The two uniformed Russian militiamen standing close to the embassy compound’s main entrance weren’t there on any kind of guard duty. They were just trying to cadge whatever warmth they could from the heated U.S. Marine sentry box right behind the gate. It had been chilly even with the sun high overhead. Now, with night drawing closer and thick black storm clouds piling up in the east, the outside temperature was slipping toward the freezing mark. Some pessimistic forecasters were even predicting Moscow’s first brief snowfall by early morning.
Banich was still crossing the street when one of the marine guards recognized him and opened the gate.
The tallest of the two Russian cops stopped blowing on his ungloved hands long enough to sketch a quick wave. “Hello, Mr. Banich.” His English was pretty good.
“Hi, Pyotr. What’d you and Mischa do to wind up on night duty this close to the river? Screw your sergeant’s grandmother?”
Both men laughed. They were part of the crime-prevention detail assigned to patrol streets near the embassy. Russia’s capital needed all the U.S. aid and investment it could attract, and having American diplomats routinely mugged didn’t strike anyone in Moscow as a particularly good advertisement for the city’s charms.
Banich stepped through the gate and headed for the huge red brick chancery building.
“Hey, Mr. Banich?”
He half turned. “Yes?”
“Got any investment advice for us?”
Banich paused for a moment, pretending to fumble for the right, poorly pronounced Russian words. “Of course. Buy low… and sell high.”
He left them chuckling behind him.
The whole incident had been recorded, of course. Probably by a hidden mike monitored in one of the apartment houses across the street from the embassy. Russia’s Federal Investigative Service didn’t have all the resources or powers of the old KGB, but it still existed to protect the new state from foreign spies. And foreign spies tended to work out of foreign embassies.
FIS surveillance was one of the reasons Banich always carefully changed his outward appearance before coming back from a stint as Nikolai Ushenko. It usually only took a quick stop at the downtown apartment he rented under Ushenko’s name. The Ukrainian’s thick, fur-lined jacket, brown sweater, and American-made blue jeans were gone, replaced by a blue London Fog raincoat, dark gray suit, white shirt, and red silk tie. The stylish pair of horn-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a splash of after-shave, and a dab of Jack Daniel’s or wine completed the transformation from plain-spoken, shrewd rustic to lazy, fun-loving, junior-grade diplomat.
When he first arrived in Moscow, Banich had spent more than a month thoroughly playing his part as a mediocre deputy assistant economic attaché firmly committed to doing as little real work as possible. While apparently evaluating sales and investment opportunities for U.S. firms, he’d led FIS watchers on a dizzying round of factory tours, boring business conferences, and marathon pub crawls. The whole booze-tinged process had been well worth it. Day by day, the team of agents tailing him had dwindled, with man after man pulled off to follow more promising suspects — or to nurse long-term hangovers. Now they hardly bothered to keep tabs on him at all.
That technique wouldn’t have worked six or seven years before. The KGB would never have allowed a foreign official, especially an American, to wander at will though Moscow and the surrounding countryside. But the KGB had been torn apart for its complicity in the August 1991 coup. And the fragment tasked with counterespionage, the FIS, spent a lot of its time and resources spying on itself; trying to sniff out the faintest whiff of a renewed hard-line threat to Russia’s elected government. Rumor said the splintered agency’s morale and effectiveness were still at an all-time low.
Of course, that robbed Banich’s own job of some of its challenge. He shrugged the thought off. He’d welcome anything that made intelligence-gathering in this crazy country easier. His own nation’s changing priorities made the job tough enough as it was.
Len Kutner was waiting for him in his cramped, sixth-floor interior office. That was something else Banich liked about the tall, balding chief of station. The man never played phony power games such as holding every meeting on his own turf.
“Alex. Sorry to break in on you like this. Everything okay?”
Banich shook Kutner’s outstretched hand and nodded. “Fine. Hennessy’s faxing shipping orders down to Kiev right now. And I picked up this for our troubles.” He held out the sheaf of Ministry of Defense documents.
The station chief flipped through them rapidly, his forehead wrinkling with effort as he translated technical terms into their English equivalents. “They’re moving three full divisions? Rather expensive, isn’t it?”
“Sure is.” Banich pointed to the last few pages in Kutner’s hands. “And they’re moving them back into Belarus from up near the St. Petersburg Military District.”
“Closer to the Polish border? Curioser and curioser.” Kutner looked up from the documents. “Have you heard anything else about this? From your sources in the Parliament, say?”
Banich shook his head. “Not a whisper. Which I find very interesting indeed.”
“Very. Maybe some of the generals are falling back into some bad old habits, eh?”
“Exactly.”
“Right. Put some time in on this one, Alex…” Kutner paused, looking troubled. “Or at least, as much time as you can afford. We’ve received some new marching orders from D.C., through Langley.”
Banich waited for the other man to explain. Now they were getting to why he’d been called out of the field so soon.
Kutner laid the documents down on his subordinate’s file-strewn desk and looked him right in the eye. “It seems there’s a new push on from some damned interagency working group. The Joint Trade Task Force. Whatever in God’s name that is.
“Anyway, they’re complaining that most of our product focuses too much on military and political matters… and not enough on trade and commerce. Stuff they call ‘the real measure of a nation’s strength.’”
“Jesus Christ!”
Kutner nodded bet kept going. “Whatever you or I may think about it, Alex, these folks have real pull with the Congress. And they’ve got backing inside the Agency, too.” He handed Banich a message flimsy. “That came down the satellite link this morning. It lists our new priorities in order of importance.”
Banich scanned the list in growing disbelief. Sales figures and prices for French and German industrial tools and pharmaceuticals? For Japanese automobiles? Evidence of “payoffs” for Russian buyers or government officials? It went on for ten or fifteen more categories, each one growing more obscure and more difficult to dig up. He looked up angrily. “These assholes can’t be serious! We’re trying to keep tabs on a dozen republics spread across eleven time zones and they want us to waste time on this kind of crap?”
Kutner held up a hand to slow him down. “Yes, they do. Look, Alex, I’m pulling in every chit I’ve got to get this reversed or at least trimmed down. But for right now, those are your new targets.”
“Great.” Banich tried unsuccessfully to tone down the bitterness in his voice. “Can you tell me which of my contacts I’m supposed to cut off while I chase down this garbage? The Ministry of Defense? Or maybe my recruits inside the Foreign Ministry?”
Kutner shook his head. “Just do what you can. Nobody’s expecting miracles from you, Alex.”
“Well, that’s good, because I’m fresh out of loaves and fishes.” Banich took a deep breath, fighting to calm down. It wouldn’t do any good to piss Kutner off. He needed all the upper-echelon backing he could get. “Look, Len. I can’t even begin to track half of this junk. Not with the resources we’ve got now. We’re going to need more bodies around here just to get the necessary legwork off the ground.”