The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (14 page)

“Agreed,” Kate responded. “The French arms merchant who is on the other side of the trade we’ve been tracking through Minh Kwang’s BanKoNoKo made the cornerstone of his fortune trading in Kalashnikovs. If LeClerc is also linked to Zagi Mountain, then we have a connection between Mort’s kidnapping and the $11 million transfer from Kabul to LeClerc.”

“Which is likely related to the loose nukes Mahmood warned Feldman about,” Wheatley said. “It could all tie together.”

“Do you think you will have time on your trip to Peshawar to draw Mahmood out a little? He knows more about this than he told Mort.”

“Possibly,” Wheatley said. “I hope it will be different once I expand my contact with him beyond these coffee klatches in his office. He seems distant and preoccupied, probably by the risk he’s taking with his own people by spending any time with me at all, especially at ISI headquarters. I hear the office politics at ISI can be lethal.”

“The generals sometimes settle scores with guns, but not in my time there. And remember that Mahmood is not one of the pack. He’s sort of aloof and scholarly. You are going to see a different side of him once you get him away from the top brass. Peshawar is the boondocks. A million people, a third of them Afghan war refugees, packed into a city that was overcrowded even with a tenth that many. The world’s most polluted city, choking under a blanket of petrochemical fog produced by charcoal braziers, cars from the 1950s that burn leaded gas, and of course the Peshawar Rickshaws.”

“You mean those motorcycle things?”

“Real blue-smokers. Vespa-type scooters attached to a Chinese-style rickshaw. A two-cycle lawnmower engine fueled with kerosene or low-grade gasoline powers the scooter, all spiked with large amounts of recycled motor oil. Hit the accelerator, and the tailpipe belches mushroom clouds of choking smoke.”

Wheatley figured he had learned as much from Kate as he was likely to for the moment. He decided to end the call.

“By tomorrow morning, I’m told that your cover for insertion into Kabul will be ready. You will be an American volunteer worker with a group that supports Afghan widows. Once that happens, I want you to get down to the border as soon as you can.”

“What about Minh Kwang and BanKoNoKo?” Kate protested.

“That effort will either strike oil very quickly or become a dry hole. If you can find out who is paying LeClerc, that’s great, but if you don’t, we can push Treasury to work the problem from their end, or get our friends in Paris to lean on the
hawaladar
who received the funds. Meantime, the priority is Mort Feldman, not some bomb that may or may not exist. I don’t have enough people on the ground here, especially people who are totally off the radar.”

“You’re the boss,” Kate said. “I’ll keep your assistant updated in Langley.”

Even in the best of times, Simon Wantree was a haunted, fearful man. It was in his nature. He dashed off a two-word email to Jacques LeClerc within minutes of Colonel Marchenko and Yasser al-Greeb departing his room.

“Major crisis!” was all it said.

Wantree no longer felt safe at the Slavyanka Hotel. He packed his single suitcase, took the elevator to the lobby, and simply walked out the door without settling his bill. He crossed Suvorovskaya Square to the entrance of the Dostoevskaya metro and went inside the modernistic subterranean station, open less than a year.

The station was decorated with black and white marble mosaics of scenes from the great writer’s books. He sat beneath a mural taken from
Crime and Punishment
—Rodion Raskolnikov threatening the elderly pawnbroker Ivanovna with an axe moments before he slaughters her. Nearby, a character from
Demons
was about to blow his brains out with a pistol. Wantree recalled reading in a London tabloid that the mayor of Moscow had temporarily closed the station just days after it opened because subway riders grumbled about the murals, which they feared would attract Moscow’s suicides as the perfect place to dispatch themselves. Moscow was not a city where suicides were unknown. Quite the contrary: Every day a half-dozen miserable people did away with themselves, often by throwing their bodies under trains.

Wantree laughed out loud. What did they want from Dostoevesky? Merry family scenes around the Christmas tree? Old Fyodor just doesn’t have them, he thought. Russian writers are infrequently optimists.

In his earlier wanderings around the neighborhood, after his arrival at the Slavyanka, Wantree had seen a tiny hostel on Prospekt Mira, the Avenue of Peace. He remembered it because it was just south of an enormous fresh produce market on the grand boulevard, which runs due north from the Garden Ring. Wantree had been surprised to see so much tasty food for sale in a city that was considered undernourished and sorely lacking luxuries.

