Puppet Master

by Dale Brown

  “Here.” Tolevi took out a business card. “I am staying at the Mercure. Uh, if maybe something changes?”

  “It won’t.”

  “Take my card anyway,” said Tolevi, knowing he sounded more than a little desperate. “If it does.”

  The man wouldn’t even look at it. Tolevi placed the card on the corner of the desk and left.

  Was he being held up for another “tax”? But in such a case, it was unlikely that the clerk would have stamped the papers. The ministry could always issue new papers, but that required steps that others might see; it was unusual.

  He was walking back to the hotel to have a drink and puzzle out the situation when he realized that the man in the blue sport coat was following him again.

  Part of him wanted to confront the bastard and see if he had anything to do with the rejection. But good sense prevailed; Tolevi simply continued to the hotel and made his way to the bar. He ordered a vodka and tonic, then took a seat across the room.

  The man in the blue jacket hadn’t followed him inside. Tolevi looked over the rest of the room, but if his shadow had an accomplice, he couldn’t pick him or her out.

  He could go on to Donetsk without the permit and complete the CIA portion of his trip. But it would dent his cover story and, more importantly, prevent him from doing any real business, as the contacts would want the assurance that he could deliver the promised goods.

  More importantly, it might mean that the Russians he dealt with no longer wanted him doing business in their territory. That was a problem of potentially catastrophic proportions.

  Had he angered someone in the trade ministry?

  Maybe Medved had somehow. But that seemed unlikely.

  The drink was weak, the vodka not the best. Tolevi decided he would go upstairs to his room and rest a bit before having lunch.

  Heading for the elevator, he spotted a restroom and ducked in. He was washing his hands when two other men came in, both Russians, both dressed like workers. Barely noticing them, he dried his hands and started for the door. It swung open just as he reached for it, smacking his right hand; as he jerked back, both of his arms were grabbed and he was pulled backward to the far side of the sinks. Three more men entered, two dressed as the others were, in T-shirts and black trousers. The third wore a tracksuit that would have been high fashion in the U.S. around 1980.

  “What the hell?” Tolevi sputtered in Russian.

  “Gabor Tolevi, welcome to Moscow,” said the man in the tracksuit. “State your business.”

  “I was washing my hands.”

  The man holding his left arm jerked it upward, pressuring Tolevi’s joints. The man in the tracksuit shook his head, though Tolevi wasn’t sure whether it was at him or the goon holding him.

  “You’re in Moscow for business,” said the man in the tracksuit.

  “I don’t talk to people when I’m being bullied.”

  “Are we not gentle?” Tracksuit laughed, but then he waved his hands and the men behind Tolevi let him go. “We’ll use English,” he added. “So you’re more comfortable. And your accent is very bad.”

  “I hang around with the wrong crowd.”

  “You are here to sell medicine to the rebels. That is not a good thing.”

  Rebels.

  Until now, Tolevi had guessed the men were SVR or otherwise Russians. But the word rebel marked him as a Ukrainian.

  Or did it?

  “Medicine is medicine,” responded Tolevi.

  “Yes, the medicine is one thing. Who it helps is another.”

  “Aspirin helps everyone.”

  “And that’s what you’re selling?”

  “I don’t have the right permit,” said Tolevi. “So I’m not selling anything.”

  “That is a shame. So you have no reason to go into the rebel lands, then?”

  The man didn’t look particularly Ukrainian. Was he SVR posing as Ukrainian to test his loyalties? Or maybe mafya.

  The only way to find out was to play along.

  “Maybe I can find some reason to go there,” said Tolevi.

  “Give me the papers you brought to the ministry.”

  Tolevi hesitated. One of the men behind him—the one on the left, obviously an overachiever—moved close, reaching for his arm again.

  “Work with us, and things will go well,” said tracksuit. “Hesitate, and—what is the saying, ‘All is lost’?”

  Tolevi took the papers out of his sport coat pocket and handed them to the man.

  “In the morning, there’ll be an envelope under your door,” said tracksuit. “Go about your business. We will contact you when we need you.”

  He waved his head at the others, who shoved Tolevi as they walked to the door. Tracksuit paused.

  “We know you spoke to partisans in Crimea,” he said. “That would not be a good thing to do again.”

  And then, with a frown, he left.

  52

  Boston—Friday, late in the day

  Chelsea had forgotten she had a date with Flores until he texted her that afternoon, asking what kind of food she liked.

  Japanese, she answered, taken off guard.

  Sushi or hibachi?

  Neither.

  But that wasn’t a good answer.

  Sushi, of course. I don’t like to hang out with people who throw food and knives around.

  Flores met her at Sushi Z, a trendy place not far from downtown that served all-you-can-eat plates of sushi for twenty-eight bucks a pop. The menu consisted of two pieces of paper, on which you marked what you wanted; the one caveat was that you had to finish all you ordered, or be charged for it. Flores ordered a pair of dragon rolls and spiced crab sushi; Chelsea, not impressed by the frenetic pace of the waitresses, ordered tuna sashimi.

  The warm sake Flores recommended was good, and very easy going down—too easy, thought Chelsea after her first few sips, and she resolved to go more slowly.

