No Time for Heroes (8 page)

‘It's the word around,' said Zimin, which was sufficient.

‘I'm not anxious for a war until we get the Swiss thing settled and make the arrangements in Italy,' said Gusovsky.

‘If we don't respond it'll be regarded as weakness,' warned Yerin.

That morning's motorised tour was intended publicly to demonstrate their presence in their domain. Gusovsky leaned slightly forwards, to the driver. ‘Make the left, on Ulitza Sadovaya,' he ordered.

‘That'll take us on to Ostankino turf,' warned the man.

‘Exactly,' smiled Gusovsky. ‘Let's hope they take it as the warning it's meant to be.'

CHAPTER NINE

He did stink.

Few drivers had parked near the grey Ford for the past two days, so it had been easy to tape the area off, which Cowley thought hardly necessary because no-one was coming anywhere close to look. Four scene-of-crime technicians around the open trunk all wore respirators and gloves as well as protective overalls; the local officers, plain-clothed and uniformed, were well away from the car and carefully upwind. Cowley looked for Rafferty and Johannsen, whom he had alerted, but they hadn't arrived. Rafferty had said they'd found out where Serov had eaten the night he'd been killed, and sounded rebuffed when Cowley topped that news with the announcement of a second, matching murder.

As he approached the police group there was the now familiar burst of television lights and flash-gun bulbs from the penned-off media. The commotion alerted the watching police group. Hal Maine hoped he'd done right calling Cowley direct; conscious of boundary jealousies, Cowley warned the local man he'd asked the two DC homicide detectives to join him.

‘You're welcome to this,' said Maine sincerely. He was a faded man in a creased suit and shirt; Cowley guessed he had about five years before retirement.

‘What do we know?' asked Cowley.

Maine waved towards an open-doored, unmarked police car inside the cordon, where an overalled FBI specialist, a respirator discarded beside him, was sitting in the rear, transferring things from a crocodile briefcase into exhibit bags. ‘The case was in the car, not the trunk, so there's not much smell. Swiss passport, in the name of Michel Paulac. Difficult to make a facial comparison with the photograph, because of the state of the body. Swiss driving licence in the same name, which matches that in which the car was rented from Hertz at Dulles, nine days ago. The rental agreement was in the briefcase, too. So was a first class return ticket, which should have been taken up four days ago, to Geneva. There's a wallet of visiting cards. Paulac's address is given as Rue Calvin, Geneva. There's quite a few documents in languages I can't read; looks like bank or financial stuff.'

There was another blaze of light from the media pack and Cowley turned to see two cars being allowed through the yellow tape by a uniformed patrolman. Rafferty and Johannsen were in the first, Brierly and Robertson in the second.

‘Jesus!' said Rafferty, nose wrinkled, as he joined them.

Brierly was zipping up a protective all-in-one as he followed. He took a tube of highly mentholated emulsion from his examination bag, smearing it on his upper lip, directly beneath his nose, then offered it generally to the group. Cowley took some but the bear-like Robertson, who was wearing the same lumberjack workshirt of the previous day, shook his head. Rafferty said he wasn't curious enough to want to look and Johannsen said he wasn't, either.

Cowley had never before seen a body in such an advanced state of putrefaction. It was grossly swollen and the skin had split within the constriction of the clothing. Most of the face and hands were black. The body lay on its back, with the legs twisted sideways and the arms tightly above the head, to fit into the trunk. The smell began to get past the barrier gel and Cowley backed away, his stomach bubbling. He kept the white smear of emulsion under his nose, not caring if he looked ridiculous, although he pointedly kept his back to the cameras when he returned to the upwind group. Hal Maine had briefed the two DC detectives during his absence.

Johannsen said: ‘First Russian, now Swiss. And all in America. Could be a job for a UN peacekeeping force.'

Cowley didn't join in the professional cynicism. To Rafferty he said: ‘So where was Serov the night he was killed?'

‘The French cafe near the Georgetown Mall,' announced the man. ‘Waitress named Mary Ann Bell made a positive ID. Puts him there around six thirty, before the place properly filled up. Thinks he left around seven forty-five: she's pretty definite about that, because that's the time her shift ends and she handled the check.'

