Coercion (10 page)

“The authorities have just released the name of a man killed earlier this evening when his car exploded in a
Bay Area driveway.  He is Alexander Ferris of San Diego, California.

This is not the first time tragedy has struck the Ferris family.  Authorities report that the powerful incendiary device used tonight is reminiscent of the terrorist
bomb which killed his parents sixteen years ago in Rome, opening speculation about the origin of the crime.  Given that this follows on the heels of his brother’s recent—.”

Victor turned off the car radio. 
At last
.  For some inexplicable reason the bomb had not gone off the first time Alex drove the car.  Victor had planned to go back tonight to check his work, but now that would not be necessary.  Whatever jiggled out of place must have jiggled back in. 
Better late than never
.

Victor pulled his BMW into the Shell station that housed his favorite phone booth.  It was the old-fashioned kind, the type you could step inside and shut the door
.  It was practically his second office.  Eager to share his latest victory, he began dialing a long series of codes from memory. Half way through he stopped and looked out into the fog.  He had it again, the strange feeling that he was being watched.

Victor did a careful
three-hundred-sixty degree survey around the Shell station and the surrounding streets.  He was looking for whatever had caused a blip on his radar, but he saw nothing.  Things had been going wrong for Victor lately, and it was beginning to play with his mind. 
This was no time to get paranoid
.  Get
paranoid?  He had
been
paranoid for a decade.  Paranoia was what kept him out of an American jail, or worse, much worse, the Lubyanka.

He shook his head and finished the sequence.  T
hen he covered the mouthpiece with a scrambler.

“Yarik.”

“It’s Victor calling.  You can call off your man at the airport.  Ferris is dead.”

Yarik grunted in disappointment.  “I was looking forward to meeting him.  The file you faxed over was quite enticing.  Never had the chance to play with one of those SERE guys before.”

“It was a long shot anyway.  Just being meticulous.  It is a pity that he’ll never know the pleasure of your company.  Some people are just born lucky.”

“Don’t suppose you used one of my condoms?”

“You’re a funny man, Yarik.  No, I arranged a barbecue.  You know how Americans love those.”

“With C4 briquettes?”

“Best thing when you want your cooking well done.”

“Isn’t that likely to get the police involved?”

“Sure, but with his brother just ten days cold, I figured the best thing to do on this one was to hide in plain sight.  The C4 makes it look like a terrorist hit, so the local cops will assume it’s revenge for something Ferris did in the CIA and gladly write it off as being out of their jurisdiction.  Meanwhile the CIA won’t care since he’s retired.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Victor put down the phone and found himself in an unexpectedly reflective mood.  It was sad that he should find it easier to talk to a professional assassin than to his own father.  Actually, he found it easier to talk to just about anyone than his father.  With Vasily, Victor felt as though he was always on trial, always on trial with something to prove.  Soon, however, he would deliver American industry on a silver platter.  Then Vasily would finally accept him, embrace him, and Victor would live within the glow he had experienced when his father first revealed his plans.  A smile grew on his face as the melancholy vanished. 
Meanwhile, you’ve got another call to make
…

Sugurov was pacing his office when the call came through.  What was happening to him?  He wasn’t the nervous type.  The Cuban Missile Crisis, the War in Afghanistan, decades of conflict in the Caucuses, none had shaken him.  Why should this one be different?  The answer was obvious, but not comforting.  This time he was fighting an invisible enemy, indigenous terrorists whose numbers were not counted, whose objectives were not clear, and whose tactics were not known.

Ri-ri-ring … swish
.

“I’m listening.”

“Good evening, Sir.  Are we secure?”

“Good morning.  Yes, we are secure.”

“Alex just bought a ticket to Irkutsk using the name Potapov.”

“Potapov?”

“Yes, Alexander Potapov.  Apparently he still has a Soviet passport from his CIA days.”

“Why Irkutsk?  Does he think that’s where they’re based?”

“Apparently.  I’m afraid I have not been able to learn any more than that yet.  Clearly it is my top priority.”

“You’ve booked yourself on the same flight, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes.  Victor put a bomb under Ferris’s car.  I disarmed it—pulled the detonator cap out so it would look accidental if Victor went back.  He didn’t, but then Ferris found it so my actions may have confused him.  Regardless, Ferris eventually went on to detonate the bomb himself in order to make it look like he was dead.  Victor fell for it.  I just heard him call in the news.”

