“This is not 1991.”
And then the street fighting began.
This was not a rehearsal. This was no simulation in the life-sized model of an abandoned city. Eighty-two people died the first day. Among them were seven bosses in the two largest criminal organizations. Three from the Russian mafia, four from the Chechen mafia. No one was paying attention anymore to whether the bloodshed was balanced. Then there were casualties among the various criminal organizations that had started streaming into the city from all across Russia, all over Asia. Many, many casualties.
The dogs began by paying house calls. There were groups on the move with lists of the members of the mafia organizations, photographs affixed. Three or four of them. One of the groups comprised an old Slavic woman with thick glasses who was built like a barrel, a Japanese girl still in her early teens, and seven dogs. Their list had the names and addresses of the mafia headquarters, affiliated facilities, and businesses, and the names and home addresses of their leaders, along with other details. The old lady led the dogs on a leash. The girl wore a shapka, pulled down low over her forehead against the cold; her face, as she walked, wore no expression at all. She looked, somehow, like the old lady’s granddaughter. She was obese. Obese in a combative sort of way. A cold glitter shone in her eyes. She was Japanese, but not in the usual way. She was Japanese like a Hokkaido dog is Japanese. Yes, indeed: she wasn’t a person, she was a dog.
Why? Because she had a dog name.
Given to her as a sign of her legitimacy: Strelka.
House calls. They’d finish one, then go on to the next. The old lady managed the gun, the dog-girl handled the dogs. Their first target lived in a luxury apartment complex. They could make him open the door himself, or they could blast it open with the gun. The girl-dog gave the commands, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in a dog language made up solely of gestures. The dogs dashed in. Keeping low, keeping out of sight. Seven dogs entered, one in charge. He was a male. The dog that was once known as number 47, the dog the girl-dog used to call Forty-seven. He went by a different name now.
Now he was Belka. His dad had died, so he had graduated from a number to a name.
Belka sprang, killed. Fell into formation with the other six dogs, leapt instantly at the target, and it was over. Just like that.
At the same time, in another place, on the grounds of a grand estate, a guard dog was killed. Teeth ripped silently into his throat. First the dogs killed their brethren, then they killed the target’s guards, then they killed the target. In some locations the target knew immediately that he was under attack and tried to escape in his car. But the surrounding roads had been closed. By dogs. They ringed the expensive car with its bulletproof windows, leapt at it, caused the target to panic, to err—to die.
They led him to kill himself.
It was a canine rebellion. On the first day, no one noticed how many mafiosos had been killed. Aside from the mafia themselves, that is, and the authorities and the company executives the mafia had bought.
Then, late at night, the city caught fire. That people noticed…And there was rioting. That same night, an old man surrounded by dogs read coordinates from a military map. To the dogs. And then into a radio handset.
1991. Moscow in the summer. In the early hours of the day, before dawn, the government declared a state of emergency. Now it was the afternoon. Already more than five hundred tanks were positioned at various points around the city. The man who had been elected the first president of the Soviet Union in March of the previous year had suddenly been removed from power. A conservative coup d’état was underway. The ringleaders included the defense minister, the head of the KGB, and the vice president. The troops in the tanks were prepared to conduct a mass arrest of everyone in the reformers’ camp. Television was censored, and the radio played the “Declaration of the Soviet Leadership” again and again. Nevertheless, the people were out in the streets. Gathered before the Russian Parliament, the reformist faction’s base. They linked arms to form a human chain, tried to keep the tanks and armored cars from entering. They built barricades—barricades behind barricades, barricades behind barricades behind barricades. Already several thousand demonstrators had converged in the square.
The old man was among them.
All beard and moustache.
He listened to the cheering crowds. The man emerged from the building. The reformists’ standard-bearer, the man who stood with the people, who had come to office just two months earlier as the first president of the Russian Federation…of a new Russia that was no longer Soviet—no longer the homeland. His last name began with the letter E.
In the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds, the E became a Y. In German, it became J. It was a J in Dutch as well. In French it remained an E.
This man could change everything, even his initials.
