by Tom Clancy
“We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”
“And yours?”
“Leningrad—well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”
Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it’s been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”
Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”
“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”
“Come in and take a seat, my boy.”
Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark’s desk and took the offered sheets of paper.
“Moscow?” he asked.
“Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”
“Super,” Chavez observed. “Well, it’s been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka’s still good.”
“It’s one of the things they do well,” John agreed.
“And they want us to teach them to do some other things?”
“Looks that way.”
“Take the wives with us?”
“No.” Clark shook his head. “This one’s all business.”
“When?”
“Have to work that out. Probably a week or so.”
“Fair enough.”
“How’s the little guy?”
A grin. “Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he’ll start walking in a few days.”
“Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up,” Clark warned.
“Hey, Pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. Damned sight better than I can say for myself, y’know?” Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.
Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.
“The whole team?” Chavez asked.
“Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD,” RAINBOW SIX added.
“Did he clean your clock today, too?” Ding asked.
“Next time I shoot against that son of a bitch, I want it right after the morning run, when he’s a little shaky,” Clark said crossly. He just didn’t like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his identity as shooting a handgun.
“Mr. C, Ettore just isn’t human. With the MP, he’s good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he’s like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays ’em dead.”
“I didn’t believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon.”
“I hear you, John,” Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law’s waist. “Hey, I’m pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my ass away by three whole points.”
“The bastard took me by one,” John told his Team-2 commander. “First man-on-man match I’ve lost since Third SOG.” And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He’d lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.
Is that him?" Provalov asked.
“We don’t have a photograph,” his sergeant reminded him. “But he fits the general description.” And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.
They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.
The guy looked about right. He’d come off the building’s elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the off-chance that this Koniev/Suvorov’s neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.
The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-class, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another identity? Provalov was sure he’d have more of those, and they’d all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.
The sergeant in the driver’s seat started up the van’s motor and got on the radio. Two other police cars were in the immediate vicinity, both manned by pairs of experienced investigators.
“Our friend is moving. The blue rental car,” Provalov said over the radio. Both of his cars radioed acknowledgments.
The rental car was a Fiat—a real one made in Turin rather than the Russian copy made at Togliattistad, one of the few special economic projects of the Soviet Union that had actually worked, after a fashion. Had it been selected for its agility, Provalov wondered, or just because it was a cheap car to rent? There was no knowing that right now. Koniev/Suvorov pulled out, and the first tail car formed up with him, half a block behind, while the second was half a block in front, because even a KGB-trained intelligence officer rarely looked for a tail infront of himself. A little more time and they might have placed a tracking device on the Fiat, but they hadn’t had it, nor the darkness required. If he returned to his apartment, they’d do it late tonight, say about four in the morning. A radio beeper with a magnet to hold it onto the inside of the rear bumper; its antenna would hang down like a mouse’s tail, virtually invisible. Some of the available technology Provalov was using had originally been used to track suspected foreign spies around Moscow, and that meant it was pretty good, at least by Russian standards.
Following the car was easier than he’d expected. Three trail cars helped. Spotting a single-car tail was not overly demanding. Two could also be identified, since the same two would switch off every few minutes. But three shadow cars broke up the pattern nicely, and, KGB-trained or not, Koniev/Suvorov was not superhuman. His real defense lay in concealing his identity, and cracking that had been a combination of good investigation and luck—but cops knew about luck. KGB, on the other hand, didn’t. In their mania for organization, their training program had left it out, perhaps because trusting to luck was a weakness that could lead to disaster in the field. That told Provalov that Koniev/Suvorov hadn’t spent that much time in field operations. In the real world of working the street, you learned such things in a hurry.
The tailing was conducted at extreme range, over a block, and the city blocks were large ones here. The van had been specially equipped for it. The license-plate holders were triangular in cross-section, and at the flip of a switch one could switch from among three separate pairs of tags. The lights on the front of the vehicle were paired as well, and so one could change the light pattern, which was what a skilled adversary would look for at night. Switch them once or twice when out of sight of his rearview mirror, and he’d have to be a genius to catch on. The most difficult job went with the car doing the front-tail, since it was hard to read Koniev/Suvorov’s mind, and when he made an unexpected turn, the lead car then had to scurry about under the guidance of the trailing shadow cars to regain its leading position. All of the militiamen on this detail, however, were experienced homicide investigators who’d learned how to track the most dangerous game on the planet: human beings who’d displayed the willingness to take ano
ther life. Even the stupid murderers could have animal cunning, and they learned a lot about police operations just from watching television. That made some of his investigations more difficult than they ought to have been, but in a case like this, the additional difficulty had served to train his men more thoroughly than any academy training would have done.