“Who
m did he call?”

“I couldn’t tell
. I only heard his end of the conversation and unfortunately I couldn’t see or hear what number he entered.  He always uses relay codes and a mouthpiece scrambler.”

“Well, it is still good news overall.  And with them thinking Alex is dead, he’ll have a little more breathing room
.”

“For as long as it lasts.”

“You stick with him, Andrey.”

“You can count on me, Sir.”

“We all are.”

The
twenty-four hours before Alex boarded SU326 had whizzed passed in a blur, yet he knew he would remember them in vivid detail for the rest of his life.  At this point he did not want to speculate on whether or not that feat would involve long-term memory, but that was beside the point.  Now that he was strapped in at 40,000 feet, he had sixteen time zones worth of travel to reflect on his past actions and refine his future ones.  He was going to Russia.

The acceleration
began when Elaine’s tears sent his investigation into a 180-degree tailspin.  Now, instead of searching for Frank’s killer inside United Electronics, he was looking outside, way outside.  And it wasn’t just a killer he was looking for.  Enslaving good people, turning housewives into terrorists, severing the sacred alliance between mother and child: that required a beast.

Alex had
deciphered the name of that beast.  It was Victor.  Elaine had read the signature on the fax as any American would, as BUKTOP, and assumed it was an acronym.  Alex knew the same letters read differently in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.  To a Russian, BUKTOP was VICTOR.

Alex did not have a last name to match, but he had a place to start looking for one. 
A big place.  Irkutsk was one of Siberia’s larger cities, and Irkutsk Motorworks one of its larger employers.  Fortunately, Alex knew a thing or two about searching.  He was anxious to get started.

Some sixteen time zones from California and five from Moscow itself,
Irkutsk held the paradoxical distinction of being both in the middle of nowhere and home to an international airport.  Getting there from San Francisco required a day and a half of travel, including a glamorous flight change at Moscow Sheremetyevo.  He used the down time to parse his plan of attack and ponder poor Elaine’s predicament, and now at last arrival was but minutes away.  Alex rubbed his palms together in nervous anticipation.  It was about to get uncomfortably cold and dangerously hot at the same time.

In a normal investigation, he would be feeling pretty good
with a partial name, a general place, and a monstrous motive.  But Alex knew this operation was not going to be normal.  He was about to try to seize a bear by the balls. 
No, Alex, not normal at all
.

With that
lovely thought, the aircraft intercom crackled to life, bringing Alex back to his current predicament: the bogey on his radar.  While clearing customs in Moscow, he had twice caught sight of a young man in gold framed glasses who looked to Alex like he was trying too hard to blend in.  Now he was on the flight to Irkutsk.  As the Aeroflot flight attendant gave the same traytable-seatback-seatbelt warning heard on descending flights the world over, Alex wondered if the warning bells in his head were rung by the finely-tuned instincts of a hardened field-operative, or the inventive paranoia of a man whose twin had just been iced by the KGB.

Frankly, Alex was betting on paranoia.  Even h
e had not known he would be coming to Russia until shortly before his departure, so how could anyone else?  Sure, it was possible that he was tailed, but he had orchestrated the ultimate disappearing act and then taken evasive maneuvers, so that was a long shot.   Faking his death by setting off the bomb beneath Frank’s car had been a bit radical, but so were the men he was up against.  It would be downright depressing, not to mention dangerous, if they had reacquired him already.

Alex had
considered the decision to fake his death a solid move.  He even felt kind of proud at the time. 
When advancing aggressively, it’s wise to make the enemy think you’re in retreat,
sounded like one of those strategic pearls Sun Tzu spouted.  The car bomb seemed tailor made for that purpose, especially since he would be disappearing from the Bay Area anyway.  Now he was questioning his judgment again.

During that questioning, Alex took a look at the big strategic picture and was not sure he liked what he saw.  He
seemed tailor-made for an operation like this.  Given his professional experience and native linguistic skills, he was a perfect fit.  Could that be a coincidence?  If Gold Frame was in fact a tail, Alex was going to have to conclude that there was more going on than met the eye, much more.  And none of it good.

