The Bear and the Dragon

interrogator. Reilly looked down at her dossier-folder from Militia headquarters. There was only one shot of her in it, a distant black-and-white of her with a john-well, probably an ivan, Reilly thought with a grunt-and in this photo her face was animated, youthful, and as alluring as the young Ingrid Bergman had been to Bogie in Casablanca. Tanya could act, Reilly thought. If this were the real Tanya in front of him, as it probably was, then the one in the photo was a construct, a role to be played, an illusion-a wonderful one, to be sure, but potentially a highly dangerous lie to anyone taken in by it. The girl on the other side of the one-way mirror could have dug a man’s eyeballs out with her nail file, and then eaten them raw before going to her next appointment at the new Moscow Four Seasons Hotel and Convention Center.

“Who were his enemies, Tanya?” the militiaman asked in the interrogation room.

“Who were his friends?” she asked in bored reply. “He had none. Of enemies he had many.” Her spoken language was literate and almost refined. Her English was supposed to be excellent as well. Well, she doubtless needed that for her customers … it was probably worth a few extra bucks, D-marks, pounds, or euros, a nice hard currency for whose printed notes she’d give a discount, doubtless smiling in a coquettish way when she told her john, jean, johannes, or ivan about it. Before or after? Reilly wondered. He’d never paid for it, though looking at Tanya, he understood why some men might …

“What’s she charge?” he whispered to Provalov.

“More than I can afford,” the detective lieutenant grunted. “Something like six hundred euros, perhaps more for an entire evening. She is medically clean, remarkably enough. A goodly collection of condoms in her purse, American, French, and Japanese brands.”

“What’s her background? Ballet, something like that?” the FBI agent asked, commenting implicitly on her grace.

Provalov grunted in amusement. “No, her tits are too big for that, and she’s too tall. She weighs about, oh, fifty-five kilos or so, I would imagine. Too much for one of those little fairies in the Bolshoi to pick up and throw about. She could become a model for our growing fashion industry, but, no, on what you ask, her background is quite ordinary. Her father, deceased, was a factory worker, and her mother, also deceased, worked in a consumer- goods store. They both died of conditions consistent with alcohol abuse. Our Tanya drinks only in moderation. State education, undistinguished grades in that. No siblings, our Tanya is quite alone in the world-and has been so for some time. She’s been working for Rasputin for almost four years. I doubt the Sparrow School ever turned out so polished a whore as this one. Gregoriy Filipovich himself used her many times, whether for sex or just for his public escort, we’re not sure, and she is a fine adornment, is she not? But whatever affection he may have had for her, as you see, was not reciprocated.”

“Anyone close to her?”

Provalov shook his head. “None known to us, not even a woman friend of note.”

The interview was pure vanilla, Reilly saw, like fishing for bass in a well-stocked lake, one of twenty-seven interrogations to this point concerning the death of G. F. Avseyenko-everyone seemed to forget the fact that there had been two additional human beings in the car, but they probably hadn’t been the targets. It wasn’t getting any easier. What they really needed was the truck, something with physical evidence. Like most FBI agents, Reilly believed in tangibles, something you could hold in your hand, then pass off to a judge or jury, and have them know it was both evidence of a crime and proof of who had done it. Eyewitnesses, on the other hand, were often liars; at best they were easy for defense lawyers to confuse, and therefore they were rarely trusted by cops or juries. The truck might have blast residue from the RPG launch, maybe fingerprints on the greasy wrapping paper the Russians used for their weapons, maybe anything-best of all would be a cigarette smoked by the driver or the shooter, since the FBI could DNA-match the residual saliva on that to anyone, which was one of the Bureau’s best new tricks (six-hundred-million-to-one odds were hard for people to argue with, even highly paid defense attorneys). One of Reilly’s pet projects was to bring over the DNA technology for the Russian police to use, but for that the Russians would have to front the cash for the lab gear, which would be a problem-the Russians didn’t seem to have the cash for anything important. All they had now was the remainder of the RPG warhead-it was amazing how much of the things actually did survive launch and detonation-which had a serial number that was being run down, though it was doubtful that this bit of information would lead anywhere. But you ran them all down because you never knew what was valuable and what was not until you got to the finish line, which was usually in front of a judge’s bench with twelve people in a box off to your right. Things were a little different here in Russia, procedurally speaking, but the one thing he was trying to get through to the Russian cops he counseled was that the aim of every investigation was a conviction. They were getting it, slowly for most, quickly for a few, and also getting the fact that kicking a suspect’s balls into his throat was not an effective interrogation technique. They had a constitution in Russia, but public respect for it still needed growing, and it would take time. The idea of the rule of law in this country was as foreign as a man from Mars.

