Duel of Assassins (10 page)

Inevitably the free-floating spell was broken, and Marcus
was plunged back into his familiar self. The body needed sleep. And Marcus was
still not ready to embrace the samurai way of death.

As he reached out to unzip the sleeping bag, he saw an
approaching figure silhouetted against the backlit tent fabric. Someone from
the next caravan, coming over to invite him to a party? For heavy-metal sounds
continued to thud into the night from that direction.

Then an arm separated from the man-shape, revealing the
stark outline of a large knife.

Electricity surged through Marcus, raising the hairs on his
scalp, the back of his neck and forearms. This was no apparition of death.
Somebody was out there, coming to kill him!

He watched, barely breathing, as the thrown shadow loomed
larger and blacker against the red fabric. The hard-rock din provided pounding
syncopation to Marcus’ hammering heartbeat. The dark figure flowed onward,
sliding like a black tide across the tent, stopping directly above him, the
huge knife poised to strike.

Marcus held his breath.

The man grunted and the tent ripped open, the blade slicing
down and burying itself in the sleeping bag and earth below—right where Marcus’
torso should have been. Then the tent collapsed as the figure fell into it.

Now! Marcus sprang forward and grappled his assailant
through the nylon fabric. The man grunted again, this time in shock, trying to
writhe away. But Marcus was on him, with surprise and position, sliding behind
the torso and pinning both arms, then cocooning the struggling body in tent
fabric. There was an instant when the other could have cried out for help, and
did not. Marcus exulted. A lone assassin, then, and surely doomed as Marcus
tightened the nylon noose, constricting the head, throttling the neck.

The body began to wrench violently under him, emitting the
glottal stops of suffocation. Marcus held on fiercely, yanking the fabric
tighter, then vising his own hands to crush the windpipe as they thrashed
together across the ground.

All at once his opponent’s struggles ceased, the muscles
going slack. The body collapsed beneath him, vented an abrupt foulness of
trapped gases.

Marcus sat back, reared his head and gorged on oxygen,
blinking up at the faint smear of light that was the Milky Way. Music continued
to thud nearby, as though nothing had happened. Marcus recognized an Abba
oldie, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Slowly he unwound the corpse from its nylon
shroud, fumbled and found his flashlight, knew even before its beam played over
the grizzled mustache who the assassin was.

So, Walter had decided to pass up Munich’s fleshpots
tonight.
Surprise, old man. You were not my death, after all. I was yours.

Marcus moved the beam of light down to the lifeless hand,
toward a pale gleam of metal. Marcus tugged, but the steel ring was stuck tight
on the fleshy forefinger. But there was more than one way to skin a traitor.
Marcus felt around under snarled fabric till he located the captain’s weapon,
brought it into the light—and swore in two languages:

“Yob tvoyu mat!
I’ll be damned!”

Only Crocodile Dundee or John Rambo would carry such a
monster survival knife, Marcus thought. Damn near a foot-long blade, with a
chisel-tooth saw. A regular Arkansas toothpick. He feathered his finger along
the edge, drew blood. Very keen. Would have filleted Marcus nicely.

He swung the flashlight back to the ring. Then with one hand
he gripped the huge knife while the other prepared for surgery by carefully
exposing and isolating Walter’s beringed forefinger.

Wear it in health, Marcus had said. And so the captain had,
for most of a day.

Eight years before, as a young GRU officer on brief
assignment to England (gathering intelligence on the activities of supposedly
retired SAS commandos), Taras Arensky had visited the Tower of London and heard
the story of Sir Walter Raleigh. The part that had both fascinated and
perplexed him was why Raleigh, finally escaping thirteen years imprisonment in
the White Tower by undertaking a last voyage to the New World, would
voluntarily return afterward to his homeland to face a capital charge—and then
stretch his neck meekly upon the infamous Tower Green chopping block.

