—not much in the way of a visual signature, just a thin puff of smoke from the rear of the launcher-tube, but the bulbous part leapt off and streaked into the hood of the other white Mercedes, and there it exploded.
It hit just short of the windshield. The explosion wasn’t the fireball so beloved of Western movies, just a muted flash and gray smoke, but the sound roared across the square, and a wide, flat, jagged hole blew out of the trunk of the car, and that meant that anyone inside the vehicle would now be dead, Golovko knew without pausing to think on it. Then the gasoline ignited, and the car burned, along with a few square meters of asphalt. The Mercedes stopped almost at once, its left-side tires shredded and flattened by the explosion. The dump truck in front of Golovko’s car panic-stopped, and Anatoliy swerved right, his eyes narrowed by the noise, but not yet—
“Govno!” Now Anatoliy saw what had happened and took action. He kept moving right, accelerating hard and swerving back and forth as his eyes picked holes in the traffic. The majority of the vehicles in sight had stopped, and Golovko’s driver sought out the holes and darted through them, arriving at the vehicle entrance to Moscow Center in less than a minute. The armed guards there were already moving out into the square, along with the supplementary response force from its shack just inside and out of sight. The commander of the group, a senior lieutenant, saw Golovko’s car and recognized it, waved him inside and motioned to two of his men to accompany it to the drop-off point. The arrival time was now the only normal aspect of the young day. Golovko stepped out, and two young soldiers formed up in physical contact with his heavy topcoat. Anatoliy stepped out, too, his pistol in his hand and his coat open, looking back through the gate with suddenly anxious eyes. His head turned quickly.
“Get him inside!” And with that order, the two privates strong-armed Golovko through the double bronze doors, where more security troops were arriving.
“This way, Comrade Chairman,” a uniformed captain said, taking Sergey Nikolay’ch’s arm and heading off to the executive elevator. A minute later, he stumbled into his office, his brain only now catching up with what it had seen just three minutes before. Of course, he walked to the window to look down.
Moscow police—called militiamen—were racing to the scene, three of them on foot. Then a police car appeared, cutting through the stopped traffic. Three motorists had left their vehicles and approached the burning car, perhaps hoping to render assistance. Brave of them, Golovko thought, but an entirely useless effort. He could see better now, even at a distance of three hundred meters. The top had bulged up. The windshield was gone, and he looked into a smoking hole, which had minutes before been a hugely expensive vehicle, and which had been destroyed by one of the cheapest weapons the Red Army had ever mass-produced. Whoever had been inside had been shredded instantly by metal fragments traveling at nearly ten thousand meters per second. Had they even known what had happened? Probably not. Perhaps the driver had had time to look and wonder, but the owner of the car in the back had probably been reading his morning paper, before his life had ended without warning.
That was when Golovko’s knees went weak. That could have been him ... suddenly learning if there were an afterlife after all, one of the great mysteries of life, but not one which had occupied his thoughts very often ...
But whoever had done the killing, who had been his target? As Chairman of the SVR, Golovko was not a man to believe in coincidences, and there were not all that many white Benz S600s in Moscow, were there?
“Comrade Chairman?” It was Anatoliy at the office door.
“Yes, Anatoliy Ivan’ch?”
“Are you well?”
“Better than he,” Golovko replied, stepping away from the window. He needed to sit now. He tried to move to his swivel chair without staggering, for his legs were suddenly weak indeed. He sat and found the surface of his desk with both his hands, and looked down at the oaken surface with its piles of papers to be read—the routine sight of a day which was not now routine at all. He looked up.
