The Fulcrum, page 14
part #1 of Rex Dalton Series
More than just a few of them, however, were using London as a base of operation for their vast and sometimes underhanded business empires. In many cases, they were just a front for Putin’s or other oligarchs’ criminal activities. So, they kept up the ruse of being dissidents, but behind the scenes they were still busy with proscribed dealings.
Rex knew of Gordievsky because of his interest in history. Gordievsky’s claim to fame was an astounding collection of ancient art, which he loaned to various museums and art galleries to display. He was also a vocal critic of Putin and his cronies. British media loved him and touted his generosity with his art collection as proof of his near-sainthood.
MI5 and MI6, according to the file in Rex’s hands, had a distinctly different opinion. Gordievsky was crooked. But they couldn’t prove it, not in a court of law. Moreover, moving against him would leave them with the proverbial egg on their faces, and could even get their budgets slashed, so popular was the bastard with the British politicians.
Recent Finint and Humint (human intelligence) had found the true nature of his business was not as aesthetic as his art pieces. Terrorist groups from the Middle East were filling their jihadi coffers by looting ancient sites and selling the antiquities to this Russian mobster. He, in turn, paid them with weapons. Weapons supplied by the Russian military.
Bringing him to justice through the usual channels would expose delicate MI5 operations. MI6’s hands were tied because it would be considered a domestic operation, and they were not allowed to operate on domestic soil, the same barrier the CIA had in the US. They hated the guy. They wanted him out of their hair, and they wanted it done in such a way that others of his ilk got the message: ‘do your dirty deeds on our shores, and we’ll show you what dirty means’. Therefore, it had to look like a professional hit.
Rex preferred a less showy message, but the customer was always right. There was just one problem. Neither MI5 nor MI6 would be involved, he would get no support from them, not even a weapon. In fact, the MI6 message was unambiguous. “Make sure your agent(s) don’t sign the guestbook on arrival.” Which Rex understood to mean, ‘make sure you are not seen, recognized, or arrested by British law enforcement, because we can’t help you if it happens’.
He was okay with that. It was not his first rodeo.
In Britain it was near impossible to buy a gun, and ammunition even more so, not to mention being a foreigner trying to get it.
The obvious solution was to have the wherewithal sent to the American embassy in a diplomatic bag and delivered to an undercover agent openly within the sacrosanct doors of the embassy. However, Rex, and in fact CRC, was so deep undercover that their own countrymen couldn’t even know of their existence. The embassy, therefore, was out. They couldn’t even know there was an operation, so a dead drop was out as well.
By the same token, asking either of the Brit units to supply a weapon by dead drop exposed Rex to observation on their part. Under the terms of the Five Eye agreement, a multilateral agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US, automatic sharing of intelligence among the five nations, Rex’s identity, if discovered, would be shared to each country. Considering the sieve-like nature of some of the agencies who’d receive it, Rex might not even get out of the country without a price on his head.
There was, however, a curious loophole in British law that he could exploit. Give him a week, he suggested, and he’d take down two Russians for the price of one. He only needed to locate one he’d been after for a while, who owned an ‘antique’ pistol and corresponding deactivated ammunition. The latter would have been emptied of its powder and had the primer deactivated. He’d have no problem ‘reactivating’ the ammunition with a little ingenuity and the supplies brought to merry old England’s shores on his person or in his kit.
The use of the weapon would implicate the owner and land him in a British prison for long enough to have a serious ‘accident’, ridding the good taxpayers of two leeches. More importantly, his arch-enemies in al Qaeda and ISIS would have to find a new place to shop for their weapons.
Rex took a day to exercise his growing ease in navigating dark places where information could be found. Some called it the Dark Web, but Rex knew that was only the tip of the iceberg. The Deep Web was his fishing ground, and in it he found the information he needed. He was ready. The next day, he used one of several passports he owned, provided by CRC, to fly from LA International to Paris, with a return ticket for the following week. His purported reason for visiting was tourism.