E climbed up onto a T-72 tank stranded among the crowds. The old man watched him, then glanced down at his watch. It was 1:15. The old man watched as E exchanged a few words with the lieutenant in the tank. He read the two men’s lips. Did you come to kill me? E asked. And the lieutenant replied, No.
E was smiling.
The cheering reached a crescendo. The square shook with the chanting: Ura! Ura! Only the old man spoke a different word. “Awful,” he said, “awful.” With only the slightest of gestures, E urged the crowd to be silent and listen. The people understood his body language and, like well-trained dogs, obeyed. The old man, all beard and moustache, kept muttering to himself. “Awful, awful.” E lambasted the reactionary right. E called upon the people to resist. From up there on the tank—rubbing his boots on the tank. The old man glanced at his watch. Soviet time, the homeland’s time, had stopped. It was 1:21 now, but only in Russia.
The old man kept grumbling under his breath. “Awful, awful, awful—the whole thing.” He could see what was coming. Four months down the road. There would be no Soviet Union. E would have destroyed it. He wouldn’t be picky about how he accomplished this, anything would suit him as long as the Union was destroyed. And it wasn’t only the Union. At the same time, E would have brought something else, something much larger, to an end.
The dogs set fires. The fires were a trap. They forced the police to disperse, fan out to different areas of the city. A second area was burning, then a third, then a fourth. The police converged on each of these locations. They searched for the arsonists but couldn’t find them. The arsonists had vanished into the darkness, leaving no traces. Or perhaps they had left footprints, but no one noticed, because they weren’t human. The pads of dog feet, front and back. No one even saw them. Sometimes the dogs remained on the scene, as if they had nothing to do with what had happened, as if they were someone’s pets. Others left and wandered the streets, pretending to be wild dogs. Acting the part of a dumb animal was all it took—people were deceived. The dogs climbed trees, if there were any nearby, and hid in the foliage. The arsonists’ targets were bases for organized crime, so when the fires started, members of the gangs would come running out, ready to fight. Who did this? Who’s responsible? What group is it? Reports had been flying back and forth since shortly after noon, so they were ready to give chase. They set out to catch whoever it was. And then the dogs, concealed in the leaves of the trees, would leap down on them, and the men would die. By the time the fourth blaze had been brought under control, people were panicking over the sixth. All the fire engines were out on call.
Attacks were launched simultaneously on all the casinos.
The banks were targeted. Sirens wailed endlessly late at night. You could hear them outside, echoing down the streets. Until the police arrived. Or until the mafia who secretly backed the financial institutions got there. Or until dawn broke.
When morning came, the city was enveloped in clouds of black smoke that announced the collapse of order. Arsonists had struck in seventy-two locations; the temperature across the city had risen a full two degrees.
A two-seated motorcycle was driving along the otherwise empty highway. The speedometer remained fixed at forty miles per hour. Two middle-aged women were riding it. The one gripping the handlebars looked just like the one sitting behind her. The two Slavic sisters that Strelka called WO and WT.
A large posse ran behind the motorcycle.
Down the highway. Incredibly fast.
Eight o’clock in the morning. Before people headed to work. The dogs following the motorcycle split into two groups, one going right and the other left. Then they spilt into four, one for each direction.
Also at 8:00 AM: Strelka woke up.
As she stirred, the seven dogs around her lifted their heads. They had been sleeping in the garage of a mafia estate they had taken. The old lady wasn’t there. She was inside, in the kitchen. Making breakfast for Strelka and the seven dogs.
Did you sleep? Strelka asked her dogs.
WE SLEPT, they answered.
DID YOU DREAM? Strelka asked Belka.
NO, Belka replied.
I FEEL LIKE I DID. I WAS X YEARS OLD, I THINK, AND HUMAN. FUNNY TO DREAM THAT, SINCE I’M A DOG.
TIRED, HUH? Belka licked Strelka’s face. His tongue was soft.
WE’LL ERASE HUMAN TIME, Strelka said. ERASE IT, AND MAKE IT…MAKE THIS…
WHAT? Belka asked.
WHAT YEAR WILL IT BE? the other six dogs asked.
