darkened and tiny living room. A couch, a tiny coffee table, a television set, an eating table with several liquor bottles on it. Big Oleg Kovalenko sat in a chair at the window looking outside through dirty blinds, his back to the room.
In English Clark said, “How much time before they know I’m here?”
Kovalenko started, stood from the chair, and turned around. His hands were empty, otherwise Clark would have pumped a.45-caliber round into his fat belly.
The big Russian grabbed at his chest, his heart pounding after he was startled, but soon he sat back down. “I do not know. Did they see you enter?”
“No.”
“Then do not worry. You have more than enough time to kill me.”
Clark lowered the pistol and looked around. This place wasn’t even as nice as Manfred Kromm’s little flat.
Three fucking peas in a pod.
“I’m not going to kill you.” Clark nodded toward the empty vodka bottles. “You don’t look like you need any help.”
Kovalenko thought this over. “Then you want information?”
Now Clark shrugged. “I know you met Paul Laska in London. I know your son, Valentin, is involved as well.”
“Valentin follows orders from his leaders, as do you. As did I. He has nothing personal against you.”
“Who are those guys out there in the park?”
Kovalenko said, “They were sent by Laska, I think, in order to capture you. They work for the French detective Fabrice Bertrand-Morel. My son is back in London, his part in this affair was political, and it was benign, he had nothing to do with men chasing after you.” The old Russian nodded toward the gun low in Clark’s right hand. “I would be surprised if my boy has ever touched a gun.” He chuckled. “He is so fucking civilized.”
“So are you in contact with the men in the street?”
“In contact? No. They came here. They told me about you. Told me you would come here, but they would protect me. I knew nothing of you before yesterday. I only set up the meeting between Valentin and Pavel. Sorry… Paul. I was not told what was discussed.”
“Laska worked for the KGB in Czechoslovakia.” Clark said it as a statement.
Kovalenko did not deny it. He only said, “Pavel Laska has been an enemy of every state he has ever lived in.”
But John did not render judgment on Laska. The American ex — CIA man knew that the ruthless KGB could have destroyed the spirit of a young Paul Laska, turned him into something not of his own choosing.
The Cold War was littered with broken men.
Oleg said, “I am going to make myself a drink if you promise you won’t shoot me in the back.” Clark waved him toward his bottles and the big Russian lumbered over to the table. “Would you like something?”
“No.”
Kovalenko said, “So what have you learned from me? Nothing. Go back home. You will have a new president in a few weeks. He will protect you.”
Clark did not say it, but he wasn’t looking for protection from Jack Ryan. Quite the opposite. He needed to protect Ryan from exposure to
Kovalenko stood at his table and poured himself a tall straight vodka into a water glass. He walked back over to the chair with the bottle and the glass in his hands.
“I want to talk to your son.”
“I can call his office at the embassy in London. But I doubt he’d call me back.” Kovalenko swigged half the glass and put the bottle down on the windowsill, rattling the blinds in the process. “You would have better luck calling him yourself.”
The Russian seemed, to Clark, like he was telling the truth. He did not have much of a relationship with his son, and his son definitely was not here. Could Clark get to him in London, somehow?
He’d have to try. Coming to Moscow to bleed Oleg Kovalenko for information had been a dry hole.
Clark slipped his gun in his pocket. “I’ll leave you with your vodka. If you do talk to your boy, tell him I would like a word. Just a friendly conversation. He’ll be hearing from me.”
The American turned to leave through the kitchen, but the Russian pensioner called after him. “Sure you won’t join me for a drink? It will warm you from the cold.”
“Maybe we could talk about old times.”
Clark’s hand stopped on the door latch. He turned, walked back into the living room.
Oleg cracked a little smile. “I do not get many visitors. I can’t be choosy, can I?”
Clark’s eyes sharpened as he scanned the room quickly.
“What?”
His eyes stopped scanning, locked onto the vodka bottle on the windowsill. It pressed against the blinds, closing them.
A signal to the men in the park. “Son of a bitch!” Clark shouted, and he shot back through the kitchen, out the door, and up the hallway.
He heard noises in the stairwell, the chirping of a walkie-talkie and the slapping, echoing footfalls of two men. John ran to the top of the stairs and grabbed a heavy, round metal ashtray/garbage can that had been positioned there. He laid the cylinder on its side at the edge of the top stair, waited until the sounds of the men told him they were just around the corner below, and then he kicked the metal can. He just caught a glimpse of the first man turning at the landing; he wore a heavy black coat and carried a small black pistol and a radio. John drew his pistol and adopted a combat stance at the top of the stairs.
The metal garbage can picked up speed as it bounced down the stairs. As the men turned onto the flight just below Clark, the can bounced head high and banged into them, sending both men crashing to the tile floor. One man dropped his pistol, but the other retained his weapon and tried to aim it up the stairwell at the man standing above them.
John fired a single round. The.45-caliber bullet burned a red crease into the man’s left cheek.
“Drop it!” Clark shouted in English.
The man on the tile floor below did as he was told. Along with his partner he raised his hands into the air as he lay there.
Even with the silencer on his SIG Sauer.45 the echo of Clark’s pistol in the stairwell was painfully loud, and he had no doubt residents would be on the phone to the police in seconds. He descended to the landing and stepped between the two men, keeping his pistol trained on them all the while. He liberated them of their guns and their walkie-talkies and their mobile phones. One of the men cursed Clark in French, but he kept his hands in the air while doing so, and John ignored him. John did not say another word to the men before continuing down the stairs.
He exited the back door of the apartment building a minute later, and here he dumped the men’s equipment in a trash can.
He thought, for a fleeting hopeful moment, that he was in the clear, but a white panel truck passed by on the opposite side of the road, and then it slammed on its brakes. Four men leapt out, there were eight lanes of afternoon traffic between John and the four, but they began running through the cars, heading right for him.
John broke into a run. His original objective had been the Pushkinskaya Metro station. But the men were on his heels, not fifty yards back, and they were a lot faster than he. The underground station would slow his escape — he would never make it on a train before they caught him. He ran across busy Tverskaya Street, eight lanes of traffic that
On the other side of the street he chanced a glance behind him. The four men were joined by two more in the street. The six hunters were only twenty-five yards back now.
They were going to catch him, it was quickly becoming apparent. There were too many men, they were too well trained, too well coordinated, and, he had to admit, they were too motherfucking young and fit for him to outrun them all across Moscow.
He could not get away from them, but he could, with a little cunning and guile, “game” his capture.
