Ed Kovacs - The Russian Bride

“She’s having dinner in the TGI Friday’s across the street with one of the embassy marines,” said Bennings in perfect Moscow-accented Russian as Sinclair pulled into traffic. They always spoke Russian as part of good operational security.

“Isn’t that the restaurant chain that got busted back in the States for watering down the hard liquor?”

“That’s why I distill my own sake back home. Cold sake is the bomb.”

“Distilling sake sounds too much like real work. Just give me a Dos Equis, ice cold, with a lime, thank you very much,” said Sinclair, winking. Herb Sinclair had thick hair becoming more salty than peppery, and he constantly pushed up the heavy black-framed glasses on his nose as he drove. He’d put on weight since he was posted to Moscow, but if you tapped his belly, it was like hitting a side of beef.

Herb was a legendary spook because of his now-long-term deep-cover penetration in Moscow. The Russians were adept at planting dozens of sleeper agents in America, while the CIA, mostly due to the nature of Soviet/Russian society, had few such operatives. Sinclair had originally gone undercover in Moscow for a single op, having assumed the identity of a Russian carpenter. But his superiors saw the value of keeping him in place and ordered him to become a “stay-behind” agent, something of a sleeper who was only activated for very sensitive operations. So for the last five years, Sinclair ran a small but thriving Moscow remodeling business as his cover.

Part of his success was due to the fact he was off the books. He had zero contact with the CIA’s Moscow station, and few in the agency knew he in fact existed. He preferred to work alone as a “singleton,” and had actually refused to take part in some operations because he felt it risked his exposure.

But Sinclair would work with partners on ops run by the SAD, the Special Activities Division, if he had previous experience with at least one team member he could trust.

Kit Bennings, though twenty years younger, had saved Sinclair’s bacon on an op in Iran once when they were both with the Activity, and that’s the only reason they were working together now.

Sinclair’s primary forte was as a close-in “knob-turner,” and he was one of the best COMINT—communications intelligence—geek maestros ever to walk the planet. If the NSA was gathering up the personal digital data of all Americans in the States, then Herb Sinclair was being even more invasive into the private affairs of all Americans working for the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The justification was simple: an American spy ring in the Moscow embassy had been passing sensitive information over to the Russians during the last eighteen months. Bennings and Sinclair had secretly uncovered two of the moles; one more was believed to remain.

So Sinclair operated as the COMINT element of the two-man team, with Bennings handling HUMINT—human intelligence.

Bennings’s and Sinclair’s spy-catching detail had been crafted by Secretary of State Margarite Padilla, with presidential backing. Kit Bennings had been pulled from the Activity and seconded to the Diplomatic Security Counterintelligence Directorate while simultaneously being transferred into the Defense Attaché System training program in preparation for the Moscow mission the two men were now conducting.

“So you tailed Rufo from the embassy?” asked Sinclair.

“No, just some good hard intelligence collecting called scuttlebutt. The embassy gossip mill is in high gear twenty-four/seven, and I’m plugged in.”

“I’m surprised she’s going out with a marine.”

“The dinner date is just for show. For both of them. She’ll ditch the marine after dessert without sleeping with him,” said Bennings.

“Why do you say that?”

“She’s eating with Shaw.”

“Oh. One of the doughnut punchers. They must have made the date in person at the embassy, because I didn’t pick it up on any of her comms.”

“Which is why you knob-turners need HUMINT guys and gossipmongers like me,” said Bennings.

“So which gay marine is she with?”

“I just told you, it’s Shaw.”

“Oh, right, the bean queen,” said Sinclair. “He likes Hispanic guys.”

Embassy marines don’t have big secrets to spill, but you still wouldn’t want them giving up what they know. While in-the-closet gays are theoretically more susceptible to blackmail, Sinclair and Bennings had already ruled out any of the marines, including the gay ones, as being the remaining mole.

Special operators are very pragmatic individuals; both Bennings and Sinclair had worked with plenty of gays and had no issues in that regard whatsoever. Just as with the color of people’s skin or their religion or gender, the only thing that mattered was were they good at their jobs and could you count on them in the clutch?

“One of the things I miss most living here in Moscow is Mexican food and Mexican ladies.”

“So I guess that makes you the bean king,” said Bennings.

“The bean king in exile. My kingdom for a good taco.”

“It makes sense Rufo ditches the marine, whether he’s gay or not,” said Bennings. “She seems to be in love with the Russian guy, Sergei Lopatin.”

“Well, she’s peeling his banana every chance she gets.”

“Lopatin is handsome and smooth. Rufo practically swoons when they’re together.”

“He’s a little too handsome, too smooth. Something’s not right, and you know it,” said Sinclair.

“Be nice if it was a real romance.”

“Has your brain turned to sap? We’ll be getting her on tape passing information to Lopatin any time now.”

“I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but… you’re probably right,” said Bennings.

“Anyway, you know that I read her e-mail and cell-phone texts. He’s coming to her place at ten. We don’t need to waste time tailing her. Let’s just take up position outside her apartment building.”

Sinclair accelerated but drove carefully, unlike most of the other vehicles on the road.

“She’s in a sexual relationship with a Russian national and hasn’t reported it,” said Sinclair. “Thanks to Putin’s expansionist exploits in Crimea and Ukraine and all the other places, the imbeciles in Washington have finally figured out that the Russians are not our good buddies. ‘Reset relations’ my ass.”

Bennings nodded. “So Rufo’s in a little trouble already.” Kit polished off the last piroshki from his sixty-ruble dinner. “Intensive surveillance for another week should tell us if she’s the third mole. One way or another, I just want to wrap this operation up and get back home.” Bennings shrugged.

“You’ve been here a few months and you can’t wait to go back. I’ve been here five friggin’ years.”

Bennings looked intently at his partner. “You telling me they won’t pull you out?”

“Bingo. Some suits back at Langley are making their careers based on the work I do here. They know I want out, but I don’t even ask about it anymore.”

Bennings knew that the Activity—an army unit—would never do that to one of their people. But the CIA was a much different animal. He wanted to ask Sinclair more about the situation, but it wasn’t his business, and his partner changed the subject back to Rufo and made further convincing arguments as to why he thought she was the third mole.

Be sweet if we could catch her in the act tonight, thought Bennings.

Twenty minutes later, Bennings and Sinclair sat parked on the sidewalk half a block down from Julie Rufo’s ten-story concrete apartment building painted beige. Rufo was an E-5 who worked in the communications room at the embassy. She wasn’t anything special to look at, but a lot of guys wouldn’t kick her out of bed, either. It was a toss-up as to whether she might have been targeted by Sergei Lopatin in a classic honey-trap intelligence operation. Sensitive information that came through the communications room had been passed on to the Russians, but that information may have been leaked by one of the two moles whom Bennings and Sinclair had already identified, or by someone else.