Coercion (6 page)

Victor used his night-vision goggles to survey the backyard.  With its grand old trees, thick grass, and gentle slope, poets might describe the Davis house as a good place to be a squirrel.  With its fenceless yards, trusting neighbors, and darkened streets, Victor would describe it as
the perfect place to be a spy.  He returned the goggles to his backpack, and slipped out of the woods.

He found the patio door unlocked.  This was a double bonus as it indicated that the alarm
would also be unarmed.  It just didn’t get any better than this.  Victor had come equipped to handle locks and alarms, but he was pleased that those skills might not be required.  He did not particularly enjoy the cloak-and-dagger part of his job; it was too dangerous.  Creative engineering, grand deception, blind extortion, those were his passions in life.  Fortunately they also comprised the bulk of his work.

The sensor in his hand emitted a
low steady hum, indicating that the alarm was indeed inactive.  Victor had learned that few Americans bothered to set their alarms at night.  It was one more thing that made operating in the “land of the free” so easy.  People were so trusting here, at least those from the middle and upper classes.  The poor knew better.  They were still grounded in global reality. 
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Dr. Davis, and you are about to feel the teeth
.

The Davises had extinguished the last light at their Seattle residence two hours earlier, just after ten.  Victor had spent the intervening time studying the house layout, courtesy of the builder’s marketing brochure, and rehearsing various contingency plans in his head.  The former activity would enable him to navigate confidently in the dark.  This was not crucial—he had identified the girl’s room by the curtains—but he wanted to be thorough and preferred to walk around without the encumbrance of night-vision goggles.  The latter activity was just a reflection of his meticulous personality.  It only took one mistake…

Now for the dog.  The Davises owned a cocker spaniel named Taffy.  They had brought her home for Clara’s third birthday and the two girls were now growing up together.  Taffy was a friendly dog that slept on a bone-shaped pillow in the family room and would eat almost anything.  She loved attention and was discouraged from barking.  It was amazing what you could learn from kids.

Most mothers probably don’t have the KGB in mind when teaching the don’t-talk-to-strangers rule, but then, in his experience, most kids don’t really learn it anyway.  They certainly weren’t the suspicious type in the Davis’s stately neighborhood.

Victor stood beside the patio door with his back to the wall and pumped a syringe full of ketamine hydrochloride into a small beefsteak.  Ketamine was primarily a veterinary anesthetic, but he rarely used it on animals.  He tossed the steak through the patio door onto the kitchen floor and then slid it closed again. 

Tonight’s operation was part of an emergency
stop-gap measure, and included a few new challenges, one of which was figuring out how to attract Taffy quietly if the muffled sound of the kitchen’s sliding door was not enough.  Victor was pleased with the creative solution he had devised.  He would crack the door again and spray cow’s blood from a perfume atomizer.  He wasn’t sure the scent would work as a lure, but he thought it was a cool idea and was looking forward to the experiment.  Victor liked to expand his repertoire and refine his technique a bit more with each operation. 

Taffy came zipping into the kitchen, ears flapping,
a second after he closed the door.  The steak had been enough; so much for tonight’s experiment.  She devoured the meat as though these midnight feedings were standard practice and then looked around for more to drop from the benevolent sky.  She caught sight of Victor through the glass and shifted her tail wagging in his direction.  Her tail got slower and slower as she begged, like a wind-up toy running out of juice.  Two minutes later she was dreaming of bones.  Five minutes after that, Victor completed the first of the night’s surgical procedures.  His plan was tracking like a Swiss watch.

With phase one complete, Victor extracted what looked like a large Mont Blanc fountain pen from his hip pack.  This was Medusa.  Medusa was a derivative of sea-snake venom that would instantly paralyze the average man for twenty to thirty seconds if sprayed on his face.  Like the
cow’s blood atomizer, Victor did not expect to need the pen, but he wanted to be prepared for the unexpected.  Meticulous.

Victor had tried Medusa on himself once, years ago,
to ensure that it really worked.  He had stood before a mirror and a wall clock with a second hand and sprayed himself in the face.  The instant the mist hit his nose he froze in place looking like a G.I. Joe action figure holding a can of mace.  It felt like the nightmare in which you can’t move, only it was real and therefore much more terrifying—like living rigormortis.  For his victims, it would be a preview of what was to come.

