Dead or Alive

  Clark and Chavez followed the cop down the jetway, through several checkpoints, then through a card reader-controlled door into Heathrow’s security center. They were led to a small conference room where they found Alistair Stanley, still officially second-in-command of Rainbow Six, standing at the diamond-shaped table under the cold glare of fluorescent lights. Stanley was SAS, or Special Air Service, Britain’s premier special warfare unit.

  Though Clark was reluctant to admit it in mixed company, as far as he was concerned, when it came to efficacy and longevity, the SAS was without peer. Certainly there were outfits out there that were as good as the SAS—his alma mater, the Navy SEALs, came to mind—but the Brits had long ago set the gold standard for modern-era special ops troops, going back as far as 1941 when a Scots Guards officer named Stirling—later of Stir-ling submachine-gun fame—and his L Detachment of sixty-five men harried the German Wehrmacht across North Africa. From their early behind-the-lines sabotage missions in North Africa to Scud hunting in the Iraqi desert, the SAS had done it all, seen it all, and written the book on special ops along the way. And like all his brethren before him, Alistair Stanley was a top-notch troop. In fact, Clark had rarely thought of Stanley as his second but rather his co-commander, so great was his respect for the man.

  Along with driving lanes and french fries, SAS organization had been another adjustment for Clark. In characteristically British fashion, the SAS’s organization was unique, divided into regiments—the 21st, the 22nd, and the 23rd—and squadrons—ranging from A through G, with a few alphabetical gaps thrown in for good measure. Still, Clark had to further admit, the Brits did everything with flair.

  “Alistair,” Clark said with a solemn nod. The look on Stanley’s face told him something serious had already happened or was in the process of happening.

  “Miss us already, Stan?” Ding said, shaking his hand.

  “I wish that were it, mate. Feel bloody awful interrupting your trip and all. Thought you boys might like to have one more go before you go soft. Got something interesting in the works.”

  “From?” Clark asked.

  “The Swedes, in a roundabout fashion. Seems they’ve gone and lost their consulate in Tripoli. Bloody embarrassing for them.”

  Chavez said, “By ‘lost,’ I assume you don’t mean misplaced?”

  “Right, sorry. Typical British understatement. Charming but not always practical. The intelligence is still filtering in, but given the location, it doesn’t take much of a leap to venture a guess as to the culprit’s general identity.”

  Clark and Chavez pulled out chairs and sat down at the table. Stanley did the same. He opened a leather portfolio containing a legal pad covered in handwritten notes.

  “Let’s hear it,” Clark said, switching mental gears.

  Ten minutes earlier he’d been in civilian mode—or at least as much of a civilian mode as he allowed himself—sitting with his family and getting ready to head home, but that was then and this was now. Now he was the commander of Rainbow Six again. It felt good, he had to admit.

  “Best as we can tell, there are eight men in all,” Stanley said. “Bypassed the local cops quick as you please with nary a casualty. Satellite images show four Swedes—probably Fallskarmsjagares—down and out within the compound’s grounds.”

  The Fallskarmsjagares were essentially Sweden’s version of airborne rangers, culled from the best of the Army. Probably members of the Särskilda Skyddsgruppen—Special Protection Group—that had been seconded to SÄPO, the Swedish Security Service, for embassy duty.

  “Those are some tough boys,” Chavez said. “Somebody did their homework—and some good shooting. Anything from inside the consulate?”

  Stanley shook his head. “Radio-silent.”

  Which made sense, Clark decided. Anyone good enough to get into the grounds that quickly and take down four Fallskarmsjagares would also be smart enough to go straight for the communications room.

  “Nobody taking credit?” Chavez asked.

  “None so far, but that won’t last long, I suspect. So far the Libyans have a lid on the press, but it’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid.”

