Black Wolf, page 26
“I think there’ll be more interviews with Kavalchuk. He’s interested in how my father, an American sheriff, would handle it.”
“Your father would call in the Feds.”
Mel held up her glass in silent agreement.
Something occurred to Julie. “Wait…does that explain Katya’s death? She was strangled, right?”
“Yes.”
“The KGB have any suspects?”
“Up until now, they’ve all been handled as isolated incidents. But the killings keep happening.”
Julie shivered theatrically. “I can think of a few suspects. Maksim, for one. He tried entering my room the other night. I threw a book at him. Clocked him in the head pretty good.”
Mel sat up straighter. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Julie made a wry face. “You kidding me? After our last conversation about the bad behavior of men? A fumble in the dark was hardly worth mentioning.”
Mel wondered how many missions she’d have to complete before she became that toughened. “He did the same thing with me, the night of the blackout.”
“Son of a bitch. You tell Dan?”
“I told Ben.” Mel chewed thoughtfully at her bottom lip. “There’s just been a lot going on.” Nadia had said the Strangler might be someone “high up.” Maksim was a creep, but he didn’t fit the description.
Patting Mel on the knee, Julie pulled a pack of playing cards out of her pocket. “Well, then, before you’re hauled in front of the Black Wolf again, you need some mindless distraction.”
They began to play gin rummy, concentrating on the cards. While Julie dealt the first hand, Mel hummed along with the music, soothed by the gentle slapping of cards being dealt and discarded. She thought of William’s advice to drink more. As well as to indulge in ill-advised love affairs.
After a few minutes, Julie said, “I told Dan a joke this morning. It goes like this. An Agency mission leader dies and goes to stand before the Almighty, who asks him, based on his deeds on earth, if he thinks he should inhabit heaven as an angel or hell as a devil. The mission leader looks at God and says, ‘Neither. You’re sitting in my seat.’”
Mel grinned. “Did he laugh?”
Julie picked up a card from the deck and discarded it. “No, he did not. And gin!”
“How did you do that so fast?”
Julie gleefully scooped up the cards and handed them to Mel for the next hand.
“It’s how I made extra money in college,” Julie said, filling their glasses again. She stretched out on her side, propped her head up with one hand, and studied Mel for a few beats. “Since your interrogation this morning, and subsequent meeting with William, Dan has gone from ranting against you to being your biggest cheerleader. He’s going to try to rescue you, you know. It’s his go-to seduction move.”
She had just echoed what Mel had intuited. “Julie, you have nothing to fear from me—”
“Oh, relax,” Julie said good-naturedly. She sat up again, collecting her cards. “It’s over. I’ve broken it off. It never would have worked anyway.” She took another swallow of wine. “He’s not Jewish. Knowing that seeing him would have pissed off my parents made the sex that much better.”
Julie drained her glass. “Anyone special stateside?”
Mel studied her cards for a few beats, forbidding her thoughts from summoning Alexi. “Nope.”
A slow-creeping smile appeared briefly on Julie’s face. “You’re blushing. Look, can I play big sister here for a moment? I have no doubt that you’re capable. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. But you are literally surrounded by killers. Both friend and foe. Don’t let your guard down with any of us. And that includes me.”
She discarded and laid down her cards triumphantly. “Gin. See what I mean?”
There was a quiet knock at the door and Julie bounded off the bed to answer it. She reappeared with Ben in tow.
He held out a bottle of vodka. “I hear this is where the party is.”
Ben gave Mel’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, and she moved to sit next to Julie on the bed, letting him have the chair.
“Gin rummy,” he said. “I haven’t played this since college.”
Julie dealt the cards, and they played a few rounds, the three of them switching to vodka once the wine was gone. Julie retold the joke she’d told to Dan.
