Assassin

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  ONE - MARCH

  ONE

  Kirov, Russia

  The Kremlin

  TWO

  Tarankov’s Train

  Dzerzhinskiy, A Moscow Suburb

  THREE

  Tarankov’s Train

  The Kremlin

  Red Square

  FOUR

  The Russian White House, Moscow

  FIVE

  Moscow

  Tbilisi, Georgia

  SIX

  Paris

  SEVEN

  Paris

  SDECE Headquarters

  EIGHT

  CIA Headquarters

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  NINE

  Paris

  Bonnières

  TEN

  Paris

  Paris, The Left Bank

  ELEVEN

  Paris, The Left Bank

  En Route To Helsinki

  Kaivopuisto

  TWELVE

  Washington

  CIA Headquarters

  THIRTEEN

  Moscow

  FOURTEEN

  Moscow, The Kremlin

  FIFTEEN

  Moscow

  SIXTEEN

  CIA Headquarters

  SEVENTEEN

  Nizhny Novgorod

  EIGHTEEN

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  NINETEEN

  Moscow

  CIA Headquarters

  Moscow

  TWENTY

  Paris

  TWENTY-ONE

  Bonnières

  TWENTY-TWO

  Le Bourget

  Bonnières

  Le Bourget

  TWENTY-THREE

  Moscow

  TWO - APRIL

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Moscow

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Moscow

  Lefortovo

  TWENTY-SIX

  Moscow

  Paris

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Moscow

  CIA Headquarters

  SDECE Headquarters

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Leipzig

  Paris

  Leipzig

  TWENTY-NINE

  Paris

  The Polish Border

  Moscow

  Paris

  THIRTY

  Riga

  Paris

  Riga

  THIRTY-ONE

  Lefortovo

  Moscow

  Riga

  Tarankov’s Train

  THIRTY-TWO

  Moscow

  At the Russian Border

  Paris

  Moscow

  THIRTY-THREE

  Riga

  Courbevoie

  Paris

  Lefortovo

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Riga

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Riga

  Enroute to Moscow

  Riga

  Moscow

  THIRTY-SIX

  Leipzig

  Paris

  Leipzig

  Red Square

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  On the Road to Moscow

  In the Air West of Moscow

  En route to Moscow

  West of Moscow

  Moscow

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Club Grand Dinamo

  Aboard Tarankov’s Train

  Lefortovo

  THIRTY-NINE

  Club Grand Dinamo

  Lefortovo

  Downtown Moscow

  Courbevoie

  Lefortovo

  Downtown Moscow

  THREE - MAY

  FORTY

  Red Square

  Aboard Tarankov’s Train

  Subterranean Moscow

  Dzerzhinsky Square

  FORTY-ONE

  CIA Headquarters

  Lubyanka Metro Station

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  Subterranean Moscow

  FORTY-TWO

  Aboard Tarankov’s Train

  The Kremlin

  St. Basil’s Cathedral

  FORTY-THREE

  The Kremlin

  Krasnaya Prensya

  St. Basil’s Cathedral

  Leningrad Station

  The Kremlin

  St. Basil’s

  FORTY-FOUR

  Red Square

  Moscow

  Above Moscow

  Aboard Tarankov’s Train

  Above Moscow

  Trackside

  Copyright Page

  For Lorrel

  Special thanks to Tania Doherty for her kind help.

  The mistakes are entirely mine.

  The Russian constitution is “ … absolutism tempered by assassination.”

  —Ernst Friedrich Herbert von Münster

  Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

  —George Bernard Shaw,

  The Rejected Statement

  If it were done when ‘tis done, then ’twere well

  If were done quickly; if the assassination

  Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

  With his surcease success; that but this blow

  Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

  But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

  We’d jump the life to come.

  —Shakespeare,

  Macbeth

  ONE

  MARCH

  ONE

  Kirov, Russia

  Yevgenni Anatolevich Tarankov was called the Tarantula because of the gargantuan web he’d spun over all of Russia in the past five years. From friends in the Kremlin and inside the old KGB, through the peoples of the central Russian plains and wheat fields still dotted with intercontinental ballistic missile silos, and beyond, to the independent-minded residents of the wild far eastern regions of Siberia, he was feared and loved. He was a force to be reckoned with. A Russian force, campaigning for the leadership of his country the Russian way, with bullets and bread.

