The Shadowmen

by David Hagberg

  “Are you alone?” Kurshin asked.

  “Of course I am. Are you?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Bullshit,” Lestov said, but he laughed. He was in his middle fifties now, with a disgusting belly that hung over his belt, thinning hair, protruding eyes, and fat lips. But he knew things.

  “I need some more information on my two Americans.”

  “Yes, Kirk McGarvey and his lover, Pete Boylan. I’ll warn you again: McGarvey is a force to be reckoned with. If you let your guard down, he will kill you, and I will never be able to forgive myself for helping you to the blood altar.”

  “Nobody talks like that anymore,” Kurshin said, and Lestov laughed again.

  “I’m booting up, so give me a minute.”

  Kurshin took another drink of the champagne and then threw the bottle over the balustrade into the trees below.

  “He’s in Monaco, the Hôtel de Paris. And let me guess—you’re nearby.”

  “Yes. What about the woman?”

  “She’s on her way here.”

  “Moscow?” Kurshin asked. He was surprised and disturbed.

  “Yes. McGarvey I can understand; you mean to go up against him. But what is the significance of the woman coming here?”

  “I don’t know,” Kurshin said, though he had a hunch why McGarvey had sent her, and it was the first unexpected anomaly in his plan. It was possible they knew about Didenko, which opened more possibilities than he wanted to admit.

  “I’ll see if I can get more details for you. Call me in twelve hours.”

  “Be careful. I don’t want to lose you,” Kurshin said.

  “Nor I you.”

  Kurshin turned around. Martine stood naked at the door.

  “You’re on some sort of a dark quest, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I am.”

  “Do you still want me to come with you?”

  “More than ever,” Kurshin said. “Now leave me for a couple of minutes; I have another call to make.”

  9

  Pete had managed to get a few hours’ sleep on the way over and a few more at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in Moscow near Sheremetyevo International Airport, but she was still tired when the valet brought up the Toyota SUV she’d rented from Enterprise. She tipped him, and before she drove off, she set the GPS for Didenko’s dacha.

  The early afternoon was a lot hotter than she expected Russia to be even for a July, and she shed the dark-blue blazer she was wearing before she hit the outermost ring highway and headed to the M7. Traffic was heavy, a good percentage of the cars late-model Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and Audis along with the occasional Ferrari and one bright-yellow Lamborghini. This definitely was not the Soviet Union of the Cold War days that she had studied in school.

  Didenko had not been connected with the FSB for a number of years, though he probably still had a few old friends in the service.

  “Their old-boy networks are just as strong as ours,” McGarvey had warned her.

  “Is he going to take a potshot at me if I show up unannounced?” she’d asked.

  “I don’t think so. He’ll be more curious than anything else. You’ve come to him for information, and he’ll expect a quid pro quo, or at least he’ll try to trick you into revealing something.”

  “If he sent the shooter, he’ll know who I am and what my real purpose is.”

  “I think he might be helping this guy, but I don’t think he sent him,” McGarvey said.

  “The real question is motivation,” Otto had said. “It sure as hell isn’t an FSB-sanctioned operation; they don’t do shit like that anymore—at least not for relatively low-value targets. No offense meant.”

  “None taken,” McGarvey said. “If I still were a deputy director in the Company, it might be different, but even then, they wouldn’t have sent a single shooter to take me out, nor would they have chiseled Katy’s name off her headstone or left me the Monaco clue.”

  “That’s right, which leaves us with trying to figure out his motivation. He has a grudge against you, but why?”

  “Maybe he’s a relative of Arkady Kurshin, the guy you took down in Portugal,” Pete suggested.

  “Kurshin had no one,” Otto said. “He was a lone wolf living on the streets in Nizhny Novgorod when the cops picked him up and sent him to School One in Moscow.” The academy was the primary institution for training intelligence officers. “He was only fourteen at the time, and he was a star pupil, from all accounts, until he ran away and worked freelance for General Baranov.”

