She hadn’t gotten any less attractive, though getting her here had proven difficult. Tanya Bogdanova hadn’t avoided anything, but she’d been unreachable for several days.
“You’ve been busy?” Provalov asked.
“Da, a special client,” she said with a nod. “We spent time together in St. Petersburg. I didn’t bring my beeper. He dislikes interruptions,” she explained, without showing much in the way of remorse.
Provalov could have asked the cost of several days in this woman’s company, and she would probably have told him, but he decided that he didn’t need to know all that badly. She remained a vision, lacking only the white feathery wings to be an angel. Except for the eyes and the heart, of course. The former cold, and the latter nonexistent.
“I have a question,” the police lieutenant told her.
“Yes?”
“A name. Do you know it? Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov.”
Her eyes showed some amusement. “Oh, yes. I know him well.” She didn’t have to elaborate on what “well” meant.
“What can you tell me about him?”
“What do you wish to know?”
“His address, for starters.”
“He lives outside Moscow.”
“Under what name?”
“He does not know that I know, but I saw his papers once. Ivan Yurievich Koniev.”
“How do you know this?” Provalov asked.
“He was asleep, of course, and I went through his clothes,” she replied, as matter-of-factly as if she’d told the militia lieutenant where she shopped for bread.
So, he fucked you, and you, in turn, fucked him, Provalov didn’t say. “Do you remember his address?”
She shook her head. “No, but it’s one of the new communities off the outer ring road.”
“When did you last see him?”
“It was a week before Gregoriy Filipovich died,” she answered at once.
It was then that Provalov had a flash: “Tanya, the night before Gregoriy died, whom did you see?”
“He was a former soldier or something, let me think ... Pyotr Alekseyevich ... something ...”
“Amalrik?” Provalov asked, almost coming off his seat.
“Yes, something like that. He had a tattoo on his arm, the Spetsnaz tattoo a lot of them got in Afghanistan. He thought very highly of himself, but he wasn’t a very good lover,” Tanya added dismissively.
And he never will be, Provalov could have said then, but didn’t. “Who set up that, ah, appointment?”
“Oh, that was Klementi Ivan’ch. He had an arrangement with Gregoriy. They knew each other, evidently for a long time. Gregoriy often made special appointments for Klementi’s friends.”
Suvorov had one or both of his killers fuck the whores belonging to the man they would kill the next day ... ? Whoever Suvorov was, he had an active sense of humor ... or the real target actually had been Sergey Nikolay’ch. Provalov had just turned up an important piece of information, but it didn’t seem to illuminate his criminal case at all. Another fact which only made his job harder, not easier. He was back to the same two possibilities: This Suvorov had contracted the two Spetsnaz soldiers to kill Rasputin, and then had them killed as “insurance” to avoid repercussions. Or he’d contracted them to eliminate Golovko, and then killed them for making a serious error. Which? He’d have to find this Suvorov to find out. But now he had a name and a probable location. And that was something he could work on.
CHAPTER 19
Manhunting
Things had quieted down at Rainbow headquarters in Hereford, England, to the point that both John Clark and Ding Chavez were starting to show the symptoms of restlessness. The training regimen was as demanding as ever, but nobody had ever drowned in sweat, and the targets, paper and electronic were—well, if not as satisfying as a real human miscreant wasn’t the best way to put it, then maybe not as exciting was the right phrase. But the Rainbow team members didn’t say that, even among themselves, for fear of appearing bloodthirsty and unprofessional. To them the studied mental posture was that it was all the same. Practice was bloodless battle, and battle was bloody drill. And certainly by taking their training so seriously, they were still holding a very fine edge. Fine enough to shave the fuzz off a baby’s face.
The team had never gone public, at least not per se. But the word had leaked out somehow. Not in Washington, and not in London, but somewhere on the continent, the word had gotten out that NATO now had a very special and very capable counterterrorist team that had raped and pillaged its way through several high-profile missions, and only once taken any lumps, at the hands of Irish terrorists who had, however, paid a bitter price for their misjudgment. The European papers called them the “Men of Black” for their assault uniforms, and in their relative ignorance the European newsies had somehow made Rainbow even more fierce than reality justified. Enough so that the team had deployed to the Netherlands for a mission seven months before, a few weeks after the first news coverage had broken, and when the bad guys at the grammar school had found there were new folks in the neighborhood, they’d stumbled through a negotiating session with Dr. Paul Bellow and cut a deal before hostilities had to be initiated, which was pleasing for everyone. The idea of a shoot-out in a school full of kids hadn’t even appealed to the Men of Black.
