“How far to the road?” asked the officer.
“About a hundred meters,” said Gennadi.
“Hit-and-run drivers move on fast. They don’t lug the victim a hundred yards. Anyway, ten yards would do in all these trees.” To one of his men the lieutenant said:
“Walk up to the highway. Check the shoulder for a smashed-up bicycle or a wrecked car. He might have been in a pile-up and crawled here. Then stay there and flag down the ambulance.”
The officer used his mobile phone to call for an investigator, photographer, and medical expert. What he saw could not be a natural causes. He also asked for an ambulance but confirmed that life was extinct. One of the policemen set off through the trees for the road. The others waited, moving away from the stench.
The plainclothes trio came first, in a plain buff Uzhgorod. They were waved down on the highway, parked on the shoulder, and walked the rest of the way. The investigator nodded at the lieutenant.
“What have we got?”
“He’s over there. I called you because I can’t see how it could be natural causes. Badly knocked about and a hundred yards from the road.”
“Who found him?”
“The mushroom picker over there.”
The detective walked over to Gennadi.
“Tell me. From the beginning.”
The photographer took pictures, then the doctor pulled on a gauze mask and made a quick examination. He straightened up and pulled off his rubber gloves.
“Ten kopecks to a good bottle of Moskovskaya, it’s a homicide. The lab will tell us more, but someone knocked the shit out of him before he died. Probably not here. Congratulations, Volodya, you just got your first zhmurik of the day.”
He used the Russian police and underworld slang for a “stiff.” Two orderlies from the ambulance came through the wood with a stretcher. The doctor nodded and they zipped the corpse into a body bag before taking it back to the road.
“Are you finished with me?” asked Gennadi.
“No chance,” said the detective. “I need a statement, at the station.”
The policemen took Gennadi back to their precinct house, the headquarters of the Western District three miles down the road toward Moscow. The body went further, into the heart of the city, to the morgue of the Second Medical Institute. There it was put in a cold chest. Forensic pathologists were few and far between and their workload was overwhelming.
Yemen, October 1985
JASON Monk infiltrated South Yemen in mid-October. Though small and poor, the People’s Republic had a first-class airport, formerly the military base of the Royal Air Force. Big jets could and did land there.
Monk’s Spanish passport and supporting United Nations travel documents excited thorough but finally unsuspicious attention at Immigration, and after half an hour, clutching his all-purpose suitcase, he was through.
Rome had indeed informed the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization program that Señor Martinez was coming, but gave him a date which postdated Monk’s actual arrival by a week. The Yemeni officers at the airport did not know that. So there was no car to receive him. He took a taxi and checked in at the new French hotel, the Frontel, on the spit of land joining the rock of Aden to the mainland.
Even though his papers were good and he expected to run into no real Spaniards, he knew the mission was dangerous. It was black, very black.
The great majority of espionage is carried out by officers inside an embassy and technically posing as embassy staff. They thus benefit from diplomatic status if anything goes wrong. Some are “declared,” meaning they make no bones about what they do, and the local counterintelligence people know and accept this, though the real job remains tactfully unmentioned. A big station in hostile territory will always try to maintain a few “undeclared” officers whose cover jobs in the trade, culture, chancery, or press section remain unblown. The reason is simple.
Undeclared officers have a better chance of not being tailed out on the street, and therefore being freer to service dead drops or attend covert meetings than those always being followed.
But a spy working outside diplomatic cover cannot benefit from the Vienna Accords. If a diplomat is exposed he can be declared persona non grata and expelled. His country will then protest its innocence and expel one of the other nation’s diplomats. The tit-for-tat dance having been gone through, the game resumes as before.
But a spy going in “on the black” is an illegal. For him, depending on the nature of the place where he has been caught, exposure can mean terrible torture, a long spell in a labor camp, or a lonely death. Even the people who sent him in can rarely help him.
In the democracies there will be a fair trial and a humane jail. In the dictatorships there are no civil rights. Some have never even heard of them. South Yemen was like that, and the United States did not even have an embassy there in 1985.
In October the heat is still fierce and Friday is the day of rest when no work is done. What, thought Monk, will a fit Russian officer do on a blazing hot day off? Have a swim was a reasonable idea.
For security’s sake the original source who had had that dinner in New York with his FBI ex-classmate had not been re-contacted. He might have given a better description of Major Solomin even helped compose a portrait. He could even be back in Yemen, in a position to point the man out. But the assessment had been that he was also a braggart who talked too much.