Chapter 19
Manhunting
Things had quieted down at Rainbow headquarters in Hereford, England, to the point that both John Clark and Ding Chavez were starting to show the symptoms of restlessness. The training regimen was as demanding as ever, but nobody had ever drowned in sweat, and the targets, paper and electronic were—well, if not as satisfying as a real human miscreant wasn’t the best way to put it, then maybe not as exciting was the right phrase. But the Rainbow team members didn’t say that, even among themselves, for fear of appearing bloodthirsty and unprofessional. To them the studied mental posture was that it was all the same. Practice was bloodless battle, and battle was bloody drill. And certainly by taking their training so seriously, they were still holding a very fine edge. Fine enough to shave the fuzz off a baby’s face.
The team had never gone public, at least not per se. But the word had leaked out somehow. Not in Washington, and not in London, but somewhere on the continent, the word had gotten out that NATO now had a very special and very capable counterterrorist team that had raped and pillaged its way through several high-profile missions, and only once taken any lumps, at the hands of Irish terrorists who had, however, paid a bitter price for their misjudgment. The European papers called them the “Men of Black” for their assault uniforms, and in their relative ignorance the European newsies had somehow made Rainbow even more fierce than reality justified. Enough so that the team had deployed to the Netherlands for a mission seven months before, a few weeks after the first news coverage had broken, and when the bad guys at the grammar school had found there were new folks in the neighborhood, they’d stumbled through a negotiating session with Dr. Paul Bellow and cut a deal before hostilities had to be initiated, which was pleasing for everyone. The idea of a shoot-out in a school full of kids hadn’t even appealed to the Men of Black.
Over the last several months, some members had been hurt or rotated back to their parent services, and new members had replaced them. One of these was Ettore Falcone, a former member of the Carabinieri sent to Hereford as much for his own protection as to assist the NATO team. Falcone had been walking the streets of Palermo in Sicily with his wife and infant son one pleasant spring evening when a shoot-out had erupted right before his eyes. Three criminals were hosing a pedestrian, his wife, and their police bodyguard with submachine guns, and in an instant Falcone had pulled out his Beretta and dropped all three with head shots from ten meters away. His action had been too late to save the victims, but not too late to incur the wrath of a capo mafioso, two of whose sons had been involved in the hit. Falcone had publicly spat upon the threat, but cooler heads had prevailed in Rome—the Italian government did not want a blood feud to erupt between the Mafia and its own federal police agency—and Falcone had been dispatched to Hereford to be the first Italian member of Rainbow. He had quickly proven himself to be the best pistol shot anyone had ever seen.
“Damn,” John Clark breathed, after finishing his fifth string of ten shots. This guy had beaten him again! They called him Big Bird. Ettore—Hector—was about six-three and lean like a basketball player, the wrong size and shape for a counterterror trooper, but, Jesus, could this son of a bitch shoot!
“Grazie, General,” the Italian said, collecting the five-pound note that had accompanied this blood feud.
And John couldn’t even bitch that he’d done it for real, whereas Big Bird had only done it with paper. This spaghetti-eater had dropped three guys armed with SMGs, and done it with his wife and kid next to him. Not just a talented shooter, this guy had two big brass ones dangling between his legs. And his wife, Anna-Maria, was reputed to be a dazzling cook. In any case, Falcone had bested him by one point in a fifty-round shootoff. And John had practiced for a week before this grudge match.
“Ettore, where the hell did you learn to shoot?” RAINBOW Six demanded.
“At the police academy, General Clark. I never fired a gun before that, but I had a good instructor, and I learned well,” the sergeant said, with a friendly smile. He wasn’t the least bit arrogant about his talent, and somehow that just made it worse.
“Yeah, I suppose.” Clark zippered his pistol into the carrying case and walked away from the firing line.
“You, too, sir?” Dave Woods, the rangemaster, said, as Clark made for the door.
“So I’m not the only one?” RAINBOW Six asked.
Woods looked up from his sandwich. “Bloody hell, that lad’s got a fookin’ letter of credit at the Green Dragon from besting me!” he announced. And Sergeant-Major Woods really had taught Wyatt Earp everything he knew. And at the SAS/Rainbow pub he’d probably taught the new boy how to drink English bitter. Beating Falcone would not be easy. There just wasn’t much room to take a guy who often as not shot a “possible,” or perfect score.
