Duel of Assassins

by Dan Pollock

  Footfalls were approaching along a pathway above, and before they died away, the damn Grisha came back. Marcus burrowed deeper into shadow and bit off a blasphemous prayer as the laserlike searchlight scythed twice across the cliffs, the second pass only meters below his legs.

  After the patrol boat vanished, it took him another fifteen minutes to worm his way over the brow, clinging to rocky knobs and exfoliated cracks, and to slither into the dark cave of shrubbery, feeling ahead for loose twigs or tripwires. He lay prone several minutes, listening, watching, gathering his mind. Thick vegetation extended to the edge of a stoneflagged path, gray-washed by a distant floodlight. Under the circumstances, Marcus wasn’t worried about triggering any line-of-sight microwave systems. But anyone checking the cliffside perimeter with thermal imaging would spot him instantly. Which made him abandon the idea of trying to hide out anywhere in the compound with the Dragunov sniper rifle, hoping for an eventual shot. The chances of finding any cover around here secure for more than a few minutes were basically nil. He would have to rely on a quick strike, in and out.

  A KGB guard walked by, kneeboots glossy in even the faint light, near enough to touch. Marcus had timed four sentry passes, averaging five minutes between. He’d better take out the next one.

  The man showed up maybe twenty seconds early, solitary like the others. Marcus waited till he’d gone a stride past, then sprang and looped a guitar string around the neck and tightened as he kicked the knees out from under. In an instant the throttled guard was dragged back into the shadowed shrubbery, expecting instant death, hearing instead a fierce whisper in his ear:

  “Stop thrashing, asshole, or I’ll pull this fucking thing tight. Tell me where Rybkin is, and I just knock you out. I’m good at it, you’ll live. Keep silent, you die now, like this.” Marcus cinched the garrote, watched the eyes bug, arms and legs flail. “Nod your head, I let you breathe. Make a sound above a whisper, you’re dead.”

  The guard nodded frantically. Marcus gave him air. The voice rasped, a strangled whisper: “If I tell you... you’ll kill me anyway.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s the only chance you got.”

  “He’s in his quarters... main palace”—an arm gestured feebly—“on the third floor... you can’t get in.”

  Marcus tightened the noose again. “You just pointed to the KGB barracks, asshole. I know the layout. One more lie does it. I hear Rybkin’s an insomniac, likes to putter in a workshop. Is he there tonight?”

  “I—don’t know... Sometimes.”

  “Where is it? Careful.”

  “Guest dacha... last one... down there... on left...” Another gesture, in the opposite direction. Marcus hoped it was accurate. He did have a layout, but it hadn’t included that most crucial piece of information.

  “If you’re wrong, friend, I’ll come back and make sure you never wake up. Nod your head.” But before the guard could obey, Marcus jerked the noose tight, using his full bodyweight to pinion the now-thrashing legs while he completed the strangulation.

  Several minutes later Marcus stepped onto the path in full KGB regalia. The visored cap and polished boots fit tolerably enough, but the green tunic with blue shoulder-straps—bearing a senior lieutenant’s stars and a gold “GB” for State Security—was at least a size too large. On the belt was a walkie-talkie and an empty holster; Marcus carried the sidearm and submachine gun from his warbag. Actually he would have preferred the guard’s SBM—a German Heckler and Koch MP5—except it was not silenced like his AKR.

  Marcus figured he looked damn good.

  He also figured he had at most a minute before the next guard passed—unless he’d been hearing the same dude walking to and fro. He walked purposefully, not hurrying, in the direction of the workshop-dacha. A voice squawked over his radio. He ignored it. If the dead lieutenant was late for his next checkpoint, there was nothing to be done about it now.

  He was getting ready for his big roll of the dice. He had to hope Marchenko’s informants had been right—that the eccentric Soviet leader spent long hours every night at Kichkine alone in his fix-it shop, like Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles. If not, Marcus didn’t have much of an alternate plan. Now if he was James Bond, he’d have maybe a nifty time-delayed, nuclear satchel charge to take out the whole damn compound. He’d look back and see the little mushroom cloud after he’d swum the hell away, having rescued the girl. As it was, he had to stay lucky. And the Hagakure notwithstanding, suicide had never been part of the deal.