The problem, Reilly thought, was that neither he nor anyone else knew how much time there was for Russians to catch up with the rest of the world. There was much here to admire, especially in the arts. Because of his diplomatic status, Reilly and his wife often got complimentary tickets to concerts (which he liked) and the ballet (which his wife loved), and that was still the class of the world … but the rest of the country had never kept up. Some at the embassy, some of the older CIA people who’d been here before the fall of the USSR, said that the improvements were incredible. But if that were true, Reilly told himself, then what had been here before must have been truly dreadful to behold, though the Bolshoi had probably still been the Bolshoi, even then.

“That is all?” Tanya Bogdanova asked in the interrogation room.

“Yes, thank you for coming in. We may call you again.”

“Use this number,” she said, handing over her business card. “It’s for my cellular phone.” That was one more Western convenience in Moscow for those with the hard currency, and Tanya obviously did.

The interrogator was a young militia sergeant. He stood politely and moved to get the door for her, showing Bogdanova the courtesy she’d come to expect from men. In the case of Westerners, it was for her physical attributes. In the case of her countrymen, it was her clothing that told them of her newfound worth. Reilly watched her eyes as she left the room. The expression was like that of a child who’d expected to be caught doing something naughty, but hadn’t. How stupid father was, that sort of smile proclaimed. It seemed so misplaced on the angel-face, but there it was, on the other side of the mirror.

“Oleg?”

“Yes, Mishka?” Provalov turned.

“She’s dirty, man. She’s a player,” Reilly said in English. Provalov knew the cop-Americanisms.

“I agree, Mishka, but I have nothing to hold her on, do I?”

“I suppose not. Might be interesting to keep an eye on her, though.”

“If I could afford her, I would keep more than my eye on her, Mikhail Ivan’ch.”

Reilly grunted amusement. “Yeah, I hear that.”

“But she has a heart of ice.”

“That’s a fact,” the FBI agent agreed. And the game in which she was a player was at best nasty, and at its worst, lethal.

So, what do we have?” Ed Foley asked, some hours later across the river from Washington.

“Gornischt so far,” Mary Pat replied to her husband’s question.

“Jack wants to be kept up to speed on this one.”

“Well, tell the President that we’re running as fast as we can, and all we have so far is from the Legal Attache. He’s in tight with the local cops, but they don’t seem to know shit either. Maybe somebody tried to kill Sergey Nikolay’ch, but the Legat says he thinks Rasputin was the real target.”

“I suppose he had his share of enemies,” the Director of Central Intelligence conceded.

Thank you,” the Vice President concluded to the packed house at the Ole Miss field house. The purpose of the speech was to announce that eight new destroyers would be built in the big Litton shipyard on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which meant jobs and money for the state, always items of concern for the governor, who was now standing and applauding as though the Ole Miss football team had just knocked off Texas at the Cotton Bowl. They took their sports seriously down here. And their politics, Robby reminded himself, stifling a curse for this tawdry profession that was so much like medieval bargaining in a village square, three good pigs for a cow or something, toss in a mug of bitter ale. Was this how one governed a country? He grinned as he shook his