He dialed the focus carefully, hoping to squeeze a bit more resolution out of it.
“The eyes,” he said. “Very wary. Hunter’s eyes.”
“Good work, Petrel Five. Now stay undercover.”
“First the good news,” said Stronski. “The good news is that there is no bad news.”
Swagger nodded. He waited for it.
“In those days, KGB started a program where a Second Directorate technical team was in constant rotation, station to station, the world over. That’s all they did. They stayed a few days, a week, they did a complete sweep, using every electronic countermeasure and tracking device at their disposal, and they issued a report to center with copies to the KGB resident in place. A Comrade Bukhov seemed to be in charge. Very thorough man, very patient, very wise in the ways of concealed microphones, wires, long-distance amplified eavesdropping, the power of batteries.”
Swagger nodded, listening hard.
“Soviet embassy, Mexico City, 1964 inspection, twenty-three listening devices found, eighteen of them removed, the point of leaving five, I suppose, to feed bad information to your eavesdroppers.”
“So in 1963–”
“Your people had it all. Everything in that building, your people heard it.”
Swagger nodded. “Of course,” he finally said, “that was a lot of info, most of it routine, I’m sure almost all of it routine. I wonder how carefully the work product was examined, who made the initial discrimination; probably someone low on the totem pole, and then what they winnowed out got passed upward to senior officers.”
“Very good questions, my friend, but answers will be found in Langley, not in Lubyanka.”
“Was there a ’62 report?”
“No, the program started in 1962, and Mexico City being not exactly a big priority, the team didn’t get to it the first time until ’64.”
Again Swagger considered.
“I saved best for last,” said Stronski, so pleased with his success. “Comrade Bukhov, very professional, very thorough, as I said, includes offices that he had found penetrated, and chief among them was that belonging to Yatskov, senior KGB and supervisor of Kostikov and Nechiporenko in Mexico City and first interrogators of Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Swagger let out an involuntary sigh. “That means that CIA had access to whatever Oswald said the last day, when he was so distraught and pulled the gun. He was in Yatskov’s office.”
“I suppose that is conclusion you could draw. I only tell you what the records say about wire operation at the embassy at the time.”
“What it proves,” Swagger said, “is that someone in the Agency could have known about Oswald’s hit on General Walker. It is not proved, but it cannot be ruled out.”
“You’re the genius. You’re the–” He went still.
Swagger picked it up immediately.
“Two,” said Stronski in the same even tone, “coming from around the bushes behind us, heavy coats, I cannot see hands. You have that pistol?”
“I do,” said Swagger, his mind gone instantly tactical. Was this a setup? Had Stronski betrayed him? If so, Stronski could have pulled a pistol and finished the job in one second. He wouldn’t have placed himself in the kill zone. In an odd way, a clarification had been issued. On the point of bad action, Swagger felt a wave of inappropriate enthusiasm. He could not help but smile.
“You laugh. Swagger, you are crazier than even I.”
“This is the only shit I was ever any good at,” said Bob, still smiling. He scanned for threat, immediately seeing two men, also in heavy coats with obscure hands, coming at them from the same direction that Stronski had come, from the Tretyakov, maybe moving with a little too much energy for so early on a sunny Moscow morning in such an out-of-the-way place.
“Two,” he said, “my twelve o’clock.”
“And two more make six, heading in from other entrance, just passing by Dzerzhinsky’s statue on the right. Are you hot?”
“I’m hot, but no reload.”
Neither body posture had altered, neither man had swiveled his head or signaled sudden anxiety through tensed body. In fact, Stronski laughed, and as he did, he reached over and shook Swagger’s arm in mirth, and Swagger felt something heavy slide into his jacket pocket and knew it to be an eighteen-round magazine for his GSh pistol.
“No cover here,” said Stronski, laughing, “and they’ve got baby Kalish, I’m sure. On three, draw and fire, then break around the bench, run straight back to cover.”
Swagger knew what was back there sixty feet or so: Stalinland. Row on row of stone Joe, wisdom in his eyes, sagacity on his face, mustache flowing like the Don, hair thick as the wheat fields of Ukraine.
“I lay down fire, you move. Get into the Stalins. Good cover, you can move, will stop their rounds, you can get shots. We’ll see if they have guts to come against our guns when we are on the sights and shooting calmly.”
“Let’s kill some bad-asses,” said Swagger.
“On my one, three, two, one–”
It happened so fast after such a long wait. The Izmaylovskaya kill team had sat in a Mercedes limo behind the Tretyakov, a glossy black beast of a car with three ranks of leather seats, smelling of new car and also of perfume, as if someone had a woman there recently. But not now. Two men in the front, two in the middle, two in the rear. Very tough, very good men, had done wet work all their lives, first in Spetsnaz, then for the mobs, and now as dedicated Izzy hard guys. It was a great life, and they had everything that the kid code-named Petrel Five dreamed about, blow, chicks, and bling. They had bleak faces and small dark eyes and wide Slavic cheekbones and frosts of gray hair, and each weighed over two hundred pounds. Each could bench his weight and was expert at Systema Combat Sambo, an advanced Russian and deadly martial art. All had scars, mended limbs, jagged knuckles, memories of death in cold or faraway places or, more recently, in back streets or nightclubs. To see them was to fear them, and the exquisitely tailored dark suits they wore over dark shirts – some black, some chocolate, some dark blue – warned the world to step aside.
Each carried what is commonly but incorrectly called a Krinkov, or “Krink” in the vernacular, the preferred weapon of choice of the late Osama bin Laden and perhaps the instrument he was reaching for when SEAL Team 6 popped his balloon. (These men had done a lot of that sort of work themselves.) It was a short-barreled AK-74 variant with a large, almost bulbous flash hider, a folding stock now cranked tight along the left side of the receiver, and a wicked, curving plum-colored mag of thirty 5.45-mm high-velocity steel-cored cartridges. It was secured by shoulder sling under the heavy Armani overcoats they wore, and in each voluminous pocket were a few more mags.
The news came to the team leader when he answered his cell in perfunctory language, without drama or excitement; they were professionals at this, none of it was new.
“Oleg, we’ve got a confirm. They’re on the bench at the Dzerzhinsky statue. You set to roll?”
“On our way, Papa Bear,” said Oleg, tapping the driver hard.
Behind him, he heard the sound he loved best in the world, which was the
“All positive,” came the ragged response.
The heavy car gunned to life but did not jump into the traffic. As in all action, smooth is fast, and the Izmaylovskaya driver was an equally experienced pro. He slid arrogantly into the traffic, accelerated, made the proper turns while obeying all laws, and in a few minutes pulled up to the margins of the park.
Oleg spoke into his phone. “Papa Bear, we’re set. Still a go?”
He heard Papa Bear speak into another phone and then come back with “Yeah, he’s still got them sitting
