Coercion (11 page)

Yarik looked down at his daily journal.  It had been a dangerously slow month on both the Knyaz and KGB fronts.  Having the KGB’s Executive Action Department sitting around on its hands was not a good idea: bored assassins make bad neighbors.

He had taken the boys moose hunting to let off some steam.  A couple of them had scoffed at the proposal—sure they were mammoth machines crowned with razory racks, but what challenge could an animal pose to a group expert at hunting men?  Then Yarik had laid down the rule: knives only.  Seven of the eight made it back.

That was five days ago.  Work had picked up since.  He flipped the page. 
Monday: Alex Ferris
.  Victor had sent him a fax that dangled the possibility of an exciting week.  An American Private Investigator with CIA and SERE training on his resume had been nosing around Victor’s end of the Knyaz operation.  Victor wanted Yarik to post a man at Sheremetyevo Arrivals to watch out for him—just in case.

Yarik had put an ambitious young agent named Sergey Shipilov on the job.  Airport surveillance is like fishing a new pond; it keeps you busy, but you never kn
ow if you are going to see any real action.  Knowing that Sergey had a pole out gave Yarik something to hope for—until Wednesday.

Wednesday: Cancel Alex Ferris, Mission Accomplished
.  Victor had called to cancel the airport watch.  He could have sent another fax, but he was obviously looking for kudos.  Yarik understood.  Victor and his father had a complicated relationship.

The Wednesday page also read,
Irkutsk Affair
.  Yarik received a tip that an engineer at Irkutsk Motorworks might be passing information—knowingly or not—to his Mongolian mistress.  Yarik had investigated, determined that a potential security leak did in fact exist, and planned to plug it personally this afternoon after Vasily’s meeting in Irkutsk.

Thursday: SibOil
.  Yarik had decided to give Victor his kudos, and called Vasily to tell him about the successful hit on the American.  Rather than expressing admiration, Vasily had come back with word of his own kill.  (Their father-son rivalry really was something to watch.  One more reason not to have kids.)

Vasily
had taken out an accountant who had stumbled onto their scheme at SibOil.  While Yarik appreciated the elegance of the method Vasily had selected, he did not like to see Vasily taking those kinds of risks.  Still, he had bitten his tongue until he learned that Vasily intended to leave Luda Orlova’s father alone.

In Yarik’s business, there was no sin greater than
leaving a loose end.  Vasily did not feel that a “knot” was necessary in this case.  Yarik disagreed.  First and foremost a hunter, he followed his instinct.  That prerogative brought Yarik to this morning’s mission.

After parking his borrowed Volga in the lot behind Mr. Orlov’s building, Yarik looked at his watch and saw that he had just enough time for a quick hit before catching the early fli
ght from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk for Vasily’s nine-o’clock meeting.  The tight time schedule meant that there was no time for artistry, which was a shame.  As far as Yarik was concerned, straightforward hits were for Cretans and Goombahs.  He would have to make up for that regression this afternoon and give the Irkutsk engineer and his Mongolian mistress something special.

Given the time constraint this morning, he would simply knock on Orlov’s door, flash his KGB badge, and then shoot the old man with his silenced Stetchkin the moment he was inside.  Even with taking the time to ensure that there was enough disarray for the scene to look like a robbery gone
bad, he would be in and out of the apartment in less than three minutes.

He
scanned the old man’s courtyard for activity.  There was none.  The street sweepers and dog walkers had not yet emerged.  Yarik pulled his fur cap down snugly on his big bald dome and walked briskly from the car to entrance number four.  He suffered from the fact that his appearance, while a valuable asset most of the time, was a liability whenever anonymity was required.  Nobody ever forgot how Yarik looked.  At times like these, his only option was to avoid observation.

He hopped into the elevator and pushed five.  The doors squeaked closed and the elevator began to rumble upwards.  Then his cell phone rang. 
Damn
.  Yarik pressed the answer button immediately to stop the ringer and then looked at the display: Sergey Shipilov.  Then he looked at his watch: five a.m. 
This better be good
.