  He moved along the path, his stony exterior belying the hammering, adrenalin high within, just as the tranquil surroundings of this elegant formal garden belied the fact that he was crossing a prime killing zone. He heard his hollow footfalls on polished stones, caught the quicksilvering of moonlight across a lily pond, looked up to see another uniformed sentry silhouetted at the end of a long radial pathway. The man gave a little wave. Marcus mirrored it and walked on.

  The indicated dacha was set apart from the others, fronting the bluffs for an ocean view. A white-gloved, gold-braided sentry was posted in the well-lighted, Moorish-colonnaded entranceway. Marcus skirted it, doubling around to the back behind a line of cypresses. There was a colonnade in back, too, but no ceremonial sentry, thank God. Only potted geraniums, trellised, flowering wisteria, marble benches, electric torches flickering in wrought-iron cressets along the stuccoed stone.

  And a dim light inside.

  In the middle of the rear colonnade were double French doors. Probably not alarmed, not here, inside the protected area, with all the bristling security systems directed outward. But it didn’t matter. He was going in.

  Marcus felt his own electricity lifting the hair on the back of his neck, shoulders, forearms. God, he loved this stuff! A hell of a night—hitchhiking on a chopper, a raft, a trawler, a midget sub, dogpaddling a little, climbing a piece-of-cake cliff, and now he was ready to walk in on one of the most powerful men on earth.

  He readied the short AKR, its steel butt-stock folded forward, but its muzzle considerably lengthened by a chubby, anodized-aluminum suppressor tube. Momentarily he wished for a 12-gauge autoloader shotgun—an alley-sweeper, a real Technicolor splatter gun. But dead was dead, after all. Deep in his Siberian grave, Old Man Marchenko could ready his stainless-steel choppers for a ghostly grin.

  Now!

  Marcus slid sideways along the back wall, touched the brass door handle. He held his breath as he turned it, ready to burst in at the first hinged squeal. But he was able to unlatch and open it outward silently, just enough for entry. He slipped inside, his night-adjusted vision quickly inventorying the jumbled darkness.

  He’d hit the workshop, all right. The place was redolent with the resinous fumes he remembered from his high school woodshop class, along with the musty odors of old furniture, aisles of junk, stacked piece upon piece, blocking most of the ocean view. Beyond was an open workspace, a faint light, a section of pegboard with tools.

  Marcus tiptoed down a middle aisle, the only sound the syncopated ticking of several clocks. Then he heard mumbling. saw, a moment later against a side wall, the enlarged silhouette of a man—bowed shoulders, cap on head. The figure didn’t move, apparently absorbed in its task. The mumbling continued.

  Marcus inched ahead, moving sideways past an old bellows organ, its dual manuals a pale, ivoried gleam in the obscurity. Now only an old monstrosity of an armoire blocked his view around the corner, but the tile floor ahead was littered with organ parts. It was time to stop pussyfooting and go for it.

  Marcus burst around the armoire, swinging the submachine-gun barrel toward the puttering figure, hunched over a workbench in baggy overalls and faded red beret. Alois Maksimovich was dead meat!

  Marcus stitched a deadly cross up and down, side to side, holding the silenced, kicking submachine gun as steady as he could—not an easy task with the enormous muzzle blast caused by the powerful rounds spitting out of the AKR’s short barrel.

  But he been suckered. It
wasn’t Rybkin, it wasn’t even human. The head burst apart in a shower of splinters, the bullet-riddled body toppled woodenly forward onto the bench—and cold metal kissed Marcus’ temple.

  Into Marcus’ peripheral vision slid the chromed-steel barrel of a .45 auto as a hand reached around, relieving him of the AKR. Marcus turned slowly—the .45 held steady, ending up between his eyebrows—till he was face to face with Taras Arensky.

  “Hell of a stalk, Cowboy,” Taras said, also removing the silenced Makarov tucked under Marcus’ tunic belt, “but you just assassinated a dressmakers’ dummy.”

  “Cossack!” Marcus was stunned. He forced a grin, but the .45 still didn’t budge and Taras’ eyes were implacable. “I guess I should be flattered, Cossack. You came all the way back here to stop me, didn’t you?”

