of Stalin. My neighbor claims to have seen him wandering the halls at night. I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting him.”
The elevator doors opened; the tubby Russian disappeared inside. Luka Osipov walked over to the lobby windows and gazed into the street. At least two other people-a woman walking along the sidewalk and a taxi driver standing next to his car-were having obvious difficulty with their cell phones.
He tried his mobile one more time without success, then walked over to the porter’s desk and asked to use his landline telephone. After ascertaining that Osipov intended to make a local call, the porter turned the instrument around and told the bodyguard to make it quick. The admonition was unnecessary. The phone wasn’t working.
“It’s dead,” Osipov said.
“It was working a minute ago.”
“Have you received any complaints from anyone in the building about trouble with their phones?”
“No, nothing.”
Luka left the porter’s desk and stepped outside. By the time he reached the limousine, the driver had his window down. Luka poked his head through the opening and told the man in the passenger seat to go inside and stand guard in the foyer. Then he turned toward the Kremlin and started walking. By the time he reached the middle of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, his phone was working again. The first call he made was to the Sparrow Hills.
58 MOSCOW
The floor was hardwood and recently polished. Even so, it took every bit of Elena’s strength to drag the two- hundred-pound unconscious body of Pyotr Luzhkov into the bathroom of the master bedroom suite. She locked the door from the inside, then made her way back to the entrance of Ivan’s office. The keypad was mounted at eye level on the left side. After punching in the eight-digit access code, she placed her thumb on the scanner. An alarm chirped three times and the armored door eased slowly open. Elena stepped inside and opened her handbag.
The desk, like the man who worked there, was heavy and dark and entirely lacking in grace. It also happened to be one of Ivan’s most prized possessions, for it had once belonged to Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader in 1982. The computer monitor and keyboard sat next to a silver-framed photograph of Ivan’s father in his KGB general’s uniform. The CPU was concealed beneath the desk on the floor. Elena crouched down and pressed the POWER button, then opened a small door on the front of the unit and plugged in the USB device that Gabriel had given her on the plane. After a few seconds, the drive engaged and the computer began to whir. Elena checked the monitor: a few characters of Hebrew, a time bar indicating that the job of copying the data files would take two minutes.
She glanced at her wristwatch, then walked over to the set of ornate bookcases on the opposite side of the room. The button was hidden behind Ivan’s first edition of
The interior light came on automatically as she pulled open the heavy door. Ivan’s secret disks, the gray matter of his network of death, stood in a neat row on a shelf. One shelf below were some of the proceeds of that network: rubles, dollars, euros, Swiss francs. She started to reach for the money but stopped when she remembered the blood.
At the edge of Serafimovicha Street lies a broad traffic island. Like most in Moscow, it is cluttered day and night with parked cars. Some of the cars that afternoon were foreign and new; others were Russian and very old, including a battered Lada of uncertain color and registry occupied by Uzi Navot and his driver from Moscow Station. Navot did not appear happy, having witnessed several developments that had led him to conclude the operation was rapidly unraveling. He had shared that view with the rest of his teammates in the calmest voice he could manage. But now, as he watched Luka Osipov coming back over the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge at a dead sprint, he knew that the time for composure had passed. “He’s on his way back,” he murmured into his wrist mike. “And it looks like we’re in serious trouble.”
Though Shmuel Peled had no radio, the steadily darkening expression on Gabriel’s face told him everything he needed to know.
'Are we losing her, boss? Tell me we’re not losing her.”
“We’ll know soon enough. If she comes out of that building with her handbag over her left shoulder, everything is fine. If she doesn’t…” He left the thought unfinished.
“What do we do now?”
“We wait. And we hope to God she can talk her way back into her car.”
“And if she doesn’t come out?”
“Speak Russian, Shmuel. You’re supposed to be speaking Russian.”
The young driver resumed his ersatz Russian monologue. Gabriel stared at the western facade of the House on the Embankment and listened for the sound of Uzi Navot’s voice.
Luka Osipov had gained fifteen pounds since leaving the Alpha Group and lost much of his old physical fitness. As a result, he was breathing heavily by the time he arrived back at the porter’s desk in the lobby.
“I need to get into Apartment 9A immediately.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible-not without a security card for the elevator and a key for the apartment itself.”
“I believe a woman under my protection is in grave danger in that apartment at this very moment. And I need you to get me inside.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s against policy.”
“Do you know who I work for, you fool?”
“You work for Mrs. Kharkov.”
“No, I work for
The porter swallowed hard. “I can get you up to the ninth floor but I can’t get you into that apartment. Mr. Kharkov doesn’t let us keep a key on file.”
“Leave that part to me.”
“Good luck,” the porter said as he came out from behind his desk. “From what I hear, you’re going to need a Red Army tank to get into that place.”
Elena closed the bookcases, removed the USB device from the computer, and switched off the power. Stepping into the hallway, she glanced at her watch:
It was then she heard the pounding. A large male fist, interspersed with a large male palm. She reckoned it was the same sort of pounding the occupants of this house of horrors had heard nearly every night during the Great Terror.