“A year for dogs. The year nineteen-ninety…X,” Strelka said. “For starters.”
LET’S DO IT! barked Belka.
He barked. Already Strelka and the six other dogs were on their feet. They sensed something. But it was over. By then a sort of phut had sounded—a gun with a silencer. Outside the garage. A mafia fighter lay on the ground. Moaning. Twice more: phut, phut. And then the old lady appeared in the door to the garage, gun in hand.
“Breakfast is ready,” she said. In Russian.
Strelka’s face remained blank for a moment; then, slowly, slowly, she began to smile.
“You meant ‘breakfast’?” she said in Japanese. “For us.”
1991. Moscow in the autumn. The old man was crazy. He listened intently to the military radio transmissions he intercepted. He played with money. He killed. Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Chechens. He fooled around with mounds of banknotes: rubles, US dollars. He was living in an abandoned building. It stood on the outskirts of Moscow, near a garbage dump. For some reason, people were throwing away huge quantities of meat and vegetables. In secret. To control how much went to market. The dump was a sort of graveyard, suspended between the controlled economy and the free-market economy.
The old man stared down at the dump from a paneless window. Sometimes he’d stare at it all day long. People came to pick over the trash. Housewives plowed through it, collecting cabbages. Ignoring the rotting meat. Meat on the verge of rotting…they grabbed. There were old men too, and people out of work, and alcoholics. They took bars of soap. They took empty bottles, which they exchanged for two or three rubles at the recycle center. They picked up old clothes to sell on the black market. The old man watched a man dig up a tattered red flag someone had thrown away, then throw it away again.
In the eyes of the scavengers that autumn, the old man hovering by the window of the abandoned building looked like a ghost. His beard and moustache had been left to grow until his cheeks, his chin, his upper lip were buried in white. Look at him—he is a ghost, lower than the scavengers themselves. So they ignored him.
Earlier, near the end of summer, someone noticed him.
A burglar had broken into his apartment and tried to steal the only thing he had left in his possession. F*cking stinks in here, the burglar said as he scanned the room. He went over and reached out to it. The globe. A second later he was dead. The old man had killed him. The burglar had brought a knife. The knife was stuck in the burglar’s heart.
“Even the bones?” the old man had asked the corpse. “The skull? You would go that far?”
And the corpse answered, Yes.
So the old man began working for cash.
He killed a punk with a tattoo on his right arm that glorified America. He killed a prostitute with a pro-democratic slogan tattooed on her left arm. People asked him to do it, and he did it. He killed bureaucrats. He killed police officers. Sometimes he charged one hundred rubles, sometimes he charged one hundred dollars. When he returned to his apartment at night, he talked to the globe. I will protect you, he said. Because you’re the perfect match for me, he said, I will protect you. Yes, I am talking to you, the skull of a dog whose destiny it was to die in space, sent up with no hope that she would return, sent up to be killed, to continue wheeling around the earth, in orbit, you, skull of a murdered hero.
Who will protect you? I am the only one. I will protect you.
One day, the old man had a guest. An invited guest. The first guest this apartment had seen. A Slavic man, his head balding. He stroked the globe, humming some sort of melody.
A military march? the old man asked.
The middle-aged man looked up. Ah, the song. I didn’t realize.
How is your mother?
She’s fine. She’s still grateful to you, Director. For those…splendid last days.
I am no longer the Director.
Sorry. We’re so used to calling you that at home. My father, and me.
Both my men.
The only ones in the unit. Father and son, wearing the same insignia.
And how are your sisters?
They’re fine too. They’ve started speaking a bit, two or three words a year.
Your family…did not dissolve.
I beg your pardon?
The Soviet Family Code predicted the dissolution of the family. In 1926.
As far as we’re concerned, you’re our father now.
Even though we are not related?
That’s right.
That is a good family. Except that…I am gone.
You’re gone?
The old mad nodded, then asked one last question.
And how are the dogs?
The dogs are well, the guest answered.
