Soul of the Assassin

by Larry Bond

  What was much more difficult, however, was discovering T Rex’s identity. Ferguson’s information about seeing Kiska Babev using a cell phone just before the bomb exploded was tantalizing, especially since the Italians had quickly concluded that the bomb was set off by phone. But as far as Ciello was concerned, it was merely a hint about a possible direction his work should take.

  Ciello had retrieved all of the Agency’s information about Kiska Babev, trying to find evidence that she was T Rex. He’d begun by looking at what might be called the Agency’s résumé on her, a brief dossier about where she’d gone to school, where her family was, and what her specialties seemed to be as a member of the FSB.

  The information in these résumés tended to be somewhat sketchy and at times unreliable, depending on the individual. The Agency did not have access to most FSB officers’ real résumés, and the information infrastructure in Russia—school and birth records, for example—was nowhere near as complete as in the West. Beyond that, the FSB, like the CIA and other intelligence agencies, often took steps to confuse anyone who happened to be watching, announcing divisions that didn’t exist and purposely confusing work assignments and job titles. So Ciello’s next job had been to assess how accurate this dossier was likely to be, and where the gaps were. He’d decided that it was at least in the ballpark; Babev appeared to be a colonel, relatively high up in the FSB structure, with an assignment that allowed her to travel despite her being based, apparently, in Moscow.

  Besides the résumé, the Agency had a number of contact reports, mission briefings, and other documents containing information on different foreign agents. Only rarely did the reports directly contain anything useful about the subject—Ferguson’s, for example, were typically as terse as classified ads—but considerable information could be teased from them. Where the contact had been made, to take a simple example, not only revealed where the agent was assigned but often what part of the FSB he or she worked for and how high up the ranks he or she was. If there were enough reports, a pattern emerged showing the agent’s specialties. And the lack of certain types of reports—nothing showing attempts at recruitment, to again give a simplistic example—could reveal a lot about an agent’s function as well.

  The portrait of Kiska Babev that had emerged was of a thirtysomething overachiever—Ciello had three different sources for her birth date, all different—persevering against the traditionally male-dominated Russian intelligence structure. She seemed to have a specialty in science and had possibly started in the FSB’s Science and Technical Service. Seven years before she had worked in what was charitably known as industrial espionage, with a cover as an administrative assistant to Aeroflot, the Russian airline company. After that, she had been in Chechnya, then Georgia; at some point she switched from recruiting scientists to spy to helping track down terrorists. Her face had been identified in a photo of onlookers at a thwarted Chechnyan terrorist attack on a Russian school in 2004; she seemed to be working undercover there, and had not received any notice in the admittedly brief write-ups about the incident.

  It was in her anti-terror role that she had met Ferguson in Moscow. Ferguson was working undercover on a project to stop the clandestine flow of items that could be used for nuclear bombs and “dirty” radiological weapons. His exact reasons for being in Moscow were not included in his report, nor did he say much about Kiska Babev. But he had clearly had some interaction with her, since he not only listed her name but also made a notation that indicated she had assisted him.

  Having studied everything the CIA knew about Kiska Babev. Ciello had then tried to find a match between her dossier and what was known about T Rex. The Agency had generic profiles for the different sorts of miscreants one might encounter in intelligence work; Kiska’s background and personality did not mesh with what one would supposedly expect from an assassin. While Ciello considered the profiles little more than pop psychology, he nonetheless noted that there was no indication that Kiska had had any serious weapons or demolitions training. She had, however, been in Chechnya; one of T Rex’s favorite methods of killing people involved car bombs, a technique employed there against the Russians.

  Hard evidence of a connection was even more difficult to find. Ciello tried to place her at or near the scene of the assassinations, trying to match her description with the descriptions of possible suspects or even witnesses, trying to find any connection, no matter how thin, between her and the deaths.

  The police reports on the murders contained very little useful information, beyond the evidence that the assassin was extremely thorough and professional. At first glance, there was little to connect any of the crimes to each other. The victims ranged from political figures, to businessmen with Mafia connections, to the CIA agent. It was the CIA, not a police agency, that had made the link, tracing wire transfers that moved through an Austrian account before and after each murder. Those transfers were used to identify several other murders, and a rough pattern had emerged. From there, they had found the advance person, and the message using T Rex as a name.

  The accounts the money had passed through had been closed long ago. Apparently T Rex had developed a better way of getting his pay, because there had been at least one assassination connected with the advance person where the transfer wasn’t detected. Most likely, said one of the analysts who had worked up the T Rex profile, he had adopted a system of multiple accounts and smaller transfers, but the efforts to discover them had not yielded any results.

  Ciello had to go through channels to look for accounts in Kiska’s name at the banks that had been used for the transfers—a request that, even for a high-priority operation like Special Demands, took some time to process and involved considerable paperwork and bureaucratic maneuvering, even with the banks that the agency had a “special relationship” with. Results would take several hours, if not days.

