The station was decorated with black and white marble mosaics of scenes from the great writer’s books. He sat beneath a mural taken from Crime and Punishment—Rodion Raskolnikov threatening the elderly pawnbroker Ivanovna with an axe moments before he slaughters her. Nearby, a character from Demons was about to blow his brains out with a pistol. Wantree recalled reading in a London tabloid that the mayor of Moscow had temporarily closed the station just days after it opened because subway riders grumbled about the murals, which they feared would attract Moscow’s suicides as the perfect place to dispatch themselves. Moscow was not a city where suicides were unknown. Quite the contrary: Every day a half-dozen miserable people did away with themselves, often by throwing their bodies under trains.
Wantree laughed out loud. What did they want from Dostoevesky? Merry family scenes around the Christmas tree? Old Fyodor just doesn’t have them, he thought. Russian writers are infrequently optimists.
In his earlier wanderings around the neighborhood, after his arrival at the Slavyanka, Wantree had seen a tiny hostel on Prospekt Mira, the Avenue of Peace. He remembered it because it was just south of an enormous fresh produce market on the grand boulevard, which runs due north from the Garden Ring. Wantree had been surprised to see so much tasty food for sale in a city that was considered undernourished and sorely lacking luxuries.
The Kvarti Hostel was a mile from the Dostoevskaya metro, an easy walk even with suitcase and laptop. The tiny building contained only six guest rooms. Wantree took the smallest available for $95 a night, nearly twice what he had been paying at the Slavyanka, but it was cleaner, had a comfortable bed, and a private bath—practically a fully equipped bed-sitter by British standards.
The tetchy babushka at the desk spoke no English, but Wantree’s primitive Russian was sufficient, and he paid in cash in advance, which is always appreciated. He saw that Wi-Fi was available. Wantree did not leave his room for the rest of the day, confident that it would take a while for Marchenko to track him down, if indeed he would try to find him at all.
He took a long, hot bath. He luxuriated in sheets that were cleaner than his own at home in England. When he awoke the next morning, his Hotmail account carried a message from LeClerc: “Most disappointed in you. Telephone office at once.” Wantree swore, then sighed. He wrote: “Leaving to find telephone kiosk now. Expect call within the hour.”
Wantree left the Kvarti, happy to see the same biddy manning the lobby desk. She barely glanced at him. He went south on Prospekt Mira toward central Moscow, searching for a post office. He found one a few thousand yards from the hostel and gave the clerk the telephone number in Paris he wished to call, along with rubles sufficient for a phone card.
“You are ruining this deal!” LeClerc shouted at him when the connection was made. “Marchenko is most angry with you. He says you are making impossible demands.”
“You told me that he was expecting me,” Wantree protested. He was furious and wanted LeClerc to know it. “He’s trying to sell you a bill of goods. I’ve been here five days now and I have yet to see the…. item. And that bloody wog you sent from your buyer! He practically told me to bugger off and treated Marchenko like a bloody servant. You’re losing control of this, my friend. And I damn well expect to be paid, don’t you forget it.”
The telephone line crackled. Wantree surmised LeClerc was trying to think of something to say.
“Expect me tomorrow,” LeClerc said at last, his voice betraying irritation and fatigue. “Where are you staying?”
“Marchenko got me a room at the Slavyanka,” Wantree said. “But I’m going to move. I don’t feel safe there any more.” He withheld information about his new digs. LeClerc was no more trustworthy in Moscow than Marchenko, and he was surely not going to make it easy for either of them to cheat him—or worse.
“The Slavyanka is a whorehouse,” LeClerc agreed. “I don’t blame you.”
“Look, just get on a plane, and send me an email when you land, and I’ll come to your hotel, or we can meet somewhere else. By then I’ll have a new place. Meanwhile, keep bloody Marchenko off my fucking back.”
His work for the day complete, Wantree walked by a roundabout route back toward the Kvarti, discovering quite by accident the well-hidden Botanical Garden of Moscow University only a few hundred yards south of his lodgings. Crowded with Russians, it was obviously a favorite haunt of Muscovites (admission was free!) who thronged around an ancient willow by the pond in the center of the blooming 16-acre preserve.
Visitors sauntered through greenhouses fragrant with the scent of oranges and lemons and other tropical and subtropical plants. It was the loveliest place Wantree had seen since arriving in Moscow and it seemed to him a perfect place to meet LeClerc, should LeClerc not invite him to his hotel when he arrived.
***
Colonel Viktor Marchenko recalled a favored maxim of General Eisenhower, the one that states that plans are worthless but planning is everything. So true. Those problems he had anticipated in his scenarios of a sale of his tactical nuclear bomb, the RA-211, had not come to pass, and contingencies that had never even occurred to him now seemed to be putting its execution at risk.
The liquidation of a British national, Simon Wantree, on Russian soil was not something he had planned for. Murder entailed risks as great or greater than the risks he was already taking. It had seemed to Marchenko in his planning that dealing through an intermediary like Jacques LeClerc, even if he was not exactly a known quantity, was preferable to trying to find the end user for his bomb himself, especially since, as he had correctly judged, the end user would likely come from somewhere far to the east of Russia. These were the lands of men Marchenko loathed: Afghans, Iranians, and even scum like Al Qaeda.