  She wasn’t sure about Flores. He wasn’t the sort of guy she had gone out with before. She couldn’t decide whether the fact that he worked for the FBI made him more or less interesting.

  He was white, but that wasn’t necessarily a big hang-up; she’d gone out with white guys before. And her father was white—though anyone seeing her just automatically checked the black box.

  They talked about movies and then their food, light chatter without commitment or pressure. She was feeling good—partly a function of the sake—until their plates were cleared.

  “So what’s the daughter like?” asked Flores out of the blue.

  “Daughter?”

  “Tolevi. You met his daughter, right?”

  “The ATM guy?”

  “Yeah. I heard you made friends with her.”

  “How’d you hear that?”

  “Just heard it.”

  Chelsea refilled her sake cup without commenting.

  “You know, if you guys are still working on that, we could possibly trade information,” said Flores.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. It might be useful. If you talk to the daughter, maybe she can tell us about her father. What he’s up to.”

  Oh, so he’s pumping me for information. This isn’t a date.

  She felt both relief and disappointment—mild disappointment. This was business, not romance.

  Trade information. But what?

  “Do you know how the scam worked?” he asked.

  “Do you?”

  “We haven’t been able to find the key,” he confessed. “The code—there’s nothing there.”

  “Your boss told my boss to drop everything,” said Chelsea.

  “My boss says a lot of things. That doesn’t mean you and I can’t work on it.”

  Chelsea finished her sake. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, think about it.” Flores looked up as the waiter approached with the check. “I got it,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Jenkins was just leaving the task force headquarters when Flores called him
on his cell phone.

  “How did it go?” he asked Flores.

  “She didn’t really say much about the girl.”

  “Nothing? They totally dropped it?”

  “She only said you told her boss to back off. That was pretty much all I could get out of her.”

  “Keep at it.”

  “This isn’t really the kind of thing I’m comfortable with.”

  “I know Massina. He’s not going to drop this. If one of his people is talking to the girl, they’re definitely working on it.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “That’s right.”

  53

  Moscow—later

  For hours, Tolevi drifted between sleep and wakefulness. Every time he started to slip off, his mind threw up something that spiked his attention just enough to keep him from drifting off: possible problems at the border, possible trouble getting into Donetsk, how to get out of the country if the airport was suddenly closed.

  And the identity of the people who had stopped him in the restroom. Clearly they were Russian, aiming to help the rebels even though they’d tried to provoke him with the clumsy reference.

  SVR, then. He had contacts, he could check.

  Not wise.

  He tried moving his mind away from those thoughts, but nothing was safe: thinking of home, he began fretting about Borya, worrying how she was getting on with the babysitter. Nothing was safe: he thought of a baseball game between the Red Sox and the hated Yankees he’d been to recently . . .

  For some reason it triggered a memory of the goons who had trapped him in the restroom.

  Yankees fans, no doubt.

  Around 3:00 a.m. he heard a noise at the door. He rolled out of bed, grabbing for the piece of iron he’d put on the nightstand to use as a weapon. Twenty-four inches long, the flat bar was part of his suitcase frame, specially installed to be used as a last-resort weapon in places like Moscow, where obtaining a real weapon was either not worth the effort or too dangerous. It was solid and heavy, more than enough to disable someone temporarily, if not break their neck—something he had done some years before in Brazil, of all places.

  Bar in hand, he slipped to the side of the wall and waited, expecting someone to come in. Within moments he realized that wasn’t going to be the case; a clerk had only walked by and slipped in the bill.

  And another envelope, just as the goons had promised.

  Tolevi stood by the door, listening. The only thing he could hear was his own breathing. Finally he bent and took the envelopes, then tiptoed back to his bed. He used the small light on his keychain to open the envelope. His import papers had been perfectly duplicated, with two exceptions—the stamp now indicated that the import had been approved, and two zeroes had been added to the number of tractor trailers he was authorized to import.

  Two hundred containers’ worth of aspirin and cough medicine? The profits would be considerable—but so was the up-front cost. And that was if he could make the necessary arrangements, both to buy and to sell.

  But his new “partners” had probably taken care of at least one half of that equation. The question was how to avoid getting stuck with the bill, since a shipment this size would require hefty deposits.

  Opening the other envelope, he saw that his bill had been paid, undoubtedly by his new “partners.” There was a note attached with a Post-it.

  G sends his regards.

  One of his SVR contacts. So at least he was sure about whom he was dealing with.

  Despite the fact that Russia and the Ukraine were fighting a war in all but name, trains and airplanes still traveled regularly between Moscow and Kiev. Getting to Donetsk was a little more complicated—all airplane flights were officially canceled, though it was still possible to charter something if you had the right connections. The train took some twenty-one hours and traveled across three borders, if one counted the rebel area; while Tolevi had the requisite papers, driving was far faster and at least arguably more reliable.

