The Venona Cable

Excerpt

PART I

Source No. 19: unidentified highly placed asset who at the time of the Trident conference in 1943 reported to the KGB on a conversation with Roosevelt and Churchill. —John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr,

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Chapter 1

I’m trapped, nearly out of time.

I have to think.

But I can’t trust my judgment. Perceptions blurred, memories distorted and incomplete. No sleep for thirty-six hours, a punch behind the ear with the butt of a Glock, and a sickening tumble down the embankment of one of L.A.’s ubiquitous freeways have taken their toll. I landed in a drainage basin beneath an overpass, where a crawl of sixty meters through a nearby culvert saved my life. The tunnel led to the other side of the expressway. From there I hot-wired an ancient Datsun pickup, abandoned it ten miles later in a mall parking lot, then walked here, to a run-down motel near the airport.

I figure I bought an hour. Two if I’m lucky.

My cell phone is gone, but that doesn’t matter, not anymore. The only person I trust is Valya, and she is half a world away. I’m on my own, hunted by the police and by American intelligence agencies. My adversaries could be from any of half a dozen organizations. What I don’t know is who is pulling the strings. If I can’t figure that out soon, I’ll be dead.

Somehow I need to wrest answers from the document on the stained bedspread in front of me. Two pages, winged open at the folds, crumpled and smudged from much handling. Labeled VENONA, TOP SECRET, it is a decrypted Soviet cable, originally sent from New York to Moscow on 29 May 1943.

No matter how many times I look at it, revelation fails to come.

I lean forward, elbows on my knees. My suit is mud-streaked, torn at the knees. A subcompact Beretta rests in my lap, only four rounds left in the magazine. It smells of burnt powder and gun oil. Opposite the bed, the door is locked and chained. A creaky wooden chair, the twin of the one I’m sitting on, is wedged beneath the knob. Next to the door is a window, the blinds closed as tight as they’ll go but still admitting slits of electric yellow light that stripe the carpet and one corner of the bed where the glow cast by the feeble overhead bulb fails to reach.

I don’t know how the Americans will handle a situation like this. Their methods in this country are restricted “by law and convention,” as a British double agent once famously put it, but the usual rules won’t apply in this case. In their position I would clear the area and launch a grenade or pump several hundred rounds through the window rather than risk any people in an assault.

My trembling hands are all that remains of the adrenaline rush brought on by the near miss on the freeway ramp. I clamp them together to steady myself. I need to concentrate in the little time I have left.

The decrypted cable in front of me is marked “3rd Reissue.” Each reissue meant that more parts of the cable had been deciphered by the code-breakers at Arlington Hall’s Venona Project or their successors in the NSA. This one was dated “10/9/74.” More than thirty years after the original cable was sent. But less than two months before my father defected in a Soviet spy plane carrying reconnaissance equipment so advanced for its time that the Americans were desperate to have it.

Through the motel’s paper-thin wall I hear a family moving their luggage into the room next door. A baby cries. A boy complains that he’s hungry, and his father gruffly tells him to shut up. Jet engines scream overhead as another plane approaches the runway. Hoping the family will leave soon— dinner, a movie, anything— I reposition myself on the hard edge of the chair and bow over the papers again.

The decrypted cable is titled “19” REPORTS ON DISCUSSIONS WITH “KAPITAN,” “KABAN” AND “ZAMESTITEL” ON THE SECOND FRONT. According to footnotes prepared by the Venona analysts, “19” was an “unidentified cover designation.” “Kapitan” was Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Kaban,” Russian for “boar,” was Winston Churchill. “Zamestitel,” the Russian word for “deputy,” is believed to have been either Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins or Vice President Wallace.

Before leaving Moscow— how long ago was that, four days, five?—I was briefed by a former KGB field operative, an aged Cold War veteran named Isadora, who described the Soviet encryption process to me. There in the glade near her dacha, her gaze flitting from one spot to another but rarely meeting mine, she told me how the Soviets’ wall of secrecy was breached. Wartime madness, Soviet mistakes. “Point to whatever reason you like,” she said. “Venona was still a singular counterintelligence achievement.”

The phone in my room rings. One, two, three jangling peals before it goes silent. Nobody knows I am here. Nobody. I draw a deep breath, then another, casting through my memories of the past two weeks for answers. Starting with Everett Walker, a renowned Hollywood filmmaker and cinematographer found dead in my Moscow ware house with the Venona cable hidden in his possessions, photographically shrunken to a microdot. He had come to Moscow looking for me, the son of Soviet defector Stepan Volkovoy.

Why?

I rub my eyes, picturing my father shivering in the cold cockpit as American interceptors escorted him toward a secret base above the Arctic Circle. What was he thinking at that moment, thousands of meters above the ice, guiding the enormous plane lower, ever lower, approaching— what? Foreign riches? Duty? Fate, I suppose. Either way, traitor or patriot, he was descending toward his new life.

