“Yes, he will do it,” Popov said. They were in a corner booth, and the background music made it a secure place to talk. “He has not confirmed it. but he will.”
“Who is he?” Henriksen asked.
“Sean Grady. Do you know the name?”
“PIRA . . . worked in Londonderry mainly, didn’t he?”
“For the most part, yes. He captured three SAS people and . . . disposed of them. Two separate incidents. The SAS then targeted him on three separate missions. Once they came very close to getting him, and they eliminated ten or so of his closest associates. He then cleaned out some suspected informers in his unit. He’s quite ruthless,’ Popov assured his associates.
“That’s true,” Henriksen assured Brightling. “I remember reading what he did to the SAS guys he caught. Wasn’t very pretty. Grady’s a nasty little fucker. Does he have enough people to make this attempt?”
“I think yes,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied. “And he held us up for money. I offered five, and he demanded six, plus drugs.”
“Drugs?” Henriksen was surprised.
“Wait, I thought the IRA didn’t approve of drug trafficking,” Brightling objected.
“We live in a practical world. The IRA worked for years to eliminate drug dealers throughout Ireland mainly kneecappings, to make the action very public. That kits a psychological and political move on his part. Perhaps now he entertains the idea as a continuing source of income for his operations,” Dmitriy explained. The morality of the issue didn’t seem very important to anyone at the table.
“Yeah, well, I suppose we can entertain that request.” Brightling said, with a small measure of distaste. “Kneecappings? What does that mean?”
“You take a pistol,” Bill explained, “and place it behind the knee, then you fire forward. It blows the kneecap to smithereens. Painful, and permanently crippling. It’s how they used to deal with informers and other people they didn’t like. The Protestant terrorists preferred a Black and Decker drill for the same purpose. It puts the word out on the street that you are not to be messed with,” Henriksen concluded.
“Ouch,” the physician in Brightling commented.
“That’s why they’re called terrorists,” Henriksen pointed out. “These days, they just kill them. Grady has a reputation for ruthlessness, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does,” Popov confirmed. “There’s no doubt that he will undertake this mission. He likes the concept and your suggestion for how it should be set up, Bill. There is also his ego, which is large.” Popov took a sip of his wine. “He wants to take the lead in the IRA politically, and that will mean doing something dramatic.”
“That’s the Irish for you-the land of sad loves and happy wars.”
“Will he succeed?” Brightling asked.
“The concept is a clever one. But remember that to him success means elimination of the primary targets, the two women, and then a few of the reaction team of soldiers. After that, he will doubtless flee the area and try to return to Ireland and safety. Just surviving an operation of this type is successful enough for his political purposes. To eight a full military action would be madness for him, and Grady is not a madman,” Dmitriy told them, not really sure he believed it. Weren’t all revolutionaries mad? It was difficult to understand people who let visions take control of their lives. Those who’d succeeded, Lenin Mao, and Gandhi in this century, were the ones who’d used their visions effectively, of course-but even then, which of the three had really succeeded? The Soviet Union had fallen, the People’s Republic of China would eventually succumb to the same political-economic realities that had doomed the USSR, and India was still an economic disaster that somehow managed to hover in stagnation. By that model, Ireland was more surely doomed by the possible success of the IRA than it was by its economic marriage to Britain. At least Cuba had the tropical sun to keep it warm. To survive, with no natural resources to speak of, Ireland needed a close economic tie to someone, and the closest was the U.K. But that was off the dinner topic.
“So, you expect him to try a hit-and-run,” Bill asked.
Dmitriy nodded. “Nothing else makes tactical sense. He hopes to live long enough to utilize the money we’ve offered him. Assuming you will approve the increase he requires.”
“What’s another million or so?” Henriksen asked, with a suppressed grin.
So both of them regarded such a large sum as trivial. Popov saw, and again he was struck in the face with the fact that they were planning something monstrous-but what?
“How do they want it? Cash?” Brightling asked.
“No, I told them it would be deposited in a numbered Swiss account. I can arrange that.”
“I have enough already laundered,” Bill told his employer. “We could set that up tomorrow if you want.”
“And that means I fly to Switzerland again,” Dmitriy observed sourly.
“Getting tired of flying?”
“I have traveled a great deal, Dr. Brightling.” Popov sighed openly. He was jet-lagged, and it showed for once.
“John.”
“John.” Popov nodded, seeing some actual affection in his boss for the first time, somewhat to his surprise.
“I understand, Dmitriy,” Henriksen said. “The Australia trip was a pain in the ass for me.”
“What was it like to grow up in Russia?” Brightling asked.
“Harder than America. There was more violence in the schools. No serious crime,” Popov explained. “But lots of tights between the boys, for example. Dominance fights, as boys will. The authorities usually looked the other way.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Moscow. My father was also an officer in State Security. I was educated in Moscow State University.”
“What major?”
“Language and economics.” The former had proven very useful. The latter had been totally valueless, since the Marxist idea of economics had not exactly proven to be an effective one.
“Ever get out of the city? You know, like Boy Scouts do here, that sort of stuff?”
Popov smiled, wondering where this was going, and why they were asking it. But he played along. “One of my happiest memories of childhood. I was in the Young Pioneers. We traveled out to a state farm and worked there for a month, helping with the harvest, living with nature, as you Americans say.” And then, at age fourteen, he’d met his first love, Yelena Ivanovna. He wondered where she was now. He succumbed to a brief attack of nostalgia. as he remembered her feel in the darkness, his first conquest…
Brightling noted the distant smile and took it for what he wanted it to be. “You liked that, eh?”
Clearly they didn’t want to hear that story. “Oh, yes. I have often wondered what it was like to live out there in a place like that, the sun on your back all the time, working in the soil. My father and I used to walk into the woods, hunting for mushrooms that was a common pastime for Soviet citizens in the sixties, walking in the woods.” Unlike most Russians, they’d driven there in his father’s official car, but as a boy he’d liked the woods as a place of adventure and romanticism, as all boys do, and enjoyed the time with his father as well.
“Any game in the woods there?” Bill Henriksen asked.
“One would see birds, of course, many kinds, and occasionally elk-you call them moose here, I think-but rarely. State hunters were always killing them. Wolves are their main target. They hunt them from helicopters. We Russians do not like wolves as you do here in America. Too many folk tales of rabid ones killing people, you see. Mostly lies, I expect.”
Brightling nodded. “Same thing here. Wolves are just big wild dogs, you can train them as pets if you want. Some people do that.”
“Wolves are cool,” Bill added. He’d often thought about making one a pet, but you needed a lot of land for that. Maybe when the Project was fulfilled.
What the hell was this all about? Dmitriy wondered, still playing along. “I always wanted to see a bear, but there are none of them left in the Moscow area. I saw them only at the zoo. I loved bears,” he added, lying. They’d always frightened the hell out of him. You heard scores of bear stories as a child in Russia, few of them friendly, though not as anti nature as the wolf stories. Large dogs? Wolves killed people in the steppes. The farmer’s and peasants hated the damned things and welcomed lie state hunters with their helicopters and machine guns, the better to hunt them down and slaughter them.
“Well, John and I are Nature Lovers,” Bill explained, waving to the waiter for another bottle of wine. “Always have been. All the way back to Boy Scouts – like your Young Pioneers, I suppose.”
“The state was not kind to nature in the Soviet Union. Much worse than the problems you’ve had here in America. Americans have come to Russia to survey the damage and suggest ways to fix the problems of pollution and such.” Especially in the Caspian Sea, where pollution had killed off most of the sturgeon, and with it the fish eggs known as caviar, which had for so long been a prime means of earning foreign currency for the USSR.