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

  “How’d you know I’d be coming here?”

  “Wild guess. Rybkin didn’t like it much, but I was prepared to hang around the next five nights till he goes back to Moscow.”

  “So now what?” When Taras didn’t answer, Marcus stretched his smile into a grinning appeal: “Christ, Cossack, what is this? I’m your friend.”

  “You were. Now looks like you’re a full-time assassin.” Taras nodded at the KGB uniform. “You kill a guard? Anybody see you?”

  “Yeah, it’s what I do. And no, so far nobody knows I’m here. Only you, old buddy. You going to kill me—or turn me in, it’s the same fucking thing as killing me—to protect an old fart who’s giving away your old homeland?”

  Still Taras didn’t respond. Marcus saw the tightness in his friend’s face, a muscular twitch in his jaw. Marcus spoke again, excruciatingly aware of the continuing silence from outside, the hollow ticking of the clocks within:

  “Cossack, this sounds like I’m begging, but all I’m doing is reminding you, man—you owe me! I kind of lost count over the years. Maybe you can remember. How many times was it exactly I saved your ass?”

  Taras nodded. “I kind of lost count, too.”

  Marcus watched the indecision writhe on the face of his old friend, saw it resolve finally in his favor. Taras would not kill him. Marcus didn’t know what tipped the scales, but he assumed it was simple friendship, and he was right.

  To Taras it was inescapable. Somehow, from as far back as the White House, he had not really foreseen this moment, but it had come. He found himself staring over the gunsight at a man he had loved, whom he had missed, dammit, and whose grinning, cockycountenance all these years later still struck chords in his heart. I missed you, Cowboy. Why didn’t you defect with me? He didn’t say these things, but he felt them.

  But there was something else. It wasn’t the debt owed, and it wasn’t mercy. Marcus had obviously become an assassin, but Taras had not, and would not. He had stopped Marcus; he could not kill him, or anyone else. Not for his new country or its President, not for world peace or even the liberty of his sister and her family. He would not become Marcus. That was why he had left Afghanistan.

  Taras stepped back, set Marcus’ AKR and Makarov on the workbench beside the splintered dummy, then put his own .45 beside them.

  “Get out of here, Cowboy. Maybe you can make it. I never saw you. I can’t do any more.”

  “It’s Peshawar all over again, isn’t it?” For Marcus saw the same look of loathing on his friend’s face as he had when Taras had walked out of their bungalow in Dean’s Hotel to defect. Only this time it was Marcus leaving. He turned to do so.

  “Marcus. It was you in Geneva, you got Raza, didn’t you?”

  Marcus paused in the dark aisle by the armoire, grinned, tipped his KGB cap. “Yeah. And I’ll be back for Rybkin, too. How about you?”

  “No. It’s over for me. Get out.”

  Marcus was gone, a shadow gliding out the back door into the colonnade.

  I’m through with this, Taras thought. All of it.

  He put the gun down, safety on, removed the clip. He was through playing what Charlotte called his “dirty little games.” Let Marcus be whatever he wanted to be. The fact remained, he had been a friend.

  If there was no immediate hue and cry, Taras would sit tight for another couple hours. Give the Cowboy a chance to exfiltrate the compound, climb down and catch his midget Spetsnaz sub—Taras was positive that’s how he’d gotten here. Starkov and Pasholikov would be along soon enough—either because they’d caught Marcus, or found the body of the guard he’d killed. And Taras would tell them exactly what happened. Let them throw a fucking tantrum. The KGB wouldn’t touch him, not with Ackerman having sent him. Besides, Rybkin couldn’t kick. Taras had saved the old man’s life.

  At least for a while.

  Twenty-Four

  “How the hell did he get out?” Hank Kelleher wanted to know.

  “Probably the same way he got in,” Taras answered. It was the following day, and he was in the CIA station chief’s office in the American Embassy compound back in Moscow.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. How did he get in?”

  “Actually, nobody knows.” Taras smiled and shrugged. “Marcus has had plenty of high-caliber Spetsnaz help all along, that’s obvious. Biryukov didn’t get the old man’s whole network. Marchenko probably kept it locked up in tight little boxes.”

  “You know they’re going apeshit over at the Lubyanka.”