That afternoon, the tension that had been building between the mafia organizations throughout the city finally erupted. According to the radio. The television reported that the gangs had declared war on each other. The authorities issued a statement calling for residents of the city to remain indoors. Newspaper reporters rushed hither and yon. The two news agencies, Interfax News and the Russia News Service, transmitted up-to-the-minute reports to every corner of the Eurasian continent. And to the New World. The extraordinary number of dogs on the streets that day was not considered newsworthy. Reports of abnormal sightings were treated as mere blather, vaguely occult in nature, and ignored. Ordinarily one would have expected the tabloids to jump at this kind of thing, but they didn’t that day, or the next, or later on. This, too, had been carefully factored into the calculations—the kinds of stories the mass media inevitably focus on, their blind spots. Elaborate preparations had been under way for months in this city, laid on the foundations of hundreds of casualties.
The dogs were rebelling, but their rebellion was invisible.
Ordinary citizens noticed the disorder but assumed it was just the usual gang violence, nothing they should be concerned about.
It helped to have the chaos noticed. Because the media fanned the flames. And when the flames had been fanned hard enough, people snapped. Finally, the incident expanded to encompass the entire nation.
Certain functions of the city were paralyzed, but the mass transit system was still in order, more or less. The airports were fine. The trains were running. The planes and trains carried “support troops” to the Russian Far East. Naturally, these newcomers got into arguments with the police at the entrance to the city. Not the dogs, though. By afternoon, the dogs were already lying low.
The dogs were guerrillas. They served no government. But they did have rules. Their fighting techniques were as refined as those of any regular army.
But they were guerrillas. They conducted only surprise attacks.
The dogs seized control of several areas. Areas dotted with mafia facilities, the scenes of deaths as yet unknown to the authorities. A printing house that produced counterfeit dollars. A vast underground factory that manufactured counterfeit brand items. A warehouse holding mountains of drugs (these were real, not counterfeit). Another warehouse full of contraband antiquities. Yet another warehouse holding concentrated uranium and disassembled nuclear warheads destined to be smuggled out of the country. The dogs were waiting. Because sooner or later, someone would come to steal these items back. Or some new players would come to make off with them, make them their own. Or maybe someone would simply come looking.
Pretty much anyone who came along was killed.
Four PM. A middle-aged man was directing the dogs. A balding Slavic man. He gave signals to the dogs, eliminated everyone who approached. The dogs’ unusual fighting techniques had been used before, in the 1980s, somewhere in Afghanistan. They had been used, as well, west of the line that divided Europe, to assassinate a senior NATO officer. The middle-aged man hummed loudly as he led his lightning squad into battle. He had a submachine gun that he used to cover the dogs’ tails, as it were, very precisely. He was the man Strelka called Opera.
At 4:30 PM, still humming, he mowed down four mafia fighters without bothering to send in the dogs. A bit of rapid-fire action was all it took.
The sun had already sunk well below the horizon.
The dogs remained invisible to human eyes.
Other dogs saw them, however. There was barking in the distance. Distant barks answered by distant barks—a conversation. Someone had been cutting the chains on pet dogs’ collars. In the forests outside the city, hunters’ dogs disappeared. Wild dogs ran through the city streets as if gone mad. Slowly, little by little, something was happening. Little by little, one by one, the dogs were being freed. Various mafia were heading by land toward the Russian Far East. To join the conflict—to enlist in a war that was, they still believed, with other mafia. To steal the drugs that had been left behind, to play their part in what they still believed was a tug-of-war among different criminal organizations.
Mafia all across Russia watched the city very closely.
Here and there, gates were opened. Whole trains were bought. They would screech to a halt a mile short of the station, and dozens of men would descend. Counterfeit papers worked their magic in airports. Police squads that had set up inspection stations on the highway saluted as their old buddies, the mafia kingpins, passed in their motorcades: Welcome to the Far East!
Around midnight, the nature of the street fighting changed as a new strategy was introduced. Now the dogs were taking hostages. They no longer lunged at the throats of their targets but brought them back alive, as they had been commanded to do. They brought the hostages back, presented them to the old man.
First one.
Then another.
And another.
All night long.
