The Third Bullet bls-8

by Stephen Hunter

  “Sorry, Richard. Okay, swell.”

  “Drop you somewhere?”

  “No, I’ll get a cab. I appreciate the way you humor me without really seeming to humor me. Your mother raised an honorable man.”

  “Thank you, Jack. Okay, I know well enough to know that I can’t persuade you to accept a ride. I’ll await your call.”

  They rose, shook hands, and separated, each heading off in his own darkness.

  - - - -

  The Russian watched. The tall one crossed Houston and headed up Elm into the high buildings of downtown. It seemed he had a limp, as if someone had taken a hard shot at his hip. There had to be a story behind that! It slowed the old man considerably, and the Russian winced at the clear discomfort the man felt while on the go. The Russian waited for him to drag his wretched, bent old body along until it disappeared behind the corner of the building to his left, waited twenty seconds, then turned on his lights, drove slowly and under control to Elm, and turned left. He could see the tall man half a block ahead, sending out vibrations of painful imprecision but at the same time holding not a care for security in his mind, lost in whatever internal drama consumed him, limping along.

  The Russian timed it perfectly, made certain not to look at the man, since some people have a weird gift for feeling the presence of another’s eyes upon them, reached him just as he was at the corner, and turned left. He drove at under thirty to the next block, turned right at the corner, and hammered it, aware only marginally that he was on the railroad tracks of Pacific Avenue, shooting up to sixty-five in three seconds to reach the next corner, found the ideal angle, and hardly lost a mile an hour on his controlled right-hand burn around the corner, then pulled up in the block with the intersection a hundred feet or so ahead of him, and halted, downshifting to neutral, putting his lights out. All was fine. It was no problem at all.

  He waited, he waited, he waited. Time sometimes goes slow on the hunt. But at last his quarry arrived, ambling into view at the same distracted old man’s pace, disfigured by the limp so that he had an odd comic bearing. The Russian cracked a rare smile at the old man’s funny walk.

  The Russian also had a gift for instantly computing interception angles. He knew not to go to the pedal at the man’s first step into the street or even the second. He had time to check for beams from oncoming traffic out of sight, and he noted there wasn’t any traffic. At the target’s third step, he got the go-code from his deep brain and rammed the car into first, controlling the clutch with a virtuoso’s touch, and a split second later, a really fast throw into second as the car’s 370 horses roared into high gallop and got there as fast as anything on earth except a straight custom drag. The sound of the engine eating gas with a basso profundo growl and alchemizing it instantly into speed filled the air. The car lurched ahead so powerfully, it turned the hard edges of reality into a blur.

  - - - -

  Swagger had the gun in his hand along his right leg, hidden behind his comically exaggerated limp, and at the roar, losing no time on surprise, none on regret, nada on indecision, and in his pure-killer move, beautiful and stoic and all-American gunman, he pivoted and, because smooth is fast, slid the gun up so smooth it moved at a rate that has no place in time, and his subconscious acquired the front sight exactly as it came to center, driver’s-side windshield, and the pistol’s double tap lasted but a tenth of a second, recoil not fast enough to catch up to fully firing fast-twitch muscles of the trigger pull, even as one muzzle flash became another and two pieces of hot brass spewed from the ramjet breech eight inches apart. The windshield yielded instantly into a haze of micro-fracture, the car careened right, ate up the curb, hit a building with the sound of metal crunching, flipped, and roared on its beautiful, glossy black flank along the sidewalk, chewing up pavement, spraying sparks and stone debris, ripping sheets of window out of storefronts, its hood bending and twisting like a burning piece of paper, at last halting in a heap of twisted steel, with the stench of gasoline, tendrils of steam and smoke arising from several wounds in the body and engine well.

  In the quiet that followed, Swagger slipped the gun into his holster and grabbed his cell.

  “Memphis,” came the quick answer.

  “I’m at Elm and North Market. He’s piled up to the right, on the sidewalk, no citizen collateral, all of it clean. Get your team here fast, and get me the fuck out of town.”

  “What happened to him?” Nick said.

