“Watch Room,” a voice said half a world away.
“This is Station Moscow. We have an indication that Sergey Golovko may just have been assassinated.”
“The SVR chairman?”
“Affirmative. A car similar to his has exploded in Dzerzhinskiy Square, and this is the time he usually goes to work.”
“Confidence?” the disembodied male voice asked. It would be a middle-grade officer, probably military, holding down the eleven-to-seven watch. Probably Air Force. “Confidence” was one of their institutional buzzwords.
“We’re taking this off police radios— the Moscow Militia, that is. We have lots of voice traffic, and it sounds excited, my operator tells me.”
“Okay, can you upload it to us?”
“Affirmative,” Lieutenant Wilson replied.
“Okay, let’s do that. Thanks for the heads-up, we’ll take it from here.”
Okay, Station Moscow out,” heard Major Bob Teeters. He was new in his job at NSA. Formerly a rated pilot who had twenty-one hundred hours in command of C-5s and C-17s, he’d injured his left elbow in a motorcycle accident eight months before, and the loss of mobility there had ended his flying career, much to his disgust. Now he was reborn as a spook, which was somewhat more interesting in an intellectual sense, but not exactly a happy exchange for an aviator. He waved to an enlisted man, a Navy petty officer first-class, to pick up on the active line from Moscow. This the sailor did, donning headphones and lighting up the word-processing program on his desktop computer. This sailor was a Russian linguist in addition to being a yeoman, and thus competent to drive the computer. He typed, translating as he listened in to the pirated Russian police radios, and his script came up on Major Teeters’s computer screen.
I HAVE THE LICENSE NUMBER, CHECKING NOW, the first line read.
GOOD, QUICK AS YOU CAN.
WORKING ON IT, COMRADE. (TAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND, DO THRE RUSSKIES HAVE COMPUTERS FOR TIS STUFF NOW?)
I HAVE IT, WHITE MERCEDES BENZ, REGISTERED TO G. F . AVSYENKO, (NOT SURE OF SPELLING) 677 PROTOPOPOV PROSPEKT, FLAT 18A.
HIM? I KNOW THAT NAME!
Which was good for somebody, Major Teeters thought, but not all that great for Avsyenko. Okay, what next? The senior watch officer was another squid, Rear Admiral Tom Porter, probably drinking coffee in his office over in the main building and watching TV, maybe. Time to change that. He called the proper number.
“Admiral Porter.”
“Sir, this is Major Teeters down in the watch center. We have some breaking news in Moscow.”
“What’s that, Major?” a tired voice asked.
“Station Moscow initially thought that somebody might have killed Chairman Golovko of the KG— the SVR, I mean.”
“What was that, Major?” a somewhat more alert voice inquired.
“Turns out it probably wasn’t him, sir. Somebody named Avsyenko—” Teeters spelled it out. “We’re getting the intercepts off their police radio bands. I haven’t run the name yet.”
“What else?”
“Sir, that’s all I have right now.”
By this time, a CIA field officer named Tom Barlow was in the loop at the embassy. The third-ranking spook in the current scheme of things, he didn’t want to drive over to Dzerzhinskiy Square himself, but he did the next best thing. Barlow called the CNN office, the direct line to a friend.
“Mike Evans.”
“Mike, this is Jimmy,” Tom Barlow said, initiating a prearranged and much-used lie. “Dzerzhinskiy Square, the murder of somebody in a Mercedes. Sounds messy and kinda spectacular.”
“Okay,” the reporter said, making a brief note. “We’re on it.”
At his desk, Barlow checked his watch. 8:52 local time. Evans was a hustling reporter for a hustling news service. Barlow figured there’d be a mini cam there in twenty minutes. The truck would have its own Kuband uplink to a satellite, down from there to CNN headquarters in Atlanta, and the same signal would be pirated by the DoD downlink at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and spread around from there on government-owned satellites to interested parties. An attempt on the life of Chairman Golovko made it interesting as hell to a lot of people. Next he lit up his desktop Compaq computer and opened the file for Russian names that were known to CIA.