Anatoliy Ivan’ch Shelepin was not a man to show fear. He’d served in Spetsnaz through his captaincy, before being spotted by a KGB talent scout for a place in the 8th “Guards” Directorate, which he’d accepted just in time for KGB to be broken apart. But Anatoliy had been Golovko’s driver and bodyguard for years now, part of his official family, like an elder son, and Shelepin was devoted to his boss. He was a tall, bright man of thirty-three years, with blond hair and blue eyes that were now far larger than usual, because though Anatoliy had trained for much of his life to deal with and in violence, this was the first time he’d actually been there to see it when it happened. Anatoliy had often wondered what it might be like to take a life, but never once in his career had he contemplated losing his own, certainly not to an ambush, and most certainly not to an ambush within shouting distance of his place of work. At his desk outside Golovko’s office, he acted like a personal secretary more than anything else. Like all such men, he’d grown casual in the routine of protecting someone whom no one would dare attack, but now his comfortable world had been sundered as completely and surely as that of his boss.
Oddly, but predictably, it was Golovko’s brain that made it back to reality first.
“Anatoliy?”
“Yes, Chairman?”
“We need to find out who died out there, and then find out if it was supposed to be us instead. Call militia headquarters, and see what they are doing.”
“At once.” The handsome young face disappeared from the doorway.
Golovko took a deep breath and rose, taking another look out the window as he did so. There was a fire engine there now, and firefighters were spraying the wrecked car to extinguish the lingering flames. An ambulance was standing by as well, but that was a waste of manpower and equipment, Sergey Nikolay’ch knew. The first order of business was to get the license-plate number from the car and identify its owner, and from that knowledge determine if the unfortunate had died in Golovko’s place, or perhaps had possessed enemies of his own. Rage had not yet supplanted the shock of the event. Perhaps that would come later, Golovko thought, as he took a step toward his private washroom, for suddenly his bladder was weak. It seemed a horrid display of frailty, but Golovko had never known immediate fear in his life, and, like many, thought in terms of the movies. The actors there were bold and resolute, never mind that their words were scripted and their reactions rehearsed, and none of it was anything like what happened when explosives arrived in the air without warning.
Who wants me dead? he wondered, after flushing the toilet.
The American Embassy a few miles away had a flat roof on which stood all manner of radio antennas, most of them leading to radio receivers of varying levels of sophistication, which were in turn attached to tape recorders that turned slowly in order to more efficiently use their tapes. In the room with the recorders were a dozen people, both civilian and military, all Russian linguists who reported to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. It was early in the day, and these people were generally at work before the Russian officials whose communications they worked to monitor. One of the many radios in the room was a scanning monitor of the sort once used by American citizens to listen in on police calls. The local cops used the same bands and the exact same type of radios that their American counterparts had used in the 1970s, and monitoring them was child’s play—they were not encrypted yet. They listened in on them for the occasional traffic accident, perhaps involving a big shot, and mainly to keep a finger on the pulse of Moscow, whose crime situation was bad and getting worse. It was useful for embassy personnel to know what parts of town to avoid, and to be able to keep track of a crime to one of the thousands of American citizens.
“Explosion?” an Army sergeant asked the radio. His head turned. “Lieutenant Wilson, police report an explosion right in front of Moscow Center.”
“What kind?”
“Sounds like a car blew up. Fire de
partment is on the scene now, ambulance ...” He plugged in headphones to get a better cut on the voice traffic. “Okay, white Mercedes-Benz, tag number—” He pulled out a pad and wrote it down. “Three people dead, driver and two passengers and ... oh, shit!”
“What is it, Reins?”
“Sergey Golovko ...” Sergeant Reins’s eyes were shut, and he had one hand pressing the headphones to his ears. “Doesn’t he drive a white Benz?”
“Oh, shit!” Lieutenant Wilson observed for herself. Golovko was one of the people whom her people routinely tracked. “Is he one of the deaders?”
“Can’t tell yet, ell-tee. New voice ... the captain at the station, just said he’s coming down. Looks like they’re excited about this one, ma’am. Lotsa chatter coming up.”
Lieutenant Susan Wilson rocked back and forth in her swivel chair. Make a call on this one or not? They couldn’t shoot you for notifying your superiors of something, could they ...? “Where’s the station chief?”
“On his way to the airport, ell-tee, he’s flying off to St. Petersburg today, remember?”
“Okay.” She turned back to her panel and lifted the secure phone, a STU-6 (for “secure telephone unit”), to Fort Meade. Her plastic encryption key was in its proper slot, and the phone was already linked and synchronized with another such phone at NSA headquarters. She punched the # key to get a response.
