Lucky Bastard Read Online Free Page A

Adams, my superior, by coincidence, arrived from Moscow. Everyone in this story will call this man Peter, a poetic choice of alias, because Peter was a fisher of men if ever there was one. Our intelligence service, founded by intellectuals and perpetuated by drudges, had an unfortunate tendency to assign excessively appropriate pseudonyms to secret operatives. This was a great weakness in our security because the entire basis of cryptanalysis is the discovery of context. If you call an agent Lothario because he is a compulsive seducer, you must expect that the enemy will work backward through a million females, if necessary, to discover his identity.
    Peter had traveled to New York, where he was not welcome in his true identity, using a false name, as a specialist in fisheries attached to the Ukrainian delegation to a UN meeting on national rights to fishing grounds. Peter found this cover amusing. At the time in question, Soviet trawlers were indiscriminately vacuuming up huge quantities of fish off the coasts of North America, processing their catch using the most modern technology, and then unloading these frozen cargoes at Murmansk and other Barents Sea ports—where they thawed and rotted on the docks because there were no refrigerated trains or trucks to haul them to market. Or only enough to supply the Nomenklatura, as the higher-ranking circles of the Party and government officials were called, with the one fish in a million that made it to Moscow.
    The real work of the trawlers, some of which were loaded with highly advanced electronic gear, was to eavesdrop on the U.S. Navy.
    â€œThis means,” Peter told me over lunch at the Côte Basque, his favorite restaurant in New York, “that the price of each kilo of cod eaten by a member of the Politburo is about the same as that of a medium-range ballistic missile.”
    He spoke airily, as was his style, as if there was nothing unusual about a lieutenant general in the KGB describing a major espionage operation to a subordinate as a farce. You may think that he felt free to do so because I was his subordinate and could do him no harm without destroying myself, but he spoke just as recklessly to everyone. He was the son of one of the original Bolsheviks, now dead, who had begotten him on a famous ballerina. This alone gave him a license to be eccentric. Few outsiders knew this, but even under Stalin, Russia had a whole class of spoiled brats, the children of the mighty, who did and said pretty much as they liked—until their fathers disappeared. Peter’s father had done him the inestimable favor of dying for the revolution, an act that placed both of them out of the reach of the secret police.
    Peter looked like his mother, tall with a symmetrical European face and large, keen, nonepicanthic blue eyes. The ballerina had raised him as an old-fashioned gentleman, privately tutored in the old culture by men who had been saved from the camps by his father. He knew languages, literature, painting, music, delightful gossip about the famous, dead and alive. As an adult, Peter behaved like an English nobleman in a nineteenth-century novel: with a certain natural hauteur, but with a single manner for all mankind. He treated everyone the same, commissar or zik.
    As children of heroes went, Peter was unusual in that he was talented, extravagantly so. He went straight into intelligence at a young age, placed in a favorable position by Lavrenti Beria, a devoted friend of his mother’s. The boy was given opportunities to excel, and he worked hard and won golden opinions from the start. In Budapest during the uprising, the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov, a future head of the KGB and of the Party itself, was so impressed by Peter’s work in subverting the rebellion from within that he practically adopted him as a son.
    Now, still in his forties, barely older than I was, he was head of a directorate that he himself had invented. Even inside the KGB no one