The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [330]
"So, what sort of work do you do, Vanya?" the female voice asked, showing the expected professional interest of an expensive hooker in a wealthy man she might wish to entertain again.
"Business" was the answer.
"What sort?" Again, just the right amount of interest. The good news, Provalov thought, was that she didn't need coaching. The Sparrow School must have been fairly easy to operate, he realized. Women did this sort of thing from instinct.
"I take care of special needs for special people," the enemy spy answered. His revelation was followed by a feminine laugh.
"I do that, too, Vanya."
"There are foreigners who need special services which I was trained to handle under the old regime."
"You were KGB? Really?" Excitement in her voice. This girl was good.
"Yes, one of many. Nothing special about it."
"To you, perhaps, but not to me. Was there really a school for women like me? Did KGB train women to … to take care of the needs of men?"
A man's laugh this time: "Oh, yes, my dear. There was such a school. You would have done well there."
Now the laugh was coquettish. "As well as I do now?"
"No, not at what you charge."
"But am I worth it?" she asked.
"Easily" was the satisfied answer.
"Would you like to see me again, Vanya?" Real hope, or beautifully simulated hope, in the question.
"Da, I would like that very much, Maria."
"So, you take care of people with special needs. What needs are those?" She could get away with this because men so enjoyed to be found fascinating by beautiful women. It was part of their act of worship at this particular altar, and men always went for it.
"Not unlike what I was trained to do, Maria, but the details need not concern you."
Disappointment: "Men always say that," she grumped. "Why do the most interesting men have to be so mysterious?"
"In that is our fascination, woman," he explained. "Would you prefer that I drove a truck?"
"Truck drivers don't have your … your manly abilities," she replied, as if she'd learned the difference.
"A man could get hard just listening to this bitch," one of the FSS officers observed.
"That's the idea," Provalov agreed. "Why do you think she can charge so much?"
"A real man need not pay for it."
"Was I that good?" Suvorov/Koniev asked in their headphones.
"Any better and I would have to pay you, Vanya," she replied, with joy in her voice. Probably a kiss went along with the proclamation.
"No more questions, Maria. Let it lie for now," Oleg Gregoriyevich urged to the air. She must have heard him.
"You know how to make a man feel like a man," the spy/assassin told her. "Where did you learn this skill?"
"It just comes naturally to a woman," she cooed.
"To some women, perhaps." Then the talking stopped, and in ten minutes, the snoring began.
"Well, that's more interesting than our normal cases," the FSS officer told the others.
"You have people checking out the bench?"
"Hourly." There was no telling how many people delivered messages to the dead-drop, and they probably weren't all Chinese nationals. No, there'd be a rat-line in this chain, probably not a long one, but enough to offer some insulation to Suvorov's handler. That would be good fieldcraft, and they had to expect it. So, the bench and its dead-drop would be checked out regularly, and in that surveillance van would be a key custom-made to fit the lock on the drop-box, and a photocopier to make a duplicate of the message inside. The FSS had also stepped up surveillance of the Chinese Embassy. Nearly every employee who came outside had a shadow now. To do this properly meant curtailing other counterespionage operations in Moscow, but this case had assumed priority over everything else. It would soon become even more important, but they didn't know that yet.
"How many engineers do we have available?" Bondarenko asked Aliyev in the east Siberian dawn.
"Two regiments not involved with the road-building," the operations officer answered.
"Good. Get them all down here immediately to