Assassin

by David Hagberg

  “Presumably. Nor should you believe that there won’t be a leak from this gathering. Such things happen despite our best precautions.”

  “Then it will have to come from one of you men,” Kabatov said coldly, his eyes shifting from man to man. “This room was electronically sealed once I entered. Nothing of a mechanical or an electronic nature can get out of here. The only thing that will leave here this afternoon is what’s in your heads.”

  Again Yuryn shrugged indifferently. “If you mean to actually arrest Tarankov and not simply eliminate him and his followers, then our staffs will have to become involved. The leak will come from there.” The bulky intelligence service chief leaned forward in his chair and tapped the table top with a blunt finger. “If you go after him he will find out, and he will come after you.” Yuryn looked at the others around the table. “He’ll come after all of us.”

  “Are we to be held hostage?” Kabatov shouted, thumping his fist on the table. “Should we shut out the lights, crawl under our beds and hand the madman the keys to the Kremlin? Stalin assassinated Lenin in order to gain power. Has that happened again? Are we going to allow our nation to sink to those levels of barbarism? Pogroms. Gulags. Wars?

  “What do you think the West’s reaction will be when we pack up our tents and abandon the field? Without trade how long will Tarankov or any of us survive? Russian winters have killed more than foreigners. Russian winters have claimed plenty of Russian lives too. He must be taken alive and placed on public trial for all the world to see.”

  “It will tear the nation apart,” Yuryn warned.

  “We will lose the nation if we don’t do it,” Kabatov said wearily. “I didn’t call you here today to argue the point. I called because I wanted you to tell me how to proceed.” He glanced down the long table at Zhigalin. “Where is General Korzhakov?”

  “He sends his apologies, Mr. Prime Minister, but he is busy with the investigation.”

  Kabatov shook his head in disgust. “Has any progress been made since this morning?”

  “Some,” Zhigalin said. He opened a report he’d brought with him. “I was given this just before I left the Kremlin. Apparently a man who identified himself as Lieutenant Colonel Boris Sazanov assigned to the presidential security detail, entered the Kremlin last night a few minutes before midnight. He said he was delivering gifts. One of the guards checked the trunk of the man’s car and found several cases of American cigarettes. He got inside the parking garage beneath the Palace of Congresses where he remained for around five minutes. He then left by a different gate.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Kabatov said. “Has this Lieutenant Colonel Sazanov been found?”

  “No such officer exists. Nor do we have much of a description. It was evening, the lighting was imperfect, and the guards said the man parked in such a way that the front seat of the car was mostly in shadow. Their impression was that he was large, under fifty, possibly under forty years old, and he spoke in a cultured, well-educated voice. He was probably a professional.”

  “A professional what?”

  “Assassin, Mr. Prime Minister,” Zhigalin said. “He drove a new Mercedes sedan, so it’s possible he worked for the mafia.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Tarankov’s people,” Mazayev said sharply.

  “Tarankov has friends among the mafia,” Zhigalin shot back. “The bastard has friends everywhere.”

  “What else?” Kabatov asked.

  “The guard at the Palace of Congresses got a partial license plate number, and the city is being searched for the car, as of noon without success.”

  “Why wasn’t I told of this?” Militia General Mazayev demanded. The Militia were the police.

  “The alert was issued routinely for a stolen vehicle,” Zhigalin replied. “General Korzhakov felt that the initial stages of the investigation should be as low key as possible so as to lull the assassin into a false sense of security.”

  “Spare me,” the Militia director said. He turned to Kabatov. “I’ll put my people on it. All my people. We’ll find this car and this colonel.”

  “How was the bomb detonated?” Kabatov asked. “If it was set on a timer, it would mean that the assassin knew President Yeltsin’s schedule. That in itself might give us a clue.”

  “The bomb was probably fired from a radio-controlled detonator,” Zhigalin said. “At least that’s the preliminary finding. It means that the assassin stationed himself someplace so that he could see the presidential motorcade show up at the Kremlin. He pushed the button, the President’s automobile exploded, and he calmly walked off.”

