A hush descended on the two men.
“Are you saying that this Amritzar person isn’t connected to a terrorist group?” asked Malko.
“Not as far as we know.”
“In other words, the FBI is taking someone with bad intentions and turning him into a full-blown terrorist.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of,” said the CIA station chief. “They’ve done it before. The bureau only cares about results.”
“So where does the agency come in?”
“Well, the bureau people don’t know the Russians as well as we do. They’ve gone and asked the FSB to lend them a working Igla-S, never imagining that the Russians will turn around and screw them.”
Malko took it from there.
“Let me guess,” he said. “An FBI agent pretending to be an arms dealer will bring Amritzar a missile. At that point the bureau will sweep in and arrest him.”
“That’s about it,” said Woolsey. “But Langley isn’t absolutely positive Amritzar isn’t connected to a terrorist group. Which might be the case, even if they can’t get him a missile. We’d like to know for sure that he’s clean before he gets in too deep with the bureau.”
Malko finished his vodka, aware that Alexandra could walk in at any moment.
“So how can I help you?”
“Amritzar will be in Vienna in two days. As I said, he sells carpets. Apparently he’s here to buy some. We’d like you to make sure that he doesn’t have any suspicious contacts during the two days he plans to be here. I know this isn’t normally up your alley, but Ted Boteler in operations is asking it as a favor.”
It certainly wasn’t what Malko was expecting. And he had no intention of doing the stakeout himself. His faithful butler and bodyguard, Elko Krisantem, could handle that perfectly well.
“I’m always glad to help Ted,” he said. “Give me the details.”
“Amritzar will arrive Thursday morning. He’s staying at the Hotel Zipser, at 49 Lange Gasse in the Josefstadt neighborhood.”
“Do you have a photo of him?”
“We don’t, and we’d like to have some.”
“That can be done. Do you have any idea what he looks like physically?”
“No, but he’s traveling with his wife. She’s also Pakistani and apparently very beautiful.”
“That’s not exactly a description, but I think we can figure it out. Tell you what: I’ll bring you my report and the photos at the embassy on Monday.” He smiled. “Along with a list of any terrorists he meets.”
Woolsey smiled in turn.
“I suspect it’ll be a very short one.”
Just then, Alexandra came into the café, her sable coat open over the Valentino dress. Jim Woolsey leaped to his feet as if the U.S. president had entered the room.
When she stopped at their table, his gaze surreptitiously moved to her neckline. The black chiffon was cleverly cut to reveal most of her breasts.
“Shatzi,” said Malko, “do you remember Jim Woolsey?”
Glancing at the paralyzed American, she said:
“No. Should I?”
Malko thought Woolsey was going to melt like a snowball in a fire. He quickly softened his fiancée’s remark.
“There were a lot of people at Liezen that day.”
Some color returned to Woolsey’s face.
By then Malko was on his feet. Alexandra gave Woolsey a haughty nod and strode toward the exit. Malko turned around and quietly repeated:
“You’ll get everything on Monday.”
—
Parviz Amritzar was closing up shop earlier than usual—he was due to fly to Vienna that evening—when the doorbell rang. He turned, about to tell the man that he was closing, when he recognized Mahmud.
He came closer and whispered:
“Can we go into the back office?”
Feeling rattled, Amritzar led him to the small, glassed-in office.
“What are you—” he began.
Without answering, Mahmud took a thick envelope from his inside jacket pocket and set it on the desk.
“There’s two hundred thousand dollars in there,” he announced. “The brothers have decided to help you. In Moscow you’ll meet a man who will sell you an Igla-S.”
“But I’m going to Vienna first.”
“No problem. Just keep checking your email. As soon as things are ready in Moscow, you’ll get the green light.” Mahmud was already heading for the exit. “And be careful with that money; it’s precious.”
The door slammed before Amritzar could recover from his surprise. With trembling fingers, he slipped the rubber band off the envelope. When he saw the wads of hundred-dollar bills, he felt dizzy.
His jihad had begun.
CHAPTER
5
General Andrei Kostina put the note from Alexander Bortnikov with the attached FBI request on his desk and looked at it with disdain.
Kostina didn’t like Americans and he didn’t like Jews, considering them equally responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Naturally, his main hatred was aimed at Mikhail Gorbachev, “the man with the birthmark,” who had allowed it all to happen. The idea of helping the Americans made Kostina sick. And yet it made sense for the FSB to turn to him, the deputy director of Rosoboronexport.
The FSB didn’t have any Igla-S missiles. It could get one, but jumping through the bureaucratic hoops would be slow and complicated. Russian army units certainly had stocks, and each unit had an all-powerful FSB political commissar. But commanders protected their assets jealously, and could be hard to budge.
Only Rosoboronexport, the Russian military export agency, could easily get hold of the missiles.
Kostina turned to his computer to see if any Igla-S were readily available. They were manufactured at Izhevsk in the Urals for regular Russian army use and for export. He learned that twelve hundred were being assembled, a batch that was ordered and partly paid for by Indonesia, but the Izhevsk factory was behind schedule. The only entity that could quickly supply a few would be the surface-to-air missile research center at Kolomna, a town about seventy miles southeast of Moscow on the M5 highway to Chelyabinsk.
