Assassin Read online

  “You’ll have to convince him differently. We cannot be seen interfering in Russian internal affairs. It would do us a great deal of damage.”

  Ryan had another thought. “Who else knows about this?”

  “Nobody. And Farley had the good grace not to mention sending this upstairs to the director’s office.”

  “Murphy has to be told.”

  “That’s your job, Howard.”

  Damned right, Ryan thought. “And your job is to keep a lid on this thing. I want you to convince Farley that I mean business. If so much as a hint of this comes out of his office I’ll nail his ass to the barn door.”

  “Of course.”

  “Where’s the file at this moment?”

  “In my safe.”

  “I want it on my desk at eight sharp. I’ll see the general at nine. He’s due back from New York sometime tonight.”

  CIA Headquarters

  It was a few minutes before nine when the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Lawrence Danielle called Ryan’s office. “We’re here, are you ready?”

  “I’m on my way,” Ryan said. “Has Technical Services scanned his office?”

  “They just left.”

  He checked his pocket watch, buttoned up his coat and took the Tarankov file recovered in a D.D.O. EYES ONLY gray folder with a blue border on each page up to the seventh floor. He’d had a sleepless night worrying about what he would to have to face this morning. And reading the material Moore had brought over, he decided that his assistant had not exaggerated.

  Ryan’s specialty, among others, was turning negatives into pluses. This time, however, he was out of ideas except one, and that was when the play got too hot you always handed the ball over to someone else. It was one of his axioms for survival.

  Roland Murphy was having coffee at his desk while he watched the 9:00 A.M. news reports from CNN and the three major news networks on a multiscreen TV monitor, as he did every morning. He was a large man with prizefighter’s arms and dark eyebrows over deep-set eyes. He was one of the toughest men ever to sit behind that desk, and no one who’d ever come up against him thought any differently.

  With him were the aging, but still effective, Danielle who’d been in the business for more than thirty years; the dapper dresser Tommy Doyle, who was Deputy Director of Intelligence; and Carleton Patterson, the patrician New York lawyer whom Ryan had recommended to take over as general counsel.

  Murphy’s eyes strayed to the file folder. “Has something happened overnight, Howard?”

  “In a manner of speaking, General,” Ryan said, closing the door. “I suggest that you ask not to be disturbed, and that you shut off the tape recorder.”

  Murphy’s eyebrows rose, but he called his secretary and told her to hold everything until further notice, then opened a desk drawer and flipped a switch. “We’re clean and isolated,” he said. “You have our attention.”

  Ryan sat down in the empty chair and laid the file folder on the edge of Murphy’s desk. Nobody made a move to reach for it. “The President must be convinced not to send an envoy as I originally suggested to speak with Yevgenni Tarankov.”

  Murphy studied Ryan’s eyes. “If you feel that strongly about it, we’ll send someone else. I don’t think that will be a major stumbling block.”

  “No, Mr. Director, we can’t send anybody to see him, unless or until he becomes President of Russia by whatever means. To do so would irreparably harm the United States, and this agency specifically. Something has come up.”

  “Who knows about this?” Patterson asked softly.

  “Tom Moore and Farley Smith.”

  “Archives?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “No one else on your staff, or Smith’s staff knows anything?” Patterson asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “What is it, Howard? What dark secret have you stumbled upon?” Danielle asked.

  “I’ve come up with incontrovertible proof that in the seventies and early eighties Tarankov spied on his own government for the United States. Specifically for a case officer working out of Moscow Station under Bob Burns.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Doyle said.

  Murphy and Danielle exchanged glances. “It was before my time, Lawrence,” Murphy said. “Did you know anything about it?”

  “No. It must have been a soft operation.”

  “His code name was CKHAMMER,” Ryan said. “Someone thought he was important.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it, Howard,” Danielle said mildly, but there was a dangerous edge to his voice. He’d played this game so often that he was a master at it. “What’s your point?”

