Moscow X, page 25
“Does this Russian have the intelligence services at his disposal?” Harry asked, returning with the drinks.
Procter’s scowl said: Try again, man.
Harry rolled his eyes and sat down.
“You’re the indispensable fucking man, Harry,” Procter said. “I know you know that. Now, you ready to hear what I want?”
“Yes, for god’s sake,” Harry said.
Procter held him in a dead-eye stare. “I want you to buy crypto from Polycoin. In big blocks.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know yet. But a lot. Maybe hundreds of millions.”
“Holy shit, Artemis,” he said, wiping grease off his hands.
Procter noticed his feet tapping, and he was rubbing his knuckles over his lips like he did when he got all hot and bothered by an idea. “I presume that these Russians will find their way to Polycoin at some point.”
Not a question. Procter ran a finger around the rim of the cup and didn’t say a word.
Harry smiled. “How much should I expect to get back?”
“Assuming the bottom doesn’t fall out of the crypto markets over the next few months, you should get back most of it. Hell, you might even make a little money. But if it swings the other direction we’ll find a way to compensate you for some of the loss. Black budgets, well, they help. Lord knows they help. Now, we both know crypto is a big scam, it’s a Ponzi scheme after all, right? No fucking underlying value. You’re trading away with Polycoin, Harry, because, well, there’s money to be made before it all falls apart. But that’s a bit distant, so we’ve got time to pull this thing off, run our little op, and you get the money out the other side. I’m obviously not financing it this way because I’ve got a lady boner for crypto. I just need a way to vaporize a bunch of money, get it out of the currency markets real quick, and I don’t much care what it’s worth on the other side. I just care that I can move it and hide it.”
Harry looked at the tent ceiling and tapped his fingers on the table.
“One more thing,” Procter said. “You say yes and I can promise you a nice letter from POTUS and a ceremony at Langley thanking you for your service. Medals and plaques and shit you can’t take from the building. No glory for you, of course. But you’ll know what you did. And that, I think, is what matters to you, Harry. You could be a simple billionaire who likes buying forests and drinking million-dollar bottles of wine on his yacht while he parties with women much more attractive than himself. But you’re not that guy. You’re Harold Hepburn Hamilton. You’re no summer patriot, no sunshine soldier. You live for this. And, like me, you are sick of the Russians pooping on the United States of America.”
They regarded each other for a moment. In the distance a tractor engine rumbled to life. The vodka bottles crunched and settled in the buckets as the ice melted.
Harry took a deep breath and shook his head like he knew he was a big sucker. He held out his glass over the table. Procter smacked it with hers. They worked the logistics over another pour of Tito’s. Then Procter stumbled back to the chopper and took off, bound for Palo Alto.
NEXT MORNING PROCTER WALKED FROM HER PALO ALTO HOTEL TO AN abandoned WeWork building in a leafy office park. Signs advertised that it was available for rent, which was no longer true. HLK Solutions, a CIA front company, had secured the lease. The building bore all the hallmarks of a commercial sensitive compartmented information facility, a SCIF: stand-alone structure, good fiber connections, plenty of room for hardware.
But the facility also had some hair on it. They’d found feces, and then, eventually, the responsible parties: raccoons. The roof leaked. They discovered hypodermic needles jammed in an espresso machine the size of a commercial oven. Procter thought one of the exposed concrete walls had been tagged by vandals, until she realized the message read: STRIVE TO BE BETTER, TOGETHER. WeWork propaganda. She’d had the team run black paint over that one. To cap it all off, the drained pool behind the building looked like one of the places the Taliban used to kill people.
She punched the code and went in. Meandering down a hallway, she clicked into another room. This had been open-plan workspace in the WeWork days, filled with cheap desks for what Procter imagined had once been a sizable horde of tech bro douchebags. Now it was the command center for Procter’s operational brainchild. She dumped her purse on a table and watched the team of techies bustle around. A guy in shorts and sandals and a Mickey Mouse hat was peering into the toaster with one eye shut, scraping a knife around.
