underside of the bench. Out of easy reach. I drag my bag, a worn canvas thing, off the ground and into my lap. I rustle through it, dropping some of its contents onto the pavement. Then, bending down to gather everything, I shift to the side and, reaching for an errant pen, swipe the note free.
I practically whoop with my own brilliance and stop myself just in time. I don’t crack a smile and I don’t open the note—though I have never wanted to do anything more in my life. I bury it deep within my bag, draw out my cigarette, and calmly go through my routine. But the second I get home, I—very dramatically—climb under the covers of my bed with a flashlight like I used to do as a kid and pull the note from its plastic sleeve.
Zatsepa 89. 3pm. 24 July.
* * *
An old maps book shows me Zatsepa is a small street outside the Ring Road in the Danilovsky District. It’s not far, but it takes me three hours hopping on and off buses and cutting through alleyways to feel confident no one has followed me or is watching me. Again, I suspect I’ve seen too many spy movies.
But I’m on time, and exactly at the stroke of three o’clock, I sit across a scuffed table from Mr. Olivers in a one-room apartment on the second floor of a narrow walk-up, situated above a row of dilapidated shops.
“I wondered if our paths would cross again,” he muses.
The apartment is no more than a couple hundred square feet. The kitchen and a toilet are situated in the corner, and the only pieces of furniture are our small table and its three chairs as well as a cot. I’m surprised to find a toilet.
Mr. Olivers sits in one metal chair. I’m in another and the third remains empty as its potential occupant stands against the wall.
I say nothing to him. He doesn’t introduce himself.
“I didn’t expect to meet with you. Not in person.” I take a breath to keep my voice from wavering. I’ve been so confident, even brave in my self-congratulatory righteousness for the past couple days. But now all my bravado is gone and I feel small and unsure faced with the magnitude of what I’m about to do.
“I thought a familiar face might put you at ease and . . .” He stalls, assessing me. “I wanted to hear from you personally what’s changed. Tell me your why.”
I study my shredded cuticles and catch sight of Dmitri’s gold band. His smile comes to me and covers me more comfortably than the jacked-up frenzy that has dogged me the past few weeks. I sit with it for a moment before replying. When I do consider what to say, only one word comes to mind. “Hope.”
“Hope?”
“There is none here. We are a culture of ‘I can’t’ rather than one of ‘I can.’” I envision Scott’s bright eyes and accept he’s been a vital part of this journey as well. It was through him that I first began to understand hope and what a life with it might feel like.
“I never realized what a real and vital thing it truly is until—” I press my lips together, keeping Scott to myself. “Georgetown . . . Hope is not desired and certainly not cultivated here, because it puts something above the State. It would divide our loyalty and make us look above and beyond, maybe as far as eternity. It’s such a little thing . . . I mean, you don’t need much, but you do need it. I miss it.”
“Join an underground church.” Mr. Olivers’s words and face carry no expression.
His statement doesn’t surprise me. Everyone knows they aren’t actual “churches.” They are groups of people from all faiths who secretly gather to look beyond, dissidents who find courage and companionship together, who may even work to fight for freedom together.
“I may . . .” I return my focus to the present. “But one thing I’ve learned about hope is that you have to carry it, act on it, and take risks to grow it. I have a friend who did that. He took risks because he found hope, maybe even faith, and he showed me that line. The one I told you I feared I’d find and not be able to cross.”
Mr. Olivers leans forward, inviting me to expound.
So I do. I tell him about Dmitri, about how he picked me up when a bully knocked me down and we became best friends. I tell him how we made forts when we were young, how we played at spies, and how he stood up for those kids with the bast shoes who were excluded from the Little Octobrists and the good clubs. I told him how Dmitri excelled at MGIMO and how he’d been sent to work as an illegal in Poland to undermine Solidarity. I tell him about Dmitri’s growing disillusionment, growing anger, growing drinking, and growing faith. I tell him about his murder.
“Murder is a strong word. He could have been mugged as reported.”
I hold up my hand. Dmitri’s gold ring sits bold and bright on my middle finger. “No mugger would leave behind this gold. Besides, at School number 227 we are trained to fight from Class Six on. He was always good, really, really good. MGIMO only would have made him better. His fingernails were clean.”
Mr. Olivers nods as he, too, catches the detail’s significance. “And if they hadn’t found him in a place he’d never be? Would you be here now?”
“Maybe not,” I admit, straining to be as honest as I can. “Maybe I wouldn’t have gone to the morgue and seen him. Maybe I’d have convinced myself that it was an accident and forget everything that came before. Maybe I could have gone on. But that’s not what happened and here I am.”
“What about your parents?” Olivers leans back in his metal chair. It creaks with the shift of his weight. “Do they share your thinking, even your anger?”
