‘Isn’t there a significance in Redin being present at the meeting?’
‘It was his job to be there, since the security changes.’
Ross nodded, accepting the qualification. ‘I’ll personally ask the CIA Director,’ he decided. ‘He’ll still lie if he wants to – and he probably will if it’s a cross-over that went wrong.’
‘I’d hoped you would,’ said Cowley honestly. The Director had a better chance than he did of being told something like the truth, if there was anything to tell.
‘We’ll give it another twenty-four hours before we make the Mafia connection,’ decided Ross. ‘And then only to Hartz. I don’t want anything to go public, making it official, so don’t mention it to the DC people in case it leaks.’
‘From what’s being published so far, the media don’t need any official confirmation of it being Mafia.’
‘Give me an opinion about the meeting with Pavlenko,’ insisted Ross. ‘Strict diplomatic formality? Or obstruction?’
Cowley hesitated, wanting to get the answer right. ‘Bordering on obstruction.’
‘You want me to bring pressure through the State Department for access to the embassy and Massachusetts Avenue?’
‘That was my initial intention: why I wanted to speak to you before I got back to Pavlenko and tried for access at my level,’ said Cowley. ‘But I’m not sure it would achieve any practical purpose. They’ll lie and conceal anything they don’t want to come out and I won’t have any authority to challenge them. And pressure from State wouldn’t cut much ice, either.’
The FBI Director looked surprised. ‘But you’re telling me the investigation will collapse unless there’s co-operation. So what’s your point?’
‘We need an official Russian investigator,’ insisted Cowley. ‘A professional who’ll know what we want and doesn’t buckle under officialdom.’
The Director shook his head, although not in refusal, looking quizzically across his desk. There was the vaguest of smiles. ‘And you know just the guy?’
‘If we’re right, we’re going to need him.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The strongest surviving legacy of Russia’s failed but struggling-to-resurge communism is the doctrine that nothing works – or will be allowed to work – unless there is a personal benefit between those who seek and those who provide: the what’s-in-it-for-me philosophy.
Ironically for someone whose total honesty now made him an outcast, Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov was an expert at the system. He had begun his education as a personal-fine-on-the-spot beat officer with ambition, and had manipulated favour-for-favour and reward-for-reward on his way through the ranks to uniformed colonel in charge of a Militia district, where he had established the tribute-accepting reign he had abdicated to Yevgennie Kosov. Danilov had, however, operated by a strict code of personally acceptable morality. He’d never become involved in the protection of vice rings or drug dealing or gun running, or with the violent, sometimes murderous enforcement of some black marketeers. Indeed, he actually investigated and prosecuted as many as he could.
With a strictly Russian logic, Danilov had never considered himself truly corrupt; he’d believed instead he was being practical and pragmatic in an environment beyond improvement or change. He had never been a member of the Communist Party – which protected the most corrupt of all – nor did he ever accept its political ideology. Most of all he despised its obvious inefficiency: if the party couldn’t provide, a man had to provide for himself, according to his own integrity. With the help, of course, of the always available entrepreneurs. The essential factor, Danilov’s justification for the compromises he’d made, was that no-one got hurt or suffered in the arrangements he reached with the people who could obtain things other people wanted. If those providers made a profit and others – like Danilov – benefited along the way from ensuring there was no official interruption, everyone benefited. It was simply a slight variation on the free market economy political leaders were today advancing as the salvation of the country.
Anatoli Nikolaevich Metkin’s disadvantage was not knowing of Danilov’s previous expertise and more particularly how Danilov could use the stultifying bureaucracy under which Metkin was trying to bury him.
The responsibilities Metkin had set out would have buried Danilov if he’d attempted to fulfil them absolutely. But they weren’t if he combined another Communist inheritance with the first, building his own bureaucratic mountain and threatening an avalanche to engulf others.
Metkin’s vagueness about Danilov’s new accommodation had been part of the theatre. The man personally showed Danilov to a long, L-shaped room on the same floor as his own secretariat to convey the gloating impression Danilov would always be under his supervision. The room was internal again, with no natural light, and completely bare of furniture. There were no bulbs in any socket, but there were jack points in the walls, for telephones. But there were no telephones.
Danilov began his fight back within minutes of Metkin leaving him, giving the man just enough time to re-enter his own suite before descending to the basement garage. There were six unused cars in their bays. The office in one corner, with I. A. Borodin lettered on the door, was a hutch of a room, misted in cigarette smoke and with used stubs smouldering in an ashtray. Borodin, who was bent over a magazine displaying melon-breasted, splay-legged women, didn’t look up.
‘I’m looking for the manager,’ announced Danilov. ‘I want a car. That Volga outside looks good.’
Borodin, a dumpy man with grease-encrusted fingernails, snorted a laugh, bringing his head up from the pornography. ‘ I allocate cars. Where’s your authorisation docket?’
‘You’ve had a memorandum from the Director…’ Danilov stretched his copy across the desk, in front of the other man.
Borodin blinked down at it, then smiled up. ‘So you’re the new Deputy Director! Your having a car depends upon availability, I’m afraid. Everything out there is committed. Sorry.’
The instructions how he should be treated had permeated throughout every floor, literally from the top to the bottom, realised Danilov. ‘You’ve also seen this?’ asked Danilov, extending Metkin’s order making him responsible for the supplies and facilities throughout the building.
Borodin nodded, not bothering to reply.
How well had he remembered the what’s-in-it-for-me approach, wondered Danilov. ‘The car pool, this garage, is a listed facility. All vehicle spares, petrol, the purchasing of new cars and the disposal of old vehicles is categorised under supplies. You are no longer allowed to order in your own name and under your own authority any parts, for any car. Nor will you be permitted to order a new car or dispose of an old one without reference and approval from me. All petrol purchasing will in future be by me. I will also want, weekly, details of all mechanics’ work sheets and all overtime claims. I have also been appointed overall controller of finance: no money will be paid on any overtime claim unless I have countersigned it. I want all authorisation dockets, at the end of every week, detailing use on official police business.’
Borodin’s mouth hung open almost as wide as the legs of the naked women he had been studying. ‘I don’t… I mean…’ stumbled the man who had just heard the threat of every bribe-accepting, price-inflating racket being taken from him.
At a conservative estimate, Danilov reckoned Borodin stood to lose about twenty times his official salary: probably more. He waved the handful of instructions from Anatoli Metkin, because it was important the cause of the catastrophe be identified from the outset. ‘The new Director is determined upon great change.’
‘I don’t want to get our relationship off on a bad footing,’ said Borodin anxiously.
‘Neither do I,’ assured Danilov.
‘You know anything about running garages? Cars?’
‘Nothing,’ admitted Danilov. ‘I’ll learn, in time.’