A duplicate of that file resided in any number of CIA computers at Langley, Virginia, and on one of those in the CIA Operations Room on the 7th floor of the Old Headquarters Building, a set of fingers typed A-V-S-Y E-N-K-O… and came up with nothing other than:
ENTIRE FILE SEARCHED. THE SEARCH ITEM WAS NOT FOUND.
That evoked a grumble from the person on the computer. So, it wasn’t spelled properly.
“Why does this name sound familiar?” he asked. “But the machine says no-hit.”
“Let’s see…” a co-worker said, leaning over and respelling the name. “Try this…” Again a no-hit. A third variation was tried.
“Bingo! Thanks, Beverly,” the watch officer said. “Oh, yeah, we know who this guy is. Rasputin. Low-life bastard— sure as hell, look what happened when he went straight,” the officer chuckled.
Rasputin?” Golovko asked. “Nekulturniy swine, eh?” He allowed himself a brief smile. “But who would wish him dead?” he asked his security chief, who, if anything, was taking the matter even more seriously than the Chairman. His job had just become far more complicated. For starters, he had to tell Sergey Nikolay’ch that the white Mercedes was no longer his personal conveyance. Too ostentatious. His next task of the day was to ask the armed sentries who posted the corners of the building’s roof why they hadn’t spotted a man in the load area of a dump truck with an RPG— within three hundred meters of the building they were supposed to guard! And not so much as a warning over their portable radios until the Mercedes of Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko had been blown to bits. He’d sworn many oaths already on this day, and there would be more to come.
“How long has he been out of the service?” Golovko asked next.
“Since ’93, Comrade Chairman,” Major Anatoliy Ivan’ch Shelepin said, having just asked the same question and received the answer seconds earlier.
The first big reduction-in-force, Golovko thought, but it would seem that the pimp had made the transition to private enterprise well. Well enough to own a Mercedes Benz S-600… and well enough to be killed by enemies he’d made along the way… unless he’d unknowingly sacrificed his own life for that of another. That question still needed answering. The Chairman had recovered his self-control by this point, enough at any rate for his mind to begin functioning. Golovko was too bright a man to ask Why would anyone wish to end my life? He knew better than that. Men in positions like his made enemies, some of them deadly ones… but most of them were too smart to make such an attempt. Vendettas were dangerous things to begin at his level, and for that reason, they never happened. The business of international intelligence was remarkably sedate and civilized. People still died. Anyone caught spying for a foreign government against Mother Russia was in the deepest of trouble, new regime or not— state treason was still state treason— but those killings followed… what did the Americans call it? Due process of law. Yes, that was it. The Americans and their lawyers. If their lawyers approved of something, then it was civilized.
“Who else was in the car?” Golovko asked.
“His driver. We have the name, a former militiaman. And one of his women, it would seem, no name for her yet.”
“What do we know of Gregoriy’s routine? Why was he there this morning?”
“Not known at this time, Comrade,” Major Shelepin replied. “The militia are working on it.”
“Who is running the case?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Shablikov, Comrade Chairman.”
“Yefim Konstantinovich— yes, I know him. Good man,” Golovko allowed. “I suppose he’ll need his time, eh?”
“It does require time,” Shelepin agreed.
More than it took for Rasputin to meet his end, Golovko thought. Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost— and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they? Not unless you believed in ghosts or God or an afterlife, things which had somehow been overlooked in Golovko’s childhood. So, yet another great mystery, the spymaster told himself. It had come so close, for the first time in his life. It was disquieting, but on reflection, not so frightening as he would have imagined. The Chairman wondered if this was something he might call courage. He’d never thought of himself as a brave man, for the simple reason that he’d never faced immediate physical danger. It was not that he had avoided it, only that it had never come close until today, and after the outrage had passed, he found himself not so much bemused as curious. Why had this happened? Who had done it? Those were the questions he had to answer, lest it happen again. To be courageous once was enough, Golovko thought.