Moscow Sting Read online

  “Then it’s a great feather in your cap, and your company will no doubt see the benefits.”

  Chapter 35

  MIKHAIL GOT UP FROM his seat at the next picnic table and crossed the few feet to where Anna was sitting. He sat opposite her and looked into her eyes.

  “Icarus was disinformation,” he said. “What the CIA calls a canary trap.”

  “How can you be sure?” she said, and felt her pulse quickening as the implications began to flood in.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Then why did you come, Mikhail? Why not use a dead drop?”

  But she knew the answer to the question before she asked it.

  “The trap springs,” he replied, “as soon as someone mentions Icarus. That was the whole purpose of Icarus. A fake operation set up solely to catch the enquirer.”

  “Then why haven’t they arrested you?” she said.

  “Simple greed,” he replied. “They want you too, Anna.”

  She let the implications of this swirl in her brain and then took out the cell phone from her pack and switched it on.

  “Make the call,” Mikhail said. “I can’t go back now. That’s why I didn’t use a drop. I’m coming over.” Mikhail looked up over her shoulder. “Icarus was all about finding me. It’s the end,” he said.

  She followed his gaze and recognised, standing in the trees two hundred yards away, the biker she had seen earlier. There he was, a yellow helmet, black Lycra pants, the same cycling sweater . . . but there was no bicycle anymore.

  She swivelled her gaze across the sixty degrees or so of her vision from the small portalled sanctuary of the stone building. There were two more men. She recognised the man who she’d seen earlier walking the dog. But there was no dog. The other man she hadn’t seen before.

  “We don’t know what’s behind us,” he said. “Behind the building. But there’ll be more. They’ve been waiting for nearly ten years for this. Make the call now. This is what they’ve wanted since Finn was first revealed in Moscow, to have the source Mikhail.”

  She began to dial Burt’s number.

  “How did you let yourself be followed?” she said to Mikhail.

  “I took every precaution. But once they knew it was me, they’ve had all the time in the world.”

  The biker moved out of the cover of the trees towards them. The two other men were already walking towards them. And there’d be more, as Mikhail said, behind the building.

  “Glencarlyn Park,” she said into the phone. “You’re two miles away. We’re in a stone building to the north of the park. Be fast. We’re under attack.”

  One of the two men was talking into a radio. All three men were quickening their pace. They’d seen her use the phone.

  She withdrew the Thompson pistol from inside her arm and slotted a rifle round into the single shot chamber.

  She and Mikhail withdrew behind the thin cover of the pillars. They were trapped here. It was better to stay in cover than to break around the side of the building.

  She saw one of the men, the one she’d seen earlier with the dog, draw a weapon from his coat. She’d take him first, the armed man, take as many of them as she could before any more came at them from the back. She aimed the pistol from a hundred and fifty yards, and the man dropped like snow sliding from a roof.

  She reloaded and saw the other two men fan away to the side, weapons drawn now. Then she saw a fourth man, right on the edge of her peripheral vision. He was close up to the right corner wall of the building, where the U extended, and using it as cover. He was only twenty yards from where they stood. The other two men began to run, moving targets, dodging at angles across the park but in the general direction of the cover to the side of the building.

  Then a fifth figure appeared just at the corner of the other wall, twenty yards to the left this time.

  She aimed at his left shoulder, all that was visible, as the first bullet from his revolver hit the pillar behind which she stood. The pillars were too thin to get right behind.

  She thought her shot had grazed the edge of his shoulder, and he spun away, but it might have been just his reaction to her shot, rather than a hit. She reloaded fast. They’d know now she only had a single-shot weapon, and there were five of them, at least. It was just a matter of time—and of which of them was prepared to put himself in the line of fire.

  A half-dozen shots rang out against the pillars, and she ducked back away from them. They would bombard her, and under that cover one of them, maybe two, would make a rush.

  She glanced at Mikhail, standing six feet away from her behind the next pillar. Why was he unarmed? If he knew the dangers, why had he come without protection?

