The Third Bullet - Страница 19

“How couldn’t I? I did some checking, and if half the rumors are true, it’s like meeting John Wayne and Ted Williams and Audie Murphy in one man. Plus, your daughter says you’re a teddy bear.”

It was through his daughter, Nikki, a TV news reporter in Washington, that Swagger had effected a meet-up with Kathy Reilly, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow.

The waitress came, and the reporter consulted the menu, which essentially consisted of meat with more meat, some other kinds of meat, some usual meat, some unusual meat, and, of course, meat. Kathy Reilly ordered some meat.

“So you’re working for the FBI, is that right?” she said.

“More or less. That’s what Nikki believes, that’s what the Russians believe. But they also believe my name is Jerry Homan and that I’m a special agent. I have all the credentials and diplomatic okays to back it up. I did meet with the State Department-FBI liaison guy at our embassy, and he thinks I’m who I say I am.”

“Wow. Undercover stuff. This is turning into something glamorous. What’s it all about?”

“Short version, I was asked to look into the death of a man in Baltimore by hit-and-run. He’d just returned from Dallas, where he’d been asking pointed questions. I went to Dallas and asked the same pointed questions. Sure enough, someone tried to kill me, hit-and-run.”

“It didn’t work out for him, I take it.”

“Not exactly. Fortunately, I’d contacted an FBI agent in Dallas, a fine man with whom I’ve worked before, and he agreed to run me as a contract undercover even though I was the one who brought it to him. It was a thin fiction, but it held up. Then it turned out that the fellow who tried to kill me was what you might call a trophy. Russian mafioso, associated with something called the Iz-may-lov-skay-a gang here.”

“Okay, now I’m impressed.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Very bad.”

“This character was wanted by Interpol all over Europe, he was wanted by the Moscow police, and he had relocated to a Coney Island outpost of the Iz-may-what’s-it empire and was doing jobs for them and freelancing. Technically, I’m here to try to find out from this end who he was working for. Not which family, but who contracted with that family either here or in New York to hire him and for what reason. I’ve got an appointment with a top Russian gang cop in a few days to try to get some dope. We may talk to some snitches and so forth.”

“You don’t want to get too close to the Izmaylovskaya boys, take it from me,” she said.

“I’m just going to ask some polite questions and go on my way. No need to mix it up with the locals.”

“Sound policy. I will tell you, and you didn’t hear it from me, that the oligarch Krulov is said to be most intimately associated with the Izmaylovskayas. His enemies had a way of disappearing or getting hit by vagrant untraceable cars.”

“Krulov,” said Swagger, marking it down internally.

The dinner arrived. It appeared to be meat. There were also suspicious vegetables, which Swagger avoided, and some soups, equally menacing. He did enjoy the animal he ate, whatever species it might have been, however it died. “It’s very good,” he said.

“She said you needed a favor. It happens that this is a perfect time. My husband is in Siberia-no, I didn’t send him, he’s covering an oil conference-and I’m sort of at loose ends, with only thumbsuckers due. So I can take you around, introduce you to people, if you want.”

“I’m not sure you should be seen with me. These people are serious. That’s why I asked to meet after dark, close to home, at a loud public place.”

“Do you think-”

“I just don’t know. I do know if you look into Russian mafia, you can get dead all of a sudden. I might have some skills that would help me get out of a tight, dangerous situation, but unless you’ve had a lot of SEAL training, I doubt that you do.”

“Not unless it’s slipped my mind.”

“Nikki says you speak Russian well but that you read it very well.”

“I can get by on the streets. I read it like a native.”

“I’m trying to get hold of some records. Copies won’t work; I have to see the actual files and try to determine to what, if any, degree they’ve been tampered with. I’m hoping you’ll read them for me. Or at least scan them. I hope to arrange it discreetly, so you’ll be in no danger of exposure. Is that a possibility?”

“I suppose it is. What are you looking for?”

“The Russian James Bond,” he said. “Circa 1963. I can feel him. I can recognize his talent, his imagination, his will, his decisiveness, his creativity. He was their top agent, and in 1963, it’s possible he pulled off the operation of the century. I’ve come to Moscow for him.”

It was another box of a building, this one much bigger. No bricks, some sort of yellow stucco, maybe ten stories tall, with all the early twentieth- or late nineteenth-century gewgaws, like pillars and arches and stone window frames, its flat roof festooned with radio communications antennas. And it was gigantic, about a block wide, a huge chunk of real estate eating up land on an empty Moscow circle a mile from Red Square.