Kostina noted all this in the document’s margin, and added his opinion that it would be risky to put a working Igla-S in American hands. The missile was already six or seven years old, but the United States might not have discovered all its secrets.
In short, the general would have vetoed the proposal if it were up to him, but his opinion was only advisory. He put the paperwork in an envelope and called for his secretary. He would pass the buck to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency.
“Take all this to General Shliaktin,” he said.
The GRU chief ruled from the “Aquarium,” a group of large white buildings off Polezhaevskaya Chaussée in the Khoroshevskiy neighborhood. Hidden among tall apartment buildings, the GRU headquarters featured dozens of ultramodern security cameras, razor wire, an impressive black front gate that was always closed, and a helicopter landing pad on the roof.
The agency’s basic outlook hadn’t changed with the end of the Soviet Union. It remained steeped in a culture of secrecy, rabid nationalism, and a visceral distrust of anything American.
As the head of the GRU, General Alexander Shliaktin’s opinion was much more than advisory. He alone would decide whether to accede to the FBI’s request or to bury it in a diplomatic refusal.
—
Since seven o’clock that morning, Elko Krisantem had been sitting behind the wheel of the old orange Opel he usually drove on errands for Liezen Castle. The car was parked near the Hotel Zipser, a modest four-story building in the center of Vienna.
Despite having gotten up at five to sit in the damp cold, Krisantem was happy to be there. The previous evening, when Malko explained the assignment, he was delighted. He might be only a devoted butler now, but Krisantem had once been a killer for hire in Istanbul. The old Turk still occasionally joined Malko on missions as a bodyguard or even an assi
stant, but that happened less and less often.
While looking after Liezen Castle, he periodically oiled his old Parabellum Astra, and in his pocket he kept the cord he once used to strangle bad guys.
Krisantem rubbed his chilled hands together. To save gas, he had turned off the Opel’s motor. Anyway, in this quiet Vienna neighborhood nobody would notice the old car parked across from the Zipser.
Suddenly he jerked upright in his seat. A taxi had just stopped in front of the hotel, and a woman was getting out. Ensconced in a fur coat that fell to her ankles, she wore very high-heeled boots and a fur hat. She was followed by a dark-skinned man who looked Middle Eastern. The cabbie took a suitcase out of the trunk, and the couple entered the hotel.
It was 8:25 a.m., and the odds were good that this was Parviz Amritzar and his wife.
Krisantem waited for a while, but the two didn’t come back out. So he took his cell phone, rang the hotel, and asked to speak to Herr Amritzar.
After a brief pause, the operator said:
“I’ll connect you now.”
Krisantem immediately hung up and phoned Malko.
“They have arrived, Your Highness. What would you like me to do?”
“Stay close to them,” he said. “And take some pictures as soon as you can.”
—
As he did every morning, Rem Tolkachev got to his Korpus No. 14 office in the south wing of the Kremlin early. Protected by a sophisticated electronic access code, his door displayed no sign, but all the Kremlin orderlies—the “gray men”—knew their way to it.
Nobody knew how long Tolkachev had been there; it seemed to be forever. In fact, he had served every Russian leader from Gorbachev to Putin.
Raised in Sverdlovsk, Tolkachev was a born silovik, humorless and incorruptible. Whenever a new “czar” came to power, Tolkachev would have a brief conversation with his new superior and be reconfirmed in his position.
In the Kremlin, Tolkachev’s mission was simple: solve problems that were difficult or impossible to undertake officially.
His office safe held all the buried secrets from the tumultuous transition that followed the collapse of the USSR.
Tolkachev’s methods hadn’t changed over the decades. Several times a week, he would be consulted on some burning issue. He would usually come up with a solution and immediately communicate it to the current president by internal Kremlin messenger. His proposal would come back, either approved or denied.
It was rarely denied.
The president would also sometimes ask him to solve a problem himself, giving him the latitude to do whatever he thought necessary.
Most of the orders Tolkachev gave were oral. If a written instruction was necessary, he typed it himself on an old Remington, in a single copy. He distrusted electronic communications.
Finally, every head of the various security agencies, whether civilian or military, was aware of Tolkachev’s position and knew he was to be obeyed without question.
Rem Tolkachev was the czar’s armed right-hand man.
The little white-haired gentleman drove a gleaming Lada through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky gate every morning and parked in the area reserved for the highest apparatchiks.
He’d been a widower for the past decade. He had lunch every day at the Kremlin’s Buffet Number 1, where you could get an excellent meal for less than 120 rubles. In the evening he did a little cooking in his apartment on Kastanaevskaya Street in western Moscow.
Tolkachev had hardly any social life. He had no friends, and only a few people who dealt with him professionally even knew what he looked like. All they knew of him was a somewhat high-pitched voice with a central Russian accent.
The rare visitors to his office left unimpressed. The walls were bare except for a calendar, a picture of the current president, and a poster of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the creator of the Cheka, published on his death in 1926.
