by Tim Tigner
The next question was going to be tough, but Alex had to ask it. “Do you think Frank was working for them, too?”
“Heavens, no. He was the one they were working against. Frank kept finding ingenious ways to counteract all the sabotage they had me do; it was driving them crazy.”
A wave of pride swept over Alex, and he felt himself starting to tear up, so he pressed on. “Them?”
“I say ‘them’ because he always said ‘we.’ But I only ever had contact with one guy.”
“Do you have any idea who he is?”
“No. But I think I know who he works for.”
Alex’s heart missed a beat. He raised his eyebrows rather than asking the question as he clenched the edge of the picnic table.
“About two months ago I got an extra page attached to a fax from him, by mistake I’m sure. It mentioned Irkutsk Motorworks.”
“As in Irkutsk, Russia?”
“Yes. I only know that because they’re in the industry.” Elaine squinted. “How do you know that?”
“My mother was Russian. Ya mnogo znayu pro Rosseyou. Do they make engines for military aircraft?”
“No. I’m pretty sure they just do passenger and cargo models.”
“Did you keep the fax?”
“It made me nervous having it around. I was afraid he would find it, so after a couple of nervous days, I burned it.”
“Damn. Was the Irkutsk Motorworks fax in English?”
“Yes, it was. Unfortunately, it was just the last page of the fax, so there were only two lines.”
Alex held his breath.
“I’ll never forget them.” She smiled for the first time. “‘This last series of mishaps should ensure that Irkutsk Motorworks beats United Electronics to market by at least twelve months. I’m working to widen the gap even further.’ It was signed with what I assume was an acronym, a word spelled B-U-K-T-O-P.”
Chapter 13
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
“I can tell by your expression that BUKTOP means something to you,” Elaine said.
Alex nodded. “Those letters read differently in the Cyrillic alphabet. To a Russian, BUKTOP is VICTOR. It’s a signature.”
“Do you know whose?”
“No. And it’s a common first name, so it will be useless at this stage of the investigation, especially since Victor is here. But that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that we know who Victor is working for. Irkutsk Motorworks was the name I needed.”
“But Irkutsk is halfway around the world in the middle of nowhere.”
“More than half if you fly the usual way. Irkutsk is further east of Moscow than New York is of San Francisco.”
“Fly? You’re not really thinking about going to Irkutsk, are you?”
“I’m going wherever it takes. I’ve always gone—in the Special Forces, the CIA, and as a PI. If it were China, I might think twice. But in this case, I’ll fit in almost as well as I do here. I speak the language fluently, and the Soviet Union was the focus of much of my government work.”
This revelation seemed to give Elaine pause. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
Alex thought so, too, but didn’t want to go there now. “You were due for some good luck.”
She smiled weakly, her mind already elsewhere. Gone were the tears. Analytics had replace emotions. Her engineering mind had kicked in, and she was running permutations. He let her run with them.
“What am I supposed to do?” she finally asked. “You were right. The UE-2000 will explode today. But what you don’t know is that there’s going to be a demonstration today. There will be onlookers who could get seriously injured or even killed. I can’t cross the line from saboteur to murderer, not now that you’ve put hope on the horizon. But if I don’t cross that line, my daughter . . .” She didn’t finish. The emotions were back.
“You can do what I did early this morning when I found my car wired to explode.”
“Your what!”
Alex didn’t elaborate. “You can interrupt the circuit, so to speak. Leave the sabotage in place so Victor can’t say you didn’t do your job, but arrange things so that the UE-2000 fails to function for some other reason. You said Victor always knows what’s going on, that you never need to report. That means he’ll know you did as asked, and you’ll be safe. You just need to ensure that when the other engineers investigate the cause of that failure, they find and fix your sabotage as well.”
She thought about that for a moment while nodding appreciatively. “That takes care of today. What about tomorrow?”
“Let me take care of tomorrow.”
“How are you going to do that? The car bomb changes everything. That means they’re on to you. Watching you. Going to Irkutsk would be like walking into a propeller blade.”
“I’ll just make sure they’re neither watching nor expecting me.”
“And how will you do that?”
“They made that part easy. All I have to do is die.”
Chapter 14
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
“The authorities have just released the name of a man killed earlier this evening when his car exploded in a Bay Area driveway. He is Alexander Ferris of San Diego, California. This is not the first time tragedy has struck the Ferris family. Investigators found that the powerful incendiary device used tonight is reminiscent of the terrorist bomb that killed his parents sixteen years ago in Rome, opening speculation about the origin of the crime. Given that this follows on the heels of his brother’s recent—.”
Victor turned off the car radio. At last. For some inexplicable reason, the bomb had not gone off the first time Alex drove the car. Victor had planned to go back tonight to check his work, but now that would not be necessary. Whatever jiggled out of place must have jiggled back in. Better late than never.
Victor pulled his BMW into the Shell station that housed his favorite phone booth. It was the old-fashioned kind, the type you could step inside and shut the door. It was practically his second office. Eager to share his latest victory, he began dialing a long series of codes from memory. Halfway through he stopped and looked out into the fog. He had it again, the strange feeling that he was being watched.
