Assassin km-6

by David Hagberg

  The connection was broken.

  Rencke stared at the screen briefly, wondering if he should reinstitute the call.

  He brought back the pay phone number in McGarvey’s Riga apartment, and had his computer speed dial it. After one ring a recorded announcement in Russian said the number was a simplex instrument, and the connection was broken. The phone could be used only for outgoing calls. It could not receive incoming calls.

  Rencke got into the Riga telephone exchange back directory in an effort to find out if there were other telephones in the building. But there were none. Even if there had been a telephone he could have reached, he couldn’t imagine what he would have said to whoever answered.

  He backed out of that program, and pulled up the worldwide travel agent reservation system, and searched for flights between Paris and Riga with empty seats on any airline leaving as soon as possible.

  The information came up on his screen, but he could only stare at it in frustration. What was he supposed to do? Jump on an airplane, fly to Riga and take a cab out to Mac’s apartment? Then what?

  He looked up at the clock. Mac would be making his call in fifty minutes, and there was nothing Rencke could do about it.

  He fished the Twinkies out of the wastepaper basket and dejectedly started to eat as he moved over to a computer hooked into the Internet.

  Mac wanted to be back stopped so here he would have to remain.

  Paris

  “Nothing,” Jacqueline said, hanging up the phone.

  Elizabeth sat with a glass of white wine in front of the laptop computer, staring at the messages scrolling up the screen. It was late and she was very tired.

  They’d been trying without luck for the past thirty six hours to find out about the anonymous re mailer address that Twinkie had used on the net.

  “Samat doesn’t exist,” Jacqueline continued. “There is no such remailing service anywhere, which means it’s a ghost service.”

  Elizabeth looked up.

  “If it’s Otto Rencke, then he created the address to hide his real location. But the fact is, that anonymous re mailer address exists only in cyberspace. And only he knows how to access it from behind.” Jacqueline threw up her hands. “The man’s a genius. We’ll never get close to him unless he wants us there.”

  “Screw the bastard,” Elizabeth said. She turned back to the computer, and entered Twinkie’s anonymous re mailer address.

  Subject: Re: CIA CLANDESTINE SERVICES 4/27/99 01 .38

  Twinkie, it’s you who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Your cats probably pissed all over your pc and shorted your brain. Get real!!!!!!! (lizmac item one)

  Several unrelated messages scrolled up her screen, until Twinkie’s anonymous re mailer address appeared.

  From: am62885@anon.samat.po

  Subject: Re: CIA CLANDESTINE SERVICES 4/27/9901.43

  I suppose you know what you’re talking about from long experience, lizmac. (twinkieitemseventeen)

  “Don’t lose him,” Jacqueline cautioned.

  “He has this number now, and if it’s Rencke, and if he traces it he’ll know that this computer is located in my father’s apartment. ““He think it’s a trap.”

  Subject: Re: CIA CLANDESTINE SERVICES 4/27/99 01.44

  I grew up with my dad’s stories. Twinkie handle have any significance, or is it just bullshit!!! (lizmac item two)

  From: am62885@anon.samat.po

  Subject: Re: CIA CLANDESTINE SERVICES 4/27/99 01 .45

  Do you have anything significant to add to this discussion or are you just trying to irritate us? (twinkie item eighteen)

  Subject: Re: CIA CLANDESTINE SERVICES 4/27/99 01.46

  I’m interested in the business. Care to chat? (lizmac item three)

  From: am62885@anon.samat.po

  Subject: Re: CIA CLANDESTINE SERVICES 4/27/99 01.47

  Standby and I’ll download some of the high points

  The telephone rang, as the computer screen came alive with messages dating from last week scrolling at ten times normal speed.

  “It might be him,” Jacqueline said, looking at the telephone. “You answer it.”

  The telephone rang a second time before Elizabeth picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  The line was silent for a few moments, then there was a subtle shift in the tonal quality of the hollowness.

  “Lizmac?” a man asked. His voice sounded high pitched, and strained.

