Assassin

by David Hagberg

  Shevardnadze had agreed only to discuss the issue, and only when Yemlin felt that there were no other options left to them, and that time was running out.

  Yemlin put out his cigarette, finished his drink and rinsed the glass in the kitchen sink. He pulled on his greatcoat and went down to a pay phone in the metro station a block away. He never used his home telephone for important calls, nor did he bother having it swept. All the old checks and balances were in place in the SVR, which meant all but the most senior officers were spot checked from time to time. The easiest and most cost effective way to do that was by monitoring telephone calls and opening mail. But Yemlin had been around for a long time, and he had a few tricks up his own sleeve.

  Sukhoruchkin answered the telephone at his home on the second ring. “Da?”

  “Meet me at the airport.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes,” Yemlin said. “It’s time.”

  Yemlin called his contact at Vnukovo domestic airport. “We would like to go flying this evening, Valeri.”

  “It’s a lovely night for it,” his pilot replied. “The tops are low, so once we get above all this shit you’ll be able to see the full moon.”

  “We’ll be returning in the morning.”

  “As you wish.”

  Yemlin’s final call was to a special number in the SVR’s communications complex. After one ring he got a dial tone for an international line that could not, by design, be monitored. In two minutes he was connected with the residential quarters of the president of Georgia.

  “This is Viktor Pavlovich.”

  “I expected you would call this evening,” Eduard Shevardnadze said.

  “Konstantin and I would like to see you tonight. Will you be free?”

  “Are you calling from Moscow?”

  “Da. But we can get down there by midnight unofficially if you will have a car and driver to meet us.”

  “What’s the tail number of your airplane?”

  Yemlin told him.

  “Take care, my old friend. Once a word is out of your mouth you can’t swallow it again.”

  It was an old Russian proverb which Yemlin understood well. He hung up and headed for a cab stand.

  Tbilisi, Georgia

  The aging Learjet, which Yemlin occasionally leased from a private enterprise he’d set up ten years ago for a KGB-sponsored project, touched down at Tbilisi’s international airport a few minutes before midnight. As promised the 1500-kilometer flight above the clouds had been smooth, the full moon dramatically illuminating the thick clouds below them until they broke out in the clear at the rising wall of the Caucasus Mountains.

  They were directed along a taxiway to the opposite side of the airport from the main terminal, where they were met by a Zil limousine and driver, who took them directly into the bustling city of more than a million people.

  Although Tbilisi was on a high plain in the mountains it was much warmer than Moscow. And it seemed more prosperous than the Russian capital, with cleaner, brighter streets and shops, though closed at this hour, displaying a wide variety of consumer goods. Georgia was not without its problems, but they were being addressed and slowly solved under Shevardnadze’s capable leadership. All that would change for the worse, Yemlin thought, if Tarankov was successful.

  They were brought to the rear courtyard of the presidential palace off Rustavelli Boulevard and were immediately escorted inside to a small private study on the second floor. Heavy drapes covered the windows, and a fire burned on the grate. The book-lined room seemed like a pleasant refuge.

  Shevardnadze joined them a few moments later. He wore a warmup suit, and carried a book, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. He looked serious.

  “Gentlemen, this is a meeting I’d hoped would never come about,” he said, and they shook hands.

  “I agree, Mr. President. This is not our finest hour,” Sukhoruchkin replied. Unlike Yemlin and Shevardnadze, he was tall and very thin, with large round eyes under thick black eyebrows. Although he was of the same age his long hair, always in disarray, was startlingly black. He looked like the brilliant academic he was. Before he’d become director of the Human Rights Commission he’d been one of Russia’s finest writers and philosophers. He and Yemlin had known each other since boyhood, and had married sisters. Sukhoruchkin’s wife had died last year.

  “You’re in accord with Viktor Pavlovich?”

