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by Frederick Forsyth

  The face was younger than it would be now, but the gaze was still direct. The hair was blond and rumpled, there was no gray moustache and no smoked glasses. But it was the same face, the face of the young Jason Monk.

  Grishin made two phone calls and left his listeners in no doubt that he would not tolerate delay. From the contact in the Immigration Department at the airport he wanted to know when this man arrived, from where, and Whether he had left the country.

  To Borodin he ordered that the detective return to the Metropol and discover when Dr. Peters checked in, if he had left, and if not what his room was.

  He had both answers by midafternoon. Dr. Peters had arrived on the scheduled British Airways flight from London seven days earlier, and if he had left the country it was not via Sheremetyevo. From Borodin he learned that Dr. Peters had checked into the hotel with a prearranged reservation from a reputable London travel agent the same day he arrived at the airport, had not left, and was in Room 841.

  There was only one odd thing, said Borodin. Dr. Peters’s passport was nowhere to be found. It ought to have remained with reception, but it had been removed. All staff denied any knowledge of how this came to be.

  It was no surprise to Grishin. He knew how far a hundred-dollar bill would stretch in Moscow. The passport for getting in would have been destroyed. Monk would now be under a new identity, but among the six hundred foreigners at the Metropol no one would notice. When he wished to leave he would just go without paying; vaporize, disappear. The hotel would shrug and write off the loss.

  “Two last things,” he told Borodin, who was still at the hotel. “Obtain a passkey and tell the manager that if a word of this is breathed to Dr. Peters, the manager will not be expelled, he will be spending ten years cutting salt. Spin him any story you like.”

  Grishin decided this was not a job for his Black Guards. They were too recognizable and this affair might end up with a protesting American Embassy. Ordinary criminals could do it and take the blame. Within the Dolgoruki mafia there was a team who specialized in high-quality break-ins.

  During the evening, after repeated calls to Room 841 to ensure no one was at home, the room was entered by two men with a passkey. A third waited among the leather chairs at the end of the hall in case the room’s occupant returned.

  A thorough search was made. Nothing of interest was found. No passport, no files, no attaché case, no personal papers of any kind. Wherever he was, Monk must have his alternative identity papers with him. The room was left exactly as the burglars found it.

  From across the corridor the Chechen who had taken the facing room eased his door open a fraction, watched the men enter and leave, then reported back on his mobile phone.

  At 10:00 P.M. Jason Monk entered the hotel lobby as one who has dined and wishes to retire to bed. He made no approach to the reception desk, having his plastic key on him. Both entrances were covered by observers, two at each, and as he entered one of the elevators, two of the watchers sauntered to the other. Two took the stairs.

  Monk walked down the corridor to his room, tapped on the opposite door, was passed a suitcase from inside, and went into 841. The first two gangsters, having taken the second elevator, appeared at the end of the corridor in time to see the door close. Shortly after, the other pair arrived by the stairs. There was a brief conversation. Two settled themselves in the club chairs from where they could survey the corridor while their companions went back down to report.

  At half-past ten they saw a man leave the room opposite the target, pass them in the lobby area, and head for the elevators. They took no notice. Wrong room.

  At 10:45 Monk’s phone rang. It was Housekeeping, asking if he wished for any more towels. He said he did not, thanked them, and hung up.

  With the contents of the suitcase Monk made his last dispositions and prepared to leave. At eleven he went onto the narrow balcony and pulled the glass doors closed behind him. As he could not lock them from outside he secured them with a strip of strong adhesive tape.

  With a length of stout cord from around his waist he lowered himself one floor to the balcony of Room 741 just below his own. From there he hopped over four intervening barriers to the windows of 733.

  At 11:10 a Swedish businessman was lying naked on his bed with his organ in his hand, watching a porno movie, when he was electrified by a tap on the window.

