An interesting bastard, Qaddafi, Clark thought. Like much of the U.S. intelligence community, Clark had his doubts about Qaddafi’s recent character transformation from bad boy of North Africa to humanitarian and denouncer of terrorism. The old phrase “a leopard can’t change its spots” might be a cliché that rang false for some, but as far as Clark was concerned, Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qaddafi, “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” was a leopard through and through, and would be until the day he died of natural causes or not-so-natural causes.
In 2003, at Qaddafi’s command, the Libyan government officially informed the United Nations it was prepared to accept responsibility for the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie some fifteen years earlier and was further prepared to compensate the victims’ families to the tune of nearly $3 billion. The gesture was immediately rewarded with not only praise from the West but also the lifting of economic sanctions and diplomatically couched “attaboys” from many European countries. And the leopard didn’t stop there, first opening up his weapons programs to international inspectors, then denouncing the 9/11 attacks.
Clark had a guess about Qaddafi’s change of heart, and it had nothing to do with the mellowing of old age but rather with plain old economics. In other words, oil prices-which had plummeted throughout the ’90s, leaving Libya poorer than it had been since camels and not black gold had been king in the desert nation, and less able to fund the Colonel’s pet terrorist projects. Of course, Clark reminded himself, Qaddafi’s nice-guy routine was probably helped along by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he probably saw as just a preview of what could happen to his little fiefdom. In fairness, Clark conceded that it was always better to have a leopard only pretending to change its spots as long as its fangs were in fact blunted. The question was, now that oil prices were back up, would the Colonel be feeling frisky again? Would he use this incident to roar?
“Of course, the Supreme Command in Stockholm wants to call in their own blokes, but Qaddafi is having none of it,” Stanley continued. “Last I heard, Rosenbad Street was talking to Downing Street. At any rate, we’ve been put on standby. Herefordshire is putting out the call for the rest of the team. We’ve got two on leave-one medical, one on holiday-but the bulk of them should be assembled and equipped within the hour and en route to us shortly after that.” Stanley checked his watch. “Say, seventy minutes to wheels up.”
“You said ‘staged,’” Chavez said. “Staged where?” Time was critical, and even in the fastest of transports, London to Tripoli was a long hop-perhaps longer than the hostages inside that consulate had to live.
“Taranto. The Marina Militare has kindly offered to put us up until the pols sort things out. If we get the call, we’re just a skip across the water to Tripoli.”
16
LIEUTENANT OPERATIVNIK (Detective) Pavel Rosikhina pulled back the sheet-a tablecloth, really-that some kind soul had draped over the body and stared into the wide-eyed face of what he’d assumed was yet another Mafia execution. Maybe not. Despite the man’s pallor, it was clear he wasn’t Chechnyan or an ethnic Russian, which surprised him, given their location. A Caucasian Russian. Interesting.
The single bullet had entered the man’s skull just above and an inch forward of his left ear and exited… Rosikhina leaned over the table, careful to touch nothing but the tablecloth, and peered at the right side of the man’s head, which lay resting on the booth’s cushioned upper edge. There. An egg-sized exit hole behind the man’s right ear. The blood and brain matter splattered on the wall behind the booth fit with the bullet’s trajectory, which meant the killer would have been standing… here. Right in front of the kitchen door. How close would be a matter for the coroner to decide, but looking at the entry wound, Rosikhina knew it wasn’t done at close-contact range. There were no powder-burn marks on the skin around the wound, nor any stippling. The wound itself was perfectly round, which further ruled out a contact shot, which usually left behind a distinctive star-shaped rip in the skin. Rosikhina covered his nose against the fecal stink. As did many victims of sudden death, the man’s bowels and bladder had relaxed. He carefully pulled back the man’s sport coat, first the left side, then the right, patting the pockets for a wallet. There was nothing but a silver ballpoint pen, a white handkerchief, and an extra button for the man’s suit coat.
“How close, you think?” he heard, and turned around.