As the Boeing 707 touched down in darkness at Vnukovo
Airport thirty kilometers southwest of Moscow, Taras thought again of Raleigh,
with a sort of kinship. For Taras was also returning under sentence of death
(though now supposedly withdrawn by the Soviet Supreme Court), in obedience to
an imperial summons. And undoubtedly like Raleigh, he was prey to conflicting
emotions, one of which was a profound and sudden homesickness. But wariness and
distrust were also present in healthy proportions, backed by undismissible
fears for his own safety—and, though it sounded trite, for his soul. He was,
after all, returning at the behest of tyrants, to stalk and murder an old
friend.

And yes, there was guilt. Taras had justified his defection
to himself countless times and knew in his heart he had not betrayed Mother
Russia, only the parasitic Soviet system. Yet the Russian language had no word
for “defector”—only for emigrant or traitor. And as the big Boeing taxied
toward the terminal lights, Taras could not escape the sense of returning to
face judgment—not God’s, certainly not the Party’s, more like the collective
judgment of three hundred million souls across this vast land—which was really
a way of saying his own self-imposed judgment. For no matter what his passport
said, Taras would always feel himself Russian, would always wish other Russians
to understand why he had left. How would his homeland greet its prodigal after
all these years and so many radical reforms? And how would
he
react to
it?

Of course no fanfare accompanied Arensky’s first footsteps
back on his native soil; quite the opposite. He deplaned into the surprising
heat of a summer night and was whisked away at once, giving him no opportunity
to savor his emergence from a U.S. presidential jet at what was, after all,
Moscow’s VIP airfield—exactly like all those foreign dignitaries he used to
watch on the nightly
Vremya
news program being greeted by Comrade
Brezhnev. Only a couple of plainclothes KGB security types were waiting at the
foot of the boarding stairs, along with Hank Kelleher, the
distinguished-looking, white-haired political attache—and CIA station chief—at
the American Embassy, who hustled Taras and Mike Usher into the back of a black
Lada. Within minutes they were following the taillights of a KGB Chaika onto
the Kiev Highway and through the darkness of the city’s suburban forest belt.

“We’re not exactly advertising your visit,” Kelleher
explained when they crossed Moscow’s outer ring road. The highway now became
Lenin Prospekt, one of the central approaches to the city, and one which
happened to trace the route of Napoleon’s disastrous retreat. “Which is why
we’re putting you up at the Metropole for tonight instead of the Embassy
compound. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Why should I?” Taras said. “If anyone bugs my room, all
he’ll hear is snoring. I’m about done in.”

“So how does the Big Village look to you after all these
years?”

“Bigger,” Taras said, recognizing the high-rise complex of
the Central Tourist House on their left. A lot of cement had indeed been poured
since he’d left, the city solidifying to the southwest beyond the old prefab
housing blocks—
Khrushchoby
, or Khrushchevian slums—filling in all the
way out to the ring road from Gagarin Square, where the spotlighted titanium
cosmonaut atop his forty-meter-high rocket column still looked to Arensky as
they passed below like a comic book superhero blasting skyward. Yet unchanged
was the city’s air of brooding, provincial gloom—something especially palpable
at this late hour, with the streets almost entirely deserted and, despite all
the
perestroika
and market-oriented economic reforms, still deficient in
the random neon flickerings taken for granted in the West.

“Ugliness on the march,” Kelleher said. “Most of the old
suburban villages are gone now. And unfortunately a lot of lovely neighborhoods
farther in were also razed by Grishin’s bulldozers and replaced with more
dreary office blocks and ‘housing estates,’ before the bastard was booted
upstairs.”

Moments later, as they passed Oktyabrskaya Square on the
Garden Ring and doglegged left toward the city center, Taras got his first
glimpse of the giant, electrified red stars atop the Kremlin towers, where once
the Tsar’s double-headed eagles had perched. Moments later, as they crossed
over the reflection-streaked Moskva on the Bolshoi Kammeny Bridge, the great
citadel itself shouldered into view with its floodlit facades and golden domes
and turrets. The Thameside Tower of London was a quaint medieval toy compared
to this immense stronghold, whose red brick walls rose twenty meters and
enclosed seventy thousand square meters of cathedrals, palaces and monumental
government buildings. Even though the Soviet empire was raveling away at its
edges, this medieval fortress still remained the seat of power of a vast
region—a sixth continent, as it had often been described.