“Well, Sergeant-Major, then I guess I’m in good company.” Clark punched him on the shoulder as he headed out the door, shaking his head. Behind him, Falcone was firing another string. He evidently liked being Number One, and practiced hard to stay there. It had been a long time since anyone had bested him on a shooting range. John didn’t like it, but fair was fair, and Falcone had won within the rules.
Was it just one more sign that he was slowing down? He wasn’t running as fast as the younger troops at Rainbow, of course, and that bothered him, too. John Clark wasn’t ready to be old yet. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather either, but he had little choice in that. His daughter and Ding had presented him with a grandson, and he couldn’t exactly ask that they take him back. He was keeping his weight down, though that often required, as it had today, skipping lunch in favor of losing five paper-pounds at the pistol range.
“Well, how did it go, John?” Alistair Stanley asked, as Clark entered the office building.
“The kid’s real good, Al,” John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.
“Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week.”
A grunt. “I guess that makes it unanimous.” John settled in his swivel chair, like the “suit” he’d become. “Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?”
“Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway,” Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.
They want what?" Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.
“They want us to help train some of their people,” Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repetition.
“Jesus, girl, how ecumenical are we supposed to get?” the DCI demanded.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch thinks we owe him one. And you know ...”
He had to nod at that. “Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though.”
“It ought to give Jack a chuckle,” the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.
Shit," Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. ”Oh, excuse me, Ellen."
She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Got one I can ... ?”
Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.
“Well, ain’t this something?”
“You know this man, don’t you?” Mrs. Sumter asked.
“Golovko? Yeah.” Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC-137 thundered down the runway at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time, it hadn’t seemed all that funny. “Oh, yeah, Sergey and I are old friends.”
As a Presidential secretary, Ellen Sumter was cleared for just about everything, even the fact that President Ryan bummed the occasional smoke, but there were some things she didn’t and would never know. She was smart enough to have curiosity, but also smart enough not to ask.
“If you say so, Mr. President.”
“Thanks, Ellen.” Ryan sat back down in his chair and took a long puff on the slender cigarette. Why was it that stress of any sort made him gravitate back to these damned things that made him cough? The good news was that they also made him dizzy. So, that meant he wasn’t a smoker, not really, POTUS told himself. He read over the fax again. It had two pages. One was the original fax from Sergey Nikolay’ch to Langley—unsurprisingly, he had Mary Pat’s direct fax line, and wanted to show off that fact—and the second was the recommendation from Edward Foley, his CIA director.
For all the official baggage, it was pretty simple stuff. Golovko didn’t even have to explain why America had to accede to his request. The Foleys and Jack Ryan would know that KGB had assisted the CIA and the American government in two very sensitive and important missions, and the fact that both of them had also served Russian interests was beside the point. Thus Ryan had no alternative. He lifted the phone and punched a speed-dial button.
“Foley,” the male voice at the other end said.
“Ryan,” Jack said in turn. He then heard the guy at the other end sit up straighter in his chair. “Got the fax.”
“And?” the DCI asked.
“And what the hell else can we do?”
“I agree.” Foley could have said that he personally liked Sergey Golovko. Ryan did, too, as he knew. But this wasn’t about like or don’t-like. They were making government policy here, and that was bigger than personal factors. Russia had helped the United States of America, and now Russia was asking the United States of America for help in return. In the regular intercourse among nations, such requests, if they had precedents, had to be granted. The principle was the same as lending your neighbor a rake after he had lent you a hose the previous day, just that at this level, people occasionally got killed from such favors. “You handle it or do I?”
“The request came to Langley. You do the reply. Find out what the parameters are. We don’t want to compromise Rainbow, do we?”