On the positive side,
Alex was pleased with the solution he and Elaine had devised for her problem.  After their long heart-to-heart in the woods, Elaine had driven him back to the UE parking garage for his car.  As he drove home, she went back inside to perform additional sabotage on the UE-2000, sabotage that would knock the engine out of action before her fuel-line replacement caused it to explode.  Elaine would be covered with Victor. Kimberly would have another reprieve. And none of Elaine’s colleagues would die. Seemed perfect.  In any case, poor Elaine was on her own again.  Using the reflective surface of his compass watch to steal a subtle glance at Gold Frame, Alex hoped his tail was no less isolated.

Another checkmark in the plus column was under the “destination” heading
.  Alex had been to Russia many times before, visiting his mother’s relations.  He had only made the trip once since her death sixteen years ago, but some things you never forget.  In a sense, he was going home.  That was important.  He was going to have to look at home to pull this off and come out alive.

Overall,
Alex did not expect blending in to be a problem.  The Soviet Union boasted hundreds of languages and dialects, and the faces ranged from dark Asian to Nordic Caucasian.  That said, he bore the high cheekbones and broad angular jaw that most locals would call ‘typical Russian.’  As for linguistic camouflage, well, speaking Russian would be like riding a rusty bike.  It might squeak a bit at first, but it would warm up quickly and get him where he needed to go.

His confidence
in this regard had received a boost at passport control in Moscow. Working undercover in the Middle East, he had often posed as a Russian rather than an American, and as such had several sets of Soviet documents with his picture on them.  Today he was traveling as Russian citizen Alexander Potapov, and though the Q&A was brief, the border guard had no problem with that claim.

Upon landing at Irkutsk International, Alex was pleased to find that the
formalities were all behind him.  That was a good thing.  It was much too dark, cold, and windy to queue up for Soviet bureaucracy.  Once the Tupolev spit them out on the howling tarmac, it was every man for himself.  Alex fell in line with those who had checked luggage as they hustled into the terminal to retrieve it.  He could have trudged through the snow with the rest of the carry-on only crowd toward the throng of entrepreneurs hawking their cars as taxis, but he had reason not to.  It was time to put Gold Frame to the test. 

Struggling to keep
his features blasé and his gait relaxed, Alex peeled away from the gaggle and sought out the terminal men’s room. 
Terminal men’s room
, Alex mused,
in this context, that could be a double entendre
.  The dim lighting he found there emphasized the point.  Nonetheless, he spent a full ten minutes pretending to freshen up.  After twenty-four hours in transit, he had begun fantasizing about a shower with a bar of scented soap.  Alas, a splash from the sink with eau de chlorine would have to do for now.  Actually, it was no big deal; he had reflexively returned to military mode once his feet hit the snow, and that meant writing off the creature comforts for the duration of the trip.

The first thing Alex saw upon exiting the restroom was that familiar face. 
Didn’t anyone tell you that I’m dead?

Gold Frame
was standing by the window of a kiosk watching the men’s room door in the reflection of the glass.  Alex surreptitiously returned the favor.  His opponent was nineteen or twenty years old and of average height and build.  He wore a dark wool coat and brown fur hat similar to Alex’s own.  He probably thought the gold-rimmed glasses made him look older and more intelligent, and perhaps he was right.  But they marked him.  It was an amateur’s mistake. 
Keep it up, my friend.

There was no sense in trying to shake
Gold Frame at this point.  By now, he surely knew that Alex was traveling as Alexander Potapov, and Alexander Potapov was about to register his passport at the Hotel Irkutsk.  Plus it was often better to turn an agent than to expose him.  Yes…  Being careful not to let his tail know that the game was up, Alex walked out the front door of the terminal and into the blustery Siberian night.

Alex found himself smiling inwardly, and realized that dangerous or not, he had missed this part of the CIA life.  Of course, at the moment he had neither cloak nor dagger, but
he could remedy that.  The key to these situations was keeping calm, and playing loose:
Think of it as a game
…

Alex made his way
out the arrivals gate and into the taxi ranks.  He shrugged his collar up around his neck to fend off the wind and began searching for a shifty-looking taxi driver without turning his head.  No problems there.  A beauty pageant might draw a blank at the Irkutsk Airport, but if Hollywood wanted to make a film on ugly, this would be the place to shoot.  Alex selected a middle-aged man with half-a-dozen metal teeth and the remnants of a black eye. 
It’s good to be back
, he thought, and gave Jaws his destination.