Apart from George, Procter knew not one of their names. She had asked exactly zilch about what she imagined to be their bizarre backgrounds. George’s instincts were impeccable when it came to nerds, and George had handpicked these. But, man, these kids were pasty as hell. Skin almost translucent. Like shrimps, Procter thought. She had half a mind to install a few tanning lights, keep them alive long enough to get this done.
Procter cracked open a Jolt and strolled to the other corner of the room, where the FINO guys had congregated. There were three of them, former bankers who spoke banker language. One, Procter remembered from the cable traffic, had been a NOC who’d run a dirty bank in the Caymans. They dressed like idiot bankers. One of them was actually wearing a pin-striped suit.
Procter knocked on a closed office door. “Fucking busy,” a voice called back.
“That’s the kind of uncouth behavior that got you in the Penalty Box in the first place, Snake.” Procter shoved open the door. A short, muscular man in a tight red polo grimaced when his door slammed into the wall. His funnyname in cable traffic was Gerald B. SNAKERSON. Everyone called him Snake. Procter did not know his real name. Snake was a senior ops officer with a glorious recruitment record and an equally abysmal managerial streak. Like Procter, he was serving time in the Penalty Box. He’d been COS Stockholm, managing a team of case officers that had recruited a startling number of Iranians. Problem was, Snake was also bedding a few of the case officers, one of whom was married.
“Pop in,” she said, tossing back the final sip of Jolt and taking a seat. “I was in the neighborhood. Working on the crypto angle. Figured I’d swing through and see how goes the move in.”
“Good, it’s good,” he said, recovering his composure, but still obviously annoyed by Procter’s materialization. “We’ve mostly got the talent we need.” He ticked through the roster. Procter promised she would send Debman, her Moscow X analyst.
Setting her empty Jolt can on his desk, she asked him to fire up the WINKELVOSS tool. “Give me a demo.” Ten months earlier, a joint CIA-NSA operation had implanted a worm on a piece of equipment the FSB used to monitor Russian telecommunications traffic. The tool gave CIA the ability to make the FSB see things in the data that had never happened. Want to make it appear as though a case officer running a surveillance detection route sat idle at a café for two hours? Or that, say, a group of senior officials close to Putin all traveled to the same dacha at the same time, perhaps in the dead of night? WINKELVOSS was the answer. It had so far been used sparingly; Langley feared they might not have more than a few bites at the apple before the FSB put two and two together and uncovered the malware.
They wound through the main room toward George’s desk in the corner, collecting the guy in the Mickey Mouse hat along the way. “Show me, Georgie,” Procter said.
“So,” George began, his six monitors flickering to life, “let’s say we land on five coup-plotters to frame. There are three ways we can sprinkle them in damning digital dust. Suspicious financial transactions. Suspicious comms. Suspicious travel inside Russia. Vadim’s laptop, if we can get into it, will help with the money. WINKELVOSS is the answer to comms and travel.”
“What exactly do we want Putin to believe?” asked the Mickey Mouse guy. “ I mean, how seriously do we want him to take the challenge? ”
Procter turned to him, shock blossoming across her face, as if she’d assumed he was incapable of speech and had preferred it that way. A crocodile smile spread across her lips to show most of her teeth.
“The idea,” she said, “is to make Putin think a nasty little cabal is coming for the crown, that a few of his boyars are fixing to snuggle his head onto a pike for display on the Kremlin ramparts. We want him to see that this cabal is meeting, conspiring, spreading hush money around. The goal here, Brian”—she was winging it, no idea what his name was— “isn’t merely a whiff of smoke, it’s a fucking five-alarm fire that a coup is imminent, a signal that Putin should rip up the floorboards hunting for traitors. They’ll be imaginary, of course, but oh so real in the steroid-and-chemo-drug fever swamp of his mind.”
“So he does have cancer,” the Brian guy murmured.
Procter put a hand on his shoulder and said, but these are all really good questions, Brian, and squeezed until he made a noise. “Rich and powerful Russian pricks killing each other,” she concluded, “is the name of the game.”
Brian, whose name was in fact Chris, nodded uneasily and took a slow, casual step away from Procter. George sipped his Jolt and continued, “So, we decide on a few big meetings for this group. Places and times where they are all together, that way once the FSB starts digging, it will look weird.”
