Three stops later all the other passengers got off the car, leaving only McGarvey and the four men, who got up and languidly took up positions at the front and rear doors. They didn’t speak nor did they make any effort to approach McGarvey, but they watched him.
The public address system announced the next stop was Leningrad Station, and as the train slowed down McGarvey got up and went to the back door. One of the young men grinned, showing his bad teeth. He started to say something when McGarvey smashed the heel of his heavy boot into the man’s right kneecap, the leg snapping with an audible pop.
He went down with a piercing scream. The second man shoved him aside with one hand while fumbling in his ragged coat pocket with his other.
Before he could pull out a weapon, McGarvey smashed him in the face with a roundhouse right, his head bouncing off the door frame. McGarvey pulled him forward, off balance, and as he doubled over, drove a knee in the man’s face.
McGarvey pulled out his gun, and brought it up as he swiveled around in one smooth motion to face the other two men charging up the car toward him. “Nyet,” he warned.
The two men pulled up short, angry and confused and a little bit fearful. In a matter of seconds the man they’d targeted to rob had taken out two of their friends, and now held a gun on them as if he knew what he was doing.
The train came to a halt, the doors slid open, and McGarvey stepped off, pocketing his gun before anyone on the crowded platform could see what was going on. He headed directly for the escalators to the street level.
There was a commotion on the platform behind him, but he didn’t think the other two men would be coming after him. They’d be getting their two injured friends out of there before someone else moved in and took advantage of them.
Yaroslavl and Leningrad Stations were directly behind the metro entrance, separated from each other by a large brown brick building where advanced reservation train tickets were sold to Russians. Only tickets that were to be used within twenty-four hours were sold from the train stations in a complicated system that separated foreigners from Russians, and Russian civilians from veterans and active duty soldiers. Even most Russians didn’t understand the system, and sometimes the lines were endless.
McGarvey ducked around the corner and crossed the street where, in the darkness behind the advanced ticket building, he changed into the army uniform, stuffing his civilian clothes into the carryall. The uniform stank of sweat and mildew and dirt, and the greatcoat with corporal’s chevrons was stiff with grease and mud. The boots were cheap, worn down at the heels and extremely uncomfortable. He pocketed his gun, and the identity and leave papers, and pulling his filthy fur hat down over his eyes, made his way back to the Yaroslavl station.
Tickets for veterans were sold from two windows upstairs, and although the station was extremely busy this evening, he got lucky and only had to wait in line for an hour and a half. No one paid him the slightest attention. He could have been invisible.
He paid for a round trip fourth class, or hard class, ticket to Nizhny Novgorod, which on the timetables was. still listed as Gorki, from a surly old woman, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She barely looked up at him, but she didn’t start working on the tickets until McGarvey had passed his money thorough the narrow opening.
Downstairs in the cavernous arrivals and departures hall, McGarvey bought a couple bottles of cheap vodka, a few packages of Polish cigarettes, and a package of greasy kielbasa sausages, a loaf of dark bread, some pickles, a couple of onions, a large tomato and one bottle of mineral water. All of these he stuffed into his carryall, then headed down to wait for his train. He cracked the seal on a bottle of vodka, took a deep drink, and sat on his carryall in the middle of the huge crowd waiting for the train.
It took him a few minutes, listening and watching, before he began to pick up an undercurrent of excitement. Something rare for Russians. All these people were going to Nizhny Novgorod for the same reason. To see Tarankov. The Tarantula. Their savior. And they were excited about it.
SIXTEEN
Elizabeth McGarvey looked up from her computer screen, the Cyrillic letters of the Russian language blurring in her vision. It wasn’t 5:00 p.m. yet which meant she had another half-hour of this crap before she could get out of here. She got up and walked past the rows of the translator’s stations to the women’s room, where she dampened a paper towel, daubed her face, and looked into the mirror at her bloodshot eyes, and pale complexion. She was only twenty three, and already she was taking on what her coworkers called the archival pallor. The only light that ever shined on them fifty hours a week came from fluorescent tubes in the ceilings, and monitors they sat in front of. She was in love with the idea of working for the Central Intelligence Agency, but bored out of her skull with translating foreign broadcasts — mostly Russian these days — for the analyst gee ks up on the fourth floor. But she was still too new to ask for a transfer to the Directorate of Operations, and she was already getting the impression that being her father’s daughter put her at a distinct disadvantage so long as Howard Ryan was DDO. She brushed her long blonde hair, touched up her lipstick and went back to her console.
Over the past three or four days the analysts had demanded information about the ultra-nationalist General Yevgenni Tarankov. Though nothing official had filtered down to them in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was happening. Tarankov had probably hit the Riga nuclear power station in Dzerzhinskiy — she’d seen a brief mention about him in Novy Mir — and it was also possible that he’d been involved with the incident in Red Square the next morning in which Yeltsin had died. But his death didn’t make any sense to her. If Tarankov was behind the explosion in Red Square Yeltsin would have been the direct target. There was no other reason for such an attack. If that was the case, and Yeltsin had died in the blast, and not of a heart attack as the Russian media was reporting, it meant the Kremlin was lying for some reason.
Elizabeth brought up the transcripts for the past seventy-two hours of on air broadcasts of the official Russian news agency, transferred the entire block of material into the RAM section of a recognition program she’d been working on for the past couple of weeks, and asked the computer to search for three pieces of information. Yeltsin’s movements, Tarankov’s appearances, and the routine informational news releases issued by the offices of the President, Minister of Defense and the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg over that period. They were the most powerful men in Russia. And they had the most to lose if Tarankov won in the June elections.
Her boss, Bratislav Toivich, came over as the program began to run. He was a Lithuanian who’d immigrated to this country in the late fifties as a young man, but he’d still not lost his accent, or his rigid hatred for the Russians. He was a thick-wasted man who smoked constantly, and always had a hangdog look as if he’d just received some terrible news. No one had ever seen him smile. But he was brilliant, he was fair, and he was kind. Everyone loved him.
“Are you writing love letters now?” Toivich asked pulling up a chair beside her.
“The Company doesn’t give me the time for a love life.”
“Aren’t there any good men in Washington these days?”
“None that I’ve met.”
Toivich studied the blocks of text rapidly shifting across the screen. “What are we looking for here? This is your new program?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. She turned to him. “Yeltsin’s heart attack doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Dzerzhinskiy could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. He’s had health problems for years.”
“Agreed. But no one is making a big deal out of the car bombing in Red Square. That in itself is kinda weird. You’d think they’d be all over it, Mr. B. The Communists should be screaming bloody murder. They’ve been predicting this sort of thing all along. It’s the moderate reformers’ fault.”
“Maybe it is,” Toivich suggested.
Elizabeth was shocked. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“As far as I’m concerned the dirty bastards can wallow in their own filth, they deserve it. But what’s happening in Russia now was expected. In any change, especially such a big change, anarchy always follows. How
