Moscow Sting (28 page)
W
HEN LOGAN RECEIVED BURT’S
call at just after nine o’clock that morning, he was about to leave the service apartment. Burt’s instructions not to come in afforded him a wave of relief. He would need no excuses now.
How long did this hiatus in Burt’s requirements give him? Twenty-four hours if he were lucky. Time enough to get out of the country, in any case, and be well clear by the time the hue and cry began.
He had a plan, ill-formed but becoming clearer through the sleepless hours of the passing night.
When a triumphant Larry had shown him Anna’s note the day before, and Burt had explained that she knew, it had almost broken him. What he wanted most of all was to speak with her. But he knew also that it was impossible now. His mind raged with grief, with guilt, and with a desperation to see her and to explain. But he knew it would be useless. And so the plan had formed. It was all that came to him in the night, and its clarity was what he hung on to. In the turmoil of his rage at himself, it was the only thing he could do. It was his road to absolution.
He didn’t pack much, even in the small bag he had; he took a very expensive suit, that was all. Otherwise he took roubles that were still part of his emergency pack. Anything else, he could buy where he was going.
He put the thing he would most need in the pocket of his jacket—the spare, unused passport in the false name that would guarantee his anonymity for long enough.
Then he left the functional service apartment with its soulless air of other anonymous people like himself, other empty lives like his own who had passed through.
He walked to Pennsylvania Station and took the train northwards that linked to Toronto. There would be no record of his departure from American soil. From Canada, he could be in Moscow almost before they even knew he’d disappeared.
As he sat on the train that ground its way northwards, he made notes, to be destroyed later certainly, but for now a guide through his mind, befuddled from sleeplessness and despair.
It was the unexpected invitation from Adrian the evening before that had opened the door to his plan. Over dinner at a chic Italian restaurant uptown, Adrian—supremely confident, arrogant in his expectations—had not so gently pumped him for anything that might be useful concerning Burt’s operation. Logan had demurred on the issues that were classified, but in the course of the evening Adrian revealed to Logan the name of a man.
He was a man Adrian was after himself, it seemed, and now he was the man Logan would hunt. Adrian had given Logan the man’s current occupation—or at least one of his no doubt many occupations.
It never occurred to Logan that Adrian had deliberately given him the name of the man, for his own reasons.
And then, back at his apartment, Logan had obsessively pursued his own enquiries, while New York slept and it was daytime in the East. In Logan’s fourth phone call of four, made at just after five o’clock that morning, he had finally located an old source of his, a Russian now residing in Cyprus. This man had filled in the yawning gaps left after Adrian’s artfully imprecise description.
Logan’s target turned out to be an MP in the Russian parliament, but that was more like an honorary title than an elective post in the modern Russia. That was his reward from the Kremlin, it seemed. In truth he was no politician; he had no history at the barricades of Putinism. He was a small-time nobody, a petty crook from Prazshkaya, south of Moscow. Those, at any rate, were his origins, and they were origins from which he’d never strayed very far.
Through graft and old-fashioned violence he had made his way into more serious, organised crime. He had been inducted into the Ismailovo gang, the Mafia organisation that controlled Moscow south. Bodyguard, hit man, bagman, and finally close lieutenant to the boss, he had been entrusted with the gang’s bigger secrets—the drug runs from the southern republics and, beyond them, Afghanistan.
For ten years, when the Ismailovo mob and the KGB fought, made truces, fought again, and finally ended up as partners in crime, he had survived the hits and counter-hits. The KGB under Putin had eventually exerted its control over the Ismailovo, that was true, but it was the control of a monarch over a distant province, controllable only with the acquiescence of his subject.
The Ismailovo had made a deal. It was a black deal of coexistence and mutual profit between a Mafia mob and the country’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB.
And all that had taken place with the imprimatur of the man who had mattered most in the previous nine years since 2000, Vladimir Putin, himself former head of the FSB, then president, now an eminence grise waiting in the wings for what everyone believed would be a third, fourth, and who knew, indefinite presidential term.
And of the many deals the KGB and the Ismailovo mob struck in this unholy alliance of organised crime and state intelligence agency, the most common was an exchange of personnel, on a job-by-job basis. KGB officers would guarantee the guarding of shipments of drugs from the south, and in return, the Ismailovo would provide the KGB, when asked, with an assassin for the KGB’s own business, in order to keep the intelligence service’s own hands notionally clean. And so the square of mob violence fitted the circle of the Russian state’s needs.
Such a man was Grigory Byko, an Ismailovo mobster who had purchased a law degree, a killer first for the gang and finally for the state. Bykov, Adrian had told Logan, was Finn’s murderer.