‘Alone?' queried Cowley.

Johannsen shook his head, taking up the story. ‘One other guy. Foreign accent, although not like Serov's. She remembers the second one better than Serov. The kid's working her way through college, like they all are. She's pretty: black hair and a tight ass. The guy came on strong and she was flattered. He promised to come back to see her again. She puts him around thirty, thirty-five. Says he dressed well: thinks it was a brown suit. Lightweight. Had a nice cologne. Good-looking guy.'

Cowley indicated the Ford. ‘He's wearing a brown suit.'

‘Pity about the cologne,' said Rafferty.

‘Anything unusual while they were in the cafe?'

There was another head shake from Johannsen. ‘When the second guy wasn't trying to hit on Mary Ann there was a lot of head-together stuff. She says they were serious.'

‘Serov had eaten fish, just before he died,' reminded Rafferty. ‘The special that night was scrod. They both had it.'

‘With a bottle of Californian chardonnay,' completed Johannsen.

The huge scientific co-ordinator lumbered back from the Ford. Behind him Cowley saw the masked technicians manoeuvring a black body bag into the boot.

‘Lookee here!' demanded Robertson, when he reached their group. The man held up a glassine bag with a brass shell casing in it.

‘Makarov?' asked Cowley.

Everyone else looked between him and Robertson, without comprehension.

Robertson said: ‘I'll tell you within an hour of getting back.'

Brierly followed immediately afterwards. He said the autopsy would be more difficult because of the decomposition but it looked like an exact copy of the first. Unless there were bone injury, it would be hard to find any marks of torture or resistance. He'd try for fingernail scrapings, but he wasn't hopeful there, either. He'd do his best to help forensic get usable fingerprints but the best chance of provable indentification would be dental records, although the teeth were extensively damaged. The mouth shot had been inflicted in the car, which was how the shell jacket came to be in the trunk: the slug would be found, among the head debris.

Cowley went to the police car where the exhibit officer was packaging the recovered articles, and signed for the passport, managing to open it to the photograph by working on the outside of the plastic envelope. The parking ticket was in a separate sachet. The date automatically registered by the entry machine was the day Serov had died, the time 20-45. Cowley gave Rafferty the opened passport and told him to take the Key Bridge and return through Georgetown to confirm Michel Paulac had been the man with Serov.

As Cowley turned to Johannsen, the detective expectantly said: ‘You'd like to know how many flights left National after eight forty-five? And to where?'

‘And get the passenger lists and credit card slips for tickets that were bought that night,' completed Cowley. He stopped, looking around the assembled policemen. Trying as always to be diplomatic among different forces, he said: ‘Anything else?'

‘You're going to get your photograph taken again when we leave,' cautioned Rafferty. ‘So you'd better wipe that shit from under your nose. Your look like Son of Hitler.'

Rafferty was thirty minutes behind Cowley returning to Pennsylvania Avenue, and arrived with more than confirmation of Michel Paulac being Petr Serov's dinner companion four nights earlier.

‘Worked the visa pages open through the plastic,' he reported. ‘Paulac's been here every month since the beginning of the year. Never for longer than one week, according to date stamps.'

‘You've got the credit card number to work from,' said Cowley. ‘He should have listed his hotel on the visa form.'

‘On my way,' said Rafferty.

In his written report to the FBI Director, Cowley undertook fully to brief the protocol office at the State Department, before sending a detailed request for all possible information about Michel Paulac, of Rue Calvin, Geneva, to the Swiss police through Interpol.

Robertson was on the telephone precisely on the promised hour. The casing recovered from the car trunk was from a 9mm bullet of Russian manufacture for a Makarov pistol. Hammer markings were identical to those on the casing of the bullet that killed Serov.

