Assassin km-6

by David Hagberg

  “That’s him,” Elizabeth cried excitedly. “My God, you’ve found him!”

  “Not yet, but we’ve made a start,” Jacqueline said. “The address is an anonymous re mailer in Poland, I think. But I can check on it.”

  “It means he could be anywhere.”

  “That’s right, Liz. Could even be in the apartment across the hall. But I have a friend who’ll know about this re mailer If it’s legitimate, we’ll have a shot at finding out Twinkle’s real location.”

  She reached for the telephone, but Elizabeth grabbed her arm.

  “If this gets back to Lynch or Galan, they’ll screw it up.”

  Jacqueline grinned. “Don’t worry, this is our little secret for now.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes strayed to the hole in the wall where they’d disabled the first of the bugs they’d found. For the moment, they were secure in this apartment. She was frightened. But she was no longer tired.

  Moscow

  McGarvey arrived back at the Metropol Hotel around noon. He gave the car keys along with a good tip to Artur the bellman, who promised that the Mercedes would be parked in a secured spot, absolutely safe from interference. After he checked in, he used a pay phone in the lobby to call Martex Taxi Company, and left a message for Arkady Astimovich to telephone him, giving the number of the pay phone.

  He bought a copy of the Paris International Herald Tribune from the gift shop, then sat drinking coffee and reading the newspaper a few feet away. Astimovich called twenty minutes later.

  “You’re back,” the cabby said excitedly.

  “That’s right. What’s your brother-in-law’s name?”

  “Yakov Ostrovsky.”

  “I want you to set up a meeting for eleven o’clock tonight at the club. Tell him I’m bringing a proposition that he won’t be able to refuse. One that will make all of us some money. Then I want you to meet me in front of the Kazan Station with your cab twenty minutes early.”

  “What if there’s a problem, can I call you again at this number?”

  “No ” McGarvey said. “If you’re not there I’ll take this deal to somebody else.”

  “I’ll be there,” Astimovich promised.

  McGarvey had a surprisingly good corned beef on rye sandwich and an American Budweiser beer at the expensive lounge in the lobby. The service was excellent but if any of the hotel staff, other than Artur, remembered him from his previous visit, they gave no sign of it.

  Afterward he went up to his room’ took a shower and slept lightly until 7:30 p.m.” when he awoke with a start. For a brief moment he was slightly disoriented, but the sensation passed immediately. He got up and went over to the window, which looked down on the Bolshoi Theater. People were crowding into the theater, as cabs drew up, dropped off their passengers and went away. The big banner on the facade said giselle, which was one of the more famous ballets performed by the company.

  He stood smoking by the window, until the crowds thinned out around 8:00 p.m.” when the performance was scheduled to begin, then took another long shower, shaved, and got dressed in dark slacks, a turtleneck, and black leather jacket.

  He switched the television to CNN, turned the volume up, and removed his gun and a spare magazine of ammunition from his laptop computer. The pistol went into a speed draw holster at the small of his back. He pocketed the silencer, and magazine.

  At half-past eight he presented himself at the hotel’s main dining room where he had alight buffet supper, and a bottle of reasonably good white wine. He took his time over his coffee and brandy afterwards. The restaurant was barely a third full, but preparations were being made for the after theater crowd, when the dining room would fill up.

  McGarvey paid his bill, then retrieved his car from one of the bellmen, who turned out to be Artur’s cousin. He tipped the man well, and was heading through heavy traffic up to the Kazan Station by 10:15 p.m.

  It took nearly a half hour to get across town, and Astimovich was leaning against his cab as he watched the people emerging from the railway station. McGarvey powered down the passenger side window and pulled up next to the cabby, who turned around in-surprise, the expression on his face changing from mild irritation to incredulity.

  “I’ll follow you to the club,” McGarvey shouted out of the window.

  Astimovich looked the Mercedes over with round eyes, like a kid in the candy store. “Is this the deal?”

  “Do you think he’ll go for it?”

