Assassin km-6

by David Hagberg

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “If you prefer not to work with Kabatov I’ll do whatever I can to help. I have connections too. Just say the word and I’ll pull strings.”

  “For now you can keep an eye on Korzhakov. I want to be informed when they plan on making their move against Tarankov.”

  “It won’t be in Nizhny Novgorod, I can tell you that much,” Cheremukhin said. “But I’ll see what I can come up with. Kabatov trusts me.”

  The limousine pulled through the gates onto the private grounds of what once was a sewing machine factory. The parking lot was half-filled with Zils and Mercedes SELs. Guards dressed in American Marine, combat fatigues and armed with M16 assault rifles were everywhere. The driver pulled up to the front doors, and they were escorted inside to a large reception area that looked like the lobby of a luxury resort hotel. Cheremukhin handed him over to a beautiful young black woman wearing a skimpy bikini beneath a transparent gauze jacket.

  “Renee, I would like you to meet my friend Viktor. He is to be given anything he wants, and you’ll put it on my tab,” Cheremukhin said.

  The young woman lit up in a smile as ‘she took Yemlin’s arm. She smelled of cinnamon and some other spice, her accent very charming. “My pleasure to meet you, Viktor.”

  “Start with some champagne, a bath, then a rubdown,” Cheremukhin grinned. “After that, who knows? But he’s tired, so he needs some peace and quiet.”

  Yemlin felt as if he were on the verge of collapse. So much had happened in the past week that he was in sensory overload. He wanted to sleep.

  “Enjoy,” Cheremukhin said, and he left.

  “That Vadim is a good guy,” Renee said innocently. “Whatever he says around here goes. So you just leave it to me, Viktor, okay?”

  “Okay,” Yemlin mumbled, too tired to do anything but go with the flow.

  She led him down one of the thickly carpeted corridors, the lighting subdued. Soft music played from hidden speakers and she chatted like a magpie about everything from Paris fashions to the wonderful people she’d met since coming to the university. At one point he stumbled and she pulled him up, and put his arm around her thin shoulders, his fingertips brushing her breasts.

  “Silly me going on like this while you, poor man, are nearly dead on your feet,” she cooed. “But I have just the thing for your tired bones. You’ll see. Just what the doctor ordered.”

  Although the club was busy there wasn’t a hint of noise or activity back here. Renee brought him into a three-room suite luxuriously furnished, and led him immediately into a palatial bathroom with a huge sunken tub filled with steaming, scented water.

  A moment later a young man dressed only in a white swimming suit came in behind them with a bottle of champagne and one flute.

  Yemlin stepped back.

  “Here’s Valeri to help us,” Renee beamed. “Isn’t he just beautiful? We call him the little doll.”

  Yemlin had never seen a more handsome man, not even among the American movie stars. In his mid twenties, his athletic body was slightly tanned, his facial features perfectly proportioned, his eyes startlingly blue, and his teeth gleaming white.

  “Renee exaggerates,” Valeri said, smiling. His voice was deep, his Russian cultured. “But she’s cute. Would you care for a glass of wine while you’re in your bath, Mr. Yemlin?”

  Yemlin said nothing. The girl tittered. “Valeri is just a masseur. He doesn’t bite.”

  Yemlin smiled despite himself. For a moment he’d been star-struck like a silly old lady. “Sure. And after”’ my bath and rubdown, I want to get a few hours sleep.” He looked at the girl. “Alone.”

  “Oh pooh,” Renee said, and she helped him undress as Valeri poured a glass of champagne.

  The bath water was a perfect temperature. The heat seeped into Yemlin’s bones, and he sighed in contentment. Renee got undressed, her breasts high and firm and she got into the tub with him, and started on his broad back with a Finnish scrub sponge. Valeri handed him the champagne then went into the bedroom where he laid out his oils and lotions beside a low, towel draped massage table.

  The champagne was Russian, sweet and cold, just as he liked it, the bath soothing, and Renee’s ministrations wonderful. After a few minutes Valeri refilled his glass, and Yemlin began to feel like he was drifting, the sensation wonderfully comforting. He was in a safe haven where for the first time since he could remember he felt warm, and secure.