  “Yes. Is this Twinkie?”

  “Tell me something.”

  “This is an open line—”

  “It’s being monitored, but I’ve taken care of it.”

  Elizabeth held the phone so that Jacqueline could hear as well.

  “My name is Elizabeth McGarvey. Are you Otto?”

  “Do you still have the diamond necklace your father gave you in Greece?” It was something only her father knew about.

  “Actually he gave it to me when I was in school in Switzerland. But I lost it in Greece, when he found it he gave it back to me.” It had happened during the operation her father had been involved with a few years ago.

  “What are you doing here, Liz?” Rencke asked.

  “Trying to find my father. I know that you and he are working together, and I know that Viktor Yemlin has hired him to kill Tarankov. But the Russians know about it, and they’ve asked the CIA and the SDECE to help out. Ryan’s agreed. So my father’s walking into a trap. Where is he, Otto?” It all came out in a rush.

  “How do you know all this—”

  “I’m working for the CIA now!” Elizabeth cut in. “Where is my father? I have to talk to him.”

  The line was silent.

  “Otto, goddammit, don’t hang up on me! Ryan’s an asshole, and I don’t have any intention of turning my father over to him or to the French. But I have to try to warn him.” Elizabeth was sick with fear. If she lost Rencke now she’d never get him back. “Jacqueline Belleau has agreed to help me.”

  The connection had not been broken, but the line remained silent.

  “We’ve got less than seven weeks to stop him. You have to help us, Otto. You’re our only hope.”

  “You don’t have seven weeks,” Otto said, his voice very strained, even higher pitched than before. “I think Mac’s taking him out on May First. Four days from now.”

  A vise closed on Elizabeth’s heart, but she immediately saw the logic in it. Tarankov wasn’t going to wait for the general elections in June. He’d be in Red Square on May Day and her father would be there waiting for him.

  “There’s something else you don’t know. The Russian police commission supposedly headed by Yuri Bykov. Well, that’s not his real name. He’s really Leonid Chernov, who is Tarankov’s chief of staff.”

  “Dear God,” Elizabeth said. “Is my father already in Moscow?”

  “No, he’s in Riga. But in a few minutes he’s going to make the biggest mistake in his life when he tries to call Yemlin. Yemlin’s line is bugged. When Mac calls, the Russians will know where he’s calling from and Chernov will come after him.”

  “The Latvians will never allow it.”

  “Chernov might convince them somehow.”

  “But that’ll take time,” Elizabeth cried. “You can warn him first.”

  “There’s no way to get through by phone and I’ve got to stay here in case he tries to call me.”

  “Jacqueline and I will fly up there.”

  “The French are watching you.”

  “Not now. They think we’re at a dead end. They’ve written us off, Otto. Give me his address, we’ll get there in time, I promise you.”

  “Put Mademoiselle Belleau on the line.”

  “I’m here,” Jacqueline said.

  “If I give you Mac’s address will you turn it over to your people?”

  “Only if I think that there is no other way in which to save Kirk’s life.”

  “If you betray him, I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t worry, Mo
nsieur Rencke, I love him just as much as you do.”

  “Liz, are you there?” Rencke said, hesitating.

  “Yes. Where is he?”

  “He has an apartment in Riga,” Rencke said. He gave her the address. “I don’t know which unit he’s in, but he called me from a pay phone in the building.”

  Elizabeth’s heart sank. Her father could just as well have called from a building across the city from wherever he was holed up. But she didn’t say anything. For the moment it was their only lead.

  “Are you sure that you guys aren’t being followed?” Otto asked.

  “They want to send us to Moscow,” Jacqueline said. “Until we agree to go — and they don’t think we will-they’re leaving us to our own devices.”

  “Standby,” Rencke said.

  Elizabeth had been holding everything in. She sat back and looked into Jacqueline’s eyes. “You weren’t lying to Otto … or to me, were you?”

  “Won, ma cherie. In this you must believe me.”

