Exum snorted. “And if you can just get seven across, you’ll figure out ten down. Five letters, starts with E…” He shook his head gravely. “John, Terence, I have the greatest respect for your gamesmanship. But you and your whiz kids forget one simple thing. There’s no time.”
Lanchester turned to Morton Culler, the NSA ace. “Where do you come out?”
“Exum’s right,” Culler said heavily. “Let me be more precise. Bryson must be apprehended immediately. And if apprehension poses any difficulties, he must be terminated. We’ve got to dispatch the Alpha squad. And make their assignment very explicit. We’re not talking about a guy who owes library fines for overdue books. We’re talking about someone responsible for mass murder, and who seems to have an even bigger game afoot. So long as he’s alive and out there, none of us can relax our vigilance.”
Lanchester shifted uncomfortably. “The Alpha squad,” he said quietly. “It isn’t supposed to exist.”
“It doesn’t exist,” Culler said. “Officially.”
Lanchester placed his hands flat on the polished table. “Listen, I need to know how certain you are in this analysis,” Lanchester said. “Because I’m the one man in this room who’s met with Bryson, face-to-face. And—I just have to say it—that’s just not the vibe I got from him. He struck me as a man of honor.” Lanchester paused, and for a few moments, nobody spoke. “Still, I’ve been fooled before.”
“Alpha will be dispatched immediately,” Morton Culler said, and waited until his colleagues nodded in agreement. Disagreements having been aired, the consensus decision was joined. They all understood the significance of the order. The Alpha squad was composed of trained killers, equally skilled at sniper fire and hand-to-hand combat. To mobilize them against someone was to impose an almost certain death sentence.
“Good Christ. Wanted dead or alive,” Lanchester said grimly. “It’s uncomfortably like the Old West.”
“We’re all conscious of your sensitivities, sir,” Culler said, his voice betraying a hint of sarcasm. “But this is the only way to handle it. Too many lives are at stake. He would have killed you in an instant if he judged that it suited his purposes, sir. For all we know, he may still try.”
Lanchester nodded slowly, looking pensive. “This isn’t a decision to be made lightly. It may be that my judgment has been impaired by my personal encounter. And I have to worry that—”
“You’re doing the right thing, sir,” Culler said quickly. “Let’s just hope we’re not too late.”
NINETEEN
The nightclub was hidden on a tiny pereulok, an alley off Tversky Bul’var, near Moscow’s Ring Road. It was truly concealed, like some speakeasy in 1920s America. Unlike an illicit liquor joint of Prohibition days, though, the Blackbird was secreted away not from the eyes of government liquor authorities but from the riffraff, the masses. For the Blackbird was meant to be a private oasis of wealth and vice for the elite, the select: the rich, the beautiful, and the heavily armed.
It was located in a shambling brick structure that looked like the abandoned factory it was: in pre-Revolutionary times, Singer sewing machines had been manufactured here. Its windows were blacked out, and there was a single door, of black-painted wood, though with steel-plate reinforcement, and on the door, in peeling, antique Cyrillic letters, were the Russian words Shveiniye Mashini: Sewing Machines. The only indication that anything was to be found within was the long line of black Mercedes limousines extending down the narrow alley, looking out of place, as if they had all somehow ended up in the wrong place, the whole lot of them.
Shortly after arriving at Sheremetyevo-2 Airport, and then, for appearance’s sake, checking into the Intourist Hotel with the rest of his raggedy tour group, Bryson had placed a call to an old friend. Thirty minutes later a midnight-blue Mercedes sedan had pulled up in front of the Intourist, and a uniformed driver ushered him into the backseat of the car, where a single envelope had been placed.
