The Shadowmen (6 page)

She smiled. “A very bad marriage but a marvelous divorce. Would you like something to eat, or would you prefer that I drive you down to the casino?”

“I think that the casino can wait until tomorrow.”

“Give me a minute to get Marie organized, and I'll fetch us a drink. More champagne?”

“I think a pink gin, easy on the ice.”

“Leave it to the Brits to invent something so disgusting,” she said, and she went inside.

Kurshin walked to the balustrade and watched as a very large motor yacht—he guessed at least one hundred meters at the waterline—heading east turned toward shore. Probably going to Monte-Carlo. The day was dazzling, puffy white clouds, a pleasant breeze. After a bleak winter in England, this was fabulous.

He'd never actually lived the good life, but he'd been trained by his handlers how to blend in with the high rollers, a lot of whom were so into themselves that they wouldn't notice if a puddler from a steel mill sat across the table as long as the man was dressed properly.

“Drink Dom or Krug or Cristal with your caviar when the occasion arises, but don't be shy about having a beer and fish and chips,” one of his instructors had taught. “Marks you as a man of self-confidence who does whatever he wants to do. Sometimes you can blend in by sticking out.”

He and Martine had aged New York strip steaks for dinner along with a fine red wine on the flight across the Atlantic, and at one point as they were getting to know each other, she'd asked what his favorite things were in America.

“A quarter pounder with cheese and a large fries,” he'd told her.

She'd given him a blank look.

“The best meal at McDonald's.”

She'd laughed. “You're a common man.”

“Whenever the need arises.”

The big yacht gradually disappeared behind the Golfe de Saint-Hospice, beyond which was Monte-Carlo as Martine came out with their drinks, his gin and bitters and her white wine.

“Lobster salad in a half hour, and afterward, I thought we might have a swim and get around our jet lag by the pool,” she said.

“Lunch sounds fine,” Kurshin said, raising his glass to her. “But I have a better cure.”

“Which is?”

“Making love, of course.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling over the rim of her wine glass.

After lunch, they retired to her master suite, the french doors open to the warm breeze from the Med. It was late afternoon, but their body clocks felt that it was the middle of the night, and they were jet lagged.

In the shower, they washed each other's backs and, still damp, went to bed where they made long, slow love. She was at least fifteen years older than he was, but her body was wonderfully tight, her skin unblemished, her breasts small, her waist narrow, and her legs long and graceful, those of a dancer.

At one point, she rolled on top of him, her eyes open and bright. “When we started, I thought I might fall asleep,” she said.

“But?”

“My God, if all Brits are as good in bed as you are, I might consider moving to London.”

“It's the pink gin.”

She laughed. “I was thinking of coming to Monte-Carlo with you, unless you're meeting someone.”

“I was hoping you'd want to.”

“Wild horses couldn't hold me back,” she said.

Something about the expression sounded odd in Kurshin's ears. Their lingua franca was English, of course—hers with a French accent, his northern England. But he got the impression that if she were French, she'd lived elsewhere, probably as a child.

“Shall I make reservations for us?” she asked.

“I've booked a casino suite at the Hôtel de Paris.”

“What's the game? I'll need to know how to dress.”

“Chemin de fer,” he said.

“Of course.”

*   *   *

They'd had champagne, and around two in the morning, Kurshin got out of bed, took the remaining half bottle and his encrypted phone, and padded naked out to the pool. A half moon was rising in a crystal-clear sky, reflecting off the calm sea.

The woman would make good cover. He'd been alone at Arlington, so McGarvey might not expect anything would be different here. It was flimsy, perhaps, but he wanted to keep the old man a little off balance at every opportunity and for as long as possible.

Every sleeper agent had their controller, always someone in country, as his was. But early on, one of his instructors had cautioned that agents would need to develop their own styles.

“If you run with the herd, you will be more easily identified than if you operate as a unique individual. Your choice, in the end—either be an antelope or the night hunter.”

