Langley, March 1986
CAREY Jordan stood at his window and stared out at his favorite view. It was late in the month and the first faint haze of green was coming upon the forest between the CIA main building and the Potomac River. Soon the glint of water, always visible through the leafless woods in winter, would disappear. He loved Washington; it had more woods, trees, parks, and gardens than any city he knew, and spring was his favorite month.
At least, it had been. Spring 1986 was proving a nightmare. Sergei Bokhan, the GRU officer the CIA had been running in Athens, had made clear during his repeated debriefings in America that he believed if he had flown back to Moscow he would have faced a firing squad. He could not prove it, but the excuse his superior officer had given for his recall, his son’s bad grades at military academy, were simply a lie. Therefore, he had been blown. He had not made any mistakes himself, so he believed he had been betrayed.
As Bokhan had been among the first three to experience problems, the CIA had been skeptical. Now they were less unbelieving. Five others around the world had been mysteriously recalled in midposting and had vaporized into thin air.
That made six. With the Brits’ man Gordievsky, seven. Five more, based inside the USSR, had also vanished. There was not a single major source, representing years of hard work, patience, and cunning, and a massive investment of tax dollars, now left functioning. Bar two.
Behind him Harry Gaunt, head of the SE Division, which was the principal—nay, at the moment the only—victim of the virus, sat plunged in thought. Gaunt was the same age as the DDO and they had come up through the ranks together, weathering years in foreign outstations, recruiting their sources, and playing the Great Game against the KGB enemy, and they trusted each other like brothers.
That was the trouble; inside the SE Division they all trusted each other. They had to. They were the inner core, the most exclusive club, the cutting edge of the covert war. Yet each man harbored a terrible suspicion. Howard, code breaks, clever detective work by the KGB’s Line KR, might account for five, six, even seven blown-away agents. But fourteen? The whole goddam lot?
And yet there could not be a traitor. There must not be. Not in the Soviet/East European Division. There was a knock on the door. The mood lightened. The last remaining success story was waiting to come in.
“Sit down, Jason,” said the DDO. “Harry and I just wanted a word to say ‘Well done.’ Your man Orion has come up with real paydirt. The guys in Analysis are having a field day. So we reckon the agent who brought him in is worth a GS-15 tag.”
Promotion, from GS-14 to GS-15. He thanked them.
“How is your man Lysander in Madrid?”
“He’s fine, sir. He’s reporting regularly. Not cosmic stuff, but useful. His tour’s nearly up. He’ll be going back to Moscow soon.”
“He hasn’t been recalled prematurely?”
“No, sir. Should he?”
“No reason at all, Jason.”
“Could I say something, speak frankly?”
“Fire away.”
“There’s word out in the Division that we’ve been having a rough time these past six months.”
“Really?” said Gaunt. “Well, people will gossip.”
Up to that point the full import of the disaster had been confined to a top ten men at the peak of the agency hierarchy. But though Ops had six thousand employees, a thousand of them in the SE Division with only a hundred at Monk’s level, it was still a village and in a village word spreads. Monk took a breath and plunged on.
“The talk is that we have been losing agents. I even heard a figure of up to ten.”
“You know the need-to-know rules, Jason.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, maybe we have had a few problems. It happens in all agencies. Runs of good luck and runs of bad. What’s your point?”
“Even if the figure was anything like ten, there is only one place all such information is gathered together in one place. The 301 files.”
“I think we know how the agency is run, soldier,” growled Gaunt.
“So how come Lysander and Orion are still running free?” asked Monk.
“Look, Jason,” said the DDO patiently. “I told you once you were weird. Meaning unconventional, a rule breaker. But that you were lucky. Okay, we have had some losses, but don’t forget your two assets were in the 301 files as well.”
“No, they weren’t.”
An observer could have heard a peanut drop on the pile carpet. Harry Gaunt stopped fiddling with his pipe, which he never smoked indoors but used like an actor’s prop.