First Team (2 page)

“How much money do you want?” Ferguson asked, as the men rolled on the floor.

The man he’d kicked in the groin blubbered something in what was probably Kirghiz, the native language.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” said Ferguson. He bent and propped the man up against the wall—probably a little too quickly, as the man’s skull smacked against the wall, knocking him unconscious. Ferguson decided whatever he’d been saying wasn’t particularly important and let him slump to the floor next to his dozing partner.

“I admire people who can fall asleep anywhere,” said Ferguson. He stepped over to the sink, washing his hands, then running them through his hair, which had a tendency to get mussed up when he did a snap kick. Satisfied that he was looking his best, Ferguson stepped over the local toughs and left the restroom, walking up the steps and through the long narrow hallway to the cafe’s dining room.

Punctuality was not highly prized in Kyrgyzstan, but as he’d been waiting for nearly two hours, Ferguson decided that the man he’d come to meet probably wasn’t going to show at all. And so, rather than returning to his table, he merely waved at the proprietor and slid a few bills out on the counter to pay his tab. Besides a few son for his tea, Ferguson left fifty dollars euro to cover the mess in the restroom.

A dark, inky haze hung over the street, spread by the incinerator smokestacks that clustered around the city like trees the developers had forgotten to clear away. Tall and thin, built of bricks that were once bright yellow but were now black almost to the bottom, the brick forest vented the smoke from the region’s only moneymaking industry—waste disposal. The furnaces beneath the stacks handled refuse from all over Europe; encouraged by the former Soviet Republic’s lax environmental standards and even laxer bureaucracy, the waste industry had made this corner of the landlocked country a cosmopolitan capital of refuse. The countryside around it was a repository for everything from onion skins and spoiled lettuce to spent nuclear waste. Located twenty miles south of Talas near a new railroad spur, the city had been a ramshackle collection of one-story hovels and played-out mine shafts ten years before. Now it boasted wide, macadam streets and new town houses, three movie theaters and a Western-style grocery that outshone anything in Bishkek, the capital far to the northeast.

For many of the inhabitants the fine layer of soot that covered everything was a small price to pay for relief from grinding poverty; others had never known the city without it. Anything that could be burned was burned here, and many things that couldn’t be burned often found their way to the furnaces as well. The waste dumps were located on the other side of the railroad spur beyond the incinerator forest. The largest dumps were for ash and chemical refuse, but there were smaller, deeper facilities for more toxic materials as well. On a good day, the wind slashed through the sweet, terrible odor, leaving the city with a merely nauseous smell; on bad days, it formed an impenetrable barrier to the outside world.

Today was a good day. Ferguson jabbed his hands into his pockets, practically bouncing as he walked briskly past the local police station, head tilted slightly as if to increase his forward momentum. Though dressed in clothes almost identical to what the two thugs he’d met in the restroom were wearing—dirty black jeans, a plain brown shirt over two thick T’s, a black leather jacket—there was no question that he was a foreigner, and most of the natives who saw him would undoubtedly think he was some sort of spy—CIA, probably, because that’s what every foreigner was considered in Kyrgyzstan. Russians from Moscow, French nuclear waste engineers, the Spanish interior commissioner who had concluded a deal just yesterday to bury waste near here—all were perceived to be spies in the employ of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Most visitors welcomed this perception, if for no other reason that spying was a considerably more glamorous profession than garbage, though at their heart their concerns were exactly the same.

It happened that Ferguson—or Ferg as he was more often called—was in fact in the employ of the CIA, though in the Agency’s parlance he was an operations “officer” as opposed to an agent, “agent” generally meaning someone of foreign extraction persuaded to supply information. Ferguson had a cover—he was in the country as the American representative of a small firm that manufactured gas nozzles used in waste combustion apparatus. The CIA officer was so thoroughly “covered” that he actually was authorized to make a sale on behalf of the firm, though if it came to that he would not be entitled to the sizable commission—60 percent—independent sales representatives for the company normally took.

Ferguson turned the corner to Yeliseev Street, making his way to the office of the man he had come to the city to meet, Alex Sheremetev. His appearance there would undoubtedly throw the eminently corruptible official into something approaching a panic. But in Ferg’s view panic was a healthy thing; he quickened his pace as he turned the corner and crossed the dusty street, ducking between ten-year-old Ladas and even more ancient Hondas, which here were considered symbols of wealth.

Sheremetev—though Russian, he was no relation to the family that gave Moscow its famous garden—worked on the second floor of the Municipal Order Building #2. In a cramped room overlooking a dusty alley, Sheremetev processed permits for a number of waste projects. One in particular interested Ferguson—a French-Russian project to contain and dispose of experimental nuclear reactors built in Russia during the 1980s. Spent fuel, reactor rods, and assorted machinery from the devices were processed at a site south of Buzuluk on the Samara River. From there, special casks of the material were shipped by train in special cars south to Kazakhstan and then into Kyrgyzstan, where they were buried in a deep-earth facility. The material was transported under heavy guard and carefully accounted for. But two months before, the CIA had detected a discrepancy between the radiation count taken by an American monitoring station near the Kazakhstan border and the one officially recorded at the waste facility.

