Assassin km-6

by David Hagberg

  Elizabeth recognized her all at once, and it showed on her face, because the woman smiled brightly.

  “I’m Jacqueline Belleau, but evidently you know this.” She held out her hand, and Elizabeth took it despite herself.

  “I think I’m supposed to hate you,” Elizabeth said.

  “Whatever for?” Jacqueline asked, surprised.

  “You work for the French intelligence service, and you seduced my father.” “The first part is certainly true, but as for the rest of it your father did his part. He is a formidable man.”

  Elizabeth knew the woman was forty, but she would never have guessed her age. She seemed self-assured” an intelligent, but amused, expression in her wide eyes.

  “My father kicked you out of his apartment, then went to ground. Now you’ve been assigned to convince me to help you find him.”

  “You’ve gotten nearly all that correct too,” Jacqueline said, her face falling a little. “I never lived with your father, although it’s something I wanted. He merely told me that he was leaving and then he was gone.”

  Elizabeth said nothing, realizing that her remark had hurt the woman. It made her sad because she instinctively felt that her father had left because he wanted to protect Jacqueline. Keep her out of harm’s way, as he was fond of explaining himself. It was one of the very few faults she could find about her father, his inability to trust the women in his life.

  “If you’re ready to go, I’ll take you back to your hotel,” Jacqueline said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jacqueline’s expression softened again. “That’s okay, I bark when I’m cornered too.”

  Elizabeth had to sign a release statement downstairs when her purse was returned to her. They did not, however, return her Elizabeth Swanson passport and papers.

  Rush-hour traffic was in full swing on the Autoroute du Nord as they headed back into the city. Elizabeth saw an airport that she did not recognize.

  “Where are we?”

  “Le Bourget,” Jacqueline said. “Charles Lindbergh landed just over there when the airport was nothing more than a wide grass field with a control tower and a few buildings. But all of Paris came out to welcome him.”

  They drove for a few minutes in silence, Jacqueline concentrating on the traffic while Elizabeth tried to sort out her feelings. If Lynch could find out where Rencke was living, she would go out to see him. Maybe he knew something and would agree to help. It was a long shot, but for-the moment there wasn’t much else she could do. Or much else that she ought to do. Nobody had explained to her yet that whatever her father had been asked to do by Yemlin was wrong. If her dad were planning on killing Tarankov he’d be doing the world a favor. Certainly nobody in Washington — including the Russian diplomats — could find much fault in such an event. From what she’d read in the Russian media, Tarankov’s broad-based support among the people and the military was based on a pack of lies. He told the people that Russia’s problems were the fault of a western influenced government in Moscow. Hitler had blamed the Jews, Stalin had blamed the peasants, and Tarankov was blaming the West. Of the three, Tarankov’s message was the easiest to defend because in a way what he was saying had a grain of truth to it. Russia’s current problems were indeed being caused by the upheaval in changing from one form of economic system to another. The Russian economy was having growing pains. If the people stuck with the reformers long enough, there was a good chance they’d come out of their depression. Russia was finally joining the rest of the major nations of the world with ongoing financial defeats and triumphs. It was called a free market economy. Everyone took their chances.

  But Tarankov was convincing the rank-and-file Russians that once he was leader of the nation he could solve all their problems by going back to the old ways. The people forgot what their lives had been like before Gorbachev. They had forgotten the repressions, the gulags, the shortages. They were being dazzled by the possibility of once again becoming a super power. It was a message that the people were taking to heart, and one that the industrial-military establishment embraced.

  “Why do you want to talk to my father?” Elizabeth, asked.

  Jacqueline glanced over at her. ” the personally or my government?”

  “The government.” “Your father had a meeting with a “Russian intelligence officer who asked him to take an assignment. We’d like to know what that’s all about.”

  “What if it has nothing to do with France?”

