Checkmate
Nate and the three technical officers stood in the darkened hallway in front of Shlykov’s apartment. The old concierge finally had left her post for the evening and the CIA men had silently walked up four flights of stairs, each stepping in the slipstream of the others’ tension. Last in line, Nate saw that even though the staircase was well-washed marble, the good ol’ boys by habit walked on the outside of the treads to avoid squeaks; each step likewise was taken supinating on the outside of their cowboy-boot soles, eliminating the sound of footfalls in the stairwell.
This had all been Nate’s plan, the ghost transmissions, the signals, the surveillance. For the final act he had blithely suggested an entry to Shlykov’s Beyo?lu apartment. But Nate had never before gone in with a veteran surreptitious-entry team; he was nervous as the whole show revolved around this break-in. Thank Christ these old boys were unflappable. The lead tech, a fifty-five-year-old peckerwood from Alabama named Gaylord, knelt in front of Shlykov’s door. He had a potbelly and knuckly hands; his white hair was wavy. His teammates had told Nate that he could pick any lock. Gaylord looked at the lock, turned to the others, and whispered “We got a Russian, in an apartment in Turkey, and the door’s got a Yale lock.” Nate was unsure whether the discovery of a Yale lock in Turkey was in effect good or bad, but concluded it must be good. With bird-like fingers on those beefsteak hands, Gaylord inserted a brass bump key into the keyway, feeling the pins through the tips of his fingers. He seated the key firmly, applied slight pressure on the cylinder, and sharply rapped the bow of the key with the rubber handle of a screwdriver. The pins jumped with the shock transmitted through the bump key, the cylinder rotated, and they were in. No emotion out of any of them; they just straightened and quietly entered the darkened apartment.
Shlykov’s apartment smelled neutral, like an intensive-care unit, hot and sanitized. It was neither messy nor neat; he didn’t have many possessions. The great repositories of a man’s secrets—the bedside table drawers—were empty: no books; no porn; no pics, empty. The second window into a man’s life, the fridge: no beer; no veg; no spice; no ice. The box was cold and sour. Most of all, Nate could not identify in the apartment where Shlykov’s personal spot was. No armchair with reading lamp; no ass-worn couch in front of the television; no canvas chair on the grimy little balcony. Did this guy hang by his heels from the closet rod until dusk?
Nate checked his watch. They had an hour-long window. Shlykov was propping up a wall at a dip party, watching fellow Russians, not working the crowd. He was too important to bother with dip targets. He had the covert action to propel him to his colonelcy. Three base officers in a loose circle around the Russian, eating, drinking, laughing, and handing off the eye, would punch Nate’s number when the major started moving. The techs were moving separately in the apartment, in a smooth, practiced choreography, dividing the rooms into cylindrical search sectors—high, low, middle—looking for the telltale wires of bugs or cameras, though it was unlikely that arrogant Major Shlykov would take such security precautions. No touching, no talking, their eyes moving in the dim light; Nate stood in the middle of the living room and waited.
The Mississippi boy named Lee, baby of the group at age fifty-two, moved to Shlykov’s bedroom and in thirty seconds had found a well-worn, hard-sided suitcase under the bed. He weighed it in his hand and nodded. He dipped into the small bag slung over his shoulder, no rummaging around, no sound, and came out with a pair of pincer pliers that looked as though they had first been used in 1415 at Agincourt. Nate kneeled beside him as Lee gently pulled off the aluminum flashing around the upper lid and using a long, thin spatula carefully pried apart the two sandwich layers of molded plastic. He snapped his fingers softly to attract Nate’s attention. From his own bag Nate took out the glassine envelope and carefully slid two secret writing carbons—specialized, essential, and incriminating—between the layers of the lid. Lee then squeezed the layers together, applied a dot of adhesive, and fitted the flashing back around the edge of the lid. He crimped the aluminum tight and pointed with his finger. Nate saw that Lee’s crimping tool had purposely left tiny teeth marks in the aluminum. Lee slid the suitcase back under the bed.
Nate again checked his watch through sweat-stung eyes and moved back to the living room. Gaylord and the third tech—a jolly Falstaff from upstate New York named Ginsburg—meanwhile had spread a tack cloth on the floor and were feeling with artisans’ hands the grain of a large wooden chessboard standing on its edge. Where had they found it? All Russians love chess, thought Nate. Was this Shlykov’s defining hobby? It was his bad luck, whatever it was. Ginsburg took an instrument of the Inquisition out of his bag, black handle, guide rails, battery pack. The tool itself made only a faint crunching termite sound as he plunged a three-inch-deep mortise into the wood along the end; Gaylord sucked up the sawdust with a silent handheld vacuum as it came off the bit, and cleaned out the hole. They both looked at Nate, who stepped forward and inserted a tiny two-inch square notepad with gummed edges—a onetime pad, called an OTP—into the cavity. This was a block of tiny pages of printed numbers in random sequences used to provide an ever-changing (and therefore unbreakable) key to encrypt messages. Onetime pads had been used forever—in the Great War, inside the Bastille dungeons, and on the Roman roads of Judea.
Gaylord meanwhile had taken the collected sawdust and mixed it in a shallow beaker with an odorless chemical from a squeeze bottle to create a thick batter. Fitting a plastic plug into the cavity to protect the OTP, he smeared the paste over the mortise hole and troweled it even along the edge of the board, like a pastry chef smoothing frosting on a cake. He blew on the spot, tested it with the tips of ridiculously sensitive fingers, and in a few minutes, lightly sanded it smooth. Nate shined the penlight as Gaylord held a color wheel to the chessboard, then painted the area; it disappeared into the exact shade of the wood. “You sure they’ll find this?” whispered Nate.
Ginsburg looked him up and down. “If they’re looking for it, guaranteed. The cavity’ll light up on a fluoroscope like a polyp on your colonoscopy.” Nate looked at Ginsburg and nodded thoughtfully; given his age, the grizzled tech perhaps was speaking from recent experience. Whatever Ginsburg intended to say, there was a certain anatomical irony: when the chessboard and suitcase were discovered by Russian counterintelligence officers, Shlykov figuratively would be bent over and would experience the long arm of Kremlin justice.
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