“Ah, then I shall be disappointed,” said Monk, “for I had brought him a gift.”
“How long will you be among us?”
“I would like to sit here awhile longer and admire your beautiful mosque,” replied Monk.
The Chechen rose.
“I will ask if anyone has heard of this man,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Monk. “I am a man of great patience.”
“Patience is a virtue.”
It was two hours before they came, and there were three of them, all young. They moved quietly, stockinged feet making no sound on the deep pile of the Persian carpets. One stayed by the door, dropping to his knees and leaning back on his heels, hands on the tops of his thighs. He might seem to be at prayer, but Monk knew no one would get past him.
The other two walked over and sat on either side of Monk. Whatever they carried under their jackets was hidden. Monk stared ahead. The questions when they came were murmurs that would not disturb the worshipers in front of them.
“You speak Russian?”
“Yes.”
“And you ask about one of our brothers?”
“Yes.”
“You are a Russian spy.”
“I am American. There is a passport in my jacket.”
“Forefinger and thumb,” said the man. Monk eased out his U.S. passport and let it fall to the carpet. It was the other man who leaned forward, retrieved it, and scanned the pages. Then he nodded and handed it back. He spoke in Chechen across Monk. The American suspected the burden of what he said was to the effect that anyone can have a forged American passport. The man to Monk’s right nodded and resumed.
“Why do you seek our brother?”
“We met, long ago. In a faraway land. He left something behind. I promised myself that if ever I came to Moscow I would return it to him.”
“You have it with you?”
“In that attaché case.”
“Open.”
Monk flicked the catches on the case and lifted the lid. Inside was a flat cardboard box.
“You expect us to bring this to him?”
“I would be grateful.”
The one on the left said something else in Chechen.
“No, it is not a bomb,” said Monk in Russian. “For if it were, and it were opened now, I too would die. So open it.”
The two men glanced at each other, then one leaned forward and lifted the lid of the cardboard box. They stared at what lay inside.
“That is it?”
“That is it. He left it behind.”
The one on his left closed the box and lifted it out of the attaché case. Then he arose.
“Wait,” he said.
The man by the door watched him leave but made no sign. Monk and his two watchers sat for another two hours. The hour of lunch had come and gone. Monk felt the yearning for a big hamburger. Beyond the small windows the light was fading by the time the messenger returned. He said nothing, just nodded to his two companions and jerked his head toward the door.
“Come,” said the Chechen who squatted to Monk’s right. All three arose. In the lobby they retrieved their shoes and put them on. The two flankers took up position on either side; the watcher by the door brought up the rear. Monk was marched out of the compound to Durova Street where a big BMW waited at the curb. Before he was allowed to enter it he was expertly frisked from behind.
Monk went into the center of the backseat with a flanker on either side. The third man slipped into the front beside the driver. The BMW moved off and headed for the ring road.
Monk had calculated the men would never defile the mosque by offering violence within it, but their own car was a different matter, and he knew enough of men like those around him to be aware they were all supremely dangerous.
After a mile the one in the front reached into the glove compartment and withdrew a pair of wraparound dark glasses. He gestured to Monk to put them on. They were better than a blindfold, for the lenses had been painted black. Monk completed the journey in darkness.
In the heart of Moscow, down a side street that it is wiser not to penetrate, is a small café called the Kashdan. It means “chestnut” in Russian and has been there for years.
Any tourist wandering idly toward the doors will be met by a fit-looking young man who will indicate to the stranger that he would be advised to take his morning coffee elsewhere. The Russian militia do not even bother to go near it.
Monk was helped out of the car and his black glasses were removed as he was led through the door. As he entered, the buzz of conversation in the Chechen language died. Two-score eyes watched in silence as he was led to a private room at the back beyond the bar. If he failed to come out of that room, no one would have seen a thing.
There was a table, four chairs, and a mirror on the wall. From a nearby kitchen came a smell of garlic, spices, and coffee. For the first time the senior of the three watchers, the one who had sat by the entrance of the mosque while his subordinates did the questioning, spoke.
“Sit,” he said. “Coffee?”
“Thank you. Black. Sugar.”
It came and it was good. Monk sipped the steaming liquid and kept his eyes away from the mirror, convinced it was a one-way device and that he was being studied from behind it. As he put down his empty cup a door opened and Umar Gunayev entered.
He had changed. The shirt collar was no longer worn outside the jacket, and the suit was not cheaply cut. It was of an Italian designer label and the tie of heavy silk probably from Jermyn Street or Fifth Avenue.
The Chechen had matured over twelve years, but at forty was darkly handsome, urbane, and polished. He nodded several times at Monk, with a quiet smile, then sat down and put the flat cardboard box on the table.
“I received your gift,” he said. He flicked the lid open, and picked out the contents, holding the Yemeni gambiah to the light and running a fingertip down the cutting edge.
“This is it?”
“One of them left it on the cobblestones,” said Monk. “I thought you might use it for a letter-opener.”