The Kvarti Hostel was a mile from the Dostoevskaya metro, an easy walk even with suitcase and laptop. The tiny building contained only six guest rooms. Wantree took the smallest available for $95 a night, nearly twice what he had been paying at the Slavyanka, but it was cleaner, had a comfortable bed, and a private bath—practically a fully equipped bed-sitter by British standards.

The tetchy
babushka
at the desk spoke no English, but Wantree’s primitive Russian was sufficient, and he paid in cash in advance, which is always appreciated. He saw that Wi-Fi was available. Wantree did not leave his room for the rest of the day, confident that it would take a while for Marchenko to track him down, if indeed he would try to find him at all.

He took a long, hot bath. He luxuriated in sheets that were cleaner than his own at home in England. When he awoke the next morning, his Hotmail account carried a message from LeClerc: “Most disappointed in you. Telephone office at once.” Wantree swore, then sighed. He wrote: “Leaving to find telephone kiosk now. Expect call within the hour.”

Wantree left the Kvarti, happy to see the same biddy manning the lobby desk. She barely glanced at him. He went south on Prospekt Mira toward central Moscow, searching for a post office. He found one a few thousand yards from the hostel and gave the clerk the telephone number in Paris he wished to call, along with rubles sufficient for a phone card.

“You are ruining this deal!” LeClerc shouted at him when the connection was made. “Marchenko is most angry with you. He says you are making impossible demands.”

“You told me that he was expecting me,” Wantree protested. He was furious and wanted LeClerc to know it. “He’s trying to sell you a bill of goods. I’ve been here five days now and I have yet to see the…. item. And that bloody wog you sent from your buyer! He practically told me to bugger off and treated Marchenko like a bloody servant. You’re losing control of this, my friend. And I damn well expect to be paid, don’t you forget it.”

The telephone line crackled. Wantree surmised LeClerc was trying to think of something to say.

“Expect me tomorrow,” LeClerc said at last, his voice betraying irritation and fatigue. “Where are you staying?”

“Marchenko got me a room at the Slavyanka,” Wantree said. “But I’m going to move. I don’t feel safe there any more.” He withheld information about his new digs. LeClerc was no more trustworthy in Moscow than Marchenko, and he was surely not going to make it easy for either of them to cheat him—or worse.

“The Slavyanka is a whorehouse,” LeClerc agreed. “I don’t blame you.”

“Look, just get on a plane, and send me an email when you land, and I’ll come to your hotel, or we can meet somewhere else. By then I’ll have a new place. Meanwhile, keep bloody Marchenko off my fucking back.”

His work for the day complete, Wantree walked by a roundabout route back toward the Kvarti, discovering quite by accident the well-hidden Botanical Garden of Moscow University only a few hundred yards south of his lodgings. Crowded with Russians, it was obviously a favorite haunt of Muscovites (admission was free!) who thronged around an ancient willow by the pond in the center of the blooming 16-acre preserve.

Visitors sauntered through greenhouses fragrant with the scent of oranges and lemons and other tropical and subtropical plants. It was the loveliest place Wantree had seen since arriving in Moscow and it seemed to him a perfect place to meet LeClerc, should LeClerc not invite him to his hotel when he arrived.

***

Colonel Viktor Marchenko recalled a favored maxim of General Eisenhower, the one that states that plans are worthless but planning is everything. So true. Those problems he had anticipated in his scenarios of a sale of his tactical nuclear bomb, the RA-211, had not come to pass, and contingencies that had never even occurred to him now seemed to be putting its execution at risk.

The liquidation of a British national, Simon Wantree, on Russian soil was not something he had planned for. Murder entailed risks as great or greater than the risks he was already taking. It had seemed to Marchenko in his planning that dealing through an intermediary like Jacques LeClerc, even if he was not exactly a known quantity, was preferable to trying to find the end user for his bomb himself, especially since, as he had correctly judged, the end user would likely come from somewhere far to the east of Russia. These were the lands of men Marchenko loathed: Afghans, Iranians, and even scum like Al Qaeda.

Yet, now Marchenko had the worst of both worlds: he was losing a significant fraction of the end user sales price of the weapon to LeClerc’s profit margin, and he had also the messy task of doing the job he was paying LeClerc to do for him, namely dealing with the buyer. Yasser al-Greeb was a nasty piece of work.

After leaving Wantree in the Slavyanka Hotel, Marchenko returned by metro to his apartment in a residential complex at the northeastern edge of the city. He had a one-bedroom flat in a 1960s building that housed some 200 retired military officers and their families. After his wife had died in the 1990s, Marchenko had converted the bedroom into a library and study, sleeping on a convertible bed in what had earlier been the sitting room.

