Agent X by Noah Boyd Page A

that the account, which was opened by one of his relatives who works there, is in a dummy name. He warned that if the Bureau tried to find out who it was or trace the funds, the relative would be alerted and all contact with us would be severed, because if he couldn’t trust us, he was as good as dead. Once the relative notified him that the money had been deposited, we would get the next name. He wanted a quarter of a million for each of them and a half million for the last one, because according to him it’s a highly placed intelligence agent.”
    “Did he say how quickly after payment you would get the next name?”
    “In fact, he made that quite clear. We would get it, in his words, ‘immediately if not sooner,’ because he felt the longer this dragged out, the better the chances of his being exposed. He said the SVR had been given strict orders by Moscow that it must never become public knowledge that the Russians were spying on the United States again. Although their agents are extremely cautious to start with, apparently that directive has made them completely paranoid. Even the faintest hint of disloyalty launches an all-out probe.”
    Vail said, “So he gives you a name, you arrest that person, and then wire a quarter of a million dollars to the Chicago account. Once it’s deposited, you get the next name, and so on until the intelligence agent is caught, and then you send a half million.”
    “Right.”
    “Does that mean he’s given you the first name?”
    “More or less,” the assistant director said.
    “As far as spycraft goes,” Vail said to the director, “this sounds pretty paint-by-the-numbers. Why am I here?”
    “A couple of reasons,” Langston said. “Two days ago we got a short, cryptic text message from him. He has been recalled to Moscow unexpectedly.”
    “Uh-oh,” Vail said.
    “What?” Kate asked.
    “When someone is suspected of spying, the Russians find some routine excuse to get them back to Moscow. Once there, they’re interrogated, for months if necessary. Should they confess or if the SVR develops any proof, the suspected individual is usually executed for treason. And since it’s not something the Russians are likely to make public, you’d never know,” Vail said.
    Langston continued, “Since the first letter, we’ve been trying to identify Calculus. And now we think we know who he is. The CIA has a fairly high-level source in the Russian embassy. In a rare act of cooperation, they’ve identified an individual for us. If they’ve given us the right name, he’s an electrical engineer by training and is extremely cautious, even obsessive, which in the spy business is a good thing. His job is what we call a technical agent. He’s sent all over the United States to their safe houses to wire them for sound and video and record meetings in case any of their double agents should get cold feet. Then they could be threatened with exposure, a foolproof way of keeping an asset’s attention. The rest of it we’re guessing at. We think, after meetings between American sources and their Russian handlers, he would collect the recordings and store them at the embassy. We think that with his financial future in mind, he started making a list of their identities. Maybe even keeping copies of the documents they turned over or other information we could use as corroborating evidence.”
    Vail said, “You got to love a communist who appreciates capitalism more than we do.”
    “Exactly.”
    Vail asked, “Well, let me ask you—hopefully for the last time—why me?”
    “The only ones who know about this are the people in this room. If we gave this to any of our agents, I guarantee it would leak out. Your discretion has been established more than once. You have a certain reputation for getting things done despite obstacles that our agents would find . . . well, procedurally insurmountable.”
    Vail laughed. “You mean none of you want to get caught.”
    The director said,