  “Someone in Red Square?”

  “There was the usual line in front of Lenin’s Tomb, some early tourists at St. Basil’s and a few people just exiting the Rossyia Hotel, plus normal pedestrian traffic. Witnesses are being rounded up and questioned.” Zhigalin glanced at Mazayev. “Again simply a routine investigation for the moment.”

  “If the man was a professional, as you suggest, then he is long gone by now,” Mazayev said bitterly. “The city should have been shut up tight immediately after the bombing. We would have found the assassin.”

  “He’s back aboard Tarankov’s train,” Zhigalin said. “If you want to find him you needn’t look anywhere else.”

  “Whoever this assassin is, there is little doubt that his action was directed by Tarankov,” Kabatov said. “On that there can be no argument. Which brings us back to arresting the sonofabitch. Are there any more suggestions as to how we should proceed?”

  “President Yeltsin wanted him arrested when he showed up in Nizhny Novgorod,” Zhigalin said. “We can go ahead with that plan.”

  “He won’t show up there,” Yuryn said.

  “Why not?” Kabatov asked.

  “Tarankov found out that preparations were being made in Nizhny Novgorod for his arrest, so he retaliated by staging the raid on the Riga facility, and then assassinating President Yeltsin.”

  “Do you know this for a fact?” Zhigalin demanded.

  Yuryn shook his head. “If, as the Prime Minister suggests, Tarankov did order President Yeltsin’s assassination, that would be the reason. He knew about Nizhny Novgorod.”

  “Assuming this is in fact true, how do we proceed?” Kabatov asked.

  “Besides plugging the leaks so that Tarankov does not learn of our plans, we have to deal with two problems,” the FSK director said. “The first is the western media. They want to know what happened this morning on Red Square.”

  “That’s already being taken care of,” Viktor Yemlin interjected from the end of the conference table. He was chief of the North American Division of the SVR, which was the foreign intelligence branch of the old KGB. Previously he’d worked as rezident for the KGB’s operations in Washington and New York.

  Kabatov had no love for the old KGB or its successors the FSK and SVR. He’d come under investigation by the intelligence service when he served as ambassador to the United Nations eight years ago. Despite his position, and the fact that the charges against him were proven to be groundless, he’d been treated roughly. But Yemlin was an important moderate, despite his position and background.

  “Well?” he said, his dislike obvious.

  “Explosive ordinance used for the protection of President Yeltsin that is normally carried in one of the escort limousines was defective and detonated by accident, killing three presidential security service officers and the driver. President Yeltsin’s limousine was not touched.”

  “Why hasn’t the President made a statement?”

  “He died of a stress-induced heart attack this morning at 11:38 A.M. A body will be produced to lie in state, and his funeral will be scheduled for one week from today.”

  Kabatov grudgingly admired the tremendous lie. “Can the SVR pull it off?”

  “I’m told we can, Mr. Prime Minister,” Yemlin said. He was a distinguished looking man who reminded everybody of Eduard Shevardnadze with his kindly eyes and thick white hair. “But it will requir
e the cooperation of everyone in this room.”

  “How long can such a lie be sustained?” Zhigalin asked.

  Yemlin shrugged. “Historians opening records a hundred years from now might find out. It was only recently that the truth behind the executions of Tsar Nicholas and his family came out.”

  Kabatov nodded. “Very well, do it.”

  Yemlin smiled faintly. “It’s already being done.”

  Kabatov held back a sharp retort. Instead he turned to Yuryn, who was staring thoughtfully at Yemlin. “What is the second problem we have to deal with?”

  “Tarankov’s next moves. If indeed he did order President Yeltsin’s assassination it may have signaled the start of his end game. Though how he’ll react to the SVR’s coverup is anyone’s guess, we need hard intelligence on his intentions. Without such knowledge trying to arrest the man will, in the very least, result in a bloodbath. If we’d known ahead of time about his raid on the Riga facility and had tried to stop him, the people up there would have gotten in the way. There would have been a lot of deaths. Killing him would be easier than arresting him. But if you mean to go ahead, give me time to put a man on the train.”

