fact Russian, though definitive information was impossible to come by. His first name was Norse — but names meant nothing.
“You’re at the terminal?”
“OK, I need you to walk through the building, back near the gate, rest rooms, all that, see if the marker was offloaded. Keep the line open.”
“Walking.”
Karr had slipped three pimple-sized “markers” onto Martin’s clothes before packing him onto the aircraft. The markers contained radioactive isotopes, chosen for their uniqueness and ability to excite the detector Grinberg had in his hand. Karr had told him to wait at the airport and see if the meter flipped.
Grinberg was a freelancer believed to retain ties to Russian intelligence. Karr found him valuable nonetheless, though admittedly he had to use some precautions — such as, in this case, not identifying whom Grinberg was looking for.
Unfortunately, to get Grinberg to do the job, Karr had had to blow one of his equipment cache points in St. Petersburg. Such points were difficult to come by, and replacing it would take several days of angst — not to mention a trip to St. Petersburg, a city he didn’t particularly like. It also meant he compromised all of the technology in the cache, which Grin-berg could be counted on to help himself to.
Which was why all of the technology — the most notable items beyond the tracking gear were some eavesdropping kits and a pair of stun guns that looked like wristwatches — had been purloined from the Russians themselves.
“How we doing?” he asked Grinberg. He could hear him walking through a crowd.
“Nee-yada.”
“You trying to say ‘nada’?”
“You have to work on your slang. But before you can do that, you have to figure out your nationality,
“I haven’t heard Japanese from you before. Thinking of moving?”
Grinberg let off a string of Russian curses, apparently aimed at someone who had bumped into him in the airport. It was already clear to Karr that Martin had in fact boarded an airplane — that or bribed Grinberg and Clark to make it look as if he had — and so he turned his attention to the laptop. After clearing himself into the system, he initiated a program that put him on the Internet, spoofing a German gateway into thinking he was in Du?sseldorf. From there he accessed a file on a server and downloaded a program to his laptop’s prodigious RAM — there was no hard drive. With two keystrokes Karr hacked into the reservation system controlling flights out of St. Petersburg, a destination he had chosen specifically because he found this system so easy to access.
“French, right?” said Karr, recognizing the phrase for “nothing.” “No trace anywhere in the airport?”
“Nope.”
“Now comes the hard part — I’m going to give you a plane to check out.”
“Plane?”
“Yeah. Actually, it’s still at the gate. I know the flight.” If Grinberg didn’t find the markers on the plane, then Martin had to be still wearing them, which would make the next step considerably easier. Karr keyed his computer and saw that the flight would be leaving in exactly forty-five minutes. “I need you to check the trash and then the plane — they won’t have vacuumed it.”
“Yeah — uh, you’ll find a ticket waiting at the gate. Round-trip.” He hesitated, waiting for the screen to refresh. The hack was perfect, but the system wasn’t particularly user-friendly — he had to enter Grinberg’s name with an asterisk before each letter. He screwed something up and it came out as “Grinnberg,” which he figured was close enough. “You’re misspelled in the computer, just so you know.”
“They will ask for my credit card,” said Grinberg.
“So give me the number and it’ll be there.”
“You’re going to make me burn a good card?”
“You buy them by the hundreds, don’t you?”
“Karr—”
“Come on, plane’s boarding. It’s worth another thousand euros. Going into your account now.”
Grinberg got the card out quickly. Dean put in the number, then told him he’d call back in about forty minutes, by which time he expected him on the plane.
Twelve flights left St. Petersburg in the hour or so since Clark had lost contact with Martin. Karr looked through the different passenger lists, looking for single passengers paying cash and added to the manifest at the last minute. He found three likely candidates on three different planes — one flying to London’s Heathrow Airport, one to Poznan in Poland, and one to Moscow.
London wasn’t worth checking out, Karr decided; if Martin really was coming west he would have taken the flight Karr had arranged. Poznan was in central Poland, not particularly handy to anything — which would make it a clever choice. But if Martin was being clever, he would have simply bribed someone and taken his ticket, gambling that the airline wouldn’t bother matching passengers.
Not a good gamble these days, but maybe worth the risk.
Nah. Not after everything else he’d been through.
But Moscow seemed too easy.
Karr backed out and went over to an airline Web site that helpfully provided flight information. The plane from St. Petersburg was due in about an hour.
Tight, doable.
Easy, though. But maybe he was due. He did live a good life.
62
Certain habits are so ingrained that they are impossible to change — the way a man sucks in the last swirl of beer at the bottom of a glass, the way he moves over a woman when making love, the way he squints into the high sun when he’s been up too long for too many days running.
Among Charlie Dean’s many inherent habits was one of considerable benefit under the current circumstances — the ability to look at a site and read it for the best possible sniper locations. Standing at the chain-link fence around the construction site Kurakin was scheduled to visit, he spotted a dozen great ones, another four or five good ones, and even a few marginal ones that might be chosen for specific reasons. Dean wanted to check them all.
Lia held him back. “Hold on. We have some work to do first.”
“Like?”
“For one thing, figuring out how to get past the guards at the gate. For another, eliminating some of the possibilities. At least a few will be covered by video devices our friends have already planted. So are the entrances.”
“The guy could’ve come in days ago.”
“We’ll check everything out that needs to be checked,” said Lia. She crossed and began walking up the street, part of a residential area in southeastern Moscow.
“You’re going in the wrong direction,” Dean told her.
“You know, Charlie, sometimes I wonder how you get your clothes on right in the morning.”
“You know, I think it’s about time you and me had a talk,” said Dean.
“Not the birds and the bees again.”
“You always have to be a wiseass, huh?”
A look of regret flickered across her face but changed quickly into a sneer. Lia quickened her pace.