  In a panic-stricken choice between a terrycloth robe and the freeze-frame button, he chose the robe first, then the remote control. Decently covered, he arose and went to the window. A man was outside gesturing that he be allowed to enter. Completely mystified, the Swede unlocked the catch to the balcony door. The man stepped into the room and addressed him in the molasses drawl of the American Deep South.

  “Mighty neighborly, friend, yes sir. I guess you’ll be wondering what I was doing on your balcony …”

  He was right, there. The Swede had not the faintest idea.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. It was the darnedest thing. I’m right next door to you here, and I just stepped out to smoke a seegar, not wanting to smoke in the room and all, and would you believe it the goddam door swung shut in the wind? So I figured I had no choice but to hop over the divider and see if you’d be kind enough to let me through.”

  It was cold outside, the cigar-smoker was fully dressed with an attaché case in his hand, there was no wind, and the balcony doors were not self-locking, but the businessman was beyond caring.

  His unwelcome guest was still babbling his gratitude and apologies when he let himself out into the corridor and wished the Swede a mighty fine evening.

  The businessman, who very fittingly marketed toilet fixtures, re-secured the balcony door, drew the curtains, disrobed, hit the “play” button, and returned to his econobudget pastime.

  Monk walked unobserved down the corridor of the seventh floor, descended by the stairs, and was met on the curb by Magomed in the BMW.

  At midnight three men entered Room 741 with a small suitcase, again using the passkey. They worked for twenty minutes before leaving.

  At 4:00 A.M. a device later shown to have contained three pounds of plastic explosive in a shaped charge detonated just below the ceiling of Room 741. Forensic exerts would deduce that it had been placed on top of a pyramid of furniture on the bed, and had gone off precisely beneath the center of the bed in the replica room upstairs.

  Room 841 was completely gutted. The mattress and duvet on the bed had been turned into a layer of fabric and down, most of it charred, which had settled on everything else. Beneath this were fragments of timber from the bed frame, wardrobe, and cupboards, shards of glass from the mirrors and lamps, and numerous slivers of human bone.

  Four emergency services arrived. The ambulances came and soon went, for there was nothing for them save the hysterical occupants of three other rooms along the corridor. However, the screaming occupants spoke no Russian and the ambulance men spoke nothing else. Seeing there were no physical injuries, they left the screamers to the night manager.

  The fire service appeared, but though everything in both the affected rooms was charred by the white heat of the explosion, nothing was actually blazing. The forensic team had plenty to do, bagging every last crumb of the debris, part of it human, for later analysis.

  Homicide was represented, on the orders of a major general, by Detective Borodin. He could see at a glance there was nothing in the room bigger than the palm of a hand, and a dangerous four-foot-diameter hole in the floor, but there was something in the bathroom.

  The door had evidently been closed, for it had fragmented and the bits hurled into the sink. The wall in which it was set had also come down, being forced into the bathroom by the blast from the other side.

  But under the rubble was an attaché case, scored, charred, and deeply scratched. Its contents, however, had survived. Apparently at the moment of explosion the case must have been standing in the most sheltered place in either room, up against the inside bathroom wall between the toilet an
d the bidet. The water from the shattered appliances had soaked the case, but its contents had survived. Borodin checked to see that he was unobserved, then slipped both documents under his jacket.

  Colonel Grishin had them in time for his coffee. Twenty-four hours can make a difference to a mood. He gazed at them both with deep satisfaction. One was a file, in Russian, which he recognized as the Black Manifesto. The other was an American passport. It was in the name of Jason Monk.

  “One to get in,” he thought, “and one to get out. But this time, my friend, you are not getting out.”

  ¯

  TWO other things happened that day and neither attracted a whit of attention. A British visitor whose passport gave his name as Brian Marks flew into Sheremetyevo Airport on the scheduled afternoon flight from London, and two other Englishmen drove a Volvo sedan across the border from Finland.

  So far as the officials at the airport were concerned the new arrival was one of hundreds and appeared to speak no Russian. But like the others he made his way through the various controls and finally emerged to hail a taxi and ask to be driven to central Moscow.