“Turning right,” his driver said into his radio. “Van takes the lead.” The leading trail car would proceed to the next right turn, make it, and then race to resume its leading position. The trailing car would drop behind the van, falling off the table for a few minutes before resuming its position. The trail car was a Fiat-clone from Togliattistad, by far the most common private-passenger auto in Russia, and therefore fairly anonymous, with its dirty off-white paint job.
“If that’s his only attempt at throwing us off, he’s very confident of himself.”
“True,” Provalov agreed. “Let’s see what else he does.”
The “what else” took place four minutes later. The Fiat took another right turn, this one not onto a cross-street, but into the underpass of another apartment building, one that straddled an entire block. Fortunately, the lead trail car was already on the far side of the building, trying to catch up with the Fiat, and had the good fortune to see Koniev/Suvorov appear thirty meters in front.
“We have him,” the radio crackled. “We’ll back off somewhat.”
“Go!” Provalov told his driver, who accelerated the van to the next corner. Along the way, he toggled the switch to flip the license plates and change the headlight pattern, converting the van into what at night would seem a new vehicle entirely.
“He is confident,” Provalov observed five minutes later. The van was now in close-trail, with the lead trail car behind the van, and the other surveillance vehicle close behind that one. Wherever he was going, they were on him. He’d run his evasion maneuver, and a clever one it had been, but only one. Perhaps he thought that one such SDR—surveillance-detection run—was enough, that if he were being trailed it would only be a single vehicle, and so he’d run that underpass, eyes on the rearview mirror, and spotted nothing. Very good, the militia lieutenant thought. It was a pity he didn’t have his American FBI friend along. The FBI could scarcely have done this better, even with its vast resources. It didn’t hurt that his men knew the streets of Moscow and its suburbs as well as any taxi driver.
“He’s getting dinner and a drink somewhere,” Provalov’s driver observed. “He’ll pull over in the next kilometer.”
“We shall see,” the lieutenant said, thinking his driver right. This area had ten or eleven upscale eateries. Which would his quarry choose ... ?
It turned out to be the Prince Michael of Kiev, a Ukrainian establishment specializing in chicken and fish, known also for its fine bar. Koniev/Suvorov pulled over and allowed the restaurant’s valet to park his vehicle, then walked in.
“Who’s the best dressed among us?” Provalov asked over the radio.
“You are, Comrade Lieutenant.” His other two teams were attired as working-class people, and that wouldn’t fly here. Half of the Prince Michael of Kiev’s clientele were foreigners, and you had to dress well around such people—the restaurant saw to that. Provalov jumped out half a block away and walked briskly to the canopied entrance. The doorman admitted him after a look—in the new Russia, clothing made the man more than in most European nations. He could have flashed his police ID, but that might not be a good move. Koniev/Suvorov might well have some of the restaurant staff reporting to him. That was when he had a flash of imagination. Provalov immediately entered the men’s lavatory and pulled out his cellular phone.
“Hello?” a familiar voice said on picking up the receiver.
“Mishka?”
“Oleg?” Reilly asked. “What can I do for you?”
“Do you know a restaurant called the Prince Michael of Kiev?”
“Yeah, sure. Why?”
“I need your help. How quickly can you get here?” Provalov asked, knowing that Reilly lived only two kilometers away.
“Ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Quickly, then. I’ll be at the bar. Dress presentably,” the militiaman added.
“Right,” Reilly agreed, wondering how he’d explain it to his wife, and wondering why he’d had his quiet evening in front of the TV interrupted.
Provalov headed back to the bar, ordered a pepper vodka, and lit a cigarette. His quarry was seven seats away, also having a solitary drink, perhaps waiting for his table to become available. The restaurant was full. A string quartet was playing some Rimsky-Korsakov on the far side of the dining room. The restaurant was far above anything Provalov could afford as a regular part of his life. So, Koniev/Suvorov was well set financially. That was no particular surprise. A lot of ex-KGB officers were doing very well indeed in the economic system of the new Russia. They had worldly ways and knowledge that few of their fellow citizens could match. In a society known for its burgeoning corruption, they had a corner on the market, and a network of fellow-travelers to call upon, with whom they could, for various considerations, share their gains, ill-gotten or not.
Provalov had finished his first drink, and had motioned to the bartender for another when Reilly appeared.