Over the last several months, some members had been hurt or rotated back to their parent services, and new members had replaced them. One of these was Ettore Falcone, a former member of the Carabinieri sent to Hereford as much for his own protection as to assist the NATO team. Falcone had been walking the streets of Palermo in Sicily with his wife and infant son one pleasant spring evening when a shoot-out had erupted right before his eyes. Three criminals were hosing a pedestrian, his wife, and their police bodyguard with submachine guns, and in an instant Falcone had pulled out his Beretta and dropped all three with head shots from ten meters away. His action had been too late to save the victims, but not too late to incur the wrath of a capo mafioso, two of whose sons had been involved in the hit. Falcone had publicly spat upon the threat, but cooler heads had prevailed in Rome—the Italian government did not want a blood feud to erupt between the Mafia and its own federal police agency—and Falcone had been dispatched to Hereford to be the first Italian member of Rainbow. He had quickly proven himself to be the best pistol shot anyone had ever seen.
“Damn,” John Clark breathed, after finishing his fifth string of ten shots. This guy had beaten him again! They called him Big Bird. Ettore—Hector—was about six-three and lean like a basketball player, the wrong size and shape for a counterterror trooper, but, Jesus, could this son of a bitch shoot!
“Grazie, General,” the Italian said, collecting the five-pound note that had accompanied this blood feud.
And John couldn’t even bitch that he’d done it for real, whereas Big Bird had only done it with paper. This spaghetti-eater had dropped three guys armed with SMGs, and done it with his wife and kid next to him. Not just a talented shooter, this guy had two big brass ones dangling between his legs. And his wife, Anna-Maria, was reputed to be a dazzling cook. In any case, Falcone had bested him by one point in a fifty-round shootoff. And John had practiced for a week before this grudge match.
“Ettore, where the hell did you learn to shoot?” RAINBOW Six demanded.
“At the police academy, General Clark. I never fired a gun before that, but I had a good instructor, and I learned well,” the sergeant said, with a friendly smile. He wasn’t the least bit arrogant about his talent, and somehow that just made it worse.
“Yeah, I suppose.” Clark zippered his pistol into the carrying case and walked away from the firing line.
“You, too, sir?” Dave Woods, the rangemaster, said, as Clark made for the door.
“So I’m not the only one?” RAINBOW Six asked.
Woods looked up from his sandwich. “Bloody hell, that lad’s got a fookin’ letter of credit at the Green Dragon from besting me!” he announced. And Sergean
t-Major Woods really had taught Wyatt Earp everything he knew. And at the SAS/Rainbow pub he’d probably taught the new boy how to drink English bitter. Beating Falcone would not be easy. There just wasn’t much room to take a guy who often as not shot a “possible,” or perfect score.
“Well, Sergeant-Major, then I guess I’m in good company.” Clark punched him on the shoulder as he headed out the door, shaking his head. Behind him, Falcone was firing another string. He evidently liked being Number One, and practiced hard to stay there. It had been a long time since anyone had bested him on a shooting range. John didn’t like it, but fair was fair, and Falcone had won within the rules.
Was it just one more sign that he was slowing down? He wasn’t running as fast as the younger troops at Rainbow, of course, and that bothered him, too. John Clark wasn’t ready to be old yet. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather either, but he had little choice in that. His daughter and Ding had presented him with a grandson, and he couldn’t exactly ask that they take him back. He was keeping his weight down, though that often required, as it had today, skipping lunch in favor of losing five paper-pounds at the pistol range.
“Well, how did it go, John?” Alistair Stanley asked, as Clark entered the office building.
“The kid’s real good, Al,” John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.
“Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week.”
A grunt. “I guess that makes it unanimous.” John settled in his swivel chair, like the “suit” he’d become. “Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?”
“Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway,” Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.
They want what?" Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.
“They want us to help train some of their people,” Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repetition.
“Jesus, girl, how ecumenical are we supposed to get?” the DCI demanded.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch thinks we owe him one. And you know ...”
He had to nod at that. “Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though.”
“It ought to give Jack a chuckle,” the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.
Shit," Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. ”Oh, excuse me, Ellen."
She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Got one I can ... ?”
Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.
“Well, ain’t this something?”
“You know this man, don’t you?” Mrs. Sumter asked.