  “His operation was called LOOKUP, and over nine years we paid him nearly seventy million dollars for SDI information. All of it black. Money he used to buy the armored train he’s terrorizing the countryside with. It makes for some disturbing possibilities.”

  “That puts a hell of a spin on the situation over there,” Murphy said. “How do you see it?”

  “We certainly can’t open a dialogue with him now,” Ryan said. “It could backfire in our faces. He’d accuse us of trying to bring down Kabatov’s government.”

  “He’s one of us,” Doyle said.

  “Not any longer,” Ryan shot back. “But if Kabatov is successful in arresting him and bringing him to trial we’ll be out of the woods.”

  “He wouldn’t use his relationship with us as a defense, that’s for damned sure,” Murphy said. “But he could end up asking us for asylum.”

  “Which we’d deny him,” Ryan said.

  “Doesn’t say much for how we treat the people who’ve worked for us,” Danielle suggested.

  “Tarankov is no friend of ours,” Ryan replied sharply. “He never was. In those days we were helping a lot of questionable people. Batista then Castro, Noriega, Marcos. It’s a big number, and most of the decisions were poorly thought out. It gave us a bad reputation which we’re just beginning to live down. If the truth came out about our involvement with Tarankov it would push back the clock, and no one would come out smelling like a rose.

  “I’ll have to brief the President—”

  “No, sir,” Ryan interrupted. “I think that would unnecessarily complicate matters. Let me work up a new proposal showing why sending an envoy to Tarankov isn’t such a good idea after all. He wasn’t all that keen on it in the first place.”

  “You’ll come out with egg on your face for waffling,” Murphy warned.

  “Better me than the agency.”

  Danielle gave him an amused look of barely concealed contempt. “I’d like to see that proposal before we kick it over to the White House.”

  “We’ll all take a look,” Murphy said, before Ryan could respond. “The President will have to be convinced that we must support Prime Minister Kabatov’s government.”

  “At all costs,” Ryan said. “It’s our only course.”

  “Is any of that file in the computer?” Danielle asked.

  “No,” Ryan said. “Smith got this from the warehouse. It’s the only copy.”

  “How about cross-references?”

  “He’s pulling them now.”

  “When he’s dug everything out, we’ll put a fifty-year seal on the material,” Danielle said.

  “We’ll destroy the files,” Ryan said.

  Danielle shook his head. “We’ve done questionable things, Mr. Ryan. But we don’t destroy records, because in the end we’re accountable to the public.”

  “No—” Ryan said.

  “I have to overrule you on this one, Howard,” Murphy said. “Lawrence is right. We’ll let the historians struggle with it fifty years from now, but we won’t alter the record.”

  “As you wish, Mr. Director,” Ryan said darkly.

  “Then we all have work to do. I suggest we get to it.”

  Tom Moore came over when Ryan got back to his office. “Did they go for it?” he asked.

  “They didn’t have any choice,” Ryan repli
ed harshly. “As soon as Smith is finished with his search, I want everything hand-delivered to me.”

  “Are we going to destroy it?”

  “No. It’s going under a fifty-year seal.”

  “Just as well,” Moore said.

  “In the meantime I’ll put something together for Murphy to take over to the White House. I’ll need comprehensive reports on Kabatov’s government, on Yeltsin’s assassination, and a sanitized version of Tarankov’s background.”

  “Will do.”

  “I’ll need it yesterday, Tom.”

  “I’ll get on it right away,” Moore assured him. He turned to go, but stopped at the door. “This business with the French and McGarvey doesn’t want to go away. How far do we want to take it?”

  Ryan’s stomach knotted up, and he absently touched the scar on his chin. “Maybe it was McGarvey who killed Yeltsin. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard.”

  “The timing is wrong. But the French are worried that the Russians have hired McGarvey to kill someone in France.”

  “Arrest him, and put him on a plane back here. We’ll pick him up at the airport.”

