Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  Through graft and old-fashioned violence he had made his way into more serious, organised crime. He had been inducted into the Ismailovo gang, the Mafia organisation that controlled Moscow south. Bodyguard, hit man, bagman, and finally close lieutenant to the boss, he had been entrusted with the gang’s bigger secrets—the drug runs from the southern republics and, beyond them, Afghanistan.

  For ten years, when the Ismailovo mob and the KGB fought, made truces, fought again, and finally ended up as partners in crime, he had survived the hits and counter-hits. The KGB under Putin had eventually exerted its control over the Ismailovo, that was true, but it was the control of a monarch over a distant province, controllable only with the acquiescence of his subject.

  The Ismailovo had made a deal. It was a black deal of coexistence and mutual profit between a Mafia mob and the country’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB.

  And all that had taken place with the imprimatur of the man who had mattered most in the previous nine years since 2000, Vladimir Putin, himself former head of the FSB, then president, now an eminence grise waiting in the wings for what everyone believed would be a third, fourth, and who knew, indefinite presidential term.

  And of the many deals the KGB and the Ismailovo mob struck in this unholy alliance of organised crime and state intelligence agency, the most common was an exchange of personnel, on a job-by-job basis. KGB officers would guarantee the guarding of shipments of drugs from the south, and in return, the Ismailovo would provide the KGB, when asked, with an assassin for the KGB’s own business, in order to keep the intelligence service’s own hands notionally clean. And so the square of mob violence fitted the circle of the Russian state’s needs.

  Such a man was Grigory Byko, an Ismailovo mobster who had purchased a law degree, a killer first for the gang and finally for the state. Bykov, Adrian had told Logan, was Finn’s murderer.

  On the train northward, Logan surveyed his options. Moscow was the only possibility. Bykov never left Moscow if he could help it. His membership of parliament might protect him and ring-fence his deeds throughout Russia, but he was still, essentially, a small-time city crook at heart. The trip to Paris to end Finn’s life had been the only time he’d ever ventured abroad.

  Logan had learned from his Cyprus contact that nowadays Bykov owned a chauffeur business with armoured cars and bodyguards that dovetailed exorbitant rides for the rich with favours for his friends in the mob and in the Kremlin. He also owned a stake in a gold mine out east, somewhere in the Yakutsk region, Logan’s source had thought. But it was a stake bought with the threat of violence or death, not money.

  And, most presciently, Bykov owned a nightclub in the Patriarshiye Ponds, a plush area in downtown Moscow, to which the rich and famous flocked for its fashion and its beautiful whores. The club was called the Venus Apollo.

  That was where he would have his best chance, Logan decided, if he had any chance at all. It was either that, or meet his own death—and his absolution lay in either outcome.

  In Toronto he withdrew $100,000 in cash from an operational account. Then, on the flight to London and again on the three-hour trip to Kiev, he slept. He needed rest after the night before and before the task that lay ahead.

  There was no visa requirement to enter Ukraine, and no fingerprint analysis in either stopover. Logan exulted in his plan. And God bless the Europeans.

  He took a short internal flight from Kiev to the small Ukrainian town of Sumy up in the northeast of the country, bordering Russia. It was empty land, with fewer people and police than the border areas farther south, in the Donetsk.

  In a cheap clothes shop in a backstreet of Sumy, he bought a set of workman’s overalls, boots, and a cap, as well as a fur hat and a thick coat. From Sumy he took a bus in the direction of L’gov on the Russian side, but disembarked a few miles from the border. When night had fallen, around five in the afternoon, he began to walk. With every step he took towards the enemy, he was both a freer and a more marked man.

  As he crossed the dark, flat, snow-covered fields, he never thought for a moment whether he would ever retrace these steps. The deed was enough; the deed was the reward. But if he made it back again, then he knew he would be a very lucky man indeed.