  When he was finished, Renee and Valeri helped him out of the bath, dried his body with warm towels, and led him to the massage table, where he lay down on his back.

  Renee left, and Valeri began massaging Yemlin’s neck and shoulder muscles with an incredibly strong, but gentle touch, his hands slippery with warm oils.

  Yemlin watched the young man for several minutes before realizing he was naked. Muscles corded down his back, and rippled his firm buttocks. When he straightened up, Yemlin saw that his penis was large and semierect. He knew that he should be embarrassed, but the boy was so handsome that watching him was like watching an erotic movie, and Yemlin began to respond despite himself. “That’s better, Viktor,” the young man said, gently massaging Yemlin’s inner thighs, his finger tips flicking around Yemlin’s anus. ” The effect was galvanizing. Yemlin had not felt anything like it since he’d had a prostitute in Tokyo. A groan of pleasure escaped from his throat.

  Valeri’s lips closed around Yemlin’s penis, the sensation incredible. He could do nothing but lie back as the young man took him deep into his mouth. It was like nothing he’d ever felt, pleasure building and rising in waves. He’d been a thirty-five-year-old man before that Tokyo prostitute had done such a thing for him, and right now the pleasure was every bit as good, even though he felt a pang of guilt at the back of his mind for having it done to him by a man.

  And then he was coming, as he’d not come for many years, the intense feeling of relief coursing through his body like nothing else could. His lotion-filled hand was on Valeri’s rigid penis now, the young man’s lips next to his head, cooing, and whispering softly.

  “Paris was wonderful, Viktor. Just like now. Was it with your mistress?”

  “McGarvey,” Yemlin murmured.

  “Her name is McGarvey?”

  “No, Kirk,” Yemlin mumbled. He wanted to return the pleasure the young man had given him. “Kirk has agreed. He’s here.”

  “In Moscow?”

  “Yes, he’s here.”

  “Why, Viktor? Why is Kirk McGarvey in Moscow?” Valeri whispered.

  “To help us. To save the Rodina.”

  “How?”

  “To kill the Tarantula. Kill Tarankov. It’s the only way.”

  “That’s very good, Viktor,” Valeri cooed. “Very good. Now tell me about Kirk McGarvey. Tell me everything.”

  FIFTEEN

  Moscow

  McGarvey spent the afternoon in the lobby of the Metropol Hotel sipping mineral water and scouring a dozen of the newspapers and news magazines published in Moscow for anything pertaining to Tarankov.

  As he suspected there was plenty of coverage about President Yeltsin’s heart attack, but none of the articles offered any speculation on the real cause of his death. No one was making a connection between the attack on the Riga nuclear power station in the Moscow suburb of Dzerzhinskiy and the bomb blast in Red Square. Nor did any of the articles on the power plant explosion mention Tarankov’s name. In fact most of the articles reported that the attack had been staged by so far unknown terrorists or dissidents, who possibly were disgruntled workers at the plant.

  Russia’s capacity for self-inflicted delusions was almost as great as the nation’s capacity for suffering. If you’re hungry read a cookbook.

  But read it alone, be cause your neighbors might see it and want to come to your house for a meal.

  Novy Mir, the magazine that had serialized Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, however, reported, in a two paragraph piece buried in the middle under a column headed “Uphea
vals,” that General Yevgenni Tarankov gave a speech recently in Dzerzhinskiy, and was scheduled to speak again tomorrow in Nizhny Novgorod, a city about three hundred miles east of Moscow that under the Soviet rule had been renamed Gorki.

  It was Russian doublespeak. Anyone in the know reading the article would immediately understand that the magazine suspected the attack on the Riga power plant had been staged by Tarankov. By reporting his next speaking engagement, the magazine was practically daring the government to do something about it.

  Considering the liberties that Russian journalists had been taking for nearly ten years, the lack of coverage Tarankov was getting bespoke the seriousness with which his campaign was being taken. Everyone in Moscow was frightened to death that if and when Tarankov took over he would purge every newspaper or magazine that had given him bad press.