Even before he'd left Russia, he'd developed a friendship with Vadim Lestov, a closet homosexual in the FSB's Data Resources Center, what had been the archives section of the KGB's First Chief Directorate. They'd been lovers for three months before Kurshin had begun his assignment in England. In the past several years, they'd had three trysts—two in Helsinki and one in Istanbul. Lestov was a top-level computer analyst for the service and could put his hands on just about any intelligence source he wanted to.

Kurshin took a drink of the nearly flat champagne and then phoned Lestov, who answered on the fourth ring. It was four o'clock in the morning in Moscow.

“Are you alone?” Kurshin asked.

“Of course I am. Are you?”

“Naturally.”

“Bullshit,” Lestov said, but he laughed. He was in his middle fifties now, with a disgusting belly that hung over his belt, thinning hair, protruding eyes, and fat lips. But he knew things.

“I need some more information on my two Americans.”

“Yes, Kirk McGarvey and his lover, Pete Boylan. I'll warn you again: McGarvey is a force to be reckoned with. If you let your guard down, he will kill you, and I will never be able to forgive myself for helping you to the blood altar.”

“Nobody talks like that anymore,” Kurshin said, and Lestov laughed again.

“I'm booting up, so give me a minute.”

Kurshin took another drink of the champagne and then threw the bottle over the balustrade into the trees below.

“He's in Monaco, the Hôtel de Paris. And let me guess—you're nearby.”

“Yes. What about the woman?”

“She's on her way here.”

“Moscow?” Kurshin asked. He was surprised and disturbed.

“Yes. McGarvey I can understand; you mean to go up against him. But what is the significance of the woman coming here?”

“I don't know,” Kurshin said, though he had a hunch why McGarvey had sent her, and it was the first unexpected anomaly in his plan. It was possible they knew about Didenko, which opened more possibilities than he wanted to admit.

“I'll see if I can get more details for you. Call me in twelve hours.”

“Be careful. I don't want to lose you,” Kurshin said.

“Nor I you.”

Kurshin turned around. Martine stood naked at the door.

“You're on some sort of a dark quest, aren't you?” she said.

“I am.”

“Do you still want me to come with you?”

“More than ever,” Kurshin said. “Now leave me for a couple of minutes; I have another call to make.”

9

Pete had managed to get a few hours' sleep on the way over and a few more at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in Moscow near Sheremetyevo International Airport, but she was still tired when the valet brought up the Toyota SUV she'd rented from Enterprise. She tipped him, and before she drove off, she set the GPS for Didenko's dacha.

The early afternoon was a lot hotter than she expected Russia to be even for a July, and she shed the dark-blue blazer she was wearing before she hit the outermost ring highway and headed to the M7. Traffic was heavy, a good percentage of the cars late-model Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and Audis along with the occasional Ferrari and one bright-yellow Lamborghini. This definitely was not the Soviet Union of the Cold War days that she had studied in school.

Didenko had not been connected with the FSB for a number of years, though he probably still had a few old friends in the service.

“Their old-boy networks are just as strong as ours,” McGarvey had warned her.

“Is he going to take a potshot at me if I show up unannounced?” she'd asked.

“I don't think so. He'll be more curious than anything else. You've come to him for information, and he'll expect a quid pro quo, or at least he'll try to trick you into revealing something.”

“If he sent the shooter, he'll know who I am and what my real purpose is.”

“I think he might be helping this guy, but I don't think he sent him,” McGarvey said.

“The real question is motivation,” Otto had said. “It sure as hell isn't an FSB-sanctioned operation; they don't do shit like that anymore—at least not for relatively low-value targets. No offense meant.”

“None taken,” McGarvey said. “If I still were a deputy director in the Company, it might be different, but even then, they wouldn't have sent a single shooter to take me out, nor would they have chiseled Katy's name off her headstone or left me the Monaco clue.”

“That's right, which leaves us with trying to figure out his motivation. He has a grudge against you, but why?”

