Midnight come again (2 page)

Another soldier was standing in front of the sedan. He, too, was armed with an automatic rifle. An older-model Kalishnikov, Kiril had just enough time to see, before, in a single, practiced motion the soldier had the muzzle trained on the black sedan.

"What the hell?" Fyodor said, startled out of his sulk.

Time seemed to slow down, enough for Kiril to notice the total lack of expression on the soldier's face as the rifle went off with a stuttering clatter, shattering the glass of the sedan's windshield. The branch manager's shoulders jerked once and went still. Half of the little clerk's blond head separated from the other half and flew back to smear against the rear window. The perfect little body seemed to relax back against her seat, as if she had decided to take a nap.

"No!" Kiril yelled and opened his door.

"Don't! Keep the door closed!" Fyodor shouted.

"No!" Kiril yelled again, already half out of his seat when he heard the quiet burping of automatic-rifle fire and felt a bullet slam into his right side. He bounced off the door, spun around and fell clumsily to the street, face down, his cheek pressed against the damp, patched tarmac, his outflung hands grasping at the cobblestones, the light layer of frost dissolving at his touch. From a great distance he heard what sounded like a lot of firecrackers going off all at once. They weren't firecrackers, though; he knew that sound all too well. All he could think of was the smear of red against the rear windshield of the black sedan, all that was left of the little cashier's head. "No," he whispered, and tried to pull himself up. His arms and legs would not obey. The right side of his chest was warm, the warm area growing larger the longer he lay there.

A foot clad in highly polished army boots stepped over him. "What the hell?" he heard Fyodor say again, just before the shot that killed him.

"Set the charge," a familiar voice snapped. It was the officer with the blue eyes, Kiril thought. He remembered the coldness in those eyes, and with the small remnant of reason left to him concentrated on not being obvious about breathing.

A few minutes later there was a loud Crump! The truck rocked forward, the right rear wheel almost rolling over his arm. The two rear doors fell into the street with loud clangs that reverberated painfully inside Kiril's head.

"All right, bring up the truck."

There was the sound of an engine approaching. Tires rolled into Kiril's view. Feet clad in bright red Reebok sneakers thudded to the pavement next to the driver's door. Kiril heard more doors slam and more footsteps. Someone gave an excited laugh.

"The soldiers?" the first voice said.

"No problem," a second voice said cheerfully.

"All right. Come on, get it out, all of it. Let's get going before the real militia show up."

There was another laugh. "Aren't they getting their share?"

"This time it's all ours."

"America, land of the free, home of the brave, here we come!"

"Come on, move it!"

There was a flurry of furious activity between the back of the armored truck and the new vehicle. It lasted about ten minutes. For every minute Kiril lived a year. His side was beginning to hurt, but he knew enough to make no sound. He had not survived Chechnyan rebels to die at home, on a street in St. Petersburg not a mile from his apartment. He thought about the carving on the head of his bed. He thought about the little blond clerk lying beneath it, smiling and holding out her arms, before half her face slid off. A scream fought its way up his throat. He held on to it, repressing the fine trembling that had begun in his legs.

"All right," the first voice said. "That's all of it. Move out."

"What about you?" the cheerful voice said.

"I'll be right there." There was a sound of a round being jacked into the chamber of an automatic pistol. "No witnesses this time." washington, D. C., june 12

"Haley!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Where the hell are Carroll and Casanare?" Special Agent Dennis Haley looked wildly around the cramped bullpen of the Russian Mafia task force, as if his extreme need would cause the two agents to crawl out from beneath one of the dozen desks jammed into the room. Instinctively he said, because even at his grade level deniability was all, "Uh, I don't know, sir."

"Well, find them, goddamn it!"

Golden slammed back into his office. Special Agent Haley's computer monitor rocked slightly on its stand from the aftershock.