This time Gunayev smiled with genuine amusement.
“How did you know my name?”
Monk told him about the mug shots the British in Oman had collected of the incoming Russians.
“And since then, what have you heard?”
“Many things.”
“Good or bad?”
“Interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“I heard that Captain Gunayev, after ten years with the First Chief Directorate, finally became tired of the racial jokes and having no chance of promotion. I heard he left the KGB to take up another line of work. Also covert, but different.”
Gunayev laughed. At this the three watchers seemed to relax. The master had set the mood for them.
“Covert, but different. Yes, that is true. And then?”
“Then I heard that Umar Gunayev had risen in his new life to become the undisputed overlord of all the Chechen underworld west of the Urals.”
“Possibly. Anything else?”
“I heard that this Gunayev is a traditional man, though not old. That he still clings to the ancient standards of the Chechen people.”
“You have heard much, my American friend. And what are these standards of the Chechen people?”
“I have been told that in a world of degeneracy the Chechens still abide by their code of honor; that they pay their debts, the good and the bad.”
There was tension from the three men behind Monk. Was the American making fun of them? They watched their leader. Gunayev nodded at last.
“You have heard correctly. What do you want of me?”
“Shelter. A place to live.”
“There are hotels in Moscow.”
“Not very safe.”
“Someone is trying to kill you?”
“Not yet, but soon.”
“Who?”
“Colonel Anatoli Grishin.”
Gunayev shrugged dis
missively.
“You know him?” asked Monk.
“I know of him.”
“And what you know, you like?”
Gunayev shrugged again.
“He does what he does. I do what I do.”
“In America,” said Monk, “if you wished to disappear, I could make you disappear. But this is not my city, not my country. Can you make me disappear in Moscow?”
“Temporarily or permanently?”
Monk laughed.
“I should prefer temporarily.”
“Then of course I can. That is what you want?”
“If I am to stay alive, yes. And I would prefer to stay alive.”
Gunayev rose and addressed his three gangsters.
“This man saved my life. Now he is my guest. No one will touch him. While he is here he will become one of us.”
The three hoods were all around Monk, offering their hands, grinning, giving their names. Aslan, Magomed, Sharif.
“Has the hunt for you begun already?” asked Gunayev.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then you must be hungry. The food here is foul. We will go to my office.”
Like all mafia chieftains, the leader of the Chechen clan had two personae. The more public one was that of a highly successful “biznizman” controlling a score of prosperous companies. In the case of Gunayev his chosen specialty was that of property.
In the early years he had simply bought prime development sites all over Moscow by the simple expedient of purchasing or shooting the bureaucrats who, as Communism collapsed and state property became available for public purchase, had the sales of these prime sites at their disposal.
Having taken title to the development sites, Gunayev was able to take advantage of the wave of collaborative planning ventures set up between the Russian tycoons and their Western partners. Gunayev provided the building sites and guaranteed strike-free labor, while the Americans and West Europeans erected their office buildings and skyscrapers. Ownership then became a shared venture, as did the profits and rents from the offices.
With similar procedures, the Chechen took over control of six of the top hotels in the city, branching out into steel, concrete, timber, bricks, and glazing. If one wanted to restore, convert, or build, one dealt with a subsidiary owned and controlled by Umar Gunayev.
That was the overt face of the Chechen mafia. The less visible side of the operation, as with all Moscow gangsterdom, remained in the provinces of black marketeering and embezzlement.
Russian state assets such as gold, diamonds, gas, and oil were simply purchased locally in rubles, at the official rate and even then at knockdown prices. The “sellers,” being bureaucrats, could all be bought anyway. Exported abroad, the assets were sold for dollars, pounds, or deutsche marks at world market prices.
A fraction of the sale price could then be re-imported, converted into a blizzard of rubles at the unofficial rate, and used to purchase the next consignment and pay the necessary bribes. The balance, in the region of eighty percent of the foreign sale, was the profit.
In the early days, before some of the state officials and bankers got the hang of things, a number refused to cooperate. The first warning was verbal, the second involved orthopedic surgery, and the third was permanent. The successor official to the one who had shuffled off the mortal coil usually grasped the game rules.
By the late 1990s violence against members of officialdom or the legitimate professions was hardly ever necessary, but by then the growth of private armies meant that every underworld chieftain had to match all his rivals if need be. Among all the men of violence none matched the speed and unconcern of the Chechens if they felt they were being crossed.
From the late winter of 1994 a new factor had entered the equation. Just before Christmas that year Boris Yeltsin launched his incredibly foolish war against the homeland of Chechnya, ostensibly to oust the breakaway president Dudayev who was claiming independence for it. If the war had been a quick surgical operation, it might have worked. In fact, the supposedly mighty Russian Army took a pasting from lightly armed Chechen guerrillas, who simply headed for the mountains of the Caucasus and fought on.