“I’m listening.”

“Sir, it’s Sergey Shipilov.  I’m calling to report that Alex Ferris is alive.  He’s alive and in Russia and staying in room 212 of the Hotel Irkutsk.”

“What
!”  Yarik hit the stop button on the elevator.  It was early; traffic would be light.

“It’s true, Sir.  I know you called off the watch, but as I had no other pressing business, I decided to go the extra mile for you.  There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for—”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m in the lobby of the Hotel Irkutsk.  I’ve questioned the receptionist and the taxi driver and learned that Alex plans to sleep all day before going out at nine o’clock this evening.  The driver didn’t know for sure where he would be going, but he has reason to believe it’s Max’s Place.”

“The strip club?”

“Yes, Sir.  Said
Ferris asked him where he could go to have a good time with a beautiful lady, or six.”

“And you’re absolutely sure it’s him?” 

“He looks just like the photos you gave me.  He has the athletic build and bright blue eyes described in the memo, and he arrived from San Francisco.  He’s got a Soviet passport with the name Alexander Potapov, but unless you’re a believer in huge coincidences, it’s got to be Ferris.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences.  When is
Ferris scheduled to check out?

“Not until the middle of next week.”

“Good.  Now, listen carefully Sergey.  You are to stay on him like glue, invisible glue.  Is that clear?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Did he do anything to indicate that he knows he’s being followed?”

“No, Sir.  I was very careful.”

“Good.  Then you should be able to handle him on your own until morning.  I happen to be flying to Irkutsk in an hour, but I’m going to be in a meeting until noon, and then I have other business that will keep me occupied until around midnight.  I doubt Ferris will last that long at Max’s—I’ve seen the girls—so I’ll plan to catch up with you at the hotel around this time tomorrow morning.  Meanwhile, you are not to arrest Ferris, just observe him.  Take detailed notes on everything he does and especially everyone he sees and call me on this number if anything extraordinary happens.”

“Yes Sir, General.”

“Are you sure you can handle Ferris alone, Sergey?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“That’s good.  I’d just as soon not involve the Irkutsk office.  I will make the decision on what to do with him when I see you tomorrow morning, based on what Ferris does between now and then.  Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.  I’m your man, Sir.”

“We’re about to find out.  If you start getting tired, Sergey, just remember that in twenty-four hours you’ll be a hero.  Don’t make a fatal mistake before then.”  Yarik hung up without waiting for acknowledgement. 

This was bittersweet news.  Yesterday Yarik had made a point of lavishing praise on Victor to
Vasily, and now he looked like a fool.  On the other hand, now he could have his way with an American spy.  Overall, it was probably a net gain.  How big a gain would depend on Ferris’s stamina.  Instinct told him it was going to be good.

Then there was Sergey.  Yarik didn’t buy the young agent’s tale of going the extra mile.  He found if far more likely that Sergey had temporarily misplaced his pager, or had forgotten to check it until he had already picked Ferris up.  That was all right.  Yarik could appreciate a man taking an advantage
when presented.  Just so long as there were no other anomalies.  On second thought…

Yarik called the office and had them transfer his call to the Hotel Irkutsk.  He identified himself, reconfirmed what Sergey had told him, and left a message with his mobile number for whoever was at reception: He was to be discretely informed
immediately
if Mr. Potapov had any change of plans.  Then he hung up and pressed 1 on his speed dial.

“Karpov.”

“It’s Yarik.  I have some bad news.  Apparently the American private eye escaped Victor’s explosion and hopped on a plane.  He arrived in Irkutsk ninety minutes ago using a Soviet passport.  Fortunately, my redundant security measures at Sheremetyevo compensated for this shortcoming.”

“Why didn’t the bomb work?”

“I don’t know.  I haven’t talked to Victor yet.”

“I see.  Don’t mention this to
him.  I’d like to bring it up myself.”

“As you wish.”

“Why were you employing redundant security, Yarik?  Is there something else I should know?”

“
Just instinct.  Ferris’s bio raised my defenses.”