  The hodgepodge of terrorist groups in the Middle East tended to take overlapping credit for any act of significant violence, and it wasn’t always about prestige, either, but rather a deliberate attempt to muddy the intelligence waters. It was a lot like what a police homicide unit went through during big murder cases. Quick confessions and nutjob suspects were a dime a dozen, and each one had to be taken seriously, lest you miss a real tango. The same applied to terrorism.

  “And no demands, I assume?” Clark added.

  “Right.”

  As often as not there were no demands. In the Middle East most hostage takers just wanted to grow an international audience before they started executing people, only belatedly explaining the whys and wherefores. Not that that made any difference to Clark and his team, but until some government functionary somewhere said “Go,” Rainbow was, like every other special ops outfit, at the mercy of politics. Only once the pols had satisfied themselves that unleashing the dogs of war was appropriate did Rainbow get to do what it did best.

  “Now here’s the tricky part,” Stanley said.

  “Politics,” Clark guessed.

  “Right again. As you might imagine, our friend the Colonel wants to send in his Jamahiriyyah—he already has them staged, in fact—but the Swedish Consul General isn’t so keen on the idea, what with the Jamahiriyyah’s rules of engagement being what they are.”

  The Jamahiriyyah Guard were essentially Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s own personal Special Forces unit, composed of two thousand or so men drawn from his own backyard, the Surt region of Libya. The Jamahiriyyah were good, Clark knew, and well supported with their own in-house logistics and intelligence units, but the Jamahiriyyah were not known for their discretion, nor for any deep concern for collateral damage, inanimate and animate alike. With the Jamahiriyyah making the assault, the Swedes were likely to lose a fair number of staff.

  An interesting bastard, Qaddafi, Clark thought. Like much of the U.S. intelligence community, Clark had his doubts about Qaddafi’s recent character transformation from bad boy of North Africa to humanitarian and denouncer of terrorism. The old phrase “a leopard can’t change its spots” might be a cliché that rang false for some, but as far as Clark was concerned, Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qaddafi, “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” was a leopard through and through, and would be until the day he died of natural causes or not-so-natural causes.

  In 2003, at Qaddafi’s command, the Libyan government officially informed the United Nations it was prepared to accept responsibility for the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie some fifteen years earlier and was further prepared to compensate the victims’ families to the tune of nearly $3 billion. The gesture was immediately rewarded with not only praise from the West but also the lifting of economic sanctions and diplomatically couched “attaboys” from many European countries. And the leopard didn’t stop there, first opening up his weapons programs to international inspectors, then denouncing the 9/11 attacks.

  Clark had a guess about Qaddafi’s change of heart, and it had nothing to do with the mellowing of old age but rather with plain old economics. In other words, oil prices—which had plummeted throughout the ’90s, leaving Libya poorer than it had been since camels and not black gold had been king in the desert nation, and less able to fund the Colonel’s pet terrorist projects. Of course, Clark reminded himself, Qaddafi’s nice-guy routine was probably helped along by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he probably saw as just a preview of what could happen to his little fiefdom. In fairness, Clark conceded that it was always better to have a leopard only pretending to change its spots as long as its fangs were in fact blunted. The question was, now that oil prices were back up, would the Colonel be feeling frisky again? Would he use this incident to roar?

  “Of course, the Supreme Command in Stockholm w
ants to call in their own blokes, but Qaddafi is having none of it,” Stanley continued. “Last I heard, Rosenbad Street was talking to Downing Street. At any rate, we’ve been put on standby. Herefordshire is putting out the call for the rest of the team. We’ve got two on leave—one medical, one on holiday—but the bulk of them should be assembled and equipped within the hour and en route to us shortly after that.” Stanley checked his watch. “Say, seventy minutes to wheels up.”

  “You said ‘staged,’” Chavez said. “Staged where?” Time was critical, and even in the fastest of transports, London to Tripoli was a long hop—perhaps longer than the hostages inside that consulate had to live.

  “Taranto. The Marina Militare has kindly offered to put us up until the pols sort things out. If we get the call, we’re just a skip across the water to Tripoli.”