  “I do,” Elizabeth said. She could see how he was going to do it. Tarankov would be standing on the reviewing balcony on Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square, and her father would be somewhere within a hundred yards or so with a sniper rifle. At the right moment Tarankov would fall, and her father would melt away into the crowds in a very clever disguise. She’d read his file. She knew what he was capable of.

  Rencke came back. “Can you be at Orly by five this morning?”

  “Orly by five?” Elizabeth said. Jacqueline nodded. “Yes.” “You’re both booked on RI AIR flight 57 to Riga, first class. It wasn’t cheap, but I figured that Ryan could afford it, so I put the tickets on his Mastercard.”

  Elizabeth laughed despite herself. “He’ll hang you.”

  “It’d be the biggest blunder of his life,” Rencke replied viciously. “By the time I got done with his computer track, he’d never again qualify for a driver’s license, he wouldn’t be able to afford to buy a stick of gum, and the IRS would probably want to put him away for life.” He calmed down. “You guys be careful out there.” He gave Elizabeth his telephone number. “Let me know what’s going on, will ya?”

  “We will,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’ll keep a two-way dialogue going between us on the net. If it’s being watched they’ll think you guys are still in the apartment.”

  Elizabeth hung up and looked at Jacqueline.

  “We’ll go out the back way,” the older woman said. “Just in case.”

  Lefortovo

  Chernov finally got the break he’d been waiting for a few minutes before three when Major Gresko called from FSK headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square. He was sitting in the darkness sipping a glass of white wine wondering what else he could have done when the phone rang. Every cop in Russia was looking for McGarvey, as were the forces of the CIA and SDECE. But it was as if McGarvey had simply dropped off the face of the earth. He’d gone to ground, and there was nothing they could do until he surfaced again, or made a mistake.

  The FSK team assigned to watch had learned from their source inside the SVR that he’d received an encrypted call from somewhere outside Russia an hour earlier. Fifty-five minutes after that call, a pay phone in a kiosk near the Metro station a couple of blocks from Yemlin’s apartment rang. It was one of the telephones that the FSK monitored at Colonel Bykov’s request. Yemlin was nowhere in the vicinity, so after two rings an FSK operator answered.

  “Da?”

  “Viktor?” a man said.

  So as not to make the caller suspicious the FSK operator told a half-truth. “Nyet. This is Nikolai, and there’s no one else around. The metro station across the street is empty.”

  “Yeb was,” the man said, and he hung up. “If it was McGarvey he called from a simplex instrument in Riga,” Gresko said. “But I can’t imagine anyone else calling a phone booth so near to Yemlin’s apartment, and so soon after the call to his office.”

  “I agree,” Chernov said.

  “It’s a safe bet those bastards won’t cooperate with us. They’ll give us the runaround if we leVel with them. No love lost up there, in fact if they knew the whole truth they’d probably do everything they could to help McGarvey.”

  Chernov thought for a moment.

  “But we’re not chasing an assassin. The man we’re after is a mass murderer, whose specialty is little boys. Who knows, maybe it’s become too hot for him here in Russia, and he may take his grim pleasures somewhere else. Like Latvia.”

  “That might work,” Gresko said.

  “Do you have an address on the trace?”

  “It’s an apartment building near the main railway station,” Gresko said. “Could be that he’s not living there. Maybe he just used the phone.”

  “If he called from there once, maybe he’ll call from there again,” Chernov said. “Get the file over to the Militia, and have Petrovsky make contact with the Riga police. Have him send a copy of McGarvey’s photograph under the name Kisnelkov. In the meantime I’ll arrange for an airplane to take us up there. I want to catch him just before dawn when people, even men like him, tend to be the slowest and most fuddle-headed.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Riga

  McGarvey awoke shortly after 5 a.m. in a cold sweat, his heart racing, his muscles bunched up. It was the same dream he often had in which he saw the light fading from the eyes of his victims. Only this time he’d been unable to focus on the face, except that whoever it was they were laughing at him. Mocking his life’s work, everything he’d fought for, everything he’d stood for.

