The Assassin Page 7

  “Marisa paused at their table, talked and shook hands. Could she have salted something on the appetizer or the drinks? Of course. Everyone looked at her—she was well turned out, nice dress, a few jewels, delightful face and figure—so her hands could have been busy. Same for her escort. Marisa’s table was the one in the corner that was also contaminated.

  “On the other hand, maybe the missing waiter poisoned Surkov and salted Marisa’s table. More likely, one of Surkov’s companions slipped something into his grub. After all, they had all evening. Or he could have been poisoned by his wife. Or someone could have dosed him that afternoon, before he got to the restaurant.”

  “That about sums it up, I think,” Grafton said sourly.

  The next morning the newspapers had it. A big splash on the front page of every London paper. Alexander Surkov had been poisoned with polonium 210, a radioactive isotope. The story didn’t stay local, either. Within another day it was all over every newspaper and television in Europe and America. Still, an exotic poisoning would have been merely a brief sensation without something more . . . and Surkov gave that something to the press. He held a hospital bed interview and accused the president of Russia of ordering his murder.

  The Russians hotly denied the accusation, of course. Regardless, two days later, four days after he was poisoned, Alexander Surkov was dead. When the photographers took his photo in his hospital bed, his hair had already started to come out. His ghastly countenance was the photo of the year.

  If that weren’t enough, British and German investigators had found a radioactive trail from Moscow to Germany to London. Apparently another man who had been at the dinner where Surkov was poisoned, now labeled as one of the suspected killers, had dribbled radioactivity everywhere he went. This man was hospitalized, according to the television, in Moscow due to radiation poisoning. A third man, in London, claimed he, too, was ill, but he wasn’t in the hospital. British, German and Russian politicians were in a tizzy.

  Meanwhile, Grafton and I flew back to the States. He wanted to confer with his bosses, and I wanted to find out if any of my female acquaintances still remembered me.

  The day after Surkov died, I was in Grafton’s office watching some of the latest on this story on television. When the talking head went on to another story, Grafton used the remote to kill the idiot beast.

  “Pretty amazing,” I muttered.

  “A novelist would have rejected a scenario like that,” Grafton mused, “as too far-fetched. A deathbed accusation, the president of Russia, an alpha-radiation source emitting isotopes of helium nuclei . . .” Obviously, Grafton knew a little more about nuclear radiation than the average Joe. And he knew more than I did.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why the Russians used a radioactive isotope to pop this dude when the chemists have a cornucopia of undetectable poisons.”

  “There is no such thing as undetectable,” Grafton said, sighing, “if you have the time and equipment to run enough experiments. Still, the Brits claim they wouldn’t have tested for plutonium poisoning if it weren’t for a medical-student prodigy working the intake desk, who suggested it as a possibility.” He glanced at his watch and stood. “I have a five o’clock meet downtown. I would appreciate it if you would come along.”

  “Sure,” I said. Although Grafton phrased his order like a request, it was indubitably an order, and I was smart enough to know it.

  As he checked his safe and burn-basket and made sure his desk was locked, I asked who we were meeting.

  “A Russian.”

  “Oleg Tchernychenko?”

  “No. I talked to him a while ago on the telephone. He is stunned and devastated, he said. He also claims that the Russian government killed Surkov.”

  “Why?”

  “He had a dozen reasons.” Grafton made a gesture with his hands.

  “This guy we’re meeting—what’s he want to talk about?”

  “My guess is a murder in London. Want to lay a little wager?”

  I didn’t. Betting against Jake Grafton was a sure way to lose money.

  Washington, D.C., in winter is a miserable place. It’s too warm to snow and too cold to be pleasant. The wet, chilly wind that blows most days cuts like a knife. I trudged along beside Grafton after the guy driving the agency heap let us off on the Mall near the Washington Monument. The only people out there were hard-core runners in Lycra and spandex, drug addicts in the various stages of euphoria or withdrawal, winos and a few screwballs from Iowa, snapping away with cameras. The people from Iowa actually thought the weather was warm, but being from California, I knew different.

