Duel of Assassins (24 page)

“I—don’t know... Sometimes.”

“Where is it? Careful.”

“Guest dacha... last one... down there... on left...” Another
gesture, in the opposite direction. Marcus hoped it was accurate. He did have a
layout, but it hadn’t included that most crucial piece of information.

“If you’re wrong, friend, I’ll come back and make sure you
never wake up. Nod your head.” But before the guard could obey, Marcus jerked
the noose tight, using his full bodyweight to pinion the now-thrashing legs
while he completed the strangulation.

Several minutes later Marcus stepped onto the path in full
KGB regalia. The visored cap and polished boots fit tolerably enough, but the
green tunic with blue shoulder-straps—bearing a senior lieutenant’s stars and a
gold “GB” for State Security—was at least a size too large. On the belt was a
walkie-talkie and an empty holster; Marcus carried the sidearm and submachine
gun from his warbag. Actually he would have preferred the guard’s SBM—a German
Heckler and Koch MP5—except it was not silenced like his AKR.

Marcus figured he looked damn good.

He also figured he had at most a minute before the next
guard passed—unless he’d been hearing the same dude walking to and fro. He
walked purposefully, not hurrying, in the direction of the workshop-dacha. A
voice squawked over his radio. He ignored it. If the dead lieutenant was late
for his next checkpoint, there was nothing to be done about it now.

He was getting ready for his big roll of the dice. He had to
hope Marchenko’s informants had been right—that the eccentric Soviet leader
spent long hours every night at Kichkine alone in his fix-it shop, like Marie
Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles. If not, Marcus didn’t have much of
an alternate plan. Now if he was James Bond, he’d have maybe a nifty
time-delayed, nuclear satchel charge to take out the whole damn compound. He’d
look back and see the little mushroom cloud after he’d swum the hell away,
having rescued the girl. As it was, he had to stay lucky. And the
Hagakure
notwithstanding,
suicide had never been part of the deal.

He moved along the path, his stony exterior belying the
hammering, adrenalin high within, just as the tranquil surroundings of this
elegant formal garden belied the fact that he was crossing a prime killing
zone. He heard his hollow footfalls on polished stones, caught the
quicksilvering of moonlight across a lily pond, looked up to see another
uniformed sentry silhouetted at the end of a long radial pathway. The man gave
a little wave. Marcus mirrored it and walked on.

The indicated dacha was set apart from the others, fronting
the bluffs for an ocean view. A white-gloved, gold-braided sentry was posted in
the well-lighted, Moorish-colonnaded entranceway. Marcus skirted it, doubling
around to the back behind a line of cypresses. There was a colonnade in back,
too, but no ceremonial sentry, thank God. Only potted geraniums, trellised,
flowering wisteria, marble benches, electric torches flickering in wrought-iron
cressets along the stuccoed stone.

And a dim light inside.

In the middle of the rear colonnade were double French
doors. Probably not alarmed, not here, inside the protected area, with all the
bristling security systems directed outward. But it didn’t matter. He was going
in.

Marcus felt his own electricity lifting the hair on the back
of his neck, shoulders, forearms. God, he loved this stuff! A hell of a
night—hitchhiking on a chopper, a raft, a trawler, a midget sub, dogpaddling a
little, climbing a piece-of-cake cliff, and now he was ready to walk in on one
of the most powerful men on earth.

He readied the short AKR, its steel butt-stock folded
forward, but its muzzle considerably lengthened by a chubby, anodized-aluminum
suppressor tube. Momentarily he wished for a 12-gauge autoloader shotgun—an
alley-sweeper, a real Technicolor splatter gun. But dead was dead, after all.
Deep in his Siberian grave, Old Man Marchenko could ready his stainless-steel
choppers for a ghostly grin.

Now!

Marcus slid sideways along the back wall, touched the brass
door handle. He held his breath as he turned it, ready to burst in at the first
hinged squeal. But he was able to unlatch and open it outward silently, just
enough for entry. He slipped inside, his night-adjusted vision quickly
inventorying the jumbled darkness.

He’d hit the workshop, all right. The place was redolent
with the resinous fumes he remembered from his high school woodshop class,
along with the musty odors of old furniture, aisles of junk, stacked piece upon
piece, blocking most of the ocean view. Beyond was an open workspace, a faint
light, a section of pegboard with tools.

Marcus tiptoed down a middle aisle, the only sound the
syncopated ticking of several clocks. Then he heard mumbling. saw, a moment
later against a side wall, the enlarged silhouette of a man—bowed shoulders,
cap on head. The figure didn’t move, apparently absorbed in its task. The
mumbling continued.

