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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Assassin
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“About what?” Elizabeth shot back.
“Don't play hardball with us, young lady,” Moore said. “You'll find yourself on the outside looking in.”
“If you want to fire me, go ahead and do it. But if you want my help, don't tell me lies. It's the thing my father hates the most. And I inherited the trait.”
“Tom spoke out of turn, Ms. McGarvey. We don't want to fire you. As a matter of fact I called you up here this afternoon to offer you a job in Operations. We've got a class starting at the Farm the first of June. If you're interested.”
“First I bring you my father.”
“Good heavens, I don't know what you think we are. Fools, perhaps. Opportunists, maybe. But we're not the enemy, Elizabeth. I'm offering you a job in Operations. You can take it or leave it. Frankly I think you'll turn out to be a bigger pain in the ass than your father, but I think you have the potential of being almost as good as he was.”
“Don't try to tell me—”
“Please hear me out,” Ryan cut her off. “I can show you your personnel file, if you want to see it. When you were evaluated for employment all three of your interviewers recommended Operations. In part because of your abilities, and in part, I have to admit, because of what your father has done for us.” Ryan studied her for a moment. “Now that is a fact, believe it or not. In the meantime we want to get a message to your father for the French. Nobody can find him, and I think you're well aware that when your father wants to hide himself he's very good. Possibly the best there ever was. At this moment we and the French have exhausted every means at our disposal short of an all out manhunt. Now that's something very dangerous. People could get hurt. So we turned to you because you know your father probably better than anyone else, and if you should happen to show up on his doorstep his first reaction won't be to escape out the back door, or shoot. We want your help.”
“What do the French want to speak to him about?” Elizabeth asked.
“Will you help us?” Moore asked.
“Not until you tell me why the French are interested in my father.”
“Under the circumstances her request is reasonable, Howard,” Moore said.
Ryan seemed to consider it for a moment, and Elizabeth had the feeling she was being set up.
“Will you accept an immediate transfer to Operations?” Ryan asked. “Independent of whether you help us out with this assignment?”
“What would my job be?”
“Special field officer in training,” Ryan answered, vexed. “But if you work for me it won't be so easy as translating. I'm not an easy man to work for.”
She wanted to tell him that sudden flash of truth was refreshing, but she held her tongue. “Okay.”
“Welcome aboard,” Moore said.
“My boss will have to be told.”
“We'll take care of it,” Moore promised.
Ryan selected a file folder from a pile on his desk. “You're to consider this matter highly confidential. You'll speak about it with no one outside of this room without prior permission, or face prosecution under the National Secrets Act. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Elizabeth said. Don't sell your soul for expediency, her father had cautioned her once. But don't turn your back on whatever works. She was in!
“Does the name Viktor Yemlin mean anything to you?”
“He's head of the Russian SVR's North American Directorate.”
Ryan's eyes lit up. “How do you know this?”
“We're running programs for the DI on the current situation in Russia, his name came up. Until a few years ago he was the KGB's
rezident
here in Washington.”
“Your father never mentioned his name?”
Elizabeth searched her memory. She shook her head. “Not that I can remember.”
“They know each other,” Ryan said.
“Considering the work my father did, I'm not surprised.”
“What work is that?” Ryan asked, a flinty look in his eyes.
“He never discussed assignments, Mr. Ryan, if that's what you mean. But my father was employed by the Company for a number of years. He would have been of great interest to Yemlin. I'm just saying that the connection between them wouldn't be unusual.”
“Comrade Yemlin showed up in France last week. He was followed to a meeting with your father at the Eiffel Tower. The French managed to overhear a part of their conversation and it worried them sufficiently to contact our Paris Chief of Station for help. Specifically they wanted to know if your father was currently on assignment for us. We told them no.”
Ryan was in his formal mode, speaking like a New York attorney. It
bugged Elizabeth. She wanted him to quit beating around the bush and tell it straight. But again she held her tongue.
“Were you aware that your father is seeing a woman in Paris?” Moore asked.
Elizabeth smiled despite herself. “I'd be surprised if he wasn't.”
“Her name is Jacqueline Belleau and she works for the French secret service.”
“To spy on him,” Elizabeth flared.
“Frankly, yes,” Ryan admitted. “Your father met with Yemlin on Saturday. On Monday he kicked Ms. Belleau out of his apartment and disappeared.”
“Maybe he found out what she was, and he just got rid of her. I would have in his shoes.”
“It's the timing that has the French most worried,” Ryan said. He slid the file folder across to Elizabeth. “That's a transcript of what the French were able to monitor.”
Elizabeth reached for the file folder.
“Before you read that, I have to ask you something, Ms. McGarvey,” Ryan said, his tone suddenly gentle. “Did you know your grandparents, on your father's side.”
The question took her by surprise. “No. They were killed in a car accident in Kansas before I was born. But I saw photographs, and my father used to talk about them. He was very close to them.”
