Assassin

by David Hagberg

  He only had the vaguest idea how he was going to do it, and get away. But he knew from long experience that the solution would come to him in due time, and that he would recognize it when it arrived. He also knew that before such a solution became evident he was going to have to do more research. A lot more.

  The truck stop on the outskirts of Maubeuge, where he stopped to have a quick lunch, was smoky and noisy, but the food was very good as it was at most French waysides.

  By noon he was across the border into Belgium, the customs officer waving him through when McGarvey held up his Belgian passport, and seventy minutes later he was parking his car in the long term ramp at Brussels’ Zaventem National Airport on the northeast outskirts of the city.

  His bags were passed through airport security without a problem, and he got lucky with a Finnair flight departing at 3:00 P.M. He wanted to avoid, as much as possible, using his Allain papers in Belgium, because under any kind of questioning by the local authorities it would be obvious that he was not a Belgian. But the clerks at Finnair had no reason to question his nationality.

  Because of the time difference it wasn’t until 8:00 P.M. when he landed at Helsinki’s Vantaa Airport, the weather here overcast, blustery and sharply colder than in Paris. He was passed through customs with no delay, though the officer did take an interest in his computer. By 9:30 P.M., he’d checked into the Strand Inter-Continental Hotel next to the old city downtown on the waterfront, and was dining on an excellent grilled salmon, with a very good bottle of French white wine.

  Afterward he went down to one of the pay phones in the soaring atrium lobby, and direct-dialed Viktor Yemlin’s apartment in Moscow. A noisy group of Russian businessmen were drinking and laughing around the fireplace across from McGarvey. The women with them were all young and expensively dressed. Even from a distance it was easy to determine that they were probably very high-priced call girls. The men were Russia’s new millionaires; the women its entrepreneurs.

  Yemlin answered his telephone on the third ring. “Da.”

  “Hello.”

  Yemlin didn’t reply for several seconds. Music played in the background. “I think you have the wrong number. You want 228—0712.” He broke the connection.

  McGarvey hung up, and walked across the lobby to the bar where he ordered a cognac and lit a cigarette. Yemlin’s line wasn’t secure. The number he wanted to use was probably located some distance from his apartment. Possibly a pay phone. The FSK couldn’t monitor every pay phone in the city, but given a little time, say a half-hour, they could isolate a specific number and tap it, which meant Yemlin would be standing by no later than fifteen minutes from now.

  The cocktail waitress serving the group by the fireplace came back to the bar to order another round of drinks. She glanced at McGarvey, who smiled.

  “Sounds like they’re having fun,” he said in English.

  “They’re Russians,” she replied disdainfully. “I’m trying to get them to move their party up to the pool.”

  “Aren’t they tipping very well?”

  “Just fine,” she said, smiling a little. “I’m just hoping they’ll all drown up there.”

  “Good luck.”

  The bartender came to fill her order, and fifteen minutes later McGarvey went back to the pay phone and called the Moscow number.

  Yemlin answered on the first ring. He sounded out of breath. “This is 228—0712,” he said.

  “Who is monitoring your home phone?” McGarvey asked.

  “Possibly no one, this is just a precaution. Are you here in Moscow?”

  “I’m in Helsinki. How soon can you get here? We need to talk.”

  “Are you taking the … package?”

  “How soon can you be here?” McGarvey repeated evenly. He could hear the strain in Yemlin’s voice.

  “I’ll take the morning flight. I can be there by noon.”

  “Will you be missed?”

  Yemlin’s laugh was short and sharp. “No one misses anything here anymore. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Kaivopuisto. Enter from the southwest.” McGarvey hung up, then went back to the bar where he had another cognac before going up to his room for the night. As he passed the Russian group one of them said something to the cocktail waitress, who dropped her tray, then spun around and rushed away. McGarvey didn’t break stride, though he wanted to go over and punch the boorish, loud-mouthed bastard in the mouth.