  Dismissing his taxi on a street corner, he made sure he was not being followed, then continued by foot to the small second-class hotel where he had a reservation for a single room.

  His currency declaration form showed he had admitted to a modest amount of British sterling pounds, which he would need to re-declare on departure, or produce official exchange receipts in lieu of them, and some traveler’s checks to which the same stipulation would apply. His currency form made no mention of the bricks of hundred-dollar bills taped to the back of each thigh.

  His surname was not really Marks but the similarity with Marx as in Karl Marx had amused the engraver who had prepared his passport. Given the choice, he had elected to retain his real first name of Brian. He was in fact the same Russian-speaking ex-soldier with a career in Special Forces whom Sir Nigel Irvine had sent on the reconnaissance mission in September.

  Having settled in, he set about his various tasks and purchases. He rented a small car from a Western agency and explored one of the outer suburbs of the city, the district of Vorontsovo in the far south of the capital.

  For two days, at varying intervals so as not to attract attention to himself, he staked out and observed one particular building, a large windowless warehouse constantly visited during daylight hours by heavy trucks.

  By night he observed the building on foot, walking past it a number of times, always clutching a half-empty bottle of vodka. On the few occasions another pedestrian came the opposite way, he would simply weave from side to side like any drunk, and be ignored.

  What he saw he liked. The chain-link fence would prove no obstacle. The truck bay for deliveries and pickups was locked at night, but there was a small door with a padlock at the rear of the warehouse, and a single guard on foot made occasional tours of the outside during the hours of darkness. In other words, the building was a soft target.

  At the old South Port secondhand car market, where everything from a decrepit wreck to a nearly new limousine just stolen in the West could be bought for cash, he acquired a set of Moscow license plates and an assortment of tools, including a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters.

  In the center of the city he purchased a dozen cheap but reliable Swatch watches and a variety of batteries, rolls of electrical wire, and tape. When he was finally satisfied that he could find the warehouse with complete accuracy at any time of the day or night and get back to the city center by a score of different routes, he returned to his hotel to wait for the Volvo pushing south from St. Petersburg.

  The rendezvous with Ciaran and Mitch was at the McDonald’s hamburger bar on Tverskaya Street. The other two Special Forces soldiers had had a slow but uneventful journey south.

  In a garage in south London the Volvo had been endowed with its unusual cargo. Both front wheels had been removed and replaced with old-fashioned tires containing inner tubes. Before this, each inner tube had been slit. Into the tubes were dropped hundreds of thumb-sized pellets of Semtex plastic explosive. The tubes were then patched, slipped back inside the tires, and inflated.

  With the spinning of the wheels, the puttylike explosive, extraordinarily stable unless subjected to the attentions of a mercury-fulminate detonator, had melded into a skin lining the inside of each inner tube. In this manner, after being shipped to Stockholm, the Volvo had rolled sedately for a thousand kilometers via Helsinki to Moscow. The detonators came in the lower layer of a box of Havana cigars, apparently bought on the ferry but in fact prepared in London.

  Ciaran and Mitch stayed at a different hotel. Brian accompanied them in the Volvo to a patch of waste ground near South Port where the car was jacked up and the two spare wheels the tourists had thoughtfully brought with them replaced the two front wheels. No one took any notice; the car thieves of Moscow were always cannibalizing cars around the South Port area. It took only a few more minutes to deflate and remove the inner tubes, stuff them in a carryall, return to the hotel, and strip away the melded Semtex that lined them.

  While Ciaran and Mitch assembled their goodies in the hotel room, Brian took the shredded rubber tubes out into the streets to lose them in a variety of public garbage bins.

  The three pounds of plastic explosive were divided into twelve small pieces, each about the size of a crushproof cigarette pack. To these were added one detonator, one battery, and one watch, with the wires connecting the components at the appropriate places. The bombs were finally held together with stout plastic tape.

  “Thank God,” said Mitch as they worked, “we don’t have to use that kipper rubbish.”

