The Falstaff Enigma (16 page)

Fischer broke in, "Now you know the consequences of your actions
here. If you continue to help him then you are committing suicide."

David suddenly jumped back and aimed his Uzi at both
men. "Put it down, Austin," he said to the analyst, who put his weapon on the floor. Austin had a look of sudden horror, but he thought he knew the ploy David was trying. "And you just stay right there," David said to Fischer.

"I need some proof of what you say before I do anything," continued David.
"How did you find Austin?"

Fischer believed the ruse, his belief coming from his certainty that Austin was a defector.
"This morning I circulated Austin's photograph among the taxi drivers at the airport. I got a positive from the guy who drove him here last night. When he told me the guy he picked up spoke perfect Russian, I knew I had my man."

“W
ho can I contact in your Tel Aviv station that knows you are here?"

"No one.
I came here from the airport without contacting anyone."

"Not anyone in the Company?"

"No, but you can still verify what I'm saying by talking with my station." Fischer still had not seen the ruse.

“Why didn’t you contact us?”
Margolis asked.

“This is an internal matter. We know how to handle our dirty laundry.”

“Tsk. Tsk.” Margolis shook his head slowly. "Pick up your weapon, Robert," he said.

"No, you fool,"
said Fischer in an exasperated voice.

"Silence," replied the M
ossad master spy. "I will say this only once. You are the one who has no knowledge of the situation and it is far too complicated to get into now. All you need to know is that Mr. Austin is no traitor."

Fischer shook his head in disgust. "So what's your next
move?"

"It doesn't matter to you.
You're out of the game for a couple of weeks," David replied.

An hour later Michael Fischer was in solitary confinement in a
Mossad cellblock. His guards were under orders to provide any reasonable comfort their prisoner might request, but under no circumstance were they to engage in conversation with the man. The orders had come directly from David Margolis, a man whose authority would not be questioned. The prisoner was not to be released until David himself issued the order. He knew his orders would be obeyed with no discussion, no gossip. He only prayed that Fischer had been honest, that no one in the CIA knew the operative had found Robert Austin.

Austin had finally slept well
at the home of David Margolis. He was no longer alone. He had a partner and a strategy and the strategy felt right.

David walked into the room.
"Are you ready to go?"

Austin had just finished dressing.
"Where?"

"Haifa.
We're going to become Russians. We have a woman there who will give us complete documents and some authentic clothing. Tomorrow we begin our journey to Moscow."

"Can we trust her?"

"I'm betting my life on it."

"Our
lives."

"Our lives.
Oh, we won't be back so leave everything but what you are wearing and five thousand of your cash. We'll buy rubles before we enter the Soviet Union. I'll put all your ID and the rest of your money into my office safe." David waited as Austin collected his wallet, his real and false passports and all his cash and travelers cheques, less four thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars.

"What will happen when the CIA discovers th
eir agent missing?" Austin asked as he handed his items to David.

"Nothing that will affect us.
For one thing it will be a week before any real concern is raised. The nature of a field operative like Mr. Fischer is the freedom to disappear when necessary. They'll think he's off trailing some Arab terrorist or Soviet diplomat. Even when they get worried they will still never make the connection to you unless, of course, he told someone he was on your path."

"Do you believe what he said?"

"Yes, he was sincerely trying to convince me you're a traitor."

"Do you trust those men who are guarding Fischer?"

David sat down on one of the room's two chairs. "I’m going to tell you something that I'll deny if ever repeated. We maintain secret prisons to detain people without warrant or charge. Those guards will do as I say and won't discuss their prisoner with anyone." David stood up. Austin looked away. His eyes held only disappointment.

"Dam
n it, Robert, don't start about the political or ethical issues on this. It's wrong and I can't defend it. It's just something that has to be in this part of the world." David turned to leave the room.

Austin did not want him to leave on this tense note.
"You never told me if you re-married."

David stopped at the door and spoke with his back to Austin.
"I'm still single, although I'm thinking about getting hitched again. In fact, I decided last night that if I come back from this alive I'm going to pop the question." David opened the door and stepped into the hall. He turned around to face Austin and paused. "Thanks."

