“Maybe. .” she started. Then, “No, I don’t know.”
“Anyhow, that’s why I’m here; that’s why I’m hoping you’ll help me. There’s not much else I can say, Ms. Reilly.”
“I told you, it’s so cold-war, how could I turn it down? Maybe, maybe, maybe somewhere down the line, there’s a story in it for me.”
“If there’s a story, you’ll get it.”
Was she sold? Enough to do the job, which, after all, was only scanning old files, looking for records of visits by Soviet intelligence personnel to one embassy over a relatively short period of time.
Nothing to it.
CHAPTER 9
The Russian spoke, Stronski translated.
“You will not be challenged. You may run into others in there, for the library is never empty. They are simply other spies who’ve paid the same price for their few hours of gnawing at the scraps of history. They will not see you, nor should you see them.”
The officer led them to a dedicated passageway – no other entries were placed along its way except at the end – and to that last door. Again, it had that old Commie look, the steel, the harsh lights behind cages, girders with rivets everywhere, the smell of paint and iron, the sense of muscular, even brutal industrialism as aggression.
The officer did discover a bright plastic keypad, self-lit, a concession to the modern era. His fingers flew across the pad, and the door clanked ajar.
He led them into a final chamber. This one had a sense of hospital to it. The officer pointed to a box of fresh-pressed surgical green utilities, and they pulled them on over their clothes. A mask slipped over nostrils and mouth, a rubberized surgical cap to contain the hair. Gloves came next, rubberized as well, tight and thin, to handle the delicate papers. When they were sealed off in their operating-theater garments, the officer took them through a last door, and they felt the temperature drop twenty degrees.
Swagger blinked to adjust his vision to the greenish hues. It seemed they were on a metal balcony of some sort, restrained by a railing from a twenty-foot drop to the floor of the place itself, a vast, hushed space with metal racks on two levels, cut by steel stairways running this way and that, the whole thing seeming to extend to infinity or whatever was beyond the realm of the greenish lights on the far side of the opening. Clearly, the cavern occupied the entire eighth and ninth floors.
Swagger beheld the belly of the red beast: a vast room with crude steel shelving sustaining boxes, each box labeled and containing a forced mass of good old paper-and-ink documents. How many coups, how many deceits, how many black ops, how many wet ops, how many pix of fat diplomats with whores sucking their cocks, how many assassinations? All chronicled here, so it wasn’t a belly, it was a memory, a part of the brain loaded with forgotten info, hard to access, buried deeply away, barely acknowledged.
“Sixty-three, Mexico?” the Russian officer said.
Swagger nodded.
“Okay, you come.”
He led them downstairs and into the maze of two-leveled shelving, turning so many times that Hansel and Gretel would have become lost. Now and then another pilgrim would pass in the green night without acknowledgment. The officer turned at last down an aisle no different from any others. He spoke in Russian to Stronski, who translated.
“He says during duty hours, clerks process requests from SVR or army intelligence officers of rank, take the box, find the file, check it out, and present to officer, who can only read in reading room, also on ninth floor. You do not have it so easy. You will have to find your own files, pull your own documents. Sorry for dust, sorry light is not good, sorry no place to sit, no bathroom, no Coke machine.”
The two Americans nodded.
The Russian spoke again through Stronski.
“Rules once again. No pictures, no notes, no Xerox machine, all must be memory. Replace everything. Delicacy, please: no tugging, no folding, no forcing. You must respect the material and make allowances for its age and brittleness. You are interviewing an old man, and his attention may wander, do you see? You yourself, do not wander. Do not leave this area. Do only business you have paid for. Be honest, diligent, and bring glory on your cause, whatever it is. I will come get you in four hours.”
“Ask him,” said Bob, “if this is all agencies, including, I’m guessing, not only KGB but GRU as well as specialized military teams, or just KGB.”
The Russian listened and, in time, responded.
“I don’t know. The idea initially was to consolidate, all by hemisphere and target country, all of it in one place so that access would be better and those who had to know could find all from one area. But budget ran out before it could be completed, and I am not certain if consolidation project got to ’63 or not. Also: this is only ‘offensive’ materials, that is, initiatives generated by heroes of the past. ‘Defensive’ – that is, ‘counterespionage,’ in response to something done by main target and others – would be on different floor. That is not so interesting, just notes of suspects being followed, wiretaps being uncovered, traitors found and executed.”
“Would I be able to get in there at some later date?” asked Swagger.
“I will take it up with committee,” the officer answered, then laughed at his own joke. “All things are possible for a man with cash in his pockets.”
“Excellent,” said Swagger.
“I will see you in four hours,” said the officer. “Not a second longer.”
They worked on their knees, as if in genuflection to the material before them.
“Station 14Alpha (1963),” read the marking on the box. That would be it, the Mexico City KGB reports, that year, that place. Stronski removed the box and set it on the floor for inspection, and they crowded in close. This, as much as anything, was what Bob had come for: to see the thing, to check it for evidence of tampering.
He bent and looked at the cardboard box full of papers, all held in coherence by a red ribbon illuminated in the beam from Stronski’s flashlight. Bob went lower, looked carefully at the knot. “Has it been untied and retied a lot?” he asked.
His two colleagues closed in as well.
“I can see the worn-flat signature on two of the intersecting ribbons that suggest it was untied once,” said Reilly, “but it doesn’t look as if it’s been subject to chronic tying and retying. I’m guessing that when Norman Mailer was here in 1993 or ’94, that’s the last time the box was opened. They untied it, found and removed the Oswald reports from the KGB goons, and took those to him in the reading room.”
“Does anybody see signs of disturbance since then?”
All looked as Stronski rotated the beam across the messy surface of the raggedly stuffed-in paperwork. Tatters and flags stuck out unevenly; a corner or two peeped out at the edges. Stronski gently ruffled the uneven edges, as though pushing his hand through sheaves of wheat, and fluffy clouds of fine dust puffed outward, roiling in the flashlight beam.
“It does not appear to have been disturbed recently,” said Swagger. “Everybody agree?”
“Let me compare with others,” said Stronski, and leaped up with his flashlight and walked a few feet, making random examinations. He returned. “It is same. Dust, chaos, paper disintegrating at the edges.”
“Okay,” said Swagger. “Now what do we see?”
“I can see divisions, I’m guessing by month,” said Reilly. “Do we start with September, when Oswald showed up?”
“That makes the most sense,” said Swagger.
Reilly pointed to the appropriate cardboard separator that demarcated the adventures of September, and he pulled it out as gently as possible, amid more clouds of dust and flecks of disintegration as the paper – at least at its edges – eased toward oblivion. Three sheaves extended a bit from the more neatly collected mass of April reports. They were an obvious starting point. He pulled them out and held them open.