I had read about Sergei Lysenkov's freelance activities in Intelligence Service reports. He had been a member of Spetznaz's Alpha Group, an elite of special-forces officers within the RGB, who used to be deployed wherever Moscow's power was under threat or there were wars of expansion. When hard line heads of the KGB led the 1991 coup in Moscow, they ordered Alpha Group to kill Yeltsin as he held out in the Russian White House, but Sergei and his mates decided that enough was enough and that the politicos were all as bad as each other. They disobeyed the order, the coup failed, and when Yeltsin learned what had nearly happened he took them under his direct command, cutting their power by turning them into his own bodyguards. Sergei decided to quit and make his experience and knowledge available to the highest bidder, and today that was me. It had been easy enough to make contact: I just went to Moscow and asked a few security companies where I could find him.
I needed Russians on the team because I needed to know how Russians think, how Russians do. And when I discovered that Valentin Lebed would be in Helsinki for twenty-four hours of R and R, and not in his fortress in St. Petersburg, Sergei was the only one who could organize vehicles, weapons, and the bribing of border guards in the time available.
The people who'd briefed me on the job had done their homework well.
Valentin Lebed, they were able to tell me, had been smart during the fall of communism. Unlike some of his gaucher colleagues, he didn't keep the designer labels on the sleeves of his new suit to show how much it had cost. His rise was brutal and meteoric; within two years he was one of the dozen heads of the 'mafiocracy' who had made ROC so powerful around the world. Lebed's firm employed only ex-KGB agents overseas, using their skills and experience to run international crime like a military operation.
Coming from dirt-poor beginnings as a farmer's son in Chechnya, he'd fought against the Russians in the mid-nineties war. His fame was sealed after rallying his men by making them watch Braveheart time and time again as the Russians bombed them day after day. He even painted his face half blue when attacking. After the war he'd had other ideas, all of them involving U.S. dollars, and the place he'd chosen to realize them was St. Petersburg.
Much of his money came from arms dealing, extortion, and a string of nightclubs he owned in Moscow and elsewhere, which served as fronts for prostitution rackets. Jewelery businesses he had 'acquired' in Eastern Europe were used as a front to fence icons stolen from churches and museums. He also had bases in the United States, and was said to have brokered a deal to dump hundreds of tons of American toxic waste on his motherland. In the Far East, he'd even bought an airline just so he could ship out heroin without administrative hassle. Within just a few years, according to the guys who'd briefed me, such activities were said to have netted him more than $200 million.
Three blocks on the other side of the hotel, parked in a car that would be abandoned once this lift kicked off, were two more of the six-man team. Carpenter and Nightmare were armed with 9mm mini-Uzi machine guns, a very small version of the Uzi 9mm, on harnesses under their overcoats, the same as the BGs (bodyguards) we were going up against.
They were good, reliable weapons, if a little heavy for their size. It was ironic, but Sergei had obtained the team's Uzis and old Spanish, semiautomatic suppressed 7mm pistols from one of Valentin's own dealers.
Carpenter and Nightmare weren't their real names, of course; Sergei-the only one who spoke English-had told me that was how they translated, and that was how he referred to them. Just as well, as I couldn't have pronounced them in Russian anyway.
Nightmare was living up to his name. He certainly wasn't the sharpest tool in Sergei's shed. Things needed to be demonstrated twenty or thirty times before he got the idea. There was a slight flatness to his face that, together with his constantly shifting eyes and the fact that he didn't seem too good at keeping food in his mouth, made him look a bit scary.
Carpenter had a heroin habit that Sergei assured me would not affect his performance, but it certainly had during the buildup. He had lips that were constantly at work, as though he'd swallowed something and was trying to recapture the taste. Sergei told him that if he screwed up on the ground he would personally kill him.
Nightmare was like a big brother to Carpenter and protected him when Sergei gave him a hard time for messing up, but it seemed to me that Nightmare would be lost without him, that they needed each other.