His sometimes partner, Gennady Oleksei, stood a few feet away, cigarette dangling from his half-smiling lips and hands shoved into the pockets of his leather coat.
Over Oleksei’s shoulder Rosikhina could see that the uniformed militia officers had finished herding the restaurant’s customers out the front door, where they stood milling around, waiting to be questioned. The restaurant’s staff-four waiters, a cashier, and three cooks-were seated at the now-empty tables, giving their names to another officer.
Oleksei and Rosikhina worked in the Saint Petersburg militia’s Main Office for Combating Financial Crimes, a subdivision of the Criminal Investigations Department. Unlike most Western police agencies, Russian operativniks were not assigned permanent partners. Why this was no one had ever explained to Rosikhina, but he assumed it had something to do with funding. Everything had to do with funding, from whether they got their own cars from week to week to whether they worked alone or with partners.
“You’re assigned?” Rosikhina asked.
“Called me at home. How close?” Oleksei repeated.
“Two to six feet. Easy shot.” He noticed something lying on the seat behind the victim’s buttocks. He leaned over for a closer look. “Got a gun,” he told Oleksei. “Semiautomatic. Looks like a Makarov. He was trying, at least. A second faster on the draw and maybe…”
“Now, there’s a question for you,” Oleksei said. “Would you rather go like our friend here, knowing it was coming, or would you rather just… poof. Be gone. Nothing.”
“Good Christ, Gennady…”
“Come on, play along.”
Rosikhina sighed. “I guess I’d rather go in my sleep-a hundred years old and lying next to Natalia.”
“Pavel, Pavel… You never humor me.”
“Sorry. I don’t like this. Something’s off. It feels like and looks like your standard Mafia hit, but this sure isn’t your standard victim-not sitting in a place like this, at least.”
“He was either very brave or very stupid,” Oleksei said.
“Or desperate.” To come into a place like this, their Caucasian Russian victim had to be in search of something more than a good bowl of djepelgesh and some of that god-awful pondur music-music that sounded to Pavel like cats in heat.
“Or really hungry,” Oleksei added. “Another boss, maybe? He doesn’t look familiar, but he could be on the books.”
“I doubt it. They never travel without their own little army. Even if somebody had managed to get to him here and put a bullet into his head at this range, his bodyguards would have started a god-awful firefight. There’d be holes everywhere, and a lot more bodies. No, we’ve got one bullet and one dead man. Very deliberate. An ambush, professionally done. The question is, who is he and why was he important enough to kill?”
“Well, we’re not going to get any answers out of this bunch.”
Rosikhina knew his partner was right. Fear of, or loyalty to, the Obshina tended to silence even the most helpful of souls. The witness reports would invariably fall into one of three general categories: I saw nothing; someone in a mask ran in, shot the man, and ran out, it all happened so fast; and Rosikhina’s favorite, Ya ne govo’ryu po russki. I don’t speak Russian.
And of those accounts, the only true statement they’d get was likely the last one: It all happened so fast. Not that he blamed any of them. The Krasnaya Mafiya, or Bratva (brotherhood), or Obshina-whatever the name or denomination-was ruthless beyond compare. Witnesses and their entire families were often targeted for death simply because some boss in some dark basement somewhere had decided the person
might have information they might disclose to authorities. And it wasn’t merely a matter of dying, Rosikhina reminded himself. The Mafia was often ingenious and unhurried in its execution methods. What, he wondered, would he do in similar circumstances? Though the Mafia generally refrained from killing militia officers-it was bad for business-it had happened in the past. Armed and trained as they were, cops could protect themselves, but the average citizen, the teacher or factory worker or accountant, what chance did they have? None, really. The militia had neither the money nor the manpower to protect every witness, and the average citizen knew it, so they kept their mouths shut and kept their heads down. Even now, some of the restaurant’s patrons were terrified for their lives, having simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a wonder places like this managed to stay open at all.
