He’d taught a lesson to the damned Americans when they came sniffing at his dacha, but they hadn’t learned it well enough. Now, sources told him, there was yet another plan afoot to snatch him, this time with collaboration from the FSB.
That hurt.
And when he hurt, Sokolov liked to share the pain.
The latest lesson for his enemies would start in Moscow, where a certain agent from the States was scheduled to arrive that very night. In fact, a stylish wall clock and Sokolov’s Rolex GMT Master II wristwatch agreed that the job should be finished by now. His friends in Moscow should be acquiring the information that Sokolov needed in order to—
He smiled when the telephone rang. Not his cell, but the gold-plated one on his desk, which he rubbed with a chamois after each and every use. Gold smudged with fingerprints was strictly déclassé.
“Hello?”
There was a heartbeat’s silence on the other end, before the gruff, familiar voice replied, “Gennady?”
“Who else would it be?”
“No one, of course,” said Leonid Bezmel, the boss of bosses for the Moscow Mafiya.
“What news?” Sokolov prompted him.
“It’s not good, I’m afraid.”
“Not good.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Tell me.”
“These incompetents Taras sent out to the airport missed their man. They’re dead, in fact, which cheats me of the pleasure I’d derive from their chastisement.”
Sokolov drained off his vodka in one swallow and commanded, “Tell me everything.”
CROSSING THE Moscow River on Mokhovaya Street, with the Kremlin complex on their right, Bolan told Pilkin, “We’re not off to the best of starts.”
“I see only three choices,” she replied. “We can give up, press on, or waste time trying to determine which side has the leak.”
“It could be both sides,” Bolan said. “I’ve got someone on my end who can try to run it down, but I won’t guarantee results.”
Pilkin hesitated, then said, “Even asking, with the FSB today, may cause some difficulty.”
Bolan heard that, loud and clear.
“Another way to do it,” he suggested, “is to cut the apron strings and carry out the mission as assigned, before it started going off the rails.”
“The kind of thing that ends careers,” she said.
“Depends on how you finish, I suppose. Or whether you were really meant to do it in the first place.”
“You suspect corruption?”
“Always. I trust the friends I’ve had forever,” Bolan said, “but I can count them on my fingers. And I still look out for number one.”
“I understand this. Here, it is the same. Before the change, we always knew the party leaders placed themselves above the people, but at least they feared exposure and the discipline to follow. Now, when there is so much money to be had, and no one left to draw the line…it’s hard to know the rules, sometimes.”
“When I run into that, I make my own,” Bolan replied.
“We have a handicap,” she said. “You were expected, at the airport. So your name, at least, is known in Moscow. If they also know your face—”
“That isn’t likely,” Bolan interrupted. “And the guys we met tonight aren’t handing out descriptions.”
“You must not use any credit cards, in that case. Or a driver’s license. No cell phone that can be traced.”
“I’ve got cash,” Bolan said. “If we run short, I’ll pick up more. My phone’s secure as it can be.”
His Inmarsat satellite phone had a built-in scrambler coded to coordinate with gear at Stony Man and on Brognola’s desk in Washington. If necessary, it could store a message for transmission as a high-speed data squirt, in lieu of real-time conversation. In the time the FSB would need to crack the code, assuming that his calls were intercepted in the first place, Bolan hoped to have his mission finished and be back in the States.
“You have assistance waiting, if we are successful?”
“When we are successful, transportation’s covered,” Bolan said. “But first, I need to soften up the other side a little.”
“Soften up?” Pilkin frowned.
“Shake up their world and start them finger-pointing,” he explained. “Put a few cracks in their united front.”
“They’ll be surprised already, with tonight’s failure,” she said. “Whoever they are.”
“It’s a start,” Bolan said. “And it doesn’t matter much who sent the welcoming committee. As I see it, there are only two or three real possibilities.”
“And they are…?”
“Sokolov himself, for starters,” Bolan answered, ticking off the options on his fingers. “Second, someone from the Mafiya who’s working with him. Third, somebody in authority.”
“Those men were not militia or FSB,” Pilkin said.
“But maybe working under contract.”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “It’s possible.”
“We’ll find out more when I start rattling cages,” Bolan told her. “Are you up for it?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Seems only fair. If you don’t want to ride the tiger, now’s the time to bail.”
“I have a job to do,” she said. “My orders don’t include surrender.”
“Right, then,” Bolan said. “Our first stop needs to be an all-night hardware store.”
MAKSIM CHALIAPIN HATED late-night phone calls. None had ever brought him good news, and they typically required him to take action that posed some risk to his standing and career, if not his life.
Such risk and aggravation came with service to the FSB, in which Chaliapin held the rank of First Assistant to the Director of the Economic Security Service. Chaliapin’s duties included supervising campaigns against organized crime of all kinds within Moscow Oblast—the city proper and its surrounding federal district—as well as liaison with Interpol and other foreign law enforcement or security agencies.
As Chaliapin left his bed and lumbered toward the shrilling telephone, he knew that he was lucky to have any job in government, much less a post with so much personal authority. At fifty-eight, he was a thirty-four-year veteran of what passed in Russia for a civil service. Chaliapin had joined the KGB as a fledgling strong-arm man in 1976 and worked his way up through the ranks to major with a combination of fancy footwork and apparent slavish obedience to his superiors of the moment. When President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the KGB in August 1991, Chaliapin had pulled every string within reach to secure a post with the new Federal Counterintelligence Service, or FSK, which, in turn, was magically transformed into the FSB in April 1995.
He was, if nothing else, a survivor.
Lifting the telephone receiver as if it weighed fifty pounds, Chaliapin spoke into the night.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
Of course it was. Chaliapin grimaced at the sound of Gennady Sokolov’s voice. Double-edged steel sheathed in moldy velvet.
“Good evening,” he said, careful not to use names. “How may