by Dan Pollock
Several minutes later, while the others were debating the relative merits of afternoon water-skiing on the Schwarzee or more tennis, Marcus finally took his nose out of the newspaper.
“Sorry,” he said, getting to his feet, “you folks will have to excuse me.”
“Where are you going?”
“For starters, München.”
“München? Now? What about tennis?”
“Well, I’m afraid doubles is definitely out.”
“Jack! Stop making jokes!”
“Silvie, I’m being serious now. Something just came up. In fact, my whole damn holiday might have just gone kaput. Orlo, can you take care of getting that glider back to Gunther for me at the school? I’ve got to leave right now.”
“But you are a madman!” Silvie said.
“I know. I’ll telephone you later, I promise, and explain.”
Before they could muster further protest, Marcus had collected his morning winnings from the table, folded the newspaper under his arm and was striding off the terrace, leaving the confounded trio almost as abruptly as he had joined them. They could not see the intense excitement that now blazed in his eyes.
So, he thought, hurrying down the outside hotel stairs toward the car park, Marchenko is gone. And how many of his highly placed people had been taken out with him? But the skeleton of the Colonel General’s network was obviously still intact—at least enough had remained to get the old man’s last command relayed to Marcus.
The small, carefully worded display ad—for a nonexistent package tour to the Canary Islands—was the one Marcus had been told to look for, the green light for the biggest assignment of his life. But he had not expected the code words signaling the General’s death. It made this morning’s foolishness recede into split-second oblivion, along with the trio of his most recent playmates—fatuous Orlo, silly Lise, sullen and sultry Silvie. (How long would she wait for his call, he wondered, before she gave up?) No matter what happened, none of them would ever see or hear from him again.
As Marcus had predicted, the hang glider had landed safely in the grassy meadow, a giant, exotic butterfly nestled among the Alpine wildflowers. He gave it only a glance before opening the saddlebags of the Moto Guzzi sportbike he had parked earlier, pulling out and zipping into his cycle leathers. Then he helmeted, straddled the saddle, fired up the 1000cc engine and, spitting gravel, snarled off down motorway 170 through the shining mountains toward Kufstein and the German border.
Three
The idea was preposterous. How could the unleashing of one potential assassin threaten the most protected man on earth—an assassin whose identity, if not his present whereabouts, was known in advance, and on whom both the KGB and GRU had voluminous dossiers?
For—though his frequent foreign visits and television appearances created an image of accessibility—Soviet President Alois Rybkin, like most of his prudent predecessors, worked and lived mainly behind the impregnable Kremlin walls or in his well-protected quarters in suburban Kuntsevo. When he traveled through the streets of Moscow, it was in a caravan of identical, curtained, armor-plated ZILs, heavily convoyed by militiamen. And wherever he went, home or abroad—and especially when, for the benefit of news cameras, he seemed to mingle with crowds—he was enveloped at every instant by an elite cohort of KGB guards.
Yet, quite apparently, Rybkin was concerned. Instead of dismissing Kuzin and Biryukov after their briefing in his private office in the Presidium building near the Spassky Tower, he had bidden them both remain while the pretty blonde from Soviet TV came waltzing in with her makeup kit. The two senior Politburo members waited now, slipping farther behind in their own heavy schedules, while Rybkin joked with the girl as she touched up the famous face with Pan Cake stick.
Foreign Minister Ivo Feodorovitch Kuzin, older of the two, consulted his watch once again. The blonde had been in nearly fifteen minutes; in another ten Rybkin was due downstairs in the Kremlin video studio for yet another address on national unity. Kuzin would have to stay for the taping, so his entire evening calendar was now by the boards. He sighed as the girl finally whisked off the shoulder cloth, buttoned up her case and, squealing at a farewell pat on the rear, sashayed out, leaving Rybkin alone at the other end of the room.
The President stood up from his favorite armchair, which, like most of the furniture in his office and private apartments, was in the ornate Empire style (in marked contrast to the utilitarian tastes of his predecessor). For the moment his blocky peasant figure was silhouetted in the tall windows against the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, its gilded dome afire now from the lingering sun of a Moscow spring evening.