“Watch Room,” a voice said half a world away.
“This is Station Moscow. We have an indication that Sergey Golovko may just have been assassinated.”
“The SVR chairman?”
“Affirmative. A car similar to his has exploded in Dzerzhinskiy Square, and this is the time he usually goes to work.”
“Confidence?” the disembodied male voice asked. It would be a middle-grade officer, probably military, holding down the eleven-to-seven watch. Probably Air Force. “Confidence” was one of their institutional buzzwords.
“We’re taking this off police radios—the Moscow Militia, that is. We have lots of voice traffic, and it sounds excited, my operator tells me.”
“Okay, can you upload it to us?”
“Affirmative,” Lieutenant Wilson replied.
“Okay, let’s do that. Thanks for the heads-up, we’ll take it from here.”
Okay, Station Moscow out,” heard Major Bob Teeters. He was new in his job at NSA. Formerly a rated pilot who had twenty-one hundred hours in command of C-5s and C-17s, he’d injured his left elbow in a motorcycle accident eight months before, and the loss of mobility there had ended his flying career, much to his disgust. Now he was reborn as a spook, which was somewhat more interesting in an intellectual sense, but not exactly a happy exchange for an aviator. He waved to an enlisted man, a Navy petty officer first-class, to pick up on the active line from Moscow. This the sailor did, donning headphones and lighting up the word-processing program on his desktop computer. This sailor was a Russian linguist in addition to being a yeoman, and thus competent to drive the computer. He typed, translating as he listened in to the pirated Russian police radios, and his script came up on Major Teeters’s computer screen.
I HAVE THE LICENSE NUMBER, CHECKING NOW, the first line read.
GOOD, QUICK AS YOU CAN.
WORKING ON IT, COMRADE. (TAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND, DO THE RUSSKIES HAVE COMPUTERS FOR THIS STUFF NOW?)
I HAVE IT, WHITE MERCEDES BENZ, REGISTERED TO G. F. AVSYENKO (NOT SURE OF SPELLING), 677 PROTOPOPOV PROSPEKT, FLAT 18A.
HIM? I KNOW THAT NAME!
Which was good for somebody, Major Teeters thought, but not all that great for Avsyenko. Okay, what next? The senior watch officer was another squid, Rear Admiral Tom Porter, probably drinking coffee in his office over in the main building and watching TV, maybe. Time to change that. He called the proper number.
“Admiral Porter.”
“Sir, this is Major Teeters down in the watch center. We have some breaking news in Moscow.”
“What’s that, Major?” a tired voice asked.
“Station Moscow initially thought that somebody might have killed Chairman Golovko of the KG—the SVR, I mean.”
“What was that, Major?” a somewhat more alert voice inquired.
“Turns out it probably wasn’t him, sir. Somebody named Avsyenko—” Teeters spelled it out. “We’re getting the intercepts off their police radio bands. I haven’t run the name yet.”
“What else?”
“Sir, that’s all I have right now.”
By this time, a CIA field officer named Tom Barlow was in the loop at the embassy. The third-ranking spook in the current scheme of things, he didn’t want to drive over to Dzerzhinskiy Square himself, but he did the next best thing. Barlow called the CNN office, the direct line to a friend.
“Mike Evans.”
“Mike, this is Jimmy,” Tom Barlow said, initiating a prearranged and much-used lie. “Dzerzhinskiy Square, the murder of somebody in a Mercedes. Sounds messy and kinda spectacular.”
“Okay,” the reporter said, making a brief note. “We’re on it.”
At his desk, Barlow checked his watch: 8:52 local time. Evans was a hustling reporter for a hustling news service. Barlow figured there’d be a mini-cam there in twenty minutes. The truck would have its own Ku-band uplink to a satellite, down from there to CNN headquarters in Atlanta, and the same signal would be pirated by the DoD downlink at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and spread around from there on government-owned satellites to interested parties. An attempt on the life of Chairman Golovko made it interesting as hell to a lot of people. Next he lit up his desktop Compaq computer and opened the file for Russian names that were known to CIA.
