“For the moment,” Zhang murmured.
“What was that?” Fang asked, not having quite caught the comment.
Zhang looked up, almost startled from his internal reverie. “Hmph? Oh, nothing, my friend.” And with that the discussion turned to domestic matters. It lasted a total of seventy-five minutes before Fang went back to his office. There began another routine. “Ming,” Fang called, gesturing on the way to his inner office.
The secretary stood and scampered after him, closing the door behind before finding her seat.
“New entry,” Fang said tiredly, for it had been a lengthy day. “Regular afternoon meeting with Zhang Han San, and we discussed…” His voice went on, relating the substance and contents of the meeting. Ming duly took her notes for her minister’s official diary. The Chinese were inveterate diarists, and besides that, members of the Politburo felt both an obligation (for scholarly history) and a personal need (for personal survival) to document their every conversation on matters political and concerning national policy, the better to document their views and careful judgment should one of their number make an error of judgment. That this meant his personal secretary, as, indeed, all of the Politburo members’ personal secretaries, had access to the most sensitive secrets of the land was not a matter of importance, since these girls were mere robots, recording and transcription machines, little more than that— well, a little more, Fang and a few of his colleagues thought with the accompanying smile. You couldn’t have a tape machine suck on your penis, could you? And Ming was especially good at it. Fang was a communist, and had been for all of his adult life, but he was not a man entirely devoid of heart, and he had the affection for Ming that another man, or even himself, might have had for a favored daughter… except that you usually didn’t fuck your own daughter…. His diary entry droned on for twenty minutes, his trained memory recounting every substantive part of his exchange with Zhang, who was doubtless doing the same with his own private secretary right at this moment— unless Zhang had succumbed to the Western practice of using a tape machine, which would not have surprised Fang. For all of Zhang’s pretended contempt for Westerners, he emulated them in so many ways.
Theyd also tracked down the name of Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov. He was yet another former KGB officer, part then of the Third Chief Directorate, which had been a hybrid department of the former spy agency, tasked to overseeing the former Soviet military, and also to overseeing certain special operations of the latter force, like the Spetsnaz, Oleg Provalov knew. He turned a few more pages in Suvorov’s package, found a photograph and fingerprints, and also discovered that his first assignment had been in the First Chief Directorate, known as the Foreign Directorate because of its work in gathering intelligence from other nations. Why the change? he wondered. Usually in KGB, you stayed where you were initially put. But a senior officer in the Third had drafted him by name from the First… why? Suvorov, K. I., asked for by name by General Major Pavel Konstantinovich Kabinet. The name made Provalov pause. He’d heard it somewhere, but exactly where, he couldn’t recall, an unusual state of affairs for a long-term investigator. Provalov made a note and set it aside.
So, they had a name and a photo for this Suvorov fellow. Had he known Amalrik and Zimyanin, the supposed— and deceased— killers of Avseyenko the pimp? It seemed possible. In the Third Directorate he would have had possible access to the Spetsnaz, but that could have been a mere coincidence. The KGB’s Third Directorate had been mainly concerned with political control of the Soviet military, but that was no longer something the State needed, was it? The entire panoply of political officers, the zampoliti who had so long been the bane of the Soviet military, was now essentially gone.
Where are you now? Provalov asked the file folder. Unlike Central Army Records, KGB records were usually pretty good at showing where former intelligence officers lived, and what they were doing. It was a carryover from the previous regime that worked for the police agencies, but not in this case. Where are you? What are you doing to support yourself? Are you a criminal?Areyou a murderer? Homicide investigations by their nature created more questions than answers, and frequently ended with many such questions forever unanswered because you could never look inside the mind of a killer, and even if you could, what you might find there didn’t have to make any sort of sense.