  McGarvey’s guide book provided the information that the most convenient train to Nizhny Novgorad left at 11:10 p.m. from the Yaroslavl Station arriving overnight just before 7:30 a.m. But taking the train presented two immediate problems. The first was that going there just now as a foreigner would be dangerous. If Tarankov’s people were as well organized as McGarvey thought they must be, the airport and train stations would probably be monitored for any suspicious people. He did not want to blow his Belgian cover yet. It would provide a solid track that would mysteriously disappear should the need arise.

  The second problem was his hotel room. In Russia if you checked out of your hotel you had only two choices. You either checked into another hotel or you left the city.

  In one of the newspapers he’d read an article about the prostitution rings that operated out of several of the hotels in Moscow, using women from the former East Germany and Poland. The Metropol was not one of them, but McGarvey circled several of the hotel names in the article, underlining one of them several times as if for emphasis. His bellman Artur had gone through his things. Nothing was missing yet, but he would be sure to see the newspaper with the circled articles and believe that McGarvey hadn’t simply abandoned his room.

  Leaving everything behind except for his money, his gun and the clothes on his back, he emerged from the hotel a few minutes before 5:00 p.m.” the afternoon dusk already deepening in the still falling and blowing snow. Two blocks away he found a cab to take him out to the flea market at the Dinamo Stadium beyond the outer ring road near the Frunze Central Airfield. The going was difficult but the driver didn’t seem to mind. He kept slyly looking at McGarvey’s image in the rearview mirror.

  The stadium’s parking lot was huge. Despite the horrible weather hundreds of entrepreneurs sold everything from Kalashnikov rifles to western currencies from stalls, or from the backs of their cars or trucks. Barrels filled with burning trash or oily rags lent a surreal air to the place. Perhaps a thousand people wandered from stall to stall. Some huddled around the wind-whipped flames. Still others, many of them well dressed and accompanied by armed men, lugged their purchases back to Mercedes and BMWs parked at the fringes, and guarded by other armed men.

  “This is not such an easy place,” his driver said pulling up. “Maybe you could use some help,”

  McGarvey held up a British hundred-pound note. “I collect military uniforms. Identity cards. Leave orders, pay books. That sort of thing.”

  “I know a guy who has that stuff,” the cabby said, reaching for the money. But McGarvey pulled it back.

  “I don’t want any trouble. I want to buy a few things, and then I want you to bring me back downtown to the same place you picked me up.”

  “You need some muscle. Five hundred pounds.”

  “A hundred now and another hundred when we get back to the city.”

  “I don’t want any bullshit,” the driver protested as he reached for something in his jacket.

  McGarvey pulled out his pistol, jammed the barrel into the man’s thick neck, and pulled the hammer back. “Don’t fuck with me, I’m not in the mood,” he said in guttural Russian.

  The driver froze, his eyes on McGarvey’s in the rearview mirror.

  “You can either make an easy two hundred pounds, or you can try to take everything I have.”

  The cabby shrugged and laughed nervously. “Your Russian is pretty good, you know. Where’d you pick it up?”

  “School One,” McGarvey said. It was the KGB’s old spy training school. One of the best in the world.

  “Okay,” the cabby said, blanching. “No trouble.”

  McGarvey uncocked his gun, stuffed it in his pocket and gave the cabby the hundred pounds.

  They drove around to the west side of the vast parking lot where the cabby led McGarvey to a ring of a half dozen army supply trucks and troop transports. Within a half-hour McGarvey bought a canvas carryall and an army corporal’s uniform, including greatcoat, olive drab hat, gloves and cheap leather boots. He also bought the identity papers and leave orders for Dimitri Shostokovich stationed at Zakamensk in the far southeast along the Chinese border. The burly entrepreneur who sold him the lot for a hundred pounds stamped the current dates on the orders, and flashed McGarvey a gold-toothed grin.

  “The photographs don’t match, but no one will look very closely,” he said. His breath smelled like onions and beer. “You’ve got eleven days until you’re A.W.O.L.. But nobody gives a fuck about that either.” He stuffed everything into the carryall.