In Paris, Rex transformed himself from an American citizen to French. He purchased French-label clothing at a second-hand store, obtained a new passport from a safety deposit box CRC kept at BNB Paribas, and then boarded a Eurostar train to London via the Chunnel. Within three hours of landing in Paris, Rex was in an alley in London to observe the comings and goings of one Anatoly Vasiliev, respected Russian expat, well-known antique gun collector, and, to Rex’s certain knowledge, child pornographer.
He was not there to kill Vasiliev, though he would have been more than happy to dispatch the slime ball. The murder of two Russian expats in as many days would attract too much attention. Therefore, he stuck to his original plan. Vasiliev’s collection was a matter of public knowledge, though Rex had no doubt he owned weapons that didn’t make it into the catalog. The item Rex was interested in, however, was. It was a Mauser C96, a semi-automatic pistol that had been manufactured in Russia between 1896 and 1937, a genuine antique. It was not particularly rare, but its presence in gun-shy England was tolerated because of its antique status.
Nicknamed the ‘Red 9’, the Mauser C96 was a peculiar-looking but efficient personal weapon. The grip, round and wooden, had earned it the additional nickname ‘Broomhandle’ in the English-speaking world. In China, it was called the ‘box cannon’ because of its rectangular internal magazine, and as a double-entendre, because it had a wooden, box-like detachable stock that doubled as a holster. Rex had no use for the stock, but he did want the rare 9x25mm Mauser ‘Export’ cartridges that were also catalogued as part of the collection. The only drawback to those cartridges was what famed big-game hunter of the twentieth century, W.D.M. Bell, referred to as its “particularly vicious bang”.
Rex had brought with him smokeless powder, manufactured on-site at the CRC base so that it did not contain markers that would make it detectable in airport security checks. It was the only thing he needed to make the antique gun and cartridges usable that he couldn’t obtain in London. The rest, a box of strike-on-box matches, a couple of hand tools, paper, and an ordinary soda straw, he quickly acquired in several stops at different locations.
That night found him concealed in the lengthening shadows of the alleyway behind Vasiliev’s residence. If he’d been in Moscow, Vasiliev would have had a few bodyguards posted, but in London they would have been more a liability than a protection. After all, law-abiding citizens didn’t require bodyguards. Vasiliev’s protection consisted of an extra pass or two per night from local Metropolitan police. They didn’t bother to peer into the alley, since Vasiliev’s presence had never caused trouble in the five years he’d been there.
After establishing the pattern of law enforcement interest, Rex waited until the normal deep-sleep hour of three a.m. before carefully picking the lock on Vasiliev’s back door. He thought the man’s housekeeper, who had left around eight p.m., was the only household staff he normally employed. Nevertheless, Rex was as silent as the grave when he cleared each room, affirming that no one was there but the snoring Russian.
Once he knew that, he let himself into the collection room, which he was surprised to find unlocked. He found the Mauser, and in an antique newsprint type cabinet, he found the cartridges, a few complete with bullets. Of course, they had all been properly deactivated, but that didn’t concern him. He’d been careful not to touch surfaces. He pulled on a pair of disposable poly gloves, and over them a pair of thin, supple, leather gloves. Then he carefully lifted the pistol from its brackets on the display wall and selected five cartridges with undamaged bullets.
As he started to leave, he had another thought. In an office he’d seen earlier, when he cleared the rooms, he’d seen a computer, and he suspected there was evidence of Vasiliev’s more depraved hobby to be found. He slipped back into the room and searched it, finding glossy photos he couldn’t bear to look at and a collection of flash drives with single names on them. The man was a fool for keeping this stuff where it could so easily be found, and Rex had every intention of making sure it was. He risked turning on a lamp and, with gloved hands, shifted one of the photos back and forth until he found what he’d hoped he would – fingerprints. He pocketed the photo and left.