This murder case had begun as a complex one, and was only becoming more so. All he knew for certain was that Avseyenko was dead, along with his driver and a whore. And now, maybe, he knew even less. He’d assumed almost from the beginning that the pimp had been the real target, but if this Suvorov fellow had hired Amalrik and Zimyanm to do the killing, why would a former— he checked— lieutenant colonel in the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB go out of his way to kill a pimp? Was not Sergey Golovko an equally likely target for the killing, and would that not also explain the murder of the two supposed killers, for eliminating the wrong target? The detective lieutenant opened a desk drawer for a bottle of aspirin. It wasn’t the first headache this case had developed, and it didn’t seem likely that this would be the last. Whoever Suvorov was, if Golovko had been the target, he had not made the decision to kill the man himself. He’d been a contract killer, and therefore someone else had made the decision to do the killing.
But who?
And why?
Cui bonuo was the ancient question— old enough that the adage was in a dead language. To whom the good? Who profited from the deed?
He called Abramov and Ustinov. Maybe they could run Suvorov down, and then he’d fly north to interview the man. Provalov drafted the fax and fired it off to St. Petersburg, then left his desk for the drive home. He checked his watch. Only two hours late. Not bad for this case.
General Lieutanent Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko looked around his office. He’d had his three stars for a while, and sometimes he wondered if he’d get any farther. He’d been a professional soldier for thirty-one years, and the job to which he’d always aspired was Commanding General of the Russian Army. Many good men, and some bad ones, had been there. Gregoriy Zhukov, for one, the man who’d saved his country from the Germans. There were many statues to Zhukov, whom Bondarenko had heard lecture when he was a wet-nosed cadet all those years before, seeing the blunt, bulldog face and ice-blue determined eyes of a killer, a true Russian hero whom politics could not demean, and whose name the Germans had come to fear.
That Bondarenko had come this far was no small surprise even to himself. He’d begun as a signals officer, seconded briefly to Spetsnaz in Afghanistan, where he’d cheated death twice, both times taking command of a panic-worthy situation and surviving with no small distinction. He’d taken wounds, and killed with his own hands, something few colonels do, and few colonels relished, except at a good officers’ club bar after a few stiff ones with their comrades.
Like many generals before him, Bondarenko was something of a “political” general. He’d hitched his career-star to the coattails of a quasi-minister, Sergey Golovko, but in truth he’d never have gone to general-lieutenant’s stars without real merit, and courage on the battlefield went as far in the Russian army as it did in any other. Intelligence went farther still, and above all came accomplishment. His job was what the Americans called J-3, Chief of Operations, which meant killing people in war and training them in peace. Bondarenko had traveled the globe, learning how other armies trained their men, sifted through the lessons, and applied them to his own soldiers. The only difference between a soldier and a civilian was training, after all, and Bondarenko wanted no less than to bring the Russian army to the same razor-sharp and granite-hard condition with which it had kicked in the gates of Berlin under Zhukov and Koniev. That goal was still off in the future, but the general told himself that he’d laid the proper foundation. In ten years, perhaps, his army would be at that goal, and he’d be around to see it, retired by then, of course, honorably so, with his decorations framed and hanging on the wall, and grandchildren to bounce on his knee… and occasionally coming in to consult, to look things over and offer his opinion, as retired general officers often did.
For the moment, he had no further work to do, but no particular desire to head home, where his wife was hosting the wives of other senior officers. Bondarenko had always found such affairs tedious. The military attaché in Washington had sent him a book, Swift Sword, by a Colonel Nicholas Eddington of the American Army National Guard. Eddington, yes, he was the colonel who’d been training with his brigade in the desert of California when the decision had come to deploy to the Persian Gulf, and his troops— civilians in uniform, really— had performed well: Better than well, the Russian general told himself. They’d exercised the Medusa Touch, destroying everything they’d touched, along with the regular American formations, the 10th and 11th cavalry regiments. Together that one division-sized collection of forces had smashed a full four corps of mechanized troops like so many sheep in the slaughter pen. Even Eddington’s guardsmen had performed magnificently: Part of that, Gennady Iosifovich knew, was their motivation. The biological attack on their homeland had understandably enraged the soldiers, and such rage could make a poor soldier into an heroic one as easily as flipping a light switch. “Will to combat” was the technical term. In more pedestrian language, it was the reason a man put his life at risk, and so it was a matter of no small importance to the senior officers whose job it was to lead those men into danger.