“Do you have a car here?” Yuryn asked in the corridor.
“No.”
“Paporov will arrange one for you. In the meantime have you got someplace to stay?”
“I’ll stay at Lefortovo for now,” Chernov said.
“Good, I’ll drive you over,” Yuryn said and they went downstairs and climbed into the back of a Zil limousine.
The meeting had lasted less than a half-hour, and the sky was finally beginning to clear up, though the sun had set and it was dark. Yuryn’s car shot out the Nikolskaya Tower gate, swept across Red Square and raced northeast toward Lefortovo Prison in Bauman suburb.
“You handled yourself very well in there,” Yuryn said. “Do you really know how to catch this bastard? Or was that all talk?”
Chernov felt almost dreamy. His brother had been wrong about revenge. Arkady had to have been wrong, because at this moment nothing else seemed to matter. He would find and kill McGarvey not for Tarankov’s sake, and certainly not for that fool Kabatov’s sake, but for nothing more than a sweet revenge.
“I’ll kill him,” Chernov said softly, not caring if Yuryn heard him or not.
Traffic was heavy, but the Zil traveled in the official lane. Traffic cops waved them on, and Chernov watched, more in love with Moscow now than the first time he’d come here from the far east, because it was here that he would settle an old score, and afterward he would leave Russia forever. Right now it was as if he were seeing an old love for the last time. He was going to make the most of it.
TWENTY-FIVE
Viktor Yemlin left the SVR Headquarters building on Moscow’s ring road shortly after seven, finally ready to take action. The weekend had been horrible for him. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours. He hadn’t eaten much, he hadn’t looked at the newspapers or watched television. Most of the time he’d sat in his favorite chair in the living room of his apartment smoking Marlboros and drinking vodka, as he watched the sun rise and set twice.
He hadn’t forced himself to come to any immediate conclusions about what had happened to him because he did not have all the facts. Nor did he allow his guilt to completely consume him, although at first his shame was so overwhelming he’d been in danger of sinking into deep depression. Instead he’d gone over what he’d done at the Magesterium, what had been done to him, and the reasons behind the attack — because that’s how he viewed the experience. He’d been lured to the club by Cheremukhin which in retrospect was the first troubling aspect he struggled with. The entire affair had been planned and orchestrated, possibly on Yuryn’s orders. But Cheremukhin was one of the moderates who had just as much to gain by Tarankov’s death as Kabatov and the rest of them. It was hard to imagine Cheremukhin working for the FSK, but if he wasn’t then his appearance on the steps of the Senate at just that moment, and his insistence on taking Yemlin to his club had to have been a tremendous coincidence.
Yemlin had turned that thought over in his mind, worrying at it like a dog with a bone. Yuryn knew about his trips to Tbilisi, Paris and Helsinki, and he was suspicious. Part of that was driven by the intense interservice rivalry between the two divisions of the old KGB. And part of it was Yuryn’s surprise and discomfort in front of Kabatov when Yemlin had come up with the plan to hide the facts behind Yeltsin’s death. Still there was no logical connection between Yuryn’s suspicions and the setup at the Magesterium.
But the job of the FSK was internal security, which meant it not only watched the borders, the train stations and airports, but it also monitored places where high ranking Russians gathered to play. The Magesterium and all the other political clubs like it would naturally be watched. At the handful of clubs that catered to high ranking politicians, journalists and intelligence officers, security would be especially tight As soon as Yemlin had walked in the front door whoever was controlling the FSK surveillance operation would have reported the fact, and the honey trap had been set up.
It was cunning of them to use not only the young woman, but a young man as well. They might expect that Yemlin would have little compunction about bragging about screwing a girl, but he might keep to himself the fact that he’d had a homosexual experience. No doubt the entire affair was on videotape. And from what memories he could dredge up from his foggy recollections, he’d enjoyed the experience. At least he’d gotten pleasure from the sexual act, which was a cause of his sharp feelings of guilt.
The worst part of the experience however was his inability to remember the details. He remembered Renee and me bath, and Valeri, the doll, who’d brought him champagne. He also remembered the feeling of warmth, and then of drifting, as if he were dreaming. He even remembered the rubdown, and the sex, but then it was fuzzy. He’d been thinking about Kirk McGarvey when he entered the club, and he was worried that in his drug induced state he had spoken his thoughts out loud.
It wasn’t likely that he had given anything away, or else Yuryn would have ordered his arrest. By now he’d be in the basement interrogation rooms at Dzerzhinsky Square where the entire plot would have been extracted from him. But he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he had talked, and they tried to find McGarvey but failed. Now they were waiting for him to make contact. It was something that he had to know. Because if the FSK was aware of the plot to kill Tarankov, then McGarvey would have to be stopped because he would be walking into a trap.
“Home?” his driver asked, when Yemlin climbed into the back seat of his car.
“Not tonight, Anatoli. You can drop me off at the Magesterium and then you’ll be free for the remainder of the evening. But you can pick me up at home in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
Yeltsin’s funeral had gone off without a hitch on Friday. Although Yemlin hadn’t attended it, his people who monitored the foreign dignitaries reported mat there’d been no trouble, for which he’d been heartily congratulated today at lunch by SVR director General Aykazyan. The fiction was holding. And as the general wisely pointed out, it didn’t matter if no one believed it, what mattered was that the western powers were acting as if they did.
Nothing coming across his desk from North American operations gave so much as a hint that the exact manner of Yeltsin’s death was being questioned. Nor did any of the product coming from the half-dozen major networks they operated in the U.S. and Canada raise questions. Yet Yemlin felt that McGarvey was right. The western powers knew what had happened, but they were biding their time to see how events unfolded over the next ten weeks before the elections. Afterward a lot of things would be different in Russia, Yemlin thought, but he was no longer so confident about his predictions for the future.
As they came into the city, he reached in his pocket and fingered the two small silver cigarette boxes that his friend Andrei Galkin in the Scientific Directorate had given him this afternoon, and he shuddered involuntarily. He had done questionable things in his long career with the KGB, things that he’d never been able to tell his wife about, things that he kept carefully hidden in a secret compartment in his mind, things that only rarely came to him in his dreams, but when they did he would awaken, his heart pounding, his bedclothes soaked in sweat. When he had finally become resident in charge of the KGB’s Washington station, he thought that he’d finally put all that behind him. Then when he’d been recalled to Moscow and promoted he was certain that he would finish out his long career safely seated behind a desk.
But he’d been wrong.
Twenty minutes later his driver let him off at the Ma gesterium, and inside at the front desk he was effusively welcomed with a guest membership.
“We know that you will be happy here, Viktor,” the manager, a portly dark-haired Georgian, said confidently. “If there’s anything that I can personally do to be of service, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
Only first names were used in the club. The manager’s name tag read Josef.
“Is Renee available this evening, Josef?”
“For you Viktor, naturally.” The manager picked up a telephone, spoke a few words, and then hung up, his smile widening. “One minute, Viktor. Sixty seconds, check your watch, and you’ll be in heaven.”
A young woman came by with a tray of champagne, and Yemlin took a bottle and two glasses. Less than a minute later Renee appeared, her face lit up in a bright smile.
“Viktor, you came back to us. Am I ever glad. You know that Vadim said you were an okay guy.” She took a
