“In Turkey it could be any of a dozen things; that’s why this covert action was ill-advised,” said Dominika, matter-of-factly. “The Turks certainly have informers inside PKK; perhaps a tradecraft problem with the delivery of weapons; US SIGINT might be listening to chatter.” Gorelikov polished his wire-framed eyeglasses.
“Or we could have a mole in the Kremlin,” he said, softly. Dominika willed her scalp not to creep.
“Always a possibility, but unlikely,” she said. “Everyone in the Council approved the plan.”
“Except for you, Bortnikov, and me,” said Gorelikov.
“I can hardly credit the Chief of FSB working for the opposition, and I know I am not a mole . . .”
“Which leaves me,” said Gorelikov, amused.
“A dangerous counterrevolutionary of the criminal Trotsky gang. Line KR will have to keep an eye on you,” said Dominika, and the moment passed.
In Istanbul, CIA officers, in addition to sending burst transmissions, had begun marking signals—chalk marks on stone walls, tape on light poles, thumbtacks in trees—along Shlykov’s walking route between his temporary Istanbul apartment and the Russian Consulate. Because Shlykov wasn’t looking for them, he didn’t notice them. Very discreet surveillance of the major, done from the front and in phases, soon determined which cafés and restaurants he favored for solitary lunches and dinners. One of these was in Cicek Pasaji, a covered street arcade with a nineteenth-century Beaux Arts latticework and glass roof. Whenever Shlykov ate there—he habitually ordered
A steady stream of local commercial brochures, advertisements, and flyers were mailed to Shlykov’s address announcing Bosphorus tours, condos for sale in Esentepe, bus excursions to Bulgaria. The junk mail was collected and delivered by his toothless concierge. Shlykov thought nothing of the brochures and threw most of them away, but one or two of them were tossed in desk drawers and forgotten. They all had been lightly sprayed with household insecticide, a chemical component of which is phenolphthalein, a telltale of secret writing developer. There were no messages on this junk mail, all of it stiff and glossy with the dried aerosol patina.
Nathaniel Nash sat in a nondescript Fiat Scudo van parked on a narrow side street in Istanbul with three technical officers from Langley. It was dusk and the final call to prayer had finished minutes ago; the steep Beyoǧlu neighborhood of grimy apartment buildings and first-floor shops was quiet and dark. There were intermittent rainstorms scudding across the city, and the alleyways, stairways, and gutters were periodically awash in a brown chyme, the composition unchanged since the Byzantine Empire. A cat sat under the eaves of a ground-floor apartment window shaking its paw. The van was parked three doors down from a brick-and-stone apartment building with a fabric canopy over double glass doors in front. They were waiting for the crone who was the concierge in the building to leave her little desk in the entrance foyer and walk down to her basement apartment to start dinner for her husband. Instead, she stuck her head out of the door and poked the underside of the bulging canopy with a mop handle to empty it of accumulated rainwater.
Nate and the three entry techs were waiting to break into the personal apartment of Valeriy Shlykov. The van was filled with the collective fragrances of the tool satchels each of them held in their laps: the bitter stench of electric motor oil; the pungency of wood putty and quick-dry paint; the gritty whiff of graphite powder, the sweetness of talcum. The techs, veterans all, sat silently, looking straight ahead; three good ol’ boys, two from the Deep South, who didn’t use aftershave because it could linger on doorknobs and drawer pulls, and who didn’t smoke because they sometimes had to lie on their stomachs in an attic for seventy-two hours straight.
