“How did you know about me, sir?”
“Down in Vietnam, some of our people in the Phoenix Program spotted you and your work. You got some good tips on the VC. They liked that.”
“It’s Langley, isn’t it, sir? You’re the CIA.”
“Oh, not all of it. Just a small cog.”
Carey Jordan was actually much more than a small cog. He would go on to become Deputy Director (Operations), that is, head of the whole espionage arm.
Monk took the advice and enrolled at the University of Virginia, right back in Charlottesville. He drank tea with Mrs. Brady again, but just as friends. He studied Slavonic languages and majored in Russian at a level his senior adviser, himself a Russian, termed “bilingual.” He graduated at the age of twenty-five in 1975 and just after his next birthday was accepted into the CIA. After the usual basic training at Fort Peary, known in the agency simply as “the Farm,” he was assigned to Langley, then New York, and back to Langley.
It would be five years, and many, many courses later, before he would get his first posting abroad, and then it was to Nairobi, Kenya.
¯
CORPORAL Meadows of the Royal Marines did his duty that bright morning of July 16. He snap-locked the reinforced edge of the flag to the hoisting cord and ran the banner up the pole to the top. There it fluttered open in the dawn breeze to tell all the world who dwelt beneath it.
The British government had actually bought the handsome old mansion on Sofia Quay from its previous owner, a sugar magnate, just before the revolution, turned it into the embassy, and had stayed there through thick and thin ever since.
Josef Stalin, the last dictator to live in the State Apartments of the Kremlin, used to rise each morning, throw back his curtains, and see the British flag fluttering right across the river. It made him extremely angry. Repeated pressure was brought to persuade the British to move. They refused.
Over the years the mansion became too small to house all the departments required by the mission to Moscow, so that subsections were scattered all over the city. But despite repeated offers to house all the sections in one compound, London politely replied that it would prefer to stay on Sofia Quay. As the building was sovereign British territory, there it stayed.
Leonid Zaitsev sat across the river and watched the flag flutter open as the first rays of dawn tipped the hills to the east. The sight brought back a distant memory.
At eighteen the Rabbit had been called up for the Red Army and after the usual minimal basic training he had been posted with the tanks to East Germany. He was a private, tagged by his instructors as not even corporal material.
One day in 1955, on a routine march outside Potsdam, he had become separated from his company in dense forest. Lost and afraid, he blundered through the woods until he stumbled out on a sandy track. There he halted, rooted to the spot, paralyzed with fear. Ten yards away was an open jeep containing four soldiers. They had evidently paused for a break while on patrol.
Two were still in the vehicle, two were standing beside it, smoking cigarettes. They had bottles of beer in their hands. He knew at once they were not Russians. They were foreigners, Westerners, from the Allied Mission at Potsdam, set up under the Four-Power Agreement of 1945, of which he knew nothing. He knew only, because he had been told, that they were the enemy, come to destroy Socialism and, if they could, to kill him.
They stopped talking when they saw him and stared at him. One of them said: “ ‘Ello, ‘ello. What have we got ‘ere? A bleeding Russky. Allo, Ivan.”
He did not understand a word. He had a tommy gun slung over his shoulder but they did not seem afraid of him. It was the other way around. Two of them wore black berets, with shining brass cap badges and behind the emblems a cluster of white-and-red feathers. He did not know it, but he was looking at the regimental hackle of the Royal Fusiliers.
One of the soldiers next to the vehicle peeled himself away and sauntered toward him. He thought he was going to wet himself. The man was also young, with red hair and a freckled face. He grinned at Zaitsev and held out a bottle.
“Come on, mate. ‘Ave a beer.”
Leonid felt the chill of the cold glass in his hand. The foreign soldier nodded encouragingly. It would be poisoned of course. He put the neck of the bottle to his lips and tilted. The cold liquid hit the back of his throat. It was strong, better than Russian beer, and good, but it made him cough. Carrot-hair laughed.
“Go on, then. ‘Ave a beer,” he said. To Zaitsev it was just a voice making sounds. To his amazement the foreign soldier turned his back and sauntered the few feet to his vehicle. The man was not even afraid of him. He was armed, he was the Red Army, and the foreigners were grinning and joking.
He stood by the trees, drinking the cold beer and wondered what Colonel Nikolayev would think. The colonel commanded his squadron.
He was only about thirty, but he was a decorated war hero. Once he had stopped and asked Zaitsev about his background, where he came from. The private had told him: an orphanage. The colonel had patted him on the back and told him that now he had a home. He adored Colonel Nikolayev.
He was too frightened to throw their beer back at them, and anyway it tasted very good, even if it was poisoned. So he drank it. After ten minutes the two soldiers on the ground climbed into the rear and pulled on their berets. The driver started up and they drove away. No hurry, no fear of him. The one with red hair turned and waved. They were the enemy, they were preparing to invade Russia, but they waved at him.
When they had gone he threw the empty bottle as far into the woods as he could, and ran through the trees until eventually he saw a Russian truck, which brought him back to camp. The sergeant gave him a week’s kitchen duty for getting lost, but he never told anyone about the foreigners or the beer.
Before the foreign vehicle drove off he noticed that it had some sort of regimental insignia on the front right wing and a wasp aerial high above the back. On the aerial was a flag, about a foot square. It had crosses: one upright in red and two diagonal, red and white. All on a blue background. A funny flag in red, white, and blue.
Forty-four years later, there it was again, fluttering above a building across the river. The Rabbit had solved his problem. He knew he should not have stolen the file from Mr. Akopov, but he could not take it back now. Perhaps no one would notice it was missing. So he would give it to the people with the funny flag who gave him beer. They would know what to do with it.
He rose from his bench and began to walk down the riverbank toward the Stone Bridge across the Moskva to the Sofia Quay.
Nairobi, 1983