“I don't know of any other way to put this, except to tell you the way it was. Until recently this agency believed that your grandparents were spies for the Soviet Union.”
“Crap,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes, indeed, it was crap, as you put it,” Ryan said. “An internal audit team is working to clear their names, but it's something your father might not know yet.”
Elizabeth's throat was tight, and her eyes smarted. “My father believed that grandma and grandpa were spies? Is that what you're saying?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Moore said. “It was apparently some kind of a Soviet disinformation plot to discredit him.”
Sudden understanding dawned on Elizabeth. “Around the time of Santiago?”
Ryan stiffened, but said nothing.
“It would seem so,” Moore said. “Amends will be made, believe me. But it's a burden that your father has carried for a long time. Too long a time.”
Elizabeth was confused. She didn't know how she felt, or even how she should feel, except that she was so terribly sorry for her father that she wanted to cry.
“It's made your father, shall we say, vulnerable in certain situations,” Moore continued in his patronizing tone.
“Angry would be closer to the truth,” Elizabeth shot back.
“Yes, angry.”
Elizabeth opened the file folder and read the single page of transcript. She could hear her father's voice, almost feel his presence in the few lines, and the ache in her heart deepened. She looked up finally, squaring her shoulders, stiffening her resolve. She was a McGarvey. Strong. Resolute. “Sometimes it's all we have, Liz,” her father told her a few years ago in Greece. They were in trouble, and he wanted to comfort her, and yet make her aware of the truth.
“We have no idea what Yemlin wants your father to do for the SVR,” Moore said. “But the French are worried that—”
Ryan interrupted. “The French are concerned that whatever Yemlin wants will involve a French citizen, or possibly someone on French soil.”
Elizabeth's head was spinning again. She'd seen her father in action, and she'd heard enough dropped hints downstairs over the past few months, to figure out what his job had been. Or at least a part of it. Her father killed people. Bad people. Horrible people. But he had been a shooter for the CIA in the days when the Company denied such hired guns existed. Her mother would be aghast if she knew, although Elizabeth thought her mother probably had an idea at the back of her head. But they never talked about it. Never.
A thought flashed in her head like a bright flare, and she had all she could do to keep it from showing on her face. Yemlin had come to ask her father to assassinate someone. Someone not in France, but in Russia. Someone who was tearing the country apart. Someone who could conceivably embroil all of eastern Europe in a war. Someone who had the complete attention of the CIA.
Yemlin had asked her father to assassinate Yevgenni Tarankov, and her father had probably accepted the assignment otherwise he would not have gone to ground.
“All right,” she said.
“Ms. McGarvey?” Ryan asked.
“I'll find my father and get the message to him, but I'll do it completely on my own. If my father gets the slightest hint that the agency is following me, or that he's being set up, nobody will find him. And if I find out that I'm being followed I'll tell my father everything, which will make him mad.” She flashed Ryan and Moore a sweet look. “You probably already know that when my father is angry you don't want to be around him. He sometimes tends to take things to the extreme.”
“We'll stay out of your way, Ms. McGarvey, you have my word on it,” Ryan said. “As of this moment you are operational. Tom will set you up with a codename, contact procedures, travel documents and money, everything you'll need.” He sat forward. “Time is of the essence. Because if your father takes the Russians up on their offer, he'll either be arrested and jailed, or killed. Something I most sincerely assure you, young lady, that no one in the Agency wants to happen.”
M
cGarvey's train arrived at the main railway station on the west bank of the Volga River a few minutes after seven in the morning, and he walked across the street to a small workmen's cafe crowded with roughly dressed factory workers and a few shabbily attired soldiers. The snowstorm had ended sometime in the middle of the night, and the sun shone brightly. A blanket of snow made the city of 1.5 million seem almost pretty. The upbeat mood of passengers aboard the train was matched by the festival atmosphere of the town. No one seemed to be working today, everybody seemed exuberant, expectant. Banners with Tarankov's name and likeness, or plain banners with a stylized design of a tarantula spider, hung from the front of the railway station, and from utility poles on the broad avenue leading across the river toward the Kremlin whose walls rose from the hill overlooking the city center. They fluttered and snapped in the fresh breeze
that carried with it odors of river sewage and factory smoke. Like most Russian cities, Nizhny Novgorod stank, but it was better than some places.
His hard class car had been so packed with bodies last night that there'd been no room to sit down, not even on the drafty connecting platform. What little sleep he'd managed to get had been done standing up. Combined with the effects of stale air, too many cigarettes, and too much vodka—everybody on the train was drunk even before they'd left Moscow—McGarvey felt like he'd been on a seven-day binge. Catching a glance at his reflection in the dirty window of the cafe, he looked as if he hadn't bathed or slept in a week. It was exactly the effect he wanted to achieve, because now he fit in. Now he was part of the scenery. No one to give a second notice to. No one threatening. Just another corporal too old for his rank, with obviously nowhere to go, and no hope, except for Tarankov.