In Moscow any semblance of hesitation the Chechen mafia might have felt toward the Russian state vanished. Ordinary life became almost impossible for a law-abiding Chechen. With every man’s hand turned against them, the Chechens became a tightly knit and fiercely loyal clan within the Russian capital, far more impenetrable than the Georgian, Armenian, or native Russian underworlds. Within that community the head of the underworld became both a hero and a resistance leader. In the late autumn of 1999 this was the former captain of the KGB, Umar Gunayev.
And yet as businessman Gunayev he could still circulate freely and live like the multimillionaire he was. His office was in fact the entire top floor of one of his hotels, a collaborative enterprise with an American chain, situated near the Helsinki Station.
The journey to the hotel was accomplished in Umar Gunayev’s Mercedes limousine, proofed against bullet and bomb. He had his own driver and bodyguard, and the three from the café came behind in the Volvo. Both cars drove into the underground garage of the hotel, and after the basement area had been searched by the three from the BMW, Gunayev and Monk walked to a high-speed elevator that took them to the tenth and penthouse floor. The electric power to the elevator was then disconnected.
There were more guards in the lobby on the tenth floor, but they finally found privacy in the Chechen leader’s apartment. A white-jacketed steward brought food and drink at a command from Gunayev.
“There is something I have to show you,” said Monk. “I hope you will find it interesting, even educational.”
He opened his attaché case and activated the two control buttons to release the false base. Gunayev watched with interest. The case and its potential clearly excited his admiration.
Monk handed over the Russian translation of the verification report first. It comprised thirty-three pages between stiff gray paper covers. Gunayev raised an eyebrow.
“Must I?”
“It will reward your patience. Please.”
Gunayev sighed and began to read. As he became more involved in the narrative he left his coffee untouched and concentrated on the text. It took twenty minutes. Finally he put the report back on the table between them.
“So. This manifesto is no joke. The real thing. So what?”
“This is your next president talking,” said Monk. “This is what he intends to do when he has the power to do it. Quite soon now.”
He slipped the black-covered manifesto across the table.
“Another thirty pages?”
“Forty, actually. But even more interesting. Please. Humor me.”
Gunayev ran his eye quickly over the first ten pages, taking in the plans for the single-party state, the re-commissioning of the nuclear arsenal, the re-conquest of the lost republics, and the new Gulag archipelago of slave camps. Then his eyes narrowed and he slowed his pace.
Monk knew the point he had reached. He could envisage the messianic sentences as he had first read them in front of the sparkling water of Sapodilla Bay in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
“The final and complete extermination of every last Chechen on the face of Russia ... the destruction of the rat-people so that they will never rise again ... the reduction of the tribal homeland to a wild-goat pasture … not a brick on brick nor a stone on stone … forever ... the surrounding Ossetians, Dagomans, and Ingush will watch the process and learn due and proper respect and fear of their new Russian masters. …”
Gunayev read to the end and put the manifesto down.
“It’s been tried before,” he said. “The Czars tried, Stalin tried, Yeltsin tried.”
“With swords, tommy guns, rockets. What about gamma rays, anthrax, nerve gases? The art of extermination has modernized.”
Gunayev rose, stripped off his jacket, draped it over his chair, and walked to the picture window with
its view over the roofs of Moscow.
“You want him eliminated? Taken down?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not? It can be done.”
“It won’t work.”
“It usually does.”
Monk explained. A nation already in chaos plunged into the abyss, probably civil war. Or another Komarov, perhaps his own right-hand man Grishin, storming to power on a wave of outrage.
“They are two sides of the same coin,” he said. “The man of thought and words, and the man of action. Kill one and the other takes over. The destruction of your people continues.”
Gunayev turned from the window and walked back. He leaned over Monk, his face taut.
“What do you want of me, American? You come here as a stranger who once saved my life. So for that I owe you. Then you show me this filth. What has it to do with me?”
“Nothing, unless you decide so. You have many things, Umar Gunayev. You have great wealth, enormous power, even the power of life and death over any man. You have the power to walk away, to let what will happen happen.”
“And why should I not?”
“Because there was a boy, once. A small and ragged boy who grew up in a poor village in the northern Caucasus among family, friends, and neighbors who clubbed together to send him to university and thence to Moscow to become a great man. The question is, Did that boy die somewhere along the road, to become an automaton, triggered only by wealth? Or does the boy still remember his own people?”
“You tell me.”
“No. The choice is yours.”
“And your choice, American?”
“Much easier. I can walk out of here, take a cab to Sheremetyevo, fly home. It’s warm there; comfortable, safe. I can tell them not to bother; that it doesn’t matter, that no one over here cares anymore, they’re all bought and paid for. Let night descend.”
The Chechen seated himself and stared into some distance long past. Finally he said, “You think you can stop him?”
“There is a chance.”
“And then what?”
Monk explained what Sir Nigel Irvine and his patrons had in mind.
“You’re crazy,” said Gunayev flatly.
“Maybe. What else faces you? Komarov and the genocide carried out by his beastmaster, chaos and civil war, or the other.”
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