It was that kind of fear, Rosikhina thought, that made people wish for the old days, the return of Stalinesque control of the country, and in many ways Putin was doing just that with his “reform programs.” There was no middle ground with that, though. As long as there were political freedoms, personal rights, and an open market in Russia, there would be crime, both large and small-and there was in Stalin’s time, too, but not nearly as much. But that argument was something of a straw man, wasn’t it? Something that old communist hard-liners and ultranationalists used to decry democracy and capitalism, all the while forgetting or ignoring that the iron-fisted control of Soviet Russia had come at a high price indeed. What was that old saying? Hardship truncates memory? Rosikhina’s father, a Yakut fisherman by birth, had his own take on the concept: “When you’ve got a shrew for a wife, even the ugliest ex-girlfriend looks enticing.” And that, he knew, was what Soviet Russia really was, an ugly ex-girlfriend. Certainly she had her positive traits, but nothing you’d like to be reunited with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an opinion many of his fellow citizens-some forty percent of them, according to the latest polls, suspect as they may be-shared. Or maybe it was what Oleksei had once accused him of being, a cockeyed optimist. Or was it “blind optimist”?
Now he gazed out the front windows of the restaurant, watching the grim-faced customers standing in tight clusters, their breath steaming in the cold night air, and wondered if his optimism was in fact unwarranted. A restaurant of thirty or so people who’d just twenty minutes earlier watched a man’s brains get blown out the side of his skull, and not a one would probably lift a finger to help them catch the killer.
“True, but you never know,” Rosikhina replied. “Better to ask and be surprised than the converse, don’t you think?”
Oleksei shrugged and smiled as only a Russian fatalist can. What can you do? Not much excited Oleksei; his composure was as permanent as the cigarette he seemed to always be smoking.
Then again, on rare occasions a few useful witness details would inadvertently slip through and give them something to pick at. More often, though, the statements were vague or contradictory, or both, leaving investigators with nothing but what they could glean from the body or bodies left behind.
“Besides,” Rosikhina said, “without all those useless witness statements to process, we won’t have four glorious hours of paperwork and bad coffee ahead of us.”
“Four hours? If we’re lucky.”
“Damn it, where’s the coroner?”
Until the victim was officially pronounced dead, the body would remain where it was, dead and glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.
“He’s on his way,” Oleksei said. “I checked before I came. Busy night, I guess.”
Rosikhina leaned over and snagged the gun’s trigger guard with his index finger and lifted it from the seat. “Nine millimeter.” He ejected the magazine and cycled back the slide. A bullet tumbled out of the chamber and clinked onto the floor.
“Well, he was ready for something. Any missing?”
Rosikhina shook his head and sniffed the barrel. “Happened too fast, I suspect. Recently cleaned. Well, I’ll be damned… Look, of all things, Gennady, the serial number’s been erased.”
“Will miracles never cease?”
Bad guys often acid-erased the serial numbers on murder weapons but rarely re-inscribed them. If that was the case here, the Makarov’s number might actually lead somewhere. Cockeyed optimism.
And probably misplaced, Rosikhina reminded himself.
As often happened in homicide cases, whether in the West or in Moscow, Lieutenant Rosikhina and Oleksei would learn little either from those present in the restaurant at the time of the murder or from the canvass of the surrounding neighborhood. The Chechnyan community was tight-knit, distrusting of the police, and deeply afraid of the Obshina. And with good reason. Its brutality knew few bounds. A witness would pay not only with his own life but with those of his family as well, a spectacle which he’d likely be forced to watch before he, too, was killed. The prospect of seeing one’s children carved up with a hacksaw tended to close loose lips. Even so, Rosikhina had little choice but to go through the motions of taking statements, however unproductive, and tracking down leads, however insubstantial.
They would diligently work the murder, but in the end what few small leads they had would evaporate and they’d be forced to set the case aside. With this thought, Rosikhina looked sadly at the victim. “Sorry, my friend.”