It was twilight, but the traffic along Tverskaya Ulitsa was heavy, the drivers manic, changing lanes abruptly, ignoring any rules of the road, even driving up on the sidewalk in order to pass slower-moving vehicles. Russia had gone mad, chaotic and furious, since Bryson had last been there. Though much of the old architecture remained in place—the wedding-cake Stalinist Gothic skyscrapers and the mammoth Central Telegraph facility; a sprinkling of the old shops, like Yeliseyevsky’s food emporium and the Aragvi, once the only decent restaurant in town—there were incredible changes. High-priced shops glittered along the once-somber avenue that had been, before the collapse of the Communist state, Gorky Street: Versace, Van Cleef & Arpels, Vacheron Constantin, Tiffany. Yet along with the visible signs of plutocratic wealth were evidence of far-reaching poverty, of a social system that had broken down. Soldiers openly begged for alms, babushki sold moonshine or fruits and vegetables, or else they pleaded with you to tell you your fortune for a few rubles. Peroxide hookers were more brazenly in evidence than ever before.
Bryson got out of the chauffeured sedan, took the small plastic card from the envelope that had been left for him, and inserted it in a slot like that of an automatic teller mounted on the splintering wooden door, the card’s magnetized strip facing out. The door buzzed open, and he entered a completely dark area. Once the door had closed behind him, he felt around for the second door, which the driver had told him, in barely serviceable English, would be there. Grasping the cold steel knob, he pulled the next door open, revealing the bizarre, garish world within.
Purple and red and blue beams of light floated and rippled on clouds of white fog and bounced off alabaster Greek columns and plaster Roman statuaries, black marble counters and high stainless-steel stools. Spotlights spun from high above in the dark recesses of what had once been the factory floor. Rock music of a sort Bryson had never heard before, a kind of Russian techno-pop, thundered at earsplitting volume. The odor of marijuana mingled with strong, expensive French perfume and bad Russian aftershave.
He paid his admission fee, the equivalent of $250, and sidled through a dense, gyrating crowd of mobsters in gold chains and huge, gaudy Rolexes who were somehow talking on cell phones over the deafening music, accompanied by their molls and other women who were either hookers or trying to look like them, in low-cut tops and short-hemmed skirts that left nothing to the imagination. Burly, shaven-headed bodyguards glowered; the club’s security guards skulked around the periphery, uniformed like ninjas in black fatigues with billy clubs. High above the pulsating, spastic throng was a glass-and-steel gallery, where spectators could watch, through a glass floor, the cavorting below, as if it were some exotic, otherworldly terrarium.
He climbed the steel spiral staircase to the gallery, which was revealed to be another world entirely. The chief attraction on this level were the strippers, mostly platinum blond, though a few of them were ebony-skinned, their outsized busts all obviously silicone-enhanced. They danced under bright spotlights, positioned throughout the gallery.
A hostess in a filmy, revealing outfit, wearing a telephone headset, stopped him; she spoke a few, quick words in Russian. Bryson replied wordlessly by slipping her a few twenty-dollar bills, and she escorted him to a steel-and-black-leather banquette.
As soon as he was seated, a waiter brought several trays of zakuski, Russian appetizers: pickled beef tongue with horseradish sauce, red and black caviar and blini, mushrooms in aspic, pickled vegetables, herring. Though Bryson was hungry, none of it looked particularly appetizing. A bottle of Dom Perignon appeared—“compliments of your host,” the waiter explained. Bryson sat alone, watching the crowd, for a few more minutes until he spotted the elegant, slim figure of Yuri Tarnapolsky gliding toward the table, both hands extended in exuberant welcome. Tarnapolsky seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, though Bryson now realized that the wily ex-KGB man had in fact entered the gallery from the kitchen.
“Welcome to Russia, my dear Coleridge!” Yuri Tarnapolsky exulted. Bryson stood, and the two embraced.
“You look younger than ever,” said Bryson.
“Yes, well, money can buy anything,” replied Tarnapolsky, sardonic and amused as ever. He gestured for the waiter to pour the Dom Perignon, along with small glasses of Georgian wine, a white Tsinandali and a red Khvanchkara. As Tarnapolsky raised his glass in a toast, a stripper approached the table; Yuri slid a few crisp, large-denomination ruble notes into her G-string and politely urged her in the direction of a table of dark-suited businessmen.
