Divide and conquer - Tom Clancy [80]
"Get single females as well," Orlov said.
"The Harpooner has been known to adopt a variety of disguises." Grosky nodded.
"You feel very confident about this?" Orlov asked. Korsov had been leaning over the desk. Now he stood like a soldier, his chest puffed.
"Completely," he replied.
"All right," Orlov said.
"Leave the hotel diagram with me. This was very good work. Thank you both." As Grosky and Korsov left, Orlov picked up the phone. He wanted to talk to Odette about the hotel and then get her on site. Hopefully, the American would be strong enough to go with her. The Harpooner was not a man to tackle alone.
Baku. Azerbaijan Tuesday, 10:07 a.m.
Odette Kolker was cleaning up the breakfast plates when the phone beeped. It was the apartment phone, not her cell phone. That meant it was not General Orlov who was calling. She allowed her answering machine to pick up. It was Captain Kilar. The commander of her police unit had not been in when she phoned the duty sergeant to let him know that she would be out sick. Kilar was calling to tell her that she was a good and hardworking officer, and he wanted her to get well. He said that she should take whatever time she needed to recuperate. Odette felt bad about that. She was hardworking. And though the Baku Municipal Police Department paid relatively well-twenty thousand manats, the equivalent of eight thousand American dollars-they did not pay overtime. However, the work Odette did was not always for the BMP and the people of Baku.
The time she spent at her computer or on the street was often for General Orlov. Baku was a staging area for many of'the arms dealers and terrorists who worked in Russia and the former Soviet republics.
Checking on visa applications, customs activity, and passenger lists for boats, planes, and trains enabled her to keep track of many of these people. After putting away the few dishes, Odette turned and looked back at her guest. The American had fallen asleep and was breathing evenly.
She had placed a cool washcloth on his head and he was perspiring less than when she had brought him home. She had seen the bruises on his throat. They were consistent with choke marks. Obviously, the incident in the hospital was not the first time someone had tried to kill him.
There was also a tiny red spot on his neck. A puncture wound, it looked like. She wondered if this illness were the result of his having been injected with a virus. The KGB and other Eastern European intelligence services used to do that quite a bit, typically with lethal viruses or poison. The toxin would be placed inside microscopic pellets. The pellets were sugar-coated metal spheres with numerous holes in their surface. These would be injected by an umbrella tip, pen point, or some other sharp object. It would take the body anywhere from several minutes to an hour or two to eat through the sugar coating. That would give the assassin time to get away. If this man had been injected, he probably was not supposed to die by the virus. He had been used to draw his colleagues out into the open. The hospital ambush had been well organized. Just like the ambush that killed her husband in Chechnya, she thought. Her husband, her lover, her mentor, her dearest friend. They all perished when Viktor died on a cold, dark, and lonely mountainside.
Viktor had successfully infiltrated the Chechan mujihadin forces. For seven months, Viktor was able to ohtain the ever-changing radio frequencies with which different rebel factions communicated. He would write this information down and leave it for a member of the KGB field force to collect and radio to Moscow. Then the idiot KGB officer got sloppy. He confused the frequency he was supposed to use with the one he was reporting about. Instead of communicating with his superiors, he broadcast directly to one of the rebel camps. The KGB officer was captured, tortured for information, and killed. He had not known Viktor's name but he knew which unit her husband had infiltrated and when he had arrived. The rebel leaders had no trouble figuring out who the