“A prince,” he murmured. “I am going up in the world.”
“Keep your sense of humor to yourself,” said Grishin. “It’s a soft target. No personal security worth the name. By Christmas Day.”
The Mechanic considered. Too quick. He needed to prepare. He was alive and free because he took meticulous precautions, and they took time.
“New Year’s Day,” he said.
“Very well. You have a price.”
The Mechanic named it.
“Agreed.”
Plumes of white frosted breath rose from both men. The Mechanic recalled seeing on the television a religious revivalist rally at which a charismatic young priest had been calling for a return to God and the czar. So that was Grishin’s game. He regretted not doubling his price.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“Unless you have more you need to know.”
The executioner slipped the photograph inside his coat.
“No,” he said, “I think I know all I need to. Nice to do business with you, Colonel.”
Grishin turned and gripped the man’s arm. The Mechanic looked down at the gloved hand until the grip was released. He did not like to be touched.
“There must be no mistakes, on target or timing.”
“I do not make mistakes, Colonel. Or you would not have asked for me. I will mail you the number of my Liechtenstein account. Good-day to you.”
¯
IN the small hours of the morning following the meeting by the skating rink in Gorki Park, General Petrovsky’s six simultaneous raids went in.
The two informers had been invited to a private dinner in the officers club at the SOBR barracks and plied with enough vodka to render them gloriously drunk. Rooms had been provided for them to sleep off the effects. To make sure, there was a guard on each door.
A tactical “exercise,” arranged during the day, had been converted into the real thing just before midnight. By then the troops in their trucks had been confined to a series of closed garages. At two in the morning the drivers and detail commanders had been given their missions and the addresses they needed. For the first time in months surprise had been total.
The three warehouses had proved little problem. Four guards protecting the treasure stores had tried to resist and been gunned down. Eight more had surrendered just in time. The warehouses had yielded ten thousand cases of imported vodka, all without duty paid, that had rolled in from Finland and Poland over the previous two months. It was the wheat famine that had forced the biggest vodka-drinking nation in the world to import its own tipple, with prices rising to three times those in the countries of manufacture.
Other consignments in the warehouses turned out to be dishwashers, washing machines, televisions, video recorders, and computers, all from the West and all hijacked.
The two arsenals had yielded enough weaponry to fit out a full-strength infantry regiment, with types running from normal assault rifles up to shoulder-borne antitank rockets and flamethrowers.
Petrovsky personally had led the raid on the casino, which was still full of gamblers who fled screaming into the night. The manager continued to protest that his was a perfectly legitimate and city—licensed business until the desk in his office was removed, the carpet lifted, and the trapdoor to the cellar revealed. Then he fainted.
At midmorning the SOBR troops were still removing box after box of financial records, which were put in vans and taken back to the GUVD headquarters at 6 Shabolovka Street for analysis.
By midday two generals of the Presidium of the MVD, the Interior Ministry, five hundred yards away at Zhitny Square, had been on the phone to offer their congratulations.
The midmorning radio news carried the first bulletins of the affair, and at noon there was a fairly full report on the TV news. The number of fatalities among the gangsters, the newscaster intoned, had risen to sixteen, while among the rapid reaction force the casualties were limited to one seriously injured with a bullet in the stomach and one slight flesh wound. Twenty-seven mafiosi had been detained alive, of whom seven were in the hospital, and two were delivering lengthy statements to the GUVD.
This last allegation was not actually true, but had been released to the media by Petrovsky to cause even further panic among the leaders of the Dolgoruki clan.
The latter were indeed in a state of trauma as they met in a sumptuous, heavily guarded dacha well out of town, a mile and a half from the Archangelskoye Bridge over the Moskva. The only emotion transcending their panic was that of rage. Most were convinced that the sidelining of their two informers, the element of complete surprise the SOBR had achieved, and the accuracy of their knowledge pointed the finger in the direction of a major leak.
Even as they deliberated word came in from their street people that the buzz was about to the effect the leak had come from a loose-talking senior officer of the Black Guard. Considering the millions of dollars the Dolgoruki had put behind Igor Komarov’s election campaign, they were not amused.
They would never learn that the street rumor had in fact been started by the Chechens on the advice of Jason Monk. The clan chiefs resolved that before any further money was released to the UPF, there would have to be a serious explanation.