  “Brings us back to square one,” Pete said.

  “Not quite. He wants me to come to Monte-Carlo to play chemin de fer, which I’m going to do, and you’re going to have a little chat with Didenko.”

  “Watch your step, please,” Louise had warned.

  “Didenko won’t do anything to her.”

  “Probably not, but Russia is still the Wild West, or East, however you want to look at it, and Pete is a beautiful woman.”

  Pete had always considered herself to be too much of a tomboy to think that she was attractive, but looking at Mac across the kitchen counter and thinking about his face at that moment, she wanted to believe Louise. She wanted to think that he thought she was beautiful.

  Traffic thinned out considerably on the M7 once she got past the housing developments and other built-up areas that finally gave way to the old-growth birch forests. Less than an hour out of the city, the GPS instructed her to turn north on a dirt road. About ten miles later, she crested a hill, and the general’s dacha—more like a compound of the main house and several outbuildings—was laid out in the valley, through which flowed a narrow stream.

  A black Mercedes SUV was parked in front of the house, but there didn’t seem to be any activity that she could see. She drove down and turned the car around so that it was facing the way she had come, and then she got out.

  Except for the onion domes, minarets, and other flourishes on the house, it could have been a fallow farm somewhere in the middle of Iowa. The stream gurgled, birdsong drifted to her on the gentle breeze, and she could smell the rich black earth.

  The place was idyllic, like something out of a fairy tale, but extremely dangerous. People had died here, or orders to go out and kill had come from this place. It had a bloody history that hung thick on the summer air.

  “Dawbrih y dyen,” an old man at the front door said.

  “Good afternoon,” Pete said. “General Didenko?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” he said, smiling. He wore a baggy old sweater despite the heat, corduroy trousers, and felt slippers. His white hair was thin, and he stood with a stoop. He looked like he had been ill for a long time and had lost a lot of weight.

  “My name is Donna Graves; I’m writing a book.”

  “Intriguing. May I ask the subject?”

  “Kirk McGarvey, who was the director of the CIA.”

  “I know the name, of course, but I don’t think I can be much help to you. I’m retired now, and I never had any dealings with the man—at least none that were direct. Nevertheless, you have traveled a long way to see me. Won’t you sit and have a glass of wine?”

  He brought out a bottle of Valpolicella and two glasses, and they sat on ratty old wicker chairs on the porch. Close up, he stank, maybe of cow manure, or at least she hoped that’s what it was. He poured the wine with a shaking hand.

  “It’s pleasant here,” Pete said.

  “Unless the wind comes from Petushki, and then we smell the factories. In the old days, we thought the air tasted sweet. Money was being made. Progress. But now it is pollution. I don’t imagine that a man such as McGarvey would take kindly to a book about his exploits.”

  “Let’s talk about General Baranov. You succeeded him after McGarvey killed him in Berlin.”

  Didenko nodded. “I would have thought that operation was still classified.”

  “I have my sources. But you must have inherited one of his shooters—a man by the name of Arkady Kurshin.”r />
  “Indeed I did, but I only ever talked to him by telephone. I never met him in person.”

  “McGarvey killed him too. First his control and then him. How did you feel about it?”

  “About McGarvey, or about Arkasha’s death?”

  “Both.”

  “McGarvey was beyond my reach—the chairman of the First Chief Directorate explained that to me in no uncertain terms. As for poor Arkasha, it had been his destiny from the very beginning to die violently.”

  “How about now?”

  Didenko was puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The First Chief Directorate is gone; perhaps you have thought about revenge.”

  “I’m an old man, Ms. Graves. And even if I did think about revenge, I don’t have the resources.”

  “There must be an old-boy network. Someone you could call.”

  Didenko drank his wine. “Are you a sensationalist? Are you writing a serious book, or will it be a story for the tabloids?”

  “I’m extremely serious, General.”