My hand comes away from my eyes smeared with blood. A red trail stains the crinkled whiteness of the cable as I pull it closer, determined to see it anew, to find the clue I believe must be hiding among the words.

The Venona decrypts helped the Americans and British identify hundreds of Soviet spies— among them Julius Rosenberg, Kim Philby, and Alger Hiss— many of them placed at the highest levels of their governments. But despite the American and British successes, they never discovered the identity of 19. They never learned the name of this Soviet source.

A lesson I learned during a training course on counterespionage at Balashikha-2 springs to mind— the paradoxical truth that the more valuable an agent, the more reason to fear deception. If Source 19 was able to get this close to Roosevelt and Churchill at this most critical stage of World War II, he was as valuable as any agent the Soviets had, and therefore the most dangerous one to both the Soviets and the Americans. All of which should be simply a historical footnote, but it’s not, because somebody protecting 19’s identity wants me dead.

Think!

The KGB assigned cover names to its agents. Julius Rosenberg was “Antennae,” then later was known as “Liberal.” Alger Hiss was “Ales.” The GRU— the Soviet military intelligence agency— often used numeric cover names. Everyone knows this, including all the people who have speculated about the identity of Source 19 for de cades. But I know more. I know that GRU Captain Oleg Bassoff has been sniffing around Moscow, rooting through old files, pressuring former agents, and pushing me and others for answers. Does that mean 19 was a GRU source? Why would it matter anymore?

The certainty that nothing can be known or trusted entirely has been drilled into me by training and experience. Truth is elusive, and never more so than in the world of espionage, where patterns are concealed within webs of disinformation and misdirection. Somehow I need to see past the distorted mirrors of deception and time. I need to start at the beginning, make the connections between what I know and what I can infer, find the relationships. My life depends on whether I can solve the puzzle.

What started me along the path to this squalid room? Your father was a traitor. A man named Filip Lachek said that four months ago, when he held me in a torture chamber in the bowels of the Lubyanka. He said it again ten days ago, just before I killed him on a foggy night in Macao. That was the moment, I decide, when the past erupted into the present. That was when I changed from predator to prey.

I settle back into the creaking hardness of the motel chair, cup my face in my hands, and drag them downward, stretching sandpapery skin, pulling my eyes wide open. Another jet passes overhead, followed by a roll of thunder and hissing sheets of rain. The color of the thin blades of light between the blinds has changed with the weather. The parallel slashes are bone-white now, strobing as fitful gusts blow from the floor-mounted air vent.

A figure darkens the window.

My hand drops to the butt of the Beretta.

PART II

There is a man, there is a problem. No man, no problem.—Joseph Stalin

Chapter 2

I pursued Lachek for more than four months. Or maybe it is better to say I followed a trail of whispers and innuendo. He was rumored to be in Jakarta, Phuket, and as far north as Beijing, but I could never find any sign of him when I went to look. “Wasted days,” Valya said of those trips, worried that my obsession with revenge was causing me to lose touch with what was truly important. “The General has work for you in Moscow, Tbilisi, London. How much longer is everyone supposed to wait while you chase a ghost?”

True enough, although I think her comment about the General reflected her impatience, not his, because he never questioned me during that time. But I didn’t listen to her.

My life-and-death game with Lachek began when I killed his son during what I thought was a terrorist attack. I didn’t intend to kill him, just to get him out of the way while I subdued two terrorists holed up in a burning building. But a blow to the head with the flat of a gun barrel speaks for itself.

Later I discovered that Lachek and others had staged the explosion of the offices of an American oil company to simulate a terrorist bombing, trying to frighten American investors and inflame passions against Chechen separatists in a bid to take over oil routes. He lost his bid and fled to Southeast Asia, but only after he raped and murdered my friend and business partner, Alla.

Then word leaked to one of my sources that China’s Ministry of State Security’s counterintelligence section, known as Sixth Bureau, had located him in Macao. I jumped on a commercial flight to Hong Kong, rode the jetfoil ferry to Macao’s Outer Harbor, and spent two fruitless days patrolling cobbled streets with their names etched in blue enamel tiles— exotic leftovers from the days of Portuguese colonialism.

Lachek should have been hard to miss. Tall, cadaverous, thinning white hair combed back in oily strands. He would stand out even among all the tourists. But I trawled hotels, theaters, nightclubs, restaurants, bars, Internet cafés, food markets, and a giant shopping mall without a hit.

I showed his picture to chambermaids, waiters, street vendors, beggars. Cabbies smoking dark cigarillos as they leaned against dented fenders, waiting for the next fare. A lounging shopgirl, who jutted her hip, ticked a shiny red nail on the photo, and batted lashes long as butterfly wings as she slowly shook her head no. I trolled the Jockey Club while the thoroughbreds barreled around the turns at Taipa racetrack. Cruised among the flashing lights and burbling machines in the casinos, bumping shoulders with gamblers, junkies, painted hookers.

