Duel of Assassins (4 page)

The idea was preposterous. How could the unleashing of one
potential assassin threaten the most protected man on earth—an assassin whose
identity, if not his present whereabouts, was known in advance, and on whom
both the KGB and GRU had voluminous dossiers?

For—though his frequent foreign visits and television
appearances created an image of accessibility—Soviet President Alois Rybkin,
like most of his prudent predecessors, worked and lived mainly behind the
impregnable Kremlin walls or in his well-protected quarters in suburban
Kuntsevo. When he traveled through the streets of Moscow, it was in a caravan
of identical, curtained, armor-plated ZILs, heavily convoyed by militiamen. And
wherever he went, home or abroad—and especially when, for the benefit of news
cameras, he seemed to mingle with crowds—he was enveloped at every instant by
an elite cohort of KGB guards.

Yet, quite apparently, Rybkin
was
concerned. Instead
of dismissing Kuzin and Biryukov after their briefing in his private office in
the Presidium building near the Spassky Tower, he had bidden them both remain
while the pretty blonde from Soviet TV came waltzing in with her makeup kit.
The two senior Politburo members waited now, slipping farther behind in their
own heavy schedules, while Rybkin joked with the girl as she touched up the
famous face with Pan Cake stick.

Foreign Minister Ivo Feodorovitch Kuzin, older of the two,
consulted his watch once again. The blonde had been in nearly fifteen minutes;
in another ten Rybkin was due downstairs in the Kremlin video studio for yet
another address on national unity. Kuzin would have to stay for the taping, so
his entire evening calendar was now by the boards. He sighed as the girl
finally whisked off the shoulder cloth, buttoned up her case and, squealing at
a farewell pat on the rear, sashayed out, leaving Rybkin alone at the other end
of the room.

The President stood up from his favorite armchair, which,
like most of the furniture in his office and private apartments, was in the
ornate Empire style (in marked contrast to the utilitarian tastes of his
predecessor). For the moment his blocky peasant figure was silhouetted in the
tall windows against the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, its gilded dome afire now
from the lingering sun of a Moscow spring evening.

“Well, Ivo, Volodya, what are you wizards going to do?”

Kuzin, after a glance at his younger colleague, KGB chief
Volodya Biryukov, addressed the question in his usual perambulatory style: “It
is not worth even a moment’s worry on your part, Alois Maksimovitch. We will
handle it, if I may say, in a routine fashion. That is to say, a perfectly
thorough fashion. Permit me to enumerate some obvious things. In an average
month there are—how many threats, Volodya?”

“Thousands,” Biryukov shrugged.

“Thousands of threats on your life—each
month
. I’m
speaking of those we are aware of—most of them, incredibly, contained in actual
letters addressed to you by lunatics—every one of which, of course, the KGB
Ninth Directorate must investigate. Others are mere drunken ravings or deranged
outbursts overheard and reported to us. Of course, these, too, must be followed
up. This is the average.”

“The White House Secret Service get even more than this,”
Biryukov added with a nonchalant wave of a plump hand. “Their chief of detail
has told me this.”

“Unfortunately, that figure has recently escalated,” Kuzin
continued. “And rather steadily so, since the Potsdam Conference and your own
Greater Europe initiatives, with the predictable howls from the old wolves that
we are proceeding down a path toward surrender of national sovereignty. Volodya
has, I daresay, lost count of the threats. Isn’t that correct?”

“Unfortunately, that is so.”

Rybkin shrugged. “The point, Ivo?”

“The point is, Alois Maksimovich, what is one more potential
assassin, more or less?”

“When none has the slightest chance of success,” added
Biryukov.

Rybkin came closer, his blunt, flat features bronzed and
softened by the studio makeup. He searched the faces of his two principal
advisers, then turned on his heel and walked heavily back across the Turkestan
carpet to his massive rosewood desk, a gift of Queen Victoria to the Tsarevich
Sasha, later Alexander III. Rybkin sank back into the red leather upholstery of
his oversized chair and pondered the coffered ceiling while the digital clock
on his blotter blinked off two minutes.

Finally Kuzin spoke: “Alois, please excuse me. I know you
are thinking, but you must be downstairs in five minutes.”