Ben laughed long and hard, almost spilling his drink in the process. “Okay, okay, I’ve got one, but you two have to finish it. Let’s see how quick you guys are. The CIA, the FBI, and the KGB are all trying to prove they’re the best at getting the bad guys. The secretary-general of the UN decides to test them. He releases a rabbit into a forest, and each of them has to catch it. The Agency people go in. They place animal informants all through the forest. They question the plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of exhaustive investigations, they conclude that the rabbit does not exist.”
Julie nodded sagely. “Good, that’s good.” She paused to study her cards and gather her thoughts. “Then the FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and make no apologies. The rabbit had it coming.”
Mel snorted. She could feel the vodka relaxing her, making her feel silly, but she composed her face to finish it up. “Martin Kavalchuk goes in personally for the KGB. He comes out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is bloody and limping, one ear gone. The bear keeps yelling, ‘Okay, okay! I am the rabbit, I am the rabbit!’”
She struggled to keep a straight face, looking at Ben’s and Julie’s troubled expressions. People had been arrested for less, and they hadn’t spent their morning with Kavalchuk themselves. William had warned her not to poke the serpent, but the alcohol, and the company, had made her careless. When Mel finally cracked and grinned, Julie wagged a finger at her. “Melvina Donleavy, we’ll make a killer of you yet.”
There was another knock on the door and Ben got up to answer it. Dan walked in, carrying another bottle of vodka.
“I hear this is where the party is.”
Ben looked at the two women and they all melted into laughter. He gave up the chair to Dan and began pouring a double shot of vodka into a glass for the newcomer. Mel realized it was the first time she’d felt completely relaxed with her team—and had no ex-Stasi officers, no minders, no clandestine KGB around. Dan smiled warmly and held his glass in a salute to Mel.
“Drink up,” Ben told him, crowding onto the bed with Julie and Mel. “You’ve got some catching up to do.”
Dan made a face when he heard they’d been playing gin rummy. “Oh, no. Real men only play poker. What’ll we use for chips?”
Ben held up a hand, grinned, and pulled from his pocket a bag of almonds. “A Boy Scout is always prepared.”
“Finally,” Julie crowed, “a use for vegetarians!”
They played for a while, making outrageous bets on bad hands.
“Listen,” Dan then said sharply, pointing to the tape player. “That’s ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’!”
“The Scorpions.” Ben named the German group.
Dan nodded as though he’d found the answer to a long-lost question. He leapt up and turned the volume louder. “Oh, man, that song was played constantly while the Berlin Wall was coming down.”
Motioning the group into the bathroom, he said, “Bring your drinks.” He crowded everyone together, closed the door, and turned on the shower.
“Hey,” he said, addressing the group. “Where were you on November ninth, 1989?”
“Uh-oh,” Julie said. “We’ve now entered the stage where we get all nostalgic.” She’d brought the bottle of vodka into the bathroom and poured another healthy round.
Ben smiled broadly. “I was on a brief furlough in New York City with some buddies, celebrating the election of David Dinkins, first Black mayor.”
“And you?” Dan asked, looking at Julie.
“Paris, translating for a bunch of industrialists who were in reality running guns to the Middle East.”
Dan looked at Mel. “I was still neck-deep in training at the Farm,” she said. “But I watched it on TV. My dad called me to say he never thought he’d live to see the day. First time I ever heard him cry.”
“I’ll bet Dan was neck-deep in sand somewhere,” Julie said.
Dan shook his head. “Nope. I was in the quaint Bavarian town of Hof, known for its hot pots and sausages. East Germans had been flooding in from Czechoslovakia and I was there to root out suspected spies. I was sitting in a little bar, drinking warm beer and watching it unfold on a crappy black-and-white television while oompah-pah music played in the background. I’m watching intoxicated Germans, from both sides, pulling down the concrete sections with hammers and picks and their bare hands. And in the back of my head, I’m thinking the world still holds sixty thousand thermonuclear weapons, the Agency is still toppling regimes across the globe, and human beings are still blithely, and enthusiastically, destroying our environment.