  Where he walked was bare farmland, bird-watcher’s country—and smuggler’s country too. The FSB’s Russian border checkpoints were strung at longer intervals on this stretch of less important borderland, but the border police, now firmly under the control of the KGB once again, could strike anywhere. What they were looking for was obvious smuggling, however, on a scale that required vehicles. Illegal trade across these borders consisted, in theory, of anything from pork fat to nuclear material. But it was always closer to the former, just petty stuff. The incentives of bribes for the guards along this stretch were not so great.

  It was a long and lonely border, and it didn’t suffer from the nervousness of Russia’s borders with the Islamic republics. The villagers on the Ukrainian side were in many cases Russians like the border guards themselves. In Soviet times, Russia’s historic desire for control of Ukraine had resulted in the movement of Russian people west, into Ukrainian lands. Out here, on the eastern borders of Ukraine, it was as much Russian as Ukrainian.

  And so the guards were more than content to stay in the warmth of their guardhouses on a freezing winter’s night. They didn’t need much excuse to remain at their fixed posts, rather than roaming the fields on the bleak chance of arresting some poor Ukrainian villagers engaged in petty smuggling who didn’t have any worthwhile bribe money.

  Alone, at night, in an icy January fog that descended over the steppe, Logan guessed he stood a good enough chance. He wasn’t sure how far on the Russian side the border zone extended; that was his main concern. It varied from stretch to stretch. He might have to walk a few hundred yards or five miles or more once he was through, in order to be clear.

  Under the thick fog he never knew the exact moment when he’d crossed the border into Russia. The fields within his impaired vision were flat and ghostly white. There was no visible moon, no features on the landscape.

  Once, he thought he saw a light or lights in the distance, but he didn’t know if his eyes were playing tricks. But in case it was a checkpoint, he skirted away over the rough, frozen, snow-covered fields.

  Whatever there was out there he couldn’t see; he knew there was nothing much apart from small, quiet villages, the inhabitants of which had long since retired for the night.

  Later he thought he heard the sound of a car, and where the fog had drifted, he made out a copse of skeletal trees to the north of his route. He had no idea of time, or even, in the dark grey fog, of space. In his recklessness he felt immortal.

  By the time the sky showed the faintest sign of change from night to day, the fog had begun to thin and he saw the dawn attempt to make an appearance through heavy cloud. By then he knew he was through. And as the dawn came up, a light snow began to fall, which thickened and blanked out the skyline, as well as the footsteps he’d left behind him.

  He trudged along the edge of a field behind a high hedge and slowly began to make out the features of the landscape ahead where he could glimpse it through now thicker flakes of tumbling snow. There were a few trees, but it was mainly snow-covered tilled earth, and the new snow was already beginning to cover the frozen crystals of earlier falls.

  In the distance, he saw a village, and he felt a soaring belief that nothing could touch him.

  As he approached the edge of the village, he saw a farmer spreading seed for some chickens under a low, hay-filled barn. He was still too close to the border, Logan thought. He didn’t trust his accent not to sound foreign.

  Skirting the farm, he came up into the village by a small church, its plaster walls crumbling beneath a snow-capped bell tower. There was nobody about. He looked at his watch. It was just after eight in the morning.

  He walked on for three hours, until he’d passed two more villages, and at the fourth, slightly l
arger than the others, he entered by a small road that came into a square. He crossed the square, walked two hundred yards to the route out towards the east, and waited for a car.

  Within half an hour he’d picked up a lift and negotiated a price to Voronezh. The driver was about his age and wasn’t going to Voronezh, but for two hundred roubles he’d take him.

  Logan spoke in a thin, rasping voice, barely audible, and told the man he was on the way to hospital for an operation on his throat.

  They didn’t talk on the road.

  Time drifted slowly. They stopped for fuel, and Logan paid. The day never really dawned, but just hung with a mind half made up in a shallow, flat wanness that enfeebled the flat country around them. They made slow progress in the snow until it eased and were in Voronezh by the afternoon.