“Well, Ivo, Volodya, what are you wizards going to do?”
Kuzin, after a glance at his younger colleague, KGB chief Volodya Biryukov, addressed the question in his usual perambulatory style: “It is not worth even a moment’s worry on your part, Alois Maksimovitch. We will handle it, if I may say, in a routine fashion. That is to say, a perfectly thorough fashion. Permit me to enumerate some obvious things. In an average month there are—how many threats, Volodya?”
“Thousands,” Biryukov shrugged.
“Thousands of threats on your life—each month. I’m speaking of those we are aware of—most of them, incredibly, contained in actual letters addressed to you by lunatics—every one of which, of course, the KGB Ninth Directorate must investigate. Others are mere drunken ravings or deranged outbursts overheard and reported to us. Of course, these, too, must be followed up. This is the average.”
“The White House Secret Service get even more than this,” Biryukov added with a nonchalant wave of a plump hand. “Their chief of detail has told me this.”
“Unfortunately, that figure has recently escalated,” Kuzin continued. “And rather steadily so, since the Potsdam Conference and your own Greater Europe initiatives, with the predictable howls from the old wolves that we are proceeding down a path toward surrender of national sovereignty. Volodya has, I daresay, lost count of the threats. Isn’t that correct?”
“Unfortunately, that is so.”
Rybkin shrugged. “The point, Ivo?”
“The point is, Alois Maksimovich, what is one more potential assassin, more or less?”
“When none has the slightest chance of success,” added Biryukov.
Rybkin came closer, his blunt, flat features bronzed and softened by the studio makeup. He searched the faces of his two principal advisers, then turned on his heel and walked heavily back across the Turkestan carpet to his massive rosewood desk, a gift of Queen Victoria to the Tsarevich Sasha, later Alexander III. Rybkin sank back into the red leather upholstery of his oversized chair and pondered the coffered ceiling while the digital clock on his blotter blinked off two minutes.
Finally Kuzin spoke: “Alois, please excuse me. I know you are thinking, but you must be downstairs in five minutes.”
“And so I will be. All right, listen carefully, both of you. You are forgetting one essential element. This is Marchenko’s hand-picked assassin. And Marchenko was a perfectionist, and an excellent judge of men. This man Marcus is, therefore, not one out of a thousand or a million dangerous lunatics. He is not a statistic of any kind, but rather a special case. And he has my full attention, as he should have yours—because of Marchenko, and because of what this mountain of paper you have brought says about him.”
Rybkin gestured toward a console table, on which they had deposited Marcus’ KGB dossier, which ran to three-hundred pages, and his smaller, but more impressive Spetsnaz military file. “According to what I read, and you have confirmed, this man has apparently never failed a ‘wet affair.’ So yes, I worry a little, perhaps because I am superstitious. Not because I am afraid for my own paltry life, but because I am on the verge of some very important things which I don’t wish interrupted.”
Kuzin read the half-mocking, half-defiant look in the President’s eyes. In recent conversations Rybkin had made more than a few references to certain heroic individuals who, a
t various times in history, had stood poised on the threshold of greatness—Alexander on the banks of the Oxus; Napoleon in Egypt, casting his conqueror’s eye eastward upon British India, and perhaps the Ottoman Empire as well; Lenin secreted on the train back from exile in 1917 to Russia, with the fire of Bolshevism in his heart. The clear inference, for Kuzin, was that, with this latest series of Greater Europe initiatives and a startling new Middle East strategy to back it up, Alois Maksimovich Rybkin was beginning to measure himself in such exalted company. That Rybkin’s dreams were of this stature Kuzin no longer doubted. But would their charismatic vozhd, leader, bring them off, as had Alexander and Lenin, or would he stumble, as had Napoleon at the battle of the Nile—and again in Moscow and Waterloo? Kuzin, the wily statesman, remained skeptical.