“And so I will be. All right, listen carefully, both of you.
You are forgetting one essential element. This is
Marchenko
’s
hand-picked assassin. And Marchenko was a perfectionist, and an excellent judge
of men. This man Marcus is, therefore, not one out of a thousand or a million
dangerous lunatics. He is not a statistic of any kind, but rather a special
case. And he has my full attention, as he should have yours—because of
Marchenko, and because of what this mountain of paper you have brought says
about him.”

Rybkin gestured toward a console table, on which they had
deposited Marcus’ KGB dossier, which ran to three-hundred pages, and his
smaller, but more impressive
Spetsnaz
military file. “According to what
I read, and you have confirmed, this man has apparently never failed a ‘wet
affair.’ So yes, I worry a little, perhaps because I am superstitious. Not
because I am afraid for my own paltry life, but because I am on the verge of
some very important things which I don’t wish interrupted.”

Kuzin read the half-mocking, half-defiant look in the
President’s eyes. In recent conversations Rybkin had made more than a few
references to certain heroic individuals who, at various times in history, had
stood poised on the threshold of greatness—Alexander on the banks of the Oxus;
Napoleon in Egypt, casting his conqueror’s eye eastward upon British India, and
perhaps the Ottoman Empire as well; Lenin secreted on the train back from exile
in 1917 to Russia, with the fire of Bolshevism in his heart. The clear
inference, for Kuzin, was that, with this latest series of Greater Europe
initiatives and a startling new Middle East strategy to back it up, Alois
Maksimovich Rybkin was beginning to measure himself in such exalted company.
That Rybkin’s dreams were of this stature Kuzin no longer doubted. But would
their charismatic
vozhd
, leader, bring them off, as had Alexander and
Lenin, or would he stumble, as had Napoleon at the battle of the Nile—and again
in Moscow and Waterloo? Kuzin, the wily statesman, remained skeptical.

“Alois, as you have already heard,” he reassured, “Volodya’s
report on security at Potsdam is very impressive. He has gone far beyond the
steps that were taken, or that were even conceivable at the original conference
back in Comrade Stalin’s day.”

“You misunderstand me. I don’t fault the efforts of the
Committee for State Security. I leave all these matters in your capable hands,
Volodya.” Rybkin pivoted the big chair and waved again at the dossiers. “But
there must be somebody else.”

“What do you mean?”

“No matter how good this assassin is at his business,
somebody must be as good—or better. I want you to ransack your files for such a
man—whether he’s KGB, or another
Spetsnaz
superman like Marcus here. I
don’t care. He can be a Kazakh, an Irkut, or a Chukchi Ekimo, for that matter.
One who shoots better scores, does better on field examinations, who also has
never failed an assignment. I want that person located.”

“But, Alois, that is exactly how we pick your bodyguards!
You already have the elite of the elite.”

“I don’t want him to guard me, Ivo Feodorovich. I want him
employed offensively, not defensively. Locate this man and give him the
assignment of finding and killing this Marcus. At once, do you hear me,
gentlemen?” Rybkin stood up and smiled. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the country
is waiting.”

*

Taras Arensky was bent over the keyboard, attempting to play
“Sabre Dance”—at least some impressive bits and pieces, trademark passages he
had memorized laboriously in his youth. It wasn’t going well. Taras was only
foolhardy enough to let the warhorse out of its stable on those infrequent
occasions when, as now, he was more than a little tipsy; but unfortunately the
alcohol, while lending courage, invariably took away dexterity.

Finally he threw up his hands in defeat and found himself
grinning sheepishly at a showy, thirtyish blonde who had inserted herself into
the curve of the closed grand. She had a high-gloss smile, a black strapless
with estimable cleavage and was regarding him as though he were an hors
d’oeuvre.

Taras quelled the twinges of panic he often experienced
around predatory females, a breed he somehow seemed to attract, especially in
the jungly habitat of the Washington party circuit.
Relax
, he told
himself,
learn to enjoy it. It’s all part of your new career
. Tonight’s
glittery occasion would certainly afford a good chance to polish his
conversational skills.