“
I love those instincts of yours.  We’ll come back to the bio later.  Where is Ferris now?”

“He’s staying at the Hotel Irkutsk under the name of Alexander Potapov.  My man is going to watch him for the next twenty-four hours.  We will probably pick him up together early tomorrow morning after he leads us to whatever fountain of information brought him here.  That way we will be able to cut off the source as well.  I’m planning to interrogate Alex personally, and should have everything there is to know by noon.”

“Excellent.  See you at nine.”

Yarik closed his phone.  Victor was not going to be happy.

When the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, two people with dogs were waiting to get on.  They seemed ready to give him a piece of their minds for holding up the elevator, but obviously thought better of it when they got a look at him.  Regardless, Yarik had been made.  He had to abort.

Yarik cursed under his breath as he rode the elevator down with the dog walkers.  A pair of pooping pooches had just granted Orlov a stay of execution.

The Boardroom at Irkutsk Motorworks was as dilapidated as its product line.  Chairs once grand were now wobbly and frayed, the laminated table had long since given up its shine, and even the walls seemed somehow sad.  To
Vasily, this room represented Russia’s state of affairs, and the very sight of it steeled his will.  It was a disgrace, it was a shame, and it was about to change.  The people of Russia deserved better.

Igor and Yarik sat to
Vasily’s left and right.  The Knyaz were about to meet.  As the wall clock ticked nine, Vasily’s watch beeped twice, and the telephone rang.  He pressed the speaker button and began.  “Victor?”

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Good afternoon, Victor.  How are you?”

“I’m just fine, Sir.  Things are going well at my end.”

“Yes, we know.  Things are going well here too.  This afternoon I’ll be sitting down with the management of Irkutsk Motorworks to discuss the status of our
Acula
engine production.  They’ve already cranked out a dozen, and I expect to learn that they will be ready for full-scale production within the month.  But that’s just details.  Today I want to talk about the big picture.” 

Vasily
paused to let the tension build.  “I am pleased to announce that our technology transfer is virtually complete.”  Igor and Yarik knocked on the tabletop for Victor’s benefit, and Vasily continued.  “For this reason it is time to bring you,” Vasily looked at Igor and then Yarik, “fully up to speed on our American operations.  I’ve asked Victor to put together a technological overview and update.  He will walk you through it while I manage the overheads.”  With that, Vasily turned on the projector and switched off the lights.  “You’re on, Victor.”

“Thank you.  As
Vasily mentioned, our technology transfer is now complete.  We all know the concept behind Vasily’s master plan: using Russia’s core competencies in manufacturing and espionage to transform our nation into an economic superpower.  What you don’t know are the specifics of how we’re accomplishing that.  I’ll start today by giving you the thirty-second synopsis.

“
I began the quest for suitable technologies by encouraging speculation within the KGB ranks that the Americans were hiding their military industrial complex within what was traditionally civilian industry.  Once interest was aroused, I was able to manipulate my peers into doing the bulk of our research for us.  That research yielded a list of five projects suitable to Knyaz purposes.  I put a year into infiltrating and investigating the five companies that owned them, and then selected the three most suitable to our needs and capabilities.  I have spent the last four years stealing those technologies, transferring them to Russian hosts, and sabotaging the American inventors.”

Igor knocked his approval and then said, “What ever happened to the other two, Victor?” 

“One was disqualified because their patent estate was too profound and well established for us to pretend to have gotten there first.  The other was dismissed both because we didn’t have a factory that was a good match here in Siberia, and because we didn’t find a good candidate for Peitho coercion.”

Yarik raised his eyebrows.  “
No good Peitho candidate?  How is that possible?”

“The technology was tightly controlled by a cohort of elderly, single men.  They were in it for the science, rather than the money.  You could say that the project was their family.  We still could have found a way to make it work, but given that we already had three very ambitious projects, we decided to let it get away.
  Simple risk-versus-reward analysis.”

“I see.”

“Getting back to the three we did go with, the first was MicroComp.  Next slide please.  MicroComp was developing the next generation of microchip, one roughly a tenth the size of the current industry standard and ten thousand times faster.  I am pleased to announce that by the end of the day we will be back on track at MicroComp.