  “Bring a body bag,” said Swagger. “And a mop.”

  PART II

  Mockba

  CHAPTER 8

  Moscow

  It was a perfect twilight in utopia as couples strolled, children frolicked, lovers squeezed, dogs yipped, and intellectuals theorized in the park off Ukrainski Boulevard. They glided with the radiant happiness of those who were happy to be who they were where they were when they were. “Life, it’s good” seemed to be the prevailing ethos. Lights winked in the soft darkness, more show than anything else, for in this urban playing field, there was no crime, or very little, nearly full employment, and low taxes. The dark for once concealed the construction frenzy of backhoes, bulldozers, and cranes as daytime Moscow reconstructed itself for about the thirtieth time in its long and convoluted history, this time giving capitalism a good shot even as the citizens ebbed and flowed through and around all the projects, dashing nimbly to avoid being crushed, either by the errant construction machine or that jet-black gleaming Ferrari whistling down the cobblestones at ninety per. Meanwhile, observing without comment, stone or steel men in greatcoats with those clamshell World War II helmets and the old red tommy guns, with their signature ventilated barrels and gangster-style seventy-one-round drums, stood fifteen feet tall every block or two, as if unsure whether this was what all their fighting and dying had protected and made possible.

  Flanked by the nine-story banks of the Kutuzovsky 7 apartment complex and nestled under trees, the restaurant Khachapuri was operating at full meat ahead. It was a place that specialized in animal parts on sticks. They arrived glistening yet crisp, with the fat broiled out of them by raw flame, chunks of pure protein whose odor filled the air and made one think of Cossack camps along the Don after a good day massacring Tsarist infantry in about 1652. The restaurant itself had a Cossack quality, as it was an open-air tent affiliated with the kitchen of a bar in the building across the sidewalk, and a gathering place for those of the new generation seeking sustenance, vodka, and comradeship, at which it excelled in providing.

  Swagger, of course, couldn’t try the vodka, knowing he’d end up in Siberia with a new Uzbek wife and nine children, plus some really cool tattoos; he wasn’t hungry, though the meat smells touched some primal thing in him; and the comradeship he sought was of a particular kind.

  He leaned alone at the bar, drinking koka, as Coca-Cola was called here in the capital city, and watching the proceedings with a wary eye, not quite willing to buy in to it. Something held him back, history perhaps, his own as well as his country’s and his culture’s. It was hard to believe he’d been nurtured to hate all these people and they’d turned out to be so beautiful, energetic, and happy. Gee, folks, he thought, glad we didn’t blow you to nuclear shreds in about 1977; that would have been a big mistake.

  It was his second day in Moscow. The first he’d spent wandering from his room at the Metropol onto Red Square and around the area and being stunned for the first time by the sheer joy of the city, a dusty, ramshackle, still-makeshift-after-865-years place. The ranks of Stalinist apartment buildings, with their dour exteriors and their ancient memories of tears and slaughter, all had been invaded by retail at the ground level and boasted gaudy signals of various frivolous goods, every luxury car and perfume and fashion designer known to man. In at least seven points on the horizon, brand-new Dallases of steel and chrome pierced the sky, lording over the five-story flatness of the now-dead Communist reality at their feet. It was a true gold-rush city, even if over a millennium old and the site of a massacre hall of
fame. He couldn’t get over how the place throbbed.

  He saw her then. She had the smart, tough look of a journalist, nothing to her of show or pretense, just a kind of irony playing through her eyes under her American hairstyle. She wore pants and a black T-shirt, as fitted the warm weather, and looked comfortable among the natives.

  “Ms. Reilly? I’m Swagger.”

  “Oh,” she said, “the great Swagger. Nice to meet a hero.” Handshakes, tight smiles, a little awkwardness.

  “I’m just a beat-up goat trying to stay on the wagon around all this potato juice,” he said.

  “The Russians do squish a nice potato. Here, I’ll get us seated.”

  He followed her to the maitre d’s station, and the maitre d’ in turn led them through the tent, past family and office parties of swilling laughers and carnivores, to a smallish table at the margins of the place, which looked out on the recreations of the vast parkland, crosscut with walkers on both two and four legs and other sorts of relaxed civilians.

