Parallax View (25 page)

40

June 1, 1987

11:50 p.m.

Columbia Road, Northeast of
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Nikolai Primakov eased his plain
white panel van into an empty parking space. The spot was perfect—a block and a
half away from his destination. Close enough to be within walking distance, but
far enough away for the vehicle to go unnoticed.

Tomorrow would be
a long day, a history-making day. Nikolai pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of
the breast pocket of his shirt and tapped out a cigarette. He lit it and took a
deep drag. Lucky Strikes were the closest thing he could find in this country
to the Soviet-made Belomorkanals—unfiltered, strong and cheap—which he smoked occasionally
when he was home.

Outside, the dim
light from a quarter-moon cloaked the buildings of the city in a gauzy sheen.
Millions of stars twinkled overhead.  Nikolai examined the horizon and nodded.
The weather would be perfect. Clear skies, virtually no wind. The temperature
was chilly right now, but the day would warm nicely. Besides, cold didn’t
bother Nikolai. He had been born and raised in the bitter chill of Yakutsk,
where winter temperatures plummeted to depths the soft citizens of this
decadent country couldn’t even comprehend, much less weather.

But Nikolai had
withstood the temperatures just fine. And he had been comfortable with weapons
from a very young age, excelling as a marksman. He had trained as a sniper in
the Red Army, serving with distinction in Afghanistan before being recruited by
the KGB for more delicate, and much more important, work.

Nikolai was one of
the finest assassins in the Soviet arsenal. Over the course of the last
decade-plus, Nikolai Primakov had eliminated somewhere in the neighborhood of
forty people; he had lost track of the exact number years ago. All of the
targets had been enemies of the Soviet state, although surprisingly few had
been politicians. Some were, of course, but many more were business leaders, or
dissidents, or people who to Nikolai’s eye were nothing special, simple people
living simple lives who had somehow found themselves on the KGB’s radar, marked
for removal from this earth.

Their offenses
were irrelevant to Nikolai, as were their job titles. When he was given an
assignment he carried it out, coldly and efficiently, and then moved on to the
next. It was a job, no different than farming or factory work. He had a talent
for assassination, so he was an assassin. End of story.

Tomorrow’s job, of
course, was a rare exception. Eliminating the president of the United States
was an assignment even Nikolai Primakov had to admit was special, even though
it was a mission no one could ever know he had performed.

He checked his
watch. Nearly midnight. It was time to go.

Nikolai took a
last deep drag on his cigarette and opened the door, flicking the butt onto the
pavement where it dropped into a thin film of condensation. It hissed and died
away. He slipped into a windbreaker with the Capitol Floor Refinishing logo
sewn onto the breast and stepped out of the van.

Capitol Floor
Refinishing was a cover created specifically by the KGB for this mission. The temperature
was cool, but not so cold Nikolai actually needed his jacket. However, creating
the illusion of legitimacy was critical to mission success, so he shrugged it
on over a uniform shirt with the identical logo sewn over the breast pocket,
opened the van door and slid to the ground.

He stepped to the
rear of the vehicle, then glanced around for any signs of law enforcement
presence. All clear. He opened the rear doors, revealing only one item secured
in the back of the van—a wheeled cart with the Capitol Floor Refinishing logo
prominently displayed on its canvas sides.

To the casual
observer, the cart would appear identical to those used by janitorial services
everywhere. The top portion was filled with tools and equipment necessary for
the business of floor refinishing. There was an electric hand buffer, brushes
and cloths of all different sizes and shapes, and a healthy assortment of hand
tools and small power tools, none of which Nikolai would be using.

Hidden under the
top portion of the cart were the things he really needed, the tools necessary
for the business of ending lives. There were four sandbags, each roughly the
size of a cement block. There was a Soviet-made Dragunov SVD sniper rifle,
disassembled and secured inside a hard plastic traveling case, along with three
cartridges filled with 7N1 steel-jacketed sniper rounds, though Nikolai was
confident he would require just one shot. There was a PSO-1 optical sniper
sight with Bullet Drop Compensation turret and quick-release mounting bracket.
There were shooting glasses, binoculars, a small pillow, candy bars and water.
There was a Makarov PB silenced semiautomatic pistol with three eight-round
magazines, an NR-40 combat knife, and a change of clothes in which Nikolai
intended to effect his escape upon completion of the mission.