By
nightfall the men had completed a transformation. They were now ready to travel the Soviet Union as Soviet citizens. David Margolis was in his mid-thirties. His brown eyes still held the youthful fire of a twenty-year-old but his face had aged rapidly since leaving academia. His underlings swore he was into his forties, and the make-up magician he employed capitalized on this. His only redeeming youthful feature, his coal black hair, was now a solid gray. His excellent vision was now marred by a pair of glasses. The Haifa makeover artist assured him that the frames were the latest rage in Moscow. David wished he could alter his slender, but fit, six-foot frame; there was simply no way to achieve that. However, the two simple alterations had a tremendous effect. The gray hair and glasses made David's body seem more frail than fit. He was satisfied with the metamorphosis.

David stood in front of the mirror and opened his new Soviet passport.
He was now Mikhail Smetlova, age 44, born in what was then called Stalingrad; occupation, farmer in the Ukraine.

Austin walked over to the same mirror
to gauge his own transformation. “Not bad. I always wondered what a moustache would look like. On the other hand, the hair is terrible.”

"You look fine
– and very different," David replied.

Austin did indeed look different.
The woman had given him a perm and now his hair, which had always been the envy of his friends because of the solid body wave that ran through it, was a short, curly mass. Its brown color was now augmented by streaks of gray, aging him effectively. Too, the woman had virtually implanted a false black and gray moustache on his upper lip. She guaranteed that it would not come off unless he shaved it off. It was the best fake either man had ever seen.

Austin kept running his new name and identity through his mind.
Andrei Olegnila, age 40; occupation, farmer in the Ukraine; birthplace, Moscow; Andrei Oleg ...

Moscow. The city is technically European yet defies European ancestry with its own version of the conflict between medieval and modern. The modern areas of the city in 1983, defined by myriad housing projects whose designers could only have praised boredom above anything else, had all been built since the Great Patriotic War. But to anyone accustomed to the shiny canyons of Manhattan or the Loop, they were anything but new. The rectangular boxes of apartment dwellings excelled only in function, certainly not in form – the physical manifestation of Marxist dogma.

The horizon, muted and sullen by pollution, lay
flat, broken sporadically by the smokestacks of half-hearted industries or the onion domes of obsolete religions. The streets were alive but the energy was absent, the strides shorter, the pace slower. Ambitions buried, replaced by planned hierarchy. Aspirations played out only on the chessboard; dreams left only to the young at heart who dared to play in the various black markets.

But the city of eight million
was the pulse of a superpower. It was a cultural, educational, and political center where at least men's minds were free to soar. It was a Mecca drawing tens of thousands of Soviet citizens annually to enjoy the monuments of Marxism fulfilled. Besides, the shopping in Moscow was far better than elsewhere inside the Soviet Union.

It
was a city of landmarks, dominated and defined by a medieval fortress: the Moscow Kremlin – universally known simply as the Kremlin. Forming the center of the city and leading the pulse of an empire, the Kremlin inspired the awe of citizen and tourist alike.

It was no different for
Robert Austin and David Margolis as they walked through Red Square. They had attached themselves to a group of tourists from Leningrad who were fascinated by the colorful domes and fairytale quality of St. Basil's Cathedral. The young woman who led the group droned her lines automatically, no longer bothering to insert the dramatic pauses she had been taught to include. Austin stopped with the group but turned to stare at Lenin's Mausoleum, remembering the film that changed his life a month earlier. Had Ivan Vazhnevsky really been killed? The answer was here. Austin wondered about his partner, Jim Welch. He could be in danger if the people behind this enigma ever decided that he might know Robert's whereabouts. The analyst stepped from the crowd, giving in to his urge to be standing alone. Guilt and cold swept over him simultaneously as he pulled the zipper shut on his medium weight jacket.

The date was Friday, June 3, 1983 and Austin was starting to expect snow as he
continued walking toward the Mausoleum. It was one o'clock in the afternoon and he guessed the wind chill factor to be 45 degrees. Moscow is never warm, the average high temperature being in the low 70s during the summer months. Yet it was welcome to Robert, who never cared much for the heat in Israel or Washington.

