The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [178]
Provalov had gotten the local varsity to handle this case, with even some help now from the Federal Security Service, formerly the Second Chief Directorate of the former KGB, the professional spy-chasers whod made life in Moscow difficult for foreign intelligence operations. They remained superbly equipped, and though not so well funded as in the past, there was little to criticize in their training. The problem, of course, was that they knew all that themselves, and took on a degree of institutional arrogance that had gotten the noses of his homicide investigators severely out of joint. Despite all that, they were useful allies. There were a total of seven vehicles to handle the surveillance. In America, the FBI would have arranged a helicopter as well, but Michael Reilly wasnt here to make that condescending observation, somewhat to Provalovs relief. The man had become a friend, and a gifted mentor in the business of investigation, but enough was sometimes enough. There were trucks containing TV cameras to tape the business of the morning, and every automobile had two people in it so that driving wouldnt interfere with watching. They followed Suvorov/Koniev into central Moscow.
Back at his apartment, another team had already defeated his lock and was inside his flat. What happened there was as graceful as any performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. Once inside, the investigative team stood still at first, scanning for telltales, left-behind items as innocuous as a human hair stuck in place across a closet door to show if someone had opened it. Suvorovs KGB file was finally in Provalovs possession now, and he knew all the things the man had been trained in—it turned out that his training had been quite thorough, and Suvorovs grades had been, well, "C" class most of the time: not outstanding enough to earn him the chance to operate in the field as an "illegal" officer on the home ground of the "Main Enemy," meaning the United States, but good enough that hed become a diplomatic-intelligence specialist, mainly going over information brought in by others, but spending some time in the field, trying to recruit and "run" agents. Along the way, hed established contact with various foreign diplomats, including three from China—those three hed used to gather low-level diplomatic information, mainly chitchat-level stuff, but it was all regarded as useful. Suvorovs last field assignment had been from 1989 to 91 in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing, where hed again tried to gather diplomatic intelligence, and, they saw, with some success this time. The accomplishments had not been questioned at the time, Provalov saw, probably because hed had some minor victories against the same countrys diplomatic service while in Moscow. His file said that he could both speak and write Chinese, skills learned at the KGB Academy that had militated in favor of making him a China specialist.
One of the problems with intelligence operations was that what looked suspicious was often innocuous, and what looked innocuous could well be suspicious. An intelligence officer was supposed to establish contact with foreign nationals, often foreign intelligence officers, and then the foreign spy could execute a maneuver that the Americans called a "flip," turning an enemy into an asset. The KGB had done the same thing many times, and part of the price of doing such business was that it could happen to your own people, not so much while you were not looking as when you were. Nineteen eighty-nine to 91 had been the time of glasnost, the "openness" that had destroyed the Soviet Union as surely as smallpox had annihilated primitive tribesmen. At that time, KGB was having problems of its own, Provalov reminded himself, and what if the Chinese had recruited Suvorov? The Chinese economy had just been starting to grow back then, and so theyd had the money to toss around, not as much as the Americans always seemed to have, but enough to entice a Soviet civil servant looking at the prospect of losing his job soon.
But what had Suvorov been