Victor did a careful three-hundred-sixty-degree survey around the Shell station and the surrounding streets. He was looking for whatever had caused a blip on his radar, but he saw nothing. Things had been going wrong for Victor lately, and it was beginning to play with his mind. This was no time to get paranoid. Get paranoid? He had been paranoid for a decade. Paranoia was what kept him out of an American jail, or worse, much worse, the KGB’s infamous Lubyanka.
He shook his head and finished the sequence. Then he covered the mouthpiece with a scrambler.
“Yarik.”
“It’s Victor calling. You can call off your men at the airports. Alex is dead.”
Yarik grunted in disappointment. “I was looking forward to meeting him. The file you faxed over was quite enticing. Never had the chance to play with a Green Beret before.”
“It was a long shot anyway. Just being meticulous. It is a pity that he’ll never know the pleasure of your company. Some people are just born lucky.”
“Don’t suppose you used one of my special condoms?”
“You’re a funny man, Yarik. No, I arranged a barbecue. You know how Americans love those.”
“With C4 briquettes?”
“Best thing when you want your cooking well done.”
“Isn’t that likely to get the police involved?”
“Sure, but with his brother just ten days cold, I figured the best thing to do on this one was to hide in plain sight. The C4 makes it look like a terrorist hit, so the local cops will assume it’s revenge for something Alex did in the CIA and gladly write it off as being out of their jurisdiction. Meanwhile the CIA won’t care since he’s retired.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Victor put down the phone and found himself in an unexpectedly reflective mood. It was sad that he should find it easier to talk to a professional assassin than to his own father. Actually, he found it easier to talk to just about anyone than his father. With Karpov, Victor felt as though he was always on trial, always a defendant with something to prove. Soon, however, he would deliver American industry on a silver platter. Then Karpov would finally accept him, embrace him, and Victor would live within the glow he had experienced when his father first revealed his plans. A smile grew on his face as the melancholy vanished. Meanwhile, you’ve got another call to make . . .
Chapter 15
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
Sugurov was pacing his office when the call came through. What was happening to him? He wasn’t the nervous type. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the War in Afghanistan, decades of conflict in the Caucuses, none had shaken him. Why should this one be different? The answer was obvious, but not comforting. This time he was fighting an invisible enemy, indigenous terrorists whose numbers were not counted, whose objectives were not clear, and whose tactics were not known.
Ri-ri-ring . . . swish.
“I’m listening.”
“Good evening, sir. Are we secure?”
“Good morning. Yes, we are secure.”
“Alex just bought a ticket to Irkutsk using the name Grekov.”
“Grekov?”
“Yes, Alexander Grekov. Apparently he still has a Soviet passport from his CIA days.”
“Why Irkutsk? Does he think that’s where they’re based?”
“Apparently. I’m afraid I have not been able to learn any more than that yet. Clearly it is my top priority.”
“You’ve booked yourself on the same flight, I assume?”
“Of course. We’ll be passing through Moscow Sheremetyevo tomorrow.”
“Good to know. Anything else?”
“Yes. Victor put a bomb under Alex’s car. I disarmed it—pulled the detonator cap out so it would look accidental if Victor went back. He didn’t, but then Alex also found it so my actions may have confused him. Regardless, Alex eventually went on to detonate the bomb himself in order to make it look like he was dead. Then he used a police contact to get his name leaked to the press. Victor fell for it. I just heard him call in the news.”
“Whom did he call?”
“I couldn’t tell. I only heard his end of the conversation and unfortunately I couldn’t see or hear what number he entered. He always uses relay codes and a mouthpiece scrambler.”
“You think this will give Alex the freedom he needs to figure this out?”
“For as long as it lasts. Sir, I was thinking, it’s not too late to go to Gorbachev with what we know.”
“We’ve been over that, Andrey. Without knowing who they are, it’s simply too risky. Once Ferris figures that out, then maybe.”
“Gorbachev has resources we don’t,” Andrey said.
“Exactly. He’ll want to use them. He’ll confide in the men he trusts. Just like you and I would have confided in Leo. But they got to Leo, so surely they’ve gotten to others in high places. Perhaps dozens of others. No, we’ve got to take them out covertly, before they know we’ve learned of their existence. If we panic them, they may act rashly and create more chaos than the current government could possibly survive. So you stick with Alex, Andrey. You keep him on track and out of trouble.”
“You can count on me, sir.”
“We all are.”
PART II
Chapter 16
NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA
Yarik looked at his watch and saw that he had just enough time for a quick hit before catching the early flight from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk for Karpov’s nine-o’clock meeting. His tight schedule meant that there was no time for artistry—just a quick “accidental” neck snap. That was a shame. As far as Yarik was concerned, straightforward hits were for Cretans and Goombahs. He would make up for that regression this afternoon. He would get creative with the engineer from Irkutsk Motorworks he suspected of slipping secrets to his Mongolian mistress.