Unlike the floor
refinishing equipment, these were items with which he was intimately familiar,
items he had used—or identical to items he had used—on dozens of successful
missions. They were hidden under the diversionary floor tools beneath a canvas
separator which would be unfolded and used for camouflage once Nikolai was in
place on the roof. The cart would stand up to casual inspection, which was
sufficient for Nikolai’s requirements. He would not permit a more thorough
inspection by anyone, under any circumstances.

Nikolai wrapped
his arms around the cart, straining under its weight, and lowered it to the
sidewalk. He stumbled to his knees and the cart landed hard, clattering but
remaining upright. He breathed a sigh of relief. Scattering the tools of his
trade on the sidewalk just a few hundred feet from where the president of the
United States was scheduled to make an appearance tomorrow morning would not be
conducive to a successful mission or, in all probability, continued personal
freedom.

A casual look
around confirmed for Nikolai that there were still no police in the area. He
locked up the van and began pushing his cart along the sidewalk. He crossed
Columbia in front of an empty Plexiglas-enclosed bus stop and continued halfway
down the block, eventually arriving in front of the Minuteman Insurance
building just before midnight. His timing was perfect. Three men stood in front
of the entrance, dressed in the identical charcoal-colored slacks of Cote
Cleaning, the company contracted to provide janitorial service for the
building. They wore button-down shirts similar to his, except with Cote’s logo
sewn onto the pocket instead of Capitol Floor Refinishing’s.

He dragged the
cart up the stairs one at a time. The cart was big and bulky and Nikolai had
begun to sweat lightly despite the cool temperatures. As he approached the top
of the stairs, the last janitor was being ushered through the front door by a
uniformed security guard. The guard closed and locked the door. He was large
and blocky, with greying brown hair trimmed in a military-style buzz cut. He
wore a white uniform shirt and dark blue pressed trousers, a handgun displayed
prominently in the leather holster at his hip.

Nikolai knocked
and the guard reluctantly opened the door, squinting as he gave Nikolai the
once-over. “Who’re you?” he asked with an aggrieved air, as if Nikolai’s sudden
appearance represented some kind of personal affront. He was standing half-in
and half-out of the doorway, blocking access with his bulk.

“Nick Kristoff,”
Nikolai answered with an easy smile. “I am here for floor refinishing project.”
There was no way to hide his thick Russian accent, so Nikolai didn’t even
bother trying. His English was passable, but would never be anything more. He
had neither the time nor the inclination to master the language, especially
since he figured one day soon the Americans would be learning to speak Russian.
It was inevitable.

“Floor
refinishing, huh?” the guard said skeptically. He frowned. “Nothing like that
on my board for tonight.” He held up a clipboard for Nikolai’s inspection as
though it might mean something to him. Idiot.

“Capitol Floor
Refinishing,” Nikolai said, pointing to the logo on the side of his cart. “We
were contracted to service floors in entire building. You would like to see
work order?”

“Yeah, I would
like to see work order,” the guard answered in a tone which was just mocking
enough to be clear to Nikolai, but not so obvious the guy couldn’t make a
plausible denial if he were called on it.

Nikolai didn’t
care about mocking tones, obvious or otherwise. He unzipped his windbreaker,
making a show of shivering. “Cold,” he observed, and the guard said nothing. He
pulled a folded document out of his breast pocket, making sure the Capitol
Floor Refinishing logo on his shirt flashed at the guard. Positive
reinforcement. He handed the paperwork to the guard and re-zipped, then stood
rubbing his hands together while the man peered at the “work order.”

The forgery would
stand up to the guard’s—or anyone’s—inspection. It had been created by top
forgers inside the KGB, men who did nothing all day but reproduce important
items for the Soviet Union. Currency, licenses, permits, work orders—you name
it, the KGB forgers could reproduce it. The work order looked real, right down
to the signature of Minuteman Mutual’s office manager. There was absolutely no
chance this drone would identify the work order as being forged.

