M
cGarvey's train pulled into the old Leningrad Station at precisely 8:55 in the morning, and he took his two bags inside where he had a glass of beer, some black bread and caviar at the stand-up counter.
Customs, crossing the border from Finland, was much less stringent by rail than by air. Russian officers had come aboard outside Vyborg in the early evening just after supper to check tickets, passports and luggage. The train was full and they wanted to get back to their own meals, so they didn't spend much time opening baggage, though they admired McGarvey's computer, and even switched on his silencer disguised as a flashlight. It was bulky, but it worked.
He'd booked a private sleeping car, and after they'd passed through St. Petersburg he went to bed and had a reasonably restful sleep, though being
back in Russia again put him on edge. It was tradecraft. In the old days this was called being in “badland,” where even a small mistake could cost you your freedom or your life.
There was nothing pretty about the station. It had been built during the Stalin era, and although it was very large and always busy, it was drab and gray. Lenin's railway car was on permanent display track side, and in the vaulted arrivals hall a huge area had been set aside for booksellers to display their wares. They had a lot of traffic this morning. The last time McGarvey had been here there'd been more KGB officers than customers, but now everything was different. If anything, the people looked even more drab and depressed than they had under the old Communist regime, but they didn't have to constantly look over their shoulders.
Even the food had been better, McGarvey thought, finishing his watery beer, though not by much.
He picked up his bags, bought a Moscow guidebook in French from one of the foreign currency shops, and made his way through the crowds to the taxi stands out front.
The weather was horrible, twenty degrees colder than Helsinki and snowing, though it wasn't as windy. Big piles of filthy snow were everywhere, and the people on the streets were sullen. Traffic was monumental. No one paid any attention to stop lights or speed limits. Pedestrians surged across the broad Komsomol Prospekt at irregular intervals forcing the traffic to a standstill by the sheer press of bodies. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere, many of them in shabby uniforms, and many of them drunk despite the early hour.
Reading about conditions here and seeing television reports on the situation did not convey the true nature of what Moscow, and presumably the rest of Russia, had become. Even the most casual observer couldn't help but see that the country was ripe for revolution. The problem was no one had any idea which way it would go when it came.
McGarvey took a cab to the newly refurbished Metropol Hotel on Marx Prospekt downtown. The Strand Inter-Continental in Helsinki had called ahead and reserved a room for him for three days. The brawny, mean-looking cabby was in a foul mood and cursed everybody and everything in his path, cutting off drivers, nearly running over pedestrians, and even pulling up on the sidewalk at one point to get around a traffic snarl.
When they pulled up at the hotel he demanded a hundred dollars from McGarvey who told him in French that he didn't understand. The driver switched to guttural French and demanded 500 francs.
“
Ce n'est pas possible
,” McGarvey said and he handed the driver a hundred-franc note.
For a second the man didn't seem to comprehend what was happening, but then his face turned red. “Fuck your mother,” he swore in Russian, and he snatched a machete off the seat beside him.
Before he could swing it around, McGarvey smashed the side of his hand
into the cabby's collar bone at the base of his neck, then clapped the palms of his hands over the man's ears.
The cabby reared back, screaming in pain. He dropped the machete and clutched at his head.
“
Merci
,” McGarvey said pleasantly. “
Au revoir
.” He climbed out of the taxi, got his bags and walked into the hotel lobby leaving the cabby screaming obscenities in the driveway, and the doorman completely indifferent.
The turn-of-the-century hotel had been completely redone a few years ago and was good even by western standards, though the service was somewhat indifferent. It took the pock-faced clerk fifteen minutes to find McGarvey's reservations under the name Pierre Allain, and another twenty minutes to run his credit card through the terminal. There was no bellman, so McGarvey took his own bags up to his old-fashioned but very well furnished room on the ninth floor. It had a spectacular view of the city looking toward the Kremlin's walls and towers. A couple of minutes later a bellman in uniform showed up. He closed the curtains that McGarvey had opened, then opened them again, turned on all the lights in the room and the bathroom, flushed the toilet and checked the waterflow in the sink and tub, then turned on the television full blast, and held out his hand for a tip.
McGarvey gave the man a few francs.
“Thanks,” he said in English. “You speak English?”
“A little.”
“That's good. Anything you need, anything whatever, you just call me. Name's Artur. Women, coke, maybe you Belgians like little boys? Call me, you'll see.”
“I'll keep you in mind, Artur.”
The bellman gave him a long, appraising look, then left the room.
McGarvey locked the door, then searched the room for bugs, but he didn't find any. Either they weren't there because the successor to the KGB didn't care, something he doubted, or they'd been buried in the walls when the hotel was refurbished. The main thing was there were no hidden closed-circuit television cameras.
He opened his laptop, and removed the bottom panel, revealing his pistol and spare magazines. He pocketed one of the magazines, then tested the Walther's action, stuffed it in his belt at the small of his back, and reassembled the computer.
McGarvey had purchased a pair of gloves, a Russian fur hat and a pair of warm hiking shoes from the department store around the corner from his hotel in Helsinki. He changed into the heavier shoes, stuffed the Moscow guidebook in his coat pocket and left the hotel.
Killing Tarankov and getting away presented a number of challenging problems, not the least of which was the when and the where. The man and his entourage were constantly on the move. And whenever he roared into a city he was immediately surrounded by thousands, sometimes even tens of
thousands of adoring people. He was worshiped like a god, and his people took full advantage of this fact, in effect using the crowds as a buffer against any would-be assassin. It was the reverse of how other security services operated. But it worked.