Aduplicate of that file resided in any number of CIA computers at Langley, Virginia, and on one of those in the CIA Operations Room on the 7th floor of the Old Headquarters Building, a set of fingers typed A-V S-Y E-N-K-O ... and came up with nothing other than:
ENTIRE FILE SEARCHED. THE SEARCH ITEM WAS NOT FOUND.
That evoked a grumble from the person on the computer. So, it wasn’t spelled properly.
“Why does this name sound familiar?” he asked. “But the machine says no-hit.”
“Let’s see...” a co-worker said, leaning over and respelling the name. “Try this ...” Again a no-hit. A third variation was tried.
“Bingo! Thanks, Beverly,” the watch officer said. “Oh, yeah, we know who this guy is. Rasputin. Low-life bastard—sure as hell, look what happened when he went straight,” the officer chuckled.
Rasputin?” Golovko asked. “Nekulturniy swine, eh?” He allowed himself a brief smile. “But who would wish him dead?” he asked his security chief, who, if anything, was taking the matter even more seriously than the Chairman. His job had just become far more complicated. For starters, he had to tell Sergey Nikolay’ch that the white Mercedes was no longer his personal conveyance. Too ostentatious. His next task of the day was to ask the armed sentries who posted the corners of the building’s roof why they hadn’t spotted a man in the load area of a dump truck with an RPG—within three hundred meters of the building they were supposed to guard! And not so much as a warning over their portable radios until the Mercedes of Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko had been blown to bits. He’d sworn many oaths already on this day, and there would be more to come.
“How long has he been out of the service?” Golovko asked next.
“Since ‘93, Comrade Chairman,” Major Anatoliy Ivan’ch Shelepin said, having just asked the same question and received the answer seconds earlier.
The first big reduction-in-force, Golovko thought, but it would seem that the pimp had made the transition to private enterprise well. Well enough to own a Mercedes Benz S- 600 ... and well enough to be killed by enemies he’d made along the way ... unless he’d unknowingly sacrificed his own life for that of another. That question still needed answering. The Chairman had recovered his self-control by this point, enough at any rate for his mind to begin functioning. Golovko was too bright a man to ask Why would anyone wish
to end my life? He knew better than that. Men in positions like his made enemies, some of them deadly ones ... but most of them were too smart to make such an attempt. Vendettas were dangerous things to begin at his level, and for that reason, they never happened. The business of international intelligence was remarkably sedate and civilized. People still died. Anyone caught spying for a foreign government against Mother Russia was in the deepest of trouble, new regime or not—state treason was still state treason—but those killings followed ... what did the Americans call it? Due process of law. Yes, that was it. The Americans and their lawyers. If their lawyers approved of something, then it was civilized.
“Who else was in the car?” Golovko asked.
“His driver. We have the name, a former militiaman. And one of his women, it would seem, no name for her yet.”
“What do we know of Gregoriy’s routine? Why was he there this morning?”
“Not known at this time, Comrade,” Major Shelepin replied. “The militia are working on it.”
“Who is running the case?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Shablikov, Comrade Chairman.”
“Yefim Konstantinovich—yes, I know him. Good man,” Golovko allowed. “I suppose he’ll need his time, eh?”
“It does require time,” Shelepin agreed.
More than it took for Rasputin to meet his end, Golovko thought. Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost—and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they? Not unless you believed in ghosts or God or an afterlife, things which had somehow been overlooked in Golovko’s childhood. So, yet another great mystery, the spymaster told himself. It had come so close, for the first time in his life. It was disquieting, but on reflection, not so frightening as he would have imagined. The Chairman wondered if this was something he might call courage. He’d never thought of himself as a brave man, for the simple reason that he’d never faced immediate physical danger. It was not that he had avoided it, only that it had never come close until today, and after the outrage had passed, he found himself not so much bemused as curious. Why had this happened? Who had done it? Those were the questions he had to answer, lest it happen again. To be courageous once was enough, Golovko thought.