The Expediter (25 page)

It was a period of we don’t ask you don’t tell, when competent people were needed to help fight the Cold War. It was the same year he’d been kicked off the soccer team for unnecessary roughness. In every subject he was at the top of his class, but little else showed up in Rencke’s research until Boyko was accepted at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy to study ballistic missile engineering, which could have eventually led to a career in the navy and eventually command of a nuclear submarine.

His grades at the academy were nothing short of stellar, easily at the top of his class in every subject, though his name did not appear on the rosters of any of the academy’s sports teams, including soccer.

Here Rencke’s report became somewhat speculative, based, he wrote, on fragments of testimony given at a closed hearing about the deaths of four seniors. This was in Boyko’s senior year.

It was in the late winter of 1987, Boyko was twenty-four, and ready to graduate in the spring. He had evidently nurtured a grudge against the four who had apparently harassed him the entire five years. Jew baiting, it was called, but it was a rare sport at the academy because so few Jews had ever been accepted.

Boyko sat in the upper bleachers of the gymnasium watching the gymnastics team working out. A number of the athletes were of Olympic potential so their practices usually drew a fairly large crowd.

One of them, a cadet named Anatoli Shuskin, on the weight-lifting team, had been the instigator among the four who had given Boyko such a hard time. After each of his successful lifts that night the audience roared its approval. He was sure to win the gold medal next year.

Afterward, when practice was over and the gymnasium began to empty, Boyko waited outside in the bitter cold, until the athletes started to emerge from the locker room, most of them heading back to the dormitories, while others headed toward the restaurants and bars just outside the main gate.

Only seniors were allowed off the grounds without special permission and Boyko had counted on Shuskin and the other three, pumped up by their practice, to want something to eat and drink before heading to bed. There would be the girls from the gym crowd there, of course, and the four of them were almost sure to get laid. Good practice, good food, good drink, and good sex. Anything for the Olympic-bound men, who would graduate in a few months and after the games head out into the fleet.

It was a few minutes after ten when the four of them came out the door and headed beyond the track field, most of the lights on campus off or dimmed for the night. Boyko fell in behind them, keeping to the shadows as much as possible, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered because not once did any of them look back.

At the gate, the four men showed their IDs and were waved through, and headed left down the street, traffic light at this hour.

Boyko hung back until they were lost in the darkness then hurried to the gate, showed his ID and the underclassman doing duty as the gate guard waved him through.

“Lucky bastards,” the guard mumbled under his breath as Boyko headed after Shuskin and the others.

The four passed the trolley station in the next block and crossed the street, obviously heading for the Four Bells, which was a favorite hangout for athletes from the academy.

Boyko caught up with them in the next block. “Hey,
pizdas
,” pussies. He spoke just loudly enough for them to hear. A half-dozen students
were gathered outside the restaurant a block away, and he didn’t want his voice to carry that far.

Shuskin, who stood less than one meter seventy, but weighed more than one hundred kilos stopped and turned back. He was built like a god, narrow waist, broad chest and shoulders, and massive arms. The other three, on the weight-lifting team with him, were built nearly the same. No one in the academy had ever messed with them.

For a moment Shuskin didn’t recognize who it was standing in the darkness, but when he did a smile spread across his broad peasant’s face. “It’s the Jew boy,” he said. “What do you think, gentlemen, did the kike say something to us?”

“I called you
pizdas
,” Boyko said. “Are you too stupid to understand the word? Or didn’t your mothers explain the facts of life to you?”

“You little fucker, it’s time you learned your manners,” Shuskin said.

Boyko turned on his heel and disappeared around the corner down the narrow side street of tailor shops and laundries, dark at this hour.

Shuskin was the first around the corner, and when he spotted Boyko he let out a roar and charged, the other three just a couple of meters behind him.

At the last possible moment Boyko stepped aside, pulled out the twenty-five-centimeter chef’s knife he’d stolen from the mess hall kitchen and had honed to razor sharpness, and sliced the weight lifter’s throat to the back of his neck. He moved back just in time to avoid the sudden gush of blood as Shuskin’s forward motion propelled him another few meters down the avenue before he collapsed with a horrible gurgling sound.

Boyko turned on the other three, calmly slashing their throats, the same as he had done to Shuskin and none of them stood a chance, they were weight lifters, solid on their feet, not as agile as a former soccer player who still worked out every day.

After they had bled out, he walked back to the academy, first stopping under a streetlight to make sure that he’d gotten no blood on his clothes.

He’d wiped the knife clean, and before he went to his room he put it back in the mess hall exactly where he’d found it, amused that in the morning it might be used to slice the kielbasa for breakfast.

From the school’s files Rencke had been able to hack, it was apparent that everyone on campus knew who had committed the murders and why, but there was no hard evidence. Even so the Frunze commandant had been put in a position where he had to do something because of Shuskin’s popularity, and at that moment the KGB came to his rescue.

The remainder of Boyko’s records were sparse and Rencke admitted that he had to do a lot of reading between the lines to put the pieces together, among his sources the debriefing of two KGB officers who’d defected to the West, one to the U.S., the other to England, who talked about the young Jew who’d been kicked out of Frunze, had become a standout at the agency’s School One, and had gone out into the field as a killer for Department Viktor.

He’d had assignments in Washington and London, working out of the Soviet embassies, as well as Mexico City, Bonn, Tokyo, Beijing, and even briefly in Tel Aviv. In each posting he’d apparently learned the language of the country, and everyone who’d ever had any contact with him said the same thing: the man was nothing short of brilliant but ruthless.