“No, Jack, but there’s not much chance of that. Europe’s quieted down quite a bit. The Rainbow troopers are mainly exercising and punching holes in paper. That news story that ran—well, we might actually want to thank the putz who broke it.” The DCI rarely said anything favorable about the press. And in this case some government puke had talked far too much about something he knew, but the net effect of the story had had the desired effect, even though the press account had been replete with errors, which was hardly surprising. But some of the errors had made Rainbow appear quite superhuman, which appealed to their egos and gave their potential enemies pause. And so, terrorism in Europe had slowed down to a crawl after its brief (and somewhat artificial, they knew now) rebirth. The Men of Black were just too scary to mess with. Muggers, after all, went after the little old ladies who’d just cashed their Social Security checks, not the armed cop on the corner. In this, criminals were just being rational. A little old lady can’t resist a mugger very effectively, but a cop carries a gun.
“I expect our Russian friends will keep a lid on it.”
“I think we can depend on that, Jack,” Ed Foley agreed.
“Any reason not to do it?”
Ryan could hear the DCI shift in his seat. “I never have been keen on giving ’methods’ away to anybody, but this isn’t an intelligence operation per se, and most of it they could get from reading the right books. So, I guess we can allow it.”
“Approved,” the President said.
Ryan imagined he could see the nod at the other end. “Okay, the reply will go out today.”
With a copy to Hereford, of course. It arrived on John’s desk before closing time. He summoned Al Stanley and handed it to him.
“I suppose we’re becoming famous, John.”
“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?” Clark asked distastefully. Both were former clandestine operators, and if there had been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.
“I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?”
“Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We’ve both met Sergey Nikolay’ch. At least this way he doesn’t see all that many new faces.”
“Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate.”
“The language school at Monterey is pretty good,” John said, with a nod.
“How long do you expect to be gone?”
Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. “Oh, not more than ... three weeks,” he said aloud. “Their Spetsnaz people aren’t bad. We’ll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can’t we?”
Stanley didn’t have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they’d have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.
“I suppose we’ll have to, John,” Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.
Clark lifted his phone and hit the button for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. “Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you.”
“His Russian is also good, as I recall.”
“We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”
“And yours?”
“Leningrad—well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”
Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it’s been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”
Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”
“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”
“Come in and take a seat, my boy.”
Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark’s desk and took the offered sheets of paper.
“Moscow?” he asked.
“Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”
“Super,” Chavez observed. “Well, it’s been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka’s still good.”
“It’s one of the things they do well,” John agreed.
“And they want us to teach them to do some other things?”
“Looks that way.”
“Take the wives with us?”
“No.” Clark shook his head. “This one’s all business.”
“When?”
“Have to work that out. Probably a week or so.”
“Fair enough.”
“How’s the little guy?”
A grin. “Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he’ll start walking in a few days.”
“Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up,” Clark warned.
“Hey, Pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. Damned sight better than I can say for myself, y’know?” Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.
Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.
“The whole team?” Chavez asked.
“Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD,” RAINBOW SIX added.
“Did he clean your clock today, too?” Ding asked.
“Next time I shoot against that son of a bitch, I want it right after the morning run, when he’s a little shaky,” Clark said crossly. He just didn’t like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his identity as shooting a handgun.
“Mr. C, Ettore just isn’t human. With the MP, he’s good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he’s like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays ’em dead.”
“I didn’t believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon.”
“I hear you, John,” Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law’s waist. “Hey, I’m pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my ass away by three whole points.”
“The bastard took me by one,” John told his Team-2 commander. “First man-on-man match I’ve lost since Third SOG.” And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He’d lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.
Is that him?" Provalov asked.
“We don’t have a photograph,” his sergeant reminded him. “But he fits the general description.” And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.
They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.
The guy looked about right. He’d come off the building’s elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the off-chance that this Koniev/Suvorov’s neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.
The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-class, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another identity? Provalov was sure he’d have more of those, and they’d all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.
The sergeant in the driver’s seat started up the van’s motor and got on the radio. Two other police cars were in the immediate vicinity, both manned by pairs of experienced investigators.
“Our friend is moving. The blue rental car,” Provalov said over the radio. Both of his cars radioed acknowledgments.