  The CIA had a limited ability to track credit card transactions made by Russians in Europe. In theory it should have been easy to connect Kiska with a transaction in Bologna and then work backward from there. But scans of data from the Russian banks the Agency had access to, as well as Western banks known to be used by the FSB, failed to turn up transactions in Bologna.

  He next began looking through databases of airline tickets, extending back ten years. The rolls were the result of voluntary anti-terrorist projects, but the collection was useful for other purposes as well. Ciello, whose clearance gave him direct access to the databases, ran searches on Kiska Babev’s name and known aliases, and came up with a dozen different hits or matches. He’d been examining them when Wu came in.

  It took him a few moments to get past her interruption and remember precisely where he was: correlating the flights with possible return trips to see if there was an alias that he didn’t know about. His theory was that Kiska might use one name for inbound or outbound flights and another for the other leg of the trip. Finding a match between a pair of flights would give him another name for the financial queries. It was a complex search, however, with a wide range of potential variables, and after a few false matches—similar names that proved to belong to different people—Ciello had to concede that he wasn’t getting anywhere. He went back to the flights themselves, trying to coordinate them with anything known about the assassinations. He found only one, but it was provocative: a trip to France a week before the American CIA agent Michael Dalton had been killed. She’d used her real name, with payment arranged through a Russian travel bureau known to be used by the FSB.

  Tenuous, but definitely something. More than just the outline Wu had demanded.

  Ciello typed up a quick summary and sent it to down to Corrigan.

  Corrigan fought back a yawn as he queued up the segment from the surveillance bugs for Ferguson. It wasn’t that he was bored—the six-hour time difference between Italy and the States was killing him. He was in effect pulling two eight-hour shifts, with Lauren DiCapri filling the last. They needed another desk person, though finding someone with the p
roper training, clearances, and temperament—they had to get along with Ferguson—seemed impossible.

  “You ready, Ferg?” Corrigan asked.

  “Yeah, if I’m not keeping you awake.”

  “I’m sorry.” Corrigan hit the key to upload the video snippet to the satellite. From there it was downloaded to Ferguson’s secure laptop.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely Atha. How long was he in Rostislawitch’s room?”

  “Ten minutes. I have a little bit of audio, but it’s muffled. The maid must have been in the room downstairs running the vacuum.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  “I can send you a transcript.”

  “Fine, but let me hear it first.”

  The audio was completely indistinguishable; only with the aid of a high-tech sound scrubber had they been able to get anything from it. But of course, Ferguson being Ferguson, he wanted to hear that for himself.

  Corrigan sent the files, then put his hand over his mike and yawned again. As he did, his computer chirped, indicating he had something new in his priority e-mail queue.

  It was the Russian report from Ciello. Corrigan opened it.

  “So Atha goes into the room while Rostislawitch is away, probably to search it. He calls someone on the phone,” said Ferguson. “Can we get the phone number?”

  “Come on, Ferg. Be real.”

  “That’s a no?”

  “By the time we set something up with the NSA for that, forget it. He’ll have a new phone by then. You’d have a better chance using a scanner to intercept his calls.”

  “All right. Did you send that brief to Imperiati?”

  “I just got it now,” said Corrigan, opening the file Ciello had sent.

  “I asked for the brief hours ago.”

  “These things take time,” said Corrigan. “And it was only a half hour.”

  “I told you to get it together at least an hour before I met with Imperiati.”

  “It takes time,” said Corrigan. He skimmed through the summary, then saw that Ciello had done a lot more than put together a standard Agency report on an FSB officer.

  A lot more.

  “Hey, Ferg, Ciello has Kiska in France when Dalton gets killed.”

  Ferguson didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear that, Ferg? He has her in France. Shit. It’s the smoking gun. She’s got to be T Rex!”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “To Ciello?”

  “No, Dalton. I want to know what the weather’s like up there.”

  Ciello was a master at teasing information out of the intelligence agency’s databases and files, but when it came to making a simple phone connection on the in-house lines, he had a great deal of trouble. The procedure for using the encrypted line involved entering a department code as well as a personal code, which of course he could never remember without consulting the instruction manual he kept in his bottom desk drawer. This meant he had to find the key for the drawer; by the time he finally got Ferguson on the line, the op was beyond testy.

  “I almost hung up on you, Ciello. Where have you been?”

  “Um, here. I haven’t left the building since yesterday. I slept on the floor. Corrigan says it’s OK as long as I don’t tell Mr. Slott. It kinda helps my back.”

  “Listen, Corrigan tells me you can connect Kiska Babev to Michael Dalton’s murder.”

  “Um.”

  “What’s um mean? Are you studying yoga or something?”

  “Um, no. I have one flight record. He went to France a few days before.”

  “She. Kiska’s a she.”

  “I knew that.”

  “That’s all you have?”

