Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

man the Indian was waiting for. That man arrived soon after. He shambled over to the table, approached the Indian, and said, in soft-spoken English: “May I join you, please?” just as he was supposed to. The Indian managed to answer: “I will be leaving shortly,” just as instructed, but he was suffering from a terrible shock. For he could see that his counterpart in this clandestine meeting, the man to whom he was entrusting his life, was an African—as black as the mud at the bottom of the river Ganges. Now I am dead, thought the Indian businessman. Very definitely, I am dead. He stared at his plate for twenty seconds and then got up and walked away, leaving the travel bag behind.

The black man was a student from Tanzania named Vladimir Ilyich Mbane. He had been recruited by the chief of station in Dar es Salaam three years before, just as he was heading off to university in the Soviet Union. It had seemed like a sensible enough recruitment—an extra body to have on hand in Moscow or Leningrad or Kiev, or wherever the young man ended up. But the Soviets assigned the Tanzanian to a university in Tashkent, and there he sat idly for two years before the SB Division finally dropped him from the payroll. At that point, he had come to Stone’s attention, and he had begun another sort of life, considerably more interesting.

Mbane ate his dinner slowly, with a genuine calm. He was the sort of man who made a perfect liar, and a perfect agent. In place of the nerve endings that, in most people, became sharp and brittle in times of stress, the African was all syrup and soft cotton. You could have hooked him up to a polygraph at that very moment and gotten a reading as flat as the waters of Lake Victoria on a windless day.

The Tanzanian finished his meal, hoisted the travel bag on his shoulder, and headed up Karl Marx Prospect toward Lenin Square. You might have thought he would stand out, a black man walking the streets of Tashkent, but the opposite was more nearly true. That was the great blessing of racism. Uzbeks and Russians disdained Africans as part of the baggage of socialist internationalism. A black man in the streets was, in many respects, invisible. People didn’t look at him, didn’t talk to him, didn’t imagine that he could possibly be doing anything of consequence.

He walked up the prospect, past hundreds of unseeing eyes, to a broad square bordered by an arc of fountains. A ten-lane boulevard cut through the square—the ceremonial route used for May Day parades—and across it stood a towering statue of Lenin. The young African stared up at the visage of Lenin, nearly a hundred feet above. It had a particular look, this Tashkent version of Lenin. In the same way that each Christian community will give its figure of Jesus a touch of the national character—hair color, skin tone, the set of the eyes—this was an Asian Lenin. His eyes had the tight slant of the East, the cheekbones were as high and prominent as a Mongolian’s, and the arm brandished a scroll, as if he were a socialist imam extending a firman toward his people.

The African’s instructions were to leave the travel bag in the bushes directly behind the marble reviewing stand that stood on either side of the statue. He was ambling in that direction when a jeep carrying two militiamen stopped directly in front of the statue. The officers got out and surveyed the boulevard with hawks’ eyes. One of them said something into his walkie-talkie. That was a bad sign, one that would rattle most people—certainly the Indian businessman—and cause them to abort the mission, run away and hide.

But the young African was a different cut entirely. He knew that his problem was plainclothes KGB surveillance, not the blue shirts. Without looking at the militiamen, he strolled casually down the boulevard, past the party administration building displaying the huge portraits of Marx and Engels, and down a long row of steps to a park below.

Mbane saw a park bench, set against a row of bushes, and settled his long body onto the seat. And without thinking about it very much, with the pure instinct that is a kind of genius, he swung the travel bag behind him, over the rail of the bench, and let it slide off his shoulder into the evergreen bushes. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and contemplated the situation.

The bench was a few dozen yards from the entrance to the Lenin subway station. From where he sat, the Tanzanian could see the large bas-relief mural gracing the station entrance. It showed Lenin leading the peoples of the East out of bondage. The figures beneath the great liberator were all Oriental—a team of Turkic men in four-cornered hats pounding metal and threshing wheat; Moslem women arrayed like the three Graces, holding aloft brooms!

This is close enough, thought the young Tanzanian. If you can’t hit the Lenin statue, hit the Lenin subway station. He finished one cigarette, lazily smoked another to let the early-evening sky darken a bit more, and then rose from the bench—checking to make sure that the bag was concealed by the overhanging branches of the bushes. Then Vladimir Ilyich Mbane, cool and calm, strode off into the subway station, five-kopeck piece in hand, disappearing into the summer evening.

And so it was that the first act of sabotage inside the Soviet Union by an agent of the West in many years blew up much shrubbery, a few dozen rose bushes, four park benches, a concrete walkway, and the coolie hat of a figure on a bas-relief sculpture. It happened in the middle of the night, hours after Tashkent had gone to bed, and many hours after the Indian businessman had landed in Kabul. The KGB let it be known that a gas line had ruptured.