No sign of him.

Valya phoned me on my last night in Macao. I was done in, ready to call it another useless trip, trudging through a back alley so narrow a driver had to fold back the side mirrors of his delivery truck to squeeze through. Past the kitchen of a noodle shop, its recessed rear door propped partway open, leaking steam and the clamor of pots and shouted Cantonese. On the other side of the alley stood three rows of boxlike housing units that looked like metal shipping containers stacked beside and on top of one another. Wet clumps of fog absorbed the orange light cast by a bulb caged in metal over the delivery door of the restaurant.

“No luck?” Valya said.

“Nothing. The man is everywhere and nowhere.”

“I went by the ware house today. You don’t have anyone watching the place, do you?”

“Not since Alla...”

I leaned my back against a wall made of sooty brick and propped my left heel behind me to relieve the pressure on my prosthesis. Alla ran my operations with dictatorial efficiency. She was so omnipresent that closing everything down had seemed inevitable after she died.

“Why?” I said.

“I went there to look for Vadim. One of the cooks told me he’d gone to get something at the ware house.”

Two people turned into the alley and strolled my way, shoulder to shoulder, holding hands. Another figure rounded the corner behind them, weaving, probably drunk.

“Three men were there,” Valya said. “One out front talked on a cell phone while two others searched for something on the side nearest the river.”

The couple turned into a gap between two buildings. Just before they disappeared, his hand dropped to her bottom and she slapped it away, giggling. The third figure resolved itself into an old man, jerking and swaying with an uneven gait. He appeared to be having difficulty finding purchase on the slick cobblestones.

“Police?”

“Probably.”

“Did they see you?”

“You’re joking, right?”

The old man drew even with me. Tall and thin, head down, one hand buried in his pocket, the other brushing the wall on the far side of the alley for balance. The upturned collar of his coat hid his face but left the top of his head exposed, revealing white strands of hair. He moved spasmodically, stooped, loosely placing one foot in front of the other before he stiffened his spine for the next step. That was what did it. His spastic movements triggered recognition.

“Got him,” I said into the cell phone, then dropped it into my pocket, gathered a head of steam in five long steps, and smashed into Lachek like a battering ram.

Chapter 3

Lachek slammed ass first onto the broken asphalt of the alley with me on top of him. Before he had a chance to take a breath, I elbowed him to the side of his head. Pistoned my knee into his groin. Hoisted him off the ground and drove him backward into the brick wall, all of my weight behind my shoulder. Ribs cracked as he hit with an explosive grunt. I held him there for long enough to see that he was done, then let him drop to the gutter, where he lay curled, clutching his midsection and groaning.

The delivery door of the noodle shop swung all the way open, casting a shaft of light into the alleyway. A Chinese cook stared without expression at us. He tucked his unlit cigarette behind his ear and looked off into the orange glow above the roofline of the building. Then he deliberately wiped his hands on his apron, turned away, and eased the door closed behind him.

I jammed the barrel of my Sig under Lachek’s nose while I frisked him. Bony shoulders and hips, ribs that felt like broom handles. He cried out when I jostled one of the broken ones to find a chrome-plated Makarov in a shoulder holster and a nasty switchblade in a belt sheath.

I transferred them to the pocket of my leather jacket. Found two keys on a ring in his pants pocket.

The twin headlights of a car swept into the alley, lit the scene, threw long shadows.

“Volk,” Lachek said matter-of-factly while I watched the car reverse out of the alley. I had to assume the driver was dialing the police on his cell phone. Meaning I didn’t have much time.

Without bothering to look directly at Lachek, I slashed the barrel of the Sig across his face. Skin split as his head snapped back. Blood welled between his fingers, and he pedaled his feet against the asphalt trying to escape another blow.

“Where are you staying?” I said.

Still holding his face, he aimed his chin toward a flight of metal stairs crawling up the side of the stacked housing units. “Second floor.”

I pulled him to his feet and frog-marched him ahead and up the stairs, grinding the barrel of the Sig into his lower back. He stumbled when we reached the landing, so I lifted him by the neck in a stranglehold and drove him up the last flight and along a breezeway.

“Here,” he wheezed outside a door numbered 243B. I twisted the key in the lock, then shoved him through the doorway as it swung open, holding his body in front of mine, aiming the Sig around the room under his arm.

Nobody in sight. I kicked the door closed with my heel, clouted Lachek in the back of the head to make sure he wouldn’t get ideas about hideaway guns and knives, and rushed to recon the flat as he lay dazed on the floor.