He and Bryson had worked a number of extremely sensitive jobs together, which Tarnapolsky had always found highly lucrative; the Vector operation had only been the most recent. International arms-inspections teams had been unable to find evidence to support the rumors that Moscow was illegally producing bioweapons. Whenever the inspectors made “surprise,” unannounced visits to the Vector laboratory facilities, they turned up nothing. Their “surprise” visits were no surprise. So the Directorate controllers had instructed Bryson that in order to get hard evidence of Russian work in germ warfare, he would need to break into Vector’s central laboratory in Novosibirsk. As resourceful as Bryson was, that was a daunting proposition. He needed assistance on the ground, and the name of Yuri Tarnapolsky had come up. Tarnapolsky had recently retired from the KGB and was in the private sector, meaning that he was for sale to the highest bidder.
Tarnapolsky had proved to be worth every kopek of his exorbitant fee. He had obtained for Bryson the blueprints of the laboratory facility, even arranged for the street sentry to be diverted to a “reported burglary” at the residence of the chairman of the city’s governing council. Using his KGB identification to browbeat and intimidate the institute’s internal security guards, Tarnapolsky had gotten Bryson into the third-containment-level refrigerated tanks, where Bryson was able to locate the ampules he needed. Then Tarnapolsky had arranged to have the ampules spirited out of the country by a circuitous route, concealed in a shipment of frozen lamb en route to Cuba. Bryson, and the Directorate, had thereby been able to prove what dozens of arms inspectors could not: that Vector, and therefore Russia, was involved in making biological weapons. They had the irrefutable proof in the form of seven ampules of weaponized anthrax, an extraordinarily rare strain.
At the time Bryson had been pleased with his success, with the ingenuity of the operation, and indeed, he had been highly lauded by Ted Waller. But the news from Geneva of the sudden outbreak of a rare strain of anthrax—precisely the same strain that he had pilfered from Novosibirsk—had now turned everything inside out. Now he felt sickened by the way he had been manipulated. There could be little question that the anthrax he had stolen years earlier had just been used in the Geneva attack.
Tarnapolsky smiled broadly at him. “You are enjoying our black-skinned beauties from Cameroon?” he inquired.
“I’m sure you understand the importance of telling no one about my visit,” said Bryson, struggling to make himself heard over the cacophony.
Tarnapolsky shrugged, as if to say the question need not have been raised. “My friend, we all have our secrets. I have a few of my own, as you might imagine. But if you are in town, may I assume you are not here to take in the sights—unlike the rest of your group?”
Bryson explained the nature of the delicate operation for which he wished to hire Tarnapolsky. As soon as Bryson uttered the name Prishnikov, however, the KGB man’s composure was quite clearly disturbed.
“Coleridge, my dear, I am not one to look a gift horse, as you say, in the mouth. As you know, I have always enjoyed our joint ventures.” He gave Bryson a somber, even shaken, look. “The prime minister one fears less. You see, there are stories about this man. This is not an American-style businessman, this you must understand. When you are ‘downsized’ by Anatoly Prishnikov, you do not collect welfare checks. No, you are far more likely to end up as part of the cement that one of his companies manufactures. Perhaps you will end up as a component of the pigment in the lipstick another one of his companies sells. Do you know what you call a gangster who has, through graft and extortion, acquired ownership of large sectors of your country’s industry?” Tarnapolsky gave a wan smile and answered his own question. “You call him CEO.”
Bryson nodded. “A difficult target deserves handsome remuneration.”
Tarnapolsky sidled close to Bryson in the banquette. “Coleridge, my friend, Anatoly Prishnikov is a dangerous and ruthless man. I am sure he has his confederates in this very club, if he doesn’t own it outright.”
“I understand, Yuri. But you are not a man to shy from a challenge, as I recall. Perhaps we can work something out to our mutual satisfaction.”
Over the next several hours, at the Blackbird and then continuing at Tarnapolsky’s immense apartment on Sadovo-Samotechnaya, the two men worked out both the financial terms and the highly complex arrangements. The assistance of two others would be required, and Tarnapolsky would supply them. “To get to Anatoly Prishnikov, blood will certainly be shed,” Tarnapolsky warned. “And who’s to say that some of it will not be our own, hmm?”
* * *
By the early hours of the morning, they had devised a plan.