  She fired again. She didn’t see whether the shot had made its target or not.

  “Shoot for the man to the left,” Mikhail ordered her.

  It was the man she thought she’d hit in the shoulder. She saw the edge of a coat flapping around the wall, and she ran to the right, from pillar to pillar, until she reached the far right edge of the yard, from where she could get a better view of the left wall, and where anyone firing from the right would have to come out and expose themselves in order to get a clear shot.

  This time she knew she’d got the man to the left and saw the body fall away from behind the wall, surprised by her new angle of fire. Another volley came from the right-hand wall, as a gun was pointed around the wall and fired blindly.

  “They’ll want me, at least, alive,” Mikhail shouted down the row of pillars.

  At that moment, as the man to the left fell, she saw that Mikhail was running across the yard towards the left wall, away from the thin protection they enjoyed and into the open. He was taking the chance that there was nobody else to the left, but at the same time he left himself wide open from the right.

  And they wanted him alive. That was his gamble, to make time for her.

  She simultaneously heard the high-pitched roar of an engine and saw the Humvee swerving across the lawns beyond the trees.

  Then she saw Mikhail fall. He was down. In quick succession and under heavy covering fire in her direction, she saw another man run to the fallen body of Mikhail.

  It was Vladimir.

  The Humvee thumped across a shallow ditch and along the edge of the trees, three or four hundred yards away, its tyres kicking up gouts of wet earth and lawn as it swivelled at them, its engine roaring.

  She saw Vladimir look up as he dragged the body of Mikhail by the shoulders towards a van that had pulled up behind him, its back doors flung open. She saw his eyes and felt the ricocheting bullets fly around her head as the men to the right gave him cover while he sought to drag Mikhail’s body, alive or dead.

  She saw in his eyes the Vladimir she’d hoped never to see. It wasn’t the Vladimir who had saved her life five years before, nor the Vladimir who had questioned their superiors many years before that, and been sentenced to the Cape Verde Islands for his pains. It wasn’t the Vladimir she’d known since she was ten years old, at School No. 47 on Leninskaya Street, the Vladimir who had loved her from that moment on.

  This was a new Vladimir, the one who had chosen, she now saw, to set his career and his life on being the one to track down Mikhail. It was the Vladimir who wanted to be KGB General Vladimir, who had made his final choice; to be inside the regime in Russia Finn had so fatally hated, and the Russia from which she’d escaped.

  Careless of exposing herself now to the wild firing from farther up the same wall where she was crouched behind the pillar, she shot this Vladimir between the eyes.

  Then she slumped to the ground, aware only that all the shooting had stopped, and she was sinking into her own blood.

  Chapter 36

  LOGAN WALKED INTO THE Venus Apollo nightclub for the third night in a row. The only difference a casual observer would notice in his appearance from the previous two visits was that he now walked with a pair of crutches.

  He was frisked at the door by two dark-coated, scowling bounce
rs, one of whom had a knife scar on the left side of his face.

  Passing their scrutiny, he limped to the hole in the wall inside the club where the girl took the customers’ coats. He checked his crutches too, with the coat and hat. He then limped unaided into the green velvet-draped lobby, where he was frisked again. This time, there was the flicker of recognition, even of welcome, in the otherwise expressionless face. For two nights, Logan had been making his presence known.

  He was finally allowed, with the minimum of civility, to proceed unmolested into the huge kitsch cave of faux stars twinkling from the ceiling, beneath which a long curving aluminium bar set into a mock rock wall snaked into the semidarkness.

  He walked with effort along the length of the bar, nodding a friendly greeting to the fashion-model hookers who, he knew from previous conversations, studied in the daytime at Moscow’s universities for their psychology degrees or veterinary diplomas. And as he had done for the past two nights, he declined their offers of a private room, two-at-a-time, anything-you-like sex and found a quiet place to sit.