  “I can’t open the archives at Lubyanka Square for you, nor would I if I had the power, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’m only asking for your memories.”

  “I think more than that,” Didenko said. “But I give you my assurances that I have no feelings of anger or regret that would lead me to take revenge.”

  “But there must be those who would,” Pete pressed.

  Didenko threw his head back and laughed. “A great many of them, I suspect,” he said at length.

  10

  McGarvey, dressed for the casino in black tie and patent leather shoes, presented himself to the maître d’ at the Hôtel de Paris’s Michelin three-star Le Louis XV.

  “Will monsieur be dining alone this evening?” the haughty Frenchman asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes, but perhaps my luck will change for the better at the casino.”

  The maître d’ led him to a table in a corner next to a tall, ornately draped window that rose to arches just below the ceiling adorned in gold leaf like nearly every other surface. It had been years since he had been here last, but nothing had changed; the large room half-filled with well-dressed diners was a fantasy from the Grand Siècle at Versailles. All the clocks were stopped at twelve, because in this restaurant, time was of no importance.

  A waiter in a white shirt and a spotlessly white apron well below his knees came to take McGarvey’s drink order, while another brought a bottle of still water and poured a glass, and a third brought a small, crusty baguette and butter.

  McGarvey ordered a Hermitage Réaux 65, which was an expensive vintage cognac, and when the first waiter was a gone, a fourth brought a menu that McGarvey declined.

  “May I offer monsieur a few suggestions?”

  “No, nor will I be rushed,” Mac said, not bothering to keep his voice low. “First, I will have a drink or two. Then, caviar, a shrimp ceviche as long as it isn’t drowned, Mediterranean sea bass with fennel, radicchio, and citrus fruit.” The fish was an Alain Ducasse specialty. “If the bass is overcooked, I will send it back.”

  The waiter was a professional; he didn’t miss a beat, but word would get out about the crude American. “Very good, monsieur. Shall I send a sommelier?”

  “Krug. Tell your man to be sharp with the vintage. I won’t drink vinegar.”

  “I understand,” the waiter said, and he left.

  “They’ll remember you,” Otto said softly in his ear.

  “That’s the point,” Mac mumbled as if he were talking to himself. No one paid any attention to him.

  His cognac came, and he drained the snifter before the waiter had a chance to get five feet away. “Another,” he called out.

  The waiter nodded. “Yes, sir.” “Is anyone nearby?” Otto asked.

  “I’m by myself in a corner. They had a hunch I was going to be trouble.”

  “Pete is on her way to Paris already.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “She didn’t get much except that Didenko agreed that there were a great many who’d like to take a go at you. He wasn’t one of them.”

  “What was the upshot?”

  “Didenko is an old man, definitely out to pasture. If it was anyone from Kurshin’s camp who came for help, he probably didn’t get much.”

  “He can’t be that old. He was playing a head game with her.”

  “She thought as much. But Didenko will get back to whoever is stalking you, no doubt with her photograph. He’ll know that you’re onto him already. Might give him pause.”

  The waiter was coming with his cognac. “I’ll be throwing money around at the casino in about an hour. Drunk.”

  “You’re not armed.”

  “No,” McGarvey said. The casino’s security systems at the entries were capable of detecting weapons.

  “Watch yourself, Mac,” Otto said.

  The waiter set the snifter down, and this time, he hesitated before leaving. McGarvey tossed the drink back.

  “Would monsieur care for another?”

  “No. I want my wine now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Salopard,” Mac said under his breath as the waiter walked away. It was gutter French for bastard.

  The champagne came a couple of minutes later, and McGarvey feigned impatience as the sommelier opened it and poured a glass. As with the cognac, Mac drank the wine in one piece and held his glass out for more. The wine master obliged and then bucketed the bottle and walked off.

  Two couples at the nearest table noticed what was happening and glanced over at him. McGarvey glared at them, and they turned away. The maître d’ was on the phone at his station, but when Mac looked at him, he didn’t turn away.

