“I just never got around to filing their details with Central Registry. It was an oversight. I’m sorry.”
“Just where are the original reports? Your own reports, covering recruitment details, places, times of meetings?” asked Gaunt at last.
“In my safe. They’ve never left.”
“And all ongoing operating procedures?”
“In my head.”
There was another even longer pause.
“Thank you, Jason,” said the DDO at last. “We’ll be in touch.”
Two weeks later there was a major strategy campaign at the pinnacle of the Ops Directorate. Carey Jordan, working with only two fellow analysts, had whittled the 198 who theoretically had had access over the previous twelve months to the 301 files down to forty-one. Aldrich Ames, by then still taking his Italian course, was on the smaller list.
Jordan, with Gaunt, Gus Hathaway, and two others argued that to make sure, the forty-one should be subjected, however painful it might be, to serious investigation. That would mean a hostile polygraph test and a check of private finances.
The polygraph was an American invention and great store was set by it. Only research in the late eighties and early nineties revealed how flawed it could be. For one thing, an experienced liar can beat it, and espionage is based on deception, hopefully only of the enemy.
For another, the questioners need to be superbly briefed to ask the right questions. They cannot be so briefed unless the subject has been checked out. To sort out the liar, they need to cause the guilty party to think, Oh my God, they know, they know, and set the pulses racing. If the liar can discern from the questions that they know nothing, he will calm down and stay calm. This is the difference between a friendly and a hostile polygraph test. The friendly version is a waste of paper if the subject is a skilled and prepared dissembler.
Key to the inquiry the DDO wanted would be a check on the subjects’ finances. Had they but known it, Aldrich Ames, broke and desperate after a messy divorce and remarriage twelve months earlier, was by then awash with cash, all deposited since April 1985.
Leading the group that opposed the DDO was Ken Mulgrew
. He evoked the frightening damage that James Angleton had achieved with his constant checking on loyal officers, pointing out that to check out private finances was a massive invasion of privacy and an assault on civil rights.
Gaunt countered that never in Angleton’s day had there been a sudden loss of a dozen agents in a brief six months. Angleton’s own investigations had been based on paranoia; the agency in 1986 was gazing at solid evidence that something had gone badly wrong.
The hawks lost. Civil rights won the day. The “hard” check on the forty-one was vetoed.
¯
INSPECTOR Pavel Volsky sighed as another file thumped onto his desk.
A year earlier he had been perfectly happy as a top sergeant in Organized Crime. At least there they had got a chance to raid the warehouses of the underworld and confiscate their ill-gotten gains. A smart sergeant could live well when confiscated luxuries suffered a slight skim-off before being handed over to the state.
But no, his wife had wanted to be the lady of a Detective Inspector so when the chance occurred he took the course, the promotion, and the transfer to Homicide.
He could not foresee that they would give him the John Doe desk. When he gazed at the tide of “who-knows-who-cares” files that drifted across his vision, he often wished he was back at Shabolovka Street.
At least most John Does had a motive attached. Robbery, of course. With the wallet gone the victim had lost his money, credit cards, family snapshots, and the all-important pazport, the internal Russian ID document, with picture, that carried all the necessary details. Oh, and his life, or he would not be on a slab in a morgue.
In the case of an upstanding citizen with a wallet worth taking there would usually be family. They would complain to Missing Persons, who ran a weekly gallery of family photos over to him, and often a match could be made. Then the weeping family could be told where to identify and collect their missing member.
In the cases where robbery was not the motive, the body would usually still have the pazport somewhere about the pockets, so the file would never come to Volsky anyway.
Nor would all the derelicts who threw their ID away because it revealed where they came from and they did not want the militia to shunt them back there, but who still died of cold or alcohol on the streets, come his way. Volsky only dealt with certain homicides, by a person unknown of a person unknown. It was, he mused, an exclusive but pretty futile occupation.
The file that landed in front of him on August 4 was different. Robbery could hardly be the motive. A glance at the Scene of Discovery report from the Western Division told him the cadaver had been discovered by a mushroom picker in the woods off the Minsk Highway just inside the city limits. A hundred yards off the highway—discount hit-and-run.
The Personal Effects list was gloomy. Victim was wearing (from the bottom up) shoes plastic, cheap, cracked, down-at-heel; socks cheap, store-bought, ingrained with grime; undershorts ditto; trousers, thin, black, greasy; belt, plastic, worn. That was it. No shirt, tie, or jacket. Just a greatcoat found nearby, described as ex-army, fifties vintage, very threadbare.
There was a brief paragraph at the bottom. Contents of pockets nil, repeat nil. No watch, ring, or any item of personal possession.
Volsky glanced at the photo taken at the scene. Someone had kindly closed the eyelids. A thin, unshaven face, mid-sixties perhaps, looking a decade older. Haggard, that was the word, and that would be before he died.
Poor old sod, thought Volsky, I’ll bet no one did you in for your Swiss bank account. He turned to the postmortem report. After several paragraphs he stubbed out his cigarette and swore.