The rental car was a Fiat—a real one made in Turin rather than the Russian copy made at Togliattistad, one of the few special economic projects of the Soviet Union that had actually worked, after a fashion. Had it been selected for its agility, Provalov wondered, or just because it was a cheap car to rent? There was no knowing that right now. Koniev/Suvorov pulled out, and the first tail car formed up with him, half a block behind, while the second was half a block in front, because even a KGB-trained intelligence officer rarely looked for a tail infront of himself. A little more time and they might have placed a tracking device on the Fiat, but they hadn’t had it, nor the darkness required. If he returned to his apartment, they’d do it late tonight, say about four in the morning. A radio beeper with a magnet to hold it onto the inside of the rear bumper; its antenna would hang down like a mouse’s tail, virtually invisible. Some of the available technology Provalov was using had originally been used to track suspected foreign spies around Moscow, and that meant it was pretty good, at least by Russian standards.
Following the car was easier than he’d expected. Three trail cars helped. Spotting a single-car tail was not overly demanding. Two could also be identified, since the same two would switch off every few minutes. But three shadow cars broke up the pattern nicely, and, KGB-trained or not, Koniev/Suvorov was not superhuman. His real defense lay in concealing his identity, and cracking that had been a combination of good investigation and luck—but cops knew about luck. KGB, on the other hand, didn’t. In their mania for organization, their training program had left it out, perhaps because trusting to luck was a weakness that could lead to disaster in the field. That told Provalov that Koniev/Suvorov hadn’t spent that much time in field operations. In the real world of working the street, you learned such things in a hurry.
The tailing was conducted at extreme range, over a block, and the city blocks were large ones here. The van had been specially equipped for it. The license-plate holders were triangular in cross-section, and at the flip of a switch one could switch from among three separate pairs of tags. The lights on the front of the vehicle were paired as well, and so one could change the light pattern, which was what a skilled adversary would look for at night. Switch them once or twice when out of sight of his rearview mirror, and he’d have to be a genius to catch on. The most difficult job went with the car doing the front-tail, since it was hard to read Koniev/Suvorov’s mind, and when he made an unexpected turn, the lead car then had to scurry about under the guidance of the trailing shadow cars to regain its leading position. All of the militiamen on this detail, however, were experienced homicide investigators who’d learned how to track the most dangerous game on the planet: human beings who’d displayed the willingness to take another life. Even the stupid murderers could have animal cunning, and they learned a lot about police operations just from watching television. That made some of his investigations more difficult than they ought to have been, but in a case like this, the additional difficulty had served to train his men more thoroughly than any academy training would have done.
“Turning right,” his driver said into his radio. “Van takes the lead.” The leading trail car would proceed to the next right turn, make it, and then race to resume its leading position. The trailing car would drop behind the van, falling off the table for a few minutes before resuming its position. The trail car was a Fiat-clone from Togliattistad, by far the most common private-passenger auto in Russia, and therefore fairly anonymous, with its dirty off-white paint job.
“If that’s his only attempt at throwing us off, he’s very confident of himself.”
“True,” Provalov agreed. “Let’s see what else he does.”
The “what else” took place four minutes later. The Fiat took another right turn, this one not onto a cross-street, but into the underpass of another apartment building, one that straddled an entire block. Fortunately, the lead trail car was already on the far side of the building, trying to catch up with the Fiat, and had the good fortune to see Koniev/Suvorov appear thirty meters in front.
“We have him,” the radio crackled. “We’ll back off somewhat.”
“Go!” Provalov told his driver, who accelerated the van to the next corner. Along the way, he toggled the switch to flip the license plates and change the headlight pattern, converting the van into what at night would seem a new vehicle entirely.
“He is confident,” Provalov observed five minutes later. The van was now in close-trail, with the lead trail car behind the van, and the other surveillance vehicle close behind that one. Wherever he was going, they were on him. He’d run his evasion maneuver, and a clever one it had been, but only one. Perhaps he thought that one such SDR—surveillance-detection run—was enough, that if he were being trailed it would only be a single vehicle, and so he’d run that underpass, eyes on the rearview mirror, and spotted nothing. Very good, the militia lieutenant thought. It was a pity he didn’t have his American FBI friend along. The FBI could scarcely have done this better, even with its vast resources. It didn’t hurt that his men knew the streets of Moscow and its suburbs as well as any taxi driver.
“He’s getting dinner and a drink somewhere,” Provalov’s driver observed. “He’ll pull over in the next kilometer.”