  “Careful they don’t kick you out of there,” Otto said.

  “I’ll tone it down a notch, but I’ve made my impression.”

  “That you have. The maître d’ has phoned a man he calls Monsieur Germain, probably the manager, about you causing a disturbance. You’re to be escorted out if you become intoxicated and loud.”

  McGarvey smiled and raised a glass to the maître d’, who finally turned away.

  “You’ve made your point,” Louise said. “Behave yourself.”

  “For now,” McGarvey said. A waiter came with his caviar. “Dinner is coming.”

  “That was fast,” Otto said.

  “They want to get rid of him ASAP,” Louise said.

  McGarvey took his time with his caviar and toasts, but the instant he was done, his plates and utensils were taken away, and his ceviche was served, followed, when he was finished, with his sea bass.

  “Was everything satisfactory, monsieur?” the head waiter asked at the end.

  Mac drank the last of the champagne. “I’ve had better,” he said. “No dessert. Bring me l’addition.”

  The waiter produced it immediately.

  McGarvey signed it, adding an outrageously large tip on top of the ordinary 15 percent already included. It was a final mark of his being a wealthy but boorish American.

  He staggered slightly as he crossed the dining room, where he stopped at the maître d’s station and laid a hundred-euro note on the stand. “For your trouble, monsieur,” he said in French, and he left the hotel.

  The night was soft, but the traffic was fairly heavy even though it was not ten yet. By midnight, the Place du Casino would be fully alive.

  “Are you okay?” Otto asked.

  “After the first glass, I poured my own wine, and most of it went into the bucket.”

  The casino was on the other side of the Place, not far away. The tree- and flower-lined walks were extremely pleasant, and there were the odd moments like these when he could forget for just an instant the danger he was walking into and thinking that Katy could be with him. She would have loved this place, and he was sorry that he’d never taken her here.

  The only disturbing note was that he was having trouble visualizing her face in any kind of sharp
focus. He could hear her laugh, smell her perfume, feel the texture of her hair and her cheek, but he could only see her wide eyes. He’d been having the same trouble for the past couple of years.

  Sometimes glancing at one of the photographs of her, it took just a split instant before he recognized her. At that moment, he felt an almost overwhelming sense of guilt not only for the reasons she was been killed but for how fast he had let the details of her slip away.

  For now, he was relieved that Pete and gotten in and out of Russia apparently without trouble, and he found that he was looking forward to seeing her.

  He crossed to the casino entrance where a man in livery opened the door for him. He had to show his passport, because locals were forbidden to enter. Crossing to the cashier’s position, he arranged for a credit of one hundred thousand euros, and once it was established, he took five thousand in cash and made his way to one of the bars, where he got a Campari and soda.

  The salon with slot machines was filled, many of the people dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and even flip-flops, with ball caps backward on their heads. And they weren’t just Americans; some were Italians, Germans, even French.

  Twenty years ago, such a thing would have been unthinkable.

  Mac put on the dark-rimmed glasses that Otto had made especially for him and headed toward the baccarat salon.

  11

  Kurshin, dressed in an impeccably tailored Armani tuxedo, with Martine, who was dressed in a simple off-the-shoulder white silk evening dress and a platinum choker with a six-carat diamond around her long neck, entered the casino, showing their passports—hers from Paris— a few minutes before eleven in the evening.

  Her hair was up in the back, and the dress was cut low enough that her practically bare breasts attracted the attention of every male in the place, including the doorman’s.

  “Good evening, sir, madam,” he said.

  “Mademoiselle,” Martine corrected.

  They arranged for a credit of 250,000 euros and then went into the nearly full lounge, where they found seats at the bar. He ordered a vodka martini for himself and a glass of champagne for her.

  She took a cigarette from her cocktail purse, and he lit it for her. “I feel almost as if we were in an early James Bond movie,” she said teasingly.