  He was a man in his early fifties, whose most prominent features were his eyes, which were large, black and expressive. When he smiled his eyes lit up with a pleasant warmth like a crackling fire on a cold Siberian night. But when he was angry, the fire was replaced by a sharply bitter man-killing wind that, as a poet from St. Petersburg wrote, “ … chilled a man’s soul so completely that he forgot there ever could be such a season as summer.

  He was unremarkable in appearance, typically Russian of moderate height with a thick waist, a bull neck and a massive head that looked common beneath a fur hat. But if his eyes were windows into the soul of Russia, his intellect was the engine that drove his successes and earned a grudging respect from his enemies, and an adoration bordering on religious faith from his followers. With Tarankov you either felt safe, or you felt as if your life were teetering on the slippery edge of an ice-coated cliff that dropped five thousand meters into a black hole from which escape was impossible.

  It was his vision for the future of Russia. The nation would either regain its greatness or it would fall i
nto a bottomless pit of despair.

  It was morning and sharply cold as he stood on the swaying platform on the last car of his twenty-car armored train headed west from Yekaterinburg. They’d passed through the industrial city of Perm a few hours ago, and soon they’d enter Kirov, their next target city, where the killing would continue.

  He leaned against the rail, smoking a German cigarette, enjoying the calm before the storm. The sky was overcast, which seemed to be appropriate this morning, the air bitter with sulphur oxides from what few factories were still in operation. The people here, he mused, were like the air and countryside—gray, dull, used up, without hope.

  His East German wife, Liesel, came out with his morning brandy. Like him she was dressed in combat fatigues, without insignia. “Radar is clear so far,” she said. Her Russian was still heavily accented though she’d lived in Russia since she was a seventeen-year-old student at Moscow State University.

  “Not a day for flying in any event.”

  “They’ll wish they had,” she replied. She hunched up her coat collar and shivered, then sniffed the air and smiled slyly. “It’s come, Zhennia, can you smell it?”

  He returned her smile. “I can smell air pollution. Is that what you mean?”

  “Hope, Zhennia. That’s what you’re smelling, and nothing is sweeter than hope.”

  “You sound like a recruiting poster now.”

  “Maybe.” She pursed her full lips. “Already a lot of young boys believe it. Believe in you.”

  “Better the factory workers and the farmers want to follow me.”

  “Them too,” Liesel said. “But it’s the young men who’ll make it happen.” Her eyes flashed. “There’ll be a bronze statue in Dzerzhinsky Square of a young soldier, his rifle raised over his head, his face pointed up to the sky in hope.” She smiled again, this time coyly. “Just like the Minuteman in Concord.”

  “With a pool of blood at his feet,” Tarankov said. The brandy had made his stomach sour.

  Liesel shot him a sharp look, her violet eyes flashing with passion, her angular face screwed up in a grimace. She was a direct woman who never took sarcasms well. She expected short, succinct answers. In school her double majors had been mathematical logic and analytical psychology. She understood what motivated people, though she most often didn’t like it.

  “It’s better to lose a river of blood now, than the entire country later,” she said.

  “Russian blood.”

  “Da, Russian blood, but from traitors, Zhennia.” She swept her hand outward. “Look what they’ve done. Look what they’re doing. It’s time for a clean sweep, even in the darkest corners. The filth has to be cleaned away before we all choke on the dust. And you’re the only man in Russia capable of doing it.”

  Tarankov looked at his wife with warmth and affection. For a brief moment he could see them alone, away from the struggle, in a dacha by a lake somewhere in the far east. A part of him desperately wanted the peace and quiet away from the struggle, back to a past, easier life.

  In the early days after the war, his father had been on the team of rocket scientists who’d built the Russian launch center at Baikonur. Tarankov had fond memories of evenings spent listening to his father and fellow Russians and captured German scientists passionately talk about a science that would not only take them to the moon and beyond, but would also be capable of launching nuclear weapons intercontinentally. The Soviet Union would become the dominant force on the planet, and these men, his father included, would be the means to achieving that goal.

  By day, his mother who was a gifted mathematician in her own right, and his aunts and grandfather, who were poets and historians, educated him. Philosophy and psychology were equally important as mathematics and physics. Literature and poetry were on par with chemistry and astronomy. Those days were simple, and he missed them now.

