“Shit, where?”
“He’s on a slab in the morgue down at Second Medical. His file came in this morning. He’s a John Doe. Found in the woods out in the west about a week ago. Beaten to death. No ID.”
“Well, you’d better get on to Chernov. He’ll be all over you.”
As he chomped on the remainder of his stew, Inspector Novikov was a very thoughtful man.
Rome, August 1986
ALDRICH Ames had arrived with his wife in the Eternal City to take up his new posting on July 22. Even after eight months at language school, his Italian was workaday and passable but not good. Unlike Monk he had no ear for foreign tongues.
With his newfound wealth he was able to live in a far better style than ever before, but no one in the Rome Station spotted the difference because no one had seen his lifestyle before April of the previous year.
Before long it became clear that Ames was a habitual drunk and underachiever. This seemed not to worry his colleagues, and even less the Russians. As at Langley, he began to sweep masses of classified material off his desk and into shopping bags with which he strolled out of the embassy to deliver to the KGB.
In August his new KGB controller came down from Moscow to meet him. Unlike Androsov in Washington, he did not live locally but flew in from Moscow whenever a meet was necessary. In Rome there were far fewer problems than in the States. The new controller, “Vlad,” was in fact Colonel Vladimir Mechulayev of Directorate K of the First Chief Directorate.
At their first meeting Ames was going to protest at the inordinate speed with which the KGB had picked up the men he had betrayed, thus putting him in danger. But Vlad got in first, apologizing for the crudity and explaining that Mikhail Gorbachev had personally overruled them all. Then he came down to the business that brought him to Rome.
“We have a problem, my dear Rick,” he said. “The volume of material you have brought us is quite enormous and of inestimable value. High among these documents are the brief pen portraits and photos you supplied of the top control officers for spies being run inside the USSR.”
Ames was puzzled, trying to register through a fuzz of alcohol.
“Yes, anything wrong?” he asked.
“Not wrong, just a puzzle,” Mechulayev said, and produced a photograph that he laid on the coffee table.
“This one. A certain Jason Monk. Right?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“In your reports you describe his reputation in the SE Division as ‘a rising star.’ Meaning, we presume, that he controls one, maybe two assets inside the Soviet Union.”
“That’s the view around the office, or it was when I last looked in. But you must have them.”
“Ah, my dear Rick, that is the problem. All the traitors you kindly revealed to us have now been identified, arrested, and ... talked to. And each has been, how shall I put it ...” The Russian recalled the shuddering men he had faced in the interrogation room after Grishin had introduced the prisoners to his own personal brand of pressure to cooperate.
“They have all been very frank, very candid, most cooperative. Each has told us who his control officers were, in some cases several of them. But no Jason Monk. Not one. Of course, false names can be used, usually are. But the picture, Rick. Not one recognized the picture. Now, you see my problem? Who does Monk run, and where are they?”
“I don’t know. I can’t understand it. They must have been on the 301 files.”
“My dear Rick, neither can we because they weren’t.”
Before the meeting ended Ames had been given a vast amount of money and a list of tasks. He stayed in Rome for three years and betrayed everything he could, an enormous haul of secret and top-secret documents. Among these were four more agents, but all non-Russians, nationals of the East European Bloc countries. But task number one was clear and simple: On your return to Washington or hopefully before, find out who Monk runs in the USSR.
¯
WHILE Detective Inspectors Novikov and Volsky had been indulging in their informative lunch in the canteen at militia headquarters, the Duma had been in full session.
It had taken time to recall the Russian parliament from summer recess, for so large is the territory that many of the delegates had to travel thousands of miles to attend the constitutional debate. Nevertheless, the debate was calculated to be of extraordinary importance because the issue at stake was a change of the c
onstitution.
After the unforeseen death of President Cherkassov, Article Fifty-nine of the constitution required the prime minister to take over the presidency per interim. The period of interregnum was decreed to be three months.
Prime Minister Ivan Markov had indeed taken over the acting Presidency but, after consulting a number of experts, had been advised that as Russia was due for a fresh presidential election in June 2000, to have set an earlier one for October 1999 could cause serious dislocation, even chaos. The motion before the Duma was therefore in favor of a once-only Amendment Act, extending the acting presidency for three further months and advancing the year 2000 election from June to January.
The word Duma comes from the verb dumat, meaning to think or contemplate; thus the Duma is “a place of thinking.” Many observers felt the Duma more a place of screaming and shouting than of mature contemplation. On that hot summer’s day it certainly justified the latter description.