The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

here in the secluded picnic area near the beach, Yurchenko was convinced that he’d called the case right. Hayden was, his instincts told him, quite probably a dangle. After he’d gone over his list of questions, Yurchenko slipped his hand back into the picnic basket, ostensibly switching off the recorder.

Glancing up, he caught Hayden studying him, probably for his report to his counterintelligence case officers, he concluded. He saw the American’s eyes return a couple of times to his right hand, looking at the missing joints on his middle and ring fingers, scars left by a winch accident when Yurchenko was an ensign in the Soviet Navy. That will be enough for his Office of Naval Investigation handlers, Yurchenko thought. They’ll have plenty of clues when they try to identify me. But by the time they put it all together, they’ll be coping with a bigger surprise. Yurchenko smiled to himself and saw that that seemed to unsettle Hayden just a little.

Yurchenko told Hayden that after cooling off for a few months—enough time to let the Walker thing die down—they would pick up contact again. Then they could get down to the job of prying secrets out of the U.S. Navy communications center in Naples, where Hayden worked.

As Hayden prepared to leave, Yurchenko looked him in the eye and said, “Tom, you are very clever, and I admire your bravery and courage.”

Chepil left the meeting with a sense of relief that his agent had passed muster. Hayden left wondering what Yurchenko’s last words really meant. Whatever doubts he may have had about Hayden, Yurchenko kept them to himself. No sense in making extra work for himself by declaring Hayden a dangle—he had plenty to do in Rome over the next few days without another distraction.

During his stay in Rome, Yurchenko grilled the officers in the Rezidentura on their knowledge of the rank and file CIA officers in Rome. He found varying degrees of understanding of the nature of the adversary, along with more than the usual inflation of the CIA’s numbers in Italy. Checking the Rezidentura’s diagram of the CIA presence in Rome, Yurchenko skipped over the name of the CIA’s Rome chief, Allan D. Wolf. The diminutive but legendary Wolf was well known in Middle Eastern intelligence circles, where he had earned the nickname “the Golden Wog”—a name he owed as much to his flamboyance as to his thick mane of blond hair. In his days as the CIA’s Near East Division chief, he had once famously declared that he ruled an espionage empire “from Bangladesh to Marrakech.”

Yurchenko scanned the list for a name that he might recognize from his own experiences in Washington or Moscow. He knew that the list was liberally sprinkled with the names of Americans who weren’t spies at all, just energetic political or economic officers working the diplomatic circuit who the local KGB Rezidentura mistakenly believed were in the CIA. Finally, his eyes settled on the name of David Shorer.

Shorer had been arrested in Leningrad almost ten years earlier, along with an agent the CIA had been running in the Soviet defense industries. The roll-up of the operation, in itself significant enough, took on even greater significance because of the severe physical abuse inflicted on Shorer when he was seized at a dead drop site under a Leningrad overpass. The Second and Seventh Chief Directorate officers had been instructed to play it extra hard in retaliation for a rough-and-tumble arrest by the FBI of a Soviet intelligence officer in New York two months earlier.

As he flipped through the Rezidentura’s files on the CIA office in Rome, Yurchenko took note of Shorer’s office telephone number. He had a surprise in store for Mr. David Shorer.

Rome, 1430 Hours, August 1, 1985

Yurchenko had left the Villa Abamelek, the Soviet embassy staff compound in the western suburbs of Rome, early, explaining to his colleagues that he would check in at the embassy near the Vatican, spend a couple of hours at the Rezidentura, and then take the rest of the day off. He muttered something about wanting to take in the sights in Vatican City and suggested to the Rezident that he had a special contact planned, something sensitive and outside the purview of the Rome Rezidentura. Mysterious activities by visiting seniors from Moscow Center were not all that unusual in Rome, not since the days when Boris Solomatin was KGB Rezident in Rome and, as rumor had it, was running a very high level agent right in the heart of the Vatican. Any senior visitor from Moscow Center who dropped a hint that he might be up to something spooky at the Holy See was given a wide berth by the Rezidentura. The offer of the Rezident to have one of his officers accompany him had been tepid; rebuffing it had been easy. Yurchenko said he would return to the compound for a dinner planned for him that evening.

He spent the rest of the morning making the tourist rounds of the Vatican. He stopped a couple of times while wandering around St. Peter’s Square, ostensibly to rest and watch the flow of tourists on holiday in Rome. But in reality, he was conducting an extensive dry-cleaning run, becoming a part of his surroundings while looking for telltale patterns and repeaters among the milling tourists. By early afternoon he knew he was surveillance free and hailed a cab. His instructions to the driver were terse: “Hotel Ambasciatore, Via Veneto.”

Among the things Yurchenko carried with him was a bag filled with Russian herbs and traditional home remedies for the stomach ailment the KGB officer was convinced was a cancer that would soon kill him.

Rome, 1435 Hours, August 1, 1985

David Shorer stared at the telephone on his desk, willing it to ring. He had just been alerted that a call had come in for “Mr. David Shorer, who served in Leningrad,” from a man speaking English with a heavy Slavic accent and describing himself as a Soviet official