  This was not without its own complications. Tolevi left the hotel at five for Moscow airport; he boarded a plane three hours later for Rostov-on-Don in the south. There he had arranged to meet a driver he trusted because of prior arrangements. But when he got to the bus station where they’d agreed to meet, neither the driver nor the car was there. Though this was uncharacteristic, Russians in general were not exactly known as paragons of timeliness. Tolevi stood near the curb at the corner of the building, not far from the closed ticket window, waiting in the cold. After half an hour, he concluded that his driver was not going to show. He was just walking toward the terminal door, intending to call a taxi so he could get to a rental car, when a Mercedes C class sedan drove up alongside him.

  “Mr. T?” asked the driver as the window rolled down. He spoke in broken English. “So sorry late. Needed petrol.”

  Tolevi didn’t recognize the man—or the car, for that matter.

  “Who are you?” he asked in Russian.

  “Boris send me.” The man stuck to English. “His wife have baby.”

  Boris was not a young man, sixty at least, and Tolevi couldn’t imagine him being married to someone young enough to still be fertile.

  “I don’t need a driver, thanks,” said Tolevi.

  “Boris told me you go over border, need guide,” added the man. “I know how to get around.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Вам потрібен гід,” said the man, suddenly speaking Ukrainian. “Vam potriben hid.”

  It meant “You need a guide.”

  “Mozhlyvo,” replied Tolevi. “Perhaps.”

  “Call me Dan.” This in English.

  “Where do you come from, Dan?”

  “Do you wish to know too much?” asked the man rhetorically.

  “You have papers?”

  “I can get wherever you need to go. Your Ukrainian is not bad,” Dan added. “But you will immediately be spotted as a foreigner. Maybe Russian, maybe not.”

  “What’s Boris’s wife’s name?” asked Tolevi.

  “Anas, after Anastasia, and she is young enough to be his granddaughter, I think. How the old devil does it, I don’t know. You are to pay me half in advance.”

  “Good,” said Tolevi, opening the car door.

  In Tolevi’s experience, there were two kinds of drivers—ones who said absolutely nothing as they drove, and ones who said far too much.

  Dan was one of the latter. Despite his earlier hints about Tolevi not knowing too much, he told his entire life story within their first half hour. He was a native of Temyruk, a tiny town not far from Donetsk; like many in the region, he was of Russian extraction and had been visiting friends in Rostov when the civil war began. Twenty-eight years old and a trained architect who had never worked as an architect, he was at least nominally on the side of the rebels who now controlled Donetsk, though Tolevi suspected what he said about the rebellion was more calculated to win his trust than to express his true opinions.

  Whatever. Dan had clearly found a way to make the rebellion profitable; he was practiced at going back and forth across the border, something that became clear as they approached it. Rather than going through Vyselky, the town that sat on the highway they were taking, he detoured two miles east, driving across a succession of dirt farm roads in a crazy pattern of Zs. After about a half hour of this, they emerged on a paved road, driving north for another fifteen minutes before seeing even a single rooftop in the distance.

  “We have about an hour to go,” Dan announced. “We can stop in Amvrosiivka for something to eat if you are hungry.”

  Tolevi took that as a hint. Dan drove to a small café a few blocks off the highway; the recommended pirozhki—meat pastries—were excellent.

  “How long will you need me for in Donetsk?” asked Dan as they finished.

  “I don’t need you there,” Tolevi told him. “You can go after you drop me off.”

  “Boris thought you would need a guide. I can stay for two days.”


  “And did Boris tell you what I was doing there?”

  “Only that you have business. I assume you bring items into the country.”

  “Something like that.”

  Tolevi nursed his beer. He didn’t trust Dan, of course, and was more than half convinced he was in the employ of the men he’d met in Moscow. But if that was the case, he might be useful, and in any event wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of. Tolevi decided to keep him where he could see him.

  “I might find having a car and driver useful,” he told him. “If the price is right.”

  “Another ten thousand euros would cover it. And my expenses.”

  It was far too much, but the response was reassuring—it made it more likely he was on his own. Tolevi bargained him down to five, with expenses and gas. He might have gone further, but Dan was still smiling; Tolevi had learned long ago better to leave everyone happy than to scrape shins fighting over a few dollars.

  Donetsk was a strange mixture of calm and violent destruction. Though it was close to the front line held by regular Ukrainian troops, a cease-fire had been in place for several months. This meant that residents could go about their business with some degree of normality, except for the periods when both sides exchanged artillery or rocket fire. These exchanges took place on almost a daily basis and followed a predictable pattern: one side would fire first, then the other would answer. The exchanges would last no more than five minutes; always the side that initiated the gunfire would stop first.

  There were two unpredictable things: one, when the gunfire would begin, and two, where the shells would land. Damage was neither limited to military areas nor reliably repaired. An otherwise normal-looking city block was punctuated by blackened, burned-out façades; another featured row after row of bricks so neatly piled up that they looked as if they were for a new construction project, rather than salvaged from the buildings that had once occupied the craters behind them.

  More than a year before, a railroad bridge over one of the main highways into town had been destroyed, temporarily blocking passage on the road. The rail cars had been removed, and much of the track and its overpass torn down, but the ends of the tracks on either side were still there, jutting above the road like fingers trying to close. Debris—ironwork, mostly, along with large chunks of concrete—sat scattered at the sides of the road. Tolevi couldn’t help but think they would make the perfect cover for an ambush as they passed.