SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 1986.
Sofiya had been living in Sweden for only twenty days, but you would never have guessed it. In her hand, she had the latest edition of the Aftonbladet—a popular local newspaper. As she rode a bus that crossed through Östermalm, she looked like every other university student out on a stroll. She’d chosen a shrimp-coloured, zip-necked knit top with drop shoulders and a sleek-looking, super stretchy pair of high-waisted denim. She’d gathered her hair up in a ponytail and finished the look with a fake pair of round reading glasses.
She sat up straighter when the bus entered the embassy district, paying attention to the people who climbed in and out at the various stops. From her seat at the back, she had an unobstructed view of the whole bus, and she noticed her target the moment he stepped in. He’d entered by the door closest to the driver and sat down next to a window, in the first half of the bus.
Sofiya got up and came to sit next to him, appearing to have climbed on board by the rear door. She greeted the man with a polite “Hej” before spreading the Aftonbladet open wide in her lap. The plump moustached man got off the bus two stations later, excusing himself as he forced the young woman to stand to get out of his seat. She obliged him with a polite smile.
The bus started to move again, and Sofiya allowed herself a glance down at the small rectangular object she now held in her hand. Light reflected off the laminated surface of Richard Starck’s ID badge, and she smiled as her gaze settled on the American seal at the top.
She got off at the next stop and found Petrov’s car parked on the curb, the engine running. He drove off at high speed the instant she got in.
“Got it?” he asked as he u-turned on a smaller street.
“Of course,” Sofiya said, flipping the newspaper open to reveal the ID badge she’d hidden inside.
The car backtracked along the road the bus had taken, entering the embassy district again. Slowing down, Petrov turned into an underground parking station two streets away from the American chancery. He parked his car next to a black delivery van.
The vehicle’s back doors opened, and Sofiya climbed in a minute later. Svetlana Alexeïeva was waiting for her inside, ready for a makeover session. Some thirty minutes later, a Richard Starck look-alike climbed out of the van.
“What do you think?” asked Alexeïeva, from where she stood, perched next to the back doors.
Petrov stepped closer to Sofiya, inspecting the result. “Good enough,” he replied, and the young woman smiled, stretching the thick moustache that had been glued above her top lip.
“You might end up making me change my mind about her, Viktor,” said Alexeïeva as she got out of the van. “I think this broken bird could turn out to be useful to us after all.”
Though the comment hadn’t been meant for her, Sofiya answered it with a cold, dark stare. She’d have gladly said more, but now was not the time to pick a fight with the ginger-haired Minister-Counsellor.
Without a word, she pinned Starck’s ID badge to her breast pocket and rearranged her tie. Beneath the wrinkled brown trousers and checked shirt, she wore a padded suit to hide her curves and give the impression of a fat belly. Alexeïeva had helped her put on a wig and glued a pair of bushy eyebrows and a thick moustache to her skin.
To complete the look, Sofiya had forced wads of cotton in her mouth to round her cheeks and placed brown-coloured lenses over her green pupils. The result was convincing, and from afar, no one would have thought she was a woman.
Though it was only four in the afternoon, the sun had already begun to set when Sofiya reached the security gate.
She feigned a cough as she handed her badge to the guard. “I’ll only be a—couple of minutes,” she whispered in low tones, keeping the cough going. “I forgot to—fax a report.”
The guard nodded before scanning the ID. A green light blinked back at him, and he buzzed the Soviet spy in.
There was only a skeleton crew left in the building, and Sofiya made her way to the third floor without being questioned. Most of the staff didn’t work during the weekends, and the few who did, like senior-translator Richard Starck, got to go home early.
Petrov had made her memorise the path to get from the entrance to the ECR, the External Communication Relay office. She reached it with two minutes to spare, and she stopped by a vending machine to not attract any attention while she waited.
Hopefully, she wasn’t the only Soviet asset at work in the American embassy, and two floors down, Minister-Counsellor Johnson was busy playing his part. His job was to disrupt the security cameras at precisely 4.15 pm. His instructions were to activate the kill switch and to place it in a paper basket, as close as possible to the security office, before covering it with loose documents. The task accomplished, he was free to return to his daily routine.
The Soviets knew it would take the Americans some time to reboot their systems and even longer to discover the disruptive device. They had calculated that Sofiya had about a ten-minute window.
The ceiling neon lights brightened for an instant, as if experiencing a momentary surge. Sofiya glanced down at her wristwatch and saw that Johnson was right on time.
Checking around to make sure the corridor was empty, she moved to the ECR office and knelt by the door. She pulled a lock-picking tool kit out of her pocket and got to work. Her heart was beating fast in her chest, and she felt the adrenaline surge in her veins. She had the door open in under two minutes—not her personal best, but the fat suit made it harder for her to move.
Slipping inside, she flicked the ceiling lamps on. Sofiya wasn’t surprised to discover an austere area with no decoration. On one side of the room stood several tall processors, and on the other, a large desk and several filing cabinets. A personal computer sat on one end of the desk, and a large printer used all the rest of the surface.
The ECR did exactly what it said on the label. The Americans had built dozens of similar offices throughout the globe, each one serving as a relay to safely transmit information to their deployed forces. There were talks of replacing them by satellites in the sky, but the technology wasn’t that far advanced yet.
Sofiya sat down at the desk and powered on the IBM workstation. The machine whirred to life, and she pulled a floppy disk out of her pocket. She waited for the operating system to come online to insert it in the slot. She knew these new generation computers could perform up to two million instructions per second with their 40 MB hard drives. As a result, it took less than two minutes for the system to absorb the data contained on the floppy and execute the new commands it required. The printer came to life, and the small print head started moving left to right as the paper unfolded.
With her eyes glued to the door, Sofiya took in a deep, controlled breath. Aware of the time quickly ticking by, she bit her lower lip as she waited for the printer to finish its task. It seemed to take forever, and she used that time to ponder this new development. She’d been surprised when Petrov told her the next step of the plan and what her involvement would be. She had thought he needed her for nothing more than to spread her legs for a man, but she’d been wrong. Or maybe the Soviet diplomat was low on manpower.
So far, the only other ally he seemed to have in Stockholm was Minister-Counsellor Svetlana Alexeïeva, and Sofiya couldn’t imagine the obnoxious, prancy woman discreetly breaking into a foreign embassy to start picking locks. Sure, Petrov could have asked Moscow for some help, but Sofiya was dead certain the man preferred keeping everything under his sole control. So, he’d turned to her with an offer she couldn’t refuse. A mission like this one—if successful—would wipe more than one black mark from her Directorate K ledger.