  Jacqueline shrugged. “Then we have no problem.” She smiled wanly. “I don’t think your father knows that you work for the CIA. It’s going to come as a shock to him.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Elizabeth said. “How about you? Do you want to talk to him?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “Why?” “I think for the same reason you do,” Jacqueline said. “Your father is probably going to assassinate someone for the Russians, which will place his life in grave danger. I don’t want that to happen. Or at the very least I want him to convince me that what he’s going to do is worthwhile. I don’t want him to throw his life away.”

  “What if it was worthwhile?” Elizabeth asked.

  Jacqueline didn’t answer at once, concentrating on her driving instead. She was having trouble keeping her emotions in check, and it showed on her face.

  She turned finally and glanced at Elizabeth. “Then I would probably help him, for the same reason you came here to help him, and not merely find him for the CIA. I love him, and I’ll do whatever it takes to be at his side when he needs me.”

  Elizabeth was touched to the bottom of her soul. “Even if it meant lying to your own government?”

  Jacqueline smiled crookedly. “You’ve lied to protect him, and so have I.”

  “How do I know that I can trust you?”

  Jacqueline shook her head. “I can’t answer that for you Elizabeth, because I don’t even know if I can trust myself to do the right thing. Right now I don’t know what’s right or wrong. I only know that I love your father, and everything else is secondary. I’ll sell my soul for him, and if need be I’ll give my life. But I don’t want him to be destroyed. I want him to retire, so that I can have all of him all the time.” Elizabeth reached out and touched Jacqueline’s hand on the steering wheel. “My father will never retire.”

  Jacqueline’s eyes began to fill. “That’s what I’m afraid of, my lovely man lying dead somewhere. I see it at night in my dreams and it frightens me so badly that sometimes I don’t know how I can go on.”

  “I know what you mean,” Elizabeth said. “Believe me, I know.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Moscow

  The interim president of Russia was a deeply troubled man. He turned away from his visitor across the desk and looked out the window at Spassky Tower rising into a leaden sky as he considered his options. Whatever action they took would seriously affect the nation’s future which was, at this moment in history, in more jeopardy than it had ever been. He was having a recurring dream in which he was flying over the charred, smoking remains of what had once been Moscow, a mammoth mushroom cloud roiling fifteen thousand meters above this very spot. Russia had fallen to Tarankov, who in his attempts to regain the old Soviet Union had brought on thermonuclear war. At the outskirts of the city the dead and dying lay in smoldering piles like cordwood that stretched for as far as the eye could see. The worst of the nightmare was the stench of scorched human flesh. Each morning he awoke with the horrible smell still in his nostrils, and the taste of it at the back of his throat.

  “It was a mistake on my part, Mr. President,” the man behind him said.

  Kabatov turned back to face Yuryn, whose normally florid complexion was even more red than normal this afternoon. “There were no survivors among the crews of those six helicopters?”

  “None.”

  “I hold you fully responsible—”

  “I take the responsibility,” Yuryn interrupted. “I’d hoped to stop his train with the minimum use o
f force, and therefore the minimum loss of life before it reached Nizhny Novgorod. An estimated one million people showed up for his speech. Had we tried to arrest him, the carnage would have been beyond belief. The nation would never have survived such an attack. Neither would this government have emerged intact. I made a decision, and I was wrong.”

  “Was he warned?”

  “He may have been, but it would not have mattered had the attack come as a surprise, because his train is more heavily armed than we’d suspected. He has SS-N-6 missiles, and radar-guided rapid-fire cannons of some sort. I still don’t have all the details.”

  “Next time use jet fighters with bigger missiles,” Kabatov said, keeping his voice in control.

  “We’re working on several scenarios. But if your wish remains to take him alive so that he can be placed on trial, our options are severely restricted. Destroying the train poses no real problem. Stopping it without harming Tarankov will be difficult if not impossible.”

  ‘-“Nothing is impossible,” Kabatov shot back. “And yes I want him taken alive. It’s our only option. Anything else and we lose the nation.”

