A last check for the telltale trailing LADA two blocks back—negative, she was totally clear of ticks this afternoon—and Helen entered the ramp to the underground parking garage, punching in the twins’ favorite music disc—Raffi singing about the wheels on the bus going round and round to which the twins resoundingly joined in (the more noise for the FSB-planted microphone in the car the better), and which was also the “ready” signal to Ricky listening from the trunk. Helen rounded the corner of the ramp, totally screened in the gap, ejected the disc (“go” signal) to howls from the twins, popped the trunk, and pulled on the emergency-brake handle to slow the car without showing brake lights. Ricky shed the blanket, rolled over the lip of the trunk, slammed the lid, and darted through a service door up a short staircase, and out into the street. Elapsed time: four seconds. Helen smoothly continued down to park and browse the stores, pushing a two-seat stroller. On the street, Ricky wore a Soviet-style cloth cap, dirty whipcord trousers, a padded light jacket torn at the shoulder, and a pair of scuffed Duolang “acid-resistant safety shoes” imported from China.
As he walked, head down, he wedged silicone spacers between his gums and cheeks, and slipped on clear-lens eyeglasses, making himself look older and heavier. He cleared the ritzy Arbat neighborhood, entered Khamovniki District, and walked slowly along Ostozhenka Ulitsa, a broad commercial street. Halfway down the boulevard, Walters loitered at a bright-red public-phone sidewalk kiosk and checked his watch. The standard four-minute window was just opening, and Walters saw the little dusty navy Skoda hatchback approach and pull over to the curb, a box of tissues on the dash. All clear. Ricky lifted the red phone off the cradle and put it back. Clear here. He scooted to the car and got into the passenger seat, scrunching down just enough to mask his profile, and the car moved off. He felt the plastic cover on the seat, a precaution against spy dust, though his Russkie disguise clothes had been kept in the Station and were unlikely to be contaminated.
This was an agent car pickup, substantially dangerous because a recognizable CIA officer was in the agent’s vehicle, the license plates of which were as good as her name being printed in block letters on the side of the car. The reverse procedure—a case-officer car pickup—was generally preferred but there was still risk: now you had a sensitive source in a US diplomatic-plated vehicle. “Pick your poison,” Gable once told Nash and Dominika during tradecraft practice. “Doesn’t matter who drives and who gets picked up. Just fucking get there black, both of you. That’s all there is to it.”
Walters looked over at DIVA, who, his chief had told him last night, was the absolute “gold standard,” so don’t make any mistakes, not one, because if he screwed this one through a tradecraft error, he’d be muscling a floor buffer in the Headquarters front lobby, making sure the Great Seal of CIA on the terrazzo marble was nice and shiny for when his replacement reported for duty. No pressure, mind you, and have fun out there.
Walters didn’t know what to expect: a mousy librarian or a rotund administrator, but not this Venus driving the car, not the classic Hellenic profile, flower-petal lips, luminous chestnut hair piled on top of her head, concentrating on traffic, electric-blue eyes darting constantly between her mirrors. Her elegant hands held the steering wheel professionally at the ten-and-two position, and she moved through traffic aggressively, shifting smoothly out of the district, east onto the third ring road, weaving through the belching blue traffic, then suddenly off again at Lyusinovskaya Ulitsa south to the 390-hectare Kolomenskoye Park on the river. DIVA parked and they quickly walked through crowds of tourists—no one paid them any attention—past the bone-white Church of the Ascension and the fanciful seventeenth-century wooden palace of Tsar Aleksey, bristling with gables, onion domes, and bell towers. DIVA led Ricky down a steep wooded slope to a small streambed, mossy paths following the water, surrounded by thick woods. It was suddenly dark and cold—and utterly silent. A slight mist hung over the trickle of water, and Walters looked around for three hags stirring a bubbling witches’ cauldron. Ricky knew they could spend more than the requisite four minutes in this creepy wooded glen for the meeting. Good screening.
“Pretty spooky down here,” said Walters, in English. He had no Russian. “We could probably find a couple of long-term cache sites somewhere along here.”
