The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [158]
"I do not know, but we must regard that as a real possibility."
Reilly nodded, thinking this would make an interesting report to send to Washington, and maybe discuss with the CIA station chief as well.
"I want the files for everyone who ever worked with him," Sergey Nikolaych ordered. "And I want you to get me his personal file."
"Yes, Comrade Chairman," Major Shelepin replied, with a bob of the head.
The morning briefing, delivered by a colonel of the militia, had pleased neither the SVR Chairman nor his principal bodyguard. In this case, for a change, the legendarily slow Russian bureaucracy had been circumvented, and the information fast-tracked to those interested in it. That included the man whose life might have been spared accidentally after all.
"And we will set up a special-action group to work with this Provalov child."
"Of course, Comrade Chairman."
It was strange, Sergey Nikolaych thought, how rapidly the world could change. He vividly remembered the morning of the murder—it was not the sort of thing a man could forget. But after the first few days of shock and attendant fear, hed allowed himself to relax, to believe that this Avseyenko had been the real target of an underworld rub out—an archaic American term he liked—and that his own life had never been directly threatened. With the acceptance of that belief, the entire thing had become like driving past an ordinary traffic accident. Even if some unfortunate motorist had been killed there at the side of the road, you just dismissed it as an irrelevance, because that sort of thing couldnt happen to you in your own expensive official car, not with Anatoliy driving. But now hed begun to wonder if perhaps his life had been spared by accident. Such things were not supposed to occur—there shouldnt have been any need for them.
Now he was more frightened than hed been that bright Moscow morning, looking down from his window at the smoking wreck on the pavement. It meant that he might be in danger still, and he dreaded that prospect as much as the next man.
Worse still, his hunter might well be one of his own, a former KGB officer with connections to Spetsnaz, and if he were in contact with the Chinese …
… But why would the Chinese wish to end his life? For that matter, why would the Chinese wish to perform any such crime in a foreign land? It was beyond imprudent.
None of this made any sense, but as a career intelligence officer, Golovko had long since shed the illusion that the world was supposed to make sense. What he did know was that he needed more information, and at least he was in a very good place to seek it out. If he wasnt as powerful as he might once have been, he was still powerful enough for his own purposes, Golovko told himself.
Probably.
He didnt try to come to the ministry very often. It was just a routine security measure, but a sensible one. Once you recruited an agent, you didnt want to hang out with him or her for fear of compromise. That was one of the things they taught you at The Farm. If you compromised one of your agents, you might have trouble sleeping at night, because CIA was usually active in countries where the Miranda warning was delivered by a gun or knife or fist, or something just as bad—as unpleasant as a police state could make it, and that, the instructors had told his class, could be pretty fuckin unpleasant. Especially in a case like this, he was intimate with this agent, and breaking away from her could cause her to stop her cooperation, which, Langley had told him, was pretty damned good, and they wanted more of it. Erasing the program hed had her input on her machine would be difficult for a CalTech-trained genius, but you could accomplish the same thing by clobbering the whole hard drive and reinstalling new files over the old ones, because the valuable little gopher file was hidden in the system software, and a write-over would destroy it as surely as the San Francisco Earthquake.
So, he didnt want to be here, exactly, but he was a businessman,