  He chose a seat on a curved red velvet banquette that half-encircled an unoccupied table at the far end of the long, high room. Stars glittered above him against the indistinguishable surface, and for the third night in a row, he ordered vintage Dom Perignon at $2,500 a bottle.

  The girls saw an opportunity to strike up conversation about his injury. One or two came to the table, made noises of sympathy, asked him what he had done, but they didn’t stay. They were wary of him now. On his previous two nights, he had turned all of them away one by one and, as he had done so, paid them $500 each to leave him alone, with the promise of another five hundred if they stayed away. The strangely behaving American was making a name for himself at the Venus Apollo.

  When he’d arrived in Moscow three days before, he’d rented an apartment in the Kitai district, where the older houses hadn’t yet been levelled by developers in the previous decade of Moscow’s smash-and-grab property boom. For $10,000 a week in cash, paid on a weekly basis, he’d taken the apartment for a month, on the reasonable assumption that the owner wouldn’t turn him in until the final payment had been made. But by that time, he’d be long gone, whichever way his mission went.

  There were great advantages to be had in times of economic meltdown, he thought, if you had cash. Moscow’s high-end rental market had crashed, its nightclubs were emptied of high-rolling foreigners, and even the rich Russians who’d watched their paper assets descend into negative numbers were curbing their more outrageous displays of wealth.

  He guessed that the girls at the Venus Apollo had earned more from him in the past two nights than in the previous month, and for doing nothing.

  Nobody but Logan was drinking the club’s most expensive champagne, and nobody came alone unless they were looking for a girl, let alone paying the women to stay away.

  The bar manager brought him the bottle in an ice bucket and swivelled the cork free. He poured a glass and asked him, as he was bound to do, what other services the club could provide—by which he meant company.

  “Nothing. This is all,” Logan said.

  He sat back in the gloom, sipped the champagne, and waited.

  Grigory Bykov entered the club at just after midnight, the same as he had done on the previous two nights. It was a routine, Logan thought. He probably did a tour of his other business and entertainment interests before coming here. As on the two nights past, he was accompanied by four burly men in suits; big hands, big angry faces, big thighs, they swung their weight through the bar like wrestlers before a crowd at the start of a fight.

  Bykov talked to the manager as he had done before—numbers, Logan assumed—and then settled into a table with the guards and a flock of girls. Later, on the basis of his behaviour so far, Bykov would go upstairs to the VIP room.

  Logan drank another glass and watched the desultory scene in the club. There were few customers, fewer still who were paying anything that Bykov would call a living wage. Moscow had changed from the Babylon it had been.

  The music beat against the walls and his ears, and beyond the bar, there was a dance area with flashing lights, empty but for a girl who thrust herself around a pole.

  He was suddenly aware that one of the four men who had entered with Bykov was standing over him. He’d expected it, if not tonight then the next night or the one after. He looked up and saw another blank, expressionless face.

  “Mr. Bykov, the owner, wants you to join him,” the man said.

  “Thank him,” Logan replied. “I’m fine where I am.”

  The man didn’t respond, or move.

  “It’s an invitation,” he said, but his tone of voice was anything other than inviting.

  “Then I’ll join him,” Logan said.

  The man snapped his fingers to a barman, who swiftly appeared at the table and picked up the bucket with the half-full bottle and waited for Logan to get painfully to his feet, before following them to Bykov’s table.

  Bykov didn’t get up when Logan appeared, and Logan was shown to a spare chair next to him. After some business manoeuvring his leg, he struggled into it satisfactorily.

  “No dancing tonight,” Bykov said, and laughed at him.

  Logan looked up and into the face of Finn’s murderer, the Russian MP with his years of Mafia experience and not much else. He saw a short man—Logan could tell, even though they were all sitting down. Bykov’s face had the marks of smallpox scars, and one eyebrow seemed to have been severed in two, giving his face a lopsided expression. His eyes were small—aggressive and defensive at the same time. His expensive suit he somehow made to appear like a sheet thrown over an unwanted sculpture.

