Chapter 19
Mikhayl Ruzhyo, now looking like just another tourist, walked toward the Imperial War Museum. The building, with its centered dome and pillared front, could have almost been an Italian church, had not the approach been guarded by a pair of fifteen-inch guns, taken, according to the sign nearby, from HMS
Churches had been violent places through the centuries, but he had never heard of one protected by naval guns outside the front entrance.
To one side of the walkway, a tall concrete slab stood, a section of the Berlin Wall taken from near the Brandenburg Gate. He had been a teenager in 1989, when they had started taking the wall down, and the significance of it had been lost on him. What an American president had once called 'the evil empire' had been much closer to home. He had known very little about the world outside his homeland in those days. He had learned too much about the world since.
The piece of the Berlin Wall had been painted to look like a giant cartoon face, done in blues and blacks, with its mouth stretched wide open. Against a dark red background in the mouth were the words 'Change Your Life.'
Ruzhyo had been to London several times, usually on his way elsewhere, once on assignment to erase a wayward colleague, and he had seen a few of the tourist sights: Buckingham Palace, the Wellington Monument, Abbey Road. He and Anna had almost come to England on a holiday once, before she got sick, but something or other had prevented it. Since Anna had died, he hadn't done much tourist activity. Anna would not have enjoyed this place, but these days, war museums suited his tastes.
Inside, the main gallery was full of old tanks and artillery pieces, with various airplanes hung from the ceiling. He strolled past a Mark V tank, a 9.2-inch howitzer, a Jeep. Gray greens were the dominant colors.
The most impressive display was of a giant V2 rocket, the side cut away to show the engine, such as it was. The missile was huge, painted a dark green. It looked to him like a cartoon rocket ship, a pointed cigar with fins on the tail.
Ruzhyo stared at the V2. How frightening it must have been to civilians to see this monster dropping from the skies during the Blitz. According to the placard, more than 6,500 of the V2s and smaller V1s fell on London and South East in hard and explosive hailstorms, killing a total of 8,938 people.
How, he wondered, had they been able to come up with the exact number killed? 8,938?
If the Germans had been able to manage a decent guidance system for these beasts, they would have killed a lot more. But while they had been fearsome devices, shooting them off had been rather like launching pop bottle rockets. That they were able to hit London at all had been more due to luck than skill. Many, if not most, of the V1s and V2s had fallen harmlessly into the sea or onto the countryside. And in a war, 9,000 civilians mean little in the overall casualty count. A few drops in an ocean of blood.
What men did best was to kill other men. Especially when given leave to do so in a war.
Ruzhyo strolled past a searchlight, another item painted a flaky military green; he looked at a shellacked and unpainted wooden fishing boat used during the evacuation at Dunkirk; he examined Monty's tank, one in which he'd ridden during the North Africa campaign against Rommel, when Montgomery was still a lowly general and not yet the famous field marshal.
The monuments of killing.
There were also side rooms with cryptography equipment the museum-goers could play with, and on the lower ground floor, a World War One experience, designed to look like the trenches. This floor also had a Blitz display, and a Second World War area, as well as a more modern conflict display: Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Falklands, Bosnia, the Middle East. Ruzhyo quickly passed through the more contemporary presentations; they held little interest for him. He knew about those kinds of wars. Chetsnya and the invading Russians lived in his memory as real as if it had taken place yesterday and not almost twenty years past.
Even though it had been a sea of mud then, it was a much cleaner business in the trenches in France in 1915 than it was when Ruzhyo had been Spetsnaz. Cleaner in the sense that you knew who your enemies were, you knew where they were, and you had things laid out for you in black and white. Attack here, shoot there, live or die along the way. There was little skulking about and shooting people while they sat at a desk or lay in bed with a wife or mistress. Those had been his stock in trade. He knew about that kind of war.
It wasn't particularly satisfying, these monuments to war, but it seemed appropriate. He would book his flight out and leave today, if possible. Perhaps by way of Spain, using another identity. Madrid would be warm by now, and the smells of Spain were more pleasing than those of England.
He should have been at home, visiting with his wife and son, John Howard knew, but he couldn't relax enough. He'd just sit there simmering, and his family would know and feel it. It wouldn't be pleasant for anybody. Might as well be at work, though there didn't seem to be much he could do here, either.
He thought about Ruzhyo, wondered about him. How could a man be a cold-blooded killer? He had started out a soldier, and killing sometimes went with the territory, but somewhere along the way, somebody had recruited the man for wetwork. He had stopped being a soldier and become an assassin, a thing of the dark. Howard could understand that an adrenaline rush could pump you up for sneaking around in the back alleys two steps ahead of somebody chasing you, but the stone-hearted murders? That was different—
'Wool-gathering, John?'
Howard smiled at Fernandez. 'Just thinking about our quarry.'
'Wishing you knew where to find him?'
'That, too. But more wondering how he can do what does.' He explained, expecting Julio to agree with him.
To his surprise, his friend shook his head. 'Not a lot of difference, way I see it.'
'Shooting men in the back of the head? You don't see the difference?'
'Would they be any deader if he had shot them in the front of the head?'
'Come again?'
'Those two we lost were soldiers, on guard duty. The risk goes with the job. If they'd been paying attention, they'd probably still be alive — or at least they'd have gotten to shoot back. But when you get right down to it, how is it different, really? Somebody shoots you for evil and might, or they shoot you for goodness and right — you're still cold, either way. Their reasons won't matter to you, will they? Dead is dead.'
Howard stared at Fernandez as if the sergeant had just turned into a big caterpillar puffing on a hookah: Whoo are youu?
Fernandez caught the look and grinned. 'You don't like spies and assassins, but they're as much a part of an army now as they ever were. You want to go into battle with the advantages on your side, or at least not against you. So you send a spy into the enemy camp to find out where they plan to march. He's doing the same to you, so the side with the quicker, smarter, faster spy gets a half step on the other side. That game is as old as war, isn't it?'
'Spies aren't the same as assassins,' Howard pointed out.
'Yeah, that's true. But let me ask you a hypothetical question, Colonel. Suppose you could go back in time to Germany in the late thirties—'
'— and assassinate Hitler?' Howard finished. He had heard this one before.
'Yeah. Would you?'
'In a heartbeat. He was a monster. It would save millions of innocent lives.'
'You'd still be an assassin, then, right?'
'Yes, but in this case, the ends would justify the means. Sometimes it does, Julio. I'd take the moral heat.'
'No question, and I'd pop him, too. But how do we know what our quarry's ends were? Why he got into what he's into? And think about what you might have done in his place, out there in the desert. We went to collect him,
