Moving Targets

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE - AN EARLY FALL EVENING

  1 - THE WINTER

  2

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  EPILOGUE

  NOVELS BY SEAN FLANNERY

  “FLANNERY IS A HELL OF A STORYTELLER!”*

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  AN EARLY FALL EVENING

  VALENTIN YAKOVLEVICH ZIMIN SAT STARING AT A COMPUTER screen, his eyes glazed by lack of sleep. His staff of four were busy at other terminals. They occupied a large room on the fifth floor of a nondescript office building on Volkhonka Street near the Pushkin Museum, and the only security they’d been provided was an electronic interface between the lock on the door and their equipment. If the lock were ever to be forced, the memory within the central processing unit of their IBM system would be instantly destroyed, and along with it the machine’s entire store of memory. It was not a comforting thought, but with the way things were going these days in Moscow, the precaution was necessary.

  He and his assistants had been busy at their task fourteen days, working thirty and forty hours at a stretch before catching a few hours of sleep. Only Zimin had been outside in all that time. He had to make his reports in person every twenty-four hours, at three in the afternoon. This special operation, classified Most Secret, was simple in concept, but so far had proved to be much more difficult than any of them had imagined. Zimin and his people were trying to break into the KGB’s main computer network without detection. Because of the coup and the aftermath, paranoia ran high in the Kremlin and the Russian Parliament, so a failure here would almost certainly mean death, at the hands of what were being called “vengeance squads.”

  He’d come upon another interlock which showed as a red rose on his full-color screen. The symbol was a new one to them, but its meaning, like the other blocks they’d managed to sidestep, was clear. At this point the user was not only supposed to come up with a coded sequence, such as a password or a series of numbers, but was also supposed to ask a question that would display the knowledge that an authorized user would be expected to possess.

  Two days ago Zimin had successfully entered into First Chief Directorate territory and had roamed at will for the most part through many of the directorate’s still closely guarded programs. At various stages he’d been required to come up with passwords and a display of knowledge that his contact had been able to provide for him.

  Not this time, though, he told himself, staring at the screen. He was there, at the entry to the territory he’d been sent to search—namely, the most secret financial records of the former Komitet. The rose signaled a way through a liaison channel between the First Chief Directorate (which always had been and still was the biggest user of foreign currencies) and the KGB’s powerful Finance Directorate, which was one of the unnumbered divisions. But he was going to be stopped for the time being because of lack of knowledge. And now that he had finally gotten this close, he did not want to blow his chances.

  It was two-thirty when he logged out his terminal with his personal code, got his coat and cane, and hobbled out of the office without saying a word to the others. They were absorbed in their work and wouldn’t have bothered looking up in any event. It was pleasantly warm outside, and it felt good to Zimin, who turned right and headed up toward Red Square.

  At precisely three o’clock Zimin was ushered into the office of Konstantin Ivanovich Malakhov, a Kremlin deputy secretary.

  “What progress this afternoon, Valentin Yakovlevich?” the deputy secretary asked. He was a large, boisterous man, and in appearance he looked very Western. He’d been completely cleared of any complicity in the August coup, but in some minds there was still some doubt.

  “We’ve made it into First Directorate files, and I’ve actually uncovered a link between that series of programs and the Finance Directorate. But we’re using telephone lines, of course, and progress is slow.”

  “I understand,” Malakhov said, beaming. “But this is excellent news. Really splendid news. Are you ready to find out what we need to know?”

  “Not quite, Comrade Deputy. There is one final security lock to be breached, for which I will need some help,” Zimin said. He was a computer expert, of course, but he was also a wizard at macroeconomics. A powerful combination in the use he had been put to.

  “Tell me.”

  Zimin quickly went over everything he’d managed to find to date, finally coming to the rose symbol. “This one I have no wish to tamper with. If I cause an alarm, an investigation will be made and our work will be discovered.”

  “I agree,” Malakhov said. “There is someone who might be able to help us.” He buzzed his secretary. “Ask Deputy Mukhin to join me for a few minutes,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mukhin is an assistant foreign affairs adviser to the President, but before that he worked for the KGB. In the Finance Directorate.”

  “Is he to be trusted?” Zimin asked. His own career, and possibly his life, were riding on the integrity of this investigation.

  “Completely,” Malakhov assured him.

  Two hours later, and eight time zones to the west, Nancy Perigorde, who worked as a night duty shift supervisor at the National Security Agency’s Communications Intercept complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, turned in her security badge at the door and ten minutes later stopped at a service station, where she filled up her bright red Nissan Sentra. Finished, she parked off to the side and used the pay phone to dial a Washington, D.C., number. A man answered on the first ring.

  “Hello.”

  “It looks as if they’re about to make a breakthrough,” she said.

  “What directorate are they after?”

  “Finance.”

  “I see. Keep me posted.”