Though a relative newcomer to the local scene, Taras had
recognized dozens of national and D.C. celebrities eddying in and out of the
elegant rooms of the Georgetown mansion—senators, a couple of network
anchormen, columnists, TV and print reporters, an activist actress, even the
mayor of New York. They were gathered ostensibly to celebrate the brave and
inexplicable launching of yet another foredoomed, alternative Washington daily.
Moving among them, indeed towering over all but one ex-NBA center turned
congressman, was their gangly host, E. Lawrence Hornaday, whose
Midwestern-based news-paper group had, for unfathomable corporate reasons,
decided upon unequal contest with the mighty Post.

“So,” the blonde wanted to know, widening her smile, “what
exactly
do you do?”

“Well... I’m not a concert pianist.”

“Mmm, I guessed that. You
should
be, though.”

“The way I play? God save us!”

“No, the way you
look
—and
talk. Très
romantique. Like Omar Sharif. Are you a Slav?”

“I
am. But Sharif’s an Egyptian, I think.”

“Mm, but
I
always think of him as Zhivago. So, tell
me about
you.”

“Not much to tell, I’m afraid,” Taras said, shifting into
standard deflection mode. “I consult. Your face is very familiar, you know. Are
you on television?”

“Mmm. Every Saturday morning.
Washington Wives.”

“I’ve seen it. You interview, uh—”

“Washington wives.
Exactly!”

She found this enormously funny, and Taras laughed along
with her, though he suspected his own inept response had set her off. At the
height of the silliness he glanced over the blonde’s bare shoulder and saw,
across the large room, his fiancée.

Charlotte Walsh was a showy and elegant woman in her own
right—tall and vivid, dark-haired and slim, her sharpish features redeemed by a
flashing smile and contralto-rich laugh. She was talking and gesturing
theatrically to an all-male group, one of whom he recognized as the French
ambassador. She was also watching Taras like a hawk.
I trust you
, her
expression said,
but I’m not letting you out of my sight.

“Heatherly Smith.” The blonde was extending her hand with a
soft jingle of antique-gold bracelets.
“Et tu—”

“His name is Taras Arensky.” Lawrence Hornaday eased his
considerable frame between them. “Sorry, Smitty, but I need to borrow him for a
moment.”

The blonde’s eyebrows went up in mock distress. “Only if you
promise
to bring him back, Larry!”

But Hornaday was already steering him away. “Taras, there’s
somebody I want you to meet,” he said as they serpentine purposefully together
out of the room, down a long corridor and through sliding, double mahogany
doors into a paneled library.

Two men got up from a tapestry-covered settee under a framed
Audubon print. Taras went through the handshakes and was immediately alert.
Despite their easygoing manner, the two were obviously high-powered errand
boys. “They’re from the White House,” Hornaday said with a nod to the men.
“I’ll leave you to it.” He backed out of the room as he drew the mahogany doors
silently together.

“You carry a gun,” Taras said to the man on the left.

“Very good. It’s not supposed to show.”

“So what’s this about?”

“The President wants to talk to you, Mr. Arensky.”

“Why does he want to see
me?”

“He’d like to tell you that himself.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“You mean now, don’t you?”

“That’s correct. We have a car waiting in back.”

“I’m sorry, but my fiancée is also waiting for me. And, for me
anyhow, she outranks even your boss. I’ll have to talk with her first.”

“Mr. Hornaday assured us he will explain your departure to
Ms. Walsh. This is an urgent matter, Mr. Arensky. Please.” They gestured at the
French doors which opened onto a garden.

Taras glanced at their Treasury Department credentials—five-pointed
silver stars with engraved Secret Service photo IDs—before following them
outside into the warm night, down a gravel path, across a dark tennis court and
out a chain-link back gate into an alley where an unmarked black sedan waited.

A little stagey, he thought, but then the street in front
was thick with
paparazzi
and stretch limos. He decided to ask no more
questions, and no further explanations were offered. He sat back and watched as
the Secret Service driver skillfully skirted the hellish traffic around
Wisconsin and M on his way to Pennsylvania Avenue. In less than ten minutes
they were waved through the White House northwest gate.