  Kaivopuisto

  Helsinki’s most elegant district on the waterfront was home to a number of foreign diplomats, and was maintained like a well-manicured park. On a pleasant day half of Helsinki took their walks here because it was so pretty. In the early days McGarvey had spent a month recuperating in Helsinki after an assignment that had gone bad in Leningrad. He’d often come down to the waterfront and he still remembered the area pretty well.

  The day was raw. A chill wind drove spits of snow almost horizontally under a leaden sky. Still there were a number of people bundled up and walking through the district.

  McGarvey had purchased a down-filled nylon jacket from a department store near the hotel, and by one o’clock, when Yemlin finally showed up, he wished he’d bought a warm hat and gloves as well. He tailed the Russian for ten minutes to make sure he’d come in clean, and then caught up with him halfway across the park.

  “Did you know my parents?” McGarvey asked, falling in beside Yemlin.

  “They were before my time, Kirk,” Yemlin said. He was professional enough not to have reacted in an obvious manner when McGarvey suddenly showed up in disguise. “But I’d heard about them from General Baranov. He told me that it was a supreme irony that in some respects he had created you by planting false information about your parents being spies for us.”

  “You didn’t give me much proof,” McGarvey said. He’d destroyed the documents on Saturday before he went back to the apartment, and he had tried to put the news out of his mind.

  “There is no more. Everything else died when you killed Baranov. Nobody’s around from those days who remembers anything. I’m sure there isn’t much more in your own records beyond what Baranov planted. It was John Trotter’s doing. But you knew that.”

  Trotter was an old friend who’d worked as Deputy Director of Operations. In the end he’d betrayed them all, and his last act had been an attempt to kill McGarvey.

  “Then you could be jerking me around here too, Viktor Pavlovich. You bastards invented the game.”

  “No,” Yemlin said sadly, studying McGarvey’s face. “But we were masters at it. We really didn’t have much else. You know yourself that most of the West’s estimates of our military and nuclear capabilities were inflated so that the Pentagon could justify its own budget.”

  It was true, McGarvey thought. And Tarankov, if he came to power, would start the cycle all over again.

  “I believe in my heart, Kirk, that your parents were not the spies that you were led to believe they were. I don’t know enough of the details to understand why Baranov ran that kind of an operation. I just know what he did. And if you’d thought about it then, you would have seen Baranov’s touch. It was his style. A lot of us admired him.”

  They walked for a couple of minutes in silence. Deeper in the park they were somewhat sheltered from the wind, and there were even more Finns out walking on their lunch hours.

  “This will be the last time we meet,” McGarvey said. “I want you to make no attempt to try to communicate with me, or find me no matter what happens.” McGarvey looked into Yemlin’s eyes. “No matter what, Viktor Pavlovich, do you understand?”

  “You’re going to do it? You’re going to assassinate Tarankov?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?” Yemlin asked, his face alive with expression.

  “Sometime before the June elections. Sooner if it looks as if he’ll try a coup d’etat.”

  “You’ll need help. I can pull enough strings in the SVR to supply you with information on Tarankov’s movements.”
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br />   “No,” McGarvey said. “You’re going back to Moscow as if nothing ever happened. You’ve never seen me, you’ve never discussed anything like this with me, and you will discuss this with no one.”

  “Impossible,” Yemlin said, shaking his head. “Sukhoruchkin and Shevardnadze know everything.”

  “Then I’ll call it off—”

  “Please listen to me, Kirk. These men have just as much stake in this as I do. We’ve already laid our lives on the line. It was us three who discussed and approved hiring you to kill Tarankov. If you fall so do we. They have to be told. But I swear to you no one else in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, knows what we’ve asked you to do. They haven’t breathed a word, even hinted about it, to anyone. I swear it.”