“That’s it, huh?” Swagger asked.

“In the flesh. Or in yellow stucco. Source of evil, source of cunning, source of murder, violence, conspiracy, treachery, torture. It’s a very bad place. You did not want to make people in that building angry with you.”

“I get it.”

“Nothing military in there,” said Mikhail Stronski. “It’s all secret-agent spy shit, games in games in games, always fucking people up.”

It was the Lubyanka: former home of the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MGB, NKVD, and KGB, and now FSB. During the purges, many were hauled here from Swagger’s polished luxury hotel, the Metropole, which in the thirties housed the wreckers and oppositionists of Comintern, and in Lubyanka’s cellars, they were shot behind the ear. No one knew what became of the bodies. Maybe they were still there.

“It’s hard to hate a building,” said Swagger.

“This one, no problem.”

Stronksi was a heavyset man with a glowering face that seemed like a map of Eastern-bloc misfortune. He had wintry gray eyes under wintry gray hair and heavy bones, and looked as if he could crush a diamond between his fingers, or at least fracture it a little bit. He had a bear’s body, yet at fifty-seven he moved with surprising grace. He had been in the same business as Swagger, but his outfit was called Spetsnaz, and he practiced the trade in Afghanistan-fifty-six kills.

An American gun writer who’d come to Russia to do a feature on the new Russian sniper rifle, the 12.7 mm KSVK, had found him and interviewed him; Swagger saw the story, contacted the gun writer, got the e-mail address and a recommendation, and reached out across the ocean to another high-grass crawler, another brother of the one-shot kill, another infiltrator and exfiltrator who knew too much about certain things but would never speak of them. Stronski had heard of Swagger-it was a small world, after all-so the two men were a natural fit, having killed for a king whom they later doubted, having lost too many good friends for a cause that now seemed to mean nothing in the world, yet sought for certain recondite skills that never go out of fashion.

“This woman, she’s okay?” Stronski asked.

“She’s not of our world, which I like. No games to her. I haven’t told her everything; that’s tonight. But she reads your language as well as a native-”

“I love her already.”

“-and she’s super-smart and tough. It’ll be fine if I can get her to feel secure. Like all Americans, she’ll fear the building.”

The two sat in an elegant restaurant, called Spy for the irony (irony was as new to Moscow as capitalism), that fronted Dzerzhinsky Square and lurked three hundred yards across the circle from the Lubyanka. They were on the balcony of the third floor, eating blintzes and caviar and cold slices of salmon, Stronski throwing down vodka, Swagger trying to keep up with old-fashioned water.

“We fear that building too. A good young fellow named Tibolotsky, good operator, brave as hell, spotted for me in the mountains, he voiced doubts about the war. He was fighting it; his right, no? Someone informs KGB, and young fellow is disappeared. Wrong for him to fight so hard and end up in cell or worse. That is why I hate bastards so goddamn much.”

“The politicals were always assholes,” Bob said. “I lost a spotter, and politicals were involved. Any apparatus in the world, the politicals are assholes.”

“It’s true,” said Stronski.

“You’ve made the arrangements?”

“I have. You have the cash?”

“Smuggled in, in my shoe. You trust this fellow?”

“I do. Not because he’s brave but because in Moscow, corruption is like any commodity. He has to deliver or it gets out, and new business goes to the competition. So the market guarantees this lieutenant-colonel will shoot straight and deliver, not his own honesty, of which, of course, he has none.”

“If Stronski says yes, I say yes. I trust Stronski.”

“I am as crooked as all of them. I extend certain courtesies to Brother Sniper, that’s all.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now put your hand under table and receive.”

“Receive what?”

“You will see.”

Swagger received. It felt like a Glock 19, loaded, from the weight, three- or four-inch barrel, no 1911 but nevertheless substantial in feel and lethal in purpose. The slide was steel, though ceramically finished for dullness and durability, the frame some sort of super-polymer. He held it out of sight under the table and looked down and saw that it was a near-Glock, dark and blunt, no safety, nothing to catch or pull on fast removal. It was a generation more streamlined than Glock’s stolid Teutonic brick, and its ergonomics were better; it slid into, rather than fought, his hand. He turned it and saw the marking in Cyrillic, and under that in English on the slide, IxGroup, 9 MM. He slid it into his belt, behind the point of his hip, under the coat.