Paul Vidich - The Mercenary

GEORGE MUELLER KNEW THAT THE night ahead would be about stamina. Stamina for waiting, for worry, and stamina for fear. He understood that he had to be ready for the moment, when everything would suddenly change and he would be a man on the run. He wouldn’t get off that roller coaster until the mission succeeded or his luck ran out. Hardened nerves, cold resolve, and a tolerance for nausea were things he would have to possess if he was going to get through the night. He had memorized his route through Moscow and took care to anticipate what could go wrong, knowing that he was no longer a young case officer who could jump off a cliff and hope to find his wings on the way down.

Five minutes after four o’clock in the evening, December 31. Mueller noted the time and date for the report he’d later write. The Agency’s new rules made it important to document an operation, and failure to do so was a poor mark on any case officer’s career, but date and time were important to Mueller for an entirely personal reason. At sixty-three, he was a few months from voluntary retirement. He didn’t want to end his storied career with a failed mission.

The cable from Headquarters that came into Moscow Station had been succinct. The walk-in Soviet intelligence officer who had approached Mueller, throwing an envelope in the open window of his car when he was stopped at a traffic light, was potentially the most valuable Soviet asset to ever offer his services to the CIA. Recruiting the man known only as GAMBIT took precedence over all other activity in Moscow Station.

Knowledge of GAMBIT’s existence was limited to Mueller and John Rositske, his deputy chief of station, who was at the wheel of the Lada. They were next in line to exit the embassy parking lot, and they waited for the marine guard to raise the barrier for the lead car. Neither of the junior officers in the Lada—Ronnie Moffat, who sat in the back next to Mueller, or Helen Walsh, in the front—knew the details of the night’s operation, nor did the case officers in the decoy car being waved through.

Mueller lit a Prima and cracked open his window. The top floor of the embassy’s French Empire façade was singed with dusk’s streaking light, turning the pale stucco an ochre red. Its height set it apart from neighboring Georgian homes along Tchaikovsky Street. Soviet militia stood in guard shacks on both ends of the embassy, using their telephones to call out the comings and goings of embassy staff to nearby KGB surveillance teams. Mueller’s eyes moved to the left, beyond the militia’s shack, toward two parked Volga sedans, exhaust pluming into the bitter cold. Across the street at the bus stop he saw two Russians in quilted-cotton jackets and shabby wool caps drawn over their foreheads sharing a bottle of holiday vodka. KGB? he wondered. Or members of the million-man-strong army of Russian alcoholics?

Gusting wind drove a light snow across the wide boulevard, which was empty of traffic at that hour as Muscovites left work early to celebrate the new year. Streetlamps went on one after another, illuminating the embassy like perimeter lights along a prison wall. Moscow was a city of elaborate privileges for foreigners with hard currency, but to Mueller and the other CIA officers in Moscow Station, it was a denied area—a dangerous place of provocations and surveillance. Mueller alone knew his destination that night. Two vertical chalk marks the day before on a postal box by the tobacco kiosk outside Kievskaya Metro Station had told him the meeting would go on.

Mueller was tall, and his knees hit the back of the small car’s front seat. He wore a bulky Russian overcoat that he’d purchased at a flea market, a pair of thick-soled shoes, and an old fox shapka . He struck a match and relit the Prima, cupping his hands against the breeze coming in his window, and exhaled pungent tobacco smoke.

Mueller had joined the Agency out of the OSS and witnessed firsthand the burgeoning bureaucracy’s reliance on new technologies, but he understood that spy satellites and code-breaking algorithms didn’t substitute for the intelligence that came from the solitary man who gathered secrets at the risk of his life. Mueller’s hair was gray and thinner, his lower back kept him from a good night’s sleep, and he started his morning with a regimen of pills, but he admitted to no one that he was too old to play at the young man’s game. He had circled his retirement date, but he had done that before, and there was no certainty he’d follow through this time. The job had defined him, shaped him in ways he hadn’t expected, and he found it hard to imagine life on the outside. Doing what? Quietly writing a memoir? Fishing? Reading Shakespeare? Looking for ways to stay relevant?

The marine guard raised the barrier. Mueller met Rositske’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and he confirmed that it was time to go operational. John Rositske was Mueller’s physical and personality opposite—shorter, heavier, Catholic, and a man who liked to talk even when it was wise to shut up. He had joined the Agency when it was no longer an exclusive club for eager young minds from the Ivy League. He was in his early forties, coming to the end of his two-year tour, a burly man with a big voice and an outsize confidence. He had red hair and a West Texas tan, which had paled in the long Russian winter, and his eyes, lively and kind at times, were grim coals and relentlessly skeptical on the job. He’d picked up his gruff voice as a teenager working weekends as a ranch hand, and it had served him well during his two tours in the Mekong Delta commanding a marine platoon. He’d led forty-two men on a risky night helicopter assault, which had earned him a Bronze Star and left half of his men dead.

Rositske lowered his window for the marine guard, who checked his State Department ID and glanced in the car.

“What’s that?” The guard pointed his flashlight at a cardboard box on the back seat.

Ronnie showed off covered porcelain dishes holding a holiday dinner: aspic, pirozhki , chicken with potato sloyami , and meat patties. She was prepared to give the address of the New Year’s party they were attending, and she also had an explanation, if one was needed, to account for the compressed air canister at her feet.

“Ready,” Rositske said after they’d been waved through. Rositske tapped the gas pedal twice to make sure the notoriously unreliable product of Soviet engineering didn’t stall, and he moved the stick shift with his knuckled fist. “Rock and roll, gentlemen. Moscow Rules.”

There was only one rule in Moscow anyone could remember, but the plural had survived . Trust no one. Assume every taxi driver, every drunk on a bench, each traffic policeman, and every shy girl in a bar looking for companionship worked for the KGB.

Rositske turned onto Tchaikovsky Street, and in his rearview mirror he saw two black Volgas pull away from the curb. “Tics. Far left side.” He kept to the speed limit, making the second right turn into a neighborhood of narrow streets and once-elegant homes, and he continued at that speed, slowing only to make another right turn and then a left, altering course, and with each turn he confirmed the Volgas still followed. He knew their advantage—high-powered cars equipped with encrypted radio transmitters.