Marchenko now paced in his study, smoking furiously, trying to think of his best course of action in the new circumstances. The problem was not only Wantree, who at least had been expected in Moscow, but also Al-Greeb, who had just appeared out of the blue, stinking horribly of a weeklong train ride from the armpit regions of the eastern steppes.

Marchenko wanted to deal solely with Jacques LeClerc. How could that be arranged? He determined to call LeClerc and tell him the deal was off unless he, LeClerc, seized control of events from Al-Greeb and Simon Wantree at once.

Though he had both a landline and a personal cell phone, Marchenko left his apartment building and went to a nearby post office on foot to make the call to Paris.

The conversation with LeClerc was sharp and scathing, but it was also brief.

***

Jacques LeClerc took the first Paris-to-Moscow flight he could muster, a Lufthansa from Charles De Gaulle to Domodedovo—2,500 kilometers in just under three hours. He took a taxi for the two-hour drive to the Leningradskaya Hotel in Komsomolskaya Square, a wedding-cake Stalinist monstrosity built in the 1950s in the dictator’s favored, florid style. When it opened, it was said to be the finest hotel in the Communist world. LeClerc had never stayed there, but it was within a mile or two of the Slavyanka and had recently undergone an expensive renovation by its new owner, an optimistic and well-funded American chain.

He arrived in his room angry and exhausted—he had spent more time in airport taxis than aboard his flight. The room was dark, paneled in cherry. He drew the drapes and collapsed in bed, utterly unsure what his next move should be. At least the hotel was luxurious.

In the morning, he called Viktor Marchenko on the colonel’s cell phone and invited him to breakfast. They met an hour later in the hotel’s restaurant, a baronial cavern of a room beneath a gothic oak ceiling supported by four blue marble columns. There were few other guests.

LeClerc ordered croissants and
café-au-lait
, Marchenko coffee and a double order of eggs benedict.

“I am so sorry we will not be able to do business,” Marchenko said, with no rancor. “But I am grateful to you for coming to see me.”

“Viktor! We have planned together the capstone of both our careers! Think of Marbella! Please, be reasonable. We can find a way through this labyrinth that is acceptable to both of us.”

“No, I do not think so,” Marchenko said firmly. “I cannot jeopardize my retirement with this sloppiness. I will have to make do with whatever profits are currently waiting for me in Switzerland. This is all becoming too risky. I’ll take it up later perhaps, in another time and in another place.”

“I have your money—five million dollars. You can have it any way you want, including cash, diamonds, anywhere you want.”

“You will have to keep the lucre,
mon ami
. And I will keep my health and my life. Perhaps you should follow my lead and retire also.”

“Viktor, the client has already paid me. I am obliged to deliver.” LeClerc’s voice had fallen to a low hiss. Marchenko was the Russian gift-horse he had been seeking for a quarter century. It was unthinkable his final and biggest deal would collapse now because of the crotchety qualms of an aging Russian martinet colonel.

“Sending Al-Greeb to harass me was reprehensible,” Marchenko said sharply. “You were obliged to insulate me. You failed. Now the hazard that I will be exposed to is vastly greater. I cannot go forward. Or rather, I will not.”

“We will roll back the clock then,” LeClerc said amiably. “We will go back to our original plan.”

“That is not possible.”

“I am prepared to pay you an additional half-million dollars for the regrettable aggravation I have caused you.”

“Did you say
one million
dollars?”

“Viktor! I must keep a little for myself! I too am nearing retirement.”

“One million more it is, then—a payment of six million total, by wire, to that place in Switzerland we discussed. No diamonds. And there will be different terms of transfer. We will make arrangements for shipment, and you will wire the funds to me the night before the package leaves Moscow. And you agree to remain personally in Russia yourself until that date. If there are any more—interruptions. You have been warned. I do not plan to do your work for you.”

LeClerc took a sip of coffee. It was watery coffee, like all the coffee served in all American hotels no matter where they were located. He felt a wave of nausea pass through him, whether from the travel or the stress of the most important business transaction of his life falling apart, he could not tell. With the eleven million dollars from the buyers already in his Paris account, a six million payment to Marchenko would leave him with five million left to cover his profit and remaining expenses, including the Englishman.

“And what of Simon Wantree?” Marchenko said, reading his mind. “Yasser al-Greeb was not pleased to see this man, let me tell you.”

“Simon is my problem,” LeClerc said wearily. “But I’m going to need your help.”