  “So how are you and Sarah getting along these days?” Grafton asked, for want of anything better to talk about. Sarah Houston lived with me for a while after our adventure in Paris.

  “We broke up again. She moved out.”

  “Ahh,” he said, as if my revelation explained the state of the world. He asked no more questions.

  A wino mining a trash can glanced at us as we walked by but said nothing. Probably figured the chances of wheedling change out of us were too slim to be worth the air. We passed the Smithsonian castle and were nearing the Hirshhorn when we passed another wino sitting against a tree. He made eye contact with Grafton and nodded.

  We went into the Hirshhorn, Grafton leading and me following like a good dance partner, and headed for the Sculpture Garden. A uniformed guard standing at the entrance told the couple in front of us that the garden was closed, then let Grafton walk on by with me in tow. The woman started to get nasty—another unhappy taxpayer—but I heard the guard tell her we were employees of the gallery.

  The man sitting in front of a huge sculpture looking it over stood as we approached. He was tall and spare, wearing a dark suit and muted tie. “Good morning, Jake,” the man said.

  Grafton gestured to me. “Tommy Carmellini, Janos Ilin.” He sat down as Ilin and I shook hands. Ilin seated himself on the bench beside Grafton, and I took a seat on a nearby bench.

  “You’re clean,” Grafton said. The winos on the Mall, the guards in the gallery—all these people were making sure neither Ilin nor Grafton was followed to this meet. If there had been any problem, someone would have called Grafton on his cell phone. In the old days they would have put a chalk mark on a wall, but technological man was marching right along to the Happy Ever After.

  “Very good.” Ilin nodded once. He was still eyeing me. “I have heard of you, Mr. Carmellini.” He didn’t have much of an accent, so perhaps that nuance I heard was irony.

  “And I’ve heard of you,” I said brightly, as if he had just released a new album of highbrow jazz. “A mutual acquaintance mentioned your name once, a couple of years ago.”

  “Anna Modin.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to mention her name, but if he wished to, that was his business. Ilin was, I knew, a senior officer in the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR—Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki—the bureaucratic successor to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. His rank, as I recall, was the equivalent of a lieutenant general.

  Ilin turned to Grafton, giving him all his attention. “Thank you for coming, Admiral. This Surkov killing—we have to talk.”

  So Grafton was right, as usual.

  “The timing couldn’t have been worse,” Ilin remarked.

  “People never die when you want them to,” Grafton said.

  If you’re like me, you know how true that is. Through the years there’d been a few of my bosses that I fervently wished would wake up dead, but they came to the office regardless.

  “We didn’t have him killed,” Ilin said flatly.

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Putin, the service, the Russian government.”

  Grafton made a rude noise. “Years ago I warned you about taking blanket oaths. You’re still doing it. I know you are not naive enough to believe everything you are told by the people in Moscow. Neither am I.”

  Ilin lowered his head in acknowledgm
ent of the point. “Let me rephrase my remark. I do not believe anyone in Moscow ordered or arranged or participated in the murder of Alexander Surkov. I believe the evidence was planted so that it would look as if someone in Moscow were guilty. Surkov, I believe, was picked for assassination because he had a history of conflict with powerful people, and it would be easy for the British, the Germans and the Americans to believe that he had been murdered for revenge. Indeed, his death has cast a pall over Russia’s relations with all three of those nations, and others besides. That is, I believe, precisely why he was murdered. He was sacrificed.”

  “By whom?” Jake Grafton said. I was watching his face, and I couldn’t tell if he believed Ilin or not.

  “That I don’t know,” Ilin countered. “I have my theories, but no facts. You can form your own.”

  “I see.”

  “We need your help on this, Admiral. My service has its resources, and I have a few of my own, but they are not enough. We are tainted. We need you to use your resources to investigate this crime and find the identity of the culprit.”

