There was no doubt now. The young man was heading his way. One more check. Fouad crossed the road and paused near another tree, glancing back. Yes, the young man had seen him and was now crossing. Fouad was not worried, but thoughts were coming quickly. If he is following me, he thought, why is he not more concerned about our distance at this point? One answer, the most reasonable and disturbing one, was that the man did not need close contact because he or someone else could pick Fouad up somewhere else. Which meant that they might well know about Kalinin Street.
Fouad passed through the line of trees to the pedestrian walkway and began a steady but unhurried walk toward Kalinin Street. The walk was long, and with every step he was more sure of the danger. There was no phone in the apartment, and even if there were, it would be madness to use it. So when he got to Vorovsky Street, instead of continuing, Fouad turned into Malaya Molchanovka Street and paused in front of the old house where the poet Mikhail Lermontov once lived. Fouad had no idea of the cultural importance of the place; he chose it because he remembered that the side of the building was hidden from the street. He paused, pretended to be looking for someone, checked his watch, and moved to the side of the building. Alexi Vukovo appeared a few minutes later, and he, too, moved around the building. Twenty seconds later, Fouad reappeared on the street.
He walked slowly and deliberately down the narrow street that would take him directly onto Kalinin. Five minutes later, he was at the door to the apartment. This was just about the time that Vukovo’s body was discovered by a hairdresser on his lunch hour. The members of World Liberation moved quickly, but the KGB, which had been watching the building, moved even faster. The death of Vukovo blew the operation. Drozhkin had no choice. He cursed the terrorists; he cursed his wife; he cursed Rostnikov, but he did so silently. On the surface he remained composed. He moved instantly to recover what he might from this failure. He told his assistant to bring in the terrorists immediately, and he made it clear that if they resisted, they were to be destroyed.
Shortly after one on that Friday afternoon, Robert, the Frenchman, stepped into the street carrying his belongings in a small sack. The first stutter of shots came before he was across the sidewalk, stitching a line across his chest.
Seven shut the door as Robert went down. She shouted into the street, “Death to the East and West!” but no one heard her over the roar of guns.
Fouad and Ali headed for the rear of the apartment where a small window opened on a side street. Neither expected it to be unguarded, but it was their only choice.
When the first burst of gunfire came from the apartment, Dmitri Kolomensk, a sergeant who had been on seven similar missions in his almost forty years, ordered his men to launch three grenades through the windows of the apartment.
Kolomensk thought he heard a woman scream something the instant before the first explosion. He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t care. This meant that he would have to prepare a tedious report and answer a series of questions put to him by Colonel Drozhkin. The hell with it, he thought, and ordered the men to launch more grenades through the apartment’s back windows. The entire operation took no more than four minutes.
“At least the building’s not burning,” Kolomensk said. “Go in and see what there is.”
The KGB agents found the bodies of four members of World Liberation, a variety of rubble, and the remnants of furniture. However, the sack that the Frenchman had dropped in the street proved to be a far more interesting discovery.
Kolomensk dropped the papers back into the sack, hurried to the waiting car, and told the driver to get back to Lubyanka as fast as he could.
The papers consisted of a series of black and white maps of Moscow with red circles penciled in at various locations. Kolomensk didn’t stop to consider what they might mean. He saw them only as a potential buffer between himself and the wrath of Colonel Drozhkin.
In spite of the noise, no curious onlookers appeared for perhaps ten minutes. It was best in Moscow not to be too near trouble. One so easily became a part of it. But curiosity is a marvelously strong motivator, and they eventually began to trickle past, kept in control by gray-uniformed policemen.
“A homemade bomb,” one man confided to a young woman who nodded as they moved slowly down the street.
“Gas explosion,” said a well-dressed man carrying a briefcase.
“Gas explosions are not accompanied by gunfire,” said a woman behind him, who was taking in as much as she could.
Behind this small group of gawkers came a woman with short, straight brown hair and very dark eyes behind black-framed glasses. She did not gawk with the others. In fact, she seemed to be a secretary or clerk who wanted nothing but to get past this road impediment and go to work. She did not need to look. The smell was familiar.
Now she would have to activate the alternative plan, and she would have to do it far more quickly than she had planned and with far less reliable people, but there was no longer any choice. She did not consider abandoning the project. There were too many reasons to go ahead. First, she had to maintain her reputation. Second, she wanted to do it. This was what she lived for, and she did it better, perhaps, than anyone else in the world. She knew how to destroy, and destroy she would.
A taxi would have taken her to the Rossyia Hotel faster than the metro, but she preferred the crowds. Instead of heading for the hotel, she crossed to the white-walled Church of Saint Anne and looked over at the glass monster. There was a risk, but risks had to be taken and controlled. She crossed Razin Street and headed for one of the doors to the hotel. The lobby looked safe enough, but she took no chances. She moved quickly to the lobby of the first tower though she knew the person she wanted was in the central tower.
No one in the lobby paid any attention as she walked past a group of Americans talking about a movie they had just seen.
“But,” said a thin, silver-haired man with a Yale accent, “must they make us pay by boring us?”
The dark-eyed one found the house phone and called the proper room.
“Oui?” came the voice of Monique Freneau.
“It’s me.” Monique Freneau said nothing, so she continued, “It will be necessary to make the purchase we discussed in France.”
The pause was long, and the dark-eyed woman looked around the lobby. She could not afford to stay long.
“I cannot,” said Monique in French.
“Tomorrow. Precisely at seven in the evening. There is nothing more to discuss.”
“I’m sorry, but that will be impossible,” Monique said, her voice breaking.
She had talked long enough. The phone might be tapped. The call could easily be traced to the lobby. The Frenchwoman’s refusal to cooperate had not come as a surprise. There were those who claimed commitment but who could not carry out that claim. In fact, this had been true of all but a handful of people she had encountered. Either the German or the Englishman might have said the same thing, but the lesson had to be taught somewhere.
She hung up, and strode across the lobby toward the restaurant, pretending to look for something in her large cloth purse. In fact, she was watching the phone she had just left. If the police or the KGB appeared there, she would hurry into the dining room, join someone at dinner, and make up a story drawn from the thread of a dozen tales that had served her in similar situations in the past. But no one pounced on the phone.
It took her ten minutes to make her way carefully to the central tower and up the stairway to the right floor. It took her another minute to assure herself that Monique was alone in her room. It took only a knock to get Monique to open the door, and it took only a pair of blows with the fist to kill her. The dark-eyed woman stepped back into the hall, closed the door, and hurried away.