The Year of the Locust, page 44
Certainly the scores of men toiling among the clouds of smoke—stripped to the waist, silhouetted against huge showers of sparks, and breathing in the toxic air—looked like the inhabitants of another realm.
“As you can imagine, the pay for working in such an environment is huge,” Falcon said. “But the real money comes if the crew hits the monthly production target—the bonuses, in Russian terms, are off the charts. A lot of recruits apply for the facility but only the toughest men are ever chosen. Not to be sexist about it, but you won’t find any women here—”
“Too fucking smart, that’s why,” Margaret said. “Not to be sexist about it, of course.” It brought a peal of laughter from around the room, including Falcon.
“The plant was built seventy years ago,” he continued. “It was used to forge the steel used in the Soviets’ fledgling rocket program but even then it must have seemed like a throwback to the darkest days of the industrial revolution—the deadly mills of Baltimore and Detroit. It has now been repurposed with the addition of this.”
He pointed at the screen as footage of a distant section of the plant, emerging through sparks and flying debris, came into focus. The camera moved close enough so that we could look through glass walls into a totally white, sealed environment: the freighter’s cargo pod had negotiated an air lock and now, inside the huge chamber, its cargo hatches opened automatically and robot scoops unloaded the off-Earth ore onto a stainless-steel conveyor belt.
The belt transported the raw material into a series of sanitizing baths and under high-intensity lights that were designed to destroy any foreign organisms. As an added precaution, clearly in case of any sudden environmental emergency, huge industrial nozzles were ranged along the steel ceiling, ready to flood the sealed chamber with either a sterilizing gas or antiseptic spray. Once the ore had been cleansed, the conveyor belt carried it into a crusher. Pulverized, it emerged into another air lock and finally out into the plant for further processing.
Nearly everyone in the room was focused on the huge glass isolation chamber, but I was looking at something else entirely.
CHAPTER 25
Once the meeting was over, I waited until only Falcon remained. I made my way down the steps toward him: “Can you tell me?” I asked quietly. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?” he replied, turning.
“You’ve got an asset on the inside at Baikonur.”
“Do I?” he said innocently.
“The Aral Sea, the landing strips, the launchpads—I get all that,” I said. “It was taken by satellites or spy planes flying at the edge of space. But what about the footage inside the processing plant? There was no other way—someone with a camera just fucking walked in there.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. Falcon didn’t say anything but he wasn’t denying it. “How the hell did they do it?” I asked. “You can’t just wander about a facility in a ZATO waving a camera around.”
“A miner’s helmet,” Falcon said at last, breaking into a tight smile. “You know—with a headlight on the front.” He pointed at his forehead. “This one had a little more—hidden in the light was a 4K camera with a tiny gyroscope to keep the image steady. Wherever the person walked, it was shooting footage.”
I shook my head in admiration. “But how did you even get an asset into Baikonur?”
“I didn’t,” he replied. “My predecessor did. She was a brilliant woman—she saw the future and acted on it.”
I didn’t know her, she was before my time, but that was what everybody said about her. Falcon had been her deputy and there were stories about the two of them, but I don’t think anyone knew the truth. Perhaps the rumors continued to be whispered—even today, so many years afterward—because on the rare occasions when he spoke about her it was always with a respect bordering on reverence. Sorrow, too. A few months before her forty-seventh birthday she had been diagnosed with a virulent form of breast cancer. She was gone six months later.
Her passing opened the door for Falcon and here he was, still working with strategies she had put in place. “Fifteen, twenty years ago,” he continued, “she realized the newly resurgent Russians would pour money into their space rocket program. Finding a source of information became her highest priority, and that led her to a man, a doctor, stationed at the cosmodrome, whose wife had never been able to join him—she had a chronic illness that required constant and expensive medical care in the outside world.” He shrugged. “It was the old story—not everybody is a traitor, but everybody has a weakness.
“He became our asset, and when he died unexpectedly his wife was still alive, with no real means of supporting herself. Another member of the family, also a doctor, took on the role.
“When it started, it was basic, smuggling out written accounts on microdots hidden in Christmas and birthday gifts. Incredibly inefficient, but it was the best we could do. Eventually everything changed, and if I can claim credit for anything, the miner’s helmet was my idea—although it took two years before the asset could take possession of it while visiting the invalided relative at a hospital on the Black Sea.”
“Who is it—the asset?” I asked.
Falcon looked at me with something close to pity. “You know better than that.”
“But the asset is looking for Kazinsky now?” I said.
“No,” Falcon replied.
“For fuck’s sake, Falcon—” I said, my voice rising.
“Listen to me!” he shouted back. “The asset is highly restricted in their movement—everybody is, it’s a goddamn ZATO, for Chrissake! It was just coincidence that a visit to the processing plant coincided with the freighter’s arrival. That was our luck. Be thankful for it.”
“Sorry.”
He nodded, accepting it. “Anyway, I’m not sure what you are doing here. I spoke to Lucas Corrigan just before I arrived—he said you aren’t on active service now; you are on light duties.”