His question stops me. I hadn’t thought that I’m working from anger. I had placed my motivation on a far superior philosophical plane. But he is right. I am angry, and I need to own that too.
“Is it wrong to be angry?” I ask the question sincerely.
He glances to the man standing, who shakes his head so minutely I almost don’t see it. Olivers returns his attention to me. “No. To be angry about something that’s wrong is a good thing. Anger fuels us, sharpens our instincts, but it takes energy, too, and it can be destructive. It can deplete us too soon, wear us down, make us sloppy, and get us killed.”
I think of Dmitri. I think of my past few months.
“I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want there to be something to be angry about.” I lean forward and lay my hands on the table between us. “My parents work and live by the rules and I don’t want to get them hurt, but they don’t see what I see. I’m not sure their generation can.”
“What do you see?”
“I see we fear you more than you fear us. We’re fed lies about you. My years in the States taught me you don’t want to destroy us. Sure, Reagan’s talk is vitriolic, but you have an innate brashness that eclipses fear. You truly trust that your Constitution, your way of life and your freedoms, are superior. I also see that what one believes becomes reality. We have fear. Real fear. Our leaders are reactive and paranoid, and that makes them dangerous—to the world and to our own people. Fear is worse than anger. If one has to drive you, let it be anger.”
I peek at the other man. His face reveals nothing, but I can tell he’s listening. Olivers crosses one leg over the other, resting an ankle on his knee. He slides a pack of cigarettes across the table.
I shake my head. I’ve smoked so much this past month my stomach sours at the thought of another. He lights one for himself, and only when the cloud of smoke hovers above him does he speak again.
“Most students who come to the US in the Foreign Studies Initiative are already KGB activated. Your answers are, after all, exactly what I want to hear.”
“That’s not true. We are never ‘activated.’” I trace a patch at the edge of the table where the laminate has pulled away from the top. “However, if I was planted to trick you, I probably would have given you all these perfect answers three years ago or I would’ve offered you old military intel now. Something you could confirm, but nothing that could tip the scales in America’s favor. In Professor Jamison’s office, you said you have good instincts. I can only ask you to trust them.”
Olivers again defers to the man still leaning against the wall.
He starts speaking. His voice is deep. He speaks with intention. “It’s not easy running an agent in Moscow. Near impossible, and I’m going to be honest with you, we’ve been ordered to stand down for a number of years now. We’ve got rust to shake off.” He shifts his focus to Olivers. “This is risky.”
“But doable.” Olivers’s eyes take on the glow of reminiscing, and his gaze drifts to the distance, somewhere between the man and me. “With the right approach, she could be better than LUMEN. Military access. Schematics. Her access to Petrov? We haven’t had anything like this in years.”
“Lumen?” I catch on to the one word I don’t understand. Light.
The unnamed man speaks. “Code name for a ghost, a shadow, a legend operating somewhere in Europe, and it bugs him that LUMEN isn’t ours.” He gestures to Olivers. “We lost an agent and got pulled outta Moscow, yet some other service found a way in. LUMEN could be Dutch, British, Swedish, Finnish . . . No one has a clue. But his intelligence is top grade, expertly controlled, and given such random provenance no one can track the source. For twenty-five years now, someone has accomplished the unthinkable in the intelligence community—a true living secret.”
The man shakes his head. Now he, too, has a wondering glow about him. “He’s the one who told us last year it was the Soviets feeding troop locations to the Argentines during the Falklands War. The Brits had no clue as to how their every move was countered.”
“Falklands?” I rack my brain. “Oh . . . Do you mean the Malvinas? They aren’t called the Falklands here. But why would Brezhnev help Argentina?” I think back to my political science courses at Georgetown. “There’s no ideological love there.”
“That’s what we wondered, until LUMEN spelled it out. He realized there was a debt to be paid. Argentina is one of the few countries who defied the call for sanctions against the Soviets for Afghanistan in ’79. You eat Argentine meat, produce, and foodstuffs on a daily basis.”
“No one eats meat or produce on a daily basis.”
The man cracks a faint one-sided smile. I like him.
Olivers cuts between us, waving a hand toward me, but he’s talking to the man. “Anya could be that good.”
Rather than answer, the man slides the third metal chair from beneath the table. He studies me. “Don’t listen to him. Don’t believe the grandiose dream he’s peddling. He’s not taking the risks. You and I are.” He stretches his hand toward me. “Peter Crenshaw.”
He holds our hands between us, not in a gesture of kindness or chivalry but to maintain my attention. His grip is firm, almost aggressive.
“Actually, only you. I might get a little roughed up and PNG’d, declared persona non grata if caught, but I’ll get tossed onto a plane and shipped home to beers and hot dogs. You, on the other hand, will be tortured, you will break, and then they will kill you.”
