I knew that the clock was ticking. The list of goodies I’d found at Andrei’s apartment, which had been translated courtesy of Ken Ross, indicated that the Russians had managed to send a complete package of nuclear refining equipment to the Middle East. The Air France waybill from Andrei’s dacha—the one for the hot freon tanks—told us that the processing site was virtually complete. And I knew that it wouldn’t take much to make enough high-quality plutonium to construct a small but deadly weapon—something that could be contained in a suitcase-size package. Maybe given to a suicide bomber to set off in Tel Aviv.
You are asking me why the Russkies would risk a full-scale war in the Middle East.
The answer is that it would provide them with a huge opportunity to insinuate themselves back into the region—and virtually assure their reemergence as a superpower.
You are looking at me as if I am crazy. Okay, tadpole, I’m going to spell it out for you.
Item: two of the most hard-line, confrontational states in the Middle East—Syria and Iraq—were former Soviet client states. In Iraq, the Soviets had provided weapons, spare parts, and money. In Syria, however, they’d built an elaborate military-intelligence infrastructure—an entire Soviet C3I infrastructure—hidden inside the Syrian military system. You—and I—know that, because Avi and I had scoped it all out during our first joint mission hack in the eighties.
So, it was time to see what Werner Lantos didn’t want me to see in his office. And it was time to get on the phone to Ken Ross. I needed some technical support. To be specific, I needed to see whether or not one of our new FORTE—Fast On-board Recording of Transient Experiments—satellites could be reprogrammed to overfly Syria in the next twentyfour hours.
You haven’t heard about FORTEs? Let me ’splain you, as Desi used to say. FORTE was developed during the Bush administration. It has a resolution that allows it to read a six-inch object from its 155-mile orbit height. But its main feature is a powerful nuclear sensing array that allows it to spot everything from chemical residue released during plutonium processing, to the heat signature of a nuke on ready alert. FORTE works through cloud cover, bad weather—and has a penetration capability of five meters. That means that even if an armed nuke is buried more than fifteen feet underground, it can sense its presence.
The problem is that we have only two of these birds. So they are used sparingly, and are always in demand. Now, I’m not supposed to know where the FORTEs are flying. But I still have friends in low places, so just between you and me, one bird was detailed over the Ukraine, checking on Chernobyl. while the other was somewhere in the mainland China AO—Area of Operations. I needed Kenny Ross to get one of ’em moved without making too many waves.
I took a copy of the list I’d taken from Andrei’s apartment and slipped it across the table to Avi.
The Israeli read it, his eyes moving greedily down the pages.
When he looked up, I could tell that he thought things were as serious as I did.
“Viktor Grinkov is not only very powerful, he’s getting very rich, I think,” Avi said, folding the papers and slipping them into his pocket.
“How much money are we talking about here, Avi?”
“Well, my estimates—which are a lot more conservative than my bosses—project that Grinkov has collected somewhere in the area of twenty to thirty million bucks in payoffs in the last twelve months alone—and he’s not at the top of the heap. Anyway, that money goes to Lantos. Lantos disburses it to numbered accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands—wherever he can.”
“And what about your old pal Ehud Golan?”
Avi’s face flushed in anger. “He’s not my friend, goddammit.”
But it was me who was righteously pissed off. “You should have let me know about him, Avi.”
He sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “I should have done. But it’s complicated. Ehud is still working for Mossad. Now, nobody’s told me that for a fact, but every time I bring his name up, I get told to lay off—there are ongoing operations that might be compromised, and so on and so forth. That is the usual Mossad mumbo jumbo bullshit, so I figure Ehud is still on the job. He’s bad news—and they should have dumped him years ago. But you know how it is—the Agency’s got its assholes, too.”
“Like Lantos.”
“Like Lantos. And for all I know Ehud’s kept Gelilot up-to-date about all the dual-use equipment.” Gelilot was Mossad shorthand for its headquarters, which, you’ll recall, is located on a bluff just above the Gelilot junction of the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway.
“That doesn’t mean he’s on the side of the angels.”