  “I’m a man of peace, a philosophy I’ve espoused and taught all of my life. I believe to the depth of my soul in nonviolence. But now I regret to have to say that I believe just as deeply that there may be no other solution to the problem at hand.”

  “A problem we all share,” Yemlin said.

  Shevardnadze nodded. He put his book down, took off his glasses and motioned for them to have a seat in armchairs in front of the fire. He sat on the leather couch.

  “I’m assuming that Yeltsin didn’t die of a heart attack, though my intelligence service cannot tell me anything different.”

  “He was assassinated by one of Tarankov’s men who posed as a presidential security service lieutenant colonel,” Yemlin said. “He planted a radio-controlled bomb last night, and waited in Red Square this morning until Yeltsin showed up for work, and pushed the button.

  “You wouldn’t be here now if he were in custody.”

  Yemlin shrugged. “It’s a moot point, Mr. President. Whether we had him or not—and you’re correct, we don’t—the attack on our Riga power station, and Yeltsin’s assassination are Tarankov’s doing, and we would have to go after him anyway. But now I believe he may have a plan to grab the presidency before the June elections.”

  “Which Yeltsin would have lost,” Shevardnadze said. “Why is Tarankov taking such a risk?”

  “Because Yeltsin ordered his arrest by whatever means of force necessary. He meant to put him on trial.”

  Shevardnadze shook his head. “Tarankov would probably have been acquitted, and it would have destroyed Yeltsin’s government.”

  “The Prime Minister has ordered the same thing,” Sukhoruchkin said. “He means to arrest Tarankov and place the man on public trial, which in itself should be the correct action to take.”

  “If Moscow were London or Washington,” Shevardnadze said.

  “It will tear the country apart,” Yemlin said.

  “If he were killed by the army it would tear Russia apart as well,” Shevardnadze said. “But if he’s allowed to continue unchecked on his present course he will succeed. Is this what you believe?”

  Both men nodded.

  Shevardnadze looked into the fire for several long seconds as he gathered his thoughts. A weight seemed to settle on his shoulders, and he sighed as if to rid himself of an impossible burden. When he turned back his face was sad.

  “I too am a man of peace, Konstantin Nikolaevich, as I know you are. I’ve long admired your writing.”

  Sukhoruchkin nodded in acknowledgement.

  “If Tarankov comes to power he means to restore the old Soviet Union by whatever means are necessary,” Yemlin said.

  “We would give him trouble, but if he had the backing of the generals we couldn’t win,” Shevardnadze admitted. “The Baltics would cause him more problems.”

  “As would regaining Eastern Europe, but the bastard will do it, and no one will dare to stand up to him.”

  “Does he have the military behind him?”

  “He will,” Yemlin said. “There’s no doubt of it.”

  “What about the SVR?”

  “By whatever name it’s called, it’s still the KGB.”

  Again a silence fell over them as they each pondered what they were on the verge of agreeing to. It was an impossibly large step, a quantum leap, from the rule of democratic law in which they all believed, to an act of terrorism.

  “Tarankov must be assassinated,” Yemlin voiced their thought.

  “I agree,” Sukhoruchkin said with surprising finnness.

  “As do I,” Shevardnadze said. �
��But I know of no one in Georgia who is capable of such a thing. Nor do I suspect you’ll find anyone in Russia whom you could trust.”

  Yemlin nodded.

  “You have such a man in mind? A foreigner?”

  “Da.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An American, Mr. President. His name is Kirk McGarvey. And if he agrees to take on the job, he’ll do so for the same reasons that we want to hire him.”

  SIX

  Paris

  Spring had come early to France. Although it wasn’t the end of March, the last two weeks had been glorious. The sky was pale blue, and each morning dawned crystal clear, as if the air above the great city had been washed and hung out to dry under a warm sun. Along the river the plane trees were budding. In sunny corners of the Tuileries some flowers had already began to bloom. And parks and boulevards and sidewalk cafes were filled with Parisians who’d been cooped up all winter, and with tourists who could scarcely believe their good luck.