A sense of blue cold washes over me. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s like all red, all warmth, leaves me. Crenshaw takes note of however that experience shows on my face and nods with satisfaction. He lets go of my hand and leans toward me.
“People enter this game for many reasons—money, revenge, the power of secrets, ideology—and some reasons are qualitatively and quantitatively better than others. One scale is measured by the asset’s internal peace and integrity. The other is numbers based, measured by money, output, and the days, months, and years the asset stays alive. It sounds harsh, but it’s reality. It’s a lonely life wrapped in a dangerous game, and if you come in for the wrong qualitative reasons, the quantitative ones won’t matter. You’ll get torn up, slip up, and you’ll die in a manner far worse than your friend.”
I almost remark that his sales pitch needs help, but I don’t. The thought, fleeting as it is, doesn’t sound funny in my head. It feels empty and naive, just like I feel at this moment.
He continues. “On the other hand, it’s also about this.” He waves his hand between us. “Connection. Hope. And trust. You trust me and earn my trust, and I expect we’ll do good work. Shed a little hope and light on this big, dark world. My goal is not to let one world power drop any more darkness onto another. The world can’t sustain this madness for too long.” His emphasis on the first syllable, breaking it from the second, grabs my attention.
MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.
He stares at me, unblinking, for a long moment. “And anger has no place here.”
“Pete—” Olivers interjects.
Crenshaw’s narrowed eyes silence him. I get the impression they’ve had this conversation before, and their motivations don’t fully align. “Am I running her or are you?”
“You. All you.”
Crenshaw turns back to me. “You in? There’s no halfway here. You do what I say and how I say it, and part of the commitment is to leave the emotions behind. Anger. Love. Fear. Pity. None of them play here.”
Whatever Mr. Olivers might think, Peter’s motivations align with me perfectly, and the order to leave emotions behind, to somehow not feel so much and not hurt so much, is tantalizing. I find myself twisting Dmitri’s ring around my finger, remembering his gold-specked eyes and the way his tawny hair flopped over his eyes when we were teenagers, long before he got the standard KGB close clip. I remember his toothy grins and his laughter. I remember those glowing days of childhood in which we thought we could change the world—when “can” was stronger than “can’t.” I close the door on all those memories and realize I have only one question.
“When do we begin?”
Fifteen
Ingrid
Moscow
November 22, 1958
“A new tomorrow. A new dawn.”
Leo’s words played within Ingrid’s imagination all month—through every nappy change, late-night feeding, and quiet moment. She wondered what they could mean, for her and for their daughter.
For Leo, what they meant became immediately apparent.
He worked longer hours and started bringing work home. Oftentimes, during Anya’s midnight feeding, she’d find Leo shuffling through files, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. He was more dedicated and more secretive. And one evening, weeks after his liybimaya, his little darling, was born, he brought an odd device home with him. It was the size of a deck of playing cards, and it made a buzzing sound as he carried it all through the apartment.
“A friend gave me my own.” He waggled the device at Ingrid. “We will always be clean now.”
Ingrid squeezed Anya tight. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“They listen everywhere.” Leo waved his hand. “And more so lately.” He kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “But not here, not to you, my little darling.”
He locked the new device in his desk’s top drawer and never mentioned it again. But he used it almost nightly.
Which was a good thing, Ingrid surmised, as Leo was a doting father who shared his secrets and his world with his liybimaya deep in the night as he rocked her to sleep. And things were not going well.
The wellspring of optimism following last year’s Sputnik launch had dried up. By insisting that all domestic hardware be kept under government control, the Central Committee now believed they’d lost the space race to the West. The United States was surging ahead and had just passed the 1958 Space Act to create NASA and do exactly what the Soviets forbade—drop all barriers to scientific collaboration between the government and civilian enterprise.
Additionally, defections from East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, continued to increase at an alarming rate, and the discontent in Grozny had not, in fact, faded away. It, too, was growing increasingly precarious.
“It’s a complex problem, you see,” he softly crooned. “But you are right, my baby girl. We must focus on here and now. The stars can wait. I will see what we can do about the GDR . . .”
Yes, Leo’s answer as to how to make the world better for his daughter was immediate. He worked relentlessly to solidify the Soviet Union’s supremacy and control at home and abroad.
Ingrid took longer to find her answer, but a month later, she believed she had.
She stood staring at the British embassy. She had never seen it before as she had never sought it out. Her ancestry always felt like a secret too hazardous to approach. But no more. She had watched her parents for years. She had listened and learned from Adam and Martin. And over the past several months, she had mastered fading into the background, a shadow within her own home. During that time, she had learned much of the inner workings of the CPSU, the Central Committee, the Politburo, and even the KGB. Information that could bring about what Leo desired—“A new tomorrow. A new dawn.” Just not the one he’d envisioned.