  “Do you have someone in mind?” Kabatov asked.

  “I have any number of capable officers.”

  “The reason I ask is because by your own admission Tarankov has his support in every government agency, at every level.”

  “I have people who will do it,” Yuryn said.

  “When can you start?”

  “If it’s what you want, immediately,” Yuryn said.

  “It is,” Kabatov said. “Arresting Yevgenni Tarankov is Russia’s only hope, and our most urgent priority.”

  FIVE

  Moscow

  Viktor Pavlovich Yemlin returned home to his spacious apartment on Kalinin Prospekt shortly after 7:00 P.M., and poured a stiff measure of Polish vodka. He sat in his favorite chair, put his feet up and stared out the window at the lights of the city and the gently falling snow.

  He was a deeply troubled man. In the old days, before his wife died of cancer, he would have enjoyed company at times like these.

  Someone with whom to discuss his misgivings, his feelings of doom and gloom. But he had been a widower for so long that he had come to make peace with his solitude. In fact he rather enjoyed being alone, though he bitterly missed his only son, who’d been killed in Afghanistan.

  He turned on the stereo with the remote control, and set the volume for the disc of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Minor, his favorite piece of music, and laid his head back.

  In his late sixties, Yemlin was not the man he should have been. Born in 1930 in Kiev, his parents had moved to Moscow at the start of the Great Patriotic War, and at twelve he ran away with his brothers to help defend Stalingrad against Hitler’s army. After the war his parents died of heartbreak, because of seven boys Viktor was the only one to survive, and he’d survived flawed because his youth had been so dramatically cut short.

  He was arrested and sent to count the birches in Siberia because he’d lied on his officer’s candidate school and Moscow State University applications. He claimed he was older than he was so that he could count his military service for bonus points.

  Four years later the NKVD, which was the forerunner of the KGB, discovered his name and his heroism in military records, and immediately recruited him. He was sent first to Moscow State University where he was educated in political science and international law and politics, to the prestigious Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations, then to Officers Candidate School and the War College, and finally to the NKVD’s School One.

  He worked on a number of projects for the NKVD and then the KGB in eastern Europe, until General Valentin Baranov recruited him for the real work of a spy: That of the grand schemes of the seventies and eighties in which the Soviet Union would take over the world with the strong right arm of its KGB.

  In a series of brilliant missions from Mexico City (the Soviet Union’s largest and most active embassy and KGB station), to the United Nations in New York, and finally as rezident of KGB operations for all of North America out of the Soviet embassy in Washington, Yemlin proved himself to be one of the most capable and effective intelligence officers the Komityet had ever fielded.

  He’d never been considered for promotion to head the agency, because he didn’t have the right background or the correct political patronage for such advancement. But he was well respected by every KGB director he’d ever served under.

  Now that the Soviet Union was no longer intact he should have been one of the bitter old guard for whom Tarankov’s message was a siren’s call to the old ways. Many of the men in the FSK and SVR were admirers of the Tarantula, hoping that a new Soviet Union would somehow rise out of the ashes of the old.

  Instead, he had become a moderate. Years of living in the West’s openness with its cornucopia of ideas and consumer goods had changed him. So subtly at first that even he wasn’t aware of the differences in his outlook. But finally he understood to the depth of his soul that the great communist experiment of a world socialist movement had failed not because of corrupt, cruel leadership, but had disintegrated of its own ponderous, unrealistic weight. Tarankov was trying to bring it all back again, and a lot of people were listening to him. Russians were tired of being second class citizens, they wanted super power status returned to them. They were tired of being hungry, they wanted to be fed. And they were tired of an aimless existence that seemed to be going nowhere, they wanted to be led. Socialism didn’t work, and Russians hadn’t learned yet how to make a go of democracy. They were tired of trying.