  “You weren’t followed?” he asked.

  “This is exciting,” she said. “No one’s ever asked me that before. No, I don’t think so. The Russians don’t follow American reporters anymore. They’re much more interested in making money.”

  “So I’ve heard. Anything’s for sale in Moscow.”

  “Anything,” she said.

  “What about rent?” he said. “See, I want to rent the Lubyanka for a night.”

  She laughed. “Good luck with that. You must know oligarchs.”

  “Since I don’t know what an oligarch is, I don’t know if I know any. What are they, by the way? I saw that word in the English-language paper.”

  “Rich guys. Tycoons, billionaires, conspicuous consumers. Mostly ex-KGB goons. They were buddies with Yeltsin in ’93, and when he dismantled the state economic apparatus, they butted their way to the head of the line and got all the pie. In short order, they became mega-rich. Pie, pie, pie, all day long. Now they drive around in gold-plated limos, marry flight attendants, buy American sports teams, try to get on Page 6, and generally run the place. Abramovich, Krulov, Alekperov, Vekselberg, Ixovich. One of ’em is married to Yeltsin’s daughter, as a matter of fact. Will and I did a story on them. Petonin, Tarkio, a couple more I can’t think of.”

  “The names would be lost on me anyhow. But it sounds typical. That’s how headquarters towns always work. Anyhow, nice of you to meet me.”

  “How couldn’t I? I did some checking, and if half the rumors are true, it’s like meeting John Wayne and Ted Williams and Audie Murphy in one man. Plus, your daughter says you’re a teddy bear.”

  It was through his daughter, Nikki, a TV news reporter in Washington, that Swagger had effected a meet-up with Kathy Reilly, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow.

  The waitress came, and the reporter consulted the menu, which essentially consisted of meat with more meat, some other kinds of meat, some usual meat, some unusual meat, and, of course, meat. Kathy Reilly ordered some meat.

  “So you’re working for the FBI, is that right?” she said.

  “More or less. That’s what Nikki believes, that’s what the Russians believe. But they also believe my name is Jerry Homan and that I’m a special agent. I have all the credentials and diplomatic okays to back it up. I did meet with the State Department-FBI liaison guy at our embassy, and he thinks I’m who I say I am.”

  “Wow. Undercover stuff. This is turning into something glamorous. What’s it all about?”

  “Short version, I was asked to look into the death of a man in Baltimore by hit-and-run. He’d just returned from Dallas, where he’d been asking pointed questions. I went to Dallas and asked the same pointed questions. Sure enough, someone tried to kill me, hit-and-run.”

  “It didn’t work out for him, I take it.”

  “Not exactly. Fortunately, I’d contacted an FBI agent in Dallas, a fine man with whom I’ve worked before, and he agreed to run me as a contract undercover even though I was the one who brought it to him. It was a thin fiction, but it held up. Then it turned out that the fellow who tried to kill me was what you might call a trophy. Russian mafioso, associated with something called the Iz-may-lov-skay-a gang here.”

  “Okay, now I’m impressed.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Very bad.”

  “This character was wanted by Interpol all over Europe, he was wanted by the Moscow police, and he had relocated to a Coney Island outpost of the Iz-may-what’s-it empire and was doing jobs for them and freelancing. Technically, I’m here to try to find out from this end who he was working for. Not which family, but who contracted with that family either here or in New York to hire him and for what reason. I’ve got an appointment with a top Russian gang cop in a few days to try to get some dope. We may talk to some snitches and so forth.”

  “You don’t want to get too close to the Izmaylovskaya boys, take it from me,” she said.

  “I’m just going to ask some polite questions and go on my way. No need to mix it up with the locals.”

  “Sound policy. I will tell you, and you didn’t hear it from me, that the oligarch Krulov is said to be most intimately associated with the Izmaylovskayas. His enemies had a way of disappearing or getting hit by vagrant untraceable cars.”

  “Krulov,” said Swagger, marking it down internally.