Tolkachev served his visitors only tea, which he himself drank very sweet.
In the reinforced cabinet at the back of his office, Tolkachev kept files on all the people he had used in the course of his long career. There was a little of everything: crooks, swindlers, killers, priests, former security agents….
To manipulate these helpers, Tolkachev had unlimited supplies of cash. When he ran low, he would write a note to the Kremlin administrator, and the money would be brought to him the same day. No accounting was required. Everybody knew that Tolkachev was compulsively honest. In the days when they were still in circulation, he wouldn’t pocket so much as a kopeck. His only pleasure was to serve the rodina—the nation—and its incarnation, the current president.
In fact, his role was enormous. Behind the surface of what looked like a nation of laws, Russia swarmed with parallel legal services, clandestine little offices ready to do anything to help the Kremlin. Tolkachev enforced iron discipline to keep these often unruly people in line.
Today he opened the first file on his desk and lit one of the slim, pastel-colored cigarettes that he smoked when he wanted to think.
The file had been brought from the office of Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, the night before.
Tolkachev studied it carefully, made some phone calls to check his options, and smoked a few more cigarettes. Then he turned to his Remington and, with two fingers, started typing.
The short memo—Putin hated anything longer than fifteen lines—read:
“I propose trapping the Moscow FBI chief and charging him with military espionage so we can exchange him for Viktor Bout, who is currently in prison in the United States.”
Tolkachev needed the president’s assent before launching such an operation.
Five minutes later, a man in gray was at his door. Tolkachev opened the automatic lock and silently handed him the sealed envelope addressed to the president of the Russian Federation.
He knew he would get a quick answer.
—
Krisantem was glad the day was nearly over. All he’d had to eat since this morning was a doner kebab gulped down while his target had a long meeting with a Caucasian and Pakistani carpet wholesaler.
The Amritzars had emerged from the hotel around eleven and taken a taxi on Operngasse. They strolled around the majestic Staatsoperbuilding, then had lunch in a pizzeria.
The woman was dressed the same way as the previous evening. When she took off her coat, Krisantem saw that she had a slim figure, an attractive face, and a mouth whose bright red lipstick contrasted with her modest head covering.
The couple had then split up. He took one taxi, and she, another.
Women rarely played an active role in the Muslim world, so Krisantem elected to follow Amritzar, whose taxi took him to the carpet dealer. Through the window, Krisantem could see Amritzar in conversation with a fat, friendly looking man with a mustache. The men were seated in the showroom and were examining carpets. It was an ordinary business transaction, and it gave Krisantem a chance to get a bite to eat.
Night was falling when Amritzar came out of the showroom. A radio taxi came to pick him up and bring him to the Zipser.
From which he had just emerged with his wife, once again walking toward the opera. Like good tourists, they settled on the Hotel Sacher terrace, which gave Krisantem a chance to take a few photos.
Deep down, the Turk felt he was wasting his time. Amritzar’s activities seemed perfectly innocuous.
Nothing about him spelled terrorist.
But he was conscientious and decided to stick with the couple until they returned to the hotel for the night.
—
The request sent to Putin came back just when Tolkachev was preparing to leave his office for a performance at the Bolshoi. The show started at eight, but with traffic, you had to leave extra time. He preferred to drive, though he could have requested one of the Kremlin’s limousines. These were black Audis with tinted windows, a police light on the left side of the roof, and a special siren whose distinctive blasts chased other vehicles out of the way.<
br />
In a holdover from Soviet days, a central lane in the major avenues was reserved for special vehicles to use as they pleased. For a small fortune, a few oligarchs had been assigned the necessary permit, knowing that the politsiya—the heirs of the old Soviet militsiya—would never stop them.
Tolkachev opened the envelope. It contained his memo with a single word written in the left-hand margin: “Da.” Seeing that gave him deep satisfaction. He knew he was just a high-grade functionary, but the idea that he shared Vladimir Putin’s views was intoxicating.
He had thought of Viktor Bout because neither the FSB nor the Kremlin’s diplomatic efforts had been able to stop the arms merchant’s extradition to the United States. A diplomatic defeat.
Bout was hardly an exalted personage, just a former GRU agent gone rogue. But he had remained faithful to his country. He had never betrayed Russia, and had provided the secret services with valuable information. He had behaved well and confessed nothing.
Above all, he was Russian.
So he had to be freed.
Tolkachev was happy to help gain Bout’s eventual release, even if it was mainly a matter of national pride.
What he now had to figure out was how to lure the head of the Moscow FBI into a trap.
From his desk, Tolkachev picked up his ticket to the Bolshoi. The great opera house had just opened after years of renovation, and he was excited to see it in its new skin.
He would deal with the FBI matter tomorrow. He just had to devise the trap.
CHAPTER
6
Anna Polikovska was sitting at a table in the mezzanine of the Chokolade Mitza on Baumanskaya Street. From her vantage point, she could watch the stairs leading up from the main room. The cup of tea before her was empty, and the café nearly so. There were just a couple of women chatting and two men watching the flat-screen TV. But Russians love chocolate, and in an hour the place would be jammed.
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