He bought a plate of goulash and black bread for a few roubles, and found a place in the corner at the end of a long table, where he sank down gratefully on the hard bench. Keeping his eyes downcast he ate the surprisingly good food, while he listened to what the men around the table were talking about. They all worked the night shift at the MiG factory on the eastern outskirts of the city, and they'd come down here after work to catch what they were calling “the Tarantula's act.” They were all cynical, as only Russians could be, nonetheless their oftentimes heated discussion about Tarankov was tinged with a little awe, and even hope. It was about time somebody came along to get them out of the mess that Gorbachev started, and that the drunken buffoon Yeltsin had worsened. They'd lost the southern republics and the Baltics, and they'd also lost their dignity as a nation. Russians were taking handouts from foreigners just so they could have a hamburger at the McDonald's in Moscow. AIDS, crack cocaine and the Mafia were direct imports from the west.
“Sonofabitch, but even our soldiers are starving in the streets,” one of the workmen shouted. “Just like this sorry bastard.”
McGarvey looked up. The men around the table stared at him with a mixture of pity and anger.
“Where the hell did you serve, Corporal?” one of the men asked.
“
Yeb vas
, Afghanistan,” McGarvey mumbled, and he went back to his food.
“He's goddamned right. Fuck your mother,” the man said.
Someone slammed a not-so-clean glass down in front of McGarvey, filled it with vodka, and they went back to their discussion, this time about the drunkenness in what was once the greatest military in the world. Officers lived in tarpaper shacks, and enlisted men were billeted in tents or simply allowed to roam the streets between duty assignments. The situation wasn't quite that bad, but Russians loved to wallow in self-pity, and loved even more to exaggerate their problems.
After his breakfast and a second glass of vodka from the factory workers at his table, McGarvey wandered outside where he bought a half-liter of
vodka from one of the street kiosks that were springing up around the railway station, and down the broad Ploshchad Lenina that led past the Tsentralnaya Hotel and across the river into the city proper. More people streamed into the area, so that for several blocks in every direction around the railway station, and along the boulevard across the river, crowds were amassing, their collective shouts and laughter rising like the low hum of a billion cicadas.
He stood to one side of the square where he had a good view of the switching yard and passenger platforms a hundred yards to the west, and the boulevard into the city. A few stragglers crossed the street, but for the most part the thoroughfare was kept perfectly clear, although there were no traffic cops or Militia officers to restrain the crowd.
The effect was strange, and unsettling to McGarvey. It was as if Tarankov's presence were strong enough that his people automatically cleared a path for his triumphal entry to the city. Parishioners did not block the aisle out of respect not only for the ceremony, but for the priest. The same deference had been accorded Stalin in the late forties and fifties. He had saved the country from the Nazis. Now Tarankov promised to save the nation from oblivion. The people loved him for it.
A huge roar went up from the crowds lining the bridge a half-mile to the south. People streamed out of the railway station and cafes and hotels as the commotion approached like a monster wave.
An open army truck appeared on the crest of the bridge, and for the first minute or so McGarvey thought the Militia might be on its way after all. But there was only one truck, moving slowly, the people along the route reacting as it passed.
A buzz of excitement suddenly swept through the tens of thousands of people around the railway station, rising in pitch as the truck came closer, and they could see the half-dozen men and two women dressed in civilian clothes in the back. They were obviously prisoners. Four men dressed in blue factory coveralls and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, stood in the back of the truck with the eight unarmed passengers.
Somebody beside McGarvey suddenly began jumping up and waving his fist in the air. “Death to the traitors!” he shouted. “Death to Lensky! Death to the traitors!” Viktor Lensky was the mayor.
Others in the mass of people took up the chant that soon rose to a deafening roar, as the truck pulled up in the square across from the railway depot.
The guards jumped down from the back of the truck, and made their prisoners climb down and line up in a row beneath one of the tarantula banners flapping in the breeze. None of the civilians wore overcoats or hats despite the cold. They looked frightened.
The mood of the crowd was turning ugly, but although people shouted curses and taunts at the prisoners, they made no move to go after them. But the air of expectation was even greater now than before. More people streamed in from the city, choking the main boulevard, as if they no longer
expected Tarankov to need the route into the city. Whatever was going to happen, they expected it would happen down here by the railway station.
According to what Rencke had pieced together, Tarankov's usual method was to charge up to a city's train depot, send several of his commando units ahead into the city to arrest the mayor and other city and federal administrators, and rob the banks. While that was going on, Tarankov and his personal guards and inner cadre made their way slowly into the main square, while he harangued the crowds, inciting them into a fever pitch of bloodlust. At the right time the prisoners were gunned down, the money stolen from the banks was distributed to the people, and in the confusion Tarankov and his commandoes made their way back aboard their train and roared off. So far they'd met no resistance from the Militia or from the military.
