A last check for the telltale trailing LADA two blocks back—negative, she was totally clear of ticks this afternoon—and Helen entered the ramp to the underground parking garage, punching in the twins’ favorite music disc—Raffi singing about the wheels on the bus going round and round to which the twins resoundingly joined in (the more noise for the FSB-planted microphone in the car the better), and which was also the “ready” signal to Ricky listening from the trunk. Helen rounded the corner of the ramp, totally screened in the gap, ejected the disc (“go” signal) to howls from the twins, popped the trunk, and pulled on the emergency-brake handle to slow the car without showing brake lights. Ricky shed the blanket, rolled over the lip of the trunk, slammed the lid, and darted through a service door up a short staircase, and out into the street. Elapsed time: four seconds. Helen smoothly continued down to park and browse the stores, pushing a two-seat stroller. On the street, Ricky wore a Soviet-style cloth cap, dirty whipcord trousers, a padded light jacket torn at the shoulder, and a pair of scuffed Duolang “acid-resistant safety shoes” imported from China.
As he walked, head down, he wedged silicone spacers between his gums and cheeks, and slipped on clear-lens eyeglasses, making himself look older and heavier. He cleared the ritzy Arbat neighborhood, entered Khamovniki District, and walked slowly along Ostozhenka Ulitsa, a broad commercial street. Halfway down the boulevard, Walters loitered at a bright-red public-phone sidewalk kiosk and checked his watch. The standard four-minute window was just opening, and Walters saw the little dusty navy Skoda hatchback approach and pull over to the curb, a box of tissues on the dash. All clear. Ricky lifted the red phone off the cradle and put it back. Clear here. He scooted to the car and got into the passenger seat, scrunching down just enough to mask his profile, and the car moved off. He felt the plastic cover on the seat, a precaution against spy dust, though his Russkie disguise clothes had been kept in the Station and were unlikely to be contaminated.
This was an agent car pickup, substantially dangerous because a recognizable CIA officer was in the agent’s vehicle, the license plates of which were as good as her name being printed in block letters on the side of the car. The reverse procedure—a case-officer car pickup—was generally preferred but there was still risk: now you had a sensitive source in a US diplomatic-plated vehicle. “Pick your poison,” Gable once told Nash and Dominika during tradecraft practice. “Doesn’t matter who drives and who gets picked up. Just fucking get there black, both of you. That’s all there is to it.”
Walters looked over at DIVA, who, his chief had told him last night, was the absolute “gold standard,” so don’t make any mistakes,
Walters didn’t know what to expect: a mousy librarian or a rotund administrator, but not this Venus driving the car, not the classic Hellenic profile, flower-petal lips, luminous chestnut hair piled on top of her head, concentrating on traffic, electric-blue eyes darting constantly between her mirrors. Her elegant hands held the steering wheel professionally at the ten-and-two position, and she moved through traffic aggressively, shifting smoothly out of the district, east onto the third ring road, weaving through the belching blue traffic, then suddenly off again at Lyusinovskaya Ulitsa south to the 390-hectare Kolomenskoye Park on the river. DIVA parked and they quickly walked through crowds of tourists—no one paid them any attention—past the bone-white Church of the Ascension and the fanciful seventeenth-century wooden palace of Tsar Aleksey, bristling with gables, onion domes, and bell towers. DIVA led Ricky down a steep wooded slope to a small streambed, mossy paths following the water, surrounded by thick woods. It was suddenly dark and cold—and utterly silent. A slight mist hung over the trickle of water, and Walters looked around for three hags stirring a bubbling witches’ cauldron. Ricky knew they could spend more than the requisite four minutes in this creepy wooded glen for the meeting. Good screening.
“Pretty spooky down here,” said Walters, in English. He had no Russian. “We could probably find a couple of long-term cache sites somewhere along here.”