  Several men came into the circle of trucks and stood around one of the barrels of burning rags.

  “Time to go,” McGarvey’s driver warned.

  McGarvey reached his hand into his coat pocket and partially withdrew his gun. He looked directly into the salesman’s eyes. “I don’t think those gentlemen mean us any harm.”

  “No,” the salesman said after a moment. “But if there is nothing else you wish to buy, perhaps it is time to go. Unless you would like some help with your… project.”

  “What project would that be?” McGarvey asked easily.

  The salesman motioned toward the carryall. “Maybe you yourself are a businessman. I have certain connections.”

  McGarvey seemed to think about it for a moment. “How do I find you?”

  “I’m here every night. Just ask for Vasha.”

  “The … project could be big. Maybe you couldn’t handle it.”

  Vasha licked his lips. “You might be surprised.”

  McGarvey picked up the carryall. “I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “Okay, you do that.”

  On the way back into the city the cabby once again kept looking at McGarvey’s image in the rearview mirror. He sensed that some kind of a deal was going down and he was hungry. He wanted to be a part of it.

  “I know this city. I could take you anywhere you want to go,” he said hopefully. “Nobody can watch their own back one hundred percent. I’ve got good eyes and plenty of guts. And I’ve got some pretty goddamned good connections. I brought you to Vasha with no trouble.”

  “What’s your name?” McGarvey asked.

  “Arkady.”

  “How can I reach you? Day or night?”

  Arkady snatched a business card from a holder on the dash and passed it back. “How do I reach you?”

  “You don’t,” McGarvey said. The cabby’s name was Arkady Astimovich and he worked for Martex, one of the private cab companies in the city. “We’ll see how you do this time, Arkasha. Keep your mouth shut like you promised, and I might have something for you.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “No. And don’t try to follow me. A little bit rich is better than very much dead. Do you understand?”

  They pulled up at the curb a couple ‘of blocks from the Metropol near the Moscow Arts Theater. Traffic was heavy tonight. The driver stared at McGarvey’s reflection for a few moments. “I understand,” he said.

  McGarvey handed him the second hundred pounds, got out of the cab and disappeared into the blowing snow and crowds with his canvas carryall.

  He ducked into the shadows of a shop doorway just around
the corner, and waited for five minutes, but the cab never showed up. Astimovich was hungry, but apparently he was also smart.

  Hefting his carryall, McGarvey walked down to the metro station on Gorki Street and bought a token for a few kopecks. Just inside he studied the system map which showed the stop for the Leningrad, Kazan and Stations was Leningradskaya. He put his token in the gate, and when the light turned green he descended to the busy platforms. It took him several minutes to figure out which train was his, and he got aboard moments before the doors closed. There were less than a dozen people aboard the car, among them four roughly dressed young men, whom McGarvey took to be in their twenties. They eyed him as he took a seat by the door, the carryall between him and the window.

  He had no illusions about what Russia had become, but since his arrival in Moscow this morning the only cop he’d seen was the one directing traffic near the hotel. In the past the Militia seemed to be everywhere, including the metro stations. But Moscow, and presumably the entire country, had sunk into an anarchy of the street. The only faction with any real power was the Mafia and the armies of private bodyguards. Street crime was not completely out of hand yet because businessmen and shopkeepers paid protection money called krysha, which literally meant roof. Without it you were either a nobody or you were dead. And the Militia might come if they were called.

  At the next stop a couple of old women got aboard, spotted the four young men, and immediately stepped off. A couple of the other passengers also got out, and the remainder kept their eyes downcast.

  Three stops later all the other passengers got off the car, leaving only McGarvey and the four men, who got up and languidly took up positions at the front and rear doors. They didn’t speak nor did they make any effort to approach McGarvey, but they watched him.

  The public address system announced the next stop was Leningrad Station, and as the train slowed down McGarvey got up and went to the back door. One of the young men grinned, showing his bad teeth. He started to say something when McGarvey smashed the heel of his heavy boot into the man’s right kneecap, the leg snapping with an audible pop.