“I suppose so.”
“Look, man to man, if the worst should happen, if Komarov should win after all, what will happen to you, your wife, and Tatiana? Worth a night of vigil? Worth a few phone calls?”
When he had put the phone down Jason Monk took a map of Moscow and the surrounding countryside. His fingers roved over the area northeast of the capital. That was where Petrovsky had said the main UPF and Black Guard base was to be found.
From the northeast the main highway was the Yaroslavskoye Chaussee, becoming Prospekt Mira. It was the principal artery and it ran past the Ostankino television complex. Then he picked up the telephone again.
“Umar, my friend. I need a last favor from you. Yes, I swear it’s the last. A car with a phone and your number through the night. ... No, I don’t need Magomed and the guys. It would spoil their New Year’s Eve party. Just the car and the phone. Oh, and a handgun. If that wouldn’t pose too much of a problem.”
He listened to the laugh down the phone.
“Any particular kind? Well, now …”
He thought back to Castle Forbes.
“You wouldn’t be able to get hold of a Swiss Sig Sauer, would you?”
CHAPTER 20
TWO TIME ZONES TO THE WEST OF MOSCOW THE WEATHER was quite different, a bright blue sky and the temperature barely two below zero, as the Mechanic moved quietly through the woods toward the manor house.
His preparations for his journey across Europe had been meticulous as always, and he had experienced no problems. He had preferred to drive. Guns and airliners seldom mixed, but a car had many hiding places.
Through Belarus and Poland his Moscow-registered Volvo had attracted no attention and his papers showed he was just a Russian businessman attending a conference in Germany. A search of his car would have revealed nothing further.
In Germany, where the Russian mafia was well established, he exchanged his Volvo for a German-registered Mercedes, and easily acquired the hunting rifle with its hollow-point ammunition and scope sight before pushing further west. Under the new dispensation of the European Community the borders were virtually nonexistent and he passed through in a column of other cars with a bored wave from a single customs officer.
He had acquired a large-scale road map of the area he sought, identified the nearest village to the target and then the manor house itself. Passing through the village he had simply followed the signs to the entrance of the short drive, noted the signboard that confirmed he had the right address, then driven on.
After spending most of the night in a motel fifty miles away, he had driven back before dawn but parked his car two miles away from the manor and walked the rest of the way through the woods, emerging at the edge of the tree line behind the house. As the weak wintry sun rose, he created a lying-up position at the bole of a big beech tree and settled in to wait. From where he sat he could look’ down at the house and its courtyard from three hundred yards while remaining out of sight behind the tree.
As the landscape came alive, a cock pheasant strutted to within a few yards of him, stared at him angrily, and scurried away. Two gray squirrels played in the beech above his head.
At nine a man emerged into the courtyard. The Mechanic raised his binoculars and adjusted the focus slightly until the figure looked to be ten feet away. It was not his target; a manservant fetched a basket of logs from a shed under the courtyard wall and went back inside.
On one side of the courtyard was a row of stables. Two of the stalls were occupied. The heads of two large horses, a bay and a chestnut, peered over the tops of the half doors. At ten they were rewarded when a girl came out and brought them fresh hay. Then she went back inside.
Just before midday an older man emerged, crossed the courtyard, and patted the horses’ muzzles. The Mechanic studied the face in his binoculars and glanced down at the photo in the frosty grass by his side. No mistake.
He raised the hunting rifle and peered through the sight. The tweed jacket filled the circle. The man was facing the horses, back to the hillside. Safety catch off. Hold steady, a slow squeeze.
The crack of the shot echoed across the valley. In the courtyard the man in tweed seemed to be pushed into the stable door. The hole in his back, at the level of the heart, was lost in the pattern of the tweed, and the exit wound was pressed against the white stable door. The knees buckled and the figure slid downward, leaving a smear on the paint. A second shot took away half the head.
The Mechanic rose, slipped the rifle into its sheepskin-lined sleeve, slung it over his shoulder, and began to jog. He moved fast, having memorized the way he had come six hours before, the way back to his car.
Two shots on a winter’s morning in the countryside would not be so odd. A farmer shooting rabbit or crow. Then someone would look out of the windows and run across the courtyard. There would be screams, disbelief, attempts to revive; all a waste of time. Then the run back to the house, the phone call to the police, the garbled explanation, the ponderous official inquiries. Eventually a police car would come, eventually roadblocks might be set
up.
All too late. In fifteen minutes he was at his car, in twenty minutes moving. Thirty-five minutes after the shots he was on the nearest highway, one car among hundreds. By that time the country policeman had taken a statement and was radioing the nearest city for detectives to be sent.
Sixty minutes after the shots the Mechanic had hefted the gun in its case over the parapet of the bridge he had selected earlier and watched it vanish in the black water. Then he began the long drive home.
¯
THE first headlights came just after seven, moving slowly through the dark toward the brightly lit complex of buildings that made up the Ostankino TV center. Jason Monk sat at the wheel of his car, the engine running to charge the heater against the cold.
He was parked just off the Boulevard Akademika Koroleva, on a side road, with the principal office building straight ahead of his windshield across the boulevard and the spire of the transmitting tower behind him. When he saw that this time the lights were not from a single car but a column of trucks, he killed the engine and the telltale plume of exhaust died away.