Sergei told me they'd been friends since they were teenagers.
Nightmare's family had looked after Carpenter when his mother went down for life for killing her husband. She'd discovered he'd raped his own seventeen-year-old daughter. As if that wasn't enough, Sergei was his uncle, his father's brother. It was As the World Turns, Russian style, and the only thing I liked about it was that it made my own family seem normal. Carpenter and Nightmare would be in the hotel with me for the lift; perhaps I could keep some control over them if I had them with me.
The last two on the team I'd christened the James brothers and they were in a green Toyota 4x4. I wasn't so worried about them; unlike the other two, they didn't have to be told what to do more than twice. They had the trigger on the target's three black Mercedes, which were about a mile and a half away from the hotel. They also had folding-stock AKs and AP (armor-piercing) rounds in their mags, and, like Sergei, they wore enough body armor to cripple a small horse.
The target was well protected in the hotel and his vehicles were securely parked underground so that no device-explosive from his enemies or listening or surveillance from law enforcement-could be placed. When they finally moved out to pick him up from the hotel with the rest of his BGs, the Jameses would follow. Carpenter and Nightmare would then take up their positions in the hotel, along with me. Sergei, Jesse, and Frank would take on the vehicles.
The Jameses were both ex-Alpha Group, too, but unlike Sergei they were far too good-looking to be straight. They'd been together since their time as young conscripts in Afghanistan, leaving after the previous Chechen war in the mid-nineties, disillusioned with the leadership that had let them lose against the rebels. Both were in their mid- thirties, with dyed blond hair, very clean shaven and well groomed. If they'd wanted a change of career they could have become catalog models. They had never been parted during their military career. As far as I could make out, all they wanted to do was kill Chechen rebels-and swap admiring glances.
I knew I could trust Sergei, but I still wondered about his selection procedure. He obviously wanted to keep most of the cash I'd promised him and had decided not to bring the A team.
It was the most unprofessional job I'd ever been on, and I'd been on a few. Things had got so bad that I'd even taken to sleeping with my door barred and my weapon ready. If the team wasn't complaining to him about my planning, Sergei said, they were moaning about who was earning what and how they might get ripped off when it came to payday.
Carpenter was so homophobic he made Hitler look like a wet liberal, and it had taken as much effort keeping the two pairs away from each other as it had preparing for the job. I did my best to keep out of their way and concentrated on dealing exclusively with Sergei; he was the one I had to keep happy, because he was the only one who could help me get the target into Russia. But they'd got me nervous; people were going to die today, and I didn't want to be one of them.
I was with a scary crew, against a scary target, with the whole of Western Europe's leadership due in town, bringing along enough security to take on China. This wasn't a good day out but, fuck it, desperation makes people do desperate things.
I blew out another cloud of breath. The digital display on the dashboard told me another twenty minutes had passed-time for a radio check. Reaching into my inside jacket pocket, I felt for the send button of my very yellow Motorola handset, the sort that parents use to keep tabs on their kids on the ski slopes or in the shopping mall. All six of us had one, each connected to an earpiece which was hooked in place. With so many people using headphones on their mobile phones, we wouldn't be conspicuous wandering around with them in.
I pressed twice, the squelch sounding off in my ear, then checked with Sergei. He nodded; I was sending. Jesse and Frank replied with two squelches, then Carpenter and Nightmare followed with three. If I'd hit the send button and there was nothing from the Jameses, Carpenter and Nightmare would have waited thirty seconds and replied anyway. We would have no option then but to close in on the target and wait for the Meres to arrive not good, as it exposed us three in the hotel and messed up coordination. There was radio silence for two reasons. One, I couldn't speak the language, and two, EU land security would be listening in. With any luck, a few clicks here and there wouldn't mean a thing. There were many other standby com ms I could have used, mobile phones for instance, but everything had to be kept pretty basic for Nightmare and Carpenter. Anything else to remember and they would have blown up. The old principle of planning keep it simple, stupid rang true yet again.