“You may recall that we recently had a hiccup when MicroComp management transferred our Peitho agent to another department, closing us out at a crucial final stage.  I quickly identified his replacement from among the team’s other members, and I implanted his daughter Monday.  I’ll call him tonight with the good news.  He should be able to get me the final code and schematics by Tuesday, and then I’ll send MicroComp spiraling downward with a series of inexplicable setbacks. 
The company anointed to produce MicroComp’s technology here in Russia is RuTek, located in Krasnoyarsk.  Before Knyaz AG acquired it, RuTek only produced elementary circuit boards.  Nothing special.  Two years from now they’ll be a member of the Global 100.”

“Excellent,”
Vasily said, as the two others knocked their approval.

“We ended up handling the second company, PhotoZ, differently from the others.  PhotoZ was still just a small group of closely-knit friends with a private company and tightly guarded revolutionary technologies—something like
the discarded company I mentioned earlier, the one with no Peitho candidate.  The difference with PhotoZ was that their technology, though not yet commercialized, was fully developed.  The icing on the cake was that PhotoZ had not yet filed for patents.”

“Why not?”  Igor asked.

“They figured their own secrets were safe and no one else was close so they were holding back their applications until just before launch in order to maximize patent life.”

“Big mistake.”

“Indeed.  In light of those circumstances, I decided to take them out altogether.  Before they filed.

“Luckily for us, PhotoZ President Paul Zeigler took the whole company to Jamaica on his yacht for Christmas.  That gave us the opportunity to steal everything in one midnight raid.  Then we blew up the yacht and burned the laboratory to the ground.
  Took us fourteen months to decrypt their work, but we’ve got it now.

“It’s my prediction that the technology we acquired free-and-clear that night will turn out to be
our greatest hit.  The photovoltaic bricks SibStroy is producing in Novosibirsk are not only going to bring the new Russia tens of billions of dollars, but I’m convinced they will also lead to a major reshuffling of global power.”

“How so?”  Yarik interrupted while
Vasily smiled a proud, understanding smile.

“Well,” Victor said, “given that we are going to make solar power the energy of the future, we are also going to greatly reduce the world’s dependence on petroleum products.  This will take the Middle East out of the power game.  Within a decade
the UAE will be populated by nomads again, and that’s only the beginning.

“Power is a zero-sum game, so each loss creates another gain.  I think we need to set aside some time in the near future to plan how President Karpov can best leverage the shifts and instability to reap those gains.  The transformation is not only going to be huge, it’s also going to be hugely complicated.  We need to start planning well in advance.”

“Agreed,” Vasily said.  “As a matter of fact, I’ve already got some guys looking into it under the pretext of advances in nuclear power.”

“I see,”
Victor said, his voice flat.  “Well, lets move on to the next slide then.  Now that the PhotoZ project is all wrapped-up, I just have United Electronics and its partner Irkutsk Motorworks on my list.

“Irkutsk Motorworks, as you will see when you take the tour after lunch, is already refining its
Acula
production.”

“Why Acula?”  Igor asked.  “Why call an aircraft engine a shark?  A ship’s motor perhaps, but…”

“You’ll understand once you see it.

“Anyhow, while Irkutsk Motorworks is ramping up Acula, United Electronics is losing ground on the UE-2000.  I
had arranged for their only prototype to explode amidst the engineering staff at the weekly test run, but a software glitch shut the engine down before my sabotage had a chance to kick in.  It was a setback, but a temporary one, I assure you.

“
I was, however, fully successful with another explosion.  This one took out Alex Ferris, the P.I. who had been snooping around after I eliminated his brother.

“O
n that positive note, gentlemen, I can conclude my report on the technology transfer.”

“I’m afraid it’s not really concluded, Victor.” 
Vasily’s tone was intentionally accusatory.  He didn’t like being hard on the boy, and he knew Victor’s life had not been easy, but this was a war and he was the general.

It took a moment for Victor to respond.
  “How so?”