On the train northward, Logan surveyed his options. Moscow was the only possibility. Bykov never left Moscow if he could help it. His membership of parliament might protect him and ring-fence his deeds throughout Russia, but he was still, essentially, a small-time city crook at heart. The trip to Paris to end Finn’s life had been the only time he’d ever ventured abroad.
Logan had learned from his Cyprus contact that nowadays Bykov owned a chauffeur business with armoured cars and bodyguards that dovetailed exorbitant rides for the rich with favours for his friends in the mob and in the Kremlin. He also owned a stake in a gold mine out east, somewhere in the Yakutsk region, Logan’s source had thought. But it was a stake bought with the threat of violence or death, not money.
And, most presciently, Bykov owned a nightclub in the Patriarshiye Ponds, a plush area in downtown Moscow, to which the rich and famous flocked for its fashion and its beautiful whores. The club was called the Venus Apollo.
That was where he would have his best chance, Logan decided, if he had any chance at all. It was either that, or meet his own death—and his absolution lay in either outcome.
In Toronto he withdrew $100,000 in cash from an operational account. Then, on the flight to London and again on the three-hour trip to Kiev, he slept. He needed rest after the night before and before the task that lay ahead.
There was no visa requirement to enter Ukraine, and no fingerprint analysis in either stopover. Logan exulted in his plan. And God bless the Europeans.
He took a short internal flight from Kiev to the small Ukrainian town of Sumy up in the northeast of the country, bordering Russia. It was empty land, with fewer people and police than the border areas farther south, in the Donetsk.
In a cheap clothes shop in a backstreet of Sumy, he bought a set of workman’s overalls, boots, and a cap, as well as a fur hat and a thick coat. From Sumy he took a bus in the direction of L’gov on the Russian side, but disembarked a few miles from the border. When night had fallen, around five in the afternoon, he began to walk. With every step he took towards the enemy, he was both a freer and a more marked man.
As he crossed the dark, flat, snow-covered fields, he never thought for a moment whether he would ever retrace these steps. The deed was enough; the deed was the reward. But if he made it back again, then he knew he would be a very lucky man indeed.
Where he walked was bare farmland, bird-watcher’s country—and smuggler’s country too. The FSB’s Russian border checkpoints were strung at longer intervals on this stretch of less important borderland, but the border police, now firmly under the control of the KGB once again, could strike anywhere. What they were looking for was obvious smuggling, however, on a scale that required vehicles. Illegal trade across these borders consisted, in theory, of anything from pork fat to nuclear material. But it was always closer to the former, just petty stuff. The incentives of bribes for the guards along this stretch were not so great.
It was a long and lonely border, and it didn’t suffer from the nervousness of Russia’s borders with the Islamic republics. The villagers on the Ukrainian side were in many cases Russians like the border guards themselves. In Soviet times, Russia’s historic desire for control of Ukraine had resulted in the movement of Russian people west, into Ukrainian lands. Out here, on the eastern borders of Ukraine, it was as much Russian as Ukrainian.
And so the guards were more than content to stay in the warmth of their guardhouses on a freezing winter’s night. They didn’t need much excuse to remain at their fixed posts, rather than roaming the fields on the bleak chance of arresting some poor Ukrainian villagers engaged in petty smuggling who didn’t have any worthwhile bribe money.
Alone, at night, in an icy January fog that descended over the steppe, Logan guessed he stood a good enough chance. He wasn’t sure how far on the Russian side the border zone extended; that was his main concern. It varied from stretch to stretch. He might have to walk a few hundred yards or five miles or more once he was through, in order to be clear.
Under the thick fog he never knew the exact moment when he’d crossed the border into Russia. The fields within his impaired vision were flat and ghostly white. There was no visible moon, no features on the landscape.
Once, he thought he saw a light or lights in the distance, but he didn’t know if his eyes were playing tricks. But in case it was a checkpoint, he skirted away over the rough, frozen, snow-covered fields.
Whatever there was out there he couldn’t see; he knew there was nothing much apart from small, quiet villages, the inhabitants of which had long since retired for the night.
Later he thought he heard the sound of a car, and where the fog had drifted, he made out a copse of skeletal trees to the north of his route. He had no idea of time, or even, in the dark grey fog, of space. In his recklessness he felt immortal.
By the time the sky showed the faintest sign of change from night to day, the fog had begun to thin and he saw the dawn attempt to make an appearance through heavy cloud. By then he knew he was through. And as the dawn came up, a light snow began to fall, which thickened and blanked out the skyline, as well as the footsteps he’d left behind him.
