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

at the edge of the highway. She kept returning to two central facts: The first was that the Armenian doctor’s predicament was almost entirely of her making; the second was that unless she did something to warn him, he would almost certainly walk into a trap on November 10, just over two weeks away. An idea began to form in Anna’s mind, born of these two inescapable facts. You couldn’t call it a plan, exactly; it was too ill formed and imprecise. Its only real virtue was its simple audacity; it was the sort of thing that no one in his right mind would consider, which meant, by Anna’s calculus, that it had a modest chance of success.

Stone was doing the crossword puzzle from The New York Times when Anna returned. He looked up from it with a kindly twinkle in his eye, and that maddening look of perfect composure. He gazed for a long moment at her earnest and resolute young face.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“To Yerevan. You’ve decided to go rescue the Armenian doctor yourself.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Anna unconvincingly. Her face was flushed.

“You are transparent, my dear.”

“It’s none of your goddamned business. I don’t work for you anymore. For once, you are out of the loop.”

“Fine,” said Stone calmly. “But if you are planning some sort of mad adventure, you should listen to a few words of advice.”

“I’m sick of your advice.”

“I can’t entirely blame you. But you had better listen to this last bit, because it could save your life, and his.”

Anna said nothing. But she listened.

“If you go, you must go entirely on your own. Stay away from the agency completely. Do you understand? Stay away from the embassy.”

“What’s your point?” She looked at her watch.

“The point is that nothing the CIA touches in the Soviet Union is secure. Nothing. There is no such thing as a secret conversation in our embassy, even in supposedly secure areas like the bubble and the communications vault. The KGB has penetrated everything. They have us wired, literally. They have a network of tunnels under Tchaikovsky Street. From there, they can run cables up the walls of the building, with microphones and even tiny cameras. They can tap into the grounding wires in the basement and read half of the electronic signals in the building. By listening to the sounds of electric typewriters and cipher machines—just the sound, mind you—they can reconstruct most of the classified traffic going in and out. Our people take the Russians for fools, people who drink too much and wear bad suits. But they are the best in the world at what they do. I’m telling you, nothing is secure.”

“Okay,” said Anna. “What else do you want to tell me?”

“I assume you’re planning to go in as a tourist, on a regular tourist visa. I have no idea whether you’re clean—whether the Soviets have tumbled to the fact that a woman named Anna Barnes with your passport number works for the agency. They may have, with all the recent commotion and cables whizzing back and forth. And then again, they may not have. Evidently it’s a risk you’re prepared to take.”

“Evidently,” she said.

“I must warn you that time is crucial. The Soviet consulate normally requires two weeks to grant a tourist visa. If you apply immediately and everything goes smoothly, you will just barely have time to get to Yerevan and warn your friend. So you’ll need to move quickly. The Soviets require three photos, a brief application form and a photocopy of your passport. You’ll also have to buy a package tour from Intourist. Fortunately, they send planeloads of tourists to Armenia every month. Half of Fresno has been to Yerevan. So it shouldn’t be too hard.”

“What else?” asked Anna, no longer bothering to maintain the fiction that she didn’t know what Stone was talking about.

“I suggest you let a travel agent make the arrangements. That’s what a tourist would do. And that way, you won’t have a chance to say anything stupid to the Soviets at the consulate. They probably won’t give you the visa until the day before you leave. That’s one of their childish habits. They apparently think it puts visitors on edge and makes them easier to manipulate. When you do get the visa, disappear. It will take the agency a few days to realize you’re gone, and by that time you should be out of the woods. Or into them.”

“Go on,” said Anna. By now, she had taken out a pen and begun to make notes. “Keep talking.”

“You must embrace your cover as if it were the very skin you were born with. You are a tourist, first, last and always. You are not a spy, you have never met any spies, you wouldn’t know what one looked like. Don’t do anything—anything—that would suggest any familiarity with tradecraft. Don’t look for surveillance, ever. Not even in the slick, hard-to-detect ways they taught you in training. Don’t look in shop windows to see the reflections of people. Don’t turn your head when you light a cigarette so you can casually check what’s behind you. And for God’s sake, don’t play counter-surveillance games. Don’t change cabs or buses. Don’t ride the subway and reverse direction. Don’t take the phone off the hook or run the water when you’re having a conversation.”

“Slow down,” said Anna, struggling to keep up.

“In short, don’t act like a spy. Because the Soviets are wise to these tricks. Every one of them is a tip-off that you may be on an intelligence assignment, and the Soviets routinely follow anyone who looks the least bit suspicious. And don’t forget, they have virtually unlimited resources to throw at you. They have been known to use as many as fifteen cars on one surveillance. Don’t try to beat them. It’s impossible. If you think you’re being followed, give up and come home. Any attempt to evade surveillance will only make it worse.