Nate checked his watch. They had an hour-long window. Shlykov was propping up a wall at a dip party, watching fellow Russians, not working the crowd. He was too important to bother with dip targets. He had the covert action to propel him to his colonelcy. Three base officers in a loose circle around the Russian, eating, drinking, laughing, and handing off the eye, would punch Nate’s number when the major started moving. The techs were moving separately in the apartment, in a smooth, practiced choreography, dividing the rooms into cylindrical search sectors—high, low, middle—looking for the telltale wires of bugs or cameras, though it was unlikely that arrogant Major Shlykov would take such security precautions. No touching, no talking, their eyes moving in the dim light; Nate stood in the middle of the living room and waited.
The Mississippi boy named Lee, baby of the group at age fifty-two, moved to Shlykov’s bedroom and in thirty seconds had found a well-worn, hard-sided suitcase under the bed. He weighed it in his hand and nodded. He dipped into the small bag slung over his shoulder, no rummaging around, no sound, and came out with a pair of pincer pliers that looked as though they had first been used in 1415 at Agincourt. Nate kneeled beside him as Lee gently pulled off the aluminum flashing around the upper lid and using a long, thin spatula carefully pried apart the two sandwich layers of molded plastic. He snapped his fingers softly to attract Nate’s attention. From his own bag Nate took out the glassine envelope and carefully slid two secret writing carbons—specialized, essential, and incriminating—between the layers of the lid. Lee then squeezed the layers together, applied a dot of adhesive, and fitted the flashing back around the edge of the lid. He crimped the aluminum tight and pointed with his finger. Nate saw that Lee’s crimping tool had purposely left tiny teeth marks in the aluminum. Lee slid the suitcase back under the bed.
Nate again checked his watch through sweat-stung eyes and moved back to the living room. Gaylord and the third tech—a jolly Falstaff from upstate New York named Ginsburg—meanwhile had spread a tack cloth on the floor and were feeling with artisans’ hands the grain of a large wooden chessboard standing on its edge. Where had they found it?
Gaylord meanwhile had taken the collected sawdust and mixed it in a shallow beaker with an odorless chemical from a squeeze bottle to create a thick batter. Fitting a plastic plug into the cavity to protect the OTP, he smeared the paste over the mortise hole and troweled it even along the edge of the board, like a pastry chef smoothing frosting on a cake. He blew on the spot, tested it with the tips of ridiculously sensitive fingers, and in a few minutes, lightly sanded it smooth. Nate shined the penlight as Gaylord held a color wheel to the chessboard, then painted the area; it disappeared into the exact shade of the wood. “You sure they’ll find this?” whispered Nate.
Ginsburg looked him up and down. “If they’re looking for it, guaranteed. The cavity’ll light up on a fluoroscope like a polyp on your colonoscopy.” Nate looked at Ginsburg and nodded thoughtfully; given his age, the grizzled tech perhaps was speaking from recent experience. Whatever Ginsburg intended to say, there was a certain anatomical irony: when the chessboard and suitcase were discovered by Russian counterintelligence officers, Shlykov figuratively would be bent over and would experience the long arm of Kremlin justice.
As it turned out, they did, and he was. After a month of burst communications heating up Russian SIGINT antennas in Turkey, followed by the shootouts, the Kremlin had enough. Colonel Egorova traveled unannounced to Istanbul to observe the situation in the consulate, accompanied by two FSB heavies collegially lent by FSB Chief Bortnikov, who expected Egorova would discredit Shlykov and prove to the president that the Security Council members who opposed the rash OBVAL operation had been correct.