But this time something was different. For whatever reason the people knew that Tarankov wouldn't be going into the city center, so they'd rounded up as many apparatchiks as they could—McGarvey figured that the smart ones had already fled the city or hidden themselves—and brought them down here to be executed.
Perhaps the military had set up an ambush downtown, meaning to trap Tarankov and his forces from returning to the safety of their heavily armed train. But if that were the case they would have to shoot into the people, because Tarankov would certainly not hesitate to use the crowd as a shield. A massacre of innocent civilians would severely damage Moscow's already tenuous hold on the nation. They would be playing directly into Tarankov's hand.
The railroad line came from Moscow in the west, and Kazan in the east. McGarvey shaded his eyes and searched the sky in both directions finally picking out a half-dozen tiny specks in the air to the southwest. They were flying low and in formation. Too slow to be jets, McGarvey figured they were probably helicopter gunships. If they were hunting Tarankov, trying to prevent him from even getting close to Nizhny Novgorod, they would concentrate on the locomotive. Once it was destroyed or derailed, Tarankov and his commandoes could be surrounded and wiped out in the countryside where civilian casualties would be limited.
It was a good tactic, but Tarankov had survived long enough to anticipate something like this happening. The intelligence reports Rencke had pirated warned that Tarankov's people were not only highly trained and motivated special forces officers, they were equipped with state-of-the-art radar and radar tracking weapons, including close-in weapons systems, rapid-fire cannons, and probably magazine-launched surface-to-air missiles, that Rencke thought might be based on the Russian Navy's SA-N-6 system, which was good out to a range of seventy-five nautical miles, accurate enough to shoot down helicopter-launched missiles or even cruise missiles, yet compact enough to easily be carried aboard a train.
For the next five minutes nothing happened, although the helicopter formation seemed to be getting closer. If they were Mi-24 Hinds, which
McGarvey figured they probably were, he estimated their distance at three or four miles.
A man in blue coveralls standing nearby, noticed McGarvey watching the sky and the shaded his eyes and looked up. When he spotted the gunships he pointed. “It's the army!” he shouted.
At that moment the helicopters suddenly broke formation. An instant later three contrails rose up from the ground, and in seconds three of the helicopters exploded in mid-air. The other three turned away from the action.
The man in the blue coveralls got the attention of the people around him, and excited shouts began to spread outward like ripples in a pond as others spotted the battle in the sky to the southwest.
For a minute or two it looked like the three remaining helicopters had broken off for good, but then they swung around in a large arc and headed back.
Now Tarankov's train came into view between the low hills that swept down to the river. It was moving very fast, and the crowds on the south side of the station who could see the action shouted back what was happening. Tens of thousands of people tried to push their way to the back of the terminal building so that they could see what was unfolding, but they were blocked by the press of bodies.
One of the helicopters fired a pair of missiles that streaked directly toward the locomotive, but at the last second they exploded in mid-air short of their target.
An instant later another of the helicopters went up in a ball of flame on the tail of a rocket launched from the train.
A cheer rose up from the crowd.
This time the remaining two Hinds turned tail and headed off. For a full ten seconds it seemed as if they would make good their escape, when a pair of rockets were launched from the train, and blew them out of the sky.
Another huge cheer spread across the vast mob, people hooting and shouting and whistling and clapping. The Tarantula had been tested and he'd proved himself. He was invincible. He had power and justice on his side. He was not only for the people, he was of the people. He was father to the Rodina—to Mother Russia—and the crowd was delirious with excitement.
People were everywhere. On the streets, along the tracks, on the roofs of every building for as far as McGarvey could see. And still more people streamed out of the city to catch a glimpse of the first hero Russia had known since Papa Stalin. But the Tarantula was even better than Stalin, because he was coming from adversity with Moscow and the entire world against him.
McGarvey continued searching the sky to the west and southwest, but nothing else was up and flying, and within minutes Tarankov's train would roar into the outskirts of the city. If the military wanted to stop Tarankov
they'd either badly underestimated the firepower aboard his train, or overestimated the skill of their helicopter pilots and the effectiveness of the Hind's weapons. It seemed more likely to him that whoever had ordered and engineered the attack had done so only for show, which placed them on Tarankov's side. It would have been relatively easy for a pair of MiG-29 Fulcrums to stand well off, illuminate the train with their look-down-shoot-down radar systems, and accurately place a half-dozen or more air-to-surface anti-armor missiles on the target before the train's radar systems had a chance to react to the attack. But the Tarantula had spun his web very well. He had friends in high places.
The people began to fall silent, until in the distance they could hear the distinctive roar of Tarankov's incoming train, its whistle hooting in triumph.

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