“We shall see,” the lieutenant said, thinking his driver right. This area had ten or eleven upscale eateries. Which would his quarry choose ... ?
It turned out to be the Prince Michael of Kiev, a Ukrainian establishment specializing in chicken and fish, known also for its fine bar. Koniev/Suvorov pulled over and allowed the restaurant’s valet to park his vehicle, then walked in.
“Who’s the best dressed among us?” Provalov asked over the radio.
“You are, Comrade Lieutenant.” His other two teams were attired as working-class people, and that wouldn’t fly here. Half of the Prince Michael of Kiev’s clientele were foreigners, and you had to dress well around such people—the restaurant saw to that. Provalov jumped out half a block away and walked briskly to the canopied entrance. The doorman admitted him after a look—in the new Russia, clothing made the man more than in most European nations. He could have flashed his police ID, but that might not be a good move. Koniev/Suvorov might well have some of the restaurant staff reporting to him. That was when he had a flash of imagination. Provalov immediately entered the men’s lavatory and pulled out his cellular phone.
“Hello?” a familiar voice said on picking up the receiver.
“Mishka?”
“Oleg?” Reilly asked. “What can I do for you?”
“Do you know a restaurant called the Prince Michael of Kiev?”
“Yeah, sure. Why?”
“I need your help. How quickly can you get here?” Provalov asked, knowing that Reilly lived only two kilometers away.
“Ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Quickly, then. I’ll be at the bar. Dress presentably,” the militiaman added.
“Right,” Reilly agreed, wondering how he’d explain it to his wife, and wondering why he’d had his quiet evening in front of the TV interrupted.
Provalov headed back to the bar, ordered a pepper vodka, and lit a cigarette. His quarry was seven seats away, also having a solitary drink, perhaps waiting for his table to become available. The restaurant was full. A string quartet was playing some Rimsky-Korsakov on the far side of the dining room. The restaurant was far above anything Provalov could afford as a regular part of his life. So, Koniev/Suvorov was well set financially. That was no particular surprise. A lot of ex-KGB officers were doing very well indeed in the economic system of the new Russia. They had worldly ways and knowledge that few of their fellow citizens could match. In a society known for its burgeoning corruption, they had a corner on the market, and a network of fellow-travelers to call upon, with whom they could, for various considerations, share their gains, ill-gotten or not.
Provalov had finished his first drink, and had motioned to the bartender for another when Reilly appeared.
“Oleg Gregoriyevich,” the American said in greeting. He was no fool, the Russian militia lieutenant realized. The American’s Russian was manifestly American and over-loud, a fine backward stealth for this environment. He was well dressed also, proclaiming his foreign origin to all who saw him.
“Mishka!” Provalov said in response, taking the American’s hand warmly and waving to the bartender.
“Okay, who we looking for?” the FBI agent asked more quietly.
“The gray suit, seven seats to my left.”
“Got him,” Reilly said at once. “Who is he?”
“He is currently under the name Koniev, Ivan Yurievich. In fact we believe him to be Suvorov, Klementi Ivan’ch.”
“Aha,” Reilly observed. “What else can you tell me?”
“We trailed him here. He used a simple but effective evasion method, but we have three cars tracking him, and we picked him right back up.”
“Good one, Oleg,” the FBI agent said. Inadequately trained and poorly equipped or not, Provalov was a no-shit copper. In the Bureau, he’d be at least a supervisory special agent. Oleg had fine cop instincts. Tracking a KGB type around Moscow was no trivial exercise, like following a paranoid button-man in Queens. Reilly sipped his pepper vodka and turned sideways in his seat. On the far side of the subject was a dark-haired beauty wearing a slinky black dress. She looked like another of those expensive hookers to Reilly, and her shingle was out. Her dark eyes were surveying the room as thoroughly as his. The difference was that Reilly was a guy, and looking at a pretty girl—or seeming to—was not the least bit unusual. In fact, his eyes were locked not on the woman, but the man. Fifty-ish, well turned out, nondescript in overall appearance, just as a spy was supposed to be, looked to be waiting for a table, nursing his drink and looking studiously in the bar’s mirror, which was a fine way to see if he were being watched. The American and his Russian friend he dismissed, of course. What interest could an American businessman have in him, after all? And besides, the American was eyeing the whore to his left. For that reason, the subject’s eyes did not linger on the men to his right, either directly or in the mirror. Oleg was smart, Reilly thought, using him as camouflage for his discreet surveillance.