Marcus inched ahead, moving sideways past an old bellows
organ, its dual manuals a pale, ivoried gleam in the obscurity. Now only an old
monstrosity of an armoire blocked his view around the corner, but the tile
floor ahead was littered with organ parts. It was time to stop pussyfooting and
go for it.

Marcus burst around the armoire, swinging the submachine-gun
barrel toward the puttering figure, hunched over a workbench in baggy overalls
and faded red beret. Alois Maksimovich was dead meat!

Marcus stitched a deadly cross up and down, side to side,
holding the silenced, kicking submachine gun as steady as he could—not an easy
task with the enormous muzzle blast caused by the powerful rounds spitting out
of the AKR’s short barrel.

But he been suckered. It wasn’t Rybkin, it wasn’t even
human. The head burst apart in a shower of splinters, the bullet-riddled body
toppled woodenly forward onto the bench—and cold metal kissed Marcus’ temple.

Into Marcus’ peripheral vision slid the chromed-steel barrel
of a .45 auto as a hand reached around, relieving him of the AKR. Marcus turned
slowly—the .45 held steady, ending up between his eyebrows—till he was face to
face with Taras Arensky.

“Hell of a stalk, Cowboy,” Taras said, also removing the
silenced Makarov tucked under Marcus’ tunic belt, “but you just assassinated a
dressmakers’ dummy.”

“Cossack!” Marcus was stunned. He forced a grin, but the .45
still didn’t budge and Taras’ eyes were implacable. “I guess I should be
flattered, Cossack. You came all the way back here to stop me, didn’t you?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“How’d you know I’d be coming here?”

“Wild guess. Rybkin didn’t like it much, but I was prepared
to hang around the next five nights till he goes back to Moscow.”

“So now what?” When Taras didn’t answer, Marcus stretched
his smile into a grinning appeal: “Christ, Cossack, what is this? I’m your
friend.”

“You were. Now looks like you’re a full-time assassin.”
Taras nodded at the KGB uniform. “You kill a guard? Anybody see you?”

“Yeah, it’s what I do. And no, so far nobody knows I’m here.
Only you, old buddy. You going to kill me—or turn me in, it’s the same fucking
thing as killing me—to protect an old fart who’s giving away your old
homeland?”

Still Taras didn’t respond. Marcus saw the tightness in his
friend’s face, a muscular twitch in his jaw. Marcus spoke again, excruciatingly
aware of the continuing silence from outside, the hollow ticking of the clocks
within:

“Cossack, this sounds like I’m begging, but all I’m doing is
reminding you, man—you owe me! I kind of lost count over the years. Maybe you
can remember. How many times was it exactly I saved your ass?”

Taras nodded. “I kind of lost count, too.”

Marcus watched the indecision writhe on the face of his old
friend, saw it resolve finally in his favor. Taras would not kill him. Marcus
didn’t know what tipped the scales, but he assumed it was simple friendship,
and he was right.

To Taras it was inescapable. Somehow, from as far back as
the White House, he had not really foreseen this moment, but it had come. He
found himself staring over the gunsight at a man he had loved, whom he had
missed, dammit, and whose grinning, cockycountenance all these years later
still struck chords in his heart.
I missed you, Cowboy. Why didn’t you
defect with me?
He didn’t say these things, but he felt them.

But there was something else. It wasn’t the debt owed, and
it wasn’t mercy. Marcus had obviously become an assassin, but Taras had not,
and would not. He had stopped Marcus; he could not kill him, or anyone else.
Not for his new country or its President, not for world peace or even the
liberty of his sister and her family. He would not become Marcus. That was why
he had left Afghanistan.

Taras stepped back, set Marcus’ AKR and Makarov on the
workbench beside the splintered dummy, then put his own .45 beside them.

“Get out of here, Cowboy. Maybe you can make it. I never saw
you. I can’t do any more.”

“It’s Peshawar all over again, isn’t it?” For Marcus saw the
same look of loathing on his friend’s face as he had when Taras had walked out
of their bungalow in Dean’s Hotel to defect. Only this time it was Marcus
leaving. He turned to do so.

“Marcus. It was you in Geneva, you got Raza, didn’t you?”

Marcus paused in the dark aisle by the armoire, grinned,
tipped his KGB cap. “Yeah. And I’ll be back for Rybkin, too. How about you?”

“No. It’s over for me. Get out.”

