Jackson nodded. “Duly noted, sir.”
” ‘Sir’? Where the hell did that come from, Rob?”
“You still be the National Command Authority, oh great man,” Robby told him with a grin and a lower-Mississippi accent. “I just be da XO, which means Ah gits all the shit details.”
“So, think of this as PCO School, Rob, and thank God you have a chance to learn the easy way. It wasn’t like that for me—”
“I remember, Jack. I was here as J-3, remember? And you did okay. Why do you think I allowed you to kill my career for me?”
“You mean it wasn’t the nice house and the drivers?”
The Vice President shook his head. “And it wasn’t to be a first-black, either. I couldn’t say ‘no’ when my President asks, even if it’s a turkey like you. Later, man.”
“See ya at lunch, Robby,” Jack said as the door closed.
“Mr. President, Director Foley on Three,” the speakerphone announced.
Jack lifted the secure phone and punched the proper button. “Morning, Ed.”
“Hi, Jack, we have some more on Moscow”
“How’d we get it?” Ryan asked first, just to have a way of evaluating the information he was about to receive.
“Intercepts,” the Director of Central Intelligence answered, meaning that the information would be fairly reliable. Communications intelligence was the most trusted of all, because people rarely lied to one another over the radio or telephone. “It seems this case has a very high priority over there, and the militiamen are talking very freely over their radios.”
“Okay, what do you got?”
“Initial thinking over there is that Rasputin was the main target. He was pretty big, making a ton of money with his female… employees,” Ed Foley said delicately, “and trying to branch out into other areas. Maybe he got a little pushy with someone who didn’t like being pushed.”
You think so?” Mike Reilly asked.
“Mikhail Ivan’ch, I am not sure what I think. Like you, I am not trained to believe in coincidences,” replied Lieutenant Oleg Provalov of the Moscow Militia. They were in a bar which catered to foreigners, which was obvious from the quality of the vodka being served.
Reilly wasn’t exactly new to Moscow. He’d been there fourteen months, and before that had been the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the New York office of the FBI— but not for Foreign Counter-Intelligence. Reilly was an OC-Organized Crime-expert who’d spent fifteen busy years attacking the Five Families of the New York Mafia, more often called LCN by the FBI, for La Cosa Nostra. The Russians knew this, and he’d established good relations with the local cops, especially since he’d arranged for some senior militia officers to fly to America to participate in the FBI’s National Academy Program, essentially a Ph.D. course for senior cops, and a degree highly prized in American police departments.
“You ever have a killing like this in America?”
Reilly shook his head. “No, you can get regular guns pretty easy at home, but not anti-tank weapons. Besides, using them makes it an instant Federal case, and they’ve learned to keep away from us as much as they can. Oh, the wiseguys have used car bombs,” he allowed, “but just to kill the people in the car. A hit like this is a little too spectacular for their tastes. So, what sort of guy was Avseyenko?”
A snort, and then Provalov almost spat the words out: “He was a pimp. He preyed on women, had them spread their legs, and then took their money. I will not mourn his passing, Mishka. Few will, but I suppose it leaves a vacuum that will be filled in the next few days.”
“But you think he was the target, and not Sergey Golovko?”
“Golovko? To attack him would be madness. The chief of such an important state organ? I don’t think any of our criminals have the balls for that.”
Maybe, Reilly thought, but you don’t start off a major investigation by making assumptions of any kind, Oleg Gregoriyevich. Unfortunately, he couldn’t really say that. They were friends, but Provalov was thin-skinned, knowing that his police department did not measure up well against the American FBI. He’d learned that at Quantico. He was doing the usual right now, rattling bushes, having his investigators talk to Avseyenko’s known associates to see if he’d spoken about enemies, disputes, or fights of one sort or another, checking with informants to see if anyone in the Moscow underworld had been talking about such things.
The Russians needed help on the forensic side, Reilly knew. At the moment they didn’t even have the dump truck. Well, there were a few thousand of them, and that one might have been stolen without its owner/operator even knowing that it had been missing. Since the shot had been angled down, according to eyewitnesses, there would be little if any launch signature in the load area to help ID the truck, and they needed the right truck in order to recover hair and fibers. Of course, no one had gotten the tag number, nor had anyone been around with a camera during rush hour— well, so far. Sometimes a guy would show up a day or two later, and in major investigations you played for breaks— and usually the break was somebody who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Investigating people who knew how to stay silent was a tough way to earn a living. Fortunately, the criminal mind wasn’t so circumspect— except for the smart ones, and Moscow, Reilly had learned, had more than a few of them.
There were two kinds of smart ones. The first was composed of KGB officers cut loose in the series of major reductions-in-force— known to Americans as RIFs— similar to what had happened in the American military. These potential criminals were frightening, people with real professional training and experience in black operations, who knew how to recruit and exploit others, and how to function invisibly— people, as Reilly thought of it, who’d played a winning game against the FBI despite the best efforts of the Bureau’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence Division.
The other was a lingering echo of the defunct communist regime. They were called tolkachi— the word meant “pushers”— and under the previous economic system they’d been the grease that allowed things to move. They were facilitators whose relationships with everyone got things done, rather like guerrilla warriors who used unknown paths in the wilderness to move products from one place to another. With the fall of communism their skills had become genuinely lucrative because it was still the case that virtually no one understood capitalism, and the ability to get things done was more valuable than ever— and now it paid a lot better. Talent, as it always did, went where the money was, and in a country still learning what the rule of law meant, it was natural for men with this skill to break what laws there were, first in the service of whoever needed them, and then, almost instantly afterward, in the service of themselves. The former tolkachi were the most wealthy men in their country. With that wealth had come power. With power had come corruption, and with corruption had come crime, to the point that the FBI was nearly as active in Moscow as CIA had ever been. And with reason.
The union between the former KGB and the former tolkachi was creating the most powerful and sophisticated criminal empire in human history.
And so, Reilly had to agree, this Rasputin— the name meant literally “the debauched one”— might well have been part of that empire, and his death might well have been something related to that. Or something else entirely. This would be a very interesting investigation.
“Well, Oleg Gregoriyevich, if you need any help, I will do my best to provide it for you,” the FBI agent promised.
“Thank you, Misha.”
And they parted ways, each with his own separate thoughts.
C H A P T E R – 1
Echoes of the Boom
So, who were his enemies?” Lieutenant Colonel Shablikov asked. “Gregoriy Filipovich had many. He was overly free with his words. He insulted too many people and—”
“What else?” Shablikov demanded. “He was not blown up in the middle of the street for abusing some criminal’s feelings!”
“He was beginning to think about importing narcotics,” the informant said next.
“Oh? Tell us more.”
“Grisha had contacts with Colombians. He met them in Switzerland three months ago, and he was working to get them to ship him cocaine through the port of Odessa. I heard whispers that he was setting up a pipeline to transport the drugs from there to Moscow.”
“And how was he going to pay them for it?” The militia colonel asked. Russian currency was, after all, essentially valueless.
“Hard currency. Grisha made a lot of that from Western clients, and certain of his Russian clients. He knew how to make such people happy, for a price.”