“Leningrad-well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”
Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it’s been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”
Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”
“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”
“Come in and take a seat, my boy.”
Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark’s desk and took the offered sheets of paper.
“Moscow?” he asked.
“Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”
“Super,” Chavez observed. “Well, it’s been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka’s still good.”
“It’s one of the things they do well,” John agreed.
“And they want us to teach them to do some other things?”
“Looks that way.”
“Take the wives with us?”
“No.” Clark shook his head. “This one’s all business.”
“When?”
“Have to work that out. Probably a week or so.”
“Fair enough.”
“How’s the little guy?”
A grin. “Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he’ll start walking in a few days.”
“Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up,” Clark warned.
“Hey, Pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. Damned sight better than I can say for myself, y’know?” Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.
Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.
“The whole team?” Chavez asked.
“Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD,” RAINBOW SIX added.
“Did he clean your clock today, too?” Ding asked.
“Next time I shoot against that son of a bitch, I want it right after the morning run, when he’s a little shaky,” Clark said crossly. He just didn’t like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his identity as shooting a handgun.
“Mr. C, Ettore just isn’t human. With the MP, he’s good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he’s like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays ’em dead.”
“I didn’t believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon.”
“I hear you, John,” Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law’s waist. “Hey, I’m pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my ass away by three whole points.”
“The bastard took me by one,” John told his Team-2 commander. “First man-on-man match I’ve lost since Third SOG.” And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He’d lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.
Is that him?' Provalov asked.
“We don’t have a photograph,” his sergeant reminded him. “But he fits the general description.” And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.
They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.
The guy looked about right. He’d come off the building’s elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the off-chance that this Koniev/Suvorov’s neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.
The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-class, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another identity? Provalov was sure he’d have more of those, and they’d all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.
The sergeant in the driver’s seat started up the van’s motor and got on the radio. Two other police cars were in the immediate vicinity, both manned by pairs of experienced investigators.
“Our friend is moving. The blue rental car,” Provalov said over the radio. Both of his cars radioed acknowledgments.
The rental car was a Fiat-a real one made in Turin rather than the Russian copy made at Togliattistad, one of the few special economic projects of the Soviet Union that had actually worked, after a fashion. Had it been selected for its agility, Provalov wondered, or just because it was a cheap car to rent? There was no knowing that right now. Koniev/Suvorov pulled out, and the first tail car formed up with him, half a block behind, while the second was half a block in front, because even a KGB-trained intelligence officer rarely looked for a tail
Following the car was easier than he’d expected. Three trail cars helped. Spotting a single-car tail was not overly demanding. Two could also be identified, since the same two would switch off every few minutes. But three shadow cars broke up the pattern nicely, and, KGB-trained or not, Koniev/Suvorov was not superhuman. His real defense lay in concealing his identity, and cracking that had been a combination of good investigation and luck-but cops knew about luck. KGB, on the other hand, didn’t. In their mania for organization, their training program had left it out, perhaps because trusting to luck was a weakness that could lead to disaster in the field. That told Provalov that Koniev/Suvorov hadn’t spent that much time in field operations. In the real world of working the street, you learned such things in a hurry.
The tailing was conducted at extreme range, over a block, and the city blocks were large ones here. The van had been specially equipped for it. The license-plate holders were triangular in cross-section, and at the flip of a switch one could switch from among three separate pairs of tags. The lights on the front of the vehicle were paired as well, and so one could change the light pattern, which was what a skilled adversary would look for at night. Switch them once or twice when out of sight of his rearview mirror, and he’d have to be a genius to catch on. The most difficult job went with the car doing the front-tail, since it was hard to read Koniev/Suvorov’s mind, and when he made an unexpected turn, the lead car then had to scurry about under the guidance of the trailing shadow cars to regain its leading position. All of the militiamen on this detail, however, were experienced homicide investigators who’d learned how to track the most dangerous game on the planet: human beings who’d displayed the willingness to take another life. Even the stupid murderers could have animal cunning, and they learned a lot about police operations just from watching television. That made some of his investigations more difficult than they ought to have been, but in a case like this, the additional difficulty had served to train his men more thoroughly than any academy training would have done.
“Turning right,” his driver said into his radio. “Van takes the lead.” The leading trail car would proceed to the
