“Project Pax,” said Gertz, nodding his head. “That’s great. I like that. The president will get a Nobel Peace Prize, and you and I will be the only people who will understand how it happened.”
16
Alan Frankel had every reason to think he was safe. His surveillance detection run had stretched across two countries by the time he got to Moscow. He had flown from his home in Amsterdam to Berlin to meet some potential clients for his advertising firm, Kiosks Unlimited, which despite its grand name had just one salesman, him, and a secretary. Then he had traveled to Prague for a day, meeting another prospective client and sending a string of text and Internet messages. In each city, he had posted an entry to “Admonitions,” his blog about the global media market. His cover was backstopped and integrated at every level; the deeper someone went on the Internet to check him out, the more confirmation they would find for his identity.
And now Alan Frankel was in Moscow on the last leg of his trip. He was staying at the Volodya Park, a new hotel on the south bank of the Moscow River, just below the old Red Square. It wasn’t as fancy as the Kempinski or the Four Seasons, not by half. But the little hotel was just right for a young ad-sales representative who was pushing into a freewheeling market with his laptop and lots of hustle.
Jeffrey Gertz thought of Frankel as one of his up-and-comers. He sometimes referred to him as “Blogger Boy” in meetings with his senior staff in Studio City. Frankel was the new-age operations officer who could go anywhere in the world he wanted because his cover was impenetrable.
Sometimes Gertz posted his own comments to “Admonitions,” under the screen name “Ironman23.” He would opine on publicity campaigns for new movies and music releases. Occasionally he would post a subtle word of praise for Frankel following an especially good operation, disguised in what he imagined was blogger language and signed, Ironman23.
Russia was a hard place to operate, even Gertz admitted that. The Russians had total control of the environment, with fixed surveillance everywhere: They saw you coming in and going out; they watched as you waited for a Metro train, or crossed the street, or sat in the hotel lobby. It wasn’t worth the trouble arranging meetings in Moscow, anyway, the old pros said. It was so easy now for Russians to get out of the country. Let them fly to Croatia or Majorca with the other tourists and meet you there.
But that no-go logic was for losers, according to Gertz. There was no such thing as a denied area in his world of mobile platforms. The Hit Parade could operate anywhere and everywhere-getting its people in and out before the local service had a chance to notice their passport stamps, let alone rumble their missions. In his operational atlas, Moscow was no different from Munich or Montreal.
Alan Frankel had come to Moscow to meet a Pakistani diplomat who had been posted to Moscow a year before. He was from a prominent Punjabi family in Lahore, whose members included the leaders of the political party that dominated the province, some of whom had a history of making trouble for America. Frankel was going to offer him a lot of money-so much money that in the old, pre-Gertz days, it would have been authorized by a covert action “finding.” What the Pakistani would have to do in return was steer his family away from the anti-American virus that infected Punjabi politics.
Gertz had gotten a tip from one of his sources that this Pakistani was ripe for recruitment. Frankel’s job was to close the deal.
Frankel kept living his bulletproof cover when he arrived in Moscow. He made an appointment with TanyaTech, an ad agency that did political work for the Kremlin. They had lavish offices in an old mansion along the river; inside the door were pretty young Russian girls to greet visitors and show them to their appointments. In other lives, these long-legged, silken-haired women might have been oligarchs’ girlfriends, or worse, but here they were decorative office ladies.
Frankel had asked to see the boss, Lev Lieberman. He was out, or so claimed his secretary, a woman with striking white-blond hair and purple eye shadow. Frankel charmed and pestered this woman into making a call, and a few minutes later the director trundled down the hall.
The Russian listened sleepily to Frankel’s presentation, staring at his iPhone most of the time. He perked up slightly when the American said that he could rep TanyaTech for one-quarter of the price that the fancy advertising firm in London was charging. But then he shook his head-impossible!-and went back to tapping out messages on his phone.
The Russian finally got rid of Frankel by sending him to NovyaBank, a financial company in Moscow that was part of the same business network. When the American asked for a contact there, the Russian rolled his eyes and called a friendly underling at the bank, who reluctantly agreed to see Frankel that afternoon at his office east of the city center.
The NovyaBank headquarters was a gray slate building that, in the harsh summer light, had the sooty look of an unwashed truck. The traffic was a knot on the way out of downtown Moscow, so Frankel was fifteen minutes late. When he arrived and asked the doorman to call upstairs, he was told that his contact was out. The man’s secretary said in broken English that the gentleman in question had left two hours ago-not long after Lieberman had called to make the appointment.
Frankel spelled his name twice for the secretary and gave her his telephone number and email address. For good measure, he left his card with the doorman. All he wanted was embellishment for his identity, which he had achieved simply by going to the bank’s offices.
Frankel never once looked for surveillance. That was the virtue of a three-country SDR. If anyone became suspicious along the way and began asking questions, they would find only reinforcing pieces of the cover legend, place to place and meeting to meeting. It wasn’t a legend, really; it was a true lie.
The meeting with the Pakistani diplomat was set for ten that night, at a bar near the Moscow hills where young couples went to get their wedding pictures taken. Gertz favored that kind of open meeting place; he believed that once your cover was established, it was best to hide in plain sight. What drew attention were the attempts at concealment.
Frankel had six hours to kill. He went back to his hotel and dropped off his briefcase. Near the hotel was the Tretyakov Art Gallery, which he had missed on his earlier trips to Moscow. That was a plausible stop for a visiting American businessman, and it was better than sitting in his hotel room.
He walked the few blocks to the gallery, still housed in its nineteenth-century palace. The collection was an ark of the Russian past: The paintings on the walls conveyed all the contradictory yearnings of the Russian elite-their French manners and fashions, their awkward enjoyment of privilege born on the backs of serfs who were no better than chattel slaves, their forays into intellectual terrain that more cautious Europeans barely dared to imagine. Room by room, with its portraits of pallid aristocrats and fierce, bearded peasants and desolate winter landscapes, the gallery conveyed a foreboding of what lay ahead for Russia.
Frankel paused occasionally to savor the paintings; he sat for a good minute looking at a Kramskoy portrait titled Unknown Woman, haughty in her carriage, a white feather in her sable hat. He doubled back to an earlier room, to see the brushwork of a portrait painted fifty years before by Borovikovsky of a similarly haunting Russian beauty. That was when he had the first inkling that he was being followed. A dark-browed beetle of a man he had noticed on his way into the gallery had appeared again, he was certain. This time the dark figure was wearing sunglasses and a red-checked beret.