In the back was a bedroom. Unmade bed, scattered clothes, two dirty syringes, the whole mess bathed in green neon from a sign outside the window advertising some energy drink. The window looked onto a steel-and-glass commercial mid-rise surrounded by a ramshackle collection of older buildings.

The combination dining room and kitchenette held a folding table, a built-in stovetop and oven combo, and a rust-stained sink. The door to the right opened onto a bathroom barely big enough to turn around in.

No bodyguard, no nurse, no maid.

Lachek had money. Not as much as he once had. Much of his wealth had been stripped away, along with all of his power and prestige, when the General and his group chased him out of Russia. But still, more money than most people could accumulate in several lifetimes. He didn’t have to live this way. This was a choice.

I went back to where he lay sprawled in the front room. Half-eaten cartons of food, periodicals, and discarded clothes littered the floor, everything coated with the sour stink of neglect and decay. No pictures or plants or personal touches anywhere.

As I waited for Lachek to regain his senses I flipped through the newspapers and magazines. The South China Morning Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Vladivostok News, Time magazine’s international edition, The Economist— some of them dated as far back as February. Lachek hadn’t been traveling every corner of Southeast Asia during the last four months. He had been here the entire time, holed up amid the squalor and the putrid smell of spoiled food and dirty socks. Waiting to die, judging by the look of him.

He stirred. Fluttered his eyelids. Drew his knees to his chest and held his bloody cheek in his hands, making a whimpering sound. Looking at him, I finally understood how he had been able to evade me for so many months. I’d been searching for the wrong man. The towering operative with a face like the blade of an ax and rabidly bright eyes was gone, replaced by this empty husk.

After another minute or so his hands dropped from his face. He stared around the room, looking lost for a few seconds before he saw me. I watched the memory come back to him. He started to say something, stopped, and looked around again. Then his expression changed as a different kind of understanding dawned. He was seeing himself through my eyes.

“Cancer,” he said. “You can’t do anything worse to me.”

I started to correct him, then didn’t. I had come here intending to destroy him. Make it last for days, I’d told myself. But now that the moment was upon me, I no longer had the taste for it. Nothing could bring Alla back to life. Killing Lachek would give me no more satisfaction than stomping a cockroach.

“Do it,” he wheezed. He tried to sit up, then cried out and fell back, clutching his rib cage. “Do what you came here to do, just get it over with.”

I stood and exchanged my Sig for his Makarov. Racked the slide. “You’re vermin, Lachek. I’m not going to waste time pulling the wings off a fly.”

“Fuck you.”

His gaze followed the barrel as I raised my arm. But no fear showed on his face. Instead, his lips curled in the shape of a smile.

“Major Stepan Volkovoy,” he said, dragging out each syllable.

“What?”

The Lachek I remembered blossomed back to life. Vicious, all curdled malevolence, a wild, gleeful light in his eyes. “Your father was a traitor. A pig.”

My finger tightened on the trigger.

“He defected. Stole our most valuable spy plane and gave it to the Americans.”

I never knew my father. As far as I had been able to learn, he disappeared not long after my mother died as I clawed out of the womb. As an air force officer, he could have been killed in any one of dozens of Cold War theaters or exiled to one of many Soviet detention camps.

I firmed my grip on the Makarov, ignoring Lachek’s demented eyes, my thoughts turned inward. I had gone through a period of several years during which I’d search the archives for news of my father whenever I was on leave or had spare time. Even during rehab while I was learning how to walk again I made calls and requested records, swimming upstream against a torrent of Soviet and post-Soviet falsifications. The name S. Volkovoy appeared among the records of the political prisoners of a camp in Kolyma during the winter of 1979, but Volkovoy is a common name, and the reference led nowhere. The idea that my father might have betrayed his country and left his son to live an orphan’s hellish existence...

“A defector, Volk.”

Where not covered in blood Lachek’s skin was parchment-dry, his hair oiled and ropey across this skull. Snot seeped from his nose, but he didn’t seem to notice. He twisted his glistening red lips, visibly glad to have one last chance to injure somebody.

“He goes down in history as one of the vilest pigs our military ever produced. And it’s not over. I’ve made sure of that. All of you are going to pay. Tell your precious General I said that. All of your worst secrets will come back from the dead when you least expect.”

I knew the right thing to do if I wanted to learn more. Burn him, cut him, pistol-whip him. Tear every scrap of information from his ruptured flesh— whispered words from a former colleague in the KGB or one of his long-ago informants, or perhaps a connection he had made between the lines of one of his magazines. Who knows? But at that moment I didn’t have the stomach to be in the same room with him any longer. I thought that anything else he said would be either a hateful lie or a truth I couldn’t stand to hear.

Something in my bearing or expression forewarned him, gave him the chance to sink his fangs one last time. “Wait until you see what’s coming. You, the General, Bassoff, all of you will pay. Wait and see,” he said again, just before I crammed the barrel between his teeth and squeezed the trigger.

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