  16

  LIEUTENANT OPERATIVNIK (Detective) Pavel Rosikhina pulled back the sheet—a tablecloth, really—that some kind soul had draped over the body and stared into the wide-eyed face of what he’d assumed was yet another Mafia execution. Maybe not. Despite the man’s pallor, it was clear he wasn’t Chechnyan or an ethnic Russian, which surprised him, given their location. A Caucasian Russian. Interesting.

  The single bullet had entered the man’s skull just above and an inch forward of his left ear and exited. . . . Rosikhina leaned over the table, careful to touch nothing but the tablecloth, and peered at the right side of the man’s head, which lay resting on the booth’s cushioned upper edge. There. An egg-sized exit hole behind the man’s right ear. The blood and brain matter splattered on the wall behind the booth fit with the bullet’s trajectory, which meant the killer would have been standing . . . here. Right in front of the kitchen door. How close would be a matter for the coroner to decide, but looking at the entry wound, Rosikhina knew it wasn’t done at close-contact range. There were no powder-burn marks on the skin around the wound, nor any stippling. The wound itself was perfectly round, which further ruled out a contact shot, which usually left behind a distinctive star-shaped rip in the skin. Rosikhina covered his nose against the fecal stink. As did many victims of sudden death, the man’s bowels and bladder had relaxed. He carefully pulled back the man’s sport coat, first the left side, then the right, patting the pockets for a wallet. There was nothing but a silver ballpoint pen, a white handkerchief, and an extra button for the man’s suit coat.

  “How close, you think?” he heard, and turned around.

  His sometimes partner, Gennady Oleksei, stood a few feet away, cigarette dangling from his half-smiling lips and hands shoved into the pockets of his leather coat.

  Over Oleksei’s shoulder Rosikhina could see that the uniformed militia officers had finished herding the restaurant’s customers out the front door, where they stood milling around, waiting to be questioned. The restaurant’s staff—four waiters, a cashier, and three cooks—were seated at the now-empty tables, giving their names to another officer.

  Oleksei and Rosikhina worked in the Saint Petersburg militia’s Main Office for Combating Financial Crimes, a subdivision of the Criminal Investigations Department. Unlike most Western police agencies, Russian operativniks were not assigned permanent partners. Why this was no one had ever explained to Rosikhina, but he assumed it had something to do with funding. Everything had to do with funding, from whether they got their own cars from week to week to whether they worked alone or with partners.

  “You’re assigned?” Rosikhina asked.

  “Called me at home. How close?” Oleksei repeated.

  “Two to six feet. Easy shot.” He noticed something lying on the seat behind the victim’s buttocks. He leaned over for a closer look. “Got a gun,” he told Oleksei. “Semiautomatic. Looks like a Makarov. He was trying, at least. A second faster on the draw and maybe ...”

  “Now, there’s a question for you,” Oleksei said. “Would you rather go like our friend here, knowing it was coming, or would you rather just . . . poof. Be gone. Nothing.”

  “Good Christ, Gennady ...”

  “Come on, play along.”

  Rosikhina sighed. “I guess I’d rather go in my sleep—a hundred years old and lying next to Natalia.”

  “Pavel, Pavel . . . You never humor me.”

  “Sorry. I don’t like this. Something’s off. It feels like and looks like your standard Mafia hit, but this sure isn’t your standard victim—not sitting in a place like this, at least.”

  “He was either very brave or very stupid,” Oleksei said.

  “Or desperate.” To come into a place like this, their Caucasian Russian victim had to be in search of something more than a good bowl of djepelgesh and some of that god-awful pondur music—music that sounded to Pavel like cats in heat.

  “Or really hungry,” Oleksei added. “Another boss, maybe? He doesn’t look familiar, but he could be on the books.”