Avi’s face went grim. “I’ve never known Ehud to be on the side of the angels,” he said. “Ehud is on the side of Ehud.”
To be honest, whether Ehud had an ongoing relationship with Mossad really didn’t matter so far as I was concerned. We already knew that Werner Lantos had hitched himself to Christians in Action. So why shouldn’t Lantos’s number-one enforcer make a deal with his own old employer, Mossad?
Indeed, linking to an intelligence or law enforcement agency is actually a common ploy used by criminals these days. They make some kind of deal with an agency—maybe they promise to snitch on their money-laundering crime partners. Or they promise inside info from the Cali Cartel. Or perhaps it’s intelligence about dual-use smuggling to countries on our SST—that’s State-Sponsored Terrorism—list. Anyway, they volunteer to help. Then, when they’re caught smuggling drugs, or laundering money, or waxing civilians, they protest—loudly, and often in the media—that they were only doing their nefarious deeds at the behest of the CIA, or Mossad, or FBI, the DEA, or whichever agency was dumbass enough to hire ’em in the first place.
The whole idea is so dishonest that it makes me sick. I drained the last of the Chenas. “C’mon,” I said to Avi. “I have to make a phone call—see if we can get ourselves a little outside help. Then, if you would be so kind, allow me to give you the one-centime tour of Lantos et Compagnie. We’ll see what we can find.”
Chapter 15
IT WAS OBVIOUS AS WE EMERGED FROM THE RESTAURANT THAT ANY excursion to Werner Lantos’s offices was going to have to wait. It was 1745. Dark—but not dark enough for them to hide. Two pairs of smokers sat in a dark sedan across the street. They were the ones we were supposed to notice—not too obvious, but there nonetheless. The ones we weren’t were no doubt in two, or three, or perhaps even four additional cars and God-knows-how-many rice rockets—those lowslung Jap motorcycles that are favorites of the messengers who cut through Paris’s gridlocked traffic.
The smokers’ car sat on the corner directly opposite La Petite Tour’s front door.
Had these guys been on Avi’s six or mine? Avi said he’d shaken his tail. I hadn’t noticed anybody on mine. But there was no time to debate the subject right now. I nudged Avi with my elbow. “We split up. See you back at the Cercle whenever.”
He didn’t bother to respond—just peeled off to the left, and walked up the Rue Gavarni against the traffic flow, and disappeared into the darkness. The sedan’s rear doors opened and two hoods emerged from the darkened interiors with the easy synergy of a unit that’s worked together for some time. (Good tradecraft there, friends. Always extinguish your interior car lights before opening doors when you’re on a surveillance op. Remember the Ivan in the Beemer in Moscow? Well, he was no pro—but these guys were.) They flung their cigarettes into the wet street, checked their own sixes, took opposite sides of the street, and started off after Avi, overcoated shoulders hunched against the chilled, wet Paris wind. It was like a scene out of a fifties French spy movie.
Were they French? Israelis? Arabs? Ivans? Fact was, it didn’t matter right now who they were—what mattered was getting rid of ’em. That meant either shaking them, or disposing of them. So far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter which way things went.
I cut right, and walked down the slight hill into the cold wind toward the Place Costa Rica. A shiny Mercedes cab slid
to a stop in front of me—perfect timing for a getaway. I was reaching for the door handle when a tiny, birdlike woman with a croc Chanel reticule the size of a sixteen-pound sledgehammer ran up, cut me off, swung the cylindrical handbag into my chest hard enough to make me grunt, pushed me aside, climbed in, shut and locked the door, and began nattering at the driver in machine-gun French.
He shrugged at me—the classic Gallic palms up expression of helplessness—and drove off. I scanned 360 degrees. There were no more cabs—but a trio of hostiles was working its way down the street I’d just traveled. They were followed by a low-slung, dark Citroën Xantia—the same goddamn fourdoor station wagon with tinted glass windows and lots of cellular antennas that had accompanied Werner Lantos and me to breakfast earlier in the day—that was moving at a crawl.