He trudged along the edge of a field behind a high hedge and slowly began to make out the features of the landscape ahead where he could glimpse it through now thicker flakes of tumbling snow. There were a few trees, but it was mainly snow-covered tilled earth, and the new snow was already beginning to cover the frozen crystals of earlier falls.
In the distance, he saw a village, and he felt a soaring belief that nothing could touch him.
As he approached the edge of the village, he saw a farmer spreading seed for some chickens under a low, hay-filled barn. He was still too close to the border, Logan thought. He didn’t trust his accent not to sound foreign.
Skirting the farm, he came up into the village by a small church, its plaster walls crumbling beneath a snow-capped bell tower. There was nobody about. He looked at his watch. It was just after eight in the morning.
He walked on for three hours, until he’d passed two more villages, and at the fourth, slightly larger than the others, he entered by a small road that came into a square. He crossed the square, walked two hundred yards to the route out towards the east, and waited for a car.
Within half an hour he’d picked up a lift and negotiated a price to Voronezh. The driver was about his age and wasn’t going to Voronezh, but for two hundred roubles he’d take him.
Logan spoke in a thin, rasping voice, barely audible, and told the man he was on the way to hospital for an operation on his throat.
They didn’t talk on the road.
Time drifted slowly. They stopped for fuel, and Logan paid. The day never really dawned, but just hung with a mind half made up in a shallow, flat wanness that enfeebled the flat country around them. They made slow progress in the snow until it eased and were in Voronezh by the afternoon.
Logan offered to buy the driver a meal. He was starving, but he also needed one more thing from the man before he left. While they ate in silence, the man drank a few beers. When he went to the toilet at the back of the café, Logan removed the man’s wallet from a jacket hung over the back of his chair and slipped out his identity card, pocketing it. He replaced the wallet and, paying for the meal, thanked the man and told him he was going to look for a hotel.
He walked to the railway station by back routes, in the unlikely event the man would check his wallet and come looking for him. When he bought a ticket to Moscow, the ticket collector barely looked at his new card. He waited for an hour before the train pulled in.
In his exhaustion, he was elated. He felt the light-headedness of supreme, unreal optimism. He knew he would succeed.
O
N THE SECOND DAY
of Logan’s disappearance, Burt knew what Logan was going to do. Concealed beneath his usual jovial good humour, Anna detected, if not self-criticism, then a sense of sorrow that a protégé was on the course of self-destruction. Burt had tried with his great energy and expansiveness to guide Logan away from rash, impulsive behaviour, but it seemed that even his powers had not been enough.
“Logan is a loser,” he pronounced with unusual cruelty and, as usual with Burt, brought his focus to bear on what was possible; Mikhail and, most vitally, Icarus.
Marcie, despite her months of increasing conflict with Logan, was anxious, while Larry’s only reaction seemed to be a sense of frustration that it wasn’t going to be him who dealt Logan some physical harm.
“It’s the last we see of him,” he’d said to Anna with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.
For herself, Anna was surprised at her reaction to Logan’s disappearance, and Logan would have been pleased if he’d known. Untroubled by her night of physical intimacy with him, she felt once more a fragile link between Logan and Finn. While Finn would never have sold anyone down the river as Logan had done, let alone a small child, what seemed about to become Logan’s final act on this earth had the heroic madness that had characterised Finn’s own end.
It was Adrian who, under questioning from Burt, had given Burt the information that led to his conclusion about Logan’s aim. When Adrian, recounting their discussion on the night before Logan disappeared, told Burt that he had given Logan the identity of Finn’s killer, Burt picked out this element of their conversation alone for analysis.
Adrian was a shit, he thought privately. He’d known just what he was doing when he gave Logan the name. He had found a shattered man and driven a stake right through the defenceless cracks of Logan’s mind.
But despite his fury with Adrian, Burt dismissed Logan now, and any further discussion about him. They—everybody—was to get on with the matter in hand, and with no further distractions.
The first task was for Anna to check the dead drop that she had arranged with Vladimir. With his arms opened expansively wide in what looked like an impersonation of a variety club performer, Burt fulsomely agreed that she should leave the apartment alone to make this contact.
The drop was only a few streets away from the apartment, and he wished her to know that in this, she was free. But behind this munificence, and as always with Burt, strategy was everything. His purpose was to reassure her that in the forthcoming meeting with Mikhail—the crucial meeting—she would be equally her own master. Burt wished to set a precedent.
