Assassin (12 page)
Authors: David Hagberg
I
n his hotel room McGarvey spent the next two days studying the material that Rencke had downloaded from his computer files. Besides the probability program which he'd developed to predict the outcome of a coup by Tarankov, Rencke had sent a complete dossier on the Tarantula, the people he surrounded himself with, and the armored train he used to make his strikes.
n his hotel room McGarvey spent the next two days studying the material that Rencke had downloaded from his computer files. Besides the probability program which he'd developed to predict the outcome of a coup by Tarankov, Rencke had sent a complete dossier on the Tarantula, the people he surrounded himself with, and the armored train he used to make his strikes.
A number of things became very clear almost from the start of his studies, the first of which was Tarankov's intelligence. Although he had the brute strength and the unshakable determination of a Stalin or a Hitler, he was not a stupid man. In fact he was brilliant, something even his enemies begrudgingly admitted. Which meant he wasn't running around the countryside hoping that by some miracle the people would rise up and put him in power. He had a plan. A definite timetable.
If he wasn't stopped he would manage to take over the entire country with two hundred commandoes, his East German wife and Leonid Chernov, a former KGB Department Viktor assassin whose name McGarvey had never heard.
On Thursday night he called Rencke from a pay phone several blocks from the hotel.
“Have you tried calling your answering machine in the past thirty-six hours?” Rencke asked as soon as he picked up the phone.
“No.”
“Don't. Langley sent the SDECE the information on you they wanted, and it's got them shook up. In their view you're a very dangerous man whom they would like very much to talk to right now. They put an automatic trace on your phone line. At this point they don't know if you're in Paris or not, but if you call from the Left Bank they'll be down there in minutes.”
“Are they watching the airports?”
“Yup. And the train stations. But the border crossings haven't been alerted yet. You could get out that way. Either that or use a disguise.”
“Have they issued a warrant for my arrest?”
“The street cops haven't got a warrant, I don't know about the Service,” Rencke said. “You gotta understand, Mac, that to this point all my knowledge about the French is second hand. I can tap into the CIA's computers, and I can play with the French phone system, but I can't do much about the SDECE. They've got computers, don't get me wrong. But they're smart enough to know that they have to treat the really important stuff manually. The old fashioned way. If you want to know what they're doing you have to break into one of their offices and steal their paper files. It's almost un-American.”
“Is anybody making any guesses who Yemlin wants me to kill?”
“Not yet. Leastways they've put nothing in their computers that I can find. But this morning Lynch sent a second query about you to Ryan. The French can't find you and they'd like the CIA to help.”
“Have they ordered my expulsion from France?”
“It doesn't sound like it. They just want to talk to you, that's all.”
“How about you? Has your name come up?”
“Knock on wood, but not yet,” Rencke said laughing. “I still have my super virus in place and the silly bastards don't suspect a thing. But if they push me the CIA's entire computer system will crash, and crash good. Maybe
for
good.”
for
good.”
“You'd do it, too.”
“Why not? I've had to start over. It's good for the soul. Maybe they wouldn't be so arrogant, because good old Rick Ames didn't teach them a damn thing.”
“I need some more information,” McGarvey said.
“Leonid Chernov,” Rencke said matter-of-factly. It was as if he could read minds. “You've got the whole enchilada, which worries me too. You're going to have to go head-to-head with him, but nobody knows anything about him. Not the CIA, nobody.”
“How about the old KGB computer files?”
“Ha,” Rencke said. “You ever try running through maple syrup on a cold day, Mac? It'd be easier than trying to wade through the mess they've created for themselves.”
“It's a big organization, Otto. Some of their systems must be up and running.”
“Without a central director, or a specific CPU for me to start from, I'd have to initiate a program search for every possible telephone number combination in Moscow. I could do it, but it might take a while. Maybe fifty years, give or take a decade.”
“What if I get you a number?”
“Then we're in. Leastways through the first portal. Do you think Yemlin will hand over the keys to the castle just like that?”
“Won't hurt to ask,” McGarvey said. “Keep your ears open, Otto, I'm going to be out of town for a couple of days.”
“Will do, Mac. Good luck.”
The desk clerk Martine was waiting for him in his room when he got back. She'd brought a bottle of wine and two glasses, and was propped up in bed, her shoes off, her silk blouse unbuttoned.