  “Him and every other big deal hot shot in town. I hope you’ve got more of them.”

  “A lot more,” McGarvey said.

  Astimovich jumped in his cab, and took off, McGarvey right behind him.

  The Grand Dinamo club occupied an out-of-the-way corner of the Dinamo Soccer stadium on the way to Frunze Central Airfield. McGarvey had picked up the Russian corporal’s uniform at the flea market set up on the opposite side of the sprawling sports complex. But here the front entrance was brightly lit and security was very tight with armed guards and closed circuit television cameras.

  Astimovich pulled his cab off to the side, but McGarvey parked the big Mercedes under-the overhang at the main entrance.

  One of the guards saluted, then opened the car door. “Good evening, sir. Are you a member?”

  Astimovich ran over. “Not yet. But he’s here to see Yakov. We have an appointment.”

  A ferret-faced man came out of the club with a clipboard, as McGarvey got out of the Mercedes. “Are you Pierre Allain?” he asked. He was wearing a tiny lapel mike and an earpiece. “Da,” McGarvey said.

  “You’re late. Mr. Ostrovsky is a busy man—”

  “Fine, I’ll take my deal elsewhere, you little prick,” McGarvey said, and he started to get back in the car.

  “Wait a minute,” Astimovich cried.

  McGarvey turned back.

  “You’d better tell Yakov that we’re here,” Astimovich told the man with the clipboard. “We’re importing cars. A lot of them.”

  The ferret glanced indifferently at the big Mercedes. “Moscow is full of car salesmen, who if they want to make a deal, show up on time.”.

  “Fifty thousand deutsch marks McGarvey said.

  The ferret chucked. “You’ve come to the wrong place. No one here buys used cars.”

  “It was new when I picked it up in Leipzig last week. And I can bring a dozen a month.”

  A corpulent man with heavy jowls came out of the club. He wore a silk shirt open at the collar, several heavy gold chains around his thick neck, a gold Rolex on his wrist, and a huge diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. He looked amused, as if someone had just told him an off-color joke. He sauntered over.

  “Yakov,” Astimovich said.

  “Good evening, Arkasha,” the heavyset man said. He turned his intelligent eyes to McGarvey. “I’m Yakov Ostrovsky. Did I hear the price correctly? Fifty thousand deutsch marks

  “That’s right,” McGarvey said.

  Ostrovsky glanced inside the car, then slowly walked around it. “What’s the catch, Monsieur Allain? With import duties, even if you could get this machine at wholesale, you’d have to sell it to me for ninety, perhaps a hundred thousand marks.”

  “I don’t buy them at wholesale.”

  McGarvey get the car’s paperwork and gave it to the Mafia boss, who handed it to the ferret. “Do you have partners?”

  “None who you’ll have to deal with.”

  “Where would you deliver these cars?”

  “Anywhere in Moscow.”

  “For fifty thousand marks, my cost?”

  “Fifty-one thousand,” McGarvey said. “I think your brother-in-law deserves a finder’s fee. He’s already been of some assistance to me.”

  ‘ The documents are legitimate,” the ferret said.” “But it says that you paid nearly ninety thousand including fees.”

  “That’s about what you’d expect to pay,” McGarvey said with a faint smirk.

  Ostrovsky pursed his lips after a moment, then shrug
ged. “How would you like to be paid?”

  “American hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Ah,” Ostrovsky said, smiling broadly now. “Not so easy to counterfeit yet.” He put out his hand. “I think we can do business, Monsieur Allain.”

  McGarvey shook hands. “I thought you might say that.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Riga

  McGarvey decided that although his Pierce Allain work name had held up to this point he would leave Russia from St. Petersburg. The search would be concentrated for him in Moscow, and security at the three airports would be too tight for him to take the risk. He had an excited Astimovich drive him up to St. Petersburg in the morning, a distance of 350 miles, where he explained that he had further business. Astimovich was so bedazzled by his good fortune that he, didn ask any questions, though during the seven-hour drive he kept up a running commentary about what he was going to do with twelve thousand marks every month once McGarvey’s business fully developed.