“A genius, but a bloody cold fish,” one of the defectors had told his SIS handlers outside London. “Just as soon cut your throat as look at you.”

Boyko had been recalled to Moscow after the collapse of the regime to help reorganize the KGB into the FSB, but within a year he had dropped off the map, completely disappearing from view.

About this time an entrepreneur who called himself Alexandar Turov burst onto the scene out of nowhere, amassing a fortune within an incredibly short time, apparently by assassinating, or arranging the assassinations of rising star businessmen whose rivals—including the FSB—were willing to pay big money in Western currencies to eliminate them.

Turov, the businessman, invested heavily in Japanese real estate, getting out just before the bust, and then in American tech stocks, getting out of those just before 9/11 when the market went into a tailspin.

After that Turov had apparently retired into obscurity in Tokyo, leaving only the vaguest of rumors connecting him with the man known only as Alexandar, who for a price could expedite a murder of anyone at any time at any place on the planet.

McGarvey phoned Rencke. “How sure are you that Boyko and Turov are the same man?”

“About eighty-five percent,” Rencke answered. “Louise thinks maybe seventy-five, but no more than eighty. But she’s always been tough, ya know.”

“How about Turov as Alexandar the expediter?”

“Less,” Rencke admitted. “Maybe just fifty-fifty, or a little better. But I got a feeling about this guy.”

“Have you found out where he lives?”

“I’m working on it, kemo sabe.”

Turov had finished with his bath and a rubdown by the two girls and he was in his sleeping quarters dressing for a simple dinner at home, hopefully with McGarvey, when someone knocked discreetly.

“Come,” Turov called softly. He studied his reflection in the mirror on the armoire door, his hair back to its natural dark, and then looked beyond to the shoji screen. As it slid aside he reached for his pistol on the shelf, but it was Minoru and he relaxed.

“The gentleman is lodging at the Asaka View. A suite on the twenty-fifth floor.”

“Your information is accurate?” Turov asked. It was an insult but he wasn’t in the mood for mistakes, though his slight anxiousness did not show.

“My police informant has been reliable in the past.”

Turov finished buttoning the broad sleeves of his white silk shirt before he turned to face his chief of staff. “I only ask because Mr. McGarvey is a dangerous man, and it will not do for us to make an error now.”

“A most remarkable man if only half of what I have learned is true,” Minoru said softly. He never raised his voice, for him to do so would be impolite, opposite of his Bushido learning. Nor did he ever find the need to repeat himself.

“Your source?” Turov asked, moving across the room to the low table for his glass of champagne. He drank some and refilled the glass from the bottle sitting in the ice bucket. He despised sweet Russian champagne. Only the French knew how to produce a decent vintage.

“In Washington, one of the senator’s aides. Do you wish to know this name?”

Turov waved it off. “I can guess who, but it doesn’t matter, the record speaks for itself.”

“He has had the ear of the past three presidents, he has friends in the FBI as well as all the other intelligence and police agencies in Washington, and of course he still has many friends and contacts inside the CIA.”

“How about Homeland Security?”

“I don’t know. Do you wish me to find out?”

“No,” Turov said. He looked out the open wall to his garden, the placement of the rocks and of the reeds comforting in their orderliness, the sounds of the flowing water soothing in the gentleness.

“He has killed men.”

“Many men?”

“Yes.”

“As many as I have?” Turov asked, turning to face his chief of staff who had not entered the room, but stood at the open screen.

“Possibly more by his own hand,” Minoru said. “He has more years experience than you do.”

For some reason this bit of news irritated Turov, but he didn’t let that show either. Instead, he smiled.

“He is a formidable man.”

“So it would seem,” Turov said, controlling his temper with a supreme effort of will. “All the more interesting when I kill him.”

“I would not advise it, Colonel.”

Turov’s left eyebrow rose. “That’s why you work for me, and not the other way around.”

Minoru nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Now this is what I want you to do tonight after you finish supervising the preparations here.”

After Minoru had left, Turov went out to the broad veranda where he drank another glass of champagne, his last, he decided, until this business with McGarvey was finished, and then he would indulge himself while China, the Koreas, and Japan burned.

It would be better than a Dostoyevsky novel, a great and tragic entertainment.

He set his glass aside, and walked back to his small study at the core of the house. The room, furnished only with a small desk and one chair, was completely surrounded by a Faraday cage that blocked any type of electronic surveillance measures, and double rice paper walls that sandwiched backer boards, which made them soundproof.

The WiFi telephone and computer were connected via series of band pass filters to an automatic remailer service in Taipei that had so far proven to be completely reliable. All calls or e-mails in or out of this room were impervious to eavesdropping, even by the American National Security Agency with its sophisticated satellite equipment.

Although it was late on the American eastern seaboard, he telephoned the man who had hired him to have General Ho and the two men before him assassinated. Service for value, his profits had been immense so far. But the job wasn’t finished.

“Do you know who this is,” he said when the phone was answered after the fourth ring.

“Yes,” his contact, code-named Daniel, said, and in that one word it was obvious he was concerned.

“We have a potential problem that will require an additional payment.”

“What problem?”

“Kirk McGarvey has become involved. He was in Seoul looking for one of my shooters, and he’s followed me here to Tokyo.”

“Impossible.”

“Nevertheless, he’s here. Which means he’s getting information from somewhere. A leak from your end?”