Book 19 in the Quiller series, 1996
More vicious than the Sicilian brotherhood, and more powerful than the dons of New York, the Mafiya is omnipotent in post-Soviet Russia. Even Quiller thinkstwice about moving unarmed and unprotected into into its deadly labyrinth.
But now he has no choice. In a mission deemed suicidal even by Croder,Quiller is up against the most evil man in Russia…
As the TU-154 bounced and floated and bounced again I wiped the mist off the window with the back of my hand and the flashing lights out there became brighter, and I could see a white carpet of fire-foam with yellow-caped figures wading through it.
The smell of garlic came suddenly on the air as Ivan leaned across me to take a look. Ivan had been my fellow-passenger all the way from Paris and I knew the names and ages of his six grandchildren but still wasn't sure what had happened to Rudi, the third-from-youngest: Ivan had been reticent on the details, and all I knew about little Rudi was that he had 'been an angel' and that hundreds had sobbed when they'd lowered the casket into the ground, hundreds.
'The last one,' Ivan said now with disgust as he stared through the window at the wrecked jetliner, 'was in Tashkent, only a week ago. A Yak-42, with thirty more people on board than there should have been.' He shrugged into his black astrakhan collar. 'Par for the course – there aren't enough planes.' The scene swung in a half-circle as the jet made its turn and started rolling towards the terminal, and the question flashed through my mind: why wasn't I feeling relieved that we were safely down? Because it can never happen to us, that's right. 'But it wasn't the extra load,' Ivan told me. 'They said there was water in the fuel tanks. It had been refuelled in St Petersburg in the pouring rain.' He slumped back into his seat. 'Get the water out of the fuel tanks and the vodka out of the pilots and we'd all sleep easier under our seat belts.'
Light snow was falling as we nosed into the runway gate; it had been announced from the flight-deck earlier: light snow, the wind at five knots, the night temperature ten below freezing, welcome to Moscow.
Ivan pumped my hand and presented me with a Cellophane-wrapped packet of toothpicks, courtesy of McDonald's. He said he hadn't checked any baggage. Nor had I, but I went off in the direction of the baggage claim because that was where I'd been told that Legge would make contact.
On my way there I passed an Aeroflot official standing on some kind of box to give him height above the people flocking around him; their faces were blank with disbelief or angry or wet with tears as he tried to reassure them: the rescue teams had now prised the cabin door of the crashed plane open and gained access to the passengers; the flight-deck had continued to report to the tower since the landing, but 'reception was difficult'. It was said that some – perhaps many – passengers were alive, together with three of the crew. Hope must be steadfastly maintained, the official told them, until definite news became available; meanwhile, free vodka and other refreshments were to be had at the cafeteria for those who wished to go there. Some of this was half-lost in the wailing of an ashen-faced babushka who stood rocking her shawled head back and forth between her hands, a little girl clutching at her skirt, her huge eyes staring at something she had never seen before: the sudden spinning away of the world she had always been told she could trust.
Legge was waiting for me at the baggage claim, watching me from the middle of the crowd until he thought I matched the description he'd been given. I'd never seen him before either; I'm just quick to note when I'm being watched, and no one else knew I was here. All I'd been given was his name, and the code-intro.
'All my eye,' he said.
'And Betty Martin.'
'You've got no baggage coming through?'
'No.'
'This way, then.' He was short, energetic, rolled a little in his walk, didn't look round to make sure I was keeping up as we nudged our way between people with wet coats and snowboots, their eyes half-hidden under their fur hats, snow on some of their shoulders: they were in from the street, like this man Legge, to meet passengers. From snatches of conversation I picked up they were talking about the crash, just heard the news.
'We've got customs clearance for you,' Legge said, 'but they'll want to see your visa at Intourist.' A young woman was coming out of the office with a clipboard and Legge steered her back and gave her the visa and she checked it and ripped off her section and didn't seem certain whether to give the visa back to Legge or to me, so I took it and put it away.
'If we can be of any help to you,' she said, 'at Intourist, here is our card and you have only to call us.' A stunning smile: she knew about the customs waiver and that I had to be some kind of VIP to qualify.
We got into a battered black Audi outside the terminal and the chains began beating a tattoo as we moved off through the rutted ice of the street.