Barks echoed back and forth across the city.
“I can prepare a table for us to negotiate at,” the old man said.
What is all this? the other man said. What the hell are these dogs?
“You remember 1812?” the old man asked.
Who are you? the other man asked. The head of their tribe?
“The Napoleonic Wars. You remember? You are a Russian, right? Or rather, you are a former Soviet? You must have learned your history. How that stupid French emperor marched into Moscow in 1812 with an enormous army, 110,000-men strong—marched into the capital, which the Russian army had decided, strategically, to give him. You remember what happened then?”
What the hell?
“They let the city be destroyed so that Russia would survive. Moscow’s residents abandoned the city. Napoleon’s army marched into a capital that was all but empty. That night, Moscow burned. It was set on fire. By the Russians. The city burned for a week, two-thirds of it reduced to rubble. And the French…they occupied the rubble and starved. All 110,000 men died of starvation. They ate crows. They ate cats. And still they did not last a month. And what is happening now?”—the old man asked, speaking now to himself, and then answering himself—“This is not 1812. This is not 1991. That is your explanation. You understand? We, the dogs, we condemn Russia! There is your answer.”
The hostage’s face was deathly white.
1991. Moscow in the winter. The temperature was below five degrees Fahrenheit. Sunset was still a ways off. A blizzard. The old man was walking. He saw three hundred people lined up outside the US Embassy. He stared at the snaking line of visa applicants. People standing without talking, exhaling clouds of white breath. Snow dusted their hats, their hair. The line progressed hardly at all.
It was decided. The end of a state so huge it covered one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. Soon, the white-, blue-, and red-striped Russian flag would be hoisted up the pole in front of the Kremlin. Four months had passed since those summer days, and during that time a handful of men who acted in secret had won, and the Soviet Union was finished. Dead.
The old man reached his destination. A closed kiosk on the corner, a large umbrella in a stand in front. A man in an Italian designer suit, his features instantly branding him Caucasian, from the Caucasus, stood waiting. He was young. In his late twenties, perhaps—no older than thirty-one or thirty-two.
“That business this morning,” the young man said. “Truly professional.”
The old man grinned. “Who did you have following me?” he asked. “And why did you want to see me? Was the guy I killed one of your associates?”
“No, no,” the young man said. “He was an enemy. You did me a favor. You know, having a real professional out there…”
“A professional?” the old man said. “You mean me?”
“Yeah. Having a professional like you running around…unchecked… don’t know if I like it. Seems dangerous, to tell the truth.”
“You want to kill me?”
“No, the opposite,” the young man said. “I want to give you what you deserve.”
“You want to give me a job, you mean? In your organization?”
“Exactly. Is that against your policy?”
“No,” the old man said. I have no policy, his eyes said, twinkling.
Twinkling with scorn…for history.
“Well then, shall we discuss terms? Contract period, benefits, compensation…by the way, I was wondering, what should I call you?”
“My name, you mean?”
“Yes, your name.”
“Listen.”
“Hmm?”
Silence. Two seconds later, a bell began chiming. It hung in the belfry of a church that had been destroyed long ago, in pre-perestroika times, whose restoration began in the late 1980s. It rang and rang as the snow skittered lightly in random patterns over Moscow.
“Call me the Archbishop,” the old man said.
One morning, Strelka awoke to a smell in the air, all over the city—it was the scent of the dogs. One morning, Strelka noticed that the temperature in the city had risen. HOT, ISN’T IT? she said to the dogs. ARE WE ACTUALLY KILLING THAT F*ckING COLD RUSSIAN WINTER? she asked Belka. Winterwinterwinterwinterwinter, the f*cking billion-year-long Russian winter is finally ending! she sang to herself, again and again. She lifted her face to the sky, looked once more at the billowing black smoke. She was about to blow up a mafia weapons storehouse she had been guarding until a few minutes ago. She’d watched the old lady making explosives with TNT. You old bag, you’re good, she had said. And then she had listened to the old lady talking to her—You have no way of knowing this, of course, darling, but my husband was a commissioned officer in the special forces, and so was my son, and I myself used to look after the dogs in the breeding facility, and part of my job was to set up explosives in the training grounds. I know what I’m doing. Since the old lady was speaking in Russian, she didn’t understand a word, but she nodded. When someone died, the old lady continued, the Director always took care of the family left behind. Strelka listened, then replied: You’re half dog yourself, aren’t you? Not that I’m one to speak—I’m all dog. She said that in Japanese. Strelka knew that last night, WO and WT had gone around cutting the chains on pet dogs, setting them loose, and agitating the wild dogs. She knew that when WO and WT breathed, their breath smelled like a dog’s breath. I’m a dog, so I can tell. They’re half dogs too.