  “Don’t tell me you want me to send Carmellini to question Russian officials.”

  “That would do no good. They know nothing. The answer is elsewhere in Europe. Someone at that table in Mayfair, or one of the kitchen staff, doctored Surkov’s food or drink with polonium. Someone supplied it to the killer. Someone probably paid the killer. That is the trail you must follow.”

  “Why polonium?”

  “Indeed,” Ilin muttered. “Why?”

  They talked for another ten minutes about how America might help investigate this crime, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention. I didn’t believe a word Ilin had said. The Russians were a slimy lot. The murder of one little man who pissed off someone powerful wouldn’t even make the back pages of the Russian newspapers. Heck, Stalin had ordered the murder of Leon Trotsky, who was half the world away in Mexico City. Stalin also murdered tens of millions of Russians he thought might make trouble someday, just in case, and the KGB had diligently kept that happy tradition alive. The Communist habit of tracking down disloyal exiles and immigrants to execute them was a well-known commonplace. Murder for hire—assassination—was as Russian as vodka and ballet.

  Grafton made Ilin no promises, nor did Ilin expect any. Grafton had a legion of bosses, all of whom had opinions and turf. They would decide what, if anything, the United States was going to do to unearth the killer of Alexander Surkov. If they wanted the killer’s identity brought to light. After all, Russia’s discomfiture played well in some circles. If it were up to me, I would let the bastards sweat.

  With a last glance at me, Ilin rose, shook Grafton’s hand and left the garden. I sat there looking at something big made of metal. Grafton seemed lost in thought. He glanced at his watch from time to time, then pulled out his cell phone and frowned at it. He put it back in his pocket, stood and stretched, then shrugged at me.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think I could use a beer.”

  That also struck me as a good idea. We went wandering off to find a place that served those marvelous elixirs.

  We burrowed into one of those terrific business-account lunch and after-work drinks places on Pennsylvania Avenue. Standing at the bar sucking suds and looking over the hot women, I saw a couple of senators and a congressman or two. Then I spotted a television news correspondent chatting up a cute dolly. Sitting two tables away was a corporate CEO who was in serious trouble with the SEC and, according to the newspapers, was in town to tell Congress all about it. With him were two prominent lawyers, the dung beetles of our age.

  I got this center-of-the-universe feeling. This city was the axis upon which the earth turned, and, amazingly, this bar was smack dead center in the center of the axis. From this vantage point you could see the gears and springs that drove the whole damned thing. The revelation was almost too much for me. To be here, be a part of it, was the reason why almost every nincompoop between the Atlantic and Pacific was running for Congress or president. I quaffed half a pint of Guinness and began thinking about throwing my own hat in the ring.

  Grafton brought me back to reality.

  We were standing in a corner, leaning on the bar, and he began talking about Russia, probably trying to bring me up to speed. I had to lean toward him to hear his voice, which was almost drowned out by the hubbub of conversation swirling around me.

  “After the collapse of Communism, everybody in Russia began grabbing for the gold in a no-holds-barred, hair-pulling, eye-gouging, backstabbing brawl that is still going on. State assets were sold off, or more often given away in return for massive bribes in one form or another. In less time than it takes to tell, the folks at the top jettisoned social justice and adopted a perverted form of capitalism, a cancerous capitalism, virulent and malignant. A few people, the oligarchs, got filthy rich, and the former Communists who ran the place got dusty rich. In this new Russia, status is what you need, and money is the yardstick that measures it. Russians are snapping up luxury goods, watches, jewels, clothes, cars, yachts, mansions in tourist resorts, trying like hell to see if happiness can be bought. It’s astounding, really. They’ve become the world’s most conspicuous consumers—”

  “The blingsheviks!” I said, interrupting. “I’ve heard about them.”