  Moore shook his head. “That’s just the problem. They can’t find him. Seems as if he’s gone to ground.”

  Ryan looked up at his assistant deputy director with renewed interest. Hate for McGarvey still burned very hotly in his gut. “Has he broken any French laws?”

  “Presumably not. They merely want to talk to him. He was living with a French intelligence officer who was keeping tabs on him, but he kicked her out and disappeared.”

  Ryan could sense trouble. It was McGarvey’s pattern. When he was given an assignment the first thing he did was drop out of sight. The son of a bitch was back in the field. He still hadn’t learned his lesson.

  “We need to give them all the help we can. Have Tom Lynch do what he can for them. But it’s a safe bet that some Russian has hired him to kill someone. Probably a mafia thing. Or, maybe he’s even decided to work for Tarankov, and is stalking Prime Minister Kabatov. With a man like McGarvey anything is possible.”

  “I’ll call Lynch and talk to him personally,” Moore said.

  “Wait,” Ryan said. He’d had another thought. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we hire Elizabeth McGarvey as a translator over my objections a few months ago?”

  Moore shrugged. “Is she some relation?”

  “His daughter,” Ryan said. “Find out if she’s on the payroll. Maybe we’ll borrow her for this one.” Ryan smiled. “Who better to find a father, than his daughter?”

  “Isn’t that a little extreme, Howard? She’s done nothing to harm the Agency has she?”

  “We’re not going to harm her,” Ryan replied, holding his anger in check. “I’ll simply explain to her that we’d like to speak to her father, but that he’s gone to ground. We’d like her help getting a message to him. Nothing more than that, Tom.”

  THIRTEEN

  Moscow

  McGarvey’s train pulled into the old Leningrad Station at precisely 8:55 in the morning, and he took his two bags inside where he had a glass of beer, some black bread and caviar at the stand-up counter.

  Customs, crossing the border from Finland, was much less stringent by rail than by air. Russian officers had come aboard outside Vyborg in the early evening just after supper to check tickets, passports and luggage. The train was full and they wanted to get back to their own meals, so they didn’t spend much time opening baggage, though they admired McGarvey’s computer, and even switched on his silencer disguised as a flashlight. It was bulky, but it worked.

  He’d booked a private sleeping car, and after they’d passed through St. Petersburg he went to bed and had a reasonably restful sleep, though being back in Russia again put him on edge. It was tradecraft. In the old days this was called being in “badland,” where even a small mistake could cost you your freedom or your life.

  There was nothing pretty about the station. It had been built during the Stalin era, and although it was very large and always busy, it was drab and gray. Lenin’s railway car was on permanent display track side, and in the vaulted arrivals hall a huge area had been set aside for booksellers to display their wares. They had a lot of traffic this morning. The last time McGarvey had been here there’d been more KGB officers than customers, but now everything was different. If anything, the people looked even more drab and depressed than they had under the old Communist regime, but they didn’t have to constantly look over their shoulders.

  Even the food had been better, McGarvey thought, finishing his watery beer, though not by much.

  He picked up his bags, bought a Moscow guidebook in French from one of the foreign currency shops, and made his way through the crowds to the taxi stands out front.

  The weather was horrible, twenty degrees colder than Helsinki and snowing, though it wasn’t as windy. Big piles of filthy snow were everywhere, and the people on the streets were sullen. Traffic was monumental. No one paid any attention to stop lights or speed limits. Pedestrians surged across the broad Komsomol Prospekt at irregular intervals forcing the traffic to a standstill by the sheer press of bodies. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere, many of them in shabby uniforms, and many of them drunk despite the early hour.

  Reading about conditions here and seeing television reports on the situation did not convey the true nature of what Moscow, and presumably the rest of Russia, had become. Even the most casual observer couldn’t help but see that the country was ripe for revolution. The problem was no one had any idea which way it would go when it came.