  “Tell me. They can’t figure it out. Within hours of the discovery, they threw a net over everything that moved—in, on or under the Black Sea, including a midget sub on a Lentra trawler that had been working along the Crimean coast, supposedly looking for an old sunken warship. Marcus was not in the net.”

  “Your fault, I assume.”

  “You got it,” Taras said.

  The KGB, predictably, had protested Taras’ negligence—and possible criminal complicity—in allowing, as Biryukov phrased it, “a world-class assassin” to escape with now less than two weeks remaining till Potsdam. There had been no gratitude for anticipating and forestalling Marcus’ attack. In fact, for a wild moment there in Rybkin’s compound, Taras had thought Pavel Starkov, the KGB Nazi, was even going to put a bullet into him. “Perhaps this Jolly was not a real defector,” Starkov had said while awaiting Biryukov’s telephonic orders, “but a CIA spy all along, and you were his confederate.”

  Taras’ one-word response did not further endear him to Starkov, but fortunately the wooden-faced lieutenant colonel was empowered by Biryukov only to escort his American guest back to Moscow—an endurable torture for Taras, under the circumstances.

  So Taras was alive, but decidedly off the case. In disgrace with the Kremlin, and perhaps the White House. And he couldn’t care less. So long as nobody tried to force Luiza and her family back on a plane to Moscow.

  “Maybe you made a mistake,” Kelleher said. “Letting him go, I mean.”

  “I don’t care, Hank. I never wanted this fucking job.”

  “Maybe you will care.” Kelleher slid a nine-by-twelve manila envelope across the table. “Take a look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Some faxes we got this morning from Washington. Answers to your query, actually. Remember those discrepancies you found in Marcus’ dossier—what, only two days ago—on his American background? Well, the FBI ran them to ground. An interesting guy, Marcus Jolly. Only that isn’t his name. It’s Hofstatter, Eric Llewellyn Hofstatter. Jolly was the guy from Wichita, whose washed-out elementary school picture you saw at the Lubyanka. There’s better pictures of both of ’em in here, and you’ll recognize who’s who. They were both born the same year—1957—both blond, blue-eyed, slim Midwestern kids. Hofstatter’s the guy from Illinois who left home—”

  “After his grandparents were killed in a fire.”

  “Yeah, a fire he was wanted for questioning about. A backyard kiln exploded, fire spread to the house, but the old couple never got out. The Hofstatter kid claimed the grandmother used to keep the burners real low during the drying-out phase, so the clay wouldn’t crack, an
d the flame must have gone out and the grandmother relit it without letting the gas disperse. But the police in Rantoul—that’s where he’s from—kind of suspected the kid arranged it to happen just that way. He disappeared without a trace until you saw him in Siberia in 1977 calling himself Marcus Jolly. And the real Marcus, after he left home in 1974, he disappeared too. His aunt in Wichita got a postcard from Amarillo in ’75, and then nothing. Who knows what happened to him? The FBI thinks he met up with your pal Eric, who decided to snatch his identity—and then made sure the real Marcus wasn’t around any more to confuse the issue.”

  Listening to the brief synopsis, Taras felt as if a series of stun grenades had just been tossed into the room. Half his life seemed to have been blown up. He reached for his coffee, rattled the cup in the saucer, set it back down on Kelleher’s desk.

  “Hank, do you mind if I take this somewhere and read it by myself for a few minutes?”

  “Hell of a shock, isn’t it? Make yourself comfortable. I’m going to go chat with some folks. Be back after a while.”

  So, numbly and for the second time, Taras found himself closeted with a dossier on his old comrade in arms, following the Cowboy’s backtrail. Only it didn’t take as long this time. He was able to wade through the sheaf of twenty or so faxes in a half-hour, reading everything several times. It was pretty damn conclusive.

  There were several teenage shots of Hofstatter. Two were class pictures. Another one showed him in a sweatshirt with sleeves hacked off, cigarette in mouth, Simonizing the front fender of an old two-tone Buick. The last one was a gag photo. He was grinning at the camera while holding a hammer and chisel up to a parking meter. There was a cardboard box below to catch any coins. They were all unmistakably a younger version of “Marcus,” complete with cocky grin.