Yet, now Marchenko had the worst of both worlds: he was losing a significant fraction of the end user sales price of the weapon to LeClerc’s profit margin, and he had also the messy task of doing the job he was paying LeClerc to do for him, namely dealing with the buyer. Yasser al-Greeb was a nasty piece of work.
After leaving Wantree in the Slavyanka Hotel, Marchenko returned by metro to his apartment in a residential complex at the northeastern edge of the city. He had a one-bedroom flat in a 1960s building that housed some 200 retired military officers and their families. After his wife had died in the 1990s, Marchenko had converted the bedroom into a library and study, sleeping on a convertible bed in what had earlier been the sitting room.
Marchenko now paced in his study, smoking furiously, trying to think of his best course of action in the new circumstances. The problem was not only Wantree, who at least had been expected in Moscow, but also Al-Greeb, who had just appeared out of the blue, stinking horribly of a weeklong train ride from the armpit regions of the eastern steppes.
Marchenko wanted to deal solely with Jacques LeClerc. How could that be arranged? He determined to call LeClerc and tell him the deal was off unless he, LeClerc, seized control of events from Al-Greeb and Simon Wantree at once.
Though he had both a landline and a personal cell phone, Marchenko left his apartment building and went to a nearby post office on foot to make the call to Paris.
The conversation with LeClerc was sharp and scathing, but it was also brief.
***
Jacques LeClerc took the first Paris-to-Moscow flight he could muster, a Lufthansa from Charles De Gaulle to Domodedovo—2,500 kilometers in just under three hours. He took a taxi for the two-hour drive to the Leningradskaya Hotel in Komsomolskaya Square, a wedding-cake Stalinist monstrosity built in the 1950s in the dictator’s favored, florid style. When it opened, it was said to be the finest hotel in the Communist world. LeClerc had never stayed there, but it was within a mile or two of the Slavyanka and had recently undergone an expensive renovation by its new owner, an optimistic and well-funded American chain.
He arrived in his room angry and exhausted—he had spent more time in airport taxis than aboard his flight. The room was dark, paneled in cherry. He drew the drapes and
collapsed in bed, utterly unsure what his next move should be. At least the hotel was luxurious.
In the morning, he called Viktor Marchenko on the colonel’s cell phone and invited him to breakfast. They met an hour later in the hotel’s restaurant, a baronial cavern of a room beneath a gothic oak ceiling supported by four blue marble columns. There were few other guests.
LeClerc ordered croissants and café-au-lait, Marchenko coffee and a double order of eggs benedict.
“I am so sorry we will not be able to do business,” Marchenko said, with no rancor. “But I am grateful to you for coming to see me.”
“Viktor! We have planned together the capstone of both our careers! Think of Marbella! Please, be reasonable. We can find a way through this labyrinth that is acceptable to both of us.”
“No, I do not think so,” Marchenko said firmly. “I cannot jeopardize my retirement with this sloppiness. I will have to make do with whatever profits are currently waiting for me in Switzerland. This is all becoming too risky. I’ll take it up later perhaps, in another time and in another place.”
“I have your money—five million dollars. You can have it any way you want, including cash, diamonds, anywhere you want.”
“You will have to keep the lucre, mon ami. And I will keep my health and my life. Perhaps you should follow my lead and retire also.”
“Viktor, the client has already paid me. I am obliged to deliver.” LeClerc’s voice had fallen to a low hiss. Marchenko was the Russian gift-horse he had been seeking for a quarter century. It was unthinkable his final and biggest deal would collapse now because of the crotchety qualms of an aging Russian martinet colonel.
“Sending Al-Greeb to harass me was reprehensible,” Marchenko said sharply. “You were obliged to insulate me. You failed. Now the hazard that I will be exposed to is vastly greater. I cannot go forward. Or rather, I will not.”
“We will roll back the clock then,” LeClerc said amiably. “We will go back to our original plan.”
“That is not possible.”
“I am prepared to pay you an additional half-million dollars for the regrettable aggravation I have caused you.”
“Did you say one million dollars?”
“Viktor! I must keep a little for myself! I too am nearing retirement.”
“One million more it is, then—a payment of six million total, by wire, to that place in Switzerland we discussed. No diamonds. And there will be different terms of transfer. We will make arrangements for shipment, and you will wire the funds to me the night before the package leaves Moscow. And you agree to remain personally in Russia yourself until that date. If there are any more—interruptions. You have been warned. I do not plan to do your work for you.”
LeClerc took a sip of coffee. It was watery coffee, like all the coffee served in all American hotels no matter where they were located. He felt a wave of nausea pass through him, whether from the travel or the stress of the most important business transaction of his life falling apart, he could not tell. With the eleven million dollars from the buyers already in his Paris account, a six million payment to Marchenko would leave him with five million left to cover his profit and remaining expenses, including the Englishman.