  McGarvey took a cab to the newly refurbished Metropol Hotel on Marx Prospekt downtown. The Strand Inter-Continental in Helsinki had called ahead and reserved a room for him for three days. The brawny, mean-looking cabby was in a foul mood and cursed everybody and everything in his path, cutting off drivers, nearly running over pedestrians, and even pulling up on the sidewalk at one point to get around a traffic snarl.

  When they pulled up at the hotel he demanded a hundred dollars from McGarvey who told him in French that he didn’t understand. The driver switched to guttural French and demanded 500 francs.

  “Ce n’est pas possible,” McGarvey said and he handed the driver a hundred-franc note.

  For a second the man didn’t seem to comprehend what was happening, but then his face turned red. “Fuck your mother,” he swore in Russian, and he snatched a machete off the seat beside him.

  Before he could swing it around, McGarvey smashed the side of his hand into the cabby’s collar bone at the base of his neck, then clapped the palms of his hands over the man’s ears.

  The cabby reared back, screaming in pain. He dropped the machete and clutched at his head.

  “Merci,” McGarvey said pleasantly. “Au revoir.” He climbed out of the taxi, got his bags and walked into the hotel lobby leaving the cabby screaming obscenities in the driveway, and the doorman completely indifferent.

  The turn-of-the-century hotel had been completely redone a few years ago and was good even by western standards, though the service was somewhat indifferent. It took the pock-faced clerk fifteen minutes to find McGarvey’s reservations under the name Pierre Allain, and another twenty minutes to run his credit card through the terminal. There was no bellman, so McGarvey took his own bags up to his old-fashioned but very well furnished room on the ninth floor. It had a spectacular view of the city looking toward the Kremlin’s walls and towers. A couple of minutes later a bellman in uniform showed up. He closed the curtains that McGarvey had opened, then opened them again, turned on all the lights in the room and the bathroom, flushed the toilet and checked the waterflow in the sink and tub, then turned on the television full blast, and held out his hand for a tip.

  McGarvey gave the man a few francs.

  “Thanks,” he said in English. “You speak English?”

  “A little.”

  “That’s good. Anything you need, anything whatever, you just call me. Name’s Artur. Women, coke, maybe
you Belgians like little boys? Call me, you’ll see.”

  “I’ll keep you in mind, Artur.”

  The bellman gave him a long, appraising look, then left the room.

  McGarvey locked the door, then searched the room for bugs, but he didn’t find any. Either they weren’t there because the successor to the KGB didn’t care, something he doubted, or they’d been buried in the walls when the hotel was refurbished. The main thing was there were no hidden closed-circuit television cameras.

  He opened his laptop, and removed the bottom panel, revealing his pistol and spare magazines. He pocketed one of the magazines, then tested the Walther’s action, stuffed it in his belt at the small of his back, and reassembled the computer.

  McGarvey had purchased a pair of gloves, a Russian fur hat and a pair of warm hiking shoes from the department store around the corner from his hotel in Helsinki. He changed into the heavier shoes, stuffed the Moscow guidebook in his coat pocket and left the hotel.

  Killing Tarankov and getting away presented a number of challenging problems, not the least of which was the when and the where. The man and his entourage were constantly on the move. And whenever he roared into a city he was immediately surrounded by thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of adoring people. He was worshiped like a god, and his people took full advantage of this fact, in effect using the crowds as a buffer against any would-be assassin. It was the reverse of how other security services operated. But it worked.

  On the way from Helsinki, McGarvey had figured out the second half of that problem. The where would be here in Moscow, because if Tarankov meant to take over the government, it was here he’d have to come. Terrorizing every other city in Russia would and already had taken him a long way. But Moscow had always been the center of Russia. Even when the governments before the revolution were housed in St. Petersburg, Moscow was still the heart and soul of Russia. Holy Moscow. With the breakup of the Soviet Union nothing had changed in that respect.

  And Moscow had its center, Red Square.