Special Agent Haley was small and thin and red-haired and harried. He was also easily cowed, and in spite of the mountain of paperwork piled on his desk he didn't hesitate to go in search of the errant agents. He found them two floors down, assisting in the sorting of evidence from the bombing of an airliner which had gone into the Atlantic off the coast of South Carolina.

Carroll looked up and saw Haley in the doorway. "We're saved," she told Casanare. There were only so many ways a witness could describe a plane blowing up, all of them resulting in the death and dismemberment of everyone on board. When you've read one eyewitness report, you've read them all, whether they were knee-deep in the ocean off Myrtle Beach, revering or reviling the memory of John Brown at Fort Sumter, or visiting your mother-in-law under duress at Tybee Island.

"Who says there's no god?" Casanare replied. If he had to look at one more report of a severed limb floating to shore, he was afraid he might vomit. You just don't vomit at headquarters. In the field, yes, neatly and discreetly behind a bush, and at a crime scene no one blamed you, but not at headquarters.

Maxine Carroll was a tall blonde with deep blue, almost violet eyes.

Alberto Casanare was an inch shorter than Carroll, fifty pounds heavier, all of it muscle, and as dark as she was fair.

They were key members on the task force investigating the Russian Mafia presence in the United States, recently covering themselves with glory following the successful cracking of a multinational organization controlling but not limited to credit card fraud, money laundering, illegal alien smuggling, white slavery, weapons trafficking and tax evasion, and the indictment (if not the trial and imprisonment, Haley thought regretfully), of one Pyotr Razikin, AKA Peter the Great, the alleged leader of the organization.

"What's up?" Carroll said in the hallway.

Haley, preoccupied with watching her walk, didn't hear her at first.

Casanare, grinning, nudged him in the side before Carroll turned around and caught him. He colored and stuttered, "Uh, the boss wants to talk to you."

"What about?"

"I don't know," Haley said.

Carroll halted to examine him through narrowed eyes. "Like hell. You're worse than a Soviet mole in the CIA. You always know what's going on."

Haley's red face darkened to purple and he very nearly wriggled with pleasure. "Really. He just said to find you, he didn't say why."

"But your best guess would be--?" Casanare said.

Haley only shook his head and marched determinedly to the elevator.

Casanare raised an eyebrow at Carroll, who shrugged and followed.

The lack of windows in Samuel Golden's office was disguised by the blizzard of memos, department communiques, ten-most-wanted lists, crime reports and hand drawn, crudely lettered cartoons scatological and profane dealing mostly with Senate oversight committees tacked to the walls. Golden himself was an intense, wiry man of fifty-two years, smart, tenacious and a Bureau man down to his toes. His family was Jewish, originally from Minsk, and he was fluent in Russian. He'd been a twenty-year veteran when tapped to head up the Russian Mafia task force.

At first the task force had been him and one administrative aide.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Republic broke up, the power and global reach of the Russian Mafia expanded exponentially, and eventually he was allocated his pick of the personnel roster. His first choice had been Alberto Casanare. On Al's recommendation, his second was Maxine Carroll. As they settled into their seats, he ran a mental review of their jackets, which were very nearly as colorful as his own.

Maxine Carroll's great-grandfather had been born Anatoli Chernofski, which became Carroll on his way through Ellis Island in 1899. He had traveled by train across the country to Dawson City, where he met a dance hall girl named Norma Swensen. They married and moved to Seattle, where Anatoli used Norma's savings to establish himself in the timber industry, gradually diversifying into paper products, soon landing a lucrative and apparently infinite contract with the Department of the Interior and thereby ensuring the security and comfort of his family well into the next century. In the fullness of time, Anatoli and Norma had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, of which Carroll was the third. At her great-grandfather's insistence, his children had grown up speaking both Russian and English, a tradition passed down through the generations. When Carroll graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in economics, she was recruited by the FBI. She was thirty-four years old, single, with no children. Golden looked at her beneath drooping lids. If he could have said the same, and if he weren't her superior officer, she wouldn't have been for long.