“You come as something of a surprise,” McGarvey said, masking his irritation.
“You've been working entirely too hard, Monsieur,” she said, and she giggled. She was tipsy.
McGarvey put his laptop on the writing table and glanced at his overnight bag. It had been tampered with, but he didn't think that the woman was a spy. She simply found him attractive and wanted to seduce him. And she was nosy.
“I am married.”
“You don't wear a ring. And when you opened your wallet to withdraw your credit card I saw no photos of your wife or children.” She smiled coyly at him over the rim of her wine glass, and shifted on the bed, parting her shapely legs. “You don't carry much clothing for a man who travels so much.”
If she'd been in his overnight bag, she'd seen the spare magazines of ammunition. She wouldn't have recognized the silencer for what it was, because it was disguised as a working flashlight. But she knew that he wasn't a writer.
“What do you expect me to do?”
She set her wine glass aside. “Make love to me,” she said huskily. “Dangerous men excite me. And from the moment I saw you I knew you were such a creature. Maybe you are a policeman here on a secret investigation. Or perhaps a private detective. Maybe even a spy.”
McGarvey took off his jacket, then poured a glass of wine for himself. He sat on the edge of the bed and brushed his fingertips across her lips. She shivered.
“What will the management do if they find out that you're snooping around and trying to seduce the guests?”
“They'd certainly fire me. That wouldn't be so good. I'm not a wealthy woman.
McGarvey smiled. “Then we both have a secret to keep.” He took a drink of his wine, and then opened her blouse and kissed the tops of her breasts.
She arched into him, a soft moan escaping her lips. “Don't hurt me,” she cooed. “Not too much.”
McGarvey checked out of his hotel around eight in the morning after securing his gun and two spare magazines of ammunition in a special compartment of his fake laptop computer that Rencke had designed and constructed for him. The compartment was shielded with sections of lead foil that appeared to airport security scanners as electronic circuitry. The computer would have to be completely stripped down to reveal what it contained. If it was turned on, the screen would light up with a convincing display. But that's all it would do. Instead of innards, the device only contained his weapon and spare ammunition.
He walked over to the car park, retrieved his Avis Renault, and was on the busy N2, heading north, past Le Bourget Airport by 9:00 A.M., the morning extremely pleasant.
Sometime over the past two days he had made his final decision to go ahead with the assassination of Tarankov, though he'd known that he would probably do it after Rencke had shown him his probability program. He no longer maintained any self-doubts, nor was he going to beat himself up over the decision. Second thoughts would come much later; in the night when he would see the faces of every person he'd ever killed, Tarankov's would be included.
He only had the vaguest idea how he was going to do it, and get away. But he knew from long experience that the solution would come to him in due time, and that he would recognize it when it arrived. He also knew that before such a solution became evident he was going to have to do more research. A lot more.
The truck stop on the outskirts of Maubeuge, where he stopped to have a quick lunch, was smoky and noisy, but the food was very good as it was at most French waysides.
By noon he was across the border into Belgium, the customs officer waving him through when McGarvey held up his Belgian passport, and seventy minutes later he was parking his car in the long term ramp at Brussels' Zaventem National Airport on the northeast outskirts of the city.
His bags were passed through airport security without a problem, and he got lucky with a Finnair flight departing at 3:00 P.M. He wanted to avoid, as much as possible, using his Allain papers in Belgium, because under any kind of questioning by the local authorities it would be obvious that he was not a Belgian. But the clerks at Finnair had no reason to question his nationality.
Because of the time difference it wasn't until 8:00 P.M. when he landed at Helsinki's Vantaa Airport, the weather here overcast, blustery and sharply colder than in Paris. He was passed through customs with no delay, though the officer did take an interest in his computer. By 9:30 P.M., he'd checked into the Strand Inter-Continental Hotel next to the old city downtown on the waterfront, and was dining on an excellent grilled salmon, with a very good bottle of French white wine.
Afterward he went down to one of the pay phones in the soaring atrium lobby, and direct-dialed Viktor Yemlin's apartment in Moscow. A noisy group of Russian businessmen were drinking and laughing around the fireplace across from McGarvey. The women with them were all young and expensively dressed. Even from a distance it was easy to determine that they were probably very high-priced call girls. The men were Russia's new millionaires; the women its entrepreneurs.