He scanned Luda Orlova’s courtyard for activity. There was none. The street sweepers and dog walkers had not yet emerged. Yarik pulled his fur cap down snugly on his big, bald dome and walked briskly from the car to entrance number four. He suffered from the fact that his appearance, while a valuable asset most of the time, was a liability whenever anonymity was required. Nobody ever forgot how Yarik looked. At times like these, his only option was to avoid observation.
He hopped into the elevator and pushed “Five.” The doors squeaked closed, and the elevator began to rumble upward. Then his cell phone rang. Damn. Yarik pressed the answer button immediately to stop the ringer and then looked at the display: Sergey Shipilov.
Sergey was the young agent Yarik had posted at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport to watch for Ferris, the former Green Beret Yarik had been hoping to get his hands on, until Victor took him out in a blaze of glory.
“I’m listening.”
“Sir, it’s Sergey Shipilov. I’m calling to report that Alex Ferris is alive. He’s alive and in Russia and staying in room 212 of the Hotel Irkutsk.”
“What!” Yarik hit the stop button on the elevator. It was early; traffic would be light.
“It’s true, sir. I know you called off the watch, but as I had no other pressing business, I decided to go the extra mile for you. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for—”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in the hotel lobby. I’ve questioned the receptionist and the taxi driver and learned that Alex plans to sleep all day before going out at nine o’clock this evening. The driver didn’t know for sure where he would be going, but he has reason to believe it’s Max’s Place.”
“The strip club?”
“Yes, sir. He said Alex asked him where he could go to have a good time with a beautiful lady, or six.”
“And you’re absolutely sure it’s him?”
“He looks just like the photos you gave me. He has the six-foot athletic build and bright blue eyes described in the memo, and he arrived from San Francisco. He’s got a Soviet passport with the name Alexander Grekov, but unless you’re a believer in huge coincidences, it’s got to be Alex Ferris.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences. When is Alex scheduled to check out?”
“Not until the middle of next week.”
“Good. Now, listen carefully, Sergey. You are to stay on him like glue, invisible glue. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did he do anything to indicate that he knows he’s being followed?”
“No, sir. I was very careful.”
“Then you should be able to handle him on your own until morning. I happen to be flying to Irkutsk in an hour, but I’m going to be in a meeting until noon, and then I have other business that will keep me occupied until around midnight. I doubt Alex will last that long at Max’s—I’ve seen the girls—so I’ll plan to catch up with you at the hotel around this time tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, you are not to arrest Alex, just observe him. Take detailed notes on everything he does and especially everyone he sees and call me on this number if anything extraordinary happens.”
“Yes sir, general.”
“Are you sure you can handle Alex alone, Sergey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good. I’d just as soon not involve the Irkutsk office. I will make the decision on what to do with him when I see you tomorrow morning, based on what Alex does between now and then. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. I’m your man, sir.”
“We’re about to find out. If you start getting tired, Sergey, just remember that in twenty-four hours you’ll be a hero. Don’t make a fatal mistake before then.” Yarik hung up without waiting for acknowledgment.
This was bittersweet news. Yesterday Yarik had made a point of lavishing praise on Victor to Karpov, and now he looked like a fool. On the other hand, now he could have his way with an American spy. Overall, it was probably a net gain. How big a gain would depend on Alex’s stamina. Instinct told him it was going to be good.
Then there was Sergey. Yarik didn’t buy the young agent’s tale of going the extra mile. He found if far more likely that Sergey had temporarily misplaced his pager, or had forgotten to check it until he had already picked Alex up. That was all right. Yarik could appreciate a man taking an advantage when presented. Just so long as there were no other anomalies. On second thought . . .
Yarik called the office and had them transfer his call to the Hotel Irkutsk. He identified himself, reconfirmed what Sergey had told him, and left a message with his mobile number for whomever was at reception: he was to be discreetly informed immediately if Mr. Grekov had any change of plans. Then he hung up and pressed “one” on his speed dial.
“Karpov.”
“It’s Yarik. I have some bad news. Apparently the American private eye escaped Victor’s explosion and hopped on a plane. He arrived in Irkutsk ninety minutes ago using a Soviet passport. Fortunately, my redundant security measures at Sheremetyevo compensated for this shortcoming.”
“Why didn’t the bomb work?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Victor yet.”
“I see. Don’t mention this to him. I’d like to bring it up myself.”
“As you wish.”
“Why were you employing redundant security? Is there something else I should know?”
“Just instinct. Alex’s bio raised my defenses.”
“I love those instincts of yours. We’ll come back to the bio later. It gave me an idea. Where is Alex now?”
“He’s staying at the Hotel Irkutsk under the name of Alexander Grekov. My man is going to watch him for the next twenty-four hours. We will probably pick him up together early tomorrow morning after he leads us to whatever fountain of information brought him here. That way we will be able to cut off the source as well. I’m planning to interrogate Alex personally, and should have everything there is to know by noon tomorrow.”