“And yet”—he paused, twirling the glass between his palms—“and yet, for a few moments I felt that something…profound was happening. That there was the glimmer of a possibility that we could stop marching into the abyss…”
Face flushed, wavering a bit on his feet, Dan trailed off.
“Oh, Christ,” Julie said, not unkindly. “We’ve now gone from nostalgic to morbid.” She opened the door to let the steam out and linked her arm through Dan’s. “Come on, stud, back to poker.”
Mel turned off the shower and joined the group back in her room. As they played, Dan told stories of his time in Afghanistan helping to train the insurgents on the newly acquired Stinger missiles, a hotly debated gift of the US government.
“The first battle came in September 1986 outside of Jalalabad,” he said, popping several of the almonds from his pile into his mouth. “Half a dozen Soviet attack helicopters were returning to base when the first Stinger was hoisted onto the rebel commander’s shoulders. He switched on the guidance system, locked it onto the heat signatures of the Mi-24s, and let her rip. But the motor failed to ignite, and the missile fell to the ground like a Pet Rock. Fortunately, two other gunners brought down two of the Soviet helicopters. The commander said a quick prayer to Allah, reloaded, and brought down a third.”
“That was the beginning of the end for the Soviets,” Ben said loudly in the direction of the two-way mirror, pouring more vodka into his glass. He reached for one of Julie’s “chips,” but she slapped his hand away. “Afghanistan is only ever a place you should be traveling through on the way to somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Starting with Alexander the Great, any force that’s ever tried to occupy it gets reamed in the end, if you’ll pardon my expression. You’d have to flatten every mountain and fill every cave to win. Fuck, I hope we never get mired down in that mess.” For a moment he stared morosely into his glass, but then he knocked back the last of the vodka, looked up, and grinned drunkenly. “Why is it so hard to do inventory in Afghanistan?”
The other three yelled drunkenly, “Because of the tally-ban!”
Through the general good-natured hooting and laughter, they heard a pounding on the door. Dan got up, and when he opened it, the group heard the unmistakable sound of Maksim’s outrage.
“You make too much noise,” he said. “Other people complain.”
He bustled his way into the room and Dan watched his quivering form with a bemused smile. At least until Ben scowled and looked at Mel. “Isn’t this the guy who tried to get into your room the other night?”
Dan looked from Maksim to Mel and back again.
“He tried using his passkey to enter my room the evening of the power outage,” Mel said.
Julie nodded. “This guy tried the same shit with me.”
Maksim saw the look on Dan’s face and began backing up. “I look after guests. These women are crazy.”
Dan grabbed Maksim by his coat lapels and dragged him into the bathroom, closing the door. The words were indistinct, but there was no doubt from the heat in Dan’s voice that threats were being made.
“I’m rather enjoying this,” Julie said.
“Do I need to intervene?” Ben asked.
Julie shook her head and deftly shuffled the cards. “Not unless we hear the sound of tiles breaking.”
A few minutes later Maksim burst free and fled. Dan sat back down in the chair next to the bed.
Ben leaned back, looking impressed. “What the hell did you say to him?”
Dan smiled unpleasantly. “I told him if he tried anything like that again, I’d personally tell Martin Kavalchuk that he tried to pass along Soviet secrets to a US State Department employee. The guy almost had a stroke.” He reached out and squeezed Mel’s arm. “I don’t think he’ll be bothering you anymore.”
Julie sighed in exasperation, one eyebrow raised. She looked at Mel and muttered, “Told you.”
Chapter 25
Wednesday, August 15, 1990
It was Wednesday evening, and the Americans were crowded around William’s dining room table. He was sketching the layout of the dacha compound on a large piece of paper, indicating where Mel’s target would be housed when he wasn’t at the institute.
The volume on the radio had been turned up, the crashing sounds of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony filling up the apartment, but they still spoke in hushed undertones.