“That’s true,” I responded. “Whatever ‘light duties’ means.”
“I’m sure I can find something.”
CHAPTER 26
It had been two weeks since my meeting with Corrigan—two weeks that I had spent cooling my jets in the office, trying to adjust to the hours of inactivity—when I heard a tone from my computer indicating that a high-priority message had just hit my inbox.
Jacket already in hand, I was about to head out of my office to try to beat the rush at the busiest Starbucks in the world. I unlocked the computer and saw that the message was from Falcon. As I opened the first of the attached files, a strange silence seemed to engulf the world. Some people might have said it was the universe marking the moment when the stars aligned, but as I mentioned earlier, I am not one of them.
I paid the silence no mind, saw the code name Magus on the title page, and realized it was what Falcon had meant when he said he’d find something for an incapacitated spy to work on. It had been my intention to take only a cursory glance, but I ended up pulling up a chair and I read the files until night fell. When I finished, I called Clay in the Tomb and asked him for all the raw material on which the files were based. By then I had decided it was my way back in. Even Lucas Corrigan’s concerns about my panic attacks would carry far less weight with Falcon if such a difficult issue as the Magus’s betrayal in Tehran could be resolved.
I also asked Clay for a favor. I needed him to look the other way so that I could take everything home and work on it over the weekend to prepare myself for the dawn meeting with Falcon on Monday. As I had expected, the archivist—good man that he was—waved me and the files through, and at home, in a bedroom converted to an office, I worked far into the night making copious notes. After a few hours’ sleep I got up before sunrise and continued, scattering paper files on the floor and with a host of different files open on my three screens. It wasn’t what anyone would call an important intelligence operation, so for once, I had left the door unlocked.
Listening through headphones to an interview with the motorcycle taxi driver who had helped the Magus make his rapid exit from the Espinas Palace Hotel, it was only when I took the cans off that I realized Rebecca was in the doorway, waiting for me to finish. She had just arrived from work, sweat stained, hair pulled back, and exhausted. I smiled as she picked her way through the papers on the floor and kissed me.
“It’s five a.m.,” she said. “I never sleep because new residents aren’t allowed to—it’s a rule, apparently. But you do it by choice and that’s sort of crazy. I’m talking as a doctor here.” She smiled and looked at a photo of the Magus on one of the screens.
It showed a tall and lean man, in his late forties when the photo was taken, handsome, with dark wavy hair and tanned skin, but already showing evidence of a dissolute life: the jowls starting to sag and the eyes discolored from too many late nights drinking in Dubai.
“Another bad guy?” she asked.
“Yeah, he was one of our most trusted assets until we found out he was batting for the other team. Of course, because he did it to us, he’s a traitor; if he was Russian and did it to them, we’d call him a hero. Confusing, right? Someone who once had Falcon’s job described the secret world as ‘a wilderness of mirrors.’ ”
“What happened to him?” she asked, indicating the man on the screen.
“Disappeared. The agency has been trying to find him for years. The theory is I might have a chance because I know how to hide. Apart from that, they need to give me something to do.” I smiled.
“Getting close?”
“Not really. You start with the family or the lover, the things people find the hardest to leave behind—but for twenty-five years he worked in the covert world, so he knows our approach. Long before he went rogue, he would have set up some form of communication system with his wife or mistress that we can’t uncover. Probably encrypted messages on a board on the dark web—similar to a method we use in Afghanistan.”
“Friends?” she suggested. “Not everybody can be using a secret message board.”
“Most of his friends are dead.” I pulled out a series of photos of the ten bodies hanging from cranes in Tehran. “Our traitor and four of his closest friends were part of an intelligence network,” I said. “That’s what happened after he revealed their names to the Iranians.”
“He sold out his friends?” Rebecca asked, shocked. “What sort of person does that?”
“Only four were friends,” I said. “The other six who were executed were just colleagues, so I guess they were expendable. What sort of person does it? Someone who loves money.”
“That part makes sense,” she said. “He’s got expensive taste.”
I looked at her. It was a strange thing to say, given the small number of pictures, videos, and documents she could see. “Why do you say that?”
She picked up a newspaper clipping showing him on a bridge over the Spree River in Berlin twenty years earlier. It was a winter’s night and the story said a woman had thrown herself into the freezing water and would have died if a passing motorist had not stopped, dived in, and dragged her to shore. I think I said earlier—the Magus was a brave man.
Accompanying the story was a photo from the scene and another shot in which he was smoking, looking into the camera. “He’s driving a Mercedes,” she said. “The overcoat he threw off before he dived in didn’t come off the rack, and there’s the cigarette,” Rebecca said.
“What?” I asked.
“The cigarette,” she said. “Look at it—we always think of cigarettes as white but I don’t think this one is. Maybe it’s the shadow but there is one type that’s black and has a gold band at the filter. Sobranie Black Russian—they’re unusual, and very expensive.”
“And you know this how?” was my next question.
“They’re popular among some wealthy, elite groups in Japan,” she explained. “When I went on rounds with my exchange hosts there was a patient in the hospital who was a senior lieutenant—a saiko komon—in the Yakuza. He had them delivered every day.”