“Oleg Gregoriyevich,” the American said in greeting. He was no fool, the Russian militia lieutenant realized. The American’s Russian was manifestly American and over-loud, a fine backward stealth for this environment. He was well dressed also, proclaiming his foreign origin to all who saw him.
“Mishka!” Provalov said in response, taking the American’s hand warmly and waving to the bartender.
“Okay, who we looking for?” the FBI agent asked more quietly.
“The gray suit, seven seats to my left.”
“Got him,” Reilly said at once. “Who is he?”
“He is currently under the name Koniev, Ivan Yurievich. In fact we believe him to be Suvorov, Klementi Ivan’ch.”
“Aha,” Reilly observed. “What else can you tell me?”
“We trailed him here. He used a simple but effective evasion method, but we have three cars tracking him, and we picked him right back up.”
“Good one, Oleg,” the FBI agent said. Inadequately trained and poorly equipped or not, Provalov was a no-shit copper. In the Bureau, he’d be at least a supervisory special agent. Oleg had fine cop instincts. Tracking a KGB type around Moscow was no trivial exercise, like following a paranoid button-man in Queens. Reilly sipped his pepper vodka and turned sideways in his seat. On the far side of the subject was a dark-haired beauty wearing a slinky black dress. She looked like another of those expensive hookers to Reilly, and her shingle was out. Her dark eyes were surveying the room as thoroughly as his. The difference was that Reilly was a guy, and looking at a pretty girl—or seeming to—was not the least bit unusual. In fact, his eyes were locked not on the woman, but the man. Fifty-ish, well turned out, nondescript in overall appearance, just as a spy was supposed to be, looked to be waiting for a table, nursing his drink and looking studiously in the bar’s mirror, which was a fine way to see if he were being watched. The American and his Russian friend he dismissed, of course. What interest could an American businessman have in him, after all? And besides, the American was eyeing the whore to his left. For that reason, the subject’s eyes did not linger on the men to his right, either directly or in the mirror. Oleg was smart, Reilly thought, using him as camouflage for his discreet surveillance.
“Anything else turn lately?” the FBI agent asked. Provalov filled in what he’d learned about the hooker and what had happened the night before the murders. “Damn, that is swashbuckling. But you still don’t know who the target was, do you?”
“No,” Provalov admitted, with a sip of his second drink. He’d have to go easy on the alcohol, he knew, lest he make a mistake. His quarry was too slick and dangerous to take any sort of risk at all. He could always bring the guy in for questioning, but he knew that would be a fruitless exercise. Criminals
like this one had to be handled as gently as a cabinet minister. Provalov allowed his eyes to look into the mirror, where he got a good look at the profile of a probable multiple murderer. Why was it that there was no black halo around such people? Why did they look normal?
“Anything else we know about the mutt?”
The Russian had come to like that American term. He shook his head. “No, Mishka. We haven’t checked with SVR yet.”
“Worried that he might have a source inside the building?” the American asked. Oleg nodded.
“That is a consideration.” And an obvious one. The fraternity of former KGB officers was probably a tight one. There might well be someone inside the old headquarters building, say someone in personnel records, who’d let people know if the police showed interest in any particular file.
“Damn,” the American noted, thinking, You son of a bitch, fucking the guy’s hookers before you waste him. There was a disagreeable coldness to it, like something from a Mafia movie. But in real life, La Cosa Nostra members didn’t have the stones for such a thing. Formidable as they might be, Mafia button-men didn’t have the training of a professional intelligence officer, and were tabby cats next to panthers in this particular jungle. Further scrutiny of the subject. The girl beyond him was a distraction, but not that much.
“Oleg?”
“Yes, Mikhail?”
“He’s looking at somebody over by the musicians. His eyes keep coming back to the same spot. He isn’t scanning the room like he was at first.” The subject did check out everyone who came into the restaurant, but his eyes kept coming back to one part of the mirror, and he’d probably determined that nobody in the place was a danger to him. Oops. Well, Reilly thought, even training has its limitations, and sooner or later your own expertise could work against you. You fell into patterns, and you made assumptions that could get you caught. In this case, Suvorov assumed that no American could be watching him. After all, he’d done nothing to any Americans in Moscow, and maybe not in his entire career, and he was on friendly, not foreign ground, and he’d dusted off his tail on the way over in the way he always did, looking for a single tail car. Well, the smart ones knew their limitations. How did it go? The difference between genius and stupidity was that genius knew that it had limits. This Suvorov guy thought himself a genius ... but whom was he looking at? Reilly turned a little more on his bar stool and scanned that part of the room.