  The dinner arrived. It appeared to be meat. There were also suspicious vegetables, which Swagger avoided, and some soups, equally menacing. He did enjoy the animal he ate, whatever species it might have been, however it died. “It’s very good,” he said.

  “She said you needed a favor. It happens that this is a perfect time. My husband is in Siberia – no, I didn’t send him, he’s covering an oil conference – and I’m sort of at loose ends, with only thumbsuckers due. So I can take you around, introduce you to people, if you want.”

  “I’m not sure you should be seen with me. These people are serious. That’s why I asked to meet after dark, close to home, at a loud public place.”

  “Do you think–”

  “I just don’t know. I do know if you look into Russian mafia, you can get dead all of a sudden. I might have some skills that would help me get out of a tight, dangerous situation, but unless you’ve had a lot of SEAL training, I doubt that you do.”

  “Not unless it’s slipped my mind.”

  “Nikki says you speak Russian well but that you read it very well.”

  “I can get by on the streets. I read it like a native.”

  “I’m trying to get hold of some records. Copies won’t work; I have to see the actual files and try to determine to what, if any, degree they’ve been tampered with. I’m hoping you’ll read them for me. Or at least scan them. I hope to arrange it discreetly, so you’ll be in no danger of exposure. Is that a possibility?”

  “I suppose it is. What are you looking for?”

  “The Russian James Bond,” he said. “Circa 1963. I can feel him. I can recognize his talent, his imagination, his will, his decisiveness, his creativity. He was their top agent, and in 1963, it’s possible he pulled off the operation of the century. I’ve come to Moscow for him.”

  - - - -

  It was another box of a building, this one much bigger. No bricks, some sort of yellow stucco, maybe ten stories tall, with all the early twentieth- or late nineteenth-century gewgaws, like pillars and arches and stone window frames, its flat roof festooned with radio communications antennas. And it was gigantic, about a block wide, a huge chunk of real estate eating up land on an empty Moscow circle a mile from Red Square.

  “That’s it, huh?” Swagger asked.

  “In the flesh. Or in yellow stucco. Source of evil, source of cunning, source of murder, violence, conspiracy, treachery, torture. It’s a very bad place. You did not want to make people in that building angry with you.”

  “I get it.”

  “Nothing military in there,” said Mikhail Stronski. “It’s all secret-agent spy shit, games in
games in games, always fucking people up.”

  It was the Lubyanka: former home of the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MGB, NKVD, and KGB, and now FSB. During the purges, many were hauled here from Swagger’s polished luxury hotel, the Metropole, which in the thirties housed the wreckers and oppositionists of Comintern, and in Lubyanka’s cellars, they were shot behind the ear. No one knew what became of the bodies. Maybe they were still there.

  “It’s hard to hate a building,” said Swagger.

  “This one, no problem.”

  Stronksi was a heavyset man with a glowering face that seemed like a map of Eastern-bloc misfortune. He had wintry gray eyes under wintry gray hair and heavy bones, and looked as if he could crush a diamond between his fingers, or at least fracture it a little bit. He had a bear’s body, yet at fifty-seven he moved with surprising grace. He had been in the same business as Swagger, but his outfit was called Spetsnaz, and he practiced the trade in Afghanistan-fifty-six kills.

  An American gun writer who’d come to Russia to do a feature on the new Russian sniper rifle, the 12.7 mm KSVK, had found him and interviewed him; Swagger saw the story, contacted the gun writer, got the e-mail address and a recommendation, and reached out across the ocean to another high-grass crawler, another brother of the one-shot kill, another infiltrator and exfiltrator who knew too much about certain things but would never speak of them. Stronski had heard of Swagger – it was a small world, after all – so the two men were a natural fit, having killed for a king whom they later doubted, having lost too many good friends for a cause that now seemed to mean nothing in the world, yet sought for certain recondite skills that never go out of fashion.

  “This woman, she’s okay?” Stronski asked.

  “She’s not of our world, which I like. No games to her. I haven’t told her everything; that’s tonight. But she reads your language as well as a native–”