“And what of Simon Wantree?” Marchenko said, reading his mind. “Yasser al-Greeb was not pleased to see this man, let me tell you.”
“Simon is my problem,” LeClerc said wearily. “But I’m going to need your help.”
***
As she later recounted it to Moscow City Police, 26-year-old Irina Raskova arrived at the Garden of the Apothecaries off Prospekt Mira, otherwise known as the Botanical Garden of Moscow University, a little after 10 AM with her two pampered blonde charges, the pre-school daughters of the Ambassador of Portugal to Russia, whose chancery office was a few hundred yards from the garden gates on Grokholsky Street.
The tulips were still in bloom and the children were permitted to run free in the park, which they could not do on the sidewalks of Moscow. The gardens had unfenced ponds, so Irina was alert, preoccupied with watching the two girls, ages five and six, as they pranced along the wooden paths around the flowerbeds, chasing a bright red rubber ball. The girls giggled and laughed.
Walking on the grass, Irina reminded them, was forbidden. The girls were deliriously happy with their outing in the botanical gardens, but obedient and well-behaved. Their father and mother would have been proud.
Irina was not too preoccupied to notice a tense and frightened man, a little on the plump side, sitting tightly squeezed on a park bench between two other men, a dapper, well-groomed foreigner in a blue serge blazer and a distinguished-looking older Russian man with iron-gray hair cut en brosse, a style favored by Russian military officers of a certain age. The plump man’s eyes were darting from left to right, from right to left, and he was mumbling a foreign language, probably English, in an agitated, gasping whisper.
Irina took the children to a playground and sandpit near large trees at the southern end of the gardens. When she and the girls retraced their steps to order hot chocolate in the café at the park gates about twenty minutes later, they passed the bench with the pudgy man a second time. He seemed to be asleep, slumped over a bit to his left, his eyes closed. His two companions were gone. When Eugênia, the elder sister, bumped into the park bench while chasing her rubber ball, the man slumped over. Irina ran up to him and apologized profusely, but the man did not respond. Only then did she see the spreading black puddle of blood oozing out from beneath the bench.
Stifling a scream to avoid alarming her young charges, she grabbed their hands and ran for the kiosk at the gate where, in a state of near-hysteria, she reported her discovery to a guard.
Chapter 16 — Kabul, Afghanistan
“Technology is what will beat Al Qaeda in the end,” Keven Smyth said.
Kate Langley looked out the tinted windshield of Smyth’s dark blue SUV, surveilling the building on Street 10B in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul. It was just after eight in the evening. A light was on in BanKoNoKo, but Kate had not seen anyone enter or leave the two-storey structure since the young clerical worker from Singapore, whom she recognized from their previous visit, had closed up shop four hours earlier. The two Americans had been sitting in the SUV for five hours, watching the street and the building.
“The advantage Al Qaeda has over us is that they can revert to a pre-technological survival mode whenever they are threatened, whereas we can’t,” Kate said. “When OBL’s satellite phone was hacked and that news leaked to media, he stopped using electronic communications completely. His house in Abbottabad was airwalled for Internet and landlines. He just vanished.”
“Agreed,” Smyth said. “That may buy them some time, but look how predator drones have changed the equation in our favor. It was the drones and the spy satellites that spotted the tall man walking in Abbottabad. Eventually, technology gives us the upper hand, even if they turn off their cell phones and power down their laptops.”
“This bank is another example of their short-term advantage,” Kate persisted. “Minh Kwang is proficient in the art of—what did you call it? Flying Money?”
“Fei ch’ien,” Smyth said. “Flying money in Mandarin, or hundi in India, or phoe kuan in Thailand, or hawala in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are all different versions of an informal value transfer system that operates under the radar, leaving no electronic trace. An underground, parallel banking system.”
“I think you’ve just made my point for me,” Kate said.
“Yet here we are, hot on the trail of Mr. Kwang.”
“Because of effective HUMINT, not technology. If Claire Stoppard’s human informant had not seen the cash itself at KBL, we would not be here. It was all about eyes and ears on the ground at Kabul International Airport, not spies in the skies.”
Kate was getting cranky and did not much want to continue this futile argument with Smyth, who seemed to take the opposite side of any position she took just to challenge her.
The street was dark and empty.
“Where are the video cameras and the other security?” Kate said.
“This is Afghanistan. Doors have locks, windows have bars,” Smyth said. “No video cameras, except at major multinationals. Plus, I don’t think this is the sort of bank that operates ATMs.”
“Do you really believe that Minh Kwang stores suitcases full of hundred dollar bills in that building?” Kate said. “I sure don’t.”
“More likely the cash is kept somewhere that is not open to the public. But he may keep his records here. This is the place where Kwang interfaces with his clients.”
It was time. Kate stepped out of the vehicle, leaving Smyth at the wheel. The building used as BanKoNoKo’s office had originally been erected as a private residence, not as an office, and it had a four-foot wall with a gate facing the street. This served in Kate’s favor as she easily vaulted over the wall without being seen. It provided cover while she worked her way to the back of the building.
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