THE NEXT DAY, after a few hours of sleep, Rex painstakingly reactivated the cartridges. To do so, he placed a hex nut he’d acquired at a hardware store on the credenza in his hotel room, first protecting it with a pillowcase he’d liberated of its pillow to make sure the surface wasn’t marred by his actions. On the hex nut, he placed a cartridge from which he’d pried the bullet, open end upright. Using a nail he’d pocketed with the hex nut and a hammer he’d purchased legally, he inserted the nail into the open end of the cartridge through the flash hole and tapped it gently. The primer, empty of its fuel, dropped into the center of the hex nut.
Next, he pried the anvil out of the primer cup and set it aside. The old primer powder had already been thoroughly scraped from it. On a small square of the notepad paper the hotel had so generously provided, he gently tapped the head of one of his matches until the coating flaked off. Using the back of a spoon, he pressed the flakes until he’d ground them into a fine powder.
With a cheap pocket knife he’d bought at a department store, he then scraped some of the red powder from the box where the matches could be scraped to ignite them. About half the amount of red powder as matchhead powder was the right amount. This he also ground with the spoon. The next bit was risky if done with a tool, so Rex gently folded the two powders together by manipulating the paper from each side until they were thoroughly mixed. With the same knife, he cut the straw from yesterday’s takeaway soda at an angle, making a small scoop.
Now he was ready to rearm the cartridges. Into the primer cups, he carefully scooped the primer powder he’d manufactured from matches, tamping it down gently with the end of the match he’d beheaded. To be extra sure it fired properly, he added more and tamped it down again. With a pair of tweezers from his dopp kit, he picked up the tiny anvil and set it atop the primer powder. He didn’t bother to press that down, as it would happen easily when he pressed the primer cup back into the cartridge’s primer pocket. To seat it properly, he set it upright again, this time open end down, and rocked the hammer head over it until it was flush with the bottom of the cartridge.
Next came the powder, and he topped it off with the bullet he’d pried out. The whole operation, he knew, should take about five minutes per cartridge if he did them separately. Instead, he created a mini assembly line, so that he had five cartridges ready in just under twenty minutes.
THE NEXT PART of his mission wouldn’t take place until night fell, so he amused himself for most of the day by taking in a few tours, being certain to speak in French-accented English when he spoke. He had no intention of being linked to tonight’s murder, but it was a good idea to camouflage his identity anyway.
Late in the afternoon, he visited an internet café and chose a machine with only a wall behind it. He searched for any news of last night’s theft, without finding any mention of it. Vasiliev must not have discovered it yet. He then went back to his hotel, had an early dinner, and turned in. He was up again by ten p.m., and repeated the previous night’s surveillance, this time near Gordievsky’s residence.
This time, he was wearing a backpack. Not that it would have helped, had police stopped and searched him. It contained the Mauser, the cartridges for it, and another item he’d picked up on his shopping trip yesterday. A Fram oil filter, fitted with a piece of equipment that had masqueraded as a piece of camera equipment when he’d brought it through airport security. A small plastic device that, fitted between the pistol’s barrel and the oil filter, would connect them to serve as a suppressor for the “particularly vicious” bang of the antique cartridges.
It would still make plenty of noise, but with the suppressor, Rex hoped to disguise the nature of the noise, giving him time to get away before any neighbors pondered it long enough to overcome their reticence and call the police. In this hope, he was counting on the universal reluctance to be thought a fool. Anyone who heard the noise should think about it carefully before they reported it. Rex didn’t have a precise idea about what it would sound like. With a regular nine-millimeter round, the makeshift suppressor made it sound like a door slamming, with a bit of an echo, as opposed to the crack and reverberations of an unsuppressed round. This, he thought, might sound like gunfire, but normal Britons didn’t hear that often except on TV. Maybe they’d hesitate.
