“There,” one of the FSS men observed. Kong’s right hand made the emplacement. Three minutes later, he folded his paper and strolled off, in the same direction he’d been heading. The FSS detail let him go a long way before they moved in.
Again it was done from a van, and again the locksmith was inside and waiting with the custom-made key. Also in the van was a high-end American laptop computer with the onetime cipher pad preprogrammed in, an exact copy of Suvorov/Koniev’s desktop machine in his upscale flat on the ring road. And so, the senior FSS officer on the case thought, their quarry was like a tiger prowling through the jungle with ten unknown rifles aimed at it, powerful, and dangerous, perhaps, but utterly doomed.
The transfer case was delivered. The locksmith popped it open. The contents were unfolded and photocopied, then replaced, and the case was resealed and returned to its spot on the metal plate under the bench. Already a typist was keying in the random letters of the message, and inside of four minutes, the clear-text came up.
“Yob tvoyu mat!”the senior officer observed. “They want him to kill President Grushavoy!”
“What is that?” a junior officer asked. The case-leader just handed over the laptop computer and let him read the screen.
“This is an act of war,” the major breathed. The colonel nodded.
“It is that, Gregoriy.” And the van pulled away. He had to report this, and do it immediately.
Lieutenant Provalov was home when the call came. He grumbled the usual amount as he re-dressed and headed to FSS headquarters. He hadn’t grown to love the Federal Security Service, but he had come to respect it. With such resources, he thought, he could end crime in Moscow entirely, but they didn’t share resources, and they retained the above-the-law arrogance their antecedent agency had once displayed. Perhaps it was necessary. The things they investigated were no less serious than murder, except in scale. Traitors killed not individuals, but entire regions. Treason was a crime that had been taken seriously in his country for centuries, and one that his nation’s long-standing institutional paranoia had always feared as much as it had hated.
They were burning more than the usual amount of midnight oil here, Provalov saw. Yefremov was standing in his office, reading a piece of paper with the sort of blank look on his face that frequently denoted something monstrous.
“Good evening, Pavel Georgiyevich.”
“Lieutenant Provalov. Here.” Yefremov handed over the paper. “Our subject grows ambitious. Or at least his controllers do.”
The militia lieutenant took the page and read it quickly, then returned to the top to give it a slower redigestion.
“When did this happen?”
“Less than an hour ago. What observations do you make?”
“We should arrest him at once!” the cop said predictably.
“I thought you’d say that. But instead we will wait and see whom he contacts. Then we will snatch him up. But first, I want to see the people he notifies.”
“What if he does it from a cell phone or a pay phone?”
“Then we will have the telephone company identify them for us. But I want to see if he has a contact within an important government office. Suvorov had many colleagues where he was in KGB. I want to know which of them have turned mercenary, so that we can root all of them out. The attack on Sergey Nikolay’ch displayed a frightening capability. I want to put an end to it, to scoop that all up, and send them all to a labor camp of strict regime.” The Russian penal system had three levels of camps. Those of “mild” regime were unpleasant. The “medium” ones were places to avoid. But those of “strict” regime were hell on earth. They were particularly useful for getting the recalcitrant to speak of things they preferred to keep quiet about in ordinary circumstances. Yefremov had the ability to control which scale of punishment a man earned. Suvorov already merited death, in Russia, usually delivered by a bullet. . . but there were worse things than death.
“The president’s security detail has been warned?”
The FSS officer nodded. “Yes, though that was a tender one. How can we be sure that one of them is not compromised? That nearly happened to the American president last year, you may have heard, and it is a possibility we have to consider. They are all being watched. But Suvorov had few contacts with the Eighth Directorate when he was KGB, and none of the people he knew ever switched over to there.”
“You are sure of that?”
“We finished the cross-check three days ago. We’ve been busy checking records. We even have a list of people Suvorov might call. Sixteen of them, in fact. All of their phones have been tapped, and all are being watched.” But even the FSS didn’t have the manpower to put full surveillance details on those potential suspects. This had become the biggest case in the history of the FSS, and few of the KGB’s investigations had used up this much manpower, even back to Oleg Penkovskiy.
“What about the names Amalrik and Zimyanin?”