Medusa was a risky weapon, so he shied away from using it on the job.  If the wind were to shift or the air conditioning suddenly kick on…  Fortunately, Victor’s plans worked so well that he had only used the spray once on another per
son.  That one time was yesterday, and then Medusa was the plan, rather than a contingency.

He had been atypically nervous at the time.  It was kind of like a first date, only with the knowledge that if things did not go as expected he would get more than a slap on the face.  When the moment of truth came, however, Victor had not hesitated.  He had trusted his equipment and Medusa had not let him down.  In fact, Medusa had lifted him up, way up.  She had transported him to a wonderland where he was omnipotent and the world was his for the taking.  Victor had craved the lady’s touch ever since.

That experience had lasted just twenty seconds, but those twenty seconds seemed like forever thanks to the accompanying blast of adrenaline, which slowed time to a snail’s pace.  Frank Ferris had stood there helplessly, horribly paralyzed while Victor placed the gun in his hand, brought it naturally to his temple, and pulled the trigger: fast, fulfilling, and forensically perfect.

As a side effect of that mission, Victor became consciously aware that
power
was his addiction.  It had taken the acute, focused rush from controlling Medusa’s paralyzing touch to bring about that realization, but now it seemed blindingly obvious.

Victor began craving his next power rush the way a junkie craves his next hit.  Before Frank Ferris, he had never given his power the ultimate exercise.  Oh, he had led many victims in a dance around death’s door, but he had never pushed one through from up close and personal before.  The old rush, the Peitho rush, was great—having another man, a powerful, arrogant man, whimpering to you for mercy was the cat’s meow—but this new rush, the Medusa rush, was the lion’s roar.

Waiting there in a dark corner of the kitchen, Victor chuckled at the irony of his addiction.  Whereas junkies were notorious for using deceit to obtain their drug, Victor’s drug was deceit itself.  Yes, he was enjoying
la dolce vita
, the sweet life.  But enough with the melodrama.  The dog was out and nobody was stirring.  It was time to create an agent.

The Davis’s new home, with its quiet floorboards and wall-to-wall carpeting, aided his silent ascent up the stairs and down the hall to Clara’s room.  Once outside her door, Victor paused just long enough to douse a handkerchief with chloroform before entering.  It would keep her asleep while he injected the ketamine.

Victor slipped into her bedroom and closed the door behind.  Clara was about to experience every child’s nightmare, but she would sleep through it.  He hoped her parents would remain equally oblivious.

He was struck by how nice Clara’s room was, so warm and cozy and full of nick-knacks and toys.  Russian children didn’t have rooms like this.  Heck, they were lucky to have a room at all.  He certainly never had a room of his own. 
Prissy bitch
.

Victor
snarled as he laid the chloroform-soaked handkerchief over the six-year-old’s nose and mouth; she did not so much as twitch.  While he waited silently in the dark for the anesthetic to take hold, Victor thought about what it would be like to find himself one day at the other end of the Peitho syringe and totally within another man’s power.  Then he thought of his father, and realized he already was...

Holding a penlight in his teeth, Victor prepared a cocktail of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, immunosuppressants, and numbing-agents, filling a
10cc syringe with the contents of five different vials.  Then he injected it into the gluteus maximus of his six-year-old victim.  The cocktail would both mitigate Clara’s immune reaction to the implant and chemically camouflage it from her senses.

With the preparatory injection complete, he withdrew a Peitho syringe from his pack with great satisfaction.  His father’s invention was as brilliant as they come, and Victor felt a touch of pride every time he used it.

He watched the second-hand on Clara’s Strawberry Shortcake clock make a full sweep before proceeding.  He almost blushed while setting the needle depth for a twenty kilo subject.  All is fair in love and war, he mumbled, and plunged it into her pink flesh with a warrior’s resolve.

