An American Spy (33 page)

4

It was, of course, a disaster from the start. On that Wednesday morning, Lester, one of Erika’s five-man team watching Weaver, woke with chills—he’d picked up a summer flu. Worried that it would spread, she ordered him left behind as the remaining four met with Yevgeny’s men—only two: Francisco, a Spaniard, and Jan, a Czech. That made six, when Erika had wanted eight, minimum. She made sure that Gilen, her most experienced, led the team as they sat in a double room of the Kings Hotel on Thirty-ninth Street in Brooklyn, settling on the details. Yevgeny came and went, apparently forced to keep to some UN-related dates. He seemed, Gilen reported, petrified of discovery—and old. Gilen asked Erika more than once if she really trusted this frail, trembling man’s intelligence, “because if we fuck this up, someone’s bound to trace it back to us.”

“Then don’t fuck it up.”

Was the risk worth it? As the hours crawled along, she wondered. What, really, did “everything” mean to Yevgeny? Certainly, it didn’t match the dictionary definition, but it meant a lot. It meant answers to old mysteries that had plagued her, answers that could turn up some bad eggs in the BND. It meant an eye into Yevgeny’s own UN department, and its secretive operations. It meant, perhaps, an eye into the mystery of Yevgeny Primakov himself.

Was all that worth the embarrassment of a failed extraction? What if Tina and Stephanie Weaver put up a fight? Even if Yevgeny was there to explain it to them, how much did they trust Milo’s father? How much did Milo trust him?

By 1:00
P
.
M
., New York time, Gilen reported that they had settled on the extraction route from the Weavers’ home on Garfield Place, as well as the method of transport—the trunk of a Chevrolet Malibu station wagon, and then the rear of a laundry van—and the approach and withdrawal from the premises. Yevgeny wanted the Weavers taken to a house in southern Connecticut, and from there he could manage the next leg of their escape, though he refused to share details with Gilen. Erika told him not to force the issue.

She did, however, call Yevgeny after listening to Gilen’s summary. Why, she asked the old Russian, did the Weaver family have to be taken by force?

“Because speed is of the essence.”

“Then go up and tell them to put on their shoes and follow you outside. You do have enough sway with them for this, don’t you?”

“They won’t be alone. They’re being watched.”

“By whom?”

Hesitantly, Yevgeny said, “The Chinese.”

It wasn’t often in her line of work that situations laid themselves out in parallel lines and then started to converge, but whenever that happened she felt that rare rush of aesthetic pleasure that reminded her why she had devoted her life to such an unrewarding career. Patriotism perhaps played a role—she wasn’t sure—but it paled in comparison to the joy of seeing puzzle pieces fit together. She said, “Alan Drummond was after Xin Zhu, and now Xin Zhu is after Milo. You aren’t going to keep pretending that Milo is an innocent in this, are you?”

“I don’t know what his role is, Erika, not really. But he needs my help. I owe him.”

“You owe him for what?”

“For my shortcomings as a father,” he said, and from the tone of his voice, she even believed him.

“Is this really just a story of revenge, Yevgeny? Alan Drummond sets out to take vengeance for his department? He drags Milo into this, and then Xin Zhu has no choice but to protect himself by . . . by what? By threatening Milo’s family?”

Again, he remained silent, his way of saying
yes.
Or
probably.

“I would do the same thing as Xin Zhu,” she said. “You would, too.”

His silence now wasn’t an affirmation of anything, she knew; it was his inability to think of an answer. She was reaching for a moral point, which was of course irrelevant. Yevgeny wasn’t interested in arguing who was right and wrong. If pressed, he probably wouldn’t know. Yevgeny was acting entirely on loyalty, which seldom served anyone well.

As when Xin Zhu sat in his office, waiting for word from his agents as they dispatched thirty-three Tourists, Erika Schwartz remained in her office long after other people had cleared out. She stared at the phone, waiting. It rang, finally, a little after midnight, by which time she had finished her evening Riesling, a plate of delivery gyros, and two Snickers bars. Gilen talked first, and then Yevgeny.

