“Then what the hell are you doing to my department?” demanded Borisov loudly.
Karpov considered the question carefully. “Why don’t you tell me what is happening to your department?” he countered.
“It’s being stripped, that’s what,” snarled Borisov. “You have to be behind it. Or aware of it. How the hell am I supposed to run the S operation when my best men, my best documents, and my best facilities are being stripped from me? Bloody years of hard work—all confiscated within a matter of days.”
He had had his explosion, the thing that he had bottled up until now. Karpov sat back, lost in thought, while Borisov filled the glasses. Karpov had not risen as high as he had within the labyrinthine corridors of the KGB without developing a sixth sense for danger. Borisov was no alarmist; there had to be something behind what he said, but Karpov quite genuinely did not know what it was. He leaned forward.
“Pal Petrovitch,” he said, dropping into the very familiar diminutive of Pavel, “as you say, we have been around for a good many years. Believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Will you please stop shouting and tell me?”
Borisov was mollified, although puzzled by Karpov’s assertion of ignorance. “All right,” he said, as if explaining the obvious to a child. “First, two goons arrive from the Central Committee and demand that I hand over to them my best illegal, a man I’ve spent years training and of whom I had the greatest hopes. They say he has to be detached for ‘special duties,’ whatever that may mean. Okay, I give them my best man. I don’t like it, but I do it. Two days later they are back. They want my best legend, a story that took more than ten years to put together. Not since that damned Iranian affair have I been treated like that. You remember the Iranian business? I still haven’t recovered from that.”
Karpov nodded. He had not been with the Illegals Directorate then, but Borisov had told him all about it later when they worked together during Karpov’s tenure as its head. In the last days of the Shah of Iran, the International Department of the Central Committee had decided it would be a nice idea to spirit the entire Politburo of the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) Party out of Iran covertly. They had raided Borisov’s magpie-hoarded files and confiscated twenty-two perfect Iranian legends, cover stories Borisov had been saving to send people into Iran, not get them out. “Stripped to the bone!” he had screamed at the time. “Just to get those flea-bitten wogs to safety.” Later he had complained to Karpov, “It didn’t do them much good, either. The Ayatollah’s in charge, the Tudeh is still banned, and we can’t even mount an operation in there anymore.”
Karpov knew that the affair still rankled, but the new business was odder. For one thing, any request for personnel or legend should have come to him. “Whom did you give them?” he asked.
“Petrofsky,” said Borisov resignedly. “I had to. They asked for the best, and he was way ahead of the others. Remember Petrofsky?”
Karpov nodded. He had headed the Illegals Directorate for two years only, but he recalled all their best nam
es and ongoing operations. In his present post he had total access, anyway. “Whose authorization was on these requisitions?”
“Well, technically the Central Committee’s. But from the authority rating ...” Borisov pointed a rigid finger at the ceiling and, by inference, the sky.
“God?” queried Karpov.
“Almost. Our beloved General Secretary. At least, that’s my guess.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Just after they got the legend, the same clowns came back again. This time they took the receiver crystal for one of the covert transmitters you planted in England four years ago. That was why I thought you were behind it.”
Karpov’s eyes narrowed. During the time he was head of the Illegals Directorate the NATO countries had been deploying Pershing II and Cruise missiles. Washington had been running around the world trying to reenact the last reel of every John Wayne movie ever written, and the Politburo had been worried sick. Karpov had received orders to upgrade the Illegals’ contingency planning for massive behind-the-lines sabotage operations in Western Europe, for use in the event of any actual outbreak of hostilities.
To fulfill this order he had had a number of clandestine radio transmitters placed in Western Europe, including three in Britain. The men guarding the sets and trained to operate them were all “sleepers,” ordered to lie low until activated by an agent with the proper identification codes. The sets were ultramodern, scrambling their messages as they were transmitted; to unscramble a message the receiving set would need a programmed crystal. The crystals were stored in a safe in the Illegals Directorate.
“Which transmitter?” Karpov inquired.
“The one you called ‘Poplar.’ ”
Karpov nodded. All operations, agents, and assets had official code names. But Karpov had been a specialist on Britain for so long and knew London so well that he had private codes names for his own operations, and they were based on London suburbs whose names contained two syllables. The three transmitters he had caused to be placed in Britain were, for him, “Hackney,” “Shoreditch,” and “Poplar.”
“Any more, Pal Petrovitch?”
“Sure. These guys are never satisfied. The last one they took was Igor Volkov.”
Karpov knew of this Major Volkov, formerly of the Executive Action Department. (When the Politburo had decided that straight hit jobs—“executive actions”—were becoming too embarrassing and that the Bulgars and East Germans should be told to do the dirty work, the department had begun to concentrate on sabotage.) “What’s his specialty?” he asked.
“Bringing clandestine packages across state borders, particularly in Western Europe.”
“Smuggling.”
“All right, smuggling. He’s good. He knows more about the borders in that part of the world, the customs and immigration procedures and how to get around them, than anyone else we’ve got. Well ... had, I should say. They took him, too.”
Karpov rose and leaned forward, placing both hands on the older man’s shoulders. “Look, Starets, I give you my word, this is not my operation. I didn’t even know about it. But we both know it has to be very big, and that means dangerous to start poking into. Stay cool, bite the bullet, absorb your losses. I’ll try to find out quietly what is going on and when you will get your assets back. For your part, stay buttoned up tighter than a Georgian’s purse, okay?”
Borisov raised both his hands, palms forward, in a gesture of innocence. “You know me, Yevgeni Sergeivitch, I’m going to die the oldest man in Russia.”
Karpov laughed. “I think you will, too.” He pulled on his coat and made for the door. Borisov followed to see him out.