'Ex-Navy?' I asked Legge.
He didn't look at me. 'Crystal ball?'
Sometimes a man's walk can tell you more than his eyes, that was all, especially if he doesn't know you're watching him. After a couple of miles I took another look at the far right top corner of the outside mirror on the passenger's side and saw the dark grey Volga was still there, keeping station two cars behind.
'That a tail?'
Legge didn't glance up at his mirror. 'No. Escort.' He lost the rear end for a moment and let the curb kick him back straight, the chains jingling across the ice.
'And the man in front?' The Land-Rover had pulled out ahead of us from the terminal and was still there, in front of a Mercedes.
'Escort.'
The rear end thing had shifted my weight and I snapped the seat-belt tighter. Two escorts, call it a bloody motorcade; it worried me. All Hagen had told me over the phone at three o'clock in Paris this morning was that I had to make Aeroflot Flight 307 at 9:51 and that he'd have transport standing by for me and a man called Legge would meet me in the baggage claim at Sheremetyevo on arrival. I was on stand-by after two weeks' leave so I couldn't ask any immediate questions: they'd come later if I had any. But it didn't look like a mission per se: I would have been ordered to London first for briefing and clearance.
'Are we in a burned-out field?' I asked Legge. This was what worried me.
'Not as far as I know.' He pulled back to let a police car in and we watched it until it went past the Mercedes and got lost in the snow-haze. Dark was already coming down, sheeting the roof-tops with steel.
It was the only reason I could think of for an escort fore and aft: there'd been instructions to protect me from the moment I landed, and that could mean that someone had blown his mission out here and left the terrain smoking.
'Where are we going?' I asked Legge; tried to make it sound casual, as if I wasn't really interested, but didn't bring it off, he knew how interested I was – you never ask questions like that when you're dropped into the field in a hurry, on the principle that you'd have been given the answers already if London had wanted you to know: yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die, so forth.
'Got a rendezvous.' He flashed his lights at someone coming the other way, trying to blind us.
An escort taking us to a rendezvous: someone important, then. Important or desperate or blown or about to be blown: despite Legge's cool I could smell panic in the air, the subtle hint of brimstone.
'Looks different,' I said, ' Moscow.' I hadn't been here since it had become the capital of Russia again. The buildings were the same: it was the traffic, quite a bit more of it. 'Lots of shiny Mercs and Jags and BMWs.' Not lots, I suppose, but they stood out from the crowd of local products.
'Mafiya,' Legge nodded.
The leading escort began taking us into side streets – we were now inside the Boulevard Ring – and finally slid into the curbside just beyond a small Russian Orthodox church and stood there with its parking lights on. Legge stopped outside the church itself and told me to wait in the car. I watched him go along to the Land-Rover through the flurries of snow and talk to the driver. He'd been checking the environment while he was picking his way through the frozen snow with his back to me: he'd stumbled a couple of times, hadn't been watching the ground, even though his head was down. Then he came back and passed the Audi and in the outside mirror I watched him talking to the driver of the rear escort vehicle. There was good street-craft in his movements and I put him down as someone more important than a local contact or sleeper or agent-in-place, possibly the chief of a major Bureau support group: Moscow was still a major field.
When he came back to the Audi he put his head in the open window and nodded. 'We'll be out here. We shan't move.' He looked at his watch. 'Rendezvous time was for 18:00. Couple of minutes to go, but your contact's already arrived.'
I got out of the car. 'Code-name? Code-intro?' I shouldn't have had to ask.
Legge looked at me with no change in his expression. 'You won't need anything like that.'
I crossed the crusted pavement, a snowflake settling on my face and burning the skin as it melted. The arched main doors of the church were shut, chained and padlocked, but the narrow entrance door was unlocked and I went inside, having to get used to the dim lighting in here after the baroque lamps of the street. Security didn't cross my mind: I'd been brought here under escort and Legge had checked the environment – as I had – and my contact for the rdv was already here, would have done his own reconnaissance or been escorted here as I was.
Three candles were burning in a small chapel on my right, their light reflecting from the gilded robes of three plaster saints – Nikolai, Marius, Pyotr. At the far end of the nave I saw movement and more light, flashing on bright silver, silhouetting a dark figure with a bald pink head.