From three that afternoon, two of Gilen’s agents had been watching the Weaver home. They saw Tina Weaver arrive just after four thirty with Stephanie. At five twelve, a Chinese-food deliveryman arrived toting two bags of food. He buzzed the Weaver home as another male walked up, and both men entered at the same time. The deliveryman, Hanna noted, was Asian, likely Chinese; the resident who entered with him was also Asian, origin unknown. Of course nationalities, particularly in that city, meant little.

Less than five minutes later, the deliveryman was gone, and it wasn’t until five forty-eight that Yevgeny got out of Gilen’s Chevy a block away and began his walk to the apartment. By then, Yevgeny’s men, Francisco and Jan, had reached the apartment’s roof via a building three doors down. If anyone reported suspicious activity on the street, the roof was their Plan B.

Yevgeny did not ring before going into the building but used the key Milo had given him. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, found the door unlocked, and then, thinking better of it, continued to the roof-access door, which he unlocked. Jan and Francisco joined him, no one saying a word. “The place was quiet,” Yevgeny explained, “except for some neighbor’s television.” Silently, they entered the apartment, which was empty. They found remnants of dinner, an unopened box of kung pao chicken, and, beside the food, a typed note that read,

THEY ARE SAFE

The place had simply been vacated.

Jan and Francisco searched the rest of the building, looking for a laundry room or some other place they might have gone. They were nowhere.

The three men left the building and sat together in Gilen’s car, sharing their discovery and discussing what could have happened. That’s when Gilen called Erika in Pullach, and she heard the misery in Yevgeny’s voice as he insisted that Xin Zhu now had them. At one point he even said, “I’ve failed him again.” She tried to persuade him that there were other possibilities, but he was immovable. “While we were sitting there, watching the front door, they went by the roof. Francisco and Jan must have just missed them.”

There was no point remaining on Garfield Place. Erika agreed that they should terminate the operation and told them to leave by different routes. Yevgeny, however, remained behind. “Milo will be home soon, and someone has to explain it to him.”

“I can leave someone with you,” she told him, but he wanted no one, not even his own agents, to witness the confrontation he predicted he would have with his son.

“Xin Zhu has played his hand,” Yevgeny pointed out. “He’ll never come back to this address.”

Within the next half hour, Yevgeny was dead.

They knew this approximate time frame because, earlier, Erika had asked her sick agent, Lester, to take a heavy dose of Tamiflu and wait at Penn Station. From there, he followed Milo Weaver back to Garfield Place, where he arrived a little after seven thirty and sat outside while Weaver went upstairs. Weaver did not leave until the next morning—seven o’clock—alone. In the meantime, Gilen had taken over Lester’s watch, and after Weaver left he broke into the apartment. He called Erika as soon as he stepped into the foul-smelling, cold bedroom. It was after one o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, and Erika was sitting in front of another untouched salad when he called with the news. Gilen didn’t believe Weaver had done it, and Erika didn’t believe it either, which meant that there was a half-hour window, between seven and Milo’s arrival at seven thirty, when Yevgeny had been killed. Milo had spent the night with his father’s corpse, then left on that warm Thursday morning and disappeared.

So this is how it ends
, she thought after hanging up. She remembered the early seventies, when the KGB kept in touch with those idiot children with too much Marx and too many guns, who ineptly tried to overthrow capitalism in West Germany. She caught glimpses of Yevgeny Primakov on the periphery of the action. Eventually, they met in safe houses for discussions of mutual benefit. He began bringing bottles of white wine to their meetings, giving her detailed vineyard histories that were lost on her. Beer had been her drink, but Yevgeny insisted that wine would help her live longer. “We kill ourselves with vodka. Your people do it with beer. Let’s try to outlive our people.” She remembered her own depression when he was recalled to Moscow suddenly, likely because of an affair he’d had with an American girl who’d joined those Marxist revolutionaries. It only deepened when she met the coarse KGB man who took his place, a man who had no interest in wine, beer, vodka, or anything that did not directly relate to the International Struggle. Now, all that charm and culture lay rotting in a too-small apartment in Brooklyn.