Yemlin answered his telephone on the third ring. “
Da
.”
Da
.”
“Hello.”
Yemlin didn't reply for several seconds. Music played in the background. “I think you have the wrong number. You want 228â0712.” He broke the connection.
McGarvey hung up, and walked across the lobby to the bar where he ordered a cognac and lit a cigarette. Yemlin's line wasn't secure. The number he wanted to use was probably located some distance from his apartment. Possibly a pay phone. The FSK couldn't monitor every pay phone in the city, but given a little time, say a half-hour, they could isolate a specific number and tap it, which meant Yemlin would be standing by no later than fifteen minutes from now.
The cocktail waitress serving the group by the fireplace came back to the bar to order another round of drinks. She glanced at McGarvey, who smiled.
“Sounds like they're having fun,” he said in English.
“They're Russians,” she replied disdainfully. “I'm trying to get them to move their party up to the pool.”
“Aren't they tipping very well?”
“Just fine,” she said, smiling a little. “I'm just hoping they'll all drown up there.”
“Good luck.”
The bartender came to fill her order, and fifteen minutes later McGarvey went back to the pay phone and called the Moscow number.
Yemlin answered on the first ring. He sounded out of breath. “This is 228â0712,” he said.
“Who is monitoring your home phone?” McGarvey asked.
“Possibly no one, this is just a precaution. Are you here in Moscow?”
“I'm in Helsinki. How soon can you get here? We need to talk.”
“Are you taking the ⦠package?”
“How soon can you be here?” McGarvey repeated evenly. He could hear the strain in Yemlin's voice.
“I'll take the morning flight. I can be there by noon.”
“Will you be missed?”
Yemlin's laugh was short and sharp. “No one misses anything here anymore. Where do you want to meet?”
“Kaivopuisto. Enter from the southwest.” McGarvey hung up, then went back to the bar where he had another cognac before going up to his room for the night. As he passed the Russian group one of them said something to the cocktail waitress, who dropped her tray, then spun around and rushed away. McGarvey didn't break stride, though he wanted to go over and punch the boorish, loud-mouthed bastard in the mouth.
Helsinki's most elegant district on the waterfront was home to a number of foreign diplomats, and was maintained like a well-manicured park. On a pleasant day half of Helsinki took their walks here because it was so pretty. In the early days McGarvey had spent a month recuperating in Helsinki after an assignment that had gone bad in Leningrad. He'd often come down to the waterfront and he still remembered the area pretty well.
The day was raw. A chill wind drove spits of snow almost horizontally under a leaden sky. Still there were a number of people bundled up and walking through the district.
McGarvey had purchased a down-filled nylon jacket from a department store near the hotel, and by one o'clock, when Yemlin finally showed up, he wished he'd bought a warm hat and gloves as well. He tailed the Russian for ten minutes to make sure he'd come in clean, and then caught up with him halfway across the park.
“Did you know my parents?” McGarvey asked, falling in beside Yemlin.
“They were before my time, Kirk,” Yemlin said. He was professional enough not to have reacted in an obvious manner when McGarvey suddenly showed up in disguise. “But I'd heard about them from General Baranov. He told me that it was a supreme irony that in some respects he had created you by planting false information about your parents being spies for us.”
“You didn't give me much proof,” McGarvey said. He'd destroyed the documents on Saturday before he went back to the apartment, and he had tried to put the news out of his mind.
“There is no more. Everything else died when you killed Baranov. Nobody's around from those days who remembers anything. I'm sure there isn't much more in your own records beyond what Baranov planted. It was John Trotter's doing. But you knew that.”
Trotter was an old friend who'd worked as Deputy Director of Operations. In the end he'd betrayed them all, and his last act had been an attempt to kill McGarvey.
“Then you could be jerking me around here too, Viktor Pavlovich. You bastards invented the game.”
“No,” Yemlin said sadly, studying McGarvey's face. “But we were masters at it. We really didn't have much else. You know yourself that most of the West's estimates of our military and nuclear capabilities were inflated so that the Pentagon could justify its own budget.”
It was true, McGarvey thought. And Tarankov, if he came to power, would start the cycle all over again.