Margolis was following the tour group into the Cathedral when he turned to check on
his compatriot. In the distance he saw the analyst walking off toward the other end of the Square. He began a quick pace in pursuit of the man he would protect with his life, but he dared not run. Outside of sport, running was simply unnecessary in the Soviet Union; the utopia of communism had slowed the pace to the level of the lowest common denominator. Anyone who ran drew unwanted attention. Running meant you were in a hurry. Being in a hurry meant you were up to no good – unless of course your employer was the KGB.

"Hey, what's wrong?" asked David as he pulled alongside Austin.

"Nothing, I'm fine." Both men spoke in Russian – as they had since entering the Soviet Union two days before.

"Time to think?"

"You think you know me pretty well, don't you?" the analyst replied.

"I saw that look many times at UC."

The pair continued slowly toward the massive tomb of this empire's first leader. The pace was drifting, aimless.

"What the hell are we doing here, Mikhail?"
the analyst queried. Over the previous two days Margolis had continuously hammered the pair's new names into Austin. They were Mikhail Smetlova and Andrei Olegnila. They were loyal Soviet farmers who had been working together for the past five years on a collective in the Ukraine. David also knew that they were covered if their story was ever checked. Mossad operatives routinely planted the documents necessary to create a life inside the Soviet Union for use in missions like this. David had pulled these two names from files kept in his Tel Aviv headquarters but he had not signed the identities out. No one inside Mossad knew – or would know – where David Margolis was, only an old woman who lived in Haifa and was as expert at forging Russian documents as she was at changing appearances. David was as sure of her as he was of himself, for it was she who had influenced a young boy in Skokie, Illinois, thirty years before when she came to visit from Israel. She was David's aunt and that meant that David and Robert – Mikhail and Andrei – were completely isolated. They would succeed or, more likely, die.

"We are going to find ourselves in the middle of a purge and then what happens? I don't even have a country right now and you may not either when this is finished," Austin
continued.

"We are here because we both know that this is where we have to be. We are the only two people on this planet in a position to alter whatever is now in motion."

"Listen to you, you just summed up this whole bullshit situation. We have no idea what this Falstaff enigma is and I'm no closer than I was in Ankara."

"Falstaff? What does that mean?"

"Nothing. That was just the phrase coined by Carson to refer to this situation until we could clarify it."

"I ho
pe that isn't an omen about us. Sir John Falstaff: the cowardly knight of the first and second parts of Henry IV," Margolis observed.

"And
of The Merry Wives of Windsor. His type of character was one of Shakespeare's favorites."

"If you ever wondered why I respect you so much, Andrei, that’s why. You are one of the few who have the knowledge to correct me."

Austin gave David a brief look that said thank you. Both men stopped in the middle of Red Square. Small groups of tourists were bouncing from landmark to landmark, yet they were alone.

"What if this is just a purge?" Austin
asked.

"Why would a purge involve possible moles in the Company and Mo
ssad? Why would they go after Govenin?"

Austin shrugged his shoulders.
"You know, I am such a diehard capitalist that I wonder what it is that drove me to learn Russian. I have absolutely no history to justify it, as you do. I'm Mr. All-American wasp." They were silent. David remained still to give the analyst time to reach his own conclusions. "I've never admitted this to myself, but I can't understand why I have this intense fascination with this country. I think ... I don't know, I can't express it."

"What?
Come on, say what you feel."

"It's as if the majority of me hates this place but part of me admires all that this country has achieved and especially all they have survived. It's a dichotomy that I can't understand."

"That just means you're normal. I have the same feelings. I hate this system, but part of me can't help loving the country of my heritage. I'll go further. You, of all people, know my Zionist feelings and you have learned that I ultimately followed those feelings and started this crazy career I find myself in. Yet you have never known that I violate my own conscience almost daily, that I am often unable to defend or justify what I'm doing, or that I have sorrow for the Arabs we have displaced or the innocent people I have destroyed in this job." David coughed. It was not from an impending cold; he almost never revealed his true emotions. These circumstances were unique. "So you are not alone, my friend."

Austin reached up and grabbed David's shoulder. "Let's go find Vladimir Ustinov." The bond between them was growing, a personal bond that violated every rule in David's book.