She arrived at the café called Ganymede late one morning when the sun was making a brief appearance through heavy clouds, which looked like they were going to win the day. The café was a student hangout, and she bought a coffee in a queue of sleepy-eyed youths carrying jute shoulder bags and with woolly hats pulled half down over their pale faces. Then she perused the rows of books in stacks by the window at the front, overlooking the street. She found the copy of Defoe, looked at the page they’d agreed, moved eleven pages on, and found a note on the page. On the back was written in pencil, “I like your invitation.” Then there was a time and a date. Vladimir’s proposal was to meet again, a week from now, and with three days added, that made ten days.
Perhaps he needed time to collect material for his initial offering to the Americans. Or maybe, she thought, it was a period for him to say good-bye to everything he knew.
Leaving the café, she returned to the apartments. There was a general air of jubilation that Vladimir, albeit the second string of their operations, was yielding fruit. Burt was particularly pleased. He seemed to take it as sign that everything else he’d planned was going to fall into place.
Mikhail had insisted that Anna meet him for the second time in Washington, D.C. It was assumed that another trip to New York was too high a risk for him.
Once again, the team was to decamp, to be flown down to another of Burt’s safe houses in the capital.
It was two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, and Mikhail had chosen the day of the inauguration itself for their meeting.
Burt, with Dupont alone now included in the knowledge of the meeting, professed himself to be in two minds about the choice. On the one hand, the million or more people who were expected to arrive at the capital and greet the new era was cover of a kind that might well provide enough confusion for a meeting. On the other side there were hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers stacked in a ring around the central procession and presidential celebrations.
But he accepted that the meeting was set in stone, and he trusted Mikhail’s instincts.
All Anna would say was, “The focus of everyone will be inwards—the law, the FBI, the CIA, everybody.”
From this Burt guessed that the meeting would not be in the centre of the city itself, but outside the perimeter of events. Everyone, both literally and metaphorically, would be looking the other way.
The wooden house in the chic Washington neighbourhood of Georgetown was another tour de force in Burt’s collection of classic American properties. To Anna, they now seemed almost like a separate project of Burt’s, a one-man preservation society of Americana, with state-by-state attention to the detail of local nuances.
“I’m an American.” Burt laughed when she displayed her astonishment at the house’s beauty and authenticity. “I’m not a Virginian or a Texan or a Californian. I love the whole damn country in all its quirky mess.”
On the day before the meeting, just before they all sat down to lunch, Burt took her aside into another study with another fire blazing like a picture in a holiday catalogue. He wanted to run over some details that had occurred to him on the trip down from New York.
He was particularly attentive to her every need, as if she were an athlete before a race.
“I don’t like you going in unprotected,” he said.
“We’ve discussed it,” she said. “Nobody but me. Mikhail’s a fox. Any sign that what he trusts will happen has changed, and he won’t make an appearance.”
“I know, I know,” Burt agreed. “I agree with you.”
He seemed unusually nervous. Maybe it was because this was the culmination of all his plans since the end of the previous summer.
“In that case, you personally could be better protected,” he said. “What about a weapon?”
“Why? Against what? ” she asked surprised.
“I don’t know. But we’re reaching the apex of the pyramid now, and any trouble will occur around this moment.”
Was he being his usual prescient self, she wondered, or was it just nerves?
“If you’re going unprotected by my watchers, as we all agree you should, I’d like you to be armed, that’s all,” he said. “Let me have that, Anna.”
He was behaving like a father on his daughter’s wedding day, she thought. Giving her away to Mikhail.
“It’s not a great day to be armed,” she said. “On a presidential inauguration.”
“Well, you tell me. Are you going to be anywhere near the main event?” he said. “What are the chances of a routine search?”
“No,” she admitted. “I want to be dropped out of the city, away from everything. Around Arlington.”
“Across the river?” Burt said. “In Virginia?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t reply, but she could see his mind trying to follow Mikhail’s logic, and that it finally approved.
“So what kind of weapon would you like?” he said.
“Are you sure, Burt? This ups the risks in all kinds of ways.”
“Not so much. And I’d be happier. If there’s any trouble from regular law enforcement, you’d have clearance after the event.”
“Then I’ll take a Thompson Contender,” she said, believing that this might deter him.
Burt smiled.
“Not the carbine, I trust.”
“No. The pistol. I can still shoot a man at two hundred yards.”
“Then that’s what you’ll have. And the rounds?”
“Standard NATO issue. Point two two three. Two dozen.”
“Okay.”
And there it was, by the end of the day, delivered personally to her by Burt.
At six o’clock the next morning, Burt, Anna, Larry, and two guards drove the few miles from Georgetown across the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery.
“Kind of a grim place to start the day,” was Burt’s comment.
