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“Komarov and Grishin have persuaded their friends the Dolgoruki gang to launch a war. They are going to take on the Chechen mafia.”
“So it’s dog-eat-dog. I should worry.”
“Except that the World Bank delegation is in Moscow negotiating the next round of economic credits. Maybe. If the streets are a hail of bullets, acting president Markov, trying to look good both in the eyes of the world and for his election prospects, will not be happy. He might wonder why it had to be now.”
“Go on.”
“Six addresses. Please take them down.”
Monk reeled them off while Major General Petrovsky noted them.
“What are they?”
“The first two are arsenals, packed with Dolgoruki weaponry. The third is a casino; in the basement are most of their financial records. The last three are warehouses. They contain twenty million dollars worth of contraband goods.”
“How do you know this?”
“I have friends in low places. Do you know these two officers?”
Monk gave him two names.
“Of course. One senior deputy of mine and one squad commander of the SOBR troops. Why?”
“They are both on the Dolgoruki payroll.”
“You’d better be certain, American.”
“I am. If you want to mount any raids, I’d keep the notice very short and those two out of the picture.”
“I know how to do my job.”
The line disconnected. General Petrovsky replaced the receiver thoughtfully. If this bizarre foreign agent was right, the information was priceless. He had a choice. Let the gang war rip, or mount a series of body blows on the major mafia syndicate at a moment likely to receive ringing congratulations from the presidency.
He had three thousand rapid reaction force troops at his disposal, the SOBR, mainly young and eager. If the American was only half-right about Igor Komarov and his plans after taking power, there would be no place in the New Russia for him, his gangbusters, or his troops. He returned to the sitting room.
The cartoons were over. Now he would never know if Wiley Coyote had got the Roadrunner for supper or not.
“I’m going back to the office,” he told his wife. “I’ll be there all night and most of tomorrow.”
¯
IN winter the city authorities are accustomed to flood the paths and walkways of the Gorki Park with water, which soon freezes rock solid, creating the country’s biggest ice rink. It extends for miles and is popular with Muscovites of all classes and ages, who bring their skates and a good supply of vodka to forget for a while their cares and troubles in the freedom of the ice.
Some drives remain ice-free and terminate in small parking areas. It was in one of these that two men, mufflered and fur-hatted against the cold, met ten days before Christmas. Each got out of his car and walked alone to the edge of the trees, facing the sheet of ice where the skaters glided and swooped around one another.
One was Colonel Anatoli Grishin, the other a solitary man known in the underworld as Mekhanik, or the Mechanic.
While killers for hire were two-a-penny in Russia, several mafia gangs but most usually the Dolgoruki regarded the Mechanic as special.
He was in fact a Ukrainian, a former army major, who years earlier had been assigned to the Spetsnaz special forces and thence to the military intelligence arm, the GRU. After language school he had enjoyed two postings to Western Europe. Leaving the army, he had realized he could parlay his fluency in English and French, his ability to move easily in societies most Russians regarded as alien and strange, and his lack of inhibitions in the matter of killing other human beings into a lucrative profession.
“I understand you wanted to see me,” he said.
He knew who Colonel Grishin was, and that inside Russia the head of security for the Union of Patriotic Forces Party would have no need of
him. Within the Black Guards, not to mention the party’s allies in the Dolgoruki mafia, there were triggermen enough who had but to be given the order. But working abroad was special.
Grishin passed him a photograph. The Mechanic glanced at it and turned it over. A name and the address of a manor house in the countryside, far to the west, were typed on the back.