  McGarvey thought about it for a moment. “You may tell them that I’ve accepted the job, but nothing else. Not that we met here, not my timetable, nothing. I won’t go any further than that, because as you say, lives are on the line. And mine is more precious to me than yours. You’ll either agree to this, or you’ll have to find someone else.”

  “There is no one else,” Yemlin said heavily. “I agree. What about money?”

  “One million dollars,” McGarvey said. He handed Yemlin a slip of paper with a seven-digit number written on it. “This is my account at Barclay’s on Guernsey. British pounds, Swiss francs or American dollars.”

  “I’ll have it there before I leave Helsinki today,” Yemlin said. “What else?”

  “The SVR must have a central data processing center that shares information with the FSK and the Militia.”

  “Of course.”

  “I want the telephone number.”

  Yemlin pulled up short, and his eyes narrowed. “Even if I knew that number it wouldn’t do you any good without the proper access codes. Those I can’t get.”

  “Nonetheless I want it.”

  “Assuming I can come up with the number, how do I get it to you?”

  “Place an ad in the personals column of Le Figaro starting in three days. Say: Julius loves you, please call at once. Invert the telephone number and include it.”

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Mac, but I’ll do my best,” Yemlin said. They started to walk again. “What about identity papers and travel documents? I can help with that.”

  “I’ll get my own.”

  “Weapons?”

  McGarvey shook his head.

  “A safehouse in Moscow in case you have to go underground?”

  They stopped again. “You’ve been in the business long enough to know that the bigger the organization, the greater are the chances for a leak. And right now the SVR and every other department in Russia is riddled with Tarankov’s spies and informers. I’ll work alone.”

  “I caught you once.”

  McGarvey smiled. “Yes, you did, Viktor Pavlovich. But things were different then. I was a lot younger, and the KGB was a lot better.”

  Yemlin agreed glumly. “In Paris you told me that the odds of success were a thousand to one against an assassin. What’s changed your mind?”

  “Nothing,” McGarvey said. “If anything I think the odds are worse, and will get worse the longer we wait. If Tarankov takes over the government either by elections or by force, he’ll be even harder to kill.”

  Yemlin looked down the broad boulevard the way they’d come. “As it is the aftermath will be terrible. I don’t know if Russia will survive.” His resolve seemed to stiffen and he turned back to McGarvey. “I do know that unless Tarankov is killed we will certainly not survive as a democracy.”

  “You’re sure this is what you want?” McGarvey asked. “Because once we part here it will be too late to change your mind.”

  Yemlin nodded after a moment, and he shook McGarvey’s hand. “Goodbye, Kirk. God go with you.”

  TWELVE

  Washington

  The National Press Club’s main ballroom was all aglitter for the annual Person of the Year banquet, although the several hundred journalists and diplomats paid scant attention to the fine linen, silver and porcelain, they’d seen it before, often.

  Word was out that President Lindsay would be given the honor this year (eighteen months late) for his international policies including the handling of the Japanese trade issues. For the first time since World War II the U.S. balance of trade with Japan was heading in the right direction. No one expected parity in the near future but Lindsay was taking the country in that direction.

  It was a little before nine in the evening, and although the President and Mrs. Lindsay weren’t scheduled to arrive until 9:45 P.M., dinner was winding down and dancing had begun.

  Howard Ryan and his stunningly dressed wife, Evangeline, had just finished a dance and were heading back to the table they shared with Senate Majority Leader Chilton Wood and his wife, J3 Admiral Stewart Phipps and his wife and Bob Castle, political columnist for the New York Times, when Ryan’s assistant DDO, Tom Moore, and his dowdy wife Doris intercepted them.

  “You two cut a fine figure out there,” Moore said.

  “We’re defined by our social graces,” Ryan said pompously. He kissed Doris on the cheek. “If your dance card isn’t filled, put my name on it.”

  “Thanks for asking, Howard, but I have a feeling that Evangeline and I are going to be deserted tonight,” Doris said. She seemed resigned.