I could take them all on right here, but there was no sense in doing that. Not now, anyway—not when I was in public, and at a tactical disadvantage. But I had to move—and fast. I crossed the crowded Place Costa Rica and dodged my way down Rue Rayounard to Charles Dickens Square. The main thoroughfares gave way to narrow, dark side streets.
The predicament was, no doubt, courtesy of the omnipresent Monsieur Murphy. Why? Because in situations like this one it’s better to stay out in public. The more witnesses there are, the less chance that the opposition can act with impunity. I crossed the upper end of the square, striding rapidly to my left against the dwindling traffic flow, to the safety of a small, dimly lit café on the far side. A round M sign with an arrow posted on a street lamp pointed left, suggesting that I might want to head toward the Passy metro stop. BTDT—no way was I going to box myself in on any subway right now.
Instead, I kept moving, striding past the café. I glanced inside. Half a dozen regulars sat at the bar, drinking. The barman was polishing glassware. You might think I pondered going inside, finding a corner table, putting my back up against the wall, and forcing them to come after me. But I knew there was absolutely no advantage in my doing that.
You—yeah, you out there, the reader with your hand flapping like a fucking flag in the wind. You what? You want to know why there was no advantage to my planting myself inside that café and making the bad guys come after me. Simple. It’s an old SWAT team lesson I learned from Dan Cusiter, a twenty-four-year veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. You’re chasing a suspect. He runs into a house—or runs into a room in a house—and slams the door in your face.
Do you follow him? You do not, says Dan the man. Why? Because maybe said malevolent miscreant has reinforcements in that house or that room, and you do not want to become a police statistic. So the rules change: the chase has now become a barricade situation, and you wait the sonofabitch out. Time is now on your side.
Well, same thing here. They could sit and wait all night if they had to. Call for reinforcements. Block off the whole fucking neighborhood. Sooner or later I’d have to come out of that café—either the front door or the back door. End of story. Time was on the pursuers’ side, not mine.
Unless, of course, I could turn things around. But to do that I’d need wheels—and there were none available at the moment. I checked my six. The trio had turned into a quartet. Two pairs of two, working opposite sides of the square. They’d picked up another car, too—a second Citroën, this one a sedan. Both vehicles sat in the Rue Rayounard at the head of Charles Dickens Square, waiting to see what I’d do before committing one way or the other. Smart. These guys were smart.
They probably thought it was the best of times for them and the worst of times for me. I like it when my enemies get overconfident—that’s when I strike back. So, as far as I was concerned, this was precisely the right time for great expectations. But first, I had to even the odds a little bit.
So I strode halfway down the square, noting that one team shadowed me on a parallel course while the other team moved to cut off my escape route. Good—that meant I had ’em right where I wanted ’em.
You, gentle reader, are asking WTF. Well, I will explain my optimistic outlook. Currently, the first pair of opposition gumshoes was now separated from me by the small park that sat in the middle of Charles Dickens Square. The park was similar to the kind of one-square-block parks one finds in London (and probably had been designed that way, given its moniker). A statue stood in its center—Dickens, no doubt. And the whole thing was bordered by a veddy English six-foot-high, spear-tipped picket fence of wrought iron—the kind of thing that would have done justice to Buckingham fucking Palace. There were four gates, one on each side of the square. And they were closed and—judging from the chains and padlocks I saw as I passed close by—secured.
So the bad guys, who were no doubt savoring the fact that I couldn’t cross the park to escape, weren’t going to be able to cross the square either—unless they were goddamn hurdlers. And even if they held Olympic gold medals, it was going to be nigh on impossible for them to jump six feet of wrought iron picket fence in their long, heavy—and currently extremely soggy—overcoats. So while Team One was physically close to me—close as the crow flies—it was in no position to do me any damage right now.
It also meant that the second team, which lurked on the Rue des Eaux, was currently isolated by a couple of hundred meters from any potential backup. Twenty to twenty-five seconds of running from the look of things and the physical appearance of Team One. That was plenty of time for me.
I cut back toward Team Two. As I passed through the shadow between streetlights I reached inside my coat. My right hand withdrew the screwdriver from my waistband.