“Zimyanin came up in our check, but not the other. Suvorov didn’t know him, but Zimyanin did—they were comrades in Afghanistan— and presumably recruited the other himself. Of the sixteen others, seven are prime suspects, all Spetsnaz, three officers and four non-coms, all of them people who’ve put their talent and training on the open market. Two are in St. Petersburg, and might have been implicated in the elimination of Amalrik and Zimyanin. It would appear that their comradeship was lacking,” Yefremov observed dryly. “So, Provalov, do you have anything to add?”
“No, it would seem that you have covered all likely investigative avenues.”
“Thank you. Since it remains a murder case, you will accompany us when we make the arrest.”
“The American who assisted us …?”
“He may come along,” Yefremov said generously. “We’ll show him how we do things here in Russia.”
Reilly was back in the U.S. Embassy on the STU, talking to Washington.
“Holy shit,” the agent observed.
“That about covers it,” Director Murray agreed. “How good’s their presidential-protective detail?”
“Pretty good. As good as the Secret Service? I don’t know what their investigative support is like, but on the physical side, I’d have to say they’re okay.”
“Well, they’ve certainly been warned by now. Whatever they have is going to be perked up a notch or two. When will they do the takedown on this Suvorov guy?”
“Smart move is to sit on it until he makes a move. Figure the Chinese will get the word to him soon—like now, I suppose—and then he’ll make some phone calls. That’s when I’d put the arm on him, and not before.”
“Agreed,” Murray observed. “We want to be kept informed on all this. So, stroke your cop friend, will ya?”
“Yes, sir.” Reilly paused. “This war scare is for real?”
“It looks that way,” Murray confirmed. “We’re ramping up to help them out, but I’m not sure how it’s going to play out. The President’s hoping that the NATO gig will scare them off, but we’re not sure of that either. The Agency’s running in circles trying to figure the PRC out. Aside from that, I don’t know much.”
That surprised Reilly. He’d thought Murray was tight with the President, but supposed now that this information was too compartmentalized.
“I’ll take that,” Colonel Aliyev said to the communications officer. “It’s for the immediate attention of—”
“He needs sleep. To get to him, you must go through me,” the operations officer announced, reading through the dispatches. “This one can wait . . . this one I can take care of. Anything else?” “This one’s from the president!”
“President Grushavoy needs a lucid general more than he needs an answer to this, Pasha.” Aliyev could use some sleep, too, but there was a sofa in the room, and its cushions were calling out to him.
“What’s Tolkunov doing?”
“Updating his estimate.”
“Is it getting better in any way?” Comms asked.
“What do you think?” Ops replied.
“Shit.”
“That’s about right, comrade. Know where we can purchase chopsticks for us to eat with?”
“Not while I have my service pistol,” the colonel replied. At nearly two meters in height, he was much too tall to be a tanker or an infantryman. “Make sure he sees these when he wakes. I’ll fix it with Stavka.”
“Good. I’m going to get a few hours, but wake me, not him,” Aliyev told his brother officer. “Da.”
They were small men in the main. They started arriving at Never, a small railroad town just east of Skovorodino, on day coaches tacked onto the regular rail service on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Getting off, they found officers in uniform directing them to buses. These headed down a road paralleling the railroad right-of-way southeast toward a tunnel drilled ages before in the hills over the diminutive Urkan River. Beside the tunnel was an opening which appeared to the casual viewer to be a siding for service equipment for the railroad. And so it was, but this service tunnel went far into the hillside, and branching off it were many more, all constructed in the 1930s by political prisoners, part of Iosef Stalin’s gulag labor empire. In these man-made caverns were three hundred T-55 tanks, built in the mid-1960s and never used, but rather stored here to defend against an invasion from China, along with a further two hundred BTR-60 wheeled infantry carriers, plus all the other rolling stock for a Soviet-pattern tank division. The post was garrisoned by a force of four hundred conscripts who, like generations before them, served their time servicing the tanks and carriers, mainly moving from one to another, turning over the diesel engines and cleaning the metal surfaces, which was necessary because of water seepage through the stone roof. The “Never Depot,” it was called on classified maps, one of several such places close to the main rail line that went from Moscow to Vladivostok. Cunningly hidden, partially in plain sight, it was one of the aces that General-Colonel Bondarenko had hidden up his sleeve.