“Yarik, why don’t you give Victor the news.
”

“As you wish.  We’re going to have to rename Mr. Ferris
Mr. Phoenix
, Victor, because he appears to have risen from the ashes.”

“What?”

“He arrived here, in Irkutsk, early this morning using a Soviet passport.  He’s at the Hotel Irkutsk now, under the name of Alexander Potapov.”

Vasily
held up his hand, indicating to Yarik that this was enough.  “Victor, what do you have to say about this?”

There was a painful silence before Victor came back on.  He was trying to sound calm and cool but an uncharacteristic inflection was obvious.  “I put a bomb on the ignition of the car that Ferris drives.  It blew up.  Those facts are certain.  The press identified the victim as Alexander Temogen Ferris of San Diego.  That is also certain.  For reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, I did not hang around to witness the explosion personally, so I cannot give you a first-hand account of Ferris’s fate, other than to say that I have not seen him since then.”

“It would appear that you haven’t seen him because he was on a plane.  But believe it or not, that may actually be a good thing.  Victor, tell me about Mr. Ferris.”

“Alexander Temogen Ferris grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, which is where his American father met his Russian mother.  He was a banker, she worked at our consulate.”

“I know it well,”
Vasily chimed in with a flickering smile.  “But please, continue.”

“So he’s a polyglot, got the Swiss German, French, and Italian
trio plus his native English and Russian.  He went through ROTC in college—same school as me—but got scooped up by the CIA upon graduation.  I suspect they wanted his native linguistic skills.  I know he wanted revenge.  The Libyans killed his parents when they bombed that hotel in Rome in seventy-four.  Don’t know if Ferris got revenge, but I know he worked primarily in the Middle East.  He left the CIA a year ago to open his own shop, Alex Ferris, International Private Investigations.”

“Any special skills?”

“He’s really good at getting on your nerves.  He’s a cocky bastard.  Aside from that, I understand the CIA put him through a lot of military training: jump school, SERE, stuff like that, leveraging the skills he developed in ROTC.”

“SERE?”

“Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape,” Yarik chimed in.  “My kind of stuff.  It’s the US Army’s course on surviving behind enemy lines—both before and after you’re caught.  They do a good job.”

“If your rookie caught him, it can’t be that good, Yarik.  Tell me, is he married?”

“No,” Victor said.  “No girlfriend either.  If he had one, I would have Peithoed her as insurance.  As far as I know he’s never had a serious relationship, although the women line up.”

“Is he gay?”

“No.  Just a loner I think.  He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Vasily
put both palms flat on the table and said “He’s perfect,” more to himself than anyone else.  “Yarik, I want you to go ahead with your plan to follow Ferris for the day to learn what he’s up to.  Then bring him back to Academic City for interrogation as discussed.  I also want you to ensure that Ferris is … undamaged.  I intend to put him to good use.”

Yarik did not inquire about the use.  He simply nodded and said, “As you wish.”

“Victor, we’ll let you know how this turns out.”

“Please.”

“I have other news, if we’re finished with this,” Yarik said.

“Go ahead.”

“I learned from an informant that one of our engineers here at Irkutsk Motorworks has a mistress down in Suhbaatar, a small town two hours south of here just over the Mongolian border.  He sneaks off to meet her there on the weekends.  She’s Mongol, so I don’t have a file on her, much less any control over her.  She could be a spy, or she could be a nobody, although I am strongly inclined toward the former because she’s way out of his league.  Given what the engineer knows, this could be a serious security leak.”  Yarik paused to look them each in the eye.

Vasily
knew Yarik sometimes felt a bit insecure about being the brawn rather than the brains of the operation.  He tended to use occasions like this to remind others of his importance.  That was fine with Vasily.

“Management confirmed that the engineer is expendable.  I am driving down to Suhbaatar this afternoon to deal with him and his mistress.”

“What about the informant?”  Vasily asked.

“I checked into him as well.  He’s an alcoholic looking for favors to help offset some other mistakes he’s made. 
He’s even more expendable than lover-boy.”