  “Goddamn, it’s good to be a businessman just like in the West,” he said.

  McGarvey felt a touch of sorrow for the man, because even if the deal had been legitimate he would probably have been cheated out of his finder’s fee by his brother in-law. It wasn’t western business, but it was the new Russian business.

  He was passed through passport control at St. Petersburg’s PuIkovo-2 International Airport without trouble, and his Finnair flight touched down at Lidosta International’s too-short main runway, the pilot standing on the brakes all the way to the end, around 10:00 P.M.

  He’d repacked his gun inside his laptop, so he encountered no problem with Latvian customs either, though passengers arriving from Russia were given a closer scrutiny than those from the West. His passport and visas were in order, and he was admitted without a search of his single canyon bag.

  Taking a cab downtown to the main railway station, McGarvey walked over to his apartment three blocks away, making two passes before he went in. With less than a week to May Day he was starting to get a’little jumpy. So far his plan had gone according to schedule. In a few days the Russian border guards would let him cross with the Mercedes without a search, and once in Moscow he would be welcomed back by the Mafia as Pierre Allain, a well connected Belgian businessman. No one would connect him to McGarvey, the American assassin. Yet he was beginning to have a very faint premonition of disaster, and he’d been in the business too long not to heed such feelings. Long ago he trained himself to distinguish legitimate sixth-sense concerns from paranoia.

  After he unpacked and took a quick shower he stood by the window looking down at the street while he had a cigarette and a bottle of beer. In another few days or so Russia would be plunged into another major turmoil, possibly even a bigger one than the 1917 revolution. This time Tarankov would die, so that he could not take the country back. However it turned out was anyone’s guess. But McGarvey was already beyond the philosophical debate within himself. Now it was simply a matter of tradecraft. Of doing the job and getting away. His thoughts had become super-focused.

  But something nagged at him. Some disconnected thought, some distant rationalization in a back compartment of his brain, that instinctively he thought was important.

  He stubbed out his cigarette, and went downstairs to the pay phone in the back hallway. Nobody was around, and the building was quiet.

  Using his Allain credit card, he telephoned Rencke in Paris. It was answered on the second ring. “Hiya,” Otto said. It sounded as if he were out of breath and anxious.

  “Have you heard from my daughter?”

  “Sure did, and everything’s fine,” Rencke responded with the proper code phrase. “You’re going to have to, call it off now for sure.”

  “Have the CIA and French picked up my trail?”

  “They’re using Jacqueline and somebody that Ryan sent over. I can’t find out who it is, but they’re serious,” Rencke said. “But that’s not the real problem, Mac. It’s Bykov, the Russian special investigator who’s looking for you. I tried to dig up some more of his background, but I kept running into a blank wall, because Yuri Bykov does not exist. There is no such man who ever worked for the KGB. But the security firm he supposedly works for in Krasnoyarsk is owned by Tarankov.”

  McGarvey’s jaw tightened.

  “I wouldn’t bet my gonads on it, Mac, but I’d wager even money that Yuri Bykov is in reality Leonid Chernov. So you gotta call it off, Mac. You just gotta.”

  “Do they have my Allain identity?”

  “I don’t think so—”

  “Then nothing has changed,” McGarvey broke in. “They don’t know who I’m posing as, they don’t know when I’m coming across, nor do they know how I’m going to do it.”

  Tarankov’s raid on Smolensk, after several days of lying low, had completely convinced McGarvey that the Tarantula would be showing up in Red Square on May Day, and would not wait until the general elections. The brief mention of the raid in the Herald-Tribune and on CNN warned that if the reaction of the people of Smolensk was any indicator, the country would not hold together until the elections. Which meant Tarankov would make his move in Red Square on May Day, declaring himself the leader of the new Soviet Union, just as McGarvey had suspected that he would.

  “You’ll have to kill Chernov,” Rencke said.

  “If our paths cross I will.”