  He attended Moscow State University, joined the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol and the Communist Party, and when he graduated with masters degrees in mathematics, physics, philosophy and psychology, he enlisted in the newly formed Strategic Rocket Force as a captain.

  But then disaster struck. His father and mother had become too moderate and too vocal in their views. They were friends with Andrei Sakharov, but they did not have the physicist’s importance so they were sentenced to a Siberian gulag for crimes against the State, where five years later they both died.

  It was the beginning of Tarankov’s real education, he once admitted to a friend. At that moment he became a realist. He embraced the Soviet Union and the Communist Party as he never had before, working equally as earnestly with Gorbachev’s moderates as with Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultra-nationalists. But when the Wall fell he shed no tears. Nor did he openly mourn the loss of the Baltic states and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Instead, he began to consolidate his power base in the military, the Militia, the old KGB, the Kremlin and the Communists.

  They passed a shack in the morning mist, a curl of smoke rising from the chimney. Then another shack, and two more, as they entered the outer suburbs of Kirov which was an industrial city on the Vyatka River.

  “Just eight hundred kilometers to Moscow,” Liesel said, straightening up. “Not so far. Maybe eight hours or less.”

  “More like eight light-years,” Tarankov replied. He finished his brandy and handed the glass to his wife. “Have Leonid join me.”

  “Here,” a dark figure said from within the shadows of the doorway behind them.

  Liesel was startled, but Tarankov didn’t bother to turn. Leonid Chernov was like an extension of his own personality, a brother, a kindred spirit. They understood each other.

  “I’ll see that Colonel Drankov is ready,” Liesel said, and she left.

  “There could be resistance in Kirov,” Chernov said joining Tarankov. “It might be better if you remained aboard until we have Government Square secured.”

  “Do you think that’s for the best, Leonid Ivanovich?”

  “For your personal safety, yes.” Chernov shrugged. “For the cause … no.”

  Tarankov turned to look at his second in command who was ten years younger than him and stood a full head taller. Like everyone else aboard the train, including Colonel Drankov and his two hundred highly-trained commandoes, Chernov wore Russian battle fatigues with no insignia. They were a well-oiled team. Everyone knew everyone else, and all of their duties were clearly defined and perfectly understood. Everyone from the lowliest APC driver to Tarankov himself was equal, only their jobs and responsibilities differed.

  “That’s the whole point.”

  Chernov smiled humorlessly, but said nothing.

  “Maybe I’ll make you director of my KGB.”

  “Maybe I won’t want it.”

  “There aren’t many causes left worth your special talents,” Tarankov said.

  “Now it’s you who are the idealist.”

  They passed the railroad siding for the Kirov Lumber Works complex, which looked all but deserted this morning. Where the yards should have been teeming with workmen, only a half-dozen men stood atop piles of lumber as the train roared by. A few of them waved, but most of them merely watched.

  “They know we’re coming,” Tarankov said.

  “It would seem that not everyone is thrilled by the prospect.”

  Tarankov studied his number two’s eyes, but this morning he could discern nothing other than an amused indifference. They’d been together for more than five years, and in that time there’d been a few moments like these in which Chernov was unreadable. Stalin had once said the same thing about his secret service chief Lavrenti Beria, a killer whose cause and loyalty wasn’t always so easy to determine. “What are you thinking?” Stalin asked. “You don’t want to know,” Beria replied. “Except that I’m yours.”

  So long as it suits me, Tarankov finished the thought as he was sure Stalin had.

  They passed other factory complexes that like the lumber works were mostly deserted of workmen. The word had
spread that Tarankov was coming. They would be gathering downtown to witness what a western journalist described as “ … a revolution so typically Russian that no one in the West has a chance of understanding it. The distance from apathy to passion is nowhere shorter than it is at this time and place in history.”

  They roared into the city at more than a hundred kilometers per hour, not slowing down until they’d passed through the central switching yards and entered the downtown section where the tracks made a huge loop to the north, passing over the river still choked with dirty ice floes. The main railway station was two blocks off the city square, and as they approached it Chernov ducked inside for a moment returning with Tarankov’s Makarov pistol and his fatigue cap with a red star on the crown.

  Tarankov put on his hat, strapped on his pistol and checked the gun’s action. Carrying a sidearm was his only concession to his personal safety. But everyone from Liesel to his military commander insisted on it, and at the rallies the crowds seemed to expect it. This was war.