Cooper did not lose his good mood. “You are flying to Brussels later today and will dance with Ivan. That’s firm. After that, who knows?”
Kyle snorted and went back to the food. “I know what happens next, Deke. Brussels is the end of the line for me. After I corroborate Ivan’s story, then he is all yours. Stick him full of truth serum or shove apples up his ass to make him talk. I don’t care. I have to get back to work.”
The colonel shot him a long look. “I know more about Ivan Strakov than you do, Swanson.”
“No argument there, Colonel Markey. You probably do. I only knew him for a few weeks many years ago when he was just a sergeant, little more than a grunt with a rifle. I still am bewildered that he tabbed me to talk with when he defected.”
The colonel finally showed some emotion. “What if I tell you that Strakov wasn’t a sergeant at the time, Swanson. Young Ivan was already an intelligence officer on assignment to evaluate and report on your Scout/Sniper program. I saw that you guys called him ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ The reason he could not shoot up to your standards is because he was never trained as a sniper at all. He was sent to join your course as a spy; he milked you like a cow.”
Kyle Swanson stopped eating and listened with growing incredulity as Markey gave him unexpected information, with Deke Cooper offering occasional side comments. After ten minutes, the breakfast adjourned and they all trooped up to Kyle’s suite for privacy. The two CID investigators stood guard in the hallway outside.
Markey said that he had been Strakov’s “mirror.” Their careers had roughly run in parallel, on opposite sides of the strategic aisle, and they had parried frequently in both official and social settings. Ivan and Tom knew each other, but were not friends.
“I never bought the story that he died in some little plane crash in Lake Baikal. Discarded that as soon as I heard about it. Ivan would never have taken such a chance. In that part of Russia, in this season, he would have been traveling aboard a transport with multiple engines. So I thought from the get-go that he was playing another one of his games.” The American colonel was looking from the hotel window as he spoke, as if watching spring bloom in Estonia. He was a worried man.
“Swanson, you know now that I am posted here in Tallinn, right? The official title is as a senior fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence?” The officer seemed to be growing nervous, talking to the window. “Have you wondered why that vital organization is located in this little burg of a country, right in the armpit of Russia?”
“No. I had other things on my mind. Tell me about it.”
Deke Cooper of the CIA took over. “The short version is that after the collapse of communism, Estonia was left with nothing. It had one point two million people and still had to do more than ninety percent of its trade with Russia. It was little more than a beggar state at the time. Estonia had one foot still in the nineteenth century, and one in the twentieth and both feet stuck in the mud. So the country made the radical move of betting the farm on the twenty-first century, and has since become an economic Baltic Tiger.”
Swanson said, “I couldn’t tell that over in Narva. That place is Russian to the core.”
Colonel Markey found a chair. “It is, but the country as a whole is leaving Narva behind. This is now one of the most wired places in Europe, and any kid who reaches high school without having developed his or her own app or start-up tech company is considered a slow learner, a social pariah and will probably never get laid. The Estonian government saw early on that computer science was the future. They built an infrastructure to support it, and now a lot of kids call their homeland ‘e-Stonia.’ Skype was not invented here by accident.”
Swanson saw the pieces coming together. “And that makes the boys in Moscow uncomfortable?”
“Better believe it. Back in 2008, there was a monster cyber-war hacking attack against Estonia, one of the biggest ever. It was of Russian origin, of course, although the Kremlin never admitted guilt. Everything over here was infected, spammed, or was virused like a plague. All it really did was make the Estonians work harder and get better at the game.”
“Was Ivan Strakov part of that attack?” Kyle asked.
The colonel nodded. “Yeah. It was his baby. He was deep in the background, but I recognized his shadow and fingerprints. He done it, Sherlock, which is another reason that I don’t trust that sonofabitch as far as I can throw a piano.”
“And where do I fit into this picture? Like I told you both, I am not a spy. I am not a trained interrogator. I do other things.” Swanson was dizzy with this new information. “I plan to swing by Brussels, do the thing with Ivan, then go home and tend to my own business. Nothing you have said, while surprising and interesting, indicates that I should do otherwise.”
Deke Cooper moved around, stretched, then folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned against a wall. “Fact is, Swanson, that the secret called Ivan Strakov has already leaked. Maybe he left a trail of bread crumbs, or a note, or who the hell knows, but the lid is already off of his defection. Moscow knows he has gone over to the other side, and Europe, NATO and Washington will not be able to contain it. Social media will have it within forty-eight hours. Think Snowden, man. Old Ivan is about to become a global celebrity.”
Now the colonel finally showed some emotion. “Even if everything he tells us is true, Kyle, somebody has to be willing to call bullshit. This is a chance for you to get some payback on him. Deke and the alphabet agencies will do all the donkey work of the interviews and follow-up, but you could be on the inside, because he wants you there. For some reason we cannot decipher, he needs you once again. The whole thing is much too hinky for me, because Ivan Strakov is not a cowboy; everything he does has a reason. What I want from you is gut feelings. Get me the right information, and I’ll stop him.”
“Or what?”
“Or we go to war, probably.”
“Another cyber-war between Russia and Estonia?”
“No, Kyle.” The colonel’s face grew tense. “Real war. Russia against NATO, which includes the United States.”
Swanson snapped a humorless laugh. “You guys want me to spy on the spy, then report straight to you instead of to my real boss at the CIA. Nothing wrong with that, Colonel, except it is borderline treason and I could end up in some supermax prison. Thanks for the chance to help save the world, but Deke and his boys are much more qualified for that sort of thing, so I pass. Get somebody else to carry that water. I’m going home.”
11
Swanson took an evening Lufthansa flight out of Tallinn primarily because it was not Aeroflot. German efficiency and timeliness was to be trusted, while riding on a Russian commercial aircraft was never really a choice if there were alternatives. His arrival in Belgium was without incident, and the check-in at the downtown hotel was smooth. It was just another city, just another airport, just another hotel. Total routine.
He had been provided with a new laptop computer and cell phone by Deke Cooper and the electronic equipment had been loaded by CIA techs with everything he might need. Brussels was six hours ahead of Washington, so the business day was just wrapping up on the other side of the Atlantic when he checked in with the office.