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

“He ever pitch you back?”

“Once, maybe. Asked me how I’d feel if he asked me to come over to his side. I said, What for? To spend the rest of my life in a fucking breadline? And he never asked me again.”

“What does Gerber think of the operation?”

“Probably hates it.”

“Why? Because of the operation or because it’s your operation?”

“Five years ago he ordered me to pitch the guy—give him his last chance to come to the promised land—when he was out in San Diego at a volleyball tournament. Did you know he’s an Olympic-grade volleyball player? Once when we were both a little drunk, he told me volleyball got him into the KGB. Said some guys recruited him out of the university to play for a team at Dynamo Sports Complex in Moscow. He didn’t know who the hell they were until they told him he was playing for team KGB! After a while he stopped playing volleyball and started playing spy. He likes to say he’s the only guy who went to the First Chief Directorate on an athletic scholarship. Anyway, I didn’t pitch the guy like Gerber told me, but I kept the thing alive. Introduced the FBI guys to him, but he still told us to fuck off every time we hit him. The FBI wants to keep trying, and Gerber can’t stop it now with the bureau on board.”

“How long have you been planning this trip?”

“About a month.”

“What does Gerber know about it?”

“Nothing.”

“How long have you known about Gerber’s travel plans?”

“About a month.” Platt smiled again.

I signed the requisition for the Winchester and handed the papers back to Platt. “Don’t go down there and get him killed.”

“Like everybody else around here?”

“Yeah, like everybody else around here. Might ask him what he’s hearing about that.”

I watched Platt, wearing faded frayed blue jeans and beat-up cowboy boots, walk out of the front office area carrying his papers. Platt was the kind of guy the CIA wouldn’t touch today. And I thought that was too bad.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, July 1986

Val Aksilenko no longer had any doubts that something very strange was going on. The latest round began with whispers of the arrests of Valeriy Martynov and Sergey Motorin, who had both served with him in Washington.

Martynov, a Line X officer responsible for scientific and technical collection in the Washington Rezidentura, had come back to Moscow with Vitaly Yurchenko as part of the defector’s “honor guard.” He never reported in at Yasenevo. At first, the word was that he’d suffered a serious accident that required surgery. He’d been taken to a sanitarium outside Moscow to recuperate. They’d even brought his family back from Washington to be by his side, the stories went.

Aksilenko hadn’t seen Martynov since his return, and he had no idea what had happened to him until rumors of his arrest began to circulate in June. Similar stories started circulating about Sergey Motorin, another former officer in the Washington Rezidentura, now working in Directorate A, the active measures department responsible for black propaganda against the United States and its allies. Aksilenko’s boss in the American Department, Anatoly Flavnov, told him in confidence that Motorin had been arrested for working for the Americans.

Aksilenko was incredulous. Two officers from the same Rezidentura! He was never close to Martynov, but Motorin had worked for him, and it pained him to see the young maverick officer in such trouble. Motorin was a rule breaker, a free spirit, but Aksilenko liked him. He’d sparred with Dmitri Yakushkin, the Washington Rezident at the time. Yakushkin plainly detested Motorin and did everything in his power to make his life miserable while he served under him in Washington. A Line PR officer, Motorin was miscast in intelligence work, but he was not the disaster Yakushkin believed. The Rezident saw him as just another privileged troublemaker, the son of a senior Party official from Archangel. Motorin had reinforced his political position even further by marrying the daughter of another senior Party man. Yakushkin thought he traded on that, too, and despised him all the more.

It was no secret inside the Rezidentura that Motorin had girls on the side and that he had cut corners. But most of his transgressions were dismissed as small stuff, all acceptable enough within the context of the “new realities.” Toward the end of his Washington tour, when he seemed to be producing better political intelligence, Aksilenko had gone to bat for him with Yakushkin, telling the skeptical Rezident that Motorin was finally catching fire. It didn’t work. If anything, Yakushkin was even more negative, and Aksilenko found himself in an unpleasant tug-of-war over the young officer. In the end, he concluded that Yakushkin disliked Motorin so much that it was useless—and perhaps dangerous—to continue to defend him. Only later would Aksilenko learn that Motorin’s improved performance in Washington had come about because he was being fed intelligence by the FBI and CIA in order to improve his standing with his superiors.

When Motorin was transferred from Washington back to Moscow, Yakushkin tried to bar him from serving in a sensitive post. He wanted him shunted off to a job where he could do no real harm. So he was assigned to Department A, responsible for black propaganda operations against the United States and its allies.

Motorin’s arrest, coming on the heels of the arrest of Martynov, sparked a frenzy of rumors and gossip throughout the First Chief Directorate. Motorin simply disappeared, and for months no one knew where he was. During this period, he was forced to call a woman he’d had an affair with in Washington to tell her he “was fine and thinking of her often.” The call was intended to reassure the FBI.

There was a grand deception game under way at Yasenevo, and the pieces of the game that were visible to Val Aksilenko were sharpening his senses. From the First Chief Directorate, there had been four cases in the last year