On the way from Helsinki, McGarvey had figured out the second half of that problem. The where would be here in Moscow, because if Tarankov meant to take over the government, it was here he'd have to come. Terrorizing every other city in Russia would and already had taken him a long way. But Moscow had always been the center of Russia. Even when the governments before the revolution were housed in St. Petersburg, Moscow was still the heart and soul of Russia. Holy Moscow. With the breakup of the Soviet Union nothing had changed in that respect.
And Moscow had its center, Red Square.
McGarvey stood in front of the big department store G.U.M. and stared across the broad square at Lenin's Tomb at the base of the Kremlin. He'd been here during his tenure at Moscow Station early in his career, and on several occasions since. He'd last been here eighteen months ago. And in that short time the city had gone sharply downhill, though traffic was worse. The entire nation was starving to death, but cars were everywhere, Russian built Ladas and Zhigulis, plus a surprisingly high number of Mercedes and BMWs. What little middle class there'd been before the breakup of the Soviet Union was almost completely gone now, leaving Russians stratified into the very poor or the very rich. There was no in between.
The system had failed, completely and miserably, and yet this morning despite the horrible weather the line in front of Lenin's Mausoleum was as long as it had ever been. Young people looking for something to believe in, and old people who knew what they believed in and desperately wanted to regain the old ways.
Lenin's Mausoleum and Red Square, free of anything but pedestrian traffic or official vehicles, seemed to be the only constants left in Moscow. The only bits of the old days that had remained, by outward appearances, the same.
He walked across the square where he bought a bouquet of wilted flowers from an old babushka at a kiosk, and joined the line for Lenin's tomb in front of the red brick History Museum opposite the entrance to the Alexandrovsky Garden. It took about twenty minutes until he got to the doors. Since he was obviously a foreigner, he had to show his passport. The people in line behind him stopped a respectful distance away as he approached Lenin's embalmed body in its glass-topped coffin, studied the corpse's surprisingly intact features, then laid his flowers with the others on the marble floor. As he turned to leave, one of the uniformed guards came over, smiled sadly, and shook his hand.
“
Merci, monsieur
,” he said gently.
“He was a great man. Many of us in Belgium admire what he stood for,”
McGarvey said humbly. He glanced toward the broad marble stairs at the back. “It would be an honor to be allowed to stand on the balcony where so many great men have watched the May Day parades. Is it permitted?”
“For you we will make an exception,” the guard replied. He led McGarvey up to the wind-swept balcony.
When Tarankov made his triumphal entry to Moscow it would be to this place. McGarvey looked out across the square, apparently lost in a vision of what it would be like to stand in front of the soldiers and tanks and rockets parading through the square while a million people watched. Overcome with emotion, he turned away and raised his eyes to the heavens. The Kremlin's brick walls rose above the mausoleum. McGarvey measured the firing angles and distances for a shooter placed somewhere on the wall above, and decided the shot would be an easy one. The problem would be getting away afterward. It would be difficult, perhaps even impossible.
“Thank you,” he said turning back to the guard. “Perhaps someday you will have greatness returned to you.”
The guard bridled, but then nodded. “We will, and sooner than those fools inside realize.”
Back outside, McGarvey turned left and walked up the hill to the Sobakina Tower pedestrian gate at the northern corner of the Kremlin, bought a ticket for the grounds and, taking out his guide book, went in. The walls beneath the one-hundred-eighty-foot tower were twelve feet thick to hide a secret well and a passageway out of the fortress into the Neglinnaya River which flowed underground. He'd considered that a possible escape route. But access to the passageway was through a series of heavy steel gates in the tower, that on the day Tarankov made his triumphal entrance into Moscow would likely be heavily guarded. It would be possible to take out the guards and blow the gates. In the noise and confusion of Tarankov's appearance such activities might go unnoticed. But if he became trapped in the river passage it would be a simple matter for the authorities to wait at the Moscow River outlet for him to appear, and he would be captured. It would be impossible to take the underground river upstream.
But the Kremlin still intrigued him, because no one would expect Tarankov to be shot from behind. The problems here were threefold; getting past the heavy security, making the shot unobserved, possibly from the top of the Kremlin wall directly above and behind the speaker's balcony atop Lenin's mausoleum, easy if the only consideration were sight lines, and making good his escape for which he wanted several options. He didn't think he could rely on one escape route no matter how foolproof it seemed.
The few people wandering around the Kremlin paid him little attention as he sauntered past the Arsenal to the Senate Building, which backed the wall directly behind Lenin's tomb, to his left. From time to time he stopped, read from his tour book then looked up, as if he were trying to orient himself, while he studied the top floors of the building. The Senate was one of the few buildings in the Kremlin that were closed to the public. But with the
proper credentials it would be possible to gain entrance to the building. He might be able to make his way to the roof from where a shot at Tarankov's back would be possible. Assuming that guards would not be placed on the roof against just such a possibility, he would still be faced with his escape after the kill.
Once Tarankov was down and the direction of the shot established, which might only take seconds, the Kremlin would be sealed. His only hope at that point would be blending in until the confusion subsided and the gates were once again open. It would mean he'd have to come up with foolproof documents and a rock-solid disguiseâa shaky proposition at best. It left him no options, unless he had a set of papers and a disguise other than the one he used to gain entrance, or an alternate route over or beneath the walls.
There was something about this place that struck him more like a prison than the seat of government. It was a fortress which protected itself not only from without, but from within.