  Kirk Collough McGarvey sat with Jacqueline Belleau at a window table in the Restaurant Jules Verne on the third floor of the Eiffel Tower sharing an expensive bottle of Chardonnay while they waited for their lunches to be served. Jacqueline had insisted they come here today because this was where they’d met three months ago, and she was “romantic and French.” He’d indulged her because it amused him, and he wanted to see what her next move would be. The French secret service, which was called the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage, or SDECE for short, was usually sophisticated in its business. But sometimes, like now, they were blatantly obvious. Jacqueline had been sent by the SDECE to seduce McGarvey to find out why he was back in Paris. The French were paranoid about former CIA agents taking up residence in their country, though not so paranoid that they would deny such men a visa. “Hein, l’argent est l’argent, n’est-ce pas?”

  “That’s a lascivious grin, if ever I’ve seen one,” she said, catching him in his thoughts. “How do you say it, a penny for your thoughts?”

  “I was thinking that Paris isn’t like any other city. It keeps getting better.”

  She smiled, her oval, pretty features lighting up as if she were a kid at Christmas. “And that from a crusty old bastard like you.”

  He nodded. “That from a crusty old bastard like me.” He admired her, not only for her stunning good looks—she could easily have been a runway mannequin, though not as thin as most of them were—but for her sharp intelligence and even sharper wit. She was unlike either of his ex-wives, or any other woman he’d ever been involved with. The number wasn’t a legion, but they’d all been memorable because they’d all ended in failed relationships.

  McGarvey, nearing fifty, was tall and muscularly built but with the coordination of a ballet dancer. He had thick brown hair that was turning gray at the temples, a wide, honest face, and penetrating eyes, sometimes green, at other times gray. He ran ten miles every day, rain or shine, from his apartment off the Rue La Fayette in the tenth arrondissement out the Avenue Jean Jaures along the Canal de l’Ourcq. He swam five miles every afternoon at the Club American downtown, and as often as possible worked out at the Ecole Militaire Annexe with the French national fencing team.

  Although he’d known plenty of women, he’d been a loner most of his life, partly out of choice, but mostly out of circumstance. In the parlance of the secret service, he’d been a shooter. A killer. An assassin. And every night he saw the faces of every person he’d ever killed. He saw the light fading from their eyes, the animation draining from their faces as they realized that they were dying. Each of them, even the very bad ones, had died the same way: surprised. That sort of a profession tended to be hard on a relationship, any relationship.

  After graduating from Kansas State University with masters degrees in literature (his specialty had been Voltaire) and languages, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a translator and analyst. But the Cold War was in high gear and the Company needed talent because a lot of its agents were getting burned. They saw something in McGarvey that even he didn’t know existed. His instinct for survival and self-preservation was a hundred times stronger than in the very best field agents. Combined with his physique, his facility for languages, his intelligence, and the results of a battery of psychological tests which showed him to be extremely pragmatic and under the correct circumstances even cold, he’d been offered the job as a field agent. But a very special agent. His training and purpose so black that only a handful of men in the agency and on the Hill knew anything about him.

  Bad times, he thought now, studying Jacqueline’s pretty face. She was forty, and from Nice, and was aging as only the Mediterraneans did. Like Sophia Loren she would become even more beautiful as she got older.

  “Such deep, dramatic thoughts for such a lovely Saturday,” she said, reaching across the table for his hand.

  He raised hers and kissed it, tenderly and with a little sadness, because when this one was gone he knew he would miss her. “It’s my day to feel a little lugubrious. Sometimes spring in this city does that.”

  “Hemingway,” Jacqueline said. “I thought you were a fan of Voltaire.”

  He managed a slight smile. He’d never told her that, which meant her SDECE briefing had been very complete. It was one of the little inconsistencies he’d spotted from the beginning.

