Russian intelligence¶
Russian intelligence is the Russian agency that reaches the Biz through a fake phone sweepstakes line during the Marblehead case, using a book cipher to tell him that two submarines have been lost near Massachusetts.
| Type | Organization (foreign intelligence service) |
| Affiliation | Russia (the Biz is later shown in contact with Boris Yeltsin) |
| First appearance | Summer Service 04 |
Overview¶
Russian intelligence appears only once, as a recorded voice on a payphone. The Biz's instructions required a particular 1980 reprint of Moby-Dick, which he did not carry, so he spent part of the day finding the right edition at the independent bookstore Readful Things (Summer Service 04).
The sweepstakes message¶
About four hours after the team returned to the hotel, the Biz sent everyone out of the room and walked to a payphone farther from the hotel than the nearest one. He had already completed the first step of the procedure, leaving a request for information. The recorded voice welcomed him to the "Miss Finn Amy[?] promotional sweepstakes" (the name is garbled in the recording) and read out a list of winning numbers beginning "178, 14, 97, 325", ending with "Best of luck! Everyone's a winner!" After about ten minutes of decoding against the book, the Biz had the message: "Two secret[?] submarine lost near Massachusetts. Cause unknown. Instructions to follow soon." The word "secret" is hard to make out in the recording (Summer Service 04). The method is described on the Moby-Dick book cipher page.
The Biz took the message as confirmation that the Russians were probably not behind the Marblehead events, since, as Ezra put it, "They also lost submarines." He was unsure whether he could share the information with the rest of the team (Summer Service 04).
Context¶
Earlier in the arc, the fisherman Briggs blamed "the goddamn Russians" for the blast, and the Biz joked that the Russians could not do anything to the team that they were not already doing to themselves (Summer Service 01).