I stared at her, my mind racing, and I started to rifle through the files until I found a photo taken from the CCTV footage of the night the Magus betrayed us. He was sitting at the table in the bistro of the Espinas Palace Hotel, his raincoat hanging over a chair and the ashtray holding a crumpled credit card receipt and the butts of two cigarettes.
“See—a grand hotel. I told you he likes luxury,” Rebecca said.
“No—look at the cigarettes stubbed out in the ashtray,” I asked.
She took a moment. “It’s difficult. Even the ends of them are crushed—maybe… maybe they’re the same.”
I picked up a closely typed report written several years before. “The research report says they’re cigarillos—thin, small cigars—probably Cuban. No marks, untraceable.”
“That might be right,” she replied, examining the photo even more closely. “I guess the casing of a cigarillo is really dark, too—but look, that could be a tiny corner of gold. If it is, I bet they’re Sobranie Black Russians.”
I was already half lost in thought. “It’s possible some researcher might have been mistaken or made an assumption. The files show the agency tested everything—the DNA on the butts, the make of the raincoat, every last detail of the credit card receipt—but maybe nobody ever questioned the belief that they were cigarillos.”
Rebecca smiled, pleased to have contributed. “Well, I guess I’m done,” she said. “I’m going to bed. If Langley needs any more help, you know where I am.”
“It would mean he’s been smoking the same cigarettes for more than twenty years,” I said to myself. “What are the chances he would change brands now?” As Rebecca headed out the door, I picked up my phone and dialed.
CHAPTER 27
It was still early on a Saturday morning and I could tell immediately I had woken Madelaine up. It came as a shock, and I don’t really know why, to realize from a muffled voice in the background that she was in bed with someone.
As she asked me to hold for a moment I heard her putting on some clothes, and then the voice spoke more clearly—it was a woman, volunteering to get them both a coffee.
“It’s brand-new, our first night together, so your timing was impeccable,” Madelaine said as she walked into my office an hour later, took off her jacket, and put down two coffees and a bag of bagels she had bought us for breakfast.
She opened her laptop and showed me an enhanced image of the cigarette butts in the ashtray. “It’s from NSA twenty minutes ago,” she said. “You can see, there is a fragment of a gold band on one of them. It’s meaningless—unless your ‘confidential source’ is correct and they are Sobranie Black Russians.
“I assume the source is right and I have told my friends at NSA I need help tracking a terrorist. I’ve asked them to try to access the distribution and sales information from Japan Tobacco—”
“Japan Tobacco owns the brand?” I asked.
“Ultimately. How much do you know about Sobranie?”
I shook my head. She went on.
“At one stage they were cigarette suppliers to almost every crowned head of Europe. The Black Russians—the top of the tree—are still made in Ukraine, and the gold-banded filter is embossed with the imperial crest of the czars.”
“The czars? Very fancy,” I replied. “Thank God they’re special—if you could buy them at a gas station we wouldn’t have a prayer. Let’s hope your buddies at NSA can help—what we need is a list of the distributors and shops that sell them.”
“I know,” Madelaine said. “But London, Paris, Tokyo, or New York—cities like that—they won’t be much use, there will be thousands of customers.”
“I don’t think that’s where the Magus is hiding,” I said. “We’re looking for something unusual—somebody living in the Australian outback who gets ten cartons on a special order.”
“Assuming we can find something like it, when do we need it by?”
“Six a.m. Monday,” I said. I didn’t tell her, but I wanted to blow Falcon’s immaculate silk socks off.
CHAPTER 28
I arrived at Falcon’s empty office a few minutes early and waited for him in his anteroom, looking at the photos and awards hanging on what he called his “wall of shame.”
They showed him as a young man in combat fatigues in the Middle East and South America, posing in the Oval Office with three presidents, standing alongside the heads of state of countries stretching from New Zealand to Sweden, visiting a battlefield in the Balkans, and in various gilded mansions with half of the world’s worst tyrants.
I heard the door behind me open and I indicated a clutch of war zones. “Afghanistan, Syria, 9/11, Iraq, the War on Terror, Ukraine,” I said. “Does it ever end?”
Falcon stood beside me. “It’s like Lenin said: ‘There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.’ ” He laughed. “I got the latter. Did you read the files?”
“Yes,” I replied as he buzzed himself into his office and we sat down at his small conference table.
“We have to get a list of ideas to at least explore,” he said. “Anything we can think of. I don’t hold out much hope, everything has been pored over—”
I opened my briefcase and laid out sheets of data. “What’s that?” he asked.
“A list of distributors and sales points from Japan Tobacco.”
“The cigarillos?” he replied.
“Except they’re cigarettes. Very exclusive—the crowned heads of Europe and the Yakuza have more in common than we thought. They both like Sobranie Black Russians.”
Falcon stared. “And this is what he was smoking at the hotel? How do you know?”
“A tiny fragment of gold on one of the butts. He’s been smoking them for twenty years,” I said. “Remember the photo on the Berlin bridge? Same cigarettes.”