It was dark as they left, but the day seemed to be dawning without rain or snow for the new president.
At her direction, they halted the Humvee—another in Burt’s stable of outsized American vehicles—about half a mile from the main gates of the cemetery. Burt laid his hand on her arm and told her they would be in the vicinity whenever she called.
He’d insisted she take a cell phone, which she didn’t trust, but she acquiesced in the knowledge that she could check it for bugs before she went anywhere near the rendezvous.
Then she began the long walk away from the vehicle, feeling the eyes of all four of them boring into her back, like dogs left behind on a promised walk.
After a few minutes she disappeared around a bend in the road.
She was carrying a small backpack over her shoulders and wore a long coat, boots, and a felt hat. The pistol was wrapped in clothing inside the pack.
When she’d walked for a mile, past the main entrance to the cemetery, she found the kind of place she was looking for. Everything now had to be improvised until she reached the rendezvous.
It was a small, neat mall, which would be closed for the national holiday. She skirted across the front of it and made her way around to the rear, watching for cameras, until she was out of sight from the road.
Behind the mall there was a delivery yard, and behind that, a high wall against theft.
She kept to the outside of the wall, where the dulled winter grey of grass offered a slice of neat wasteland, until she found a niche where the wall doglegged to the left; from here there was no view apart from straight out.
Checking that there was nobody on this piece of ground, she then dismantled the phone, examined it for a positioning device, and, when she was satisfied there was none, reassembled it. As long as she left it switched off, she’d be untraceable.
She then stripped off her coat, trousers, boots, and jacket until she stood in just her jogging clothes. She took jogging shoes from the pack and then unwrapped the gun from a fleece jacket and removed the firing pin for safety. She slung it under her armpit with a sling they’d concocted the night before that gave it an easy draw, and strapped it again around her body. She wore the baggy fleece over the top.
Then she turned the backpack inside out, so that it became the orange colour of the inside, instead of grey. She refilled it with the clothes she’d removed, put it on her back again, and pulled a woollen hat over her head, tucking her hair away completely. When she was satisfied that she was a different person from the one who had stepped out of the car, she checked the ground ahead from the niche in the wall. Content that she was alone, she began to run, away from the rear of the mall, across a small park, and into a residential street that ended in a cul de sac on the far side of the wasteland.
She checked her watch as she ran and saw that it was coming up to seven in the morning. It was about two miles to the rendezvous, she reckoned. She’d be there with plenty of time to spare, but it was necessary to obscure the time of her meeting with Mikhail from Burt and the others as much as possible.
She ran along neat streets in the grey morning and guessed that the people in cars, mostly families, were driving into the capital early to get the best view of the new president and settle in for a long wait. The presidential procession wasn’t taking place until after lunch.
And the further she ran away from the great events of the day, the more she appreciated Mikhail’s rendezvous. Everyone who wasn’t in front of their television sets was heading away from here, in the opposite direction, towards the city.
The Glencarlyn Park was an area of clumps of trees and broad lawns of about a hundred acres. There was a one-storey stone replica building at the north side of the park, which had pillars along the front of it, in some kind of antebellum style. It was the type of folly you might find in the grounds of an English stately home. The gardens, grey and brown in the colourless January light, were laid out in a piece of gentle landscaping that spoke of informality. Couples might stroll here on summer evenings, families sit on the grass and picnic. It was a small, unnoticed place, close enough to the city without having to make an expedition.
She stopped at a wooden sign that spelled out the park’s rules, but without really seeing them. Her eyes were alert to the area around her—movements, any figures who appeared, then reappeared. But she saw nobody. Even the joggers were taking it easy this early in the morning on a national holiday.
She ran once around the park, checking on the position of the pillared stone building and leaving it well to the north of her path. Then she exited at the eastern entrance and sat on a bench in the street, seeing the cars that passed without looking at them, noting their number plates and colours and brands.
She held a good two dozen of them in her mind before she got up and walked into a small coffee shop on the far side of the street that had decided to remain open for the day.
After buying a coffee, she picked up a daily paper from a shelf and leafed through it, glancing up from time to time at the television high up in the corner of the wall, where CNN was already beginning its coverage of the day, and already trying to string out information that would be repeated a dozen times. Sipping the coffee, Anna watched the street and checked her watch for the final time.
In the bathroom, she fixed the firing pin of the pistol into its position, checked the ease of draw, and zipped the baggy fleece jacket over it once again. She put the pack back on her shoulders and left the café, deciding to walk now. She saw her breath in the cold air and felt the damp on her skin, but it was going to be a day without rain.