  It was a mark of wealth he wore with utter disdain for the civilised world of tailors and designers of fashion, a world he seemed metaphorically to spit on. The hands that rested on Bykov’s chair were thick and shapeless, the blunt tools of a killer.

  “No.” Logan smiled back. “No dancing. I had an accident on the ice.”

  Bykov wasn’t a man who smiled or laughed unless it was at somebody else’s discomfort.

  “Safer inside,” Bykov said. “Inside here.”

  Drinks were ordered, including another bottle of Dom Perignon, which Logan guessed accurately would find its way onto his bill later, and they all went upstairs in a lift to Bykov’s private VIP area.

  “Less noise,” Bykov explained on their way up.

  More girls arrived when they were seated in a wide circle of expensive sofas. It was like the setup in a Kazakh tent, Logan thought, and wondered if Bykov’s deeper origins were in Central Asia. But this time, Logan had let two girls sit on the sofa on either side of him.

  “You don’t like my girls,” Bykov said bluntly.

  “I like them very much,” Logan replied.

  “You a blue boy or something?” Bykov said, meaning a homosexual. “You pay them to go away. Why?”

  “No, not a blue boy. Just a connoisseur,” Logan said.

  “You won’t find better girls than this in the whole of Moscow. In the whole world,” Bykov said, and stroked the hair of the blonde beauty next to him as if she were a dog.

  “Maybe later in the week,” Logan said. “If I haven’t found somewhere else to spend my evenings.”

  “How long are you in Moscow?”

  “A month . . . maybe more. It depends.”

  “Come to my club every night. We’ll give you a discount. Better than any you’ll find in Moscow.”

  “Thank you,” Logan answered. “I may do that.”

  The drinks arrived, and a new barman opened the bottle of champagne. Bykov’s guards drank beer or vodka.

  “American,” Bykov stated, when they’d toasted each other.

  “That’s right,” Logan said.

  “What are you doing in Moscow?”

  “I’m an investor.”

  Bykov laughed harshly. “Funny time to invest,” he said.

  “The best time,” Logan replied. “E
verything’s falling. If you have cash, you can make good deals.”

  “You have cash.”

  “A great deal of cash,” Logan said.

  “What’s your business?”

  “Luxury yachts, an agency for sports players, entertainment—anything in that line that grabs my interest.”

  “You have a card?”

  Logan took out his wallet and removed a card with his and his company’s name.

  Bykov flipped it to one of his men, who disappeared through a door at the end of the room.

  “Good,” Bykov said. “Maybe we do business.”

  “Maybe,” Logan said. “I’m looking for soccer players on this trip, but I’m open to other things.”

  Bykov’s eyes seemed to weigh the possibilities with a kind of ignorant cunning.

  The man returned to the room and gave Bykov Logan’s card, neither with nor without a nod of approval.

  Logan explained at Bykov’s prompting that the L.A. Galaxy team was searching for Russian players, to supplement their harvest of European talent. Soccer, he told Bykov, is going to be big business in America someday.

  Bykov, it turned out, was a soccer fan. Logan hadn’t known that. They discussed the merits of various Russian players; the Spanish, Italian, and English leagues, the gambling possibilities, and other underlying opportunities that Bykov seemed equally interested in.

  Finally, at half past one, Logan said he had to go. Food and then sleep, he said. Bykov insisted that they have dinner. He would take Logan to the best all-night restaurant in Moscow, open only to members and their women.

  “Maybe you take home a couple of my women,” Bykov said. “Tonight, it’s on the house.”

  Bykov was bored, Logan thought. There was nothing anymore that was extreme enough to excite his years of blunted senses. Well, that was just fine.

  But he didn’t go along with the Russian immediately.

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” Logan agreed, and after protesting that he was tired and needed a decent night’s sleep, and Bykov insisting that he would provide many things to keep Logan awake, Logan acquiesced with a display of reluctance to go to dinner.