Oddly enough, while applying the slow and steady pressure that would implant Peitho, Victor found himself hoping that it was the last time he would be doing this.  If Dr. Davis were to wake up and find him there, a stranger manipulating his baby’s body in the dead of the night, he would surely launch himself at Victor with murderous fury.  Of course, Victor had Medusa by his side, but still …

He felt the plunger hit bottom.  Dr. Davis was now his slave.  Victor withdrew the syringe beneath a compressed cotton ball and let out a sigh of relief.  He maintained pressure on the site for two minutes to ensure hemostasis.  Then he wiped it clean, applied a drop of skin sealant, and the cover-up was done.  By morning, the injection site would look and feel no worse than a bug bite, and given the location, Clara would probably not notice it at all.

Victor packed up his supplies as carefully as an operating room nurse.  Aside from a satiated dog, he would leave no trace of his midnight visit.  Meticulous.

As he slid the patio door shut behind him Victor knew he had locked up another Knyaz victory.  He knew he was the best, whether his father would acknowledge it or not.

The rising moon that greeted Victor
reminded him of the next problem he had to tackle.  His life was full of challenges—for a decade the stream had been unending—but this next one would be different.  Victor was about to engage his first active opponent, and the prospect thrilled him.  He looked forward to finding an explosive way of dealing with Alexander Temogen Ferris.

There were no lights in the entrance
hall of Luda Orlova’s apartment building, and the stairway was dark as Stalin’s basement.  Somebody had stolen the bulbs.  Vasily was pleased to find that for once Gorbachev’s incompetence was working in the country’s favor; he couldn’t afford to be seen.  Of course, nobody would believe their eyes if they did see The General in such an undistinguished place, but why tempt fate.

Something squished under
Vasily’s polished shoe as he neared the third floor.  He did not look down.  He just grumbled over the combination of bad luck and bizarre coincidence that necessitated tonight’s intervention.  What a waste of time.  He hated wasting time.  At least there was consolation in knowing that his stopgaps and controls had functioned properly.

An outside observer might say that
Vasily had been lucky, lucky that he had caught this in time, lucky that Luda had taken her finding to the right person, lucky that she herself was pliable and compliant.  But it wasn’t luck, not really.  Vasily controlled the bottlenecks and the gatekeepers in and around all his interests.  To do otherwise would be inviting disaster to a long-term complex operation like his.  The system worked brilliantly in times like these.  And there were always times like these.

The Knyaz outer circle—those who knew about one of his trees but had no idea they were part of a forest—consisted of key accountants and engineers, bankers and lawyers, the local Party leadership, and all the general management.  Those coconspirators thought of
Vasily’s setup as routine politics, as the I’ve-got-your-back-you’ve-got-mine scenario that worked behind the scenes of every powerful organization the world over.  It was camouflaged compartmentalization, and it worked beautifully.

This was not the first time that part of
Vasily’s operation had been uncovered, and it would not be the last, but Luda’s discovery was potentially a doozy.  Power, position, and Peitho had made it possible for Vasily to divert a fraction of the crude oil pumped from one of the wells at Siberia’s largest reserve.  Once off the books, he remixed the embezzled oil fifty-fifty with legitimate crude and shipped to LOCo, which sent half the payment to his offshore interest, the Swiss corporation Vasily had also named
Knyaz
.  Knyaz AG then kicked two percent back to another account in the same bank, one owned by LOCo’s president.

Although such an operation might sound outrageously complicated, it was
actually quite simple.  There are a plethora of pipes running around every oil extraction site, but you never actually see anything flowing through them.  Gauges tell you what’s going on inside, and gauges can be recalibrated.  So can people.  And since Vasily had been siphoning off his portion since the first day SibOil began pumping, there would only be an anomaly to investigate if he stopped.  Nonetheless, today’s close call was a reminder that even after six years, he could not take his financing operation for granted.

According to the letter of the law,
Vasily had embezzled nearly half a billion dollars worth of Siberian crude, but according to the spirit of the law, he was no crook.  He had invested every ruble of the SibOil proceeds back into Russia, the New Russia, the Knyaz’s Russia.  He was not in this for personal gain.

The
real crooks were in Moscow—fat, drunk, stupid bureaucrats who lived high on the hog while the masses ignorantly muddled by on the scraps.  Vasily despised Moscow bureaucrats.  He was out there in Siberia, in the thick of it, fighting trench warfare for the people of Russia.