“Golosov Ravine,” said DIVA, looking around. “It’s very famous to Muscovites. There are sacred stones, holy natural springs, and tales of phantoms appearing out of the fog. Thank you for coming. No problem getting clear?” This CIA boy looks smart, he’s calm, and handles himself well on the street. Not like Bratok but solid.
Walters shook his head, unzipping his backpack, mentally reviewing his meeting agenda. “Thank you, Colonel, for all you’ve done,” said Walters. “I’m aware of only a fraction of your service, but enough to know what you contribute.” A charmer, like Nathaniel Nash, she thought. Same purple halo too. Passionate.
“Call me Dominika,” she said. “Do you have my replacement equipment?” She saw his face fall. He told her quickly about the SRAC situation, and said that Simon Benford was working to get commo gear to her as soon as possible. In the meantime, Mr. Benford wanted her to have this. He held out a chunky sports watch inside a plastic bag, a precaution against metka.
“Are you people serious?” she said, carefully dipping into the bag, extracting then fingering the watch. Walters hurried to explain.
“Without SRAC, we’ll have to use personal meets—or dead drops—to pass intel and requirements. You know all the call-out signal sites, right?” Dominika nodded.
“This is different. The watch is a beacon, for emergencies. It’s connected to something called the Cospas-SARSAT rescue system, which is a maritime rescue locator with a GPS capability,” said Walters. “The beacon frequency is encrypted and hops around. It looks like background noise to nearby receivers. No triangulation.”
“Quite lovely, but what is its purpose?”
Walters did not know about Dominika’s militant opposition regarding exfiltration. “An exfil trigger. If you activate the beacon, and we geolocate the signal in Moscow, we’ll check every day at 2100 hours at the downtown pickup site,” said Ricky, reading off a small tablet. “You remember it, the twin phones to the right of the Filevsky Park metro station entrance? It’s less than a kilometer from your current apartment.” Dominika nodded. “If we geolocate your beacon near Petersburg, we use Red Route Two. You know that site. If your beacon transmits from Cape Idokopas, which we have designated as the Black Sea exfil site, you wait on the beach for pickup.”
“Exfiltration again? Another submarine?” asked Dominika, her voice suddenly edgy. She had once rescued a blown CIA agent by delivering him to a minisubmersible crewed by Navy SEALs in Neva Bay, near Petersburg.
“No, there’s something different,” said Walters, sweating despite the dank air in the ravine. He swiped at the tablet. “A manned minisubmarine takes time to deploy, and is slow. We have something new that’s always ready, and very fast. You will be taken off the beach in a USV, an unmanned surface vessel.” He showed her streaming images of a low-slung, fifty-foot, flush-deck speedboat painted gray overall, with wavy patterns of white and black camouflage. Dominika looked at Walters.
“You are telling me this boat has no one driving? There is no crew?” Ricky swallowed hard. Gable had warned him that DIVA could quickly get in a “horn tossin’ mood.”
“It is precisely computer controlled, steered by satellite, undetectable on radar, can loiter indefinitely, and is always available,” said Walters. “With this platform, maritime exfiltration from Putin’s Palace on the Black Sea becomes a viable option.”
“I will only be at the cape during the president’s four-day reception this fall in November, so it is not a viable site,” she said. “Besides, Gospodin Benford knows my attitude regarding fleeing and defecting. Didn’t he mention it to you?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” said Walters, trying to keep this together. Agent handling. More like playing a snake charmer’s pungi flute in front of a swaying cobra. He hurriedly dug into his backpack for another plastic envelope. “You wait on the shore, night or day, and you wear these infrared sunglasses so you’ll see the USV’s IR strobe two klicks out to sea. Just stand there and it’ll home in to the wristwatch. The thing’ll beach itself, glide up to you without a sound, like a horse nuzzling for a sugar cube. You climb up the toeholds on the stern, open the deck hatch and get in; watch your head, it’s tight. There’s a recliner-like chair, a seat belt, headphones, food and drink, heat control. Close the hatch, and the USV will do the rest.” He showed her more images.