30 June, 2:00 PM, Czernograd, 44 Rimsky Street
When Halszka got back to the office from a quick lunch, there was an email sitting at the top of her inbox from D1’s personal assistant stating that Josef Palec, the Director of RiG counter-intelligence service for the past fifteen years and a career counter-intelligence officer for the twenty years prior to that, wanted to see her for a quick chat; “an update”, as the email put it. She was expecting it for the past day or two and she was looking forward to it the same way she looked forward to Christmas with her mother’s latest husband; resigned to the inevitability of pain and shame.
Palec looked at least ten years younger than his age would suggest. His hair might have been the colour of white pepper and closely cropped, but otherwise his good genes spared his face the indignity of lines, except for the crow’s feet at the corners of eyes, and his considerable self-discipline involving a daily jog, exercise and strict diet kept his body lean and mind clear. Some called it, perhaps mockingly, asceticism, but there was nothing monk-like about Palec; Halszka knew he liked an occasional cigar, a good drink, and he liked fine women, not necessarily in that order. If he was a monk, his ethos harked back to the warrior-monks of the early Middle-Ages, who like him had to ensure their communities survived, while stranded in the midst of an alien and often unwelcoming world. Unlike the Templars, however, he was highly literate and highly cunning; the two qualities that rarely went hand in hand in real life. Thankfully, for Ruthenia and Galicia’s sake, they have found home within his well-proportioned, five foot ten frame and a head that seemed slightly too big, the effect perhaps due to a large pair of ears that stuck away from his skull like two satellite dishes, constantly picking up the full spectrum of signals, many of them seemingly outside the normal range of mere humans, or even not-quite humans like Halszka.
Sophia, D1’s personal assistant, alerted him that Halszka was waiting, and then, the handset still cradled on her shoulder, gestured with her head for Halszka to go in. Even though she was expected, she still knocked on the door, more a reflex, or perhaps a good luck charm, since she did not actually wait for the answer.
Palec was sitting behind his desk, his high office chair leaning back as far as it could go, the man himself half reclining with his hand locked behind his head, staring at the ceiling. The only thing missing were feet on the desk, but that was not Palec, not unless he was fully relaxed and alone in his office.
“Sit down, SGB,” he said. She imagined he took to calling her that because he never addressed anyone at work by their first name, and her surname was too long to comfortably roll off the tongue during a conversation.
She chose the chair on the right, in his line of sight once he would eventually look down and acknowledge her. The law, not to mention security regulation, prohibited smoking inside the building, but her nose picked up, like it always did, a faint whiff of good, exotic tobacco. The legend around the building had it that Palec has had the guts of the smoke alarm and the sprinkler system uninstalled years ago, leaving only the outside shells to fool the casual observer. If there were other ways he bent the rules, she wasn’t aware of them but figured that everyone deserved some slack in life.
“Tell me you’ve worked it all out and have all the answers for me,” he said, still looking up. Halszka dared not follow his gaze to see if there was a specific target – a crack in the ceiling, a crack in the national security – or just an expanse of pale seledin to rest one’s tired eyes for a moment.
“I wish...” she shifted uncomfortable in the chair.
“Is manpower the problem?” he finally looked down at her, his pale green eyes somewhat unsettling, seemingly too soft and too watery, at odds with the hardness behind them. “You already have a ten-person team working for you. Do you need more?”
“No, it’s just...” she started and halted. She hated to disappoint him, not just as her boss, but the latest, and the most senior, in the succession of substitute father figures she relied on for the past quarter of a century to make up for the loss of her own father when she was five. It frustrated her to feel this way, which only made the feelings more difficult to suppress. “We’re working as hard as we can, but it’s frustrating...”
“That indeed it is,” he said, taking his glasses off and putting them on the desk in front of him.
From behind his right shoulder King Stefan, too, was looking down at her from an obligatory royal portrait in every high official’s office throughout the Kingdom, more in a bored benevolence than disapproval. In Palec’s private little fiefdom the King was dwarfed by a landscape; an autumny, rain-swept plain, almost featureless except for a small grove of leafless trees towards the blurred horizon and a figure of a hunched-over peasant trudging along a muddy track. Halszka never asked the Director if it was a piece of nostalgia to remind him of where he had come from, or an unspoken statement that the land is bigger and older than the people who are but passers-by, and the country itself will always – has to - in the end come before even its mightiest. Not a bad subliminal motto for one of the people tasked with guarding the well-being and survival of the nation.
“So what do we know at the moment?” he said, rubbing the base of his nose.
Halszka shifted in her seat again.
“We have our intercepted phonecall,” she started slowly. “But it’s the only one; Fedorov has not been so indiscreet since then. We still haven’t been able to identify who he was talking too... or determine the exact meaning of the conversation.”