Marcus was gone, a shadow gliding out the back door into the
colonnade.

I’m through with this
, Taras thought.
All of it.

He put the gun down, safety on, removed the clip. He was
through playing what Charlotte called his “dirty little games.” Let Marcus be
whatever he wanted to be. The fact remained, he had been a friend.

If there was no immediate hue and cry, Taras would sit tight
for another couple hours. Give the Cowboy a chance to exfiltrate the compound,
climb down and catch his midget
Spetsnaz
sub—Taras was positive that’s
how he’d gotten here. Starkov and Pasholikov would be along soon enough—either
because they’d caught Marcus, or found the body of the guard he’d killed. And
Taras would tell them exactly what happened. Let them throw a fucking tantrum.
The KGB wouldn’t touch him, not with Ackerman having sent him. Besides, Rybkin
couldn’t kick. Taras had saved the old man’s life.

At least for a while.

“How the hell did he get out?” Hank Kelleher wanted to know.

“Probably the same way he got in,” Taras answered. It was
the following day, and he was in the CIA station chief’s office in the American
Embassy compound back in Moscow.

“Okay, I’ll bite. How did he get in?”

“Actually, nobody knows.” Taras smiled and shrugged. “Marcus
has had plenty of high-caliber
Spetsnaz
help all along, that’s obvious.
Biryukov didn’t get the old man’s whole network. Marchenko probably kept it
locked up in tight little boxes.”

“You know they’re going apeshit over at the Lubyanka.”

 “Tell me. They can’t figure it out. Within hours of the
discovery, they threw a net over everything that moved—in, on or under the
Black Sea, including a midget sub on a Lentra trawler that had been working
along the Crimean coast, supposedly looking for an old sunken warship. Marcus
was not in the net.”

“Your fault, I assume.”

“You got it,” Taras said.

The KGB, predictably, had protested Taras’ negligence—and
possible criminal complicity—in allowing, as Biryukov phrased it, “a
world-class assassin” to escape with now less than two weeks remaining till
Potsdam. There had been no gratitude for anticipating and forestalling Marcus’
attack. In fact, for a wild moment there in Rybkin’s compound, Taras had
thought Pavel Starkov, the KGB Nazi, was even going to put a bullet into him.
“Perhaps this Jolly was not a real defector,” Starkov had said while awaiting
Biryukov’s telephonic orders, “but a CIA spy all along, and you were his
confederate.”

Taras’ one-word response did not further endear him to
Starkov, but fortunately the wooden-faced lieutenant colonel was empowered by
Biryukov only to escort his American guest back to Moscow—an endurable torture
for Taras, under the circumstances.

So Taras was alive, but decidedly off the case. In disgrace
with the Kremlin, and perhaps the White House. And he couldn’t care less. So
long as nobody tried to force Luiza and her family back on a plane to Moscow.

“Maybe you made a mistake,” Kelleher said. “Letting him go,
I mean.”

“I don’t care, Hank. I never wanted this fucking job.”

“Maybe you will care.” Kelleher slid a nine-by-twelve manila
envelope across the table. “Take a look at this.”

“What is it?”

“Some faxes we got this morning from Washington. Answers to
your query, actually. Remember those discrepancies you found in Marcus’
dossier—what, only two days ago—on his American background? Well, the FBI ran
them to ground. An interesting guy, Marcus Jolly. Only that isn’t his name.
It’s Hofstatter, Eric Llewellyn Hofstatter. Jolly was the guy from Wichita,
whose washed-out elementary school picture you saw at the Lubyanka. There’s
better pictures of both of ’em in here, and you’ll recognize who’s who. They
were both born the same year—1957—both blond, blue-eyed, slim Midwestern kids.
Hofstatter’s the guy from Illinois who left home—”

“After his grandparents were killed in a fire.”

“Yeah, a fire he was wanted for questioning about. A
backyard kiln exploded, fire spread to the house, but the old couple never got
out. The Hofstatter kid claimed the grandmother used to keep the burners real
low during the drying-out phase, so the clay wouldn’t crack, and the flame must
have gone out and the grandmother relit it without letting the gas disperse.
But the police in Rantoul—that’s where he’s from—kind of suspected the kid
arranged it to happen just that way. He disappeared without a trace until you
saw him in Siberia in 1977 calling himself Marcus Jolly. And the real Marcus,
after he left home in 1974, he disappeared too. His aunt in Wichita got a postcard
from Amarillo in ’75, and then nothing. Who knows what happened to him? The FBI
thinks he met up with your pal Eric, who decided to snatch his identity—and
then made sure the real Marcus wasn’t around any more to confuse the issue.”

