The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [150]
"Anything else turn lately?" the FBI agent asked. Provalov filled in what hed learned about the hooker and what had happened the night before the murders. "Damn, that is swashbuckling. But you still dont know who the target was, do you?"
"No," Provalov admitted, with a sip of his second drink.
Hed have to go easy on the alcohol, he knew, lest he make a mistake. His quarry was too slick and dangerous to take any sort of risk at all. He could always bring the guy in for questioning, but he knew that would be a fruitless exercise. Criminals like this one had to be handled as gently as a cabinet minister. Provalov allowed his eyes to look into the mirror, where he got a good look at the profile of a probable multiple murderer. Why was it that there was no black halo around such people? Why did they look normal?
"Anything else we know about the mutt?"
The Russian had come to like that American term. He shook his head. "No, Mishka. We havent checked with SVR yet."
"Worried that he might have a source inside the building?" the American asked. Oleg nodded.
"That is a consideration." And an obvious one. The fraternity of former KGB officers was probably a tight one. There might well be someone inside the old headquarters building, say someone in personnel records, whod let people know if the police showed interest in any particular file.
"Damn," the American noted, thinking, You son of a bitch, fucking the guys hookers before you waste him. There was a disagreeable coldness to it, like something from a Mafia movie. But in real life, La Cosa Nostra members didnt have the stones for such a thing. Formidable as they might be, Mafia button-men didnt have the training of a professional intelligence officer, and were tabby cats next to panthers in this particular jungle. Further scrutiny of the subject. The girl beyond him was a distraction, but not that much.
"Oleg?"
"Yes, Mikhail?"
"Hes looking at somebody over by the musicians. His eyes keep coming back to the same spot. He isnt scanning the room like he was at first." The subject did check out everyone who came into the restaurant, but his eyes kept coming back to one part of the mirror, and hed probably determined that nobody in the place was a danger to him. Oops. Well, Reilly thought, even training has its limitations, and sooner or later your own expertise could work against you. You fell into patterns, and you made assumptions that could get you caught. In this case, Suvorov assumed that no American could be watching him. After all, hed done nothing to any Americans in Moscow, and maybe not in his entire career, and he was on friendly, not foreign ground, and hed dusted off his tail on the way over in the way he always did, looking for a single tail car. Well, the smart ones knew their limitations. How did it go? The difference between genius and stupidity was that genius knew that it had limits. This Suvorov guy thought himself a genius … but whom was he looking at? Reilly turned a little more on his bar stool and scanned that part of the room.
"What do you see, Mishka?"
"A lot of people, Oleg Gregoriyevich, mainly Russians, some foreigners, all well-dressed. Some Chinese, look like two diplomats dining with two Russians—they look like official types. Looks cordial enough," Reilly thought. Hed eaten here with his wife three or four times. The food was pretty good, especially the fish. And they had a good source of caviar at the Prince Michael of Kiev, which