What there
was
a
chance of—and the one way this mission could fall apart before it even got
started—was the guard smelling a rat and deciding to phone the manager at home
to question the legitimacy of the project. Given the time of night, and the
relative stations in life of the guard and the office manager, Nikolai didn’t
think there was much of chance of that happening.

If it did, Nikolai
would be forced to take out the guard, something he absolutely could not afford
to do here on the front steps of the Minuteman Mutual building, not fifty feet
from Columbia Road. He had already decided that if the guard made any mention
of double-checking with his superiors, Nikolai would slip his NR-40 combat
knife—identical to the one currently hidden inside his cart, right down to the
curved blade and lethal, razor-sharp cutting edge—out of its sheath strapped
above his ankle and force his way inside the building. He would then bring the
man to the interior stairwell, where he would kill him and hide the body.

He hoped it
wouldn’t come to that.

It didn’t. The
guard glanced at the paperwork, sweeping his eyes over it for maybe five
seconds, not bothering to hide his utter disinterest. Then he handed it back to
Nikolai and said, “Come on in, then,” in a tired voice. He stepped back, and
just like that, Nikolai was inside.

Nikolai smiled
again and nodded. One of the reasons he had been so successful in his current
line of work—in addition to his proficiency with dozens of weapons and his total
lack of compunction when it came to taking human life—was his physical
appearance. Nikolai Primakov was utterly unremarkable, from his thinning sandy
hair to his gold-rimmed everyman glasses, to his wiry frame, to his average
height, to his lack of identifying scars or blemishes.

He was easy to
underestimate.

He blinked
owlishly at the guard and said, “I would like to start on top floor. Where is
elevator, please?”

The guard shook
his head slightly.
“The
elevators are right over there, on the far side
of the lobby.” He gestured vaguely at the far wall.

Nikolai pretended
not to notice the guard’s derisive correction of his phrasing and peered across
the lobby. He nodded, as if he hadn’t known for weeks where the elevators were
located. He suspected he was more familiar with the interior of this building
than the guard had ever been. “Thank you,” he said, bowing his head
submissively and trundling his cart across the shiny marble floor.

He was completely
alone when he reached the elevators. Thanks to the length of his exchange with
the guard at the front door, all three janitorial workers who had entered in
front of him were by now dispersed throughout the building. He pressed the
button with the up arrow and turned to look in the direction of the front
entrance while waiting for the elevator car. The guard hadn’t moved. He stood
staring at Nikolai through narrowed eyes, his forehead wrinkled like a Shar-Pei
puppy’s.

Nikolai hoped the
man wouldn’t be a problem.

41

June 2, 1987

12:05 a.m.

Washington, D.C.

Tracie rolled over and checked the
bedside clock. Its iridescent numerals bathed the room in an eerie green glow,
giving the unfamiliar surroundings an alien, almost lunar cast. She slipped out
of bed, barely rippling the mattress, moving with a feline grace and economy of
motion that belied her tension. Shane continued to sleep, breathing heavily,
smoothly.

She padded to the
bathroom, peed without flicking on the light, padded back to bed, knowing she
likely wouldn’t sleep any more tonight. She had not lied to Shane, not exactly,
when she told him taking down the Russian assassin would be just another
operation. But what she hadn’t told Shane, what she suspected he knew anyway—he
was a lot of things, including one amazing lover, but he wasn’t stupid—was that
a typical CIA op would have taken place after dozens, if not hundreds, of hours
of preparation, and would only have been green-lighted after briefings,
surveillance, and meticulous planning. And it would have involved a hell of a
lot more people than one lone agent.

Her mission later
today would be the exact opposite of that: a rushed intervention based on the
uncorroborated words of a Soviet politician sitting thousands of miles away,
and potentially unreliable information offered up under duress by a pair of
Russian spies. There had been no preparation. Tracie had never even set foot
inside the building she would enter to stop the assassination.