  Semtex-H, the most popular of all the RDX plastic explosive derivatives, has always been a Czech product, and under Communism was made completely odor-free, which made it the terrorists’ favorite device. After the fall of Communism, however, the new Czech president Vaclav Havel quickly acceded to a Western request to change the formula and add a particularly foul odor to make the stuff detectable in transit. The odor was similar to rotten fish, hence Mitch’s reference to kippers.

  By the mid-nineties detection devices had become so sophisticated that they could even identify the non-smell variety. But warm rubber has its own very similar odor, hence the use of the tires as a transporting device. In fact the Volvo had not been subjected to that sort of test, but Sir Nigel believed in extreme caution, a quality of which Ciaran and Mitch totally approved.

  The raid on the factory took place six days after Colonel Grishin received the Black Manifesto and the passport of Jason Monk.

  The trusty Volvo, with its new front wheels and equally new and false Moscow license plates, was driven by Brian. If anyone stopped them, he was the Russian speaker.

  They parked three streets away from their target and walked the rest of the way. The chain-link fence at the rear of the premises proved no match for the bolt cutters. The three men ran at a crouch across the intervening fifty feet of concrete and disappeared into the shadows cast by a pile of ink drums.

  Fifteen minutes later the solitary night guard made his round. He heard a loud burp from a patch of shadow, spun around, and fixed his flashlight on the source. He saw a drunk, collapsed against the warehouse wall, clutching a bottle of vodka.

  He had no time to work out how the man had got into the sealed compound, for having turned his back on the pile of drums he never saw the figure in black overalls who emerged from between them and hit him hard on the back of the head with a piece of lead pipe. So far as the guard was concerned there was a brief flash of fireworks and then darkness.

  Brian cinched the man’s ankles, wrists, and mouth with heavy tape while Ciaran and Mitch took the padlock off the door. When it was open they dragged the senseless guard inside, laid him by the wall, and closed the door.

  Inside the cavernous factory a string of night-lights burned among the girders of the roof, casting a dim glow over the interior. Much of the floor space was taken up by great ree
ls of newsprint and stacked drums of ink. But the center of the factory contained what they had come for: three huge web-offset printing presses.

  Somewhere near the front doors of the building they knew the second guard would be ensconced in his warm glass booth, watching the television or reading his newspaper. Brian slipped quietly between the machines to take care of him. Having done so he returned, went out the back, and stood guard over the exit route.

  Ciaran and Mitch were no strangers to the three machines in front of them. They were Baker-Perkins presses, made in the United States and not replaceable in Russia. Re-supply would require a long sea journey from Baltimore to St. Petersburg. Provided the mainframes were distorted, not even a Boeing 747 could bring the needed components by air.

  Posing as Finnish newspaper executives contemplating the reequipping of their plant with Baker-Perkins presses, both men had kindly been given a tour of the factory by a company in Norwich, England, which used the same machines. After that a retired engineer, handsomely rewarded, had completed their education.

  Their targets were four in type. Each press was fed by giant reels of paper, and the feeders for these rolls of newsprint, the reel stands, were of sophisticated technology, capable of ensuring that as one reel ran out it was seamlessly replaced by another. The reel stands were the first target and there was one for each machine. Ciaran began to place his small bombs precisely where they would guarantee that the reel stands would never work again.

  Mitch took care of the ink-supply mechanism. These were four-color presses, and the supply of the exact amounts of four different inks at the right moment in the press run depended on a mixer unit fed by four great drums containing different colors. With both these pieces of technology taken care of, the two saboteurs addressed the actual presses.

  The parts they chose for their remaining bombs were the mainframes and the bearings of the impression cylinders, one per machine.

  They spent twenty minutes inside the press shop. Then Mitch tapped his watch and nodded at Ciaran. It was one in the morning and the timers were set for one-thirty. Five minutes later they were back outside, dragging the guard, now awake but still helpless, behind them. He would be colder out there, but shielded from flying fragments. The guard at the front, lying on the floor of his office, was too far away to be hurt.