  In the end the Company had sent him to Santiago to kill a general who’d massacred hundreds of people in and around the capital. But the orders had been changed in mid-stream without his knowledge, and after the kill McGarvey was out.

  He’d run to Switzerland where for a few years he’d made a life for himself, operating a rare-book store in Lausanne. There, like here, the secret service worried about his presence and had sent a woman to his bed to keep tabs on him, though how they’d found out he once worked for the CIA was a mystery. When the CIA called him out of retirement for a particularly bad assignment they couldn’t handle, he’d left her. The call to arms had been stronger than his love for her.

  Greece, Paris, even back to the States for awhile, the CIA kept coming for him, and he kept losing the women in his life, and kept running from his demons. And now he was getting the odd, twitchy feeling between his shoulder blades that it was about to happen again. Lately he’d been thinking about returning to New York to see the only woman he’d ever loved unreservedly, and the only one who’d loved him back the same way. His daughter Elizabeth, now twenty-three and working as a translator and analyst for the United Nations. He smiled, thinking about her.

  “That’s better,” Jacqueline said.

  “I’ll try to smile more often if it has that effect on you,” McGarvey said.

  “That too,” she said. “But I meant here comes our lunch and I’m starved.”

  “You’re not a cheap date.”

  She laughed. “You can afford it. Besides, there’s something I haven’t told you about myself.”

  He waited, an indulgent smile on his lips.

  The waiter served their filet of sole and tournedos of beef plat du jour expertly, then refilled their wine glasses.

  “What’s that?” McGarvey asked.

  “Whenever I have a good meal like this I get horney as hell. I’ll show you when we get home.”

  The waiter nearly dropped the wine bottle. “Excusez-moi,” he muttered, and he left.

  “That wasn’t very fair,” McGarvey said.

  “Paris waiters are all shits. Nobody dislikes them worse than a Parisian. Maybe next time he won’t eavesdrop.”

  “I think you’re becoming a crusty bastard from being around me so much.”

  “Anatomically impossible,” she said airily as she broke off a piece of bread and buttered it. “Crusty bitch, not bastard.”

  McGarvey raised his wine glass to her. “Salut,” he said.

  She raised her glass. “Salut, mon cher.”

  After lunch they took the elevator to the observation deck a thousand feet above the Seine, and looked out across the c
ity. From here they could see people strolling through the park, and along the river. It was the most famous view of Paris from the city’s most famous monument, and McGarvey felt at home here as he always had.

  “When are you going to let me read your book?” she asked.

  McGarvey was a hundred pages into a personal look into the life of the writer, philosopher Francois Marie Arouet, whose pen name was Voltaire. His working title was The Voltaire I Knew, but the SDECE almost certainly believed that he was writing his memoirs, a book that no one wanted written. He wrote longhand, and kept the manuscript and most of his notes under lock and key. So far his failsafes had not been tampered with.

  “When I’m finished with it,” he said. “How about an after lunch drink at Lipps?”

  “You are a Hemingway fan,” she laughed. “Let’s walk along the river first. Then afterward we’re going home.”

  “Sounds good,” McGarvey said, and she turned to go, but he stopped her. “Are you happy, Jacqueline?”

  A startled look crossed her face. “That’s an odd question.”

  “Are you?” McGarvey studied her eyes.

  It took her a moment to answer, but she nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  She was telling the truth, he decided.

  They took the elevator back to street level, and headed past the sidewalk vendors and jugglers to the busy Quai Branly where they could cross to the river. Out of habit he scanned the quay; the pedestrians, the traffic, the taxis lines up at the cab ranks and the cars parked at the curb. His gaze slipped past a dark blue Citröen parked behind a yellow Renault, a man seated behind the wheel, and then came back. His stomach tightened, but he did not vary his pace, nor change his expression in the slightest. Jacqueline, holding his arm, detected nothing.

  He turned left toward the taxis, and Jacqueline looked up at him.

  “Aren’t we crossing here?” she asked.