I scanned the square. There weren’t any people on the street besides the five of us players. Good. Time to move. I cut across the narrow street, moving toward my targets. My body attitude was shifting now from neutral to aggressive; the screwdriver sat tight in my right hand in a modified ninja grip—the shaft tucked tight against my wrist, pointed up my forearm. My left hand was balled in a fist. I had my War Face on.
What’s that? You say you’re dubious when I talk about a War Face? More macho bullshit psychobabble from the old Rogue, you say?
Listen and learn, tadpoles. A War Face is an important element of battle. The Marine Corps makes every fuzzy-scalped, stinking trainee develop one. We SEALs do, too. The War Face is the enemy’s worst nightmare. It’s the face you use when you charge, screaming, into his lines. It’s the face you use when you work up close and personal, with knives, bayonets, and the other sundry hand tools of war. It’s the man-to-man combat face that makes your enemy know, deep in his very soul, that you are going to kill him before he can kill you. It is the face that Means Business—the face whose very business is Meanness itself.
We were closing now like ships on a collision course—less than twenty yards apart; then ten, then five. They examined my expression and took note like the professionals they were. I did the same. I saw their narrow, dark eyes, expressionless, wind-creased faces, and the thick, brushy mustaches favored by Mediterranean types from Barcelona to Cairo; from Palermo to Tunis. But these two weren’t Spanish, Italian, or Arabs. No. These two had the glacial, compassionless, indifferent look common to most of the fucking ugly Corsicans I’ve ever seen, so that’s what I dubbed them—FUC One and FUC Two. FUC One was tall and thin, with a touch of gray in his thick ’stache. FUC Two was smaller and darker than FUC One. Uglier, too.
As I moved abreast of ’em, just below the empty, dark corner where the Rue Charles Dickens dead-ends at the Rue des Eaux, the opposition separated. A trio of antique store windows, each protected by its own roll-away metal grating, provided dim light. FUC One paused, as if to peruse a Louis Quinze divan with gilt frame and striped silk upholstery. FUC Two, five yards ahead, concentrated on a display of Empire chandeliers that hung above angled, polished wood furniture accented by bright metal.
You could see them both tense as I drew even with FUC One. He moved aside, simultaneously gesturing with his head, as if to let me see the goods displayed in the shop window more easily. “Bon soir,
m’sieur,” he growled. He slipped to my right flank (and his left), all the while making sure that he kept the protection of the antique store’s sturdy metal grating to his shoulder.
I appeared to peer—but I was watching his reflection in the window as he snuck silent and smooth, slightly behind me into the snooker position. Now the light was in his favor. But my peripheral vision still picked up all his movement.
And there was movement: I caught the hint of something dark in FUC One’s gloved hand. A sap, a club, or a blackjack perhaps. His arm started to move—a short practiced, powerful swing that would catch me upside the head from the rear. FUC Two was moving up to my port side now, from two doors down, reaching into his pocket as he, too, edged within striking distance.
Up at the top of the square, the Xantia began to creep forward. I could see its parking lights moving down the street that ran parallel to where I stood. It was going to fishhook back—so they could snap me up. This had been designed as a snatch and grab. A cosh and carry. A hit and run. They didn’t want me dead—they wanted me. Tie me up and ask me questions, maybe with the help of burning cigarettes, needle-nosed pliers, and a twelve-volt battery.
Did that make me nervous? Honest answer: a little. But if you’re not on edge in a situation like this, if your heart isn’t pumping and your pores aren’t like antennas, sensing everything around you, then there is something wrong with you. Besides, the anticipation of blood and guts—especially my enemy’s blood and guts—makes my adrenaline flow. Let me tell you something about me: tension makes me extremely dangerous.
Okay, where was I? Oh, yes—I was describing how the opposition had committed itself.
Well, I committed, too. I dealt with the most immediate threat first. I turned slightly to my right, reversed my grip on the screwdriver so that it pointed blade out, and—War Face kinetic energy mad as hell Hoo Yaah—stuck it completely through the wrist of FUC One.
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