“Maybe he's a relative of Arkady Kurshin, the guy you took down in Portugal,” Pete suggested.

“Kurshin had no one,” Otto said. “He was a lone wolf living on the streets in Nizhny Novgorod when the cops picked him up and sent him to School One in Moscow.” The academy was the primary institution for training intelligence officers. “He was only fourteen at the time, and he was a star pupil, from all accounts, until he ran away and worked freelance for General Baranov.”

“Brings us back to square one,” Pete said.

“Not quite. He wants me to come to Monte-Carlo to play chemin de fer, which I'm going to do, and you're going to have a little chat with Didenko.”

“Watch your step, please,” Louise had warned.

“Didenko won't do anything to her.”

“Probably not, but Russia is still the Wild West, or East, however you want to look at it, and Pete is a beautiful woman.”

Pete had always considered herself to be too much of a tomboy to think that she was attractive, but looking at Mac across the kitchen counter and thinking about his face at that moment, she wanted to believe Louise. She wanted to think that he thought she was beautiful.

Traffic thinned out considerably on the M7 once she got past the housing developments and other built-up areas that finally gave way to the old-growth birch forests. Less than an hour out of the city, the GPS instructed her to turn north on a dirt road. About ten miles later, she crested a hill, and the general's dacha—more like a compound of the main house and several outbuildings—was laid out in the valley, through which flowed a narrow stream.

A black Mercedes SUV was parked in front of the house, but there didn't seem to be any activity that she could see. She drove down and turned the car around so that it was facing the way she had come, and then she got out.

Except for the onion domes, minarets, and other flourishes on the house, it could have been a fallow farm somewhere in the middle of Iowa. The stream gurgled, birdsong drifted to her on the gentle breeze, and she could smell the rich black earth.

The place was idyllic, like something out of a fairy tale, but extremely dangerous. People had died here, or orders to go out and kill had come from this place. It had a bloody history that hung thick on the summer air.

“Dawbrih y dyen
,
”
an old man at the front door said.

“Good afternoon,” Pete said. “General Didenko?”

“Yes, that's me,” he said, smiling. He wore a baggy old sweater despite the heat, corduroy trousers, and felt slippers. His white hair was thin, and he stood with a stoop. He looked like he had been ill for a long time and had lost a lot of weight.

“My name is Donna Graves; I'm writing a book.”

“Intriguing. May I ask the subject?”

“Kirk McGarvey, who was the director of the CIA.”

“I know the name, of course, but I don't think I can be much help to you. I'm retired now, and I never had any dealings with the man—at least none that were direct. Nevertheless, you have traveled a long way to see me. Won't you sit and have a glass of wine?”

He brought out a bottle of Valpolicella and two glasses, and they sat on ratty old wicker chairs on the porch. Close up, he stank, maybe of cow manure, or at least she hoped that's what it was. He poured the wine with a shaking hand.

“It's pleasant here,” Pete said.

“Unless the wind comes from Petushki, and then we smell the factories. In the old days, we thought the air tasted sweet. Money was being made. Progress. But now it is pollution. I don't imagine that a man such as McGarvey would take kindly to a book about his exploits.”

“Let's talk about General Baranov. You succeeded him after McGarvey killed him in Berlin.”

Didenko nodded. “I would have thought that operation was still classified.”

“I have my sources. But you must have inherited one of his shooters—a man by the name of Arkady Kurshin.”

“Indeed I did, but I only ever talked to him by telephone. I never met him in person.”

“McGarvey killed him too. First his control and then him. How did you feel about it?”

“About McGarvey, or about Arkasha's death?”

“Both.”

“McGarvey was beyond my reach—the chairman of the First Chief Directorate explained that to me in no uncertain terms. As for poor Arkasha, it had been his destiny from the very beginning to die violently.”

“How about now?”

Didenko was puzzled. “I don't know what you mean.”

“The First Chief Directorate is gone; perhaps you have thought about revenge.”