They came off the bridge into Borovitskaya Square and turned
right on Marx Prospekt, alongside the Kremlin’s west wall and the Alexandrovsky
Gardens. Unlike other monuments to repression—the Bastille and the Berlin Wall
came to mind—these great crenellated ramparts might never come tumbling down,
but the winds of
glasnost
were gradually rendering them less menacing.
Still, Arensky’s jet-lagged nervous system was slightly overwhelmed by the
Kremlin’s massive reality. He needed a shot of vodka, and a good mattress.

The Chaika now preceded them past Gorky Street (recently
rechristened “Tverskaya Street,” its pre-Stalinist name) and the gray
granite-and-marble bulk of the Moskva Hotel on Revolution Square, then swung
round Sverdlov Square on the side opposite the illuminated Greek temple front
of the Bolshoi. They pulled up behind the Chaika in front of the five-storied,
glass-domed edifice of the Metropole Hotel. Not exactly four stars, but at
least atmospheric, with a facade decorated with mosaic panels. Better than the
Ukraina or the Leningradskaya, for instance, or the awful Rossiya down by the
river, known as the “Big Box” for ts gargantuan size and general resemblance to
a packing crate. And the Metropole was certainly preferable to Lefortovo
Prison, where, as a convicted traitor, Arensky might reasonably have expected
to spend his first night back on Soviet soil.

As had been the case at Vnukovo with the formalities of
customs and immigration, the red tape of hotel registration was sliced through
on his behalf. Arensky kept passport and visa, and was given his key directly
at the desk. As he came off the elevator, his KGB escort waved off the
sour-faced
dezhurnaya,
the floor lady, whose usual function, besides
snooping, was to issue passkeys in exchange for chits. After a brief good night
to Kelleher, Taras was left alone. He threw open the windows to let in a warm,
humid breeze, decided against vodka and instead downed a small bottle of
Borzhomi mineral water from the minibar, threw his sticky clothes in the
general direction of a poisonous green-plush armchair and collapsed into bed.

Welcome home.

*

At No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square—only a few long blocks and one
Metro stop north of Red Square—stands a massive red-granite and ocher-stucco
structure. Actually this monstrosity, which fills the square’s entire
northeastern side, is composed of two buildings haphazardly matched—a
seven-story turn-of-the-century Italianate building (pre-Revolutionary
headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company) and a nine-story extension (built
by German prisoners during, and after, the Great Patriotic War).

The site is commonly passed over in guidebooks and Intourist
spiels, while attention is directed to the large Children’s World department
store opposite at No. 2, Marx Prospekt. But the two-building structure requires
no identification for Muscovites. It is infamous as KGB headquarters, and still
known by its former function as the Lubyanka Internal Prison. Since December of
1920
dom dva
(house number two) has been the stronghold of the Soviet
secret police, the organ of state security founded by the man whose bronze
statue stands in the center of this square, which also bears his name, “Iron
Feliks” Dzerzhinsky.

During the long nightmare of Stalinist terror, the
building’s vehicle courtyards were kept busy with NKVD “bread vans” and Black
Marias making their ceaseless deliveries of enemies of the state for the
Lubyanka’s dog kennel cells, or
sobachniki
. During those dark decades,
the rococo structure on Dzerzhinsky Square served as combined interrogation
center, torture-and-execution chamber and crematorium.