“I believe in my heart, Kirk, that your parents were not the spies that you were led to believe they were. I don't know enough of the details to understand why Baranov ran that kind of an operation. I just know what he did. And if you'd thought about it then, you would have seen Baranov's touch. It was his style. A lot of us admired him.”
They walked for a couple of minutes in silence. Deeper in the park they were somewhat sheltered from the wind, and there were even more Finns out walking on their lunch hours.
“This will be the last time we meet,” McGarvey said. “I want you to make no attempt to try to communicate with me, or find me no matter what happens.” McGarvey looked into Yemlin's eyes. “No matter what, Viktor Pavlovich, do you understand?”
“You're going to do it? You're going to assassinate Tarankov?”
“Yes.”
“When?” Yemlin asked, his face alive with expression.
“Sometime before the June elections. Sooner if it looks as if he'll try a coup d'etat.”
“You'll need help. I can pull enough strings in the SVR to supply you with information on Tarankov's movements.”
“No,” McGarvey said. “You're going back to Moscow as if nothing ever happened. You've never seen me, you've never discussed anything like this with me, and you will discuss this with no one.”
“Impossible,” Yemlin said, shaking his head. “Sukhoruchkin and Shevardnadze know everything.”
“Then I'll call it offâ”
“Please listen to me, Kirk. These men have just as much stake in this as I do. We've already laid our lives on the line. It was us three who discussed and approved hiring you to kill Tarankov. If you fall so do we. They have to be told. But I swear to you no one else in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, knows what we've asked you to do. They haven't breathed a word, even hinted about it, to anyone. I swear it.”
McGarvey thought about it for a moment. “You may tell them that I've accepted the job, but nothing else. Not that we met here, not my timetable, nothing. I won't go any further than that, because as you say, lives are on the line. And mine is more precious to me than yours. You'll either agree to this, or you'll have to find someone else.”
“There is no one else,” Yemlin said heavily. “I agree. What about money?”
“One million dollars,” McGarvey said. He handed Yemlin a slip of paper
with a seven-digit number written on it. “This is my account at Barclay's on Guernsey. British pounds, Swiss francs or American dollars.”
with a seven-digit number written on it. “This is my account at Barclay's on Guernsey. British pounds, Swiss francs or American dollars.”
“I'll have it there before I leave Helsinki today,” Yemlin said. “What else?”
“The SVR must have a central data processing center that shares information with the FSK and the Militia.”
“Of course.”
“I want the telephone number.”
Yemlin pulled up short, and his eyes narrowed. “Even if I knew that number it wouldn't do you any good without the proper access codes. Those I can't get.”
“Nonetheless I want it.”
“Assuming I can come up with the number, how do I get it to you?”
“Place an ad in the personals column of
Le Figaro
starting in three days. Say: Julius loves you, please call at once. Invert the telephone number and include it.”
Le Figaro
starting in three days. Say: Julius loves you, please call at once. Invert the telephone number and include it.”
“I can't guarantee anything, Mac, but I'll do my best,” Yemlin said. They started to walk again. “What about identity papers and travel documents? I can help with that.”
“I'll get my own.”
“Weapons?”
McGarvey shook his head.
“A safehouse in Moscow in case you have to go underground?”
They stopped again. “You've been in the business long enough to know that the bigger the organization, the greater are the chances for a leak. And right now the SVR and every other department in Russia is riddled with Tarankov's spies and informers. I'll work alone.”
“I caught you once.”
McGarvey smiled. “Yes, you did, Viktor Pavlovich. But things were different then. I was a lot younger, and the KGB was a lot better.”
Yemlin agreed glumly. “In Paris you told me that the odds of success were a thousand to one against an assassin. What's changed your mind?”
“Nothing,” McGarvey said. “If anything I think the odds are worse, and will get worse the longer we wait. If Tarankov takes over the government either by elections or by force, he'll be even harder to kill.”
Yemlin looked down the broad boulevard the way they'd come. “As it is the aftermath will be terrible. I don't know if Russia will survive.” His resolve seemed to stiffen and he turned back to McGarvey. “I do know that unless Tarankov is killed we will certainly not survive as a democracy.”
“You're sure this is what you want?” McGarvey asked. “Because once we part here it will be too late to change your mind.”
Yemlin nodded after a moment, and he shook McGarvey's hand. “Goodbye, Kirk. God go with you.”
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