  “I doubt it. They never travel without their own little army. Even if somebody had managed to get to him here and put a bullet into his head at this range, his bodyguards would have started a god-awful firefight. There’d be holes everywhere, and a lot more bodies. No, we’ve got one bullet and one dead man. Very deliberate. An ambush, professionally done. The question is, who is he and why was he important enough to kill?”

  “Well, we’re not going to get any answers out of this bunch.”

  Rosikhina knew his partner was right. Fear of, or loyalty to, the Obshina tended to silence even the most helpful of souls. The witness reports would invariably fall into one of three general categories: I saw nothing; someone in a mask ran in, shot the man, and ran out, it all happened so fast; and Rosikhina’s favorite, Ya ne govo’ryu po russki. I don’t speak Russian.

  And of those accounts, the only true statement they’d get was likely the last one: It all happened so fast. Not that he blamed any of them. The Krasnaya Mafiya, or Bratva (brotherhood), or Obshina—whatever the name or denomination—was ruthless beyond compare. Witnesses and their entire families were often targeted for death simply because some boss in some dark basement somewhere had decided the person might have information they might disclose to authorities. And it wasn’t merely a matter of dying, Rosikhina reminded himself. The Mafia was often ingenious and unhurried in its execution methods. What, he wondered, would he do in similar circumstances? Though the Mafia generally refrained from killing militia officers—it was bad for business—it had happened in the past. Armed and trained as they were, cops could protect themselves, but the average citizen, the teacher or factory worker or accountant, what chance did they have? None, really. The militia had neither the money nor the manpower to protect every witness, and the average citizen knew it, so they kept their mouths shut and kept their heads down. Even now, some of the restaurant’s patrons were terrified for their lives, having simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a wonder places like this managed to stay open at all.

  It was that kind of fear, Rosikhina thought, that made people wish for the old days, the return of Stalinesque control of the country, and in many ways Putin was doing just that with his “reform programs.” There was no middle ground with that, though. As long as there were political freedoms, personal rights, and an open market in Russia, there would be crime, both large and small—and there was in Stalin’s time, too, but not nearly as much. But that argument was something of a straw man, wasn’t it? Something that old communist hard-liners and ultranationalists used to decry democracy and capitalism, all the while forgetting or ignoring that the iron-fisted control of Soviet Russia had come at a high price indeed. What was that old saying? Hardship truncates memory? Rosikhina’s father, a Yakut fisherman by birth, had his own take on the concept: “When you’ve got a shrew for a wife, even the ugliest ex-girlfriend looks enticing.” And that, he knew, was what Soviet Russia really was, an ugly ex-girlfriend. Certainly she had her positive traits, but nothing you’d like to be reunited with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an opinion many of his fellow citizens—some forty percent of them, accord
ing to the latest polls, suspect as they may be—shared. Or maybe it was what Oleksei had once accused him of being, a cockeyed optimist. Or was it “blind optimist”?

  Now he gazed out the front windows of the restaurant, watching the grim-faced customers standing in tight clusters, their breath steaming in the cold night air, and wondered if his optimism was in fact unwarranted. A restaurant of thirty or so people who’d just twenty minutes earlier watched a man’s brains get blown out the side of his skull, and not a one would probably lift a finger to help them catch the killer.

  “True, but you never know,” Rosikhina replied. “Better to ask and be surprised than the converse, don’t you think?”

  Oleksei shrugged and smiled as only a Russian fatalist can. What can you do? Not much excited Oleksei; his composure was as permanent as the cigarette he seemed to always be smoking.

  Then again, on rare occasions a few useful witness details would inadvertently slip through and give them something to pick at. More often, though, the statements were vague or contradictory, or both, leaving investigators with nothing but what they could glean from the body or bodies left behind.

  “Besides,” Rosikhina said, “without all those useless witness statements to process, we won’t have four glorious hours of paperwork and bad coffee ahead of us.”

  “Four hours? If we’re lucky.”

  “Damn it, where’s the coroner?”

  Until the victim was officially pronounced dead, the body would remain where it was, dead and glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.