I’m a dog. They won’t kill me.
With all this street fighting going on, we’re invisible.
Belka protected Strelka. He carried out her commands immediately. He was the older brother, watching over the others—and more. There was also the name. He had become the next Belka, so the other dogs acknowledged him, acknowledged that one day, at some point in the future, he would lead them all. Belka slept, awoke, ran. Belka slept stretched out beside Strelka, awoke, ran. Belka lay low, watching passively as gangsters had shootouts in the streets in the early morning, as black cars with tinted windows were blown into the air with rocket launchers. Belka understood. He knew the humans didn’t realize that the flames of this war they were fighting were being fanned by dog guerrillas. He knew the humans were looking for human enemies, so they wouldn’t suddenly start shooting dogs, or Strelka for that matter, because Strelka was a dog, and because in human eyes she looked like a defenseless human girl. So, Belka said, they’ll let Strelka kill them, they’ll be killed, and even as they die they won’t understand what’s happening, and all along, all throughout the town, the dogs…we dogs…we will multiply. Belka could feel it happening. He didn’t think it, he felt it—all across the Eurasian continent, his brethren, the other dogs…they were setting out, heading for this land, the Russian Far East, a massive migration.
The humans had it all wrong.
The city was full of dogs loitering, hanging around. So they thought.
They allowed the dogs to remain invisible. Even the dogs who had been trained, thoroughly trained, in the deadly art of street fighting.
All morning, the barking continued back and forth in the distance. Echoing. The dogs were on their way. The dogs were coming. The dogs were getting closer. From the taiga beyond the city, from enclaves in the mountains dozens of miles away, from across the Amur River, from the lands where Russian aristocrats were exiled in the nineteenth century. Gradually, little by little, their numbers increased as they converged on the city. In reality, however, three planes contributed the most to the great migration. Three planes owned by private companies that took off one after the other from Moscow, then landed together in the city. Dogs obeyed their own instincts. When a dog barked somewhere far off, they responded. And humans too…mafia members, too, acted in accordance with instincts they could not disobey. When an organization began to lose its grip on an area, competitors moved in to gobble it up. The three planes brought in 220 members of the most powerful criminal organization in Russia: a far-reaching international gang whose operations extended as far as the old Eastern Bloc, come now to overwhelm the city by force of numbers. The organization could display its power by taking control. We don’t need you little guys diddling around—we control the Russian underworld. That was the message. The mass media had been waiting, they were ready to spread the news across the Eurasian continent. They had been primed for two days now.
The timing was perfect.
That afternoon, there were two hours of hell. Hell for the mafia. Then an hour of rest. Rest for the dogs. Intermittent gunshots continued into the evening, but that was all—it was a scene, peaceful in a way, of ordinary mafia warfare. Then, suddenly, the situation changed. First there were Strelka, Belka, and six other dogs; ten minutes later there were Strelka and Belka and five other dogs. Number 114, a bitch, had died. Belka’s sister. So there were Strelka and Belka and five other dogs, and then, two minutes later, there were Strelka and Belka and three other dogs. Number 46 and number 113 had died. Belka’s brother and sister. Strelka barked. The old lady was yelling frantically in Russian. Pull back! Pull back! One minute later Strelka and Belka and three other dogs had become Strelka and Belka and one other dog. Number 44 and number 45 had died, been killed, and Strelka was still barking, and Belka was watching.
The enemy had changed.
The enemy had noticed the canine rebellion.