  “I’m working on more information. To get data—”

  “You look at credit card information?”

  “In the works. To get access to the records, first we have to make—”

  “All right. Kiska has a second cousin in a mental institution in Romania.”

  “Um, sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be. Her last name is Stronghauf or something along those lines—it’s German. The mental hospital is right outside Baja Mare. There can’t be too many institutions around. Find out the name, then give it to this guy whose phone number I’m going to give you, and he’ll find the accounts for you. Or if you’re really nice to him, he’ll tell you how to get them yourself. Save you a couple of hours, if not days.”

  “Um—”

  “There’s that um again. You sure you’re not practicing yoga?”

  “The cousin isn’t named in any of the reports.”

  “What a shock. Guy goes by the name of Fibber. Here’s his number—”

  “Is this outside, um—strictly speaking, am I breaking protocol? Because the privacy laws, see there’s an internal counsel who’s supposed to review requests, even when they involve overseas—”

  “U tebya cho ruki iz jopi rastut?” said Ferguson.

  “My hands are where they’re supposed to be,” said Ciello.

  The Russian expression—literally “are your hands growing out your ass?”—was generally used to deride an inept boob.

  “Well, then do what I’m telling you,” answered Ferguson. “Use my name as soon as Fibber answers the phone. But don’t ‘um’ him; he’s not into that New Age crap.”

  “Corrigan always says we should totally obey the procedures because otherwise—”

  “Hooy tebe,” said Ferguson, using a Russian expression that meant “don’t mess with that,” though it was rather more emphatically put. Then he dictated the phone number; the country code indicated it was in Nigeria.

  “Run your request through channels as a backup,” added Ferguson. “This way, no one will complain. You just don’t mention that you already have the information.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you sound, Ciello. I didn’t know you knew Russian.”

  “Just curse words.” He’d made a study of them several years before; they helped break the ice when dealing with Russian UFO experts about the so-called Siberian Series Sightings.

  “Otvai,” said Ferguson.

  “Piss off yourself.”

  Ferguson laughed. “Talk to you later.”

  7

  BOLOGNA, ITALY

  Thera hesitated before getting out of the cab, scanning the block in front of the hotel for anything suspicious.

  “Maybe I’ll just go to bed,” said Rostislawitch, getting out on the other side.

  “How about dinner?” Thera asked. “Are you hungry?”

  Rostislawitch looked across the roof of the taxi. She was beautiful and concerned, and despite the difference in their ages—despite the fact that he knew, knew, that she would not be interested in him sexually—he wanted badly to make love to her.

  Even acknowledging the thought to himself felt awkward. And yet many older men had younger women. Many. Why was he different?

  They were handsome, and rich. He was neither.

  “Professor?”

  “You should call me Artur,” said Rostislawitch. “Artur is what friends call me. And I have never liked to be a professor. Research has been my true calling.”

  “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting.”

  “You deserve dinner for rescuing me. Let’s have something nice. Yes,” said Rostislawitch, suddenly sure of himself. “Come on. Let us see what we can find in the hotel restaurant. It is supposed to be very good.”

  Ferguson moved the binoculars slowly, scanning the street. There were two Italian surveillance teams on the roofs near the hotel, and one more on the top floor of the hotel itself. But no sign of Kiska, or the Iranian.

  “Thera’s on her way in,” said Guns, who was on the street a few yards behind her.

  “Got it,” acknowledged Rankin, who was in the lobby.

  Ferguson continued to scan the buildings after Thera and Rostislawitch went inside. He assumed that T Rex would know by now that he—or she—had missed. Would the assassin try to finish the job quick
ly, or wait until some of the heat died down? Ferguson could make a good argument either way.

  But Kiska Babev as T Rex? That still didn’t quite fit, despite what Ciello had found, and even though Ferguson had seen Kiska’s alabaster face, her thick black lips, and the cell phone: a bomb detonator. Or maybe just a cell phone.

  “They’re going into the hotel restaurant,” said Rankin over the radio. “Maître d’ is talking to them, I assume telling them they’re closed until seven. Going to the bar.”

  “Give her some space,” said Ferguson.

  “No shit.”

  Guns checked in; Ferguson told him to circle the block a few times and then head over to one of their safe rooms and grab a nap: he decided T Rex would undoubtedly need some time to reload as well as let the pressure die down. If he’d been thinking of striking right away, he would have gone to the hospital.

  Or she.

  Ferguson was thinking about whether he might take a rest as well when his sat phone began to buzz.

  “Yeah?” he said, making the connection.

  “No funny jokes this time?” asked Corrine Alston.

  “Lost my sense of humor when I crashed the Ducati,” said Ferguson. “Beautiful bike. Seat was a little uncomfortable, but I could live with that.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Corrigan didn’t tell you?”

  “No. Are you OK? What happened to you?”

  “One of the spokes went through my liver,” said Ferguson. He picked up the field glasses and went back to scanning the street.