The room was a typical Moscow flat, one room with bathroom attached. The furnishings were circa 1960. The bathroom had tiles missing in several places, mildew on many of the others, and an old English style toilet with water bowl suspended about five feet above the floor. The scene from the single meter-wide window was typically Moscow. The apartment was on the street and from the second floor David had a good view of life as it progressed below. It was half past seven and sunset was still over two and a half hours away. But the sun hung low in the sky and shadows on the street set a rhythmic pattern of intermittent light and dark in both directions. An old couple strolled toward David on the opposite sidewalk. The man wore an olive drab tunic with two medals still pinned to his chest, which he tried in vain to stick out beyond his stomach. David was amazed at how the memories of World War II pervaded every aspect of Russian life.

For twenty minutes more David kept a watch on the street below. The two men rarely spoke and when they did it was about the sights they had seen that day, or the weather, or the crowds, or anything trivial and meaningless. They had decided that they would treat any hotel room in Moscow as if it were bugged, even if they weren't staying in any of the fancy "new" hotels reserved only for foreigners and continually monitored by the KGB.

"I've got something here," David said.

Austin put down his morning issue of Pravda, the headlines heralding the latest estimates for the summer wheat crop. He walked to the window. On the street below
, a taxi had stopped where David had first noticed the old couple. It was only the fifth automobile to pass since Margolis began his vigil and it was directly in front of the entrance to the apartment building of Vladimir Ustinov. As the passenger stepped out, David felt sure for the first time that the address he had found in a Mossad file was correct. The Russian scientist disappeared into the foyer of his building in seconds.

"Was that the right one?" Austin
asked.

"I think so. Look." David pointed down the street to where a car pulled into an available space fifty yards short of Ustinov's residence. Two men were seated in the auto, neither bothering to get out.

"What did you expect?" asked David rhetorically. "How about dinner?"

"Good idea.”

On his way to the door, David put on a tan coat and picked up a gray overcoat which he handed to Austin. "Andrei, will you hold this for me?" Austin took the coat. It had Govenin's passport sewn into the bottom.

The men turned right on the street, walking away from the KGB surveillance car.

"What's our game plan?" asked the analyst after they were a block away from their apartment.

"I was hoping we could pull him off the street, but obviously we can't wi
th that KGB tail around. I think we can also assume that his place is fully wired. So we have to contact him discreetly and quietly, which I will do shortly. But first, some dinner."

Three blocks later they found the small cafe that Austin had noticed earlier during the day. It had no windows in the front, only an unobtrusive door with the name "Ostankino Cafe" crudely painted at eye level. A forty-watt bulb struggled to reveal the words.

David walked in first. The old couple who had passed by thirty minutes before were seated at the small table nearest the counter. The man was deeply engaged in a conversation with the much younger manager of the cafe. Another old man sat at the next table waiting desperately to interject his opinion. The conversation was about whether or not the Soviet Army should have stopped where it did in Germany in 1945. The younger manager argued that Stalin had done the right thing. The old man with the medals vehemently argued that they should have taken all of Germany while they had the strength to do it. His face turned red whenever he spoke. His wife took no notice as she slowly ate her potato soup. She had heard this countless times before.

Austin walked to the counter and ordered the day's special, roast beef and boiled potatoes. David ordered the same to speed the delivery.
They chose a table close to the door, farthest away from the only other customers, the troika busy with the manager. Ten tables remained, going unused for another night.

"How confident are you about our passage here?" asked Austin after a few minutes of listening to the debate.

"We used a network I developed about seven or eight months ago. It was the first time and we weren’t arrested.” Margolis gave Austin a slight smile. “So I guess it was good. The two Iranian shepherds that got us across the border were recruited by an Arab who works for me. They think he is from Libyan intelligence. As for us, they were, of course, completely blind. No names, only the correct code words exchanged. From Baku to here you know about. I guarantee that no one followed us past Volgograd."

"I wish I could have your confidence."

"Don't worry, Andrei, you do."

The sharp report of a bellhop's
bell suddenly announced dinner. Austin went to the counter, paid the bill and took the two plates back to the table. He returned to the counter for the two glasses of sparkling mineral water. When he sat down again at the table, he noticed that David was writing a note on a 5" x 7" sheet of paper. David glanced quickly at the analyst, his eyes effectively conveying his command to remain quiet. He slowly scrawled two short paragraphs, cursing his ineptitude with Cyrillic letters, and then calmly folded the paper and placed it in his hip pocket.