  Three other seemingly unconnected events that fall heralded what could be argued as the watershed of relations between the various spy agencies of the East and West. A last hurrah of the dying cold war. A last spasm before the corpse was finally laid to rest.

  In Riga, the capital city of a newly emergent Latvia, a thin, desultory rain had been falling all day from a deeply overcast sky. A raw wind blew off the Baltic Sea, temperatures all week had never gotten above ten degrees Celsius, and as if to add insult to injury, the city had been plagued with a spate of electrical outages to go along with the endemic shortages Latvians had always suffered. Moscow had severely limited the flow of natural gas into the republic, and Soviet warships including a guided missile frigate of the Krivak III class were patrolling the gulf, barely eighty kilometers from the city center.

  The Aeroflot direct flight from Bucharest touched down at Riga’s Spilve Airport a few minutes after nine in the evening. The sun was still shining above the overcast, lending a foreboding grayness to the city and the choppy waters of the bay, an odd flattening of perspective that the assassin who deplaned hardly seemed to notice.

  He was short and totally unremarkable in appearance and build, with the small paunch of a man who was probably in his mid to late forties. His hair was graying and he’d gone bald in the back. His shoulders sloped, and his face could only be described as forgettable. He wore a reasonably well cut dark suit, decent shoes, and the single bag he’d passed through customs with diplomatic
papers was leather and handmade, though not ostentatious because it was fairly well battered by long use.

  In Bucharest, where he’d spent the last four years of his life under cover as a secretary in the consular section of the Soviet Embassy, his name had been Nikolai Stepanovich Noskov. Before that, in Afghanistan, it had been I. F. Skripov, and before that, in Africa, it had been R. A. Markov.

  Here, the Estonian passport he’d presented to the customs officials identified him as Vladimir Ivanovich Privalov. None of those names was his real one, of course. And it had been so long since he had used his own name that had someone stepped out of the crowded airport terminal and called it, he would not have responded.

  Outside, he joined the queue at the taxi stand, unprotected from the wind and rain. But he didn’t mind. In fact, it was good to be back in the field, though he sincerely suspected that this would be his last assignment, no matter what his control officer had told him.

  “You have languished here for all but eight months of your posting, Nikolai Stepanovich,” his control officer, Yuri Krivtsov, had told him, his voice gently, patiently understanding.

  They were having an early dinner of cotelet Valdostana, which was a hearty veal dish, and the specialty of the Cina Restaurant, where they were meeting downtown, very near the Athenaeum.

  “There has been no need for my … services,” the assassin said. He glanced across the crowded dining room toward the garden cafe in the rear. With the fall of Ceauescu everything had changed here, as it had throughout the rest of eastern Europe, and as it still was in the Rodina.

  “On the contrary, there has been and continues to be a great need for you. And now it is time for you to go to work.”

  The assassin looked sharply at Krivtsov. “This has been directed by Moscow?” He was, among other things, a pragmatic man. He didn’t want to be caught in the middle of some harebrained operation that one of the new Kremlin power brokers might have cooked up. Great Russians were notorious for their love of scheming and intrigue.

  “Da.”

  “By whom?”

  “Come now, this is not necessary. Not amongst old friends.” They went back nearly eight years together.

  “Who?”

  “I can’t tell you …”

  “Then I will not accept this assignment.”

  Krivtsov stiffened slightly. He did not want a scene here. He could not afford it. His instructions had been very concise. Besides, despite their old friendship, he was slightly fearful of the man.

  “It comes from very high up,” he said.

  “A name,” the assassin insisted point-blank. He watched his control officer’s gray eyes so that he would know if the man was lying to him. It was a talent he’d been born with in Yakutsk and had used to good advantage in Moscow. It was a talent that had saved his life on more than one occasion, and a talent that had been a root cause of his becoming what he was.

  He’d studied to become an engineer. He wanted to build dams. It was to have been his ticket out of the Soviet Union. More than anything he had wanderlust. He wanted to see faraway lands. In his last year of school he was engaged to a girl in one of his classes. The same night they met, they went to bed with each other and life suddenly took on a new, exciting meaning to him. They were to be married in the summer, as soon as they both graduated. But in April he caught her in a lie. He’d seen it in her eyes. She’d told him that she was tutoring another engineering student, when in reality she’d been sleeping with the boy. The assassin had killed her the moment he found out, and forty-eight hours later the KGB had recruited him out of jail. That had been in 1971, at the height of the cold war. He had killed twenty-seven men and one woman in that time, and he remembered every one of their names and faces. Especially their faces at the moment of their deaths.

  “Lavrushko,” his control officer whispered.

  “General Lavrushko?” the assassin asked sharply.

  Krivtsov nodded nervously. Lavrushko was a deputy director of the GRU—the Soviet Military Intelligence Service. If it was true, his name was a gold passport. No matter what happened, it would be a way out. Insurance.

  “Prove it.”