Luda had promised to keep the LOCo incident, their earlier meeting, and tonight’s date a secret.  Although he knew that she meant it,
Vasily was not the type to take chances.  So he did some research and learned that if Luda were going to tell anyone of their meeting, it would be her father.  How quaint.

As luck would have it, Mr. Orlov worked at
his KGB complex as a custodian.  Vasily could easily silence him at the first sign of trouble, but he was sure there would be no need.  During forty years of service, Mr. Orlov’s loyalty had never been questioned. 
It was almost too easy
.

Vasily
reached the fourth floor without encountering anyone and found apartment forty-two.  The number was stenciled in pen on the door’s wood-grained contact paper.  He smoothed his suit, turned his charm on full volume, and knocked.

Luda opened the door with a big nervous smile on her face. 
Vasily stepped immediately inside and closed the door behind him.  He waited a moment for her to exhale before speaking.  “Good evening Luda.  My, you look radiant tonight.  Give me a moment to take you in.”

He stepped back and performed a move he called
the thermometer
.  Vasily ran his eyes slowly, suggestively, from her ankles to her eyes, forcing an admiring smile to his lips while her temperature rose and face reddened in response.  Then he held up the picnic-basket in his left hand while she gulped air.  “I thought it might be easier for us to get to know one another if we stayed in, away from the distractions that so often present themselves in public.  So I’ve taken the liberty of bringing dinner to you.  Is that all right?”

He saw a series of emotions sweep over her ruddy face, but he knew that she would defer to his wishes long before she managed to respond.  People were predictable.

“That sounds wonderful.”

A large gray cat had scurried as he entered, and now it was creeping back to have a closer look at him. 
Vasily noted that Luda had decorated her apartment using a cat theme.  In addition to the live specimen, there were stuffed cats, ceramic cats, wooden cats, and pictures of cats.  She even had a cat clock that probably meowed on the hour.  Vasily hated cats.

The apartment itself was the typical Soviet one-roomer, furnished as predictably as the hotel room it resembled.  There was a couch that turned into a bed at night, and a wall unit that served as wardrobe, bookcase, entertainment center, and display case.  A
lacquered coffee table with chipped edges stood to the left of the couch, completing the humble ensemble.  Luda undoubtedly used it nightly as she drank tea and ate chocolates alone before the TV.  Her life was as bland, generic, and predictable as that of a bee in a hive.  Vasily couldn’t see into the bathroom or the kitchen—the doors were closed—but he was sure that they too were as neat and tidy as her cat’s paws.  Anybody who had met Luda even once would expect nothing less. 

He drew the blinds, set the basket on the coffee table, and took a seat
beside it on the couch.  He was a suitor ready to serve.  As he extracted a chilled bottle of champagne from the basket, she took two carved crystal glasses from the display.  Judging by the look and the way she handled them, Vasily guessed the glasses were her prized possession.  It was a shame they weren’t champagne flutes, as he had brought French champagne.  Vasily was sure it would be the first and only time she would experience the real thing—most Russians would go their whole lives drinking nothing but the sickly sweet
Sovietskoe Champanskoe
—and now she would miss out on its exquisite nutty nose.  Tragic.

“Here you go,
Vasily,” Luda said, proudly handing him the glasses.

“Why, aren’t these lovely.”

“They were my grandmother’s.  She got them in Czechoslovakia.”

“Well then, we’ll have to drink to your dear grandmother.”

The cat stared at him as he poured.  Vasily looked it in the eye and got the distinct impression that they understood each other.  They did have common ground, he and the feline.  They were both cunning and sleek and needed something from Luda, and both of them were pretending to be more like dogs, loyal and trustworthy, in order to get it. 

“I’ve brought us strawberries to start with, followed by black caviar on buttered toast and finally a bird’s milk cake for tea.  I hope that’s to your liking?”

Luda was still staring at him in disbelief.  The groceries had all come from a
Beryozka
hard-currency store, and were generally unavailable to the public.  Even in Beryozkas, however, strawberries were virtually unheard of during the winter.  You had to have major connections to get them.  But Vasily was sure it was not just the food that surprised the accountant.  She had probably never seen a man set a table before tonight.  That was strictly a woman’s job in most Russian households.  Tonight, however, it was part of his charm.

“Perfect,” she said, and he thought she might cry.