  “In that case, Mr. President, we have another more serious, more immediate problem,” Yuryn said heavily.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Viktor Yemlin has hired an assassin to kill Tarankov.”

  It didn’t come as a complete surprise to Kabatov, still he found that he was shocked. “Is the SVR behind this?”

  “No. Apparently Yemlin is working alone, but on the advice of Konstantin Sukhoruchkin and Eduard Shevardnadze.” “How do you know this?”

  “I didn’t believe him when he said he went to Paris and Helsinki to do some shopping, so I arranged to place him in a position that he willingly told the truth.” Yuryn took a thin report from his briefcase and handed it to Kabatov. “If Yemlin does remember the encounter it’s not likely he’ll say anything to anybody.”

  Kabatov opened the report and started to read, bile rising up in the back of his throat, making him almost physically ill. He looked up, unable to finish and unable to hide a look of disgust from his face. “Where is Yemlin at this moment?”

  “At his office. He’s done nothing outwardly to indicate he remembers what happened to him, beyond the fact that he had a pleasant evening at the Magesterium.”

  “We know the assassin’s name, and we know that he lives in Paris. I’ll instruct our people to grab him, or short of that, kill him.”

  “That, Mr. President, might prove to be more difficult than capturing or killing Tarankov, who after all is nothing more than a soldier. But Kirk McGarvey is a very special man who has already done our country a great deal of harm.” “I’m not familiar with the name. He’s an American. What, mafia?”

  “He’s a former CIA officer who killed General Baranov some years ago, which subsequently threw the entire KGB into a disarray that took us years to overcome.”

  “We can arrest Yemlin, and force him to tell us how to find McGarvey. Or, Yemlin can call him off.”

  “That won’t work either, Mr. President. If you read the summary on the Helsinki meeting you’ll see that McGarvey has not only agreed to do the job for one million dollars — money that has apparently already been transferred to an account in the British Channel Islands-but he’ll make no further contact.”

  “Paris is not that big a city—”

  “McGarvey is already here in Moscow,” Yuryn cut in impatiently. “It’s even possible that he was in Nizhny Novgorod to witness the latest spectacle.” “Then he’s tried and failed?”

  “He probably came here to work out his plans. I think he’s waiting for something, for the right moment.”

  “Do we have a photograph of him?”

  “Da.”

  “Then with the help of the Militia, you will find him.”

  “We can try that. But if we don’t succeed, and McGarvey finds out, then he’ll be all the more difficult to kill. In any event he’s probably here under an assumed identity, and very likely in disguise. He knows what he’s doing, and his Russian is said to be nearly perfect.”

  “Is he working for the CIA? You said he was a former officer, but have they rehired him to do this thing?”

  “I don’t think so,” Yuryn said. “Which does give us an advantage, if you want to take it.”

  “I’m listening,” Kabatov said, his insides seething.

  “We’ll form a special task force to find and destroy this American before he gets a chance to assassinate Tarankov. The Americans want our reform movement to succeed as much as we do. So you might think about asking President Lindsay for help. Between us, the CIA, and possibly the French on whose soil McGarvey apparently now resides, we will catch him. Even a man such as McGarvey cannot outwit the combined forces of the police and intelligence services of three countries. In the meantime we’ll keep this from the public to avoid any panic or possible backlash.”

  “We’ll also maintain our efforts to capture Tarankov. Once we have him in custody, McGarvey will become a moot point.”

  “Agreed, Mr. President. For the moment it will be a race against us and him.”

  “Will you head this special commission?”

  “No,” Yuryn said.

  “Who then?”

  “When I was head of the old KGB’s First Directorate a man named Yuri Bykov worked for me. When the Komityet was split apart he left Moscow.”

  “Is he good?”

  “He’s the best.”

  “Where is he now?” Kabatov asked.

  “In the East. Krasnoyarsk, I think. I’ll get word to him to come immediately.”

