A Day in the Country
Playboy Magazine
Some say the Cold War is over, but Sam Waterman and his Russian counterpart know better.
Moscow: October 13, 1998, 10:17 A.M.
Sam Waterman spent the morning of his 45th birthday a hostage to his profession, stuffed rudely onto the rear floorboard of one of the consulate's Ziv sedans, the drive shaft hump wedged against his kidneys, his long legs tucked fetal, his body hidden under a damp blanket. Even though he knew he couldn't be seen through the tinted windows, he still held his breath as the car clunked over the antiterrorist barriers at the Russian police checkpoint outside the garage gate. He exhaled slowly when the driveshaft whined as the car merged into the late morning traffic.
"Keep going, keep going," Sam instructed tersely from under musty cover. "Don't check you mirrors, just drive. Nice and easy." "Don't have a cow, man." That was the consular officer Tom Kennedy, imitating Bart Simpson. Tom, who'd been recruited to do the driving, could impersonate Bart perfectly. He was still working on his Homer, though, reviewing night after night the videotapes his sister sent him through the mail pouch-which tells you what Moscow's social life has to offer a reasonably good-looking African American junior-grade diplomat, even in these post-Soviet days.
Sam grunted and shifted slightly, trying to reduce the pressure on his kidneys as the car turned left, heading west. "We're on Kutuzovskiy Prospekt," Kennedy told him. "Doh. Crossroads of the world."
"Tom, put a cork in it." Christ, he'd warned the kid this was serious business, and Kennedy still wanted to talk. Not good, because they weren't safe. Not by a long shot. FSB, the Russian internal security agency, had inherit-ed the KGB's elaborate passive surveillance system. Vizirs they were called - long-range, high-powered telescopes mounted on tripods, positioned in buildings along Moscow's major thoroughfares. The watchers would scan for diplomatic plates and peer inside the cars. If they saw the driver's lips move, they'd take note. Was he talking to someone hidden in the car? Was he broadcasting? If they thought you were up to no good, they'd send the police to do a traffic stop - diplomatic plates or no.
And Sam couldn't afford a traffic stop. Not today.
He had to meet General Pavel Baranov at precisely five past one, and the rendezvous was critical: Baranov had used his emergency call-out signal, an inconspicuous broken chalk line on a weatherworn lamppost 60 yards from the entrance to the Arbatskaya metro stop. Sam had seen the short-long-long-short Morse code signal last night on his regular evening jog - a five-mile run that began outside the embassy's faded walls and proceeded on a meandering but consistent route that took him all the way to the western boundary of the Kremlin and back to the embassy.
The Arbatskaya signal site and the letter P were to be used by Baranov only under crisis conditions. Still in his running gear, Sam sent Langley a code word-secret "blue-striper," an urgent cable alerting his division chief to Baranov's emergency signal, detailing his operational plan and requesting comment. Today he was awake by five, running the operation in his mind. By six he was in the office, checking for response from Langley (there was none, which was typical) and removing gear from the duffel he kept in the station's walk-in safe.
The next step was to shanghai Tom Kennedy, one of three greenhorn consular officers Sam had identified as potential decoys. The decoy factor was critical. As station chief, Sam was a "declared" intelligence officer. And thanks to an American defector, a CIA turn-coat named Orville Madison who worked at Moscow Center for the aggressive new FSB director, Vladimir Putin, Russian counterintelligence knew who was Agency and who wasn't.
If one of Sam's people drove, surveillance was virtually guaranteed. So he'd used an outsider, a junior consular officer the Russians thought was uninvolved in intelligence gathering.
At 9:06 A.M., Sam strode unannounced into the expansive office of Sandra Wheeler, the consul general At 9:12 he returned to his own eighth-floor quarters. Seven minutes after that, there was a tentative knock on Sam's door. [Enter Thomas Jefferson Kennedy, Foreign Service Officer Grade Four, stage left.] Twelve minutes later, a wide-eyed Tom Kennedy headed for the garage, having received his first inculcation into the shadowy Wilderness of Mirrors in which Sam Waterman had lived and worked for almost 19 years.
10:38. The drive train had developed a nasty vibration. Sam could feel it shudder through the floorboard. He was sweating even though the Ziv's heater didn't work. He lay silent, eyes closed, counting off the seconds, timing the route he'd painstakingly devised as Tom drove in blessed quiet. They'd be heading northwest now, less than a kilometer from Ring Road, which encircled the city. At the Volokolamskoe on-ramp they'd turn north to-ward the M10 and Moscow's Sheremetevo-airport.
But they wouldn't go there. Instead, Kennedy would exit south onto Lenin-gradskoe and divert to a narrow, deserted strip of parkland where Sam would roll out. Then Tom would drive like hell to the airport, where he'd wait in the no-parking zone - in vain - for a consular official scheduled to arrive from Berlin. And, yes, tickets had been bought. Sam had thought of every-thing, down to the smallest detail. "Plausible" and "denial," after all, were the foremost watchwords of his particular faith.
