“So he jumped,” McGarvey said.
“That night. I don’t know exactly how he did it on such short notice. Might have simply taken a bus over to the Lubyanka and knocked on the door. He may have had an emergency setup with his control officer. But by morning when he didn’t show up for work we knew he had gone over.”
“You mean to tell me after all of that you didn’t follow him to make sure?”
“Of course not, McGarvey. We were trying to legitimize him. If there had been so much as a hint of a tail on him, that night of all nights, and his Russian control officer had gotten wind of it, the jig would have been up. They would have shot him themselves.”
“What was your posture at the embassy?” McGarvey asked. “How was this handled, in the open I mean?”
“We went through all the moves, if that’s what you mean. Conducted our own little search, of course. Then we contacted the Moscow city militia, the police, and told them one of our people was missing, and that we suspected foul play. We had to go through the maneuvers. We had to make it seem as if we were worried about him and that his disappearance had come out of the blue.”
“What did that produce?”
“Nothing, not a damned thing,” Owens said. He was looking inward, his thoughts traveling backward in time. “It struck me as a little odd, though. That one aspect.” He looked up. “If the kid was going over, I would have thought he’d have asked for political asylum. The Russians would have made a big hoopla. They would have crowed about it. Shown him off on television. But there wasn’t a damned thing.”
“Maybe they weren’t so sure of him themselves.”
Owens nodded. “Darby suggested the same thing. Said we would have to continue making some noises, but that for the most part we were going to have to keep our mouths shut. He wanted us to go on an emergency footing, call in our field people across the entire Eastern Bloc because as soon as Innes started to talk in detail, the Russians would expect it of us.”
“Did we pull our people in?”
“No. Langley overruled that.”
“Was Yarnell angry?”
“Not angry, worried. He didn’t care who got the credit when something went right, or who got the blame if things fell apart, he just didn’t want to see any blood shed.” Owens saw the sudden intense look of incredulity on McGarvey’s face. “He didn’t want to see any innocent blood shed.”
“Was there?”
“No more than normal attrition. Innes only had bogus information for the most part.”
“What happened next?” McGarvey asked. Owens was beginning to wind down. McGarvey suspected that the story was nearly finished.
“We spent a few days looking as if we were licking our wounds, and then we began making serious noises about getting him back.”
“How?”
Owens chuckled. “I picked up the telephone and called the centre. Lubyanka. Identified myself and told them we wanted Sergeant Innes returned or we were going to make a very large stink. Kidnapping, since Innes had not yet asked for political asylum.”
“You didn’t get through to anyone, did you?”
“No one important. But our message had been received. Their incomings, just like ours, are automatically taped. And the telephone numbers are no great secret. We figured by then that the Russians might be getting skeptical of the kid’s information. We wanted to make absolutely sure they believed him. If we treated him as if he were real, it would go a long way toward convincing them.”
“Did it work?”
“Not right off the bat. It did eventually, of course. We made enough noises so that the Russians finally agreed to a trade. Sergeant Innes for Yuri Suslev, a spy we had nicked in Washington four months earlier.” Owens seemed a little pale. The flush from the wind had faded. He got to his feet, stretched, and went to a window where he looked outside across the porch toward the rising waves pounding the beach below. There was a wistful set to his shoulders, as if he had gone as far with his story as he wanted to go because the telling had drawn him back to an earlier age when he was active. He had come face-to-face, via an unpleasant memory, with his own age.
McGarvey got to his feet, too, and threw another log on the fire, poking the dying flames to life. “Who was Innes’s control officer, did you ever find that out?”
“A young man, coincidentally the same one who had run CESTA,” Owens said.
McGarvey turned away from the fire to look at the old man. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gotten a little thin. “Baranov?” he asked.
Owens turned. “As a matter of fact, yes, that’s the one. A real sharp cookie. I suppose there was some kind of a vendetta between him and Yarnell for Mexico City. So Innes became a special case for both of them.”
19
It was nearly time to leave. There was little or no doubt in McGarvey’s mind what was coming next. Owens had come back to his chair so that he could be nearer to the fire. The wind in the flue sounded cold; it made the room a little smoky.
“Did you ever meet him? Baranov?” McGarvey asked.
“I saw photographs of him. Never actually came face-to-face with the man, though.”
“Had Yarnell?”
Owens looked up. “I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. I suppose he might have in Mexico City.”
“But not in Moscow?”
“I don’t know.”
“They were enemies though?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” Owens flared. “Of course they were enemies.”
“Yet the Russians let Yarnell come to Moscow. They knew he was a spy. They knew he had worked wonders in Mexico. They even knew that he had been involved in the Bay of Pigs, and in at least some measure with the Cuban missile crisis, yet they let him accept an assignment in Moscow.”
“That’s not so unusual. You should know that. If you have a good operative spotted, you can do one of two things; bar him from your country, in which case he might drop out of sight and then God only knows what mischief he’ll get himself into, or you can keep him out in the open, in plain sight, where you can watch him. KGB has a sophisticated setup in Moscow, as you might suspect.”
McGarvey offered a nod of understanding. “Yuri Suslev was brought to Moscow for the trade?”
“No. He was being held in Maryland. The plan was to bring him to Washington, where we would hand him over to representatives from the Soviet embassy. They could provide him with his transportation home. Meanwhile, KGB would be handing Sergeant Innes over to us on our front doorstep.”
“Where?”
“In front of our embassy.”
“During the day?”
“No. Everyone agreed that would be too risky. No one wanted any publicity about this. Suslev had been a damned effective spy—”
“Whose brains we had picked clean,” McGarvey interrupted.
“Naturally,” Owens said. “They picked Innes clean.”
“Of disinformation.”
“Suslev didn’t fall into our hands with any guarantees. It’s a game. You know about it.”
“What were the safety signals?” McGarvey asked. “I mean, how were we to know in Washington, for instance, when exactly to turn Suslev over to his people?”
“We set up a radio link. Actually it was pretty sophisticated. Both ends of Tchaikovsky Street within a block of the embassy had been blocked off all day for construction. The switch was to take place at four in the morning, our time. In Washington it was eight in the evening, so the switch took place in the parking lot of the Marriott Twin Bridges. Our people brought Suslev over by car, and the Russians brought Innes to us the same way. The embassies were in communication with the drivers and bodyguards in both places and with each other on trans-Atlantic links.”