“Alois, as you have already heard,” he reassured, “Volodya’s report on security at Potsdam is very impressive. He has gone far beyond the steps that were taken, or that were even conceivable at the original conference back in Comrade Stalin’s day.”
“You misunderstand me. I don’t fault the efforts of the Committee for State Security. I leave all these matters in your capable hands, Volodya.” Rybkin pivoted the big chair and waved again at the dossiers. “But there must be somebody else.”
“What do you mean?”
“No matter how good this assassin is at his business, somebody must be as good—or better. I want you to ransack your files for such a man—whether he’s KGB, or another Spetsnaz superman like Marcus here. I don’t care. He can be a Kazakh, an Irkut, or a Chukchi Ekimo, for that matter. One who shoots better scores, does better on field examinations, who also has never failed an assignment. I want that person located.”
“But, Alois, that is exactly how we pick your bodyguards! You already have the elite of the elite.”
“I don’t want him to guard me, Ivo Feodorovich. I want him employed offensively, not defensively. Locate this man and give him the assignment of finding and killing this Marcus. At once, do you hear me, gentlemen?” Rybkin stood up and smiled. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the country is waiting.”
*
Taras Arensky was bent over the keyboard, attempting to play “Sabre Dance”—at least some impressive bits and pieces, trademark passages he had memorized laboriously in his youth. It wasn’t going well. Taras was only foolhardy enough to let the warhorse out of its stable on those infrequent occasions when, as now, he was more than a little tipsy; but unfortunately the alcohol, while lending courage, invariably took away dexterity.
Finally he threw up his hands in defeat and found himself grinning sheepishly at a showy, thirtyish blonde who had inserted herself into the curve of the closed grand. She had a high-gloss smile, a black strapless with estimable cleavage and was regarding him as though he were an hors d’oeuvre.
Taras quelled the twinges of panic he often experienced around predatory females, a breed he somehow seemed to attract, especially in the jungly habitat of the Washington party circuit. Relax, he told himself, learn to enjoy it. It’s all part of your new career. Tonight’s glittery occasion would certainly afford a good chance to polish his conversational skills.
Though a relative newcomer to the local scene, Taras had recognized dozens of national and D.C. celebrities eddying in and out of the elegant rooms of the Georgetown mansion—senators, a couple of network anchormen, columnists, TV and print reporters, an activist actress, even the mayor of New York. They were gathered ostensibly to celebrate the brave and inexplicable launching of yet another foredoomed, alternative Washington daily. Moving among them, indeed towering over all but one ex-NBA center turned congressman, was their gangly host, E. Lawrence Hornaday, whose Midwestern-based news-paper group had, for unfathomable corporate reasons, decided upon unequal contest with the mighty Post.
“So,” the blonde wanted to know, widening her smile, “what exactly do you do?”
“Well... I’m not a concert pianist.”
“Mmm, I guessed that. You should be, though.”
“The way I play? God save us!”
“No, the way you look—and talk. Très romantique. Like Omar Sharif. Are you a Slav?”
“I am. But Sharif’s an Egyptian, I think.”
“Mm, but I always think of him as Zhivago. So, tell me about you.”
“Not much to tell, I’m afraid,” Taras said, shifting into standard deflection mode. “I consult. Your face is very familiar, you know. Are you on television?”
“Mmm. Every Saturday morning. Washington Wives.”
“I’ve seen it. You interview, uh—”
“Washington wives. Exactly!”
She found this enormously funny, and Taras laughed along with her, though he suspected his own inept response had set her off. At the height of the silliness he glanced over the blonde’s bare shoulder and saw, across the large room, his fiancée.
Charlotte Walsh was a showy and elegant woman in her own right—tall and vivid, dark-haired and slim, her sharpish features redeemed by a flashing smile and contralto-rich laugh. She was talking and gesturing theatrically to an all-male group, one of whom he recognized as the French ambassador. She was also watching Taras like a hawk. I trust you, her expression said, but I’m not letting you out of my sight.
“Heatherly Smith.” The blonde was extending her hand with a soft jingle of antique-gold bracelets. “Et tu—”
“His name is Taras Arensky.” Lawrence Hornaday eased his considerable frame between them. “Sorry, Smitty, but I need to borrow him for a moment.”