  Logan offered to buy the driver a meal. He was starving, but he also needed one more thing from the man before he left. While they ate in silence, the man drank a few beers. When he went to the toilet at the back of the café, Logan removed the man’s wallet from a jacket hung over the back of his chair and slipped out his identity card, pocketing it. He replaced the wallet and, paying for the meal, thanked the man and told him he was going to look for a hotel.

  He walked to the railway station by back routes, in the unlikely event the man would check his wallet and come looking for him. When he bought a ticket to Moscow, the ticket collector barely looked at his new card. He waited for an hour before the train pulled in.

  In his exhaustion, he was elated. He felt the light-headedness of supreme, unreal optimism. He knew he would succeed.

  Chapter 33

  ON THE SECOND DAY of Logan’s disappearance, Burt knew what Logan was going to do. Concealed beneath his usual jovial good humour, Anna detected, if not self-criticism, then a sense of sorrow that a protégé was on the course of self-destruction. Burt had tried with his great energy and expansiveness to guide Logan away from rash, impulsive behaviour, but it seemed that even his powers had not been enough.

  “Logan is a loser,” he pronounced with unusual cruelty and, as usual with Burt, brought his focus to bear on what was possible; Mikhail and, most vitally, Icarus.

  Marcie, despite her months of increasing conflict with Logan, was anxious, while Larry’s only reaction seemed to be a sense of frustration that it wasn’t going to be him who dealt Logan some physical harm.

  “It’s the last we see of him,” he’d said to Anna with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.

  For herself, Anna was surprised at her reaction to Logan’s disappearance, and Logan would have been pleased if he’d known. Untroubled by her night of physical intimacy with him, she felt once more a fragile link between Logan and Finn. While Finn would never have sold anyone down the river as Logan had done, let alone a small child, what seemed about to become Logan’s final act on this earth had the heroic madness that had characterised Finn’s own end.

  It was Adrian who, under questioning from Burt, had given Burt the information that led to his conclusion about Logan’s aim. When Adrian, recounting their discussion on the night before Logan disappeared, told Burt that he had given Logan the identity of Finn’s killer, Burt picked out this element of their conversation alone for analysis.

  Adrian was a shit, he thought privately. He’d known just what he was doing when he gave Logan the name. He had found a shattered man and driven a stake right through the defenceless cracks of Logan’s mind.

  But despite his fury with Adrian, Burt dismissed Logan now, and any further discussion about him. They—everybody—was to get on with the matter in hand, and with no further distractions.

  The first task was for Anna to check the dead drop that she had arranged with Vladimir. With his arms opened expansively wide in what looked like an impersonation of a variety club performer, Burt fulsomely agreed that she should leave the apartment alone to make this contact.

  The drop was only a few streets away from the apartment, and he wished her to know that in this, she was free. But behind this munificence, and as always with Burt, strategy was everything. His purpose was to reassure her that in the forthcoming meeting with Mikhail—the crucial meeting—she would be equally her own master. Burt wished to set a precedent.

  She arrived at the café called Ganymede late one morning when the sun was making a brief appearance through heavy clouds, which looked like they were going to win the day. The café was a student hangout, and she bought a coffee in a queue of sleepy-eyed youths carrying jute shoulder bags and with woolly hats pulled half down over their pale faces. Then she perused the rows of books in stacks by the window at the front, overlooking the street. She found the copy of Defoe, looked at the page they’d agreed, moved eleven pages on, and found a note on the page. On the back was written in pencil, “I like your invitation.” Then there was a time and a date. Vladimir’s proposal was to meet again, a week from now, and with three days added, that made ten days.

  Perhaps he needed time to collect material for his initial offering to the Americans. Or maybe, she thought, it was a period for him to say good-bye to everything he knew.