But those were the bad old days. With the advent of
glasnost
and
perestroika
, the Committee for State Security had changed its spots
and considerably polished its public relations, going so far as to institute
citizen hotlines and permit a degree of legislative oversight by the Congress
of People’s Deputies. The current KGB chief, Volodya Biryukov, now allowed
anti-KGB demonstrations in Dzerzhinsky Square to become quite boisterous before
sending in the riot police. “We bow our heads in memory of the innocent
victims,” one of Biryukov’s predecessors, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had said of
secret-police brutality under Stalin. “It will never happen again. Never.”

Taras very much hoped that that was true, as he and Hank
Kelleher approached the bas relief of Karl Marx at the entrance of the original
Lubyanka building the next morning. Most guests and KGB subordinates, he knew,
were required to use one of the headquarters’ six side entrances, but the two
Americans were conducted past the sentry with no credential check, and without
being issued the usual time-stamped pass for verifying the movements of all
visitors.

Taras had never before set foot in this vast sanctum
sanc-torum, but, with the exception of uniformed sentries and frequent security
checkpoints, he found it exactly like other state ministries—cavernous, dingily
carpeted corridors, with high ceilings and oversized doors, steadily trafficked
by mostly civilian personnel. Except here, undoubtedly, the faces were more
impassive and the eyes more knowing.

An ancient elevator took them to the fourth floor of the old
building, where thick carpeting muffled their steps and polished walnut
paneling darkly mirrored their passage. After a considerable trek they were
ushered into a large office with a mahogany and tooled-leather conference table
at one side, positioned before high windows opening onto the square; opposite
was a large, red-leather-paneled desk. At their entrance, three men—two in
uniform, the other in business suit—got quickly up from the table; and a fourth
man—squat, long-armed and bow-legged—emerged from behind the desk.

This man, smiling and extending his hand, was also in
civilian attire. But the portrait behind his desk showed him in uniform,
visored cap under arm, with a colonel general’s stars on his red shoulder
boards and a chestful of medals—including the Order of Lenin and Hero of
Socialist Labor. This was, then, Volodya Biryukov, current chairman of the
Committee for State Security.

Besides being short and simian, Biryukov was pockmarked,
with oily, thinning black hair and bushy Brezhnevian eyebrows. The portraitist
had done his best to flatter his unprepossessing subject, strengthening the
rudimentary features, thickening the hair and smoothing the cratered
complexion. But darting black eyes, which Taras thought could almost be
described as merry, were more impressive in the original.

Biryukov and Kelleher were already “Volodya” and “Genrikh”
to each other. The rest of the introductions were quickly made by the KGB
chairman. The two in uniform were Biryukov’s sturdy-looking deputy, Lieutenant
General Anatoliy Borovik, and a blond, crew-cut, square-jawed lieutenant
colonel, Pavel Starkov, who looked to Arensky like a Volga German. It was
Starkov, the KGB chairman explained, who had conducted the arrest of Marchenko
for treason—an arrest which the old general had resisted, violently and
futilely, leading, unfortunately, to his death. Starkov was on temporary
reassignment from the Second Chief Directorate for internal security to the
Ninth Directorate, responsible for guarding the Politburo members—specifically
in this case President Rybkin. The fourth man in the room, also in civilian
clothes, was a Major General Piotr Rogovoy, a bald and humorless-seeming fellow
with a limp handshake; his reason for being present was not given.

They took seats around the big table, Biryukov in an
armchair beside the window—a place from which, Taras thought, he could easily
look down on any protests, or commune with Iron Feliks, whose brooding bronze
statue outside was circled endlessly and noisily by the square’s vehicle
traffic. An air-conditioning unit hanging outside one window was out of
commission; and a small electric fan atop a file case had been pressed into
service to stir a lethargic breeze across the table.

Biryukov laced plump fingers together and leaned forward.
“Well, gentlemen, shall we start? My friend Genrikh has been up here before, of
course. But Taras Olegovich, may I be the first to say ‘welcome home’?”

Arensky acknowledged with a slight nod. He wasn’t about to
express gratitude for the atavistic, Cold War-vintage coercion that had brought
him here.