  “Of course, most of the people in Russia are still desperately poor. In the last few years the people in power decided that the oligarchs were too rich. They began using all the levers at their command to jail the oligarchs, cut up their empires, do whatever it took to once again become the absolute masters of Russia. Vladimir Putin is the driving force. He is consolidating his power, becoming the new czar of Russia.

  “The old KGB was the state organ that maintained the Communists in power, doing whatever was required to destroy those the Communists perceived as a threat. After the fall, the KGB was broken up, but the men and women who were in it became the soldiers in the brawl that followed. They had connections, they knew who to bribe, they kept their mouths shut, they were willing to do whatever it took to get the job done as long as the pay was right. They own houses in Mayfair, eat at London’s finest restaurants, wear the best clothes, the flashiest watches, drive the best cars and bed the skinniest, hottest women. Alexander Surkov, who was murdered in Mayfair, was one of these men. So were the men who are the prime suspects in his murder.

  “The oligarchs and the new rich have their money and toys only at Vladimir Putin’s pleasure, and they all know it. So when Surkov whispered his name on his deathbed, the Russians trembled. Very neat, eh?”

  I heard the question and scrutinized Grafton’s face. He had used the pause to sip beer. “Do you think Putin ordered Surkov killed?” I asked.

  “Killed in England with an exotic poison that left a trail of radioactivity all the way to Moscow? And chilled Russia’s relations with Britain and Germany and the rest of Europe?”

  “But no one was supposed to know Surkov was poisoned,” I objected.

  “It’s true that the test for polonium poisoning is rarely given, but any competent physician who examined Surkov would suspect poison of some kind. After he died, medical experts would have sliced and diced the corpse until they came up with the answer even if it took weeks, and the trail would still be there, pointing straight at Moscow.”

  “A bullet would have been just as fatal,” I mused, “and the assassin could have easily walked away—but there would be no trail.”

  Grafton locked eyes with me. “To find the people who ordered this killing, we must have a satisfactory explanation for the choice of polonium as the deadly weapon. It’s an alpha-radiation emitter, easily shielded by something as simple as aluminum foil or a sheet or two of paper, easily washed off, and shouldn’t hurt anyone as long as it stays off their skin and outside their body. To use it as a weapon, you must somehow get someone to ingest or inhale it, which presents a whole host of problems. The best explanation for its use is that it left a radioactive trail.”


  “Did it?”

  Grafton smiled. “That’s another question.”

  “So Putin was delivering a radioactive message to every Russian alive?”

  “Or someone chose this method of chilling relations between all the European countries and Russia,” Grafton suggested. “And, incidentally, terminating Surkov.”

  “So you think there is a possibility that Putin and company are being set up? That Ilin is telling the truth?”

  Grafton attracted the barman’s attention and signaled for two more beers.

  “Somehow we must explain what Marisa Petrou, the daughter of Abu Qasim, was doing at that restaurant. The man you saw her with was her husband, by the way; apparently he and she are back together.”

  “It could be coincidence,” I said.”

  Grafton’s eyebrows twitched. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “And Abu Qasim?”

  “He’s burrowed in someplace. No one seems to know where.”

  “Is she his daughter or isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I sighed. One of the things about intelligence work that will drive the average person crazy is that there are no absolute answers. It’s a world of mirrors and mirages, where perceptions rule and reality is often unknowable. I had never gotten used to that.

  “So what are the powers that be going to say about helping Ilin and the Russians?”

  “Darned if I know,” Grafton said with a sigh. “I just work here.”

  Now, I’m not the swiftest guy you ever met, but I was beginning to see daylight. Jake Grafton was professionally interested in Surkov before today’s meeting with Janos Ilin. I had thought it was because he didn’t trust Huntington Winchester’s pal, Oleg Tchernychenko, or his guy Friday. Then he took me with him to see and hear what Ilin had to say. I thought I knew the next move.

  “Do you think it’s time for me to chase down Marisa?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt. I’ve been waiting for Qasim to surface and make a move before we moved in on her. This might have been it.”

  I stared into my beer. Polonium! Oh, boy.