“The conversation is pretty clear,” Palec interrupted her. “Someone in the Palace is going to do a favour for our Russian friends once the old King is out of the way, but just in case, the Russians have insured themselves against any backsliding or second thoughts by their local collaborator.”
“Yes, that is pretty clear,” Halszka said. “But we’re talking about generalities. We still don’t know who is working for the Russians, what the Russians want, and what exactly they’re going to do if, for some reason, they don’t get their way.”
“Perezagruzka,” said Palec.
“Indeed. The reset. But it could mean anything. A psy-op to destroy someone’s reputation, an assassination even...”
“Judging by the fact that they’re bringing a number of their own people here, it sounds... substantial,” Palec said and swung forward in his chair. He leaned over the desk on his elbow and picked up his glasses, absent-mindedly swinging them around in his hand. “What else?”
“Well, we have the Maciar suicide,” she said.
“Do you think it’s connected?”
“I don’t know. The timing is certainly curious.”
“Are we sure it was suicide?”
“That’s what the police tell us,” she said. “But we’re also told that the Special Service has pretty quickly taken over from the cops and closed down the show.”
Palec shrugged. “Nothing necessarily unusual; the Palace generally errs on the side of caution. No one wants risk even the smallest of embarrassments, particularly at a time like this.”
The Director reached for his phone and pressed the direct line to his personal assistant. “Tea, please, Sophia.” He did not ask if Halszka wanted anything to drink. It could have been useful; her throat was going dry.
“Anything on Maciar on our files,” Palec resumed the questioning, “particularly Russian related?”
“No, we don’t have any evidence of contacts or dealings with the Russians, outside of his professional duties. In fact, he’s – he appears to have been – pretty clean; as far as they go.”
“So nothing blackmailable?”
“The official Palace story does involve gambling problems.”
“Which does not help us very much. It can either be God’s honest truth, or it might be a cover story to disguise something far more embarrassing. In either case, we don’t know.”
Halszka was realising quite quickly and comprehensively how much they – or she, more specifically and more importantly – did not know. Granted, she was working in a field that some American of an allied profession had once described as the wilderness of mirrors. There were never cold hard facts to play with or information as properly understood by people out there in the normal world, merely suppositions, guesswork, suspicion and ultimately paranoia. But even granting all that, her stomach was still tightened up in a knot and she just realised her nails were digging into the plush upholstery of her chair.
“So we know that we still don’t know very much,” said Palec. “And since the man himself,” he motioned with his head to the portrait behind him, “has only days to live, we know we have very little time to find out. So what are we doing?”
Halszka swallowed. So.
“On the Russian side we have doubled the surveillance of the embassy and its staff, especially those of course we know or suspect are SVR people. It’s stretching our resources rather thin though.”
“You’ve got my permission to shift the resources from other areas,” Palec said. “This is the top priority in the near future.
“Thanks,” Halszka said. “We’re also-“ She stopped when the door opened and Sophia brought in a cup of tea for her boss. Earl Gray, white, two sugars, that’s how he always liked it. “We’re also scanning all the arrivals into the country, starting as of about a week ago. Arrivals from Russia, Russian citizens arriving from third country, any other nationals who might be of interest. We’re looking for any patterns to identify the team or the teams they’re bringing, and since we do not know what the Russians are planning for as their fall-back option, I mean any patterns. We’re hoping that the ‘who’ might lead us to ‘what’...”
The Director did not say anything, stirring his tea. He took the spoon out, licked it and put on the desk, next to a pile of papers.
“We’re also looking at the Palace,” Halszka continued. “We’re skating on thin ice here, for all sorts of reasons, particularly since we can’t ask for assistance...”
Unspoken, that the Special Service, the people who otherwise should be of most help in the current situation cannot be trusted, since for all practical purposes they are more of a Praetorian guard for the Palace rather than an independent agency working in the national interest. And the police... Insufficient powers to help without something more concrete on the table. That, and they leak like a sieve.
“But again we are looking for any unusual activity, any patterns,” she continued. “At any level.”
Unspoken again, that you cannot ask for assistance the very people you’re investigating, mostly because at this stage you don’t really know who you are investigating and therefore who you cannot trust. Where does the rot start and where does it stop? The Palace is a big place, easy to get lost in. Too many mirrors, too many winding corridors, too many secrets at the best of times. Maybe if the King was not on his death bed... But now...
“Good,” Palec nodded and sipped his tea, but Halszka knew it wasn’t good. She sat in her seat, hunched over, feeling the weight of the entire country pressing down on her. And King Stefan looking at her from behind D1’s shoulder, his stare now mocking her. Poor little devil you, way over your head all this, isn’t it? I will be dead soon, girl, and all the cares of this world will be lifted off my shoulders by the Merciful Lord, but you, your problems are only just starting. Pray, little devil girl, pray that you survive the tempest, and may God have mercy on my country...
Photo by Pro Church Media on Unsplash
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