  He got up and went to the window. A delivery van passed below, and at the corner a truck rumbled through the intersection. The city was coming alive with the morning. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  A persistent voice at the back of head gave warning like the blare of a distant fire alarm, but he wasn’t at all sure it was for him. Sometimes in his dreams a part of his subconscious tried to warn his victims to get out, to get away before he came to kill them. A psychologist friend at Langley said the dreams were — nothing more than his conscience.

  “Proves you’re just as sane as the rest of us,” the company shrink said. “Only a true sociopath can kill without remorse.”

  He’d debated calling Rencke last night after he’d failed to reach Yemlin. But Rencke would be unable to tell him anything he didn’t already know. Yemlin’s position had been discovered, and by now he was either dead or under arrest.

  There was an outside chance that Chernov knew about the calls to the phone booth near Yemlin’s apartment, in which case McGarvey’s call had not been answered by a chance passerby, but had been picked up by an FSK technical unit. It was even possible that they’d traced the call to this apartment building.

  But the Latvians actively hated Russians. All Russians. So not only wouldn’t they cooperate with a commission trying to stop the man who was planning to assassinate Tarankov, they’d probably throw up road blocks.

  It was on this thought that McGarvey had finally gone to sleep last night. And it was this thought now that nagged at him. Someone was coming, with or without the cooperation of the Latvian authorities. If he got involved in some kind of a confrontation with Chernov, whatever the outcome, the Latvians would try to arrest them all, and someone would get hurt.

  He turned away from the window and got dressed in a dark turtleneck sweater and slacks. The bolstered gun went in the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back, and the silencer and spare magazine went in the pockets of his leather jacket. He left everything else, including his clothes, his shaving gear and other toiletries, and the overnight bag. If anyone came up here they might believe that he’d just stepped out and was planning on returning. It might give him a few extra hours.

  Checking the street again to make sure no one had shown up, he took his laptop computer down to the Volkswagen, and drove over to the secured garage near the train station, where he switched cars for the Mercedes. Before the VW was reported missing by the rental ag
ency, the operation would be long finished, and McGarvey would drop the keys and a note where the car could be found in a mailbox somewhere.

  By 6:30 a.m.” he was having breakfast on the outskirts of the city, with several hours to kill. He did not want to’ cross the border at Zilupe until late this afternoon, when the customs officers he’d dealt with before would be at the end of their shift, and therefore impatient to take his bribe and get home.

  It was past 8:00 a.m. when the Tupolev jet transport carrying Chernov, Petrovsky, Gresko and a couple of Militia detectives was finally cleared to taxi from the holding ramp over to a customs and immigration hangar. Latvian officials had held them for over an hour and Chernov was beside himself with rage.

  Riga Police Lieutenant Andrejs Ulmanis, and his dour faced sergeant Jurin ZarinS were waiting for them. Chernov forced himself to remain calm as they all shook hands, but the tension and animosity were very thick.

  “We surrounded the building forty-five minutes ago, as you requested, but so far there’s been no sign of the man you are looking for,” Lieutenant Ulmanis said, leading them over to a police van for the ride into the city. He was a heavyset man with thinning sand-colored hair and a double chin.

  “Considering the political conditions between our countries, we thank you for your help,” Chernov said, carefully.

  Ulmanis eyed him distastefully. “Murder is a terrible crime, and we’re all police officers, ja?”

  “This one is very bad. He specializes in little boys.”

  The Latvian policeman’s jaw tightened. “I wasn’t clear on his nationality. His name is Kisnelkov. Is he Russian or Ukrainian?”

  “He’s a Russian,” Chernov said. “But he may be traveling on an American or a French passport under another name. The son of a bitch is good, he always manages to keep one step ahead of us.”

  “What’s he doing in Latvia?”

  “Trying to get away. Last week he raped and killed three young boys in Moscow. When he was finished he mutilated their bodies in ways that even you as a police officer would not believe.”