Johannsen's was the last report, which he came back to make in person, leaving the rest of the squad at the airport. There had been sixteen departing flights after 8.45 p.m. on the night in question, three of them the last shuttles to New York and Boston. Four had been international – none direct or intermediate to Moscow – the rest internal. All credit card slips had already gone to the respective companies for payment, and flight manifests had also been filed. The airlines and the card companies had warned it was going to take a long time.

‘And maybe get us nowhere,' pointed out Johannsen. ‘Because Paulac's ticket was out of Dulles, we're assuming our killer drove out to National for his escape, right?' He raised his hands against interruption, wanting to finish. ‘Why can't the Ford being dumped at National be a wrong steer, to send us in more circles than we're going around in already? Or if he flew
in
, he could have had a return ticket, or he might have bought his ticket with cash, so the credit card slips are going to tell us nothing. There's a passport check against ticket names for international flights, but there were only four of those. Any ticket for a flight
within
America could be in whatever name the guy wanted to use.'

‘I don't need reminding of the problems,' said Cowley.

CHAPTER TEN

Danilov had caught a segment about the murder of Petr Serov on the previous evening's television news and seen – with difficulty, because the set was old and faulty and beyond effective repair – a brief shot of William Cowley emerging from a plastic scene-of-crime tent and walking, unspeaking, through a swarm of questioning journalists. There was no reference on Russian TV to Cowley's previous involvement in Moscow, or to Danilov, but there was, extensively, in the following day's newspapers. On his way to Petrovka, Danilov stopped the car and bought the papers, reading the near-matching accounts and briefly indulging himself in memories. On an inside page there was a group photograph taken at the time, of Danilov and Lapinsk and Cowley and the Federal Prosecutor. One headline described the investigation as a triumph of co-operation between Russia and the United States; another used the word ‘brilliant'. Danilov carefully discarded the newspapers in a rubbish bin, not wanting to invite mockery by arriving at Militia headquarters carrying accounts of himself publicly described as the leading investigator in an Organised Crime Bureau from which he'd been deposed. But when he entered his office, every newspaper was on his desk, folded uppermost to demonstrate his previous importance. Games to play, Danilov decided.

Two fingered, he typed a memorandum to the Director asking what action he was expected to take upon the newspaper accounts of the killing of Petr Aleksandrovich Serov so obviously deposited in his office. Additionally he sent a note to the Foreign Ministry, asking to be informed what was happening in America, and made a copy for Anatoli Metkin with a covering slip assuming it was the sort of action Metkin would wish. He sent his communication to the Foreign Ministry at once, but to prevent it being interrupted he held back the message to Metkin.

By the time the creased-faced Director burst into his room, Danilov had typed invitations to the supervisors of the car pool and supply division, proposing meetings to decide their future working relationship, and written for display on the squad room noticeboard the news that he had been made responsible, on the specific orders of Anatoli Metkin, for all future work rosters, and also for the finance of the Bureau. Accordingly, he would in future need, in writing, each assignment of each investigator with itemised details of overtime being claimed; without such details, no payments would be authorised. He'd despatched copies of the roster arrangements to the Interior and Finance Ministries minutes before Metkin's arrival.

‘What the hell are these!' demanded Metkin, waving Danilov's messages.

Danilov looked up, blank-faced: Metkin was very red. ‘A request for guidance,' he said ingenuously.

‘I don't know anything about any damned newspaper stories!'

‘I assumed it was upon your orders. What reason would there be for anyone in the squad room to come all the way up here to leave them?'

Metkin made tiny, ineffectual flapping gestures with his hands. ‘I don't want anything going to the Foreign Ministry.'

‘I'm afraid it's gone. About two hours ago.'

‘
What?
'

‘I don't see the problem,' said Danilov. ‘I might have misunderstood the newspapers, but shouldn't we be interested in the murder of a Russian diplomat?'

‘Any request for information should have come …' Metkin stopped before completing the sentence, so Danilov did it for him.

‘It will appear to have your authority, won't it …?' He let Metkin stand there, nonplussed. ‘Like these.' Danilov offered the other man copies marked for his attention but not yet sent, of the notes about work rosters and overtime payments.

Metkin's hands began to shake in fury. ‘This is preposterous!'