“In the flesh. Or in yellow stucco. Source of evil, source of cunning, source of murder, violence, conspiracy, treachery, torture. It’s a very bad place. You did not want to make people in that building angry with you.”
“I get it.”
“Nothing military in there,” said Mikhail Stronski. “It’s all secret-agent spy shit, games in games in games, always fucking people up.”
It was the Lubyanka: former home of the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MGB, NKVD, and KGB, and now FSB. During the purges, many were hauled here from Swagger’s polished luxury hotel, the Metropole, which in the thirties housed the wreckers and oppositionists of Comintern, and in Lubyanka’s cellars, they were shot behind the ear. No one knew what became of the bodies. Maybe they were still there.
“It’s hard to hate a building,” said Swagger.
“This one, no problem.”
Stronksi was a heavyset man with a glowering face that seemed like a map of Eastern-bloc misfortune. He had wintry gray eyes under wintry gray hair and heavy bones, and looked as if he could crush a diamond between his fingers, or at least fracture it a little bit. He had a bear’s body, yet at fifty-seven he moved with surprising grace. He had been in the same business as Swagger, but his outfit was called Spetsnaz, and he practiced the trade in Afghanistan-fifty-six kills.
An American gun writer who’d come to Russia to do a feature on the new Russian sniper rifle, the 12.7 mm KSVK, had found him and interviewed him; Swagger saw the story, contacted the gun writer, got the e-mail address and a recommendation, and reached out across the ocean to another high-grass crawler, another brother of the one-shot kill, another infiltrator and exfiltrator who knew too much about certain things but would never speak of them. Stronski had heard of Swagger – it was a small world, after all – so the two men were a natural fit, having killed for a king whom they later doubted, having lost too many good friends for a cause that now seemed to mean nothing in the world, yet sought for certain recondite skills that never go out of fashion.
“This woman, she’s okay?” Stronski asked.
“She’s not of our world, which I like. No games to her. I haven’t told her everything; that’s tonight. But she reads your language as well as a native–”
“I love her already.”
“–and she’s super-smart and tough. It’ll be fine if I can get her to feel secure. Like all Americans, she’ll fear the building.”
The two sat in an elegant restaurant, called Spy for the irony (irony was as new to Moscow as capitalism), that fronted Dzerzhinsky Square and lurked three hundred yards across the circle from the Lubyanka. They were on the balcony of the third floor, eating blintzes and caviar and cold slices of salmon, Stronski throwing down vodka, Swagger trying to keep up with old-fashioned water.
“We fear that building too. A good young fellow named Tibolotsky, good operator, brave as hell, spotted for me in the mountains, he voiced doubts about the war. He was fighting it; his right, no? Someone informs KGB, and young fellow is disappeared. Wrong for him to fight so hard and end up in cell or worse. That is why I hate bastards so goddamn much.”
“The politicals were always assholes,” Bob said. “I lost a spotter, and politicals were involved. Any apparatus in the world, the politicals are assholes.”
“It’s true,” said Stronski.
“You’ve made the arrangements?”
“I have. You have the cash?”
“Smuggled in, in my shoe. You trust this fellow?”
“I do. Not because he’s brave but because in Moscow, corruption is like any commodity. He has to deliver or it gets out, and new business goes to the competition. So the market guarantees this lieutenant-colonel will shoot straight and deliver, not his own honesty, of which, of course, he has none.”
“If Stronski says yes, I say yes. I trust Stronski.”
“I am as crooked as all of them. I extend certain courtesies to Brother Sniper, that’s all.”
“Fair enough.”
“Now put your hand under table and receive.”
“Receive what?”
“You will see.”
Swagger received. It felt like a Glock 19, loaded, from the weight, three- or four-inch barrel, no 1911 but nevertheless substantial in feel and lethal in purpose. The slide was steel, though ceramically finished for dullness and durability, the frame some sort of super-polymer. He held it out of sight under the table and looked down and saw that it was a near – Glock, dark and blunt, no safety, nothing to catch or pull on fast removal. It was a generation more streamlined than Glock’s stolid Teutonic brick, and its ergonomics were better; it slid into, rather than fought, his hand. He turned it and saw the marking in Cyrillic, and under that in English on the slide, IxGroup, 9 MM. He slid it into his belt, behind the point of his hip, under the coat.
“I have enemies. Maybe they get on to you from me. Moscow is full of bad people. You can never tell. That gun, freshly stolen from factory, no serial number. If you get in trouble, use and ditch. It can’t be traced.”
“It’s not a Glock?”
“GSh-18, better than Glock. Eighteen in magazine, double action, from the Instrument Design Bureau KPB, in Tula. Manufactured by IxGroup, meaning rich guy named Ixovich, one of our new big oligarchs.”
“Just learned the word.”
They made their plans.
You couldn’t help but love the Metropole, the famous old hotel where Swagger had booked himself. Rich in history, it was also – at least in the new Moscow – rich in appointments, possibly restored to something like prerevolutionary glory. Everywhere glitter, glass, shiny brass, marble, full of beautiful people. Even the whores sitting in the bar were high-class.
Yet Swagger tried to see it as it had been in 1959, when it housed, for a few troubling weeks, the melancholy Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Russians tried to figure out what to do with him. In those days, before the fall of the reds and the infusion of Finnish capital, the hotel must have been a dump, smelling of cabbage, vodka, and sewage, dour and dank and grim. It fit the self-exiled American perfectly, a man with a dismal past and not much future, who’d as yet impressed nobody in his short life.
When he got to his room, Swagger found that Oswald wouldn’t go away. The little hangdog mutt, radiating anger and self-pity, tracked him at every stop in the classy room that, in dumpier days, could have housed the would-be defector.
The whole thing turned on him, didn’t it? You couldn’t ask why. There was no point in asking why. The only question had to be how.
Don’t think of him as a man, Swagger instructed himself. Think of him as an agent, a servo-mechanism, some anonymous hinge in history that did what he did, and you have to figure out how he did it. It wasn’t as simple as waking up one day and deciding to kill the president. There were too many factors involved and too many questions to answer.
Swagger wished he had vodka. He wished he had a cigarette. Many a man had gotten through a bad night in the Metropole on vodka and cigarettes. Maybe Oswald himself, as the bosses figured out his immediate fate.
Little fucker. Who would have guessed?
Don’t think about that, Swagger ordered himself again. Think only of the how.
Don’t waste your time on his feckless, difficult personality, his pitiful upbringing, his learning problems, his attitude problems, his bullying problems, his endless string of small-time failures, his temperament, his vanity and narcissism, as all are on record. Anyone can look up Lee Harvey Oswald and conclude that he was exactly the type of lazy loser who might abandon the ongoing parade of nothingness that would be his life in exchange for eternal notoriety.
Instead, let’s stick to the how of the act. Not did he do it, but could he do it?
Swagger tried to make contact with him through the only vessel that connected them, the one he loved and Oswald hated: the United States Marine Corps. After all, Oswald was a trained rifleman, as his scores attested, particularly in the sitting position, similar to the position he fired from in the Book Depository. Similar but not exact: different stresses, different angles, different muscles involved, and while some skills are transferable, position to