The blonde’s eyebrows went up in mock distress. “Only if you promise to bring him back, Larry!”
But Hornaday was already steering him away. “Taras, there’s somebody I want you to meet,” he said as they serpentine purposefully together out of the room, down a long corridor and through sliding, double mahogany doors into a paneled library.
Two men got up from a tapestry-covered settee under a framed Audubon print. Taras went through the handshakes and was immediately alert. Despite their easygoing manner, the two were obviously high-powered errand boys. “They’re from the White House,” Hornaday said with a nod to the men. “I’ll leave you to it.” He backed out of the room as he drew the mahogany doors silently together.
“You carry a gun,” Taras said to the man on the left.
“Very good. It’s not supposed to show.”
“So what’s this about?”
“The President wants to talk to you, Mr. Arensky.”
“Why does he want to see me?”
“He’d like to tell you that himself.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“You mean now, don’t you?”
“That’s correct. We have a car waiting in back.”
“I’m sorry, but my fiancée is also waiting for me. And, for me anyhow, she outranks even your boss. I’ll have to talk with her first.”
“Mr. Hornaday assured us he will explain your departure to Ms. Walsh. This is an urgent matter, Mr. Arensky. Please.” They gestured at the French doors which opened onto a garden.
Taras glanced at their Treasury Department credentials—five-pointed silver stars with engraved Secret Service photo IDs—before following them outside into the warm night, down a gravel path, across a dark tennis court and out a chain-link back gate into an alley where an unmarked black sedan waited.
A little stagey, he thought, but then the street in front was thick with paparazzi and stretch limos. He decided to ask no more questions, and no further explanations were offered. He sat back and watched as the Secret Service driver skillfully skirted the hellish traffic around Wisconsin and M on his way to Pennsylvania Avenue. In less than ten minutes they were waved through the White House northwest gate.
A few minutes later, having entered the West Wing through the basement and by now nearly sober, Taras was ushered into the Oval Office.
Four
As he often did after a grueling day, President William Ackerman was relaxing by wat
ching a videotaped sporting event—inthis case a hockey playoff game. But when his intercom light flashed, Ackerman hastily switched off the gizmo, which recessed into a Federal mahogany sideboard behind a potted palm. It was damn silly to hide an innocent pastime, Ackerman thought, but considering the gravity of the interview ahead, with a man he’d never met, he didn’t want to risk diluting the impression of his seriousness.
When the three men entered, he rose and came around the big, carved-oak Rutherford Hayes desk, which had been fashioned from British ship timbers. The President’s shirtsleeves were rolled up, his hand extended, his smiling gaze locked on Arensky.
“Thanks for coming along. I apologize for the lateness of the hour and, uh, shall we say, abducting you from Larry Hornaday’s little soiree. I think you’ll see the reason for it.” With his bull neck, ruddy complexion and bluff, engaging manner, Ackerman reminded Taras of a tough, likable military man or sport coach, neither of which fitted the facts. This President, Taras knew, was entirely a political creature.
The group moved, at Ackerman’s expansive gesture, across the pale gold oval carpet to twin white sofas by the marble fireplace. Outside, in the West Wing Reception Room, Taras had been shed of his errand boys while being introduced to the other two men—Buck Jones, a crewcut former aerospace executive who served as White House chief of staff; and Dr. Eugene Ledbetter, a rotund, wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet whose subsequent career path included a masters in physics, a doctorate in European history, a term in Congress, and a short stint as a distinguished Defense Department analyst followed by a Defense undersecretaryship. Now, under Ackerman, he was National Security Adviser. Ledbetter parked his wheelchair between the facing sofas; Arensky sat beside Jones, with the President opposite. Coffee was brought in, and they helped themselves.
“All right, let’s get right to it, shall we, gentlemen?” Ackerman said.
Jones turned to Arensky. “Earlier Gene and I were briefing Scotty about your work with the CIA, and he’s very impressed.”