Ferguson had been sent to Kyrgyzstan to account for the discrepancy by the Joint Services Special Demands Project Office—a CIA-Special Forces unit that answered directly and only to the deputy director of operations at the CIA. Generally referred to either as the “First Team” or simply “the Team,” Ferguson worked with a Joint Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit headed by Colonel Charles Van Buren, who not only had a battalion of Army Special Forces soldiers under his command but controlled a range of resources to support them as well. The Team had been created to address unconventional threats in an unconventional way, without interference from the bureaucracy of either the intelligence or military establishments. The arrangement made Ferguson and the SF troopers who worked with him essentially free agents, and Ferg was a free agent par excellence.

Ferguson had never been in the municipal building before, but he had studied its floor plan earlier, thus knew to go in through the side entrance, avoiding the security officer in the lobby. A quick turn to the left, a jog up the steps, and the caffeine rush from all the tea he’d drunk earlier was almost entirely dissipated.

Sheremetev’s secretary momentarily revived it, her short skirt riding up on her hips as she hunched over a filing cabinet behind the desk. She wore a tight sweater despite the fact that it was spring and comparatively warm outside; Ferguson smiled at the fit, then asked in Kirghiz for her boss.

The secretary frowned and replied in Russian that he wasn’t there. Ferguson apologized for his accent, then asked where she thought he might be. She said in Kirghiz that she had no idea, and repeated the information in Russian.

Under other circumstances, Ferguson might have lingered a bit to refine his accent and admire the scenery, but he knew that the two SF soldiers who comprised his trail team were probably getting antsy. So he left a business card and brochure on the desk and trudged back down the steps, carrying the slight glow a pair of smooth legs always left him with.

Out on the street, a black Lada whipped toward him. Ferg kept one eye on it as it barreled past, noting that there were three men crammed into the backseat. He resisted the impulse to throw himself to the ground; when the back of his head wasn’t ripped by bullets, he congratulated himself on his good judgment and told himself that he was being much too paranoid. Continuing down the block, Ferg smiled at an old lady pulling a two-wheeled folding shopping cart, then cut through the gas station—a special deal on A92 petrol today and every day—turning down a street lined with apartment houses that looked as if they’d been built by Stalin in the fifties, though in fact they were only a year old. Beyond the apartments were industrial warehouses waiting to be demolished for more housing. Sheremetev’s apartment was on the other side of the buildings in a row of town houses that marked the outskirts of the affluent neighborhood.

Three boys were playing soccer in a field near the end of the block. The ball bounded away and rolled toward him; Ferguson ran to it, dribbling back and forth, then passing off to one of the kids on the left. The boy fumbled badly, sliding as he went to kick it; his friends started to goad him. Always one for the underdog, Ferguson swept back and dribbled the loose ball toward the goal, marked by upside-down water buckets. The others gave chase belatedly. He bounded back and took them on, ducking left and right, then launching a bullet that smacked one of the buckets so hard it left a dent. Laughing, he caught the ball on the rebound and headed it skyward.

The kids started jabbering in Kirghiz that he should play. Ferguson laughed and told them thanks, eying the black Lada moving slowly along the nearby road. It looked exactly like the car he’d seen earlier—but then that might be said of any black Lada, which came in dozens of varieties and had been made for decades.

Ferg reached into his pocket for a few coins, tossing them to the kids. Then he launched the ball in the direction opposite to the vehicle. Two men were just getting out; Ferguson made like he was running with the boys after the ball before veering off to the left, crossing the road, and running toward a pair of squat factory-type buildings. He bolted over the chain-link fence, hustling to the right and back around, running the whole way though he didn’t think the men in the car had given chase.

It took a good ten minutes to work his way back around to the street where Sheremetev lived, and he waited another ten minutes against the alley of a garage to see if the Lada reappeared. Finally, he went to Sheremetev’s door, knocking discreetly at first, then pounding to make sure he was heard. When no one answered, Ferg decided to play tourist—he reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a set of picklocks so he could sightsee inside.

The dead bolt at the front was about as secure as any tumbler lock in the West, which meant it took him nearly five seconds to open.

“Sheremetev,” said Ferguson, closing the door behind him. “Yo!”

Middle-class opulence in Kyrgyzstan was still a work in progress and, like most other city residents, Sheremetev hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it. His front room looked like a combination bedroom, den, and storage area. A small TV sat on a pile of books perched between two bookcases on the right. A daybed with tangled sheets sat opposite it. There were some paintings on the wall—Kandinsky as drawn by a five-year-old. Tall piles of newspapers and magazines sat against the rear wall; one of them had a lamp on it.

Ferguson walked toward the open doorway at the back, stepping over a pair of pajama bottoms on the floor.

The next room was a kitchen. Sheremetev sat with his back to him, head slumping over his chest as if he were dozing.

“What the hell, Sheremetev, sleeping off a drunk?” said Ferguson, stepping into the room.

It was only then he realized there was a pool of blood on the floor. Sheremetev had been shot once in the back of the head, slightly off center.

“Shit,” said Ferguson.

He might have said more but there was a knock on the door.

~ * ~

ugh Conners and Stephen Rankin sat in the front seat of the van, Conners sipping tea from his thermos and Rankin sliding his thumb obsessively back and forth against the trigger housing of his Uzi pistol. They’d lost track of the CIA officer after he started playing with the kids and had circled around to Sheremetev’s apartment just in time to see a black Vax-21063 Zhighuli—better known as a Lada— pull up in front. Two men had gotten out and gone to the front door.

“Got a walkie-talkie,” said Rankin, pointing out the man waiting at the front door. “Think they’re cops or mafiya?”

Before Conners could answer, the man at the door knocked, then stepped back and drew a Makarova from a holster beneath his coat. Then he shot through the lock and rammed inside the apartment.