The dogs in this city were no longer invisible.
All of a sudden, the humans began shooting them.
Belka stared. At the equipment of a group of a dozen men who had joined the fray. They were not mafia. They wore bulletproof helmets that fighter pilots wear and camouflage uniforms, and they had assault rifles with folding stock. They looked nothing like gangsters. Belka stared as number 48 was shot, yelping; Belka heard the yelp, he had to protect Strelka, the dogs are visible, and so Strelka is visible; the enemy will not hesitate to eliminate her. Belka recognized their smell. Not their biological, animal scent, but the smell of their group. Belka felt it. And he was right. The enemy was a special unit belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service, the new Russian secret police, successor to the Soviet KGB. The unit was in charge of domestic security. It was in charge of fighting terrorism. The unit would destroy. The dogs. Their revolution. Officials at the highest levels of the Federal Security Service had realized, during a committee meeting with KGB veterans, that many of the dogs that had turned up in the city were using the same combat techniques “S” had cultivated. The special forces unit was briefed, and arriving on the scene, they killed the dogs very quickly. In fewer than fourteen minutes, Strelka and Belka found themselves alone, with zero other dogs.
At the same moment, in another part of town, a second special forces unit leapt out of an eight-wheel-drive armored truck and started firing at dogs, killing them. None of these extraordinarily talented dogs were allowed to survive. They brought in the truck, jumped out, did their work quickly. Another human ran into the crowd of special forces. Humming as he ran. Opera had bombs strapped to his stomach. He put his finger on the switch.
Singing, now, at the top of his voice, he pressed the switch.
Two hours earlier. The old man said: These are my terms.
An hour earlier.
All right, the old man said, I have just injected two different chemicals into you: the first is a truth serum, and the second—you may be surprised to hear—is a rabies virus. It is a biological weapon, actually, he explained kindly, developed during Soviet times. I have got to say it again and again to make the hypnosis work, so I will keep repeating it as often as you like: now that I have captured you, I have finally got what I was after. Now that you have come to this city with 220 of your soldiers, you have finally given me the card I need to negotiate successfully. You volunteered to take charge of this raid because you wanted to put yourself forward. You wanted to be noticed. What are you, number three? Or is it number four? You are the treasurer, right? Yes, it is very nice to rely on your mafia instincts, the old man said to the hostage. I know, you wanted to do something big, he went on. I have been waiting for you, you know, stupid thugs colluding with the government. Here, look, this is a serum that kills the rabies virus, see? The incubation period for rabies may last thirty days, but when you get sick, you will get sick, there is no escape: you will feel uneasy, then terrified, you will have delusions, hallucinations, and then your whole body will go numb and you will die, the old man told the hostage kindly. All I want are the documents that show how the money moves, that is all I ask for, the old man said. All I want to do is stir up a little scandal in the office of the president. That is all, the old man said.
Ten minutes earlier.
That is all I need, that is enough to topple the eight leading figures in the government. With this information I could do it tomorrow, the old man said. I have prepared channels to pass the information along to the Western media—a little international pressure is all it takes in these cases, am I right? Then the whole system will collapse. This is a real revolution, my friend, not like that stuff they pulled in Moscow in the summer of 1991, that was no revolution. Not bad, this, huh? A revolution carried out entirely by dogs, the old man said. The problem is, dogs cannot disappear in Moscow, it is too urban, too much of a national capital, you know what I mean? But out here in the Far East! A kak zhe? I am sure you have guessed this already, my friend, but I have totally lost my mind.
One minute earlier.
The old man had trapped his prey in a room in a thirteen-story hotel. The commander of a force of 220 mafia fighters in a room on the twelfth floor. The room had windows, but the shades were drawn. You could hear things, though, from outside. Even through the thick soundproofed glass he could hear the roar of military helicopters hovering over the city. He stood up.
The window exploded. A spray of bullets shattered the glass, shredded the curtains. Quick work, the old man thought. They are fast, faster than I thought, if only by a…he thought. But he never finished his thought.
Now.
The old man’s body danced as the bullets pounded it.