“Anything else turn lately?” the FBI agent asked. Provalov filled in what he’d learned about the hooker and what had happened the night before the murders. “Damn, that is swashbuckling. But you still don’t know who the target was, do you?”
“No,” Provalov admitted, with a sip of his second drink. He’d have to go easy on the alcohol, he knew, lest he make a mistake. His quarry was too slick and dangerous to take any sort of risk at all. He could always bring the guy in for questioning, but he knew that would be a fruitless exercise. Criminals like this one had to be handled as gently as a cabinet minister. Provalov allowed his eyes to look into the mirror, where he got a good look at the profile of a probable multiple murderer. Why was it that there was no black halo around such people? Why did they look normal?
“Anything else we know about the mutt?”
The Russian had come to like that American term. He shook his head. “No, Mishka. We haven’t checked with SVR yet.”
“Worried that he might have a source inside the building?” the American asked. Oleg nodded.
“That is a consideration.” And an obvious one. The fraternity of former KGB officers was probably a tight one. There might well be someone inside the old headquarters building, say someone in personnel records, who’d let people know if the police showed interest in any particular file.
“Damn,” the American noted, thinking, You son of a bitch, f*cking the guy’s hookers before you waste him. There was a disagreeable coldness to it, like something from a Mafia movie. But in real life, La Cosa Nostra members didn’t have the stones for such a thing. Formidable as they might be, Mafia button-men didn’t have the training of a professional intelligence officer, and were tabby cats next to panthers in this particular jungle. Further scrutiny of the subject. The girl beyond him was a distraction, but not that much.
“Oleg?”
“Yes, Mikhail?”
“He’s looking at somebody over by the musicians. His eyes keep coming back to the same spot. He isn’t scanning the room like he was at first.” The subject did check out everyone who came into the restaurant, but his eyes kept coming back to one part of the mirror, and he’d probably determined that nobody in the place was a danger to him. Oops. Well, Reilly thought, even training has its limitations, and sooner or later your own expertise could work against you. You fell into patterns, and you made assumptions that could get you caught. In this case, Suvorov assumed that no American could be watching him. After all, he’d done nothing to any Americans in Moscow, and maybe not in his entire career, and he was on friendly, not foreign ground, and he’d dusted off his tail on the way over in the way he always did, looking for a single tail car. Well, the smart ones knew their limitations. How did it go? The difference between genius and stupidity was that genius knew that it had limits. This Suvorov guy thought himself a genius ... but whom was he looking at? Reilly turned a little more on his bar stool and scanned that part of the room.
“What do you see, Mishka?”
“A lot of people, Oleg Gregoriyevich, mainly Russians, some foreigners, all well-dressed. Some Chinese, look like two diplomats dining with two Russians—they look like official types. Looks cordial enough,” Reilly thought. He’d eaten here with his wife three or four times. The food was pretty good, especially the fish. And they had a good source of caviar at the Prince Michael of Kiev, which was one of the best things you could get over here. His wife loved it, and would have to learn that getting it at home would be a lot more expensive than it was here.... Reilly’d done discreet surveillance for so many years that he had trained himself to be invisible. He could fit in just about anyplace but Harlem, and the Bureau had black agents to handle that.
Sure as hell, that Suvorov guy was looking in the same place. Casually, perhaps, and using the bar’s mirror to do it. He even sat so that his eyes naturally looked at the same place as he sat on his bar stool. But people like this subject didn’t do anything by accident or coincidence. They were trained to think through everything, even taking a leak ... it was remarkable, then, that he’d been turned so stupidly. By a hooker who’d gone through his things while he was sleeping off an orgasm. Well, some men, no matter how smart, thought with their dicks.... Reilly turned again.... one of the Chinese men at the distant table excused himself and stood, heading for the men’s room. Reilly thought to do the same at once, but ... no. If it were prearranged, such a thing could spook it ... Patience, Mishka, he told himself, turning back to look at the principal subject. Koniev/Suvorov set down his drink and stood.