“Show me,” Procter said.
George opened a map of Moscow. Procter pointed at a spot along Rublyovka. “There,” she said. “Goose’s estate.” George clicked on the plot. “And let’s say he travels there from his office.”
George traced a series of roads from the Kremlin to Goose’s villa. He entered start and arrival times. He punched in the phone number and a date and hit enter. Up came a new map. Blue dots were the cell towers the phone pinged on the fake route. George tapped on the screen. “This is oversimplified because we haven’t created all of the fake data, but it will show any FSB unit investigating that this phone traveled from central Moscow to Rublyovka in the middle of the night on December twentieth.”
“You beautiful nerd,” she exclaimed, slapping George’s back so hard he yelped.
“Make sure you include everything you need from her in the ops cable,” Procter said, speaking excitedly. This was getting good. “We’ve got one shot in Switzerland, then she’s gone.”
- 37 -
Moscow / Geneva / Gimmelwald
ANNA SLEPT SOUNDLY AND WOKE EARLY WITHOUT AN ALARM. IN her silky pajamas, she took a breakfast of toasted rye and black coffee alone in the Ostozhenka apartment, flicking mindlessly through the news on her phone. Padding into the bathroom, she gently peeled off her pajama top and examined the sickly green and yellow splotches on her ribs. She grazed fingers over her stomach and found the muscles less tender than the day before. Four ibuprofen went down with a glass of water.
Opening her closet safe, she withdrew the tourist passport she would use for Geneva. Many Russians had left during the operation in Ukraine, never to return. Artists. Writers. Ballerinas. Journalists. Academics. Many still would kill for her passports and state-approved travel to leave the Rodina. But she had not once considered fleeing. How could she? Luka was here.
She could not bring herself to pick up the phone she used for him, which also lived behind the locked safe door.
ANNA SLEPT ON THE FLIGHT TO GENEVA. SHE MET THE DREARY SWISS banker over lunch at the Beau Rivage. They discussed his dealings with the American financial authorities and Washington’s perspective on the sanctions against Russia. The banker droned on about the various Russian yachts, scattered in ports across the Mediterranean, that he expected to be impounded. Her reports, she thought, would be of certain interest to SVR and, critically, reduce the chances anyone might press her on the two-day sojourn tacked on the back end of the trip. In the late afternoon she got her nails done and fell asleep after two glasses of wine in her room. Next morning, she took a circuitous walk through the downtown and along the water. The Geneva weather was a warm relief from the tightening grip of the Moscow winter. She watched the plume arcing from the fountain in the center of the lake, spouting high into the cloudy sky. Anna sported a long skirt and boots with a cashmere sweater and a white jacket she had not worn in Moscow since September. She bought a new pair of Louboutins on the rue du Rhone, stopped for a long coffee, then trudged back to the Beau Rivage in a zigzag route including a few reversals that, to any practitioner of street tradecraft, would have been considered extremely provocative. Outside a boutique on the rue du Marché, Anna spotted a man riding a Vespa whom she thought she may have seen earlier in the day, near the fountain. She assumed he was part of their countersurveillance team, but could he be SVR, or FSB? Both had reasons to watch her. She filed the profile for now. She had more time to confirm.
In her hotel room she packed her suitcase and sat on the edge of the bed, considering a hasty return to Moscow. Again, she thought: Is there another way? And, again, she could not imagine one.
She had told herself she would not visit the old neighborhood. But five minutes later she found herself calling the front desk for the bus schedule and the man said in French, Mademoiselle Agapova, please let us take you in a car? In the choppy French she had practiced here during her first four years of marriage, her first four years employed by the now-shuttered Bank Rossiya branch in Geneva, she explained that she preferred the bus. She had always taken the bus. The phone reported a long, metallic sigh.
On the bus, Anna daydreamed. Luka was here and they drank coffee atop twisted sheets in the slanted morning light. Vadim did not exist. The SVR did not exist. Life was sunny fields and warm wind. The dream popped at the screech of the brakes.