'He's the lay janitor,' a voice came from the shadows of the chapel. 'We shan't be disturbed.'
Croder, by his voice. By his voice and the way he was standing, still and thin as a heron, the steel claw at his left wrist outlined against the dark of his astrakhan coat.
Croder, Chief of Signals.
Hence the motorcade and the formality and Legge's touch of pride when he'd looked at his watch and said, 'Rendezvous time was for 18:00. Couple of minutes to go…' The Chief of Signals is a punctual man. He is also brilliant, ruthless, and without mercy when the choice is to abandon a mission or the life of its shadow executive in the field, showing compassion only when the cost is nothing. He saved my life, once, and that had been the price.
But I was glad to see him. It always stimulates me to find myself in the presence of excellence – let's forget, in this case, the other things.
'Shall we sit down?' Croder suggested.
There was a hewn bench below Marius, the saint. Croder's claw hit the carved edge with the sound of a stone dropping onto a coffin, scattering echoes; he's never careful with it, doesn't find it embarrassing: I've seen him open a tin of sardines with it, push in the broken cork of a '92 Pommard, and, once, smash through the window of a Jaguar and hook the driver's throat before he could take off.
'It's so bloody cold in here,' I said, and sat down near him. Not too many executives, I suppose, would come so close to telling the Chief of Signals he'd chosen an inconvenient rendezvous.
'Yes, I apologise – you don't like the cold, do you? But we needed total security, as you can imagine, and I rather left things to Legge. But I was glad to see you turn up – I thought you'd crashed.'
'Crashed?' I was thinking of the journey here from the airport through the icy streets.
'I heard there was a plane down.'
'Oh, that, yes. It didn't have my number on it.' What the hell are you doing in Moscow? Iwanted to ask him. The COS hardly ever leaves the signals room in London: it is the innermost of inner sanctums – once a wine cellar underneath the building – where at any given time half a dozen directors in the field could be calling in their reports to the mission boards and asking for immediate instructions, and where sometimes the voice of a shadow executive with direct access to the short-wave bands is heard for the last time if he's left things too late to pull out of whatever death-trap he's caught in and even his local support group can't get him clear. Only a man with Croder's impregnable nerves could run a place like that – but here he was in Moscow.
'You're on stand-by,' he said, 'I believe.'
'Yes.' He didn't believe; he knew: he would have checked before he sent for me.
'I'm not sure I have anything for you.' He watched the man with the bald head at the far end of the nave; I could now see he was polishing some silver candlesticks. 'By which I mean,' Croder added, 'anything you would accept.'
I left that. It wasn't like him to hedge, and it alerted me.
'I was with the prime minister,' he said, 'late last night.'
He waited.
'And how was the prime minister?'
'In a towering rage. He told me in effect that while the US is pouring billions of dollars into the Yeltsin economy and the UK is doing its rather more limited best in the same direction, the Russian mafiya is threatening to destroy that same economy and bring the country to its knees.' His narrow head was turned to watch me suddenly from the shadows. 'We may remember that quite recently the head of Russia's Analytical Centre for Social and Economic Policies warned Yeltsin that the growth in organized crime here could well overturn his government and force Russia, with her back to the wall and at gun-point, to choose between anarchy and fascism under the leadership of some dangerous fanatic like Zhirinovsky – with twenty-eight thousand nuclear missiles at his command.'
'I understand it's on the cards, yes,' I said. But that wouldn't account for the 'towering rage'. I waited again.
'General Mikhail Yegorov, Russia 's first deputy interior minister, believes there are upwards of five thousand individual mafiya gangs operating in this country, totalling a hundred thousand active members. Other estimates are double that. Four million business organizations are known to be forced to pay protection money to their local mafiya "services", some of them foreign entrepreneurs – American, British, Japanese – with the result that the price of consumer goods is being forced up by more than twenty per cent, triggering a runaway inflation and damaging the economy to the point where the Russian man-in-the-street is near destitution at a time when Yeltsin is desperate to keep down the threat of revolution on the scale of the storming of the Winter Palace. I'm quoting these few statistics from memory simply to give you a brief picture of events.'