William squinted against the light from the chandelier and occasionally rubbed tenderly at his temples. He’d spent the prior evening with Oleg Shevchenko, plying him with vodka and caviar in exchange for access to the thermophysics lab, ostensibly to run his own experiments with computer microprocessors. William had promised he could help them improve their systems.
“The Soviets are having a terrible time with their own computers, with poor quality and worse reliability,” he said. “I even ruffled his vanity by telling him that his biggest rival, Aleksandr Nadiradze of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, just acquired a hundred state-of-the-art IBM systems. But he wouldn’t budge.”
But something was going on. For three days the Americans, with William’s cooperation, had tried every distraction and subterfuge they could to get Mel close to the lab, all unsuccessful. The guard had instead been doubled at the door and security teams appointed along the back side of the institute. Elena stuck to Mel like a Siamese twin, following her everywhere, including into the toilet. The few times she’d tried to engage Elena in conversation, the woman kept to the weather, national monuments, and food. The one time Mel brought up the murdered and missing women, Elena seemed to forget her mastery of English and lapsed into scandalized Russian. She’d shaken her head and pressed her fingers to her lips to signal the subject was off-limits.
The ambient measurement taken that morning on William’s pen dosimeter had read 50 millisieverts.
“However,” William added, propping his elbows on the table, “I did extract an invitation this Saturday to the dacha, where Oleg intimated there were some very important visiting scientists.”
He turned to Mel, holding up a finger for emphasis. “Notice he said ‘scientists,’ in the plural.”
Mel’s pulse surged at the thought of identifying more targets.
“How did you get the invitation?” she asked.
“Ah,” he said, “I’m pleased to say I had a burst of inspiration between my fourth and fifth vodkas.” He walked to the living room and returned with a large book. On the cover was a star-studded sky with the title in Russian, Meteory I Komety.
“Meteors and Comets,” William translated. He opened the book to a chapter titled “Meteoritnyy Dozhd’ Perseid.”
“The Perseid Meteors,” Julie said.
William nodded, a satisfied grin on his face. “Every August the earth is blessed with the return of the Perseids. This year the peak for Russia will be around August eighteenth, which just happens to be this coming Saturday. And a quick check of the lunar calendar shows that there’ll be a waning crescent moon, which, along with almost no ambient light from the city, will make viewing of the meteor shower spectacular.”
He removed a pill bottle from his coat pocket and dry-swallowed a few aspirin. “God, that man can drink.”
Pulling a chair from the table, he sat. “Knowing that Oleg had a powerful telescope at the institute, I proposed to him that we impress his visiting scientists with a celestial show the likes of which they may never see again. He was very keen on the idea.”
William pursed his lips, looking at Mel over his glasses. “I floated the idea of inviting you Americans too, which he forbade. No guests, especially no women. The regular female staff have been let go until the scientists leave. Also, no alcohol is permitted on the premises, which will put quite a crimp in Oleg’s style.”
“Religious restrictions?” Dan asked.
Dan was fishing for clues. He was smart and experienced, and Mel knew that he’d probably figure out what was going on without her spelling it out. He knew that “visiting scientists” who were on the US intelligence radar, and who didn’t drink alcohol, meant they were most likely from Pakistan or Iran.
“I’ll be searched, not allowed to bring in any recording equipment,” William said. “I could probably get my hands on a Tropel pen camera, but it’s not good at capturing moving images at low light. So we need to bring Mohammed to the mountain, so to speak, by putting Mel close to the dacha. The question is, how do we get her close enough to make an identification?”
Mel leaned over the table, studying the drawing. The central dacha was a building six thousand square feet in size, the front door oriented to the south. Two cabins flanked the main building to the east, and two more were situated to the west. The surrounding forest had been felled in all directions up to where a tall chain-link security fence circled the parameter. It would be patrolled at night by a guard with a dog.
Dan jabbed a finger at the forest behind the compound. “We need to get Mel positioned here. Are there any roads along the back side of the compound?”
