This mission to Russia would hopefully be his last. Thank God. Because age made it harder to stomach the missions, too. Or maybe it wasn’t age. Maybe it was the Trust’s recent descent toward the ruthless and the careless. That wasn’t how they used to operate. Luckily—if you could call it that—his mission in Moscow was absolutely necessary for the good of the organization, and most importantly for the good of the United States. And so he would do his job, no matter how distasteful, and then he would go home, and he would try to start living a more normal existence. And he would call Kate. Because if he was no longer playing the same role he used to, there might be room in his life for a partner. And he might have found her.
He moved forward in the line. He would be next to give his documentation to the agent. A flicker of anxiety hit him—a slight increase of his pulse, a knotty feeling in his stomach. Even though the Soviet Union had died and the cold war was over, Michael still felt nervous every time he arrived in Russia. The truth was, “Michael Waller” would have serious problems getting through the passport check. The U.S. government had placed restrictions on his passport for travel into any country once considered communist because he had, technically, worked for the CIA in the past. His presence in a post-communist country might be taken as an act of espionage. But Michael wasn’t “Michael Waller” today.
He took a full breath into the lower lobes of his lungs. He forced his pulse to slow. His anxiety calmed quicker than usual. He wondered if the speedy calm was because he’d done this so many damn times. Then another possibility came to him. Maybe it was because of Kate. She made him feel younger, and somehow cleansed of the sins he’d committed, although she knew nothing about those sins, nor would she ever. That thought stalled him for a moment—no matter how present he was now with Kate, no matter what the future held, she could never know his past. Michael felt a wave of sadness, but he let that emotion evaporate from his body. He focused instead on how Kate made him feel—virile and youthful, yes, but more than anything optimistic, actually looking forward to his future.
The customs agent signaled to Michael. He stepped up to the man and handed him the passport he was holding. The man flipped it open and read it.
“Sergei Kovalev?” the agent said.
“Da,” he said. Yes.
“What countries did you visit?” the agent asked in Russian.
“Italy. France.”
“How long were you gone?”
Michael continued to answer the man’s questions in Russian, all the while giving the air of a wearied traveler eager for his trip to be over.
The agent paused then, his eyes flicking from Michael to Sergei’s passport photo.
Michael felt his breath become shallow, but he continued to give the agent a bored look.
Finally, the agent lifted his head and stamped the passport with a hearty thud. “Welcome home.”
“Thank you,” Michael said. But really, his trip had just begun.
6
F ive hours later, Michael walked through the lobby of his Moscow hotel, a once shabby place that was now grand again, the gold ceilings sparkling like new. The combination of the shabby memory and the new gold made him think of Vegas. Like Vegas, Moscow now had its glamorous sides, its historically seedy sides and its always dangerous sides. Yet Moscow was still much, much tougher.
Michael stepped outside the hotel and walked to Red Square, where gray snow edged itself along the perimeter. He walked through the square, admiring, as he always had, the brightly colored, funhouse cupolas of St. Basil’s. The square was different now than it used to be. In the past, the cathedral and the Kremlin stood stark against the bleakness that used to permeate Moscow, making the square almost eerie, sinister. Now the square boasted a skating rink and a new mall filled with designer stores. Michael preferred the old Red Square, but it remained an excellent place to stroll and to search for a tail.
He crossed the square twice, stopping to gaze occasionally at the star atop the Kremlin tower. Yet he was always aware of all the people around him, most of them tourists, along with stylish Russian youths and a few babushkas seeking alms. Each person who came into his sightline turned away in time. He wasn’t being tailed. At least not right now.
Michael walked to the metro station with its arched marble doorways, bronze sculptures, ornate chandeliers and vaulted, chrome ceilings. Michael had always been intrigued by the stations. They’d been Stalin’s pride, built in the thirties, forties and fifties, and they were intended to display preeminent Soviet architecture and art, to show the privilege of the Russian lifestyle. Whether the opulent stations were optimistic, delusional or simply deceiving, he had never been able to decide, but he could certainly see their beauty.
He took one of the long, long escalators downward, studying the mosaic walls while methodically glancing over his shoulder, memorizing the faces of the other commuters. At the landing, he looked at a portrait of Stalin receiving flowers from a group of children. He walked to another lengthy escalator and took it farther into the bowels of Moscow. The landing boasted a mosaic of Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, made of colored glass.
The Muscovites pushed past Michael, no one stopping to notice the art, much less him. Two minutes later, he boarded a train, rode two stops and disembarked. Once street side again, he held out his hand and waited for a car to stop. Muscovites didn’t take cabs, they simply waited until a driver headed in their direction pulled over. A fare would be negotiated, usually a few hundred rubles, and off they went. It was sort of an elevated level of hitchhiking.
A car pulled over. Inside, it was cramped and smelled of cigarettes. The driver was a grim woman in her sixties who wanted no talk, only cash, which was fine for Michael.
After a mile, Michael asked her to stop. He took a minibus in the opposite direction. He got out after a few miles and took another metro ride on a different line, all the while calmly watching anyone he came into casual contact with. There was no indication that he was being tailed. Even if he was, the Moscow Metro was the best place in the world to lose a tail because there were so many levels in the stations, so many trains.
Finally, he disembarked again and went to the street level. Using an international cell phone he’d rented at the airport, he dialed a man he knew as Sebastian Bagley, a Trust operative stationed in Seattle. Sebastian, a man about ten years his junior, was probably the smartest person Michael had ever met, and one of the most humble. Sebastian and Roger Leiland were his two best friends at the Trust, and Sebastian, like Roger, had a medical background. But a long time ago, Sebastian became enthralled with computers and technology. Once he was a member of the Trust, Sebastian had willingly become backup staff, running things behind the scenes. He had never suffered dreams of glory, he just wanted to do an exceptional job, and as such he was a preeminent Trust staffer. Luckily, Michael had enough seniority that he got to work with Sebastian whenever he requested.
“It’s Andrew Marson,” he said when Sebastian answered, giving one of the aliases he used in the field.
“You’re ready,” Sebastian said calmly.
“Trotsky in his office?”
“Yes.”
“His usual staff in place?”
“Yes. How do you feel?”
Michael smiled. No other backup ever asked an operative how they felt. And he wasn’t sure if Sebastian did this for anyone else but him, but he liked it. It was nice to have someone give some small measure of appreciation for what he now had to do.
And so finally, he walked a half a mile to the squat concrete office building where he was to meet Radimir Trotsky.
Radimir Trotsky was a high-ranking member of the Mafiya, the Russian mob, and he was one of the most dangerous. Since the Soviet collapse, Michael had shifted his focus to the Mafiya, and