He wouldn’t be found with the gun on him, at least, if he were stopped. He’d leave it at the scene. The expensive leather gloves and his other equipment would go down the nearest drain or waste bin, and not together. The disposable gloves that were protecting the inside of the leather ones would go in his pocket, to be disposed of in France.
The photo was even now on its way to MI5, with a note to check the fingerprints. With luck, the pistol would also have Vasiliev’s fingerprints, but if he didn’t go down for murder, he’d go down for the child pornography that MI5 would find in abundance in his home. Either way, Gordievsky would be dead, just the way the client had ordered.
Rex again waited for the witching hour. Even insomniacs slept sometimes – they just didn’t remember. It would be sometime between three a.m. and four, but by four, some people would be beginning to stir. Bakers. People who had to be to work by seven, like nurses and others who had the day shift in twenty-four-hour operations. Rex preferred three for his insertion.
AT THE APPOINTED time, he stepped carefully through the alley, avoiding garbage cans and any other item that might trip him and make noise. Ambient light from streetlights and a half-moon helped. When he arrived at the back door of Gordievsky’s home, he first tried the door. It never ceased to amaze him how many people left their doors unlocked. However, his target was not one of them. Silently, he slipped his backpack off and rummaged inside for his lockpick tools.
Eight seconds later, he slipped into the house with all the noise a ghost would make. Once inside, he closed the door and disarmed the security system. Before taking another step, he pulled a pair of disposable polypropylene booties over his soft shoes. Once again, he cleared all the rooms before making his final visit to Gordievsky. Surprisingly, there were no inside guards. The fool must have relied on the good graces of the metropolitan police and their nightly patrols. Or maybe he just didn’t believe anyone would have a problem with him.
Rex stepped into a polypropylene coverall that matched the booties and pulled the hoodie tight, leaving only his nose and eyes exposed.
In Gordievsky’s bedroom, he found the misbegotten piece of crap snoring, clearly undisturbed by the havoc he’d caused or the loss of innocent life. Had he supplied the explosives that took out that train station five years ago? It didn’t matter. He’d certainly supplied arms that ended American lives in the Middle East. He was guilty as charged, and Rex was there to carry out his sentence.
Rex contemplated waking the son-of-a-bitch up to tell him why he was killing him but decided it was a futile idea, this man’s learning days were over.
Rex placed the homemade suppressor carefully between Gordievsky’s eyes and saw his eyes open just when he pulled the trigger.
“For my family,” Rex whispered.
There was no need for a second shot. Gordievsky’s brains would have been scrambled by the first. But the directions were clear. Two shots in the head, execution-style. He backed off and placed the other shot two inches higher than the first. Quickly, he stripped out of the coveralls, turning them inside out as he shed them. He stuffed them into his backpack, left the gun lying slightly under the bed, as if someone had dropped it carelessly.
At the back door, he shed the booties, stuffed them inside the backpack, and shrugged into it. He locked the door as he left.
Rex slipped through the night shadows like a whisper of wind, dropping the disposables in a bin here, a drain there. Last to go were his gloves, which went into separate wastebins behind restaurants. They’d never be found, but even if they were, there was nothing to tie them to him. After disposing of the gloves, he peeled the last layer – the disposable gloves – from his hands and threw them in another bin as he passed.
Aside from the waiting, the entire assassination had taken less than five minutes. He had three hours to kill before returning to France.
23
The assessment, Arizona, 2012
REX MADE IT back to CRC headquarters well inside his self-imposed deadline. Before he could leave on his compulsory three-week Bahamas vacation, though, there were post-mission details to take care of. Due to the nature of the work these field agents did, CRC kept a close watch on them on all fronts, especially psychologically and physically.
After each mission they went through prescribed debriefing, as well as medical and psychological evaluations. This was partly to make sure that they didn’t fall in love with killing and really become uncontrollable psychopaths. Though it had never happened, the other reason was to be sure they didn’t become corrupt and get involved with the bad guys and all their money.