Vasily had designed dinner to be quick.  Part of his seduction plan was to encourage Luda to talk about herself throughout the meal, and he knew there would be only so much of that he could take.  When she began talking about her cat, Vasily dipped his finger in the caviar and let Barsik lick it clean.  Even if Vasily didn’t like the players, he could still enjoy the game.

By the time the strawberries and caviar were gone
Vasily knew Luda’s life story.  It varied only slightly from the prediction he had made in Podoltsev’s office, and contained little that was not in the file he had read before coming over.  Luda Orlova was an only child.  Her mother had died of pneumonia twenty years ago, so she spent most of her free time caring for her father and her cat.  She liked … blah, blah, blah.  The Beluga was wonderful, fresh, firm and bursting with flavor beneath his probing tongue.  He could enjoy an accounting seminar while munching on those little pieces of toast.  And he was beginning to anticipate a tasty dessert.  Luda cleaned up well.

At last she rose and said, “I’ll go make the tea.”

Vasily stood up and began unfolding the couch the moment she closed the kitchen door.  He always played it conservative in public, but loved to shock people occasionally in private.

When Luda returned five minutes later with the boiling kettle and saw the bed prepared she froze mid-stride and began to tremble. 
Vasily quickly grabbed the serving tray and set it down.  Then he bent and gave her a long kiss, wrapping his arms around the small of her back in case she should swoon.  As she relaxed and eventually began to respond, he shifted his grip, picked her up in his arms, and walked across the room to lay her on the bed.

Luda was apparently shocked but willing, and obviously completely unsure of what she should do.  She just lay there, staring up at him with eyes he had last seen when removing a hook.  He found her school-girlish tension to be both strange and erotic. 
But back to business.

Vasily
loved sex.  He prided himself on having no addictions or dependencies, but sex came close.  His sexuality was part of his charisma, part of the invisible subliminal magnetism that drew people to him, so he did nothing to stifle it.  It even worked on men, although he had never gone there.

Vasily
ran his hand lightly down Luda’s face, using two fingertips to close her disturbing eyes. 
Much better
.  Then he slowly traced one fingertip over her nose, against her lips and down her throat until she suddenly gasped with involuntary anticipation.  As he began to undress her with practiced hands, button by button, snap by snap, her cat looked on with reptilian indifference. 
She really should have bought a dog
.

Vasily
was pleased to discover that his hunch had been correct: she was a sheep in wolf’s clothing.  Her face was still rigid when he finished undressing her, but her body was actively responding.  Her distal capillaries were flushing, her superficial arteries were pulsing, and her tiny hairs were standing.  He blew a cool breeze across her breasts and felt his manhood begin to awaken.

Although far from athletic, Luda had obviously led the active life of most Russian women, cooking, cleaning, shopping and otherwise providing for her man—her father in Luda’s case.  The results look
ed good.  Her breasts, small but perky, were still winning the fight with gravity, and her bottom was superbly firm and round.  He gave it a light slap and she nearly jumped off the bed.  It was a good thing her eyes were closed so she did not see his smirk.

Feeling playful,
Vasily decided to extend the foreplay.  He licked and bit, kissed and sucked, scratched and squeezed, befuddling and bemusing the innocent accountant.  He felt like the tour guide at the museum of sensual delights.  It was fun to play different roles, especially when there was no fear of disgrace.  Luda just lay there breathing heavily, enjoying a forbidden-fruit kind of nervous pleasure.

When she finally opened her eyes again, Luda the accountant was gone.  She had transformed into a playful nymph so full of sexual energy that it was all
Vasily could do to keep up.  He reached for his condom to a chorus of carnal pleas, feeling like a magician whose wand had unlocked a long-forgotten door.

As her euphoric cries grew increasingly intense, t
he cat clock joined her in duet.  Eight meows.  He was making good time.  Working on autopilot now, Vasily closed his eyes so he could replace Luda’s visage with that of his fantasy girl.  One day, it really would be Anna Zaitseva in his bed.  Meanwhile,
all hail the chief…
 

When
Vasily reopened his eyes, he checked the clock.  It had been five minutes since the mechanical meow, five minutes since he first entered her, and five minutes since her warm wetness began absorbing the toxins that coated his condom.  It would not be long now.