  “Will you arrest Yemlin?”

  “Not yet, Mr. President. There is an outside chance that McGarvey might contact him. If that should happen we’ll be ready.”

  “As you wish. Get Bykov here as quickly as possible. This situation must be resolved.”

  At 5:00 p.m. that afternoon, Kabatov placed a call to President Lindsay who was just about to receive his 9:00 a.m. CIA briefing from Roland Murphy, a fact of which he was not aware. Nor was he aware that Lindsay immediately switched the call to his speaker phone. So far as Kabatov knew he was seated alone in his office in the Kremlin, speaking to the American President who was alone in his Oval Office.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” Kabatov said. “I trust your day is beginning well?” Kabatov’s English was passable, so translators were not necessary.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. President,” Lindsay said. “My morning is busy. We’ll be leaving for Moscow in a few hours. Is this why you called?”

  “No, the State funeral will be conducted on schedule tomorrow, and were our meeting to be under any other circumstances I would welcome the opportunity to finally meet you.”

  “May I again offer my condolences, and those of the United States.”

  “Thank you, that is very kind.” Kabatov hesitated. Lindsay was not a devious man. He seemed to have no hidden agenda as did so many American presidents before. But it was possible that McGarvey was working for the CIA after all, in which case Kabatov was about to make a fool of himself. Nonetheless there was no other choice. “Another matter has developed, Mr. President, for which I would like to ask your help.”

  “I’ll certainly do what I can, Mr. President. But if you’re speaking about the internal affair we discussed earlier, I don’t know if there is much of a substantive nature that I can do for you.”

  “This morning I was given a report by the director of our internal intelligence service that a plot to assassinate Yevgenni Tarankov seems to be developing. The assassin may be an American citizen — as a matter of fact a former Central Intelligence Agency officer by the name of Kirk McGarvey. And, Mr. President, I stress former CIA officer.”

  “I see,” President Lindsay said after a moment. “I assume that you would not have made this call if you believed this information was anything less than certain.”

  “That is correct. I am forming a special commission to hun
t down this man and stop him. Tarankov will. be arrested and brought to trial, it is the only option open to me that makes any democratic sense. I’m sure you can understand the difficulties we are facing.” “Yes, I do,” Lindsay said. “How may I help?”

  “It may be possible that McGarvey is already here in Moscow. On the chance that information is incorrect, or that he has returned to France, or the United States, I would like the Central Intelligence

  Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to locate and detain him. I intend asking President Chirac for his help as well.”

  “That may present us with a problem,” Lindsay said, and Kabatov got the distinct impression that the man was holding something back.

  “Yes?”

  “If Mr. McGarvey has broken no U.S. law there’s actually very little that I can do. I’m sure that President Chirac will tell you the same thing.”

  “I’m simply asking for enough time that my police can take Tarankov into custody.”

  “How much time?”

  “Certainly before the June elections. Less than eleven weeks.”

  Again Lindsay didn’t respond immediately, and Kabatov got the impression that the President might have someone with him after all, an adviser.

  “Mr. President, I’ll do whatever is possible,” Lindsay said. “I sincerely understand the problems you’re faced with, and I give you my assurances that if Mr. McGarvey returns to the’ United States he will be detained and questioned.”

  “I can ask for nothing more, Mr. President,” Kabatov said.

  “Will you send me a report on what you have?”

  “Immediately,” Kabatov said.

  “Then, good luck, Mr. President,” Lindsay said.

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. President.”

  TWO

  APRIL

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Moscow

  A few minutes before six Monday afternoon Leonid Chernov stepped out of an automobile in front of the Kremlin’s old Senate Building, and thanked the militia driver. He’d changed his appearance over the weekend. Now his hair was short cropped and dyed gray, his eyes made deep blue by contact lenses, and he held himself in a slouch. His civilian suit fit him reasonably well, but was obviously not expensive.