  Krivtsov took a sealed envelope out of his pocket and handed it across. “Don’t open it here,” he said. “If your decision to take this assignment depends only on proof of that one thing, then do so. If not, the contents will be of no value to you. Believe me in this.”

  The assassin did. It was in the man’s eyes.. There would be no need to open the envelope. “What is my assignment?”

  “We want you to kill a man in Riga. A Latvian union leader by the name of Ergi Janjelsgau. Do you know this name?”

  The assassin did. Janjelsgau was Latvia’s Lech Walesa. “He will not be guarded?”

  “Not all the time. In three days he meets in secret with what is being called the Committee for October First. It’s the date they have planned for an armed revolt.”

  “Against his own government?”

  “Yes. But just now it’s in our best interests to keep the present government in place. We have some control.”

  “Where will they be meeting?”

  “In a warehouse in Pardaugava on the left bank.”

  “There’ll be others with him, I presume.”

  “Of course.”

  “Am I to kill them all?”

  “Only Janjelsgau. A taxi will pick you up at the airport and the driver will take you into the city. He will let you off one block from the warehouse. You will kill Janjelsgau and then walk back to your taxi.”

  “And afterward?”

  “You will be given instructions.”

  “Will I return to Bucharest?”

  Krivtsov looked at him and shook his head after a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.

  He’d been lying, the assassin thought as he climbed in the backseat of a taxi. He gave the number of a street on the right bank of the Daugava River, which split the city in two, and as the cab pulled away he sat back in his seat and took the nine-millimeter Beretta automatic pistol and silencer from his bag and loaded it.

  But that lie hadn’t mattered. He knew he could not return to Romania. He never returned to the posting from which he was dispatched on a kill. It just wasn’t done. The question, of course, was where he would be sent after this.

  He levered a round into the pistol’s firing chamber, his heart beginning to quicken. He would not return to Russia either. That part of his life was over. Only the CIA cowboys fielded assassins. That had been the line ever since Khrushchev had made such a big deal out of Francis Gary Powers. And it had become terribly more important after Oswald had assassinated Kennedy to keep Russian hands as clean as possible … at least in the world public’s eye. It was a long-standing policy that was finally beginning to bear fruition. No, he would not be welcomed home.

  He closed his eyes for a long moment or two, drawing deeply of the cool night air. Tension began to build in his body, strengthening not only his muscles but his resolve as well.

  In Switzerland, in Belgium, and on the Channel island of Jersey he maintained secret bank accounts far from the prying eyes of the KGB. When it was time to run, and after tonight it might be, he would have no financial worries. Over the years he had secreted in excess of three million pounds sterling, in large part from the assets of those victims he’d first gotten close to.

  They crossed the river into Pardaugava twenty minutes later, the night finally dark, and the driver took them down a series of narrow streets, finally passing a four-story warehouse across from which railroad tracks ran away from the river to a switchyard.

  “There,” his driver, a slightly built Latvian, said, and he continued around the block, where he parked in the shadows. He shut off the cab’s headlights, but he did not switch off the engine, nor did he say another word.

  The assassin got out of the cab, and holding the pistol loosely at his side, his thumb on the safety catch, walked back the way they had come.

  Outwardly
he appeared calm, a man in complete control of himself. Inwardly, however, he was sweating. His heart hammered in his chest. His breathing was rapid and shallow. He felt flushed, sweaty, twitchy.

  At the corner he stopped in the darkness. From here he was forty meters from the front door of the warehouse. It was too far.

  Easing around the corner, he walked the rest of the way down the block, stopping in a doorway just across the tracks. A few seconds later a black Chaika limousine, its hubcaps missing and its right fender smashed, pulled up across the street.

  The assassin switched the Beretta’s safety catch to the off position. A warmth began to build in his groin, and he began to feel a sexual power. It was the same at each kill.

  Nothing seemed to happen for a full minute, but then a light appeared in the doorway of the warehouse, and six men came out. Only one of them was dressed in a business suit, and he towered over the others. His profile was very reminiscent of De Gaulle’s, with the large nose. He was Janjelsgau, and even from across the street the assassin could feel the charismatic power emanating from the man.

  A second automobile, this one a Soviet-made Lada, pulled up behind the limousine. The drivers of both cars got out and hurried around to open the doors.

  The assassin stepped out of the shadows and walked rapidly across the street, his penis erect and pressing almost painfully against the material of his trousers. His blood was singing, his breath came even more rapidly, and he was on the verge of orgasm.

  No one across the street spotted him; they were too intent on what Janjelsgau was saying to them. The assassin raised his pistol at the same moment the Latvian union leader looked up, and he fired two shots, the first hitting the man in the face just below the bridge of the nose, and the second in the chest, driving him backward.

  The assassin ejaculated as he turned and walked back into the shadows and around the corner, pleasure coursing through his body as if he had just made passionate and satisfying love to a beautiful woman.

  No one followed him in the confusion.

  Reaching the cab, he climbed in the backseat, and the driver pulled away, switching on the headlights a block away.