“Golovko? Yeah.” Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC-137 thundered down the runway at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time, it hadn’t seemed all that funny. “Oh, yeah, Sergey and I are old friends.”
As a Presidential secretary, Ellen Sumter was cleared for just about everything, even the fact that President Ryan bummed the occasional smoke, but there were some things she didn’t and would never know. She was smart enough to have curiosity, but also smart enough not to ask.
“If you say so, Mr. President.”
“Thanks, Ellen.” Ryan sat back down in his chair and took a long puff on the slender cigarette. Why was it that stress of any sort made him gravitate back to these damned things that made him cough? The good news was that they also made him dizzy. So, that meant he wasn’t a smoker, not really, POTUS told himself. He read over the fax again. It had two pages. One was the original fax from Sergey Nikolay’ch to Langley—unsurprisingly, he had Mary Pat’s direct fax line, and wanted to show off that fact—and the second was the recommendation from Edward Foley, his CIA director.
For all the official baggage, it was pretty simple stuff. Golovko didn’t even have to explain why America had to accede to his request. The Foleys and Jack Ryan would know that KGB had assisted the CIA and the American government in two very sensitive and important missions, and the fact that both of them had also served Russian interests was beside the point. Thus Ryan had no alternative. He lifted the phone and punched a speed-dial button.
“Foley,” the male voice at the other end said.
“Ryan,” Jack said in turn. He then heard the guy at the other end sit up straighter in his chair. “Got the fax.”
“And?” the DCI asked.
“And what the hell else can we do?”
“I agree.” Foley could have said that he personally liked Sergey Golovko. Ryan did, too, as he knew. But this wasn’t about like or don’t-like. They were making government policy here, and that was bigger than personal factors. Russia had helped the United States of America, and now Russia was asking the United States of America for help in return. In the regular intercourse among nations, such requests, if they had precedents, had to be granted. The principle was the same as lending your neighbor a rake after he had lent you a hose the previous day, just that at this level, people occasionally got killed from such favors. “You handle it or do I?”
“The request came to Langley. You do the reply. Find out what the parameters are. We don’t want to compromise Rainbow, do we?”
“No, Jack, but there’s not much chance of that. Europe’s quieted down quite a bit. The Rainbow troopers are mainly exercising and punching holes in paper. That news story that ran—well, we might actually want to thank the putz who broke it.” The DCI rarely said anything favorable about the press. And in this case some government puke had talked far too much about something he knew, but the net effect of the story had had the desired effect, even though the press account had been replete with errors, which was hardly surprising. But some of the errors had made Rainbow appear quite superhuman, which appealed to their egos and gave their potential enemies pause. And so, terrorism in Europe had slowed down to a crawl after its brief (and somewhat artificial, they knew now) rebirth. The Men of Black were just too scary to mess with. Muggers, after all, went after the little old ladies who’d just cashed their Social Security checks, not the armed cop on the corner. In this, criminals were just being rational. A little old lady can’t resist a mugger very effectively, but a cop carries a gun.
“I expect our Russian friends will keep a lid on it.”
“I think we can depend on that, Jack,” Ed Foley agreed.
“Any reason not to do it?”
Ryan could hear the DCI shift in his seat. “I never have been keen on giving ’methods’ away to anybody, but this isn’t an intelligence operation per se, and most of it they could get from reading the right books. So, I guess we can allow it.”
“Approved,” the President said.
Ryan imagined he could see the nod at the other end. “Okay, the reply will go out today.”
With a copy to Hereford, of course. It arrived on John’s desk before closing time. He summoned Al Stanley and handed it to him.
“I suppose we’re becoming famous, John.”
“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?” Clark asked distastefully. Both were former clandestine operators, and if there had been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.
“I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?”
“Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We’ve both met Sergey Nikolay’ch. At least this way he doesn’t see all that many new faces.”
“Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate.”
“The language school at Monterey is pretty good,” John said, with a nod.
“How long do you expect to be gone?”
Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. “Oh, not
more than ... three weeks,” he said aloud. “Their Spetsnaz people aren’t bad. We’ll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can’t we?”
Stanley didn’t have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they’d have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.
“I suppose we’ll have to, John,” Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.
Clark lifted his phone and hit the button for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. “Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you.”
“His Russian is also good, as I recall.”
“We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”
“And yours?”
“Leningrad—well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”
Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it’s been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”
Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”
“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”
“Come in and take a seat, my boy.”
Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark’s desk and took the offered sheets of paper.
“Moscow?” he asked.
“Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”