She considered what to do with Yevgeny’s body, finally deciding that nothing was to be done besides the obvious—remove his phones and all signs of identification. Weaver had thoughtfully turned the air conditioner to full blast to slow decomposition, and the most important thing was to make sure that her own people made it out of New York unassociated with any of this. Once they were gone, she went through the files and uncovered a number that she had never dialed before, one that she didn’t want to dial even now, but it was important that the news come from someone who at least had an inkling of what had happened. It was 6:00
P
.
M
. Thursday, Pullach time.

“Yes?”

“Alexandra Primakov? Hello, my name is Erika Schwartz. We met once years ago, but you probably don’t remember.”

A pause. “I know who you are, Miss Schwartz.”

“Oh. Good. Where are you now?”

She heard wind through the line; then Alexandra said, “I’m at Geneva International.”

“You’re not flying to New York, are you?”

“Actually, yes. I’m looking for my father, and I’m having trouble reaching him.”

“That’s what I’m calling about, Alexandra. Your father.”

Alexandra changed her flight and reached Munich’s Franz Josef Strauss Airport by eight thirty. Erika was waiting for her at the curb, sitting in her gray Volvo, and by the time they parked at her house in a leafy Pullach neighborhood, she had shared the entire story.

“And where the hell is Milo?” Alexandra asked. It was one of the few things she’d said, and the words seemed to contain all of the anger she’d been holding back.

“We don’t know.”

“Then I’ll find him,” she said and climbed out of the car. She walked through the trees that sheltered Erika’s house from the road and took out her cell phone. Erika felt a pang of worry—not for Alexandra but for Milo Weaver. There was no telling what this woman would do to him.

Inside, they ate roast chicken and drank Riesling. Alexandra gradually relaxed. “I don’t really know him,” she said. “Milo. As a teenager, sure, but then he left, and I could count the number of times we’ve seen each other in the last two decades on a couple of hands.”

Erika had relatives she could say the same about. “He’s unlikely,” she told Alexandra.

“What does that mean?”

What did it mean? The word had just come out of her, perhaps because of the wine. She said, “He’s never quite what he seems to be. He’s very easy to underestimate.”

“And what about his family?”

Erika shrugged.

“Alan Drummond seemed to think he could protect them.”

“When did he say that?”

Alexandra didn’t answer.

“Well,” Erika said, “it wouldn’t be the first time an employee of the CIA got something wrong.”

Then an odd thing happened. Around four in the morning, Erika’s phone rang, and Oskar related a report they’d picked up over the news wire. At eight o’clock on Thursday night, New York time, a team of ten Homeland Security agents, in a flurry of loud, boisterous activity, invaded number 203 Garfield Place. Terrified residents attested that they went directly to the third floor and after knocking and shouting commands broke down the Weaver door. The agents removed a corpse on a stretcher, but since it was covered no one could say for sure who had died, or how. Homeland Security certainly wasn’t sharing. They did, however, interview the residents about the events of the last couple of nights. No one knew of anything out of the ordinary. No one except a man named Raymond Lister, the Weavers’ next-door neighbor, whom they found tied to his bed and gagged. The journalist writing the story did not learn what Mr. Lister had shared with the agents before he was bundled off in a government SUV, because the head of the Homeland Security team, Special Agent Janet Simmons, cut him off with a “national security” excuse.

Francisco and Jan had not missed Tina and Stephanie Weaver’s kidnappers, because, before their arrival, they had not left the building.

She woke Alexandra in the guest room to share this information, but it didn’t tell them much more than they already knew.

They had coffee together in the morning, and Erika offered to bring her into the office. “If you don’t mind,” Alexandra said, “I’d rather stay here. Is your place wired?”

Erika shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

“Then I’ll stay, and we can compare notes at noon, and again at five. Is this agreeable?”

A lawyer, Erika remembered. She spoke just like a lawyer.

Just before noon on Friday, Oskar walked into her office. She was already on the phone with Berlin, dealing with one of her agent’s deaths in Paris. France had sent the body back but was growing irate at what it saw as a territorial infringement. In seven different ways, Erika could only assure the BND president that the man had been on leave. “Are we not allowed to take foreign vacations anymore?”

She tried to wave Oskar away, but he drew an index finger across his neck to get her to hang up. When she didn’t respond immediately, he held up a printed CCTV image of Milo Weaver staring directly up at the camera, holding out a paper towel with a note written across it in English, beginning,