“Oleg. I want you to point me toward the men’s room,” the FBI agent said. “In fifteen seconds.”
Provalov counted out the time, then extended his arm toward the main entrance. Reilly patted him on the shoulder and headed that way.
The Prince Michael of Kiev restaurant was nice, but it didn’t have a bathroom attendant, as many European places did, perhaps because Americans were uneasy with the custom, or maybe because the management thought it an unnecessary expense. Reilly entered and saw three urinals, two of them being used. He unzipped and urinated, then rezipped and turned to wash his hands, looking down as he did so ... and just out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other two men share a sideways look. The Russian was taller. The men’s room had the sort of pull-down roller towel that America had largely done away with. Reilly pulled it down and dried his hands, unable to wait too much longer. Heading toward the door, he reached in his pocket and pulled his car keys part of the way out. These he dropped just as he pulled the door open, with a muttered, “Damn,” as he bent down to pick them up, shielded from their view by the steel divider. Reilly picked them off the tile floor and stood back up.
Then he saw it. It was well done. They could have been more patient, but they probably both discounted the importance of the American, and both were trained professionals. They scarcely touched each other, and what touching and bumping there was happened below the waist and out of sight to the casual observer. Reilly wasn’t a casual observer, however, and even out of the corner of his eyes, it was obvious to the initiated. It was a classic brush-pass, so well done that even Reilly’s experience couldn’t determine who had passed what to whom. The FBI agent continued out, heading back to his seat at the bar, where he waved to the bar-keep for the drink he figured he’d just earned.
“Yes?”
“You want to identify that Chinaman. He and our friend traded something in the shitter. Brush-pass, and nicely done,” Reilly said, with a smile and a gesture at the brunette down the bar. Good enough, in fact, that had Reilly been forced to sit in a witness stand and describe it to a jury, a week-old law-school graduate could make him admit that he hadn’t actually seen anything at all. But that told him much. That degree of skill was either the result of a totally chance encounter between two entirely innocent people—the purest of coincidences—or it had been the effort of two trained intelligence officers applying their craft at a perfect place in a perfect way. Provalov was turned the right way to see the two individuals leave the men’s room. They didn’t even notice each other, or didn’t appear to acknowledge the presence of the other any more than they would have greeted a stray dog—exactly as two unrelated people would act after a happenstance encounter with a total stranger in any men’s room anywhere. But this time as Koniev/Suvorov resumed his seat at the bar, he tended to his drink and didn’t have his eyes interrogate the mirror regularly. In fact, he turned and greeted the girl to his left, then waved for the bartender to get her another drink, which she accepted with a warm, commercial smile. Her face proclaimed the fact that she’d found her trick for the night. The girl could act, Reilly thought.
“Well, our friend’s going to get laid tonight,” he told his Russian colleague.
“She is pretty,” Provalov agreed. “Twenty-three, you think?”
“Thereabouts, maybe a little younger. Nice hooters.”
“Hooters?” the Russian asked.
“Tits, Oleg, tits,” the FBI agent clarified. “That Chinaman’s a spook. See any coverage on him around?”
“No one I know,” the lieutenant replied. “Perhaps he is not known to be an intelligence officer.”
“Yeah, sure, your counterintelligence people have all retired to Sochi, right? Hell, guy, they trail me every so often.”
“That means I am one of your agents, then?” Provalov asked.
A chuckle. “Let me know if you want to defect, Oleg Gregoriyevich.”
“The Chinese in the light blue suit?”
“That’s the one. Short, about five-four, one fifty-five, pudgy, short hair, about forty-five or so.”
Provalov translated that to about 163 centimeters and seventy kilos, and made a mental note as he turned to look at the face, about thirty meters away. He looked entirely ordinary, as most spies did. With that done, he headed back to the men’s room to make a phone call to his agents outside.
And that pretty much ended the evening. Koniev/Suvorov left the restaurant about twenty minutes later with the girl on his arm, and drove straight back to his apartment. One of the men who’d stayed behind walked with the Chinese to his car, which had diplomatic plates. Notes were written down, and the cops all headed home after an overtime day, wondering what they’d turned up and how important it might be.