  Leaving the café, she returned to the apartments. There was a general air of jubilation that Vladimir, albeit the second string of their operations, was yielding fruit. Burt was particularly pleased. He seemed to take it as sign that everything else he’d planned was going to fall into place.

  Mikhail had insisted that Anna meet him for the second time in Washington, D.C. It was assumed that another trip to New York was too high a risk for him.

  Once again, the team was to decamp, to be flown down to another of Burt’s safe houses in the capital.

  It was two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, and Mikhail had chosen the day of the inauguration itself for their meeting.

  Burt, with Dupont alone now included in the knowledge of the meeting, professed himself to be in two minds about the choice. On the one hand, the million or more people who were expected to arrive at the capital and greet the new era was cover of a kind that might well provide enough confusion for a meeting. On the other side there were hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers stacked in a ring around the central procession and presidential celebrations.

  But he accepted that the meeting was set in stone, and he trusted Mikhail’s instincts.

  All Anna would say was, “The focus of everyone will be inwards—the law, the FBI, the CIA, everybody.”

  From this Burt guessed that the meeting would not be in the centre of the city itself, but outside the perimeter of events. Everyone, both literally and metaphorically, would be looking the other way.

  The wooden house in the chic Washington neighbourhood of Georgetown was another tour de force in Burt’s collection of classic American properties. To Anna, they now seemed almost like a separate project of Burt’s, a one-man preservation society of Americana, with state-by-state attention to the detail of local nuances.

  “I’m an American.” Burt laughed when she displayed her astonishment at the house’s beauty and authenticity. “I’m not a Virginian or a Texan or a Californian. I love the whole damn country in all its quirky mess.”

  On the day before the meeting, just before they all sat down to lunch, Burt took her aside into another study with another fire blazing like a picture in a holiday catalogue. He wanted to run over some details that had occurred to him on the trip down from New York.

  He was particularly attentive to her every need, as if she were an athlete before a race.

  “I don’t like you going in unprotected,” he said.

  “We’ve discussed it,” she said. “Nobody but me. Mikhail’s a fox. Any sign that what he trusts will happen has changed, and he won’t make an appearance.”

  “I know, I know,” Burt agreed. “I agree with you.”

  He seemed unusually nervous. Maybe it was because this was the culmination of all his plans since the end of the previous summer.

  “In that case, you personally could be better protecte
d,” he said. “What about a weapon?”

  “Why? Against what? ” she asked surprised.

  “I don’t know. But we’re reaching the apex of the pyramid now, and any trouble will occur around this moment.”

  Was he being his usual prescient self, she wondered, or was it just nerves?

  “If you’re going unprotected by my watchers, as we all agree you should, I’d like you to be armed, that’s all,” he said. “Let me have that, Anna.”

  He was behaving like a father on his daughter’s wedding day, she thought. Giving her away to Mikhail.

  “It’s not a great day to be armed,” she said. “On a presidential inauguration.”

  “Well, you tell me. Are you going to be anywhere near the main event?” he said. “What are the chances of a routine search?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I want to be dropped out of the city, away from everything. Around Arlington.”

  “Across the river?” Burt said. “In Virginia?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t reply, but she could see his mind trying to follow Mikhail’s logic, and that it finally approved.

  “So what kind of weapon would you like?” he said.

  “Are you sure, Burt? This ups the risks in all kinds of ways.”

  “Not so much. And I’d be happier. If there’s any trouble from regular law enforcement, you’d have clearance after the event.”

  “Then I’ll take a Thompson Contender,” she said, believing that this might deter him.

  Burt smiled.

  “Not the carbine, I trust.”

  “No. The pistol. I can still shoot a man at two hundred yards.”

  “Then that’s what you’ll have. And the rounds?”

  “Standard NATO issue. Point two two three. Two dozen.”

  “Okay.”

  And there it was, by the end of the day, delivered personally to her by Burt.

  At six o’clock the next morning, Burt, Anna, Larry, and two guards drove the few miles from Georgetown across the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery.