A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1) (47 page)

Higgins arrived back in Washington two days later. He didn't even go home to his wife. Instead, the first thing he did was cable the Helsinki Station to say that in his opinion, Galerkin was an agent of penetration, designed by the Russians to try to infiltrate himself into the CIA's defector program and spread disinformation. The man had fluffed several of the questions and made a crude attempt to extort money from a senior officer from Langley. Higgins' recommendation was that Galerkin be dropped as soon as possible and no further contact should be made with him by CIA Helsinki.

The next thing he did was to go down to the Registry and look up the few details they had on a Russian intelligence officer by the name of Vladimir Krivitsky. There was precious little. A few postings when he had operated under diplomatic cover; Switzerland, Paris, Berlin, plus one grainy photograph that showed the man in profile. Higgins stared at the photo, imprinting the man's face in his memory.

Aside from a meeting with the Director of Plans, for the rest of the day he sat in his office, making notes in his personal ledger. The ledger he would take home with him to work on and to streamline the scribbling inside into a workable strategy. By late that afternoon, he was tired and suffering from being on the road for the past week.

“This just came in. It's from Helsinki in reply to your cable,” said his secretary. He was on his way out the door, but waved his hand for her to pass it to him. Then he was going home to his wife, his home and his bed. The cable read:

* * *

Higgins had driven through the night to reach Vermont. Following his enforced retirement, Chuck Ferrera had been staying at the family-owned lodge in the mountains not far from Mount Mansfield.

The cabin was anything but modest, a five room hunting lodge in six acres of grounds, which had been bought by the Ferrera family for long weekend vacations. For now, though, it had a very different purpose. It was partly to rehabilitate Chuck, partly to settle his mind, but also to see if his desire for revenge was quenched in the calm stillness of the mountains.

That night following his return from Helsinki, Higgins had found Chuck Ferrera sitting in his reading chair by the fire, halfway through a book. There was no evidence of alcohol anywhere in the room.

Higgins took off his winter jacket, sat in the chair opposite his friend and whispered quietly, “I think we've found him.”

Ferrera had put his book down calmly and said, “Good, then let's begin.”

* * *

Over the coming weeks, Higgins would make a visit to the mountain lodge once a fortnight, landing at Burlington Municipal Airport and then taking a winding car journey through the mountains, ostensibly to visit a grieving friend, but in reality, to bring any intelligence he had managed to glean from CIA files and to plan out the next phase of their covert operation. They would sit drinking coffee and talking, late into the night. Their talk was operational. Do we target the man or the system? What about our escape plan? Is it deniable enough?

On a practical level, no operation can exist without the necessary funds and monies to make it happen, so Ferrera had, through intermediaries, liquidated all his assets; properties, shares, savings bond, pensions and his termination package from the Agency, which all went into the fund. He had the funds deposited into a Swiss bank account, as well as several smaller, satellite banks located throughout Europe. By the end of several weeks, he had a two-million-dollar bounty which would enable him to run his operation and resettle him somewhere outside of US jurisdiction when the job was over.

The final thing to do was to destroy any ID naming him as Charles Ferrera. He gathered together his passport, driving license and birth certificate and set fire to them outside the lodge on a clear and starry night. He watched as the embers finally burned away. They were inconsequential anyway, he had several sets of new ID's, which had been provided by one of Higgins' contacts that the CIA used.

It was a way of putting down his old life and taking up a new one.

And so on that night, Charles 'Chuck' Ferrera, former CIA officer, and soon-to-be traitor, dropped off the intelligence radar and officially ceased to exist.

* * *

“It means that Dan's unsolved murder has to be buried and the investigation cancelled. Especially if we have any hope of covering our tracks,” said Higgins, at one of their regular meetings. They were sitting on the porch, enjoying the view of the mountains and the cool evening air.

“As long as we have that scum's head and his network destroyed, it will be worth it,” said Ferrera bitterly.

“I've read through the Helsinki Station's reports into Galerkin. The Warsaw shooting, Krivitsky, his agents in the West. Only we have access to that list. If there's anything that could lead back to us, I'll see if a little judicious trimming of file details might be enough to throw them off the scent,” said Higgins.

Ferrera looked concerned.
It might be easier said than done,
he thought. Altering a few biographical details would be enough to confuse most case officers, but he knew the Chief of Counter-Intelligence was a driven, some would say, zealot of a man who refused to take no for an answer. “What about Angleton?” he said.

“It's not a problem; I'll take care of Jim. I outrank him by a country mile, besides, he's gotten more than enough intelligence product to keep his little team happy for the next few years,” said Higgins.

The plan had been simple. Identify Krivitsky's network of agents and start eliminating them, one by one. Let Krivitsky watch as his agents were picked off one at a time and then when he has no more network left, and the effectiveness of KGB operations in the West was almost decimated, they would wait for Svarog to come out into the open and then they would strike – chopping off the head of the hydra. Svarog was to be the ultimate target.

They had an impressive target list; a NATO liaison officer, propulsion engineer, bankers, diplomats, businessmen, political appointees. All Soviet agents and all easy targets. Of course, this couldn't be an official CIA-backed operation; no, not even the Assistant to the Director of Plans could swing that, and besides Ferrera had made an enemy of the current DCI. But what it could be, was a private enterprise between two old friends and comrades, determined to get revenge for the death of a loved one. They'd spent the night discussing various options, some good and some terrible.

Finally, they settled on a false flag operation as the one with the most realistic chance of succeeding. A false flag was a time-honored tradition in the intelligence world. You represented yourself as one thing, when in fact you were another. So a French Intelligence officer might pass himself off as an Italian spy, in the hope of recruiting an Italian citizen to pass him information. As long as the agent believed they were working for one side, usually out of patriotism, the concept would work well.