  “They will,” Rencke said, after a brief strained silence.

  “I need you to do one more thing for me, Otto,” McGarvey said. “What is it?” Rencke asked dejectedly.

  “Do you think that the SVR knows that someone is roaming around inside their computer system?”

  “No.”

  “Can you get a direct line to Yemlin’s apartment, through an SVR secured line?”

  “I think so,” Rencke said with renewed interest because he was being handed another challenge. “Call him right now, and warn him off. Tell him who Bykov is, and tell him that I’ll call him one hour from now at the number I called him from Helsinki. He’ll know what you’re talking about.”

  “What if he’s not there?”

  “He’ll have a rollover number, or he’ll be carrying a secured beeper in case of emergencies. Just get the message to him, okay?”

  “Mac, I’m scared big time,” Rencke said. “I’ve got this bad feeling, you know?”

  “Just hold together a little longer, Otto.”

  “Yeah. We’re family after all. We’ve gotta stick together, or else there’s nothing left.”

  Courbevoie

  Rencke stared at the display on his computer screen, his shaking hands hovering over the keyboard. In the past week he’d discovered a way by which he could defeat his own backscatter encryption program to the extent that he’d gained the ability to trace a call even though both sides of the line were encrypted.

  McGarvey was in the Latvian capital city of Riga, or at least within the city code 2.

  He glanced at the open package of Twinkies, his last, lying on the table beside him, and tears suddenly came to his eyes. Mac was the only friend he’d ever had. Ever. The only human being who’d ever treated him fairly, who’d ever understood him, and who’d ever accepted him. Even his parents had rejected him when he was fifteen in Indianapolis. His father in a drunken rage had kicked him out of the house. His mother had pressed some money into his hand outside in the darkness, and kissed him. “You’re too smart for your own good,” she’d said. They were the last words she’d ever spoken to him.

  The only other people who tolerated him were the gee ks on the Internet. Most of them were idiots, but sometimes they provided a diversion. If they didn’t always agree with his views, at least he was respected on most of the Web sites.

  He flicked the Twinkies into the overflowing wastepaper basket, and with a dozen keystrokes was inside the Latvian telephone exchange system. He fed in McGarvey’s telephone number, which pulled up a locator code. Within ten seconds he had an address, with a designator that the unit was a pay ph
one, and his heart sank. McGarvey had probably called from an anonymous booth on the street somewhere. Nevertheless, he entered the maintenance database within the Riga tele phone exchange which displayed a street-by-street city map. McGarvey’s number came up as a street address. A building on Gogala Street a few blocks from the train station, which the telephone company listed as a multiunit private dwelling. An apartment building. Mac had rented an apartment in Riga.

  Rencke entered the information on a tamperproof section of a hard disk, then backed out of the program, and quickly got into the SVR’s system on the Ring Road in Yasenevo on the outskirts of Moscow.

  Scrolling through the personnel files, he came up with Viktor Yemlin’s locator file and instituted a call to the secure line to his apartment. The telephone was answered on the first ring.

  “Da.”

  “Is this Viktor Pavlovich?” Rencke asked in Russian.

  “Yes. Who is calling, please?” Yemlin replied. He sounded harried.

  “An old friend wishes to speak with you fifty-five minutes from now at the same number he used when he telephoned from Helsinki.”

  “Is this a joke? How’d you get this number? Who is this?”

  “Julius loves you,” Rencke blurted. “Please call at once.” It was the ad that Yemlin had placed in Le Figaro with the SVR’s data number.

  “Yeb vas,” Yemlin said, shocked. “Who is this?”

  “A friend who wants to warn you that the head of the special police commission, Yuri Bykov, is in reality Leonid Chernov, Tarankov’s chief of staff. Can you take this call in fifty-four minutes?”

  The line was dead silent for several seconds. “Nyet,” Yemlin said in a strangled voice. “That phone has been bugged. They’re listening with tracing equipment. He must not call that number. Do you understand me? He must not call.”