  After the meeting in the White House, Yemlin had returned to his office at SVR headquarters on the Ring Road and written his report. He was careful to draw no conclusions or make any substantive recommendations. But in his heart of hearts he agreed with General Yuryn: Trying to arrest Tarankov would likely end in a bloodbath in which dozens, perhaps hundreds of innocent people would get killed. And placing Tarankov on public trial would tear Russia apart. It would be just like the Red Army versus the White Army after the October Revolution. The nation would sink into a civil war that this time would drag on forever, and that no one could possibly win.

  But if Tarankov were allowed to continue on his course he would probably win the next election in June three months from now. Either that or he would take the Kremlin by force.

  Yemlin thought about that possibility. The raid on the power station in Dzerzhinskiy was within a half-dozen kilometers of the Kremlin. The bold attack had shaken the government to its core. Yeltsin’s assassination twenty-four hours later had come as a worse shock. Perhaps they were witnessing the start of Tarankov’s end game, as Yuryn suggested. If that were the case his next move would be even bolder, more daring, and certainly more destructive. Yemlin could think of a number of plausible scenarios in which Tarankov could simply swoop into Red Square, arrest or assassinate the moderates who opposed him in the Kremlin, and de facto take over the government. A Red Square filled with a million Tarankov supporters—Yemlin believed he had that many in Moscow alone—would block a military retaliation.

  Yemlin also suspected that Prime Minister Kabatov’s worst fears were true; that Tarankov’s base of support went far beyond a bunch of starving kulaks who wanted to go back to the old ways. It involved more than just a handful of old hardliners in the government and the military and the old KGB, it cut across the board into every segment of the nation’s population. He’d even heard noises from the Baltics, and from Ukraine and some of the other breakaway republics, that after all what Tarankov was trying to do was give the nation back its dignity.

  He went to the sideboard, poured another vodka and took his drink back to the window where he lit a cigarette.

  Yeltsin’s chief of staff Zhigalin’s suggestion that the Army and Air Force hunt down Tarankov’s train and destroy it would not work either. The people would certainly rise up against the government, and what lit
tle remained of Russia’s shaky democracy would disintegrate into anarchy. That’s if the military would undertake such an operation without tearing itself apart first. There certainly would be desertions, and possibly an outright revolution amongst the troops, and much of the officer’s corps. It might even happen that the army would move against the Kremlin, and when the government was secured invite Tarankov to take over.

  Which once again brought him back to the conclusions he’d drawn several months ago. Tarankov had to be assassinated, but no one in Russia could be trusted to do it. The job would have to be done by an outsider. By someone who in the end could be blamed for the killing, because even if a Russian could be found to kill Tarankov, the people would believe the government had ordered it, and the revolution would explode.

  If an outsider did it the killing could be laid on the doorstep of a foreign country, or at the very least it could be portrayed as the act of a lone gunman. A nut. Another Lee Harvey Oswald, who the Warren Commission determined had worked alone, not as a conspirator hired by the Soviet Union.

  He’d shied away from that concept as well as he could through the summer and fall. But each time news of Tarankov’s exploits came to him, he was drawn back to the inevitability of the idea.

  In October he’d cautiously broached the subject with his old friend Konstantin Sukhoruchkin, the director of the Russian Human Rights Commission that Gorbachev had founded after the Kremlin Coup. Sukhoruchkin had agreed wholeheartedly without a trace of hesitation. Like Yemlin, though, his only reservation was that the assassin would only get one chance so he would have to be very good. He’d also suggested that between them they attempt to build a power base of support for the idea among the people who had the most to lose by a Tarankov dictatorship.

  By the first of the year it became painfully clear to both men that task they’d set themselves to was not only dangerous—they had no idea who to trust or learn who they were—but it was foolish. No one in Russia could be trusted with such a secret. So Yemlin did the next best thing by contacting his old mentor Eduard Shevardnadze, president of Georgia, who would have as much to lose under Tarankov as they would.