Assassin km-6

by David Hagberg

  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.”

  “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. “Parley 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 th
at’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 had 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. Parley 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.”

  “You’ll have to convince him differently. We cannot be seen interfering in Russian internal affairs. It would do us a great deal of damage.”

  Ryan had another thought. “Who else knows about this?” “Nobody. And Parley had the good grace not to mention sending this upstairs to the director’s office.”

  “Murphy has to be told.”

  “That’s your job, Howard.”

  Damned right, Ryan thought. “And your job is to keep a lid on this thing. I want you to convince Parley that I mean business. If so much as a hint of this comes out of his office I’ll nail his ass to the barn door.”

  “Of course.”

  “Where’s the file at this moment?”

  “In my safe.”

  “I want it on my desk at eight sharp. I’ll see the general at nine. He’s due back from New York sometime tonight.”

  CIA Headquarters

  It was a few minutes before nine when the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Lawrence Danielle called Ryan’s office. “We’re here, are you ready?”

  “I’m on my way,” Ryan said. “Has Technical Services scanned his office?”

  “They just left.”

  He checked his pocket watch, buttoned up his coat and took the Tarankov file recovered in a d.d.o. eyes only gray folder with a blue border on each page up to the seventh floor. He’d had a sleepless night worrying about what he would to have to face this morning. And reading the material Moore had brought over, he decided that his assistant had not exaggerated.

  Ryan’s specialty, among others, was turning negatives into pluses. This time, however, he was out of ideas except one, and that was when the play got too hot you always handed the ball over to someone else. It was one of his axioms for survival.

  Roland Murphy was having coffee at his desk while he watched the 9:00 a.m. news reports from CNN and the three major news networks on a multi-screen TV monitor, as he did every morning. He was a large man with prize-fighter’s arms and dark eyebrows over deep set eyes. He was one of the toughest men ever to sit behind that desk, and no one who’d ever come up against him thought any differently.

  With him were the aging, but still effective, Danielle who’d been in the business for more than thirty years; the dapper dresser Tommy Doyle, who was Deputy Director of Intelligence; and Carleton Patterson, the patrician New York lawyer whom Ryan had recommended to take over as general counsel.

  Murphy’s eyes strayed to the file folder. “Has something happened overnight, Howard?”

  “In a manner of speaking, General,” Ryan said, closing the door. “I suggest that you ask not to be disturbed, and that you shut off the tape recorder.”

  Murphy’s eyebrows rose, but he called his secretary and told her to hold everything until further notice, then opened a desk drawer and flipped a switch. “We’re clean and isolated,” he said. “You have our attention.”

  Ryan sat down in the empty chair and laid the file folder on the edge of Murphy’s desk. Nobody made a move to reach for it. “The President must be convinced not to send an envoy as I originally suggested to speak with Yevgenni Tarankov.”

  Murphy studied Ryan’s eyes. “If you feel that strongly about it, we’ll send someone else. I don’t think that will be a major stumbling block.”

  “No, Mr. Director, we can’t send anybody to see him, unless or until he becomes President of Russia by whatever means. To do so would irreparably harm the United States, and this agency specifically. Something has come up.”

  “Who knows about this?” Patterson asked softly.

  “Tom Moore and Parley Smith.”

  “Archives?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “No one else on your staff, or Smith’s staff knows anything?” Patterson asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “What is it, Howard? What dark secret have you stumbled upon?” Danielle asked.

  “I’ve come up with incontrovertible proof that in the seventies and early eighties Tarankov spied on his own government for the United States. Specifically for a case officer working out of Moscow Station under Bob Burns.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Doyle said.

  Murphy and Danielle exchanged glances. “It was before my time, Lawrence,” Murphy said. “Did you know anything about it?”

  “No. It must have been a soft operation.”

  “His code name was CKHAMMER,” Ryan said. “Someone thought he was important.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it, Howard,” Danielle said mildly, but there was a dangerous edge to his voice. He’d played this game so often that he was a master at it. “What’s your point?”

  “His operation was called LOOKUP, and over nine years we paid him nearly seventy million dollars for SDI information. All of it black. Money he used to buy the armored train he’s terrorizing the countryside with. It makes for some disturbing possibilities.”

  “That puts a hell of a spin on the situation
over there,” Murphy said. “How do you see it?”

  “We certainly can’t open a dialogue with him now,” Ryan said. “It could backfire in our faces. He’d accuse us of trying to bring down Kabatov’s government.” — “He’s one of us,” Doyle said.

  “Not any longer,” Ryan shot back. “But if Kabatov is successful in arresting him and bringing him to trial we’ll be out of the woods.”

  “He wouldn’t use his relationship with us as a defense, that’s for damned sure,” Murphy said. “But he could end up asking us for asylum.”

  “Which we’d deny him,” Ryan said.

  “Doesn’t say much for how we treat the people who’ve worked for us,” Danielle suggested.

  “Tarankov is no friend of ours,” Ryan replied sharply. “He never was. In those days we were helping a lot of questionable people. Batista

  then Castro, No riega, Marcos. It’s a big number, and most of the decisions were poorly thought out. It gave us a bad reputation which we’re just beginning to live down. If the truth came out about our involvement with Tarankov it would push back the clock, and no one would come out smelling like a rose.”

  “I’ll have to brief the President—”

  “No, sir,” Ryan interrupted. “I think that would unnecessarily complicate matters. Let me work up a new proposal showing why sending an envoy to Tarankov isn’t such a good idea after all. He wasn’t all that keen on it in the first place.”

  “You’ll come out with egg on your face for waffling,” Murphy warned.

  “Better me than the agency.”

  Danielle gave him an amused look of barely concealed contempt. “I’d like to see that proposal before we kick it over to the White House.”

  “We’ll all take a look,” Murphy said, before Ryan could respond. “The President will have to be convinced that we must support Prime Minister Kabatov’s government.”

  “At all costs,” Ryan said. “It’s our only course.”