The Ziv banked hard right. In his head, Sam saw the exit and the industrial zone. He felt Tom brake, accelerate, then brake again. Show time. Sam pulled off the blanket, reached up, opened the rear door and scrambled out next to the pockmarked brick wall of an alley. He rapped the Ziv's door. "Go-go-go!"
Alone, he made his way southwest toward a swath of green parkland. He checked the cheap Bulgarian watch on his wrist. He was two minutes behind schedule.
10:52. Sam caught the sparsely occupied ferry with 75 seconds to spare, paid his ticket and sat on a bench in the rear of the smoky passenger cabin for the six-minute ride to Zaharkovo. Halfway across, he went to the toilet, a cramped compartment that stank of urine. He stepped across a puddle under the tin trough that served as a pissoir, entered the single stall, shut the door and quickly shed his long black nylon overcoat. Underneath he wore a thigh-length brown leather jacket. He stuffed the black coat behind the toilet, pulled a wool cap from his jacket pock-et and jammed it on his head. He left the men's room just in time to feel the engines reverse as the boat pulled alongside the quay. Without reentering the cabin, he nudged his way to the rail, marched up the dock and walked across the street. There he boarded bus number 96, which he rode to the Tushinskaya metro stop. Sixty-nine minutes and three train changes later, he emerged from Teksilshchiki station, crossed the road and walked gingerly over a single rusting set of railroad tracks into a deserted industrial park where, in the old days, they'd assembled Moskvich automobiles as part of Joe Stalin's workers' paradise.
What Sam had performed since leaving the Ziv was a Surveillance Detection Route, a timed course during which he'd had half a dozen opportunities to spot a hostile tail. Not to shake it, however. Simply to identify it. Only in Hollywood do CIA officers shake a tail. In real life, you spot the opposition. But you do nothing to alert them. If the other side realizes it has been tagged, it will change surveillance methods, and the cycle has to begin all over. Sam had spent weeks crafting each segment of this SDR, even though he'd use it only once.
He walked until he reached an alley that had a row of corrugated-sheet-metal gated sheds where Muscovites bribed the watchmen in hard currency so they could keep their autos under roof. The streets leading to these shanties were deserted. Even if they had been crowded, no one would have paid Sam any mind, because the tall, gray-eyed man looked like a local.
Careful to avoid getting mud on his scuffed shoes, he stepped around a rusted Latta with a tarp spread under the rear of its chassis. There were two blue-jeaned legs poking out. Sam rapped the Latta's hood. "Yuri Gregorovich, is that you under there, or should I call the police?"
Yuri G. Semerov rented the shed next to Sam's and owned a store near the Arbat, where he sold everything from fake czarist antiques to Soviet Army uniforms. Sam knew the Russian had been checked out to ensure that he wasn't a provocateur.
The legs crabbed from under the vehicle, followed by a torso, then a thick arm holding a big crescent wrench, and finally a broad, flat, mustached Tatar face that peered up warmly at Sam. "Hello, Sergei Anatolyvich."
So far as Yuri knew, Sergei Anatolyvich Kozlov was an up-and-coming businessman with an unhappy marriage in Moscow and a mistress near Podolsk. And if he'd checked - something Sam knew he hadn't - Sam's cover would have been confirmed. "Long time no see," Yuri said. "How's it going?"
"Any better I couldn't stand it," Sam answered effortlessly in Moscow-accent-ed Russian. It was a gift. Some people have an aptitude for mathematics or science. Others are innate painters or musicians. Sam had an ear for languages. He learned them quickly and retained them. He spoke Russian at a 4.86 level, in addition to 5.8-level French and work-able German, Polish and Czech. To get a better rating in Russian he'd have had to be born in the Soviet Union. Sam focused on Yuri and smiled mischievously. "Anytime I escape to Podolsk for a few hours, life is great."
"I can imagine," Yuri said wistfully. He pulled himself into a sitting position and brandished the wrench. "Hey, have you a number 15 socket? This piece of shit won't catch on what's left of my tailpipe bracket bolt."
"I'll look." Sam withdrew from his pocket a bunch of keys attached to a chain clipped to his belt. He selected and unlocked a trio of padlocks the size of paperback books, and replaced the locks on their hasps. He scraped the battered door of the shed across the wet ground and disappeared inside.
There was silence for about 40 seconds. Yuri wasn't aware that Sam had retrieved a small electronic gadget from his jacket and quickly checked the car for listening devices and locator beacons. The Russian heard only the sounds of an ignition stammering, followed by the hiccupping of an engine starting. After half a dozen puffs of gray-black smoke emanated from the shed, Yuri watched as a beat-up Zhiguli coupe with local plates backed out onto the uneven dirt, sputtering and backfiring.
Sam opened the car door and eased his big frame out from behind the wheel, his hand still playing with the choke. "I'll look for the socket for your Bentley while my Ferrari warms up."
Thirty seconds later he was back from the shed. "Nothing," Sam said. "I must have taken them home." He wrestled with the shed door, slapped the hasps closed and replaced the padlocks. "Sorry, Yuri Gregorovich."
©2002 John Weisman