The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [5]
"What was that, Major?" a somewhat more alert voice inquired.
"Turns out it probably wasn't him, sir. Somebody named Avsyenko—" Teeters spelled it out. "We're getting the intercepts off their police radio bands. I haven't run the name yet."
"What else?"
"Sir, that's all I have right now."
By this time, a CIA field officer named Tom Barlow was in the loop at the embassy. The third-ranking spook in the current scheme of things, he didn't want to drive over to Dzerzhinskiy Square himself, but he did the next best thing. Barlow called the CNN office, the direct line to a friend.
"Mike Evans."
"Mike, this is Jimmy," Tom Barlow said, initiating a prearranged and much-used lie. "Dzerzhinskiy Square, the murder of somebody in a Mercedes. Sounds messy and kinda spectacular."
"Okay," the reporter said, making a brief note. "We're on it."
At his desk, Barlow checked his watch. 8:52 local time. Evans was a hustling reporter for a hustling news service. Barlow figured there'd be a mini cam there in twenty minutes. The truck would have its own Ku-band uplink to a satellite, down from there to CNN headquarters in Atlanta, and the same signal would be pirated by the DoD downlink at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and spread around from there on government-owned satellites to interested parties. An attempt on the life of Chairman Golovko made it interesting as hell to a lot of people. Next he lit up his desktop Compaq computer and opened the file for Russian names that were known to CIA.
A duplicate of that file resided in any number of CIA computers at Langley, Virginia, and on one of those in the CIA Operations Room on the 7th floor of the Old Headquarters Building, a set of fingers typed A-V-S-Y-E-N-K-O … and came up with nothing other than:
ENTIRE FILE SEARCHED. THE SEARCH ITEM WAS NOT FOUND.
That evoked a grumble from the person on the computer. So, it wasn't spelled properly.
"Why does this name sound familiar?" he asked. "But the machine says no-hit."
"Let's see … " a co-worker said, leaning over and respelling the name. "Try this … " Again a no-hit. A third variation was tried.
"Bingo! Thanks, Beverly," the watch officer said. "Oh, yeah, we know who this guy is. Rasputin. Low-life bastard—sure as hell, look what happened when he went straight," the officer chuckled.
"Rasputin?" Golovko asked. "Nekulturniy swine, eh?" He allowed himself a brief smile. "But who would wish him dead?" he asked his security chief, who, if anything, was taking the matter even more seriously than the Chairman. His job had just become far more complicated. For starters, he had to tell Sergey Nikolay'ch that the white Mercedes was no longer his personal conveyance. Too ostentatious. His next task of the day was to ask the armed sentries who posted the corners of the building's roof why they hadn't spotted a man in the load area of a dump truck with an RPG—within three hundred meters of the building they were supposed to guard! And not so much as a warning over their portable radios until the Mercedes of Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko had been blown to bits. He'd sworn many oaths already on this day, and there would be more to come.
"How long has he been out of the service?" Golovko asked next.
"Since '93, Comrade Chairman," Major Anatoliy Ivan'ch Shelepin said, having just asked the same question and received the answer seconds earlier.
The first big reduction-in-force, Golovko thought, but it would seem that the pimp had made the transition to private enterprise well. Well enough to own a Mercedes Benz S-600 … and well enough to be killed by enemies he'd made along the way … unless he'd unknowingly sacrificed his own life for that of another. That question still needed answering. The Chairman had recovered his self-control by this point, enough at any rate for his mind to begin functioning. Golovko was too bright a man to ask Why would anyone wish to end my life? He knew better than that. Men in positions like his made enemies, some of them deadly