Listening to the brief synopsis, Taras felt as if a series
of stun grenades had just been tossed into the room. Half his life seemed to
have been blown up. He reached for his coffee, rattled the cup in the saucer,
set it back down on Kelleher’s desk.

“Hank, do you mind if I take this somewhere and read it by
myself for a few minutes?”

“Hell of a shock, isn’t it? Make yourself comfortable. I’m
going to go chat with some folks. Be back after a while.”

So, numbly and for the second time, Taras found himself
closeted with a dossier on his old comrade in arms, following the Cowboy’s
backtrail. Only it didn’t take as long this time. He was able to wade through
the sheaf of twenty or so faxes in a half-hour, reading everything several
times. It was pretty damn conclusive.

There were several teenage shots of Hofstatter. Two were
class pictures. Another one showed him in a sweatshirt with sleeves hacked off,
cigarette in mouth, Simonizing the front fender of an old two-tone Buick. The
last one was a gag photo. He was grinning at the camera while holding a hammer
and chisel up to a parking meter. There was a cardboard box below to catch any
coins. They were all unmistakably a younger version of “Marcus,” complete with
cocky grin.

According to the police files, Hofstatter had been having
frequent arguments with his grandparents. He’d hocked some family heirlooms,
used their car without permission to joyride with an older crowd from the local
Chanute Air Force Base. After the devastating fire, apparently caused by the
kiln explosion, the boy had moved in with schoolmates, collected some insurance
money. But when suspicion had gradually turned toward him, he had simply
vanished.

The circumstances of the real Marcus Jolly’s disappearance
were just as Kelleher had synopsized, and as Taras himself had read in the
official dossier at KGB headquarters—the dossier of an American defector turned
Spetsnaz
assassin. Whoever he was, by whatever name, he had worked out
well for them. The covering fax, from the FBI to Kelleher and his bosses back
at Langley, commented that the KGB First Directorate would have thoroughly
researched the past of any American defector, and thus would have been well
aware of “Marcus’” real identity as Eric Hofstatter, and the fact that he was
wanted in Illinois for questioning in connection with a possible arson and
homicide. Apparently, the FBI speculated, the KGB had decided for its own
reasons to accept the impersonation.

Taras had another theory as he recalled the KGB case
officer’s notation on Marcus’ dossier for further information—a request that
seemed to have been ignored. Perhaps the First Directorate had been overruled
by the GRU—in the formidable person of General Marchenko, who had taken such a
liking to the arrogant young American.

Taras struggled to confront the specter of this strange new
“Marcus”—he still couldn’t think of him as Eric Hofstatter; the name simply
didn’t conjure up the Cowboy. Marcus’ defection had always seemed capricious,
but the younger Taras had simply accepted it, glad of the friendship. But was
the happy-go-lucky vagabond Taras had known the kind of person who could have
killed his grandparents, and perhaps a fellow drifter?

Or had he been a grinning sociopath all along?

Taras ransacked his memories of their time together, from
Khabarovsk to Moscow, from Wrangel and Ryazan to Kabul and Peshawar. It was
quite an assignment, sifting for evidences of sensitivity during years in which
they were being turned into efficient killing machines and then sent off to
exercise those hard-won lethal talents. Where did you look? The Cowboy had a
pet rat for a while in Kabul, used to carry him around Bagram Airbase in his
beret. And, of course, he had been Taras’ truest friend in all the world, in
battle and out. Not exactly the sort you could picture setting fire to his
loved ones and running off into the night.

On the other hand, the Cowboy hadn’t cared much about the
plight of the wretched Afghans—the hundreds of thousands killed or crippled,
the millions made homeless—but how many Soviet soldiers had? Their business was
to kill, and stay alive doing it. Marcus was supremely good at both.

What else? The Cowboy had quickly acquired the Slavic knack
of waxing sentimental—spiritual, if you will—over quantities of shared vodka.
But probably so had Stalin, and he wasn’t even a Slav.

Only one incident shone forth with any kind of special
refulgence from the general murk of memory. That icy, leaden day in Khabarovsk
when Taras had stood beside the Cowboy as they watched snow and fresh-thawed
earth being shoveled onto the descending casket of Eva Sorokina, and both had
wept uncontrollably in spite of mutual resolves.

It had been the tragic event that brought them together.

