A pall of pessimism settled over the team. Meanwhile, on the world stage, Kennedy had just steamed for the Russian fleet 500 miles from Havana. The world was on the verge of all-out nuclear war. Which was when MI5 received a cable from CIA Washington. The cable was short and sweet. "Overseer needs to talk with ULYSSES. Request an immediate call." The "Overseer" was President Kennedy himself, needing additional information from Nikolai.
Randall Cummings said to cable back that ULYSSES would call.
"How's that?" asked Donovan. “KGB has him under constant surveillance. The odds of him shaking free and making a phone call on a secure line are non-existent. We need him the hell out of Russia.”
“Agree,” Cummings said through gritted teeth. "We're going to get him the hell out of Russia. Then he's going to get Kennedy on the phone and save this world before it blows itself apart. That's an order!"
53
Roy Longfellow, a distant relative of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American poet, was MI6 station chief in Moscow. Bluer blood never flowed through English veins—the monarchy excepted. He received the cable from MI5 London and immediately dropped what he was doing. The President of the United States needed a word with Nikolai Semenov. Kennedy's next chess move in the Cuban Missile Crisis depended on a missing piece from Kennedy's chessboard. Semenov held that piece.
Longfellow also understood the problem. Semenov had been removed from the streets. No one had a clue about how to make contact. He was gone, kaput. Longfellow called his second, Rodney Mallard, into his office mid-morning, minutes after the cable arrived. Mallard was an experienced officer who was soon due to take over from Longfellow as head of the station. Everyone agreed he was the best field agent in Russia.
"We must remove Semenov from Russia. President Kennedy must talk to him. There is no failure possible."
“TINKER, then. It’s all we have.”
Thirty minutes later, Longfellow received a call from MI6 London from the Director. He was to meet with his staff and rehearse TINKER immediately.
"TINKER is at level four. Full rehearsal is ordered. This means the signal could come at any minute. Pass the most recent full face to the team," Longfellow ordered Mallard. They needed the most recent headshot. "We start full rehearsal on my call."
"Photographs were updated as of six this morning. ULYSSES was in there. But it's grainy as hell. It could be anyone in the snap."
Longfellow and Mallard reviewed TINKER top to bottom.
For two years, now, the Longfellows—the chief and his wife, Sue Ellen—had traveled by car and ferry from Moscow to Tallinn to Helsinki several times to familiarize themselves with the escape route rendezvous point. Each time, they shook their heads in fear the plan would ever conclude with a happy ending.
"I'm torched, Rodney," Longfellow said, collapsing into his executive chair behind his desk. "There's no way a car with diplomatic plates will leave Moscow without KGB escort."
"Agreed," said Mallard. "Arriving without surveillance at the rendezvous point is laughable."
"But no one's laughing. It's a bitter pill to see that TINKER is the best London can do. The several times Sue Ellen and I practiced the trip, she egged me on to improve on the plan. Honestly? I couldn't come up with any alternatives. Fleeing Moscow, where KGB agents smother the city, is all but impossible. If I knew of a better way, I would've flown it. As it is…zero. I've got zero to offer."
Just six people in Moscow knew of the escape plan: Longfellow and his wife; his deputy, Rodney Mallard and his wife, Cindy; Nikolai; and the MI6 secretary, Missy Anders. The six MI6 staff lived in the expatriate compound on Diruvsky Prospekt. Every month, one of the officers headed off to the Red Square and Saint Basil’s. When Nikolai was in Moscow, the chapel was checked twice each day for the hymnal. Whether in snow up to their hips or pouring rain or a bright and sunny evening, failure wasn't an option. They monitored the cathedral, looking for the signal day and night.
As it turned out, Cindy could leave their flat, walk to the corner, and peek around north to see Saint Basil's and the people passing by. Sometimes she would walk there and check. Longfellow and Mallard usually manned their turns in driving home, always going past the landmark and keeping the same routes for the KGB following behind. Sometimes they broke it up by entering the church and taking pictures. It was known by the bugs inside Longfellow's flat that Sue Ellen's mother painted religious paintings. She wanted interior photographs of Saint Basil's.
Still, whenever Sue Ellen went out shopping, she had a three-car convoy of KGB cars following close behind, so close the targets understood the KGB didn't care whether they were noticed or not. The job was going to get done, and secrecy be damned.
Nikolai would signal with the hymnal, and the team would acknowledge by calling his Soviet number and leave a message that Somerset Maugham had called.
"It's a complex plan," Longfellow said to Mallard, "and full of holes. I see failure nine times out of ten."
"Likewise," Mallard told him. "Why not just disguise and paper him and fly him out on British Airlines? Wouldn't that be simpler?"
"Could very well be," Longfellow had to admit. "Maybe they've passed on that plan for some reason. For once, I'm glad I'm not in the driver's seat on this one. I don't see a happy ending at all."
"What about the vehicle search at the Tallinn ferry? Are they sure the Border Troops won't demand an open trunk? What then? Take him out and shoot him? It sickens me to think."
"It calls for the exfiltration of his child, too, not just ULYSSES the spy. He's bringing his young daughter, just two years old. How will a kid behave when stuffed in the trunk of a car? It's going to be horrifying for her. She's likely to cry out at any moment, drugged or not."
Mallard shook his head. "The KGB is all over us. When I evacuate my bladder, they know the ounces."
"Diplomats, diplomatic cars, all of it bugged."
The garage doing the maintenance on embassy automobiles was a KGB front. "No vehicle left unbugged" was the joke around the embassy when cars were checked out on business. It was true. You just didn't talk in the car except maybe to call a stop for lunch or to share directions to some destination. Otherwise, nothing else got said. The vehicles of suspected MI6 officers were sprayed with the same radioactive dust put on Nikolai's clothes and shoes. Additionally, there was a chemical odor the KGB German shepherds were trained to sniff out. So each MI6 officer kept two pairs of shoes, one for everyday wear and one for secret missions.
Longfellow and Mallard sat and stared out the embassy's top floor windows opening onto the Moscow streets below. Nothing was said. They were helpless and could only wait for Nikolai's signal.
54
Nikolai locked himself in the bathroom with A Tale of Two Cities. He thought of those two cities as London and Moscow. And what a tale it was.
He slit open the specially bound novel, brought out the sheet bearing the copy of his exfiltration plan, and studied it. The document would have meant little to anyone else, for it appeared to refer to places in France, but it contained detailed instructions for reaching the rendezvous in the city of Tallinn on the border between Estonia and Finland. The distances were all real. For security, the names of French towns had been substituted for Russian originals—Paris for Moscow, Marseilles for Leningrad, and so on.