Carroll's family was one generation up on Alberto Casanare's, whose grandfather had waded across the Rio Grande in Texas, picked lettuce until he had enough money to send for his wife, and who, by the time the Immigration and Naturalization Service got around to asking, had sired nine children, all born safely north of the Rio Grande and the eldest of which was an attorney specializing in civil rights. Al, the sixth of the grandchildren, had grown up speaking Spanish and English, which facilitated his talent for linguistics. He majored in foreign languages at the University of Texas, specializing in Russian and Japanese and, like Carroll, was recruited by the FBI on graduation. He'd spent four years in El Paso, that black hole of the FBI, intercepting drug shipments, before his fluent Russian got him seconded to Golden's task force. He was four years older than Carroll, happily married and the father of three, all of whom called Carroll Auntie Maxie, which she said made her sound like a Southern spinster, but that was all she said, so Golden figured she didn't mind that much.

They'd been partners for five years, and speculation was rife in the Bureau over the possibility of an ongoing affair. Golden knew better.

Casanare was married to one of the smartest, prettiest women Golden knew, not excluding Carroll, and Carroll had all the moral flexibility of Carrie Nation. No, they were partners, and friends, no more. He approved. There was nothing worse than sex to fuck up a relationship, not to mention the job site.

Carroll moved restively in her seat, and Golden tried not to admire her legs, displayed to advantage beneath a slim skirt and a jacket that made everything else nip in and stick out the way it was supposed to. The woman was a first-class clotheshorse. "You wanted to see us, sir?"

Golden got his overactive imagination back under control. "Yes." He chucked a file across the desk and she caught it neatly. Casanare rose to read over her shoulder. "Couple of reports out of Russia. First one's a bank robbery. The ruble equivalent of $10 million. First National Bank of Commerce and Trade, St. Petersburg, March 25. They were transferring the rubles from the branches to the main bank."

"Seems like a hell of a lot of money for a provincial bank," Casanare observed.

"A hell of a lot," Golden agreed. "But then they do a hell of a lot of foreign trade. Finland, the Baltic states, like that."

"Over or under?"

"The table?" Carroll nodded, and Golden shrugged. ''s up to the Russian cops. Anyway, it's about eleven-thirty; there are three vehicles: a four-door sedan with a driver, the bank manager and a clerk, an armored truck with a driver and a guard, and a troop truck with twenty soldiers on board bringing up the rear." He paused.

"Let me guess," Carroll said. "A detour sign."

Golden nodded. "Except they didn't take the detour." "Figures," Casanare said.

"Yeah, but it didn't help them, the crooks knew they wouldn't, and a couple streets on they were met by an army captain with a detachment who directed them down a dead-end street, ambushed them with automatic rifles, blew the doors off the truck with a handful of homemade C-4 and got away with all the marbles."

"Job inside or outside?"

"Outside."

Carroll made a face. "Everyone dead?"

"All but one," Golden said coolly, ignoring Casanare's wince. "Which won't surprise you." "Why not?" Carroll demanded.

Golden jerked his head at the file in her hands. "Check out the description of the police captain."

She skimmed through the pages and came to a halt, her eyes running rapidly down the page. She went very still. "Ivanov." "Ivanov?" Casanare said, sitting up.

"Ivanov," Golden said, nodding.

"Back in business," Casanare said.

"He was never out," Carroll said.

Ivanov, the only name by which he was known, had been the missing person in the Peter the Great case. There was no clear file photo of him, only a description of a tall, broad-shouldered blond with blue eyes, Slavic cheekbones and a thin-lipped smile that one terrified informant had described as "a fucking throat-cutter, and happy in his work. I mean, Jesus Christ, if Ivanov smiles at you, you know you're dead." Ivanov had sat at Peter the Great's right hand, had been his enforcer, had been, literally on one memorable occasion, Pyotr's hatchet man.