father told her a few years ago in Greece. They were in trouble, and he wanted to comfort her, and yet make her aware of the truth.
“We have no idea what Yemlin wants your father to do for the SVR,” Moore said. “But the French are worried that—”
Ryan interrupted. “The French are concerned that whatever Yemlin wants will involve a French citizen, or possibly someone on French soil.”
Elizabeth’s head was spinning again. She’d seen her father in action, and she’d heard enough dropped hints downstairs over the past few months, to figure out what his job had been. Or at least a part of it. Her father killed people. Bad people. Horrible people. But he had been a shooter for the CIA in the days when the Company denied such hired guns existed. Her mother would be aghast if she knew, although Elizabeth thought her mother probably had an idea at the back of her head. But they never talked about it. Never. A thought flashed in her head like a bright flare, and she had all she could do to keep it from showing on her face. Yemlin had come to ask her father to assassinate someone. Someone not in France, but in Russia. Someone who was tearing the country apart. Someone who could conceivably embroil all of eastern Europe in a war. Someone who had the complete attention of the CIA.
Yemlin had asked her father to assassinate Yevgenni Tarankov, and her father had probably accepted the assignment otherwise he would not have gone to ground.
“All right,” she said.
“Ms. McGarvey?” Ryan asked.
“I’ll find my father and get the message to him, but I’ll do it completely on my own. If my father gets the slightest hint that the agency is following me, or that he’s being set up, nobody will find him. And if I find out that I’m being followed I’ll tell my father everything, which will make him mad.” She flashed Ryan and Moore a sweet look. “You probably already know that when my father is angry you don’t want to be around him. He sometimes tends to take things to the extreme.”
“We’ll stay out of your way, Ms. McGarvey, you have my word on it,” Ryan said. “As of this moment you are operational. Tom will set you up with a code name, contact procedures, travel documents and money, everything you’ll need.” He sat forward. “Time is of the essence. Because if your father takes the Russians up on their offer, he’ll either be arrested and jailed, or killed. Something I most sincerely assure you, young lady, that no one in the Agency wants to happen.”
McGarvey’s.train arrived at the main railway station on the west bank of the Volga River a few minutes after seven in the morning, and he walked across the street to a small workmen’s cafe crowded with roughly dressed factory workers and a few shabbily attired soldiers. The snowstorm had ended sometime in the middle of the night, and the sun shone brightly. A blanket of snow made the city of 1.5 million seem almost pretty. The upbeat mood of passengers aboard the train was matched by the festival atmosphere of the town. No one seemed to be working today, everybody seemed exuberant, expectant. Banners with Tarankov’s name and likeness, or plain banners with a stylized design of a tarantula spider, hung from the front of the railway station, and from utility poles on the broad avenue leading across the river toward the Kremlin whose walls rose from the hill overlooking the city center. They fluttered and snapped in the fresh breeze that carried with it odors of river sewage and factory smoke.
Like most Russian cities, Nizhny Novgorod stank, but it was better than some places.
His hard class car had been so packed with bodies last night that there’d been no room to sit down, not even on the drafty connecting platform. What little sleep he’d managed to get had been done standing up. Combined with the effects of stale air, too many cigarettes, and too much vodka — everybody on the train was drunk even before they’d left Moscow — McGarvey felt like he’d been on a seven-day hinge. Catching a glance at his reflection in the dirty window of the cafe, he looked as if he hadn’t bathed or slept in a week. It was exactly the effect he wanted to achieve, because now he fit in. Now he was part of the scenery. No one to give a second notice to. No one threatening. Just another corporal too old for his rank, with obviously nowhere to go, and no hope, except for Tarankov.
He bought a plate of goulash and black bread for a few roubles, and found a place in the corner at the end of a long table, where he sank down gratefully on the hard bench. Keeping his eyes downcast he ate the surprisingly good food, while he listened to what the men around the table were talking about. They all worked the night shift at the MiG factory on the eastern outskirts of the city, and they’d come down here after work to catch what they were calling “the Tarantula’s act.” They were all cynical, as only Russians could be, nonetheless their oftentimes, heated discussion about Tarankov was tinged with a little awe, and even hope. It was about time somebody came along to get them out of the mess that Gorbachev started, and that the drunken buffoon Yeltsin had worsened. They’d lost the southern republics and the Baltics, and they’d also lost their dignity as a nation. Russians were taking handouts from foreigners just so they could have a hamburger at the McDonald’s in Moscow. AIDS, crack cocaine and the Mafia were direct imports from the west.
“Sonofabitch, but even our soldiers are starving in the streets,” one of the workmen shouted. “Just like this sorry bastard.”
McGarvey looked up. The men around the table stared at him with a mixture of pity and anger.
“Where the hell did you serve, Corporal?” one of the men asked.
“Yeb was, Afghanistan,” McGarvey mumbled, and he went back to his food.
“He’s goddamned right. Fuck your mother,” the man said.
Someone slammed a not-so-clean glass down in front of McGarvey, filled it with vodka, and they went back to their discussion, this time about the drunkenness in what was once the greatest military in the world. Officers lived in tarpaper shacks, and enlisted men were billeted in tents or simply allowed to roam the streets between duty assignments. The situation wasn’t quite that bad, but Russians loved to wallow in self-pity, and loved even more to exaggerate their problems.
After his breakfast and a second glass of vodka from the factory workers at his table, McGarvey wandered outside where he bought a half-liter of vodka from one of the street kiosks that were springing up around the railway station, and down the broad Ploshchad Lenina that led past the Tsentralnaya Hotel and across the river into the city proper. More people streamed into the area, so that for several blocks in every direction around the railway station, and along the boulevard across the river, crowds were amassing, their collective shouts and laughter rising like the low hum of a billion cicadas.
He stood to one side of the square where he had a good view of the switching yard and passenger platforms a hundred yards to the west, and the boulevard into the city. A few stragglers crossed the street, but for the most part the thoroughfare was kept perfectly clear, although there were no traffic cops or Militia officers to restrain the crowd.
The effect was strange, and unsettling to McGarvey.
It was as if Tarankov’s presence were strong enough that his people automatically cleared a path for his triumphal entry to the city. Parishioners kept the aisles clear out of respect not only for the ceremony, but for the priest. The same deference had been accorded Stalin in the late forties and fifties. He had saved the country from the Nazis. Now Tarankov promised to save the nation from oblivion. The people loved him for it.
A huge roar went up from the crowds lining the bridge a half-mile to the south. People streamed out of the railway station and Gate’s and hotels as the commotion approached like a monster wave.
An open army truck appeared on the crest of the bridge, and for the first minute or so McGarvey thought the Militia might be on its way after all. But there was only one truck, moving slowly, the people along the route reacting as it passed.
A buzz of excitement suddenly swept through the tens of thousands of people around the railway station, rising in pitch as the truck came closer, and they could see the half-dozen men and two women dressed in civilian clothes in the back. They were obviously prisoners. Four men dressed in blue factory coveralls and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, stood in the back of the truck with the eight unarmed passengers.
Somebody beside McGarvey suddenly began jumping up and waving his fist in the air. “Death to the traitors!” he shouted. “Death to Lensky! Death to the traitors!” Viktor Lensky was the mayor.
Others in the mass of people took up the chant that soon rose to a deafening roar, as the truck pulled up in the square across from the railway depot. The guards jumped down from the back of the truck, and made their prisoners climb down and line up in a row beneath one of the tarantula banners flapping in the breeze. None of the