17
IT WAS A FUNNY THING, Jack Ryan Jr. thought, that there’d been no congratulatory replies to the birth announcement. Not one. He had everything cross-filed on his computer, all of it in the terabytes of RAM on The Campus’s monstrous server, and he called up the most recent documents, making a written note of initiator and recipient, but those were always nothing more than an alphanumeric handle that might or might not have a relationship to their real names. Jack extended his search of past e-mails to six months prior and ran a quick spreadsheet. Sure enough, the traffic had been steady, rarely varying more than five percent from month to month. And now, within days of the birth announcement, a precipitous drop. In fact, aside from a few routine messages that had probably been sent before the announcement and had been stuck in cyberspace, there were no e-mails. The Emir and his URC-the Umayyad Revolutionary Council-had in essence gone radio-silent, and that thought gave Jack a chill. There were three options: Either they’d switched communication protocols as a general security measure, or they’d somehow figured out someone was reading their mail, or this was an OpSec change, a zipping of the electronic lips prior to a high-level operation. The first two options were possible but unlikely. The URC had changed its procedures little in the last nine months, and The Campus had been careful not to tip its hand. So option three. There was precedent, of course. Just before 9/11, Al-Qaeda standard electronic chatter level dropped like a stone; so, too, with the Japanese before Pearl Harbor. Part of Jack wanted his hypothesis to be proven out; another part hoped to hell he was wrong.
How, then, would the Emir get his messages out? Couriers were the most secure method, if not the quickest: Write up the messages, burn the disk, and have someone take it for a handoff rendezvous. With modern air travel, a man could get from Chicago to Calcutta in less than a day, so long as he didn’t mind airline food. Hell, international air travel was designed with that idea in mind, wasn’t it? It might have been designed with the “black” community in mind, not just the sales force of Frederick’s of Hollywood or Dow Chemical.
Chicago to Calcutta. What if the Emir was in Chicago, or New York, or Miami? What was to stop him from living there? Not a goddamned thing. The CIA and everyone else assumed he was somewhere in the Stans-why? Because that was the last place they’d known him to be. Not because of any evidence that would place him anywhere. And there was a good half of the United States government’s Special Forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan beating the bushes and looking into every hole in the rocks, asking endless questions, tossing money around, looking for the one man-or woman-who might know his face and might know where he might be. And still nothing. What were the odds of that? Jack wondered.
A man like the Emir could never feel secure enough, not with every intelligence agency in the world looking for him-even dedicated, patriotic intelligence officers could look at the public reward America had placed on his head and think of a nice house on the Riviera and a comfortable retirement, just for one phone call and a little bit of information…
The Emir would know all of that. He’d limit the number of people who knew his location. He’d limit that number to people whom he could absolutely trust, and he’d take good care of them. The best of care. Money, comfort, such luxuries as circumstances permitted. He’d reinforce their desire to earn his trust. He’d reinforce their faith in Allah and in himself, be solicitous as hell to them. But he would also maintain his aura of command, because the source of that authority was always on a man-to-man basis, as with all the really important things in life, a thing of the mind.
So what would it take for the Emir to relocate beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan? How does one go about moving the most wanted man on the face of the earth?
The CIA’s master file on the Emir had mediocre photos, some of them raw and some digitally enhanced, all of which had been distributed to virtually every intelligence and police agency in the world. Same with the general public. If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can’t go out to Sunday brunch without being mobbed, the Emir would certainly find it difficult to travel beyond his regular stomping grounds.
The Emir couldn’t change his height, though it was technically possible, but it involved major and somewhat painful surgery, followed by a lengthy recovery period, which would necessitate being immobile for several weeks-bad joss for a guy on the run. He could change his face, his skin color, his hair. He could wear colored contact lenses to change his eye color and maybe improve his eyesight, which, the file said, was about average. He walked erectly, not slumped over, and the talk about how he suffered from Marfan syndrome had been shot down by a doc at Johns Hopkins who was an expert in the disorder, rather to Langley’s surprise, as that had become gospel to the intelligence community. So he did not need a dialysis machine in constant proximity.
Dead or Alive Page 13