They had given up on any direct approach to Prishnikov, who was far too well defended, far too dangerous a target. The point of vulnerability, Tarnapolsky concluded, after making a few highly discreet telephone calls to former KGB colleagues, was Prishnikov’s senior deputy, a small, weedy man named Dmitri Labov. Prishnikov’s longtime lieutenant, Dmitri Labov was known in certain circles as chelovek kotory khranit sekrety—the man who keeps the secrets.
But even Labov would hardly be a simple target. Tarnapolsky’s research had determined that the deputy was driven every day between his heavily guarded residence and the heavily guarded Nortek office, in suburban Moscow near the old Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR on Prospekt Mira.
Labov’s chauffeured vehicle was a bullet- and bomb-resistant Bentley—there were, Bryson knew, no truly bullet-proof or bomb-proof vehicles—with almost two tons of armoring on the chassis. It was practically a tank, a Level IV armored vehicle, the highest level of protection that exists, capable of withstanding super-powered military ammunition including 7.62 NATO rounds.
During stints in Mexico City and South America, he had acquired a familiarity with such fully armored vehicles. They were usually fabricated with a quarter-inch of 2024-T3 aluminum as well as a high-performance synthetic composite, typically aramid and ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. Mounted inside the 19-gauge steel car doors would be a 24-ply sheet of high-strength fiberglass-reinforced plastic, half an inch thick, capable of stopping a .30-carbine slug fired from five feet away. The glass would be a polycarbonate/glass laminate; the fuel tank would be self-sealing, antiexplosive even when directly hit; a special dry-cell battery would keep the engine running after an attack. “Run-flat” tires would enable getaways at high speeds for up to fifty miles even when the tires were shot through by gunfire.
Labov’s Bentley would have been modified specifically for Moscow, where gangs were likely to use AK-47 assault rifles. It would probably also be able to withstand grenades and small pipe bombs, probably even armor-piercing ammunition, high-velocity, full-metal-jacket rounds.
But there were always vulnerabilities.
For one, there was the driver, who was probably not professionally trained. For some reason, the Russian plutocrats tended to use their own personal assistants as drivers, not trusting professional ones and not bothering to have them trained in something they pro
bably considered common sense, though it was not.
And there was one more vulnerability—around which Bryson had devised his plan.
* * *
Every morning at exactly seven o’clock in the morning Dmitri Labov left his apartment building just off the Arbat, a very exclusive, recently renovated nineteenth-century building that had once been reserved for ranking Central Committee officials and Politburo members. The apartment complex, now home to Russia’s nouveaux riches, mostly mafiya, was sealed off and well guarded.
This consistency in schedule, the information obtained by Tarnapolsky, was an example of the slipshod security combined with flamboyantly showy protective measures that was peculiar to large-scale criminal enterprises, Bryson had learned. Security professionals knew the importance of varying their charges’ schedules, ensuring that nothing was predictable.
Just as Tarnapolsky had been informed, Labov’s Bentley pulled out of the newly built underground parking garage beneath Labov’s apartment building and traveled a short distance before pulling onto Kalinin Prospekt. Bryson and Tarnapolsky, in a nondescript Volga, tailed the Bentley as it traveled the Ring Road all the way to Prospekt Mira. Shortly after the Bentley had passed the titanium-clad Sputnik obelisk, which soared majestically into the sky, it turned left onto Eizensteina Ulitsa, then proceeded three more blocks to the refurbished baronial palace that provided the headquarters for Nortek. There, Labov’s car entered another underground parking garage.
It would remain there for the entire day.
The only somewhat unpredictable element to Labov’s schedule concerned the time of his return home. He had a wife and three children and was known to be a family man who never missed dinner at home unless there was an emergency at work or Prishnikov summoned him back in. Most days, however, his limousine left the Nortek garage by seven or seven-fifteen in the evening.
This evening, Labov was clearly intent on getting home in time for dinner with the family. At five minutes after seven o’clock, his Bentley emerged from the Nortek garage. Tarnapolsky and Bryson were waiting, in a grimy white package-delivery panel truck across the street, and Tarnapolsky immediately radioed ahead to his confederate. The timing would be tight, but it should be manageable. Most important, it was still rush hour in this congested city.
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