  Ryan shot Moore a questioning look. His assistant was worried.

  “Why don’t you and Doris go back to our table and have another glass of wine,” Ryan told his wife. “Tom and I will join you ladies in a couple of minutes.”

  “Don’t strand us here, Howard,” Evangeline warned, and she and Doris headed back to the table. She did not share her husband’s love for intrigue.

  “This better be good,” Ryan told his assistant.

  “It’s much worse than that, Howard. Believe me,” Moore said. “My car is in front. I suggest we go for a ride.”

  Ryan was annoyed. He wanted to see the President again, but Moore’s obvious agitation was worrisome. They walked outside, got into the assistant DDO’s car, and pulled away, merging with traffic on 14th Street.

  “I just came from Langley,” Moore said. “Farley Smith caught me as Doris and I were leaving the house. He must have missed you by only a couple of minutes.”

  Smith was chief of the CIA’s archives section where the agency’s most highly classified records and historical documents were stored. He was working on deep background for Ryan’s follow-up report to the President on sending an envoy to Tarankov.

  “What has he come up with?” Ryan asked.

  “We’ve got trouble, Howard,” Moore replied. “Not just the DO, but the entire agency. If this breaks, the remainder of our careers will be spent on the Hill answering some tough questions that’ll make the Iran-Contra fiasco look like a tempest in a teacup.”

  He stopped for a red light and looked over at Ryan. “What’s the worst thing you can think of that could happen to us in this operation? The absolute worst piece of information.”

  “Don’t play games, Tom. Lay it out for me.”

  “Tarankov is ours. Or was.”

  Ryan was stunned. “What are you talking about?”

  “In the seventies his code name was CKHAMMER,” Moore said. The CK digraph was an old CIA indicator that the code named person was a particularly sensitive Soviet or Eastern bloc intelligence source.

  “He spied for us?” Ryan asked, thunderstruck.

  “While he was in the missile service. His parents ran into trouble with the KGB, and were sentenced to ten years in a Siberian gulag. They were friends of the Sakharovs. Our Moscow COS at the time, Bob Burns, assigned a case officer to see if Major Tarankov could be turned. He was, and until he was transferred out of the service he apparently provided us with some pretty good information.”

  “Then we have the bastard,” Ryan said triumphantly. “We’ll get a message to him to back off, or we expose what he was to the Russian people. It’ll ruin him.” Ryan h
ad another thought. “Do we have proof? Photographs? Documents? Signatures?”

  “Presumably, but it’s all worthless, because there’s more.”

  “What more can there be?” Ryan demanded. “The son of a bitch was a spy. His people can’t trust him. Hell, we’ll even offer him political asylum. We can dump him in Haiti, or maybe Panama where he’d be out of everyone’s hair.”

  “Money. A lot of it. Moscow station had an open checkbook for a few years back then, because of the SDI thing. Word was that the Russians were way ahead of us on research. Farley is still digging, but he thinks that rumor may have gotten started on the basis of false information Tarankov sent us.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Over a nine year period we gave Tarankov, and a supposed network of spies under his direction, more than seventy million dollars. All of it black, none of it authorized by, or even known about on the Hill or the White House.”

  “He used the money to buy that goddamned train.”

  “It would appear so.”

  “Nothing has changed—”

  “We can’t send an envoy to Tarankov. He’d just laugh in our faces. Imperialist bastards who tried to buy Russia for seventy million. It would backfire on us. It would set our foreign policy back a hundred years.”

  They came around the corner on K Street a block from the National Press Club.

  “We have to move very carefully, Howard,” Moore said. “Tarankov must be arrested and put on trial as soon as possible. Before the June elections.”

  “Our involvement will come out in any trial.”

  “It won’t matter,” Moore interjected. “As long as we’re not involved with him now we can deny everything. Tarankov will come out sounding like a desperate man clutching at straws.”

  “The President wants to send me as the envoy.”