It was a mistake, because by the time he got on the road again he was caught in the middle of rush-hour traffic as factory and shipyard workers clogged the highways on their way home.
He’d hoped to have reached the border with Russia at Braniewo around seven in the evening, and when traffic might still be reasonably heavy, and the customs officers too busy to check him thoroughly. Instead he arrived at the frontier a few minutes before 10:00 p.m., his the only car within sight in either direction.
On the Polish side the customs officials stamped his in-transit papers, and waved him through. On the Russian side, however, the armed FSK security officer motioned him to a parking area a few yards from the roadway. A customs officer in the dark blue uniform of a Militia cop, came out of the customs shed, and took his papers.
“Good evening,” the official said indifferently, as he studied McGarvey’s passport.
“Good evening,” McGarvey replied in fractured Russian.
“Did you drive this automobile all the way from Brussels?”
“I bought it in Leipzig.”
A second FSK security officer came out of the customs shed, a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He * walked over to the car, touched the hood, examined the knobby tires, and ran his fingers along the passenger side door. He stopped in back.
McGarvey glanced in the rearview mirror as the soldier studied the spare tire on the rack, and then shined a flashlight inside at the second spare tire and the gas cans.
“Why are you coming to Russia?” the customs official asked.
“I’m in transit to Riga.”
“Will you-be staying in Kaliningrad tonight?”
“No. I’d like to reach Latvia by morning if the roads are okay and the weather continues to cooperate.”
“There is nothing wrong with Russian roads,” the official said sharply. He examined the car’s papers, lingering over the German export and Latvian import licenses. “Do you have a buyer for this pussy wagon in Riga?”
“I hope so.”
The official laughed. “No one up there has any money these days, except for a certain class of… businessmen.”
McGarvey shrugged but said nothing.
The customs officer gave him a hard, bleak stare, then handed back his passport. He wrote something on the Russian transit permit. “There is an additional transit fee of five hundred deutsch marks Do you have this money with you? It says here you didn’t pay it in Leipzig.” It was a bribe, of course.
“It was an oversight,” McGarvey said. He counted out the money and handed it over without protest. He was being perceived as one of “those businessmen,” which meant Latvian Mafia, which was giving the Russians still living in the country a horrible time. It was exactly the image he wanted to portray.
“Don’t stay long in Russia,” the official ordered. He stepped back, and Waved the FSK security guard to raise the barricade.
An hour and a half later McGarvey was crossing the much friendlier border into Lithuania where the customs officials joked and smiled, and waved at him as he left.
“He’s disappeared and nobody can find him,” Chernov told General Yuryn at breakfast in the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters of the FSK shortly after eight in the morning. “We’ll have to wait until he contacts Yemlin, or makes a mistake.”
“Maybe he’s given up.”.
“That’s not likely.”
“President Kabatov has to be told something.”
Chernov looked at him coldly. He despised weakness of any kind, and he took Yuryn’s obesity to be a sign of a lack of self control. But
Tarankov needed the general, at least until after the elections. Then many things would change in Moscow.
“Sorry, General, but we’ve been working around the clock, and I’m getting tired.”
Yuryn laughed because the remark was so obviously disingenuous. “I’ll pass your complaint along to him.”
“Tell him that we’re working on it. McGarvey will not succeed. I guarantee it.”
Elizabeth had slept poorly, and as a result she had a difficult time getting started. She didn’t leave the apartment until nearly 7:00 a.m.” and her heart wasn’t in her jogging. She’d come to enjoy the mornings, as she was sure her father had, in part because by doing the same things he did she felt closer to him. But not this morning because she was frightened and confused. For the first time she was beginning to doubt that even a man such as her father could succeed with the deck so stacked against him.
A half-dozen blocks from the apartment, she stopped at a telephone kiosk, and using her credit card called a number in Alexandria, across the river from Washington. It was one in the morning over there, but she didn’t care. She’d wake up the dead if she thought that it would help.
Her old boss Bratislav Toivich answered his home phone on the first ring as if he’d been expecting the call. “Hullo.”
“Mr. B, it’s Liz. I’m in Paris.”
“You’re up early.”
“I’m jogging the same route my father takes. But we haven’t found a thing. And I don’t know what to do next.”
“I haven’t heard much here either, little devochka. Maybe it’s time for you to come home.”
“They want to send me and Jacqueline to Moscow to act as bait. But I’m afraid of what my father might do if he finds out.”
“That bastard,” Toivich said with much feeling. “Don’t you do it, Elizabeth. Don’t you let them bully you into going over there. You know the situation in Moscow. Anything can happen. You and Ms. Belleau could be swallowed up and no one would ever hear from you again.”
“The Russians know what my father is planning to do, and they’re waiting for him. He doesn’t have a chance, Mr. B. He’s walking into a trap, unless we can warn him first. But I don’t know what to do anymore. We’ve tried just about everything.”
“Have you tried reaching him through his friend, Otto Rencke?”
“He’s disappeared too.”
“He’s a computer genius. The machines are his entire life.”
“We’ve tried the computer schools here in Paris but no one has heard from him.”
“You’re young, Elizabeth. You were raised in the computer age, so think like a computer genius.” “I don’t understand.”
“Rencke is probably helping your father. But that wouldn’t take him twenty-four hours a day. He has to amuse himself somehow in the off hours. So what would a man like that do with himself?”
THIRTY
McGarvey crossed the Daugava River that ran through the heart of the Latvian capital around eight o’clock in the morning, his eyes gritty and his stomach rumbling. The traffic clogged streets were in terrible repair, the drivers even more reckless than in France, so he had to watch his own driving.
Using the Latvian guide book and maps he’d picked up at a truck stop this morning, he found his way to the main Telephone and Telegraph office on Brivlbas Boulevard. The Mercedes attracted some attention, but nobody bothered him.
Inside, he gave one of the clerks at the counter a Paris number and she directed him to one of the booths.