The village bustled in the lunch rush. She bought a warm butterand-salami sandwich at a bakery she had visited every day in her old life. She had loved the bread and for some silly reason she expected the taste would be cheerful, but instead it drew her back to this horrible season and became dry in her mouth. She tossed the sandwich in a rubbish bin and continued her march to the villa. Ten bedrooms, expansive views of the lake and the Jura Mountains. Vadim had chosen it. They had been rich Russians, young and ambitious. Here, she had once thought, here we can work things out. Here we can find our way to love.
From outside the front gate she could see the windows of their old bedroom and the windows of the room that soon became her own bedroom. Here, in Geneva, she had decided a marriage bed shared with an ensemble cast of tarty women was not one worth protecting. They’d mostly stopped making love, and she’d secretly begun taking the pill to defend her uterus if Vadim tried. Here Maximov had dangled the SVR job and then she’d said no on account of her father and Vadim and the then-powerful voice of the Good Daughter and Wife, keen to please the boys to their faces even though the blast furnace of resistance was already roaring inside her. Anna had hoped her visit now would conjure a righteous certainty in her choices, but instead this felt like she was snooping on a dead woman’s life, and she turned from her old home angrier at herself than at them.
She returned to the village and the bus, which, at 3:07 p.m., was precisely on time for its departure to central Geneva. She collected her suitcase from the Beau Rivage and checked out at the front desk. “Where to next, Mademoiselle Agapova?” the clerk answered.
“A few days of skiing,” she said.
FRIDAY WAS A CLASSIC HYNES DAWSON LATE-NIGHT BURNER. DOZENS of client calls, a few interviews with prospective hires, document reviews—the mass crank-turning on the associates at the bottom of this pyramid. The blinking, too-early November Christmas tree brought little cheer; it was instead a reminder that the world outside the firm might be joyfully anticipating the holiday season instead of toiling in a glorified sweatshop. An associate on one of Sia’s teams noticed that the boss, usually quite serene, now seemed pretty tweaked. She was texting a lot in meetings; her sculpted hair was a little mussed; one hand now seemed to be shaky. Might be coked up, the associate thought. God knew everyone needed the energy.
At two-thirty a.m. he knocked on Sia’s office door to explain that he had sent her everything she’d asked for and was going home. The boss was sitting there in the light of her computer. Weirdly staring at the screen. Zoned out. The associate knocked again and Sia sat up straight. “What’s up?” she mumbled.
“Sent you the Sandalwood files,” he said. “You okay?”
“Yes, yes. Just tired. As we all are.” She’d not turned her head to look at him.
“Course,” he said. “Night, boss.”
THERE WERE DOZENS OF DIRECT FLIGHTS FROM LONDON TO GENEVA, but Sia’s travel pattern to Switzerland required obfuscation: multiple legs and modes, the use of cash wherever possible. In the morning she packed a bag with winter gear and rode the Eurostar to Paris, the TGV Lyria to Geneva, then on to Interlaken, where she spent the night. Next morning she caught a blue-and-gold-painted train that trundled up into the Jungfrau. As the train rumbled into the mountains, Sia fought the urge to sleep. Her left hand had stilled, but she was struggling to shake the fatigue.
The train clipped by alpine churches and timber chalets with shutters and windows trimmed in reds and greens. Lugging a suitcase to the Hotel Staubbach in Lauterbrunnen, she checked in, dumped her belongings, and put her cell phone and laptop in the safe because they could not travel with her to the meeting.
It was the opening day of Lauterbrunnen’s Christmas market. Sia bought a cup of hot chocolate and sat on a bench, forcing her mind to focus on the meeting. Jon, her old instructor, had once asked her how many meaningful ops she thought an officer would land in a lifetime. Five, she had guessed. One, he corrected, just one that will really make a difference. And this, she knew, was hers. From the cone-spired alpine church beneath the falls came four pleasant dings of the bells. Her bus would soon arrive.
She was the lone passenger. Though the drive was only fifteen minutes, she greeted the bus driver with, “Wake me up at Stechelberg.” He gave her a cold stare, as if he did not understand her more than passable French. She took her seat and the door shut with a hiss.