For Ferrara, he would be representing himself as a still-active CIA case officer. They'd put in the necessary 'plumbing', to use an old Agency phrase. Hired safe-houses, prepared false travel documents and where they needed on the ground intelligence about their targets, they set about hiring private detectives from the various target countries to provide them with addresses, car registration numbers, up-to-date surveillance photos or to track movements on a day-to-day basis. It was expensive, but money well spent in the long run.

By the end of September of 1963, they had a workable plan complete with an accurate target list, surveillance logs and a timeline for the operation to start. However, there had been a bigger concern as summer gave way to fall. There had been a blip in the running of the operation, just as everything had about to be launched.

The assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas in November of 1963 had shut everything down. Security was tight within the various branches of government, not least within the Agency, where there was a witch hunt going on.

“We need to close this down,” Higgins had said. “Hoover and his boys are seeing reds under the beds everywhere at the minute. They're paranoid!”

“I agree,” said Ferrera. “There's too much heat at the moment. We have everything in place, so the hard part is done. Besides, we don't want to get caught up in the assassination investigation. The worst case is that the FBI blunders into the fringes of our op, and the whole thing is blown sky high.”

So they packed up the operation until the FBI hunters and Secret Service had begun to wind down their respective investigations. It was a long and painfully frustrating time for Ferrera, but as the operation's controller, he knew the wisdom of calling a temporary halt to proceedings.

But as a father out for vengeance, it was akin to going through the whole grieving process again. Had the targets moved? Would Svarog go further underground? Would the whole thing still be workable when it was finally launched? Would it lose momentum and if so, what could he do to get it back on track?

He had no definite answer to any of these imponderables, so he did the only thing he could; he stayed in Vermont and walked and read and hunted and planned. And when he'd finished planning, he planned some more in detail. He existed only in limbo, caught between the fine line of action and failure. Finally, the hiatus was at an end and he threw himself back into the heart of the operation, taking personal control of the next, crucial level.

They would, of course, need suitably qualified contractors to carry out their mission. Higgins had made time to rifle through the agent files of known 'contractors' who were capable of carrying out the job. Not that they would have an exhaustive list of contract killers, in fact the reverse was true, the list was anything but grand, it was downright miniscule. Following Kennedy's murder, the CIA had gone into freefall and ousted many of their contract personnel to avoid any kind of scandal. This meant that a number of agents with some very deniable skills were tossed out onto the garbage heap, which for a likely recruiter, would make it a buyer's market.

As part of the false flag ruse, they both felt it would be wise to choose agents who had been cut loose from the Agency and were no longer classed as 'active agents'. This would remove the risk of direct conflict of interests with current personnel, and reduce the risk of the agent betraying them to the CIA.

Instead, Higgins searched for contractors who had been de-activated, but who were still in the market to take on a freelance job if the conditions were favorable. Eventually, they short-listed three likely candidates.

The first was a retired US Special Forces Colonel who had liaised with the CIA during the 1950's, and had carried out several long-range sniper killings.

His credentials were impeccable. But after much thought, they ruled the man out. He was still an American citizen and therefore probably still had a lot of contacts within the military and intelligence services. They couldn't trust that he wouldn't betray the operation, especially one that was a false flag. The man might have seen it as being part of a traitorous operation against his own government. Besides, their contractor needed to be a bit more flexible in his approach to killing the targets they had acquired. Not everything could be solved with a rifle from half a mile away.

The second was a Ukrainian national who was living in Frankfurt. He'd completed several contract killings for the Ukrainian nationalist groups against informers and double agents, and had, in fact, been a very good operator by all accounts, even though he had only operated in Germany. Was he good enough to hit numerous targets across Europe, some of them high profile? He may be good at eliminating static ethnic groups, but Ferrera doubted he would be comfortable working this type of operation.

The third man was a former drug smuggler and international criminal who had been recruited into the CIA's Executive Action program to carry out, or be part of, several high profile assassinations the Agency had been involved in. Lumumba and Trujillo, to name but two.

“He seems perfect. I vaguely remember hearing about that operation. Not the details, of course, just that the Executive Action department had several very good men at their disposal,” said Ferrera.

Higgins nodded agreement. “He certainly has the right temperament and qualifications. You'll need a cut-out man, someone to act as an initial go-between.”

Ferrera shook his head. “No. There's no need. I can handle simple agent recruitments.”

“No,
you're
wrong Chuck. Think about it. We have to make it look like a legitimate CIA operation and that means following agent recruitment protocols to the letter. These people will know how the Agency acts. If they see something out of the ordinary, they'll smell a rat.”

Ferrera thought about it. Higgins was right, of course. Besides, a cut-out man would have other uses too, such as arranging security, safe-houses and the like. “Okay, who did you have in mind?”

Higgins pulled out a copied file. “This man. He's Hungarian, an intelligence peddler, but everyone uses him for small jobs. He's based out of Vienna. We use him, then we dispose of him.”

* * *

Did they class themselves as traitors?

Higgins had mulled it over time and time again, and still his conclusions weren't as straightforward as he would have liked. He surmised that they weren't, in the classic sense of the word. They weren't actively betraying their country by selling secrets, or by trying to subvert the United States government. But still it didn't sit comfortably with either man, he was sure.

He understood Ferrera's motive, certainly. The former intelligence officer wanted nothing more than good old-fashioned revenge for what was the brutal gunning down of his only son. That motive was as old as time.