“No,” Provalov admitted, with a sip of his second drink.
He’d have to go easy on the alcohol, he knew, lest he make a mistake. His quarry was too slick and dangerous to take any sort of risk at all. He could always bring the guy in for questioning, but he knew that would be a fruitless exercise. Criminals like this one had to be handled as gently as a cabinet minister. Provalov allowed his eyes to look into the mirror, where he got a good look at the profile of a probable multiple murderer. Why was it that there was no black halo around such? people? Why did they look normal?
“Anything else we know about the mutt?”
The Russian had come to like that American term. He shook his head. “No, Mishka. We haven’t checked with SVR yet.”
“Worried that he might have a source inside the building?” the American asked. Oleg nodded.
“That is a consideration.” And an obvious one. The fraternity of former KGB officers was probably a tight one. There might well be someone inside the old headquarters building, say someone in personnel records, who’d let people know if the police showed interest in any particular file.
“Damn,” the American noted, thinking, You son of a bitch, fucking the guy’s hookers before you waste him. There was a disagreeable coldness to it, like something from a Mafia movie. But in real life, La Cosa Nostra members didn’t have the stones for such a thing. Formidable as they might be, Mafia button-men didn’t have the training of a professional intelligence officer, and were tabby cats next to panthers in this particular jungle. Further scrutiny of the subject. The girl beyond him was a distraction, but not that much.
“Oleg?”
“Yes, Mikhail?”
“He’s looking at somebody over by the musicians. His eyes keep coming back to the same spot. He isn’t scanning the room like he was at first.” The subject did check out everyone who came into the restaurant, but his eyes kept coming back to one part of the mirror, and he’d probably determined that nobody in the place was a danger to him. Oops. Well, Reilly thought, even training has its limitations, and sooner or later your own expertise could work against you. You fell into patterns, and you made assumptions that could get you caught. In this case, Suvorov assumed that no American could be watching him. After all, he’d done nothing to any Americans in Moscow, and maybe not in his entire career, and he was on friendly, not foreign ground, and he’d dusted off his tail on the way over in the way he always did, looking for a single tail car. Well, the smart ones knew their limitations. How did it go? The difference between genius and stupidity was that genius knew that it had limits. This Suvorov guy thought himself a genius.. . but whom was he looking at? Reilly turned a little more on his bar stool and scanned that part of the room.
“What do you see, Mishka?”
“A lot of people, Oleg Gregoriyevich, mainly Russians, some foreigners, all well-dressed. Some Chinese, look like two diplomats dining with two Russians—they look like official types. Looks cordial enough,” Reilly thought. He’d eaten here with his wife three or four times. The food was pretty good, especially the fish. And they had a good source of caviar at the Prince Michael of Kiev, which was one of the best things you could get over here. His wife loved it, and would have to learn that getting it at home would be a lot more expensive than it was here. . . . Reilly’d done discreet surveillance for so many years that he had trained himself to be invisible. He could fit in just about anyplace but Harlem, and the Bureau had black agents to handle that.
Sure as hell, that Suvorov guy was looking in the same place. Casually, perhaps, and using the bar’s mirror to do it. He even sat so that his eyes naturally looked at the same place as he sat on his bar stool. But people like this subject didn’t do anything by accident or coincidence. They were trained to think through everything, even taking a leak.., it was remarkable, then, that he’d been turned so stupidly. By a hooker who’d gone through his things while he was sleeping off an orgasm. Well, some men, no matter how smart, thought with their dicks…. Reilly turned again…, one of the Chinese men at the distant table excused himself and stood, heading for the men’s room. Reilly thought to do the same at once, but.., no. If it were prearranged, such a thing could spook it… Patience, Mishka, he told himself, turning back to look at the principal subject. Koniev/Suvorov set down his drink and stood.
“Oleg. I want you to point me toward the men’s room,” the FBI agent said. “In fifteen seconds.”
Provalov counted out the time, then extended his arm toward the main entrance. Reilly patted him on the shoulder and headed that way.
The Prince Michael of Kiev restaurant was nice, but it didn’t have a bathroom attendant, as many European places did, perhaps because Americans were uneasy with the custom, or maybe because the management thought it an unnecessary expense. Reilly entered and saw three urinals, two of them being used. He unzipped and urinated, then rezipped and turned to wash his hands, looking down as he did so . . . and just out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other two men share a sideways look. The Russian was taller. The men’s room had the sort of pull-down roller towel that America had largely done away with. Reilly pulled it down and dried his hands, unable to wait too much longer. Heading toward the door, he reached in his pocket and pulled his car keys part of the way out. These he dropped just as he pulled the door open, with a muttered, “Damn,” as he bent down to pick them up, shielded from their view by the steel divider. Reilly picked them off the tile floor and stood back up.
Then he saw it. It was well done. They could have been more patient, but they probably both discounted the importance of the American, and both were trained professionals. They scarcely touched each other, and what touching and bumping there was happened below the waist and out of sight to the casual observer. Reilly wasn’t a casual observer, however, and even out of the corner of his eyes, it was obvious to the initiated. It was a classic brush-pass, so well done that even Reilly’s experience couldn’t determine who had passed what to whom. The FBI agent continued out, heading back to his seat at the bar, where he waved to the barkeep for the drink he figured he’d just earned.
“Yes?”
“You want to identify that Chinaman. He and our friend traded something in the shitter. Brush-pass, and nicely done,” Reilly said, with a smile and a gesture at the brunette down the bar. Good enough, in fact, that had Reilly been forced to sit in a witness stand and describe it to a jury, a week-old law-school graduate could make him admit that he hadn’t actually seen anything at all. But that told him much. That degree of skill was either the result of a totally chance encounter between two entirely innocent people— the purest of coincidences—or it had been the effort of two trained intelligence officers applying their craft at a perfect place in a perfect way. Provalov was turned the right way to see the two individuals leave the men’s room. They didn’t even notice each other, or didn’t appear to acknowledge the presence of the other any more than they would have greeted a stray dog—exactly as two unrelated people would act after a happenstance encounter with a total stranger in any men’s room anywhere. But this time as Koniev/Suvorov resumed his seat at the bar, he tended to his drink and didn’t have his eyes interrogate the mirror regularly. In fact, he turned and greeted the girl to his left, then waved for the bartender to get her another drink, which she accepted with a warm, commercial smile. Her face proclaimed the fact that she’d found her trick for the night. The girl could act, Reilly thought.
“Well, our friend’s going to get laid tonight,” he told his Russian colleague.
“She is pretty,” Provalov agreed. “Twenty-three, you think?”
“Thereabouts, maybe a little younger. Nice hooters.”
“Hooters?” the Russian asked.
“Tits, Oleg, tits,” the FBI agent clarified. “That Chinaman’s a spook. See any coverage on him around?”
“No one I know,” the lieutenant replied. “Perhaps he is not known to be an intelligence officer.”
“Yeah, sure, your counterintelligence people have all retired to Sochi, right? Hell, guy, they trail me every so often.”
“That means I am one of your agents, then?” Provalov asked.