*

Two days later, after a final Embassy debriefing in Moscow,
Taras was on a plane back over the Atlantic—not
Air Force One
this time,
but a British Airways 747 connecting from London to Washington.

He hadn’t phoned ahead. He wanted to walk in on her, make
his appeal face to face. But in his thoughts he beseeched Charlotte to be
there, willing to listen and judge and finally be persuaded. Surely that was
not too much to ask.

*

As Taras was crossing the Atlantic, “Marcus Jolly”—once
again disguised and credentialed as Canadian journalist Byron Landy—was
disembarking the M/S
Liapunov
, a Soviet Morflot steamer docked at the
Karaköy Maritime Terminal in Istanbul.

Getting out of Yalta had been far more strenuous than
getting in. He had slipped out of the compound, stripped off his KGB disguise,
and descended the cliff without incident. But once in the water, having failed
to get himself either killed or captured as Captain Chapayev had so confidently
assured him would be the case, Marcus faced the further dilemma of having no
getaway vehicle.

It had been a long, dark swim. He’d headed east, crawling
and sidestroking a half kilometer offshore, and diving several times to avoid
searchlight sweeps from a patrolling Grisha. By the time he was abreast of
Yalta harbor—at least three klicks from Oreanda—he was exhausted, but struggled
on, wary of the berms and beaches along the lamplighted embankment. A kilometer
or two beyond in Massandra, having reached his last ebb and with dawn only a
couple hours off, Marcus angled toward a dark, deserted Intourist beach,
dragging himself ashore along with his waterproof warbag—which also contained
clothing, makeup kit and identity papers, including faked entry visa into the
Soviet Union.

He had spent the morning lounging in cafes along the Yalta
waterfront, clad in blue jeans and sport shirt, and further concealed behind a
shaggy mustache and a newspaper. The KGB Guards Directorate had undoubtedly
been combing the area, but either they’d been damn inconspicuous or Marcus was
just too fatigued to spot them. In fact, he was almost beyond caring whether he
was caught or not, if they’d just show him to a comfy cell with a decent
mattress.

In the afternoon he walked the gangway to the
Liapunov
and experienced vast relief as it churned away from the quayside and, with a
basso profundo blast, nosed into the Black Sea. As the hills of Yalta faded
astern, Marcus stumbled down a long alleyway to his private cabin, toppled
fully clothed onto his bunk and slept nineteen hours straight, not waking until
they left Odessa at nine the next morning. In fact, he slumbered through much
of the next day and their stay at Varna the following night. By the time they
entered the Bosphorus the afternoon of the third day, he was feeling fairly
decent.

He’d escaped to fight another day.

He checked into a seedy hotel near Sirkeci Station. Not
exactly his style, but the past weeks’ adventurings had made serious inroads in
his operational funds—and the GRU would not be funneling any more his way. He
recalled with slight chagrin the fifteen-thousand Schillings won on the
hang-gliding bet from Orlando, only to be blithely discarded on the table at
Hopfgarten. Marcus would have to curtail those kinds of extravagant gestures
for a while. And with the old pipeline sealed, he’d have to give some thought
to the future.

Plenty of ex-SAS and Delta types, he knew, hired out as
security experts to multinationals, or military consultants to third world
nations. Some ex-KGB agents had even opened their own private detective bureau
in Leningrad. Many special forces people, of course, went the straight
mercenary route—out of idealism, or greed, or sheer ennui. A few got involved
in low-level bodyguarding. Others turned their expertise to lucrative
illegalities, like the smuggling of weapons or drugs.

But Marcus had his own daydream, something he’d thought
about for several years, ever since the successful Geneva hit on Raza. He would
hang out his own shingle, become a sort of traveling virtuoso—only his
instrument of choice would be a
Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova
, an SVD
sniper rifle, deadly in his hands from as far away as thirteen hundred meters.
Like any new businessman, of course, he’d have to get the word out, attract the
right sort of clients—powerful men who could both use and afford his services.
But it could be done; he had contacts. The more he turned it over in his mind, the
more he liked it. He could do very well as a Dragunov soloist.

But there was unfinished business.

Rybkin.

The Soviet President had to die. No longer because Marchenko
had decreed it. But because Marcus had bungled his first attempt. Been beaten
by Taras.

And that didn’t sit very well.

He hadn’t liked the ease with which he’d been outguessed,
the cold, contemptuous touch of the gun against his head. And then let off,
thrown back into the Black Sea like a small fish.

Taras had not been friendly. On reflection, that final look
of loathing on the Cossack’s face might not have been self-loathing, but meant
for Marcus.