Petrov’s eyes sparkled, enjoying the joke. He carefully measured another glass of vodka and swallowed it at once. “Here’s another,” he said. “Then we will go. Same idea. There is an official meeting in the KGB’s Dzerzhinsky Club, where higher-ups go. There are one hundred officers in a room facing a dais where a few important colonels are making speeches. The junior officers sit together in the audience, chatting during the speeches, which, as usual, are long and tedious. The first junior officer says to his neighbor, ‘Lyosha, we spotted a CIA mole among us.’ ‘Really?’ the second officer says. ‘Which one is he?’ ‘Row ten, just on the aisle, with a red tie. Can’t you tell? He’s the one paying attention.’ ”
Petrov’s smile vanished when he looked at Garin. “You laugh when we make fun of ourselves. That’s the thing about you Americans. You’re dull, serious, smug, but easily fooled, and you underestimate us. We have perfected look-down radar systems that are a generation ahead of your best technology. We are many things, and we have many failures, but we are not stupid.”
Garin saw that Petrov had drunk too much. He saw in Petrov the struggle of a man who disliked America but who felt himself an outsider in the Soviet Union, holding dangerous opinions. They both stood and were at the door.
“What can you tell me about Zyuganov?” Garin asked.
Petrov was suddenly alert, and his eyes narrowed. He looked at Garin warily. “He was executed. No one believes the official story. He was Andropov’s man heading up the KGB’s anti-corruption crusade—and you don’t make friends that way.” Petrov was close to Garin. “He worked with you.”
“Who betrayed him?”
Petrov cupped a match against the wind in the open door and drew on his filterless Prima. He blew gamy smoke from the corner of his mouth and eyed Garin. After a second quick pull on the cigarette, he tossed it to the ground. He thrust one arm into his overcoat but kept his eyes on Garin. “Who said he was betrayed? Caught? Yes.”
Petrov shoved his other arm in the sleeve. He had the expression of a man who was done with the conversation. He turned sullenly and walked toward the Ferris wheel. But having gone a few meters he stopped suddenly and turned. “It’s in the past,” he said. “Leave it there.”
6
TOWER 324
DOUBT WASN’T NEW TO GARIN. He’d lived with doubt for years, and with doubt came fear. His childhood fear had been crippling, but he had trained himself to confront his demons. He tested himself against the dark, sleeping in his bedroom without the night light, trembling and afraid to close his eyes but unwilling to surrender. As a ten-year-old, he had stood at the edge of an abandoned quarry, inching toward the precipice, feeling the nausea of vertigo. He had closed his eyes, feeling the lip with his toes and imagining the hundred-foot drop. He made fear his companion, and he came to understand that men who weren’t afraid were either lying to themselves or colossally stupid. These experiences had shaped the one true thing he knew about himself: his need to do the opposite of what was expected of him was often stronger that the threat of harm that might befall him if he went ahead.
Garin didn’t see the prostitute at first. He felt a presence on the sidewalk when he was outside his apartment block, but she was there when he looked a second time. She wore high heels, a fur scarf, and gaudy red lipstick, and she had wide eyes that invited him to join her. Of course he was tempted, and of course he knew the last thing he should do is let himself be fooled by a local prostitute. He smiled at her air kisses but shook his head.
Garin stood at his ninth-floor apartment door. The hallway was quiet, but he knew that even at a late hour there would be curious, or frightened, neighbors who would crack open their doors at a hint of trouble.
Garin placed his hand high on the doorjamb and found the single strand of hair still in place. He’d fixed it with egg white in the morning, and it had held fast. He undid the mortise lock, turned the key to open the bolt, and entered.
He’d been billeted in temporary housing arranged by a nice woman in the embassy’s personnel department. The small apartment was dark when he entered. The embassy had provided used furniture from storage—a white cotton sofa with wine stains from someone else’s party, unmatched dining chairs, chipped plates, and a greasy saucepan.
There was nothing personal about the apartment, nothing that made it belong to him. He preferred it that way. It would be easier to leave it. There was nothing to attach to, and when he left, it would all stay behind. The blank walls and empty windows didn’t depress him. They were a reminder that he was there to sleep, and when his work was done, he would move on. Nothing in the apartment would help investigators establish who he was.
The refrigerator had moldy cheese, four dozen eggs, and three beers, and he took one. He undressed in the dark and drew a bath. Electricity for the water heater shut off at 9:00 P.M., so the water was cold, almost shocking, but he slipped into the porcelain tub until only his head was above water. This too was a test he gave himself. His chest tightened, and his member shriveled, ridding him of fatigue and urges. He thought briefly of the prostitute, but then he closed his mind to concentrate on all that he needed to accomplish by May 28. As he did, his thoughts drifted back to the night he lost General Zyuganov, trying to find the conducting threads of that labyrinth.
He opened his eyes and stepped out of the tub. He was cadaver white, and his hands were wrinkled like a newborn’s, but his mind was sharp. He began his handwritten note to Mueller at the small desk that faced the dark Moscow skyline. This note, and the ones that followed, would later serve Mueller when he assembled his account, but when Garin put his pen to paper, shaping his thoughts, he had no intention of creating a self-conscious record.
Every time you get a walk-in, he wrote, he is observed, doubted, and interrogated until there is a good answer to the question: Why is this man turning against his country? In GAMBIT’s case, it is a combination of things. Money is important, but he’s not just trading secrets for a bank account—at least that’s not the whole picture. He has a five-year-old son who suffers seizures. He needs medicine for the boy, but the medicine he needs is only available in the West. After three vodkas, I saw another side of him. He is opinionated about the Soviet Union. The more he drank, the darker his humor became, and I saw a disillusioned man, maybe even a desperate one. He talked at length about growing up in the provinces, and he was proud that he was the first in his family to earn a commission in the Soviet Army, and then privileged to enter Frunze Military Academy. He believes in the greatness of Russia, but he has contempt for the Communist Party and the Soviet system. His litany of complaints went on for twenty minutes: corruption, red tape, the queues, empty shelves, filth in the public bathrooms, police rudeness, and the impossibility of getting proper medical care for his son. And he resents his privileged Moscow colleagues who hold his peasant background against him. He went on about the miseries his family suffered under Stalin.