“What’re you going to get me,” said Swagger, “a new rocker?”
“Any one you want, even the deluxe version. But how about if we get your pal Nick Memphis off the Bureau shit list and back on the A team? Deputy director? That’s what he wants, right? What about if some real nice scoops fall Nikki’s way at FOX 5? That can happen. Does Miko want to go to Harvard, then Harvard Law? We hear she’s smart enough, but it isn’t just about being smart. We can make it happen. Yale, Princeton, Virginia. Where does she want to go? Be a shame for her to have to end up as a Boise State commuter student. What I’m saying is, if you’re good to us, we’ll be good to you. That’s all. If you say yes, you can drive out of here — that is, when I give you your distributor cap back. You go on back to your lives, and the good stuff starts happening. No monitoring, no observing, nothing like that. The whole thing runs on the honor system, because we know you’re honorable.”
“What if we say no?” said Reilly.
“Ouch,” said Renn. “I’d hoped that wouldn’t come up. You asked, so I guess I’ll answer. I’ve got five guys. Heavy-metal guys from some Moscow gangs. Dumber than stumps but packing a ton of heat. Boy, they love that 74, don’t they? To me it doesn’t hold a candle to the AR, but don’t tell them that. Anyhow, Jesus, don’t make me do this. It would be so tragic. These boys, you know, they like this shit. I’d have to let them loose. I have a secret to protect. It has to be protected. Here you are, standing on a pedestrian bridge in a Carpathian tourist trap, unarmed, and suddenly you’ve got six real bad operators on your case. I guess by the time I got them back here, you’d have at least an hour head start. I suppose you’d try and hide in the mountains, but an old guy with a stainless-steel ball where his hip used to be and a grandmother, over rough country, in what is basically complete wilderness, I don’t like your chances. Plus, we have a dog. I’d hate to see it happen. Guys, it’s up to you.”
Swagger looked at Reilly, who nodded.
“Tell him good,” said Reilly. “So he understands.”
That was it. He turned back to the younger man.
“We ain’t here for God, country, and baseball, and excuse me, I don’t think you are neither. We’re here for Mili Petrova, who was betrayed by everyone and everything. Nobody stood for Mili. She was all alone. Still she found a way to get her job done. But then the big boys got to her and crushed her and her memory. Now, seventy years later, you fucking birds come along, and you’re the same action. Crush Mili. Destroy Mili. She’s so goddamned inconvenient. Mili’s nothing. Mili’s disposable. Nobody cares, nobody knows, nobody gives a damn. Not this time. This time she’s got some pals. That’s us, the old man and the old lady. So if you want to go all black ops on us, we’ll go black ops. You better be good, sonny, because I may be old, but I’m still who I always was. I’m the sniper.”
CHAPTER 38
A bird tweeted from the trees nearby, except it wasn’t a bird at all, and with a crash and a stumble, a large body broke free in the clearing. It was the Peasant.
“Sergeant Mili,” he called in Ukrainian, “I have returned.”
Mili felt a surge of pure bliss. He wasn’t dead at all. Nobody could kill him. He smiled as he shambled closer. From inside the cave, she heard the Teacher stir, as the mild clamor had awakened him. The Teacher came out.
“He says the Germans are gone,” he translated.
“The Germans are gone?”
The Peasant began unpacking his sack, explaining in Ukrainian what he’d brought, though Mili could see for herself: bread, salted beef, vegetables.
Then he said something about the Germans — Mili understood the word — and the Teacher grabbed him, yelling in Russian, “How do you know the Germans have left?”
The Teacher translated the Peasant’s story: “I have been lying in brush for days. It was horrible. I made it to the outskirts of the village and took my chances with a man, and he’d lost sons to the Nazis. He volunteered to help. But he was bringing me food, and they nabbed him not a hundred meters from where I hid. They beat him and dragged him off, but I was too close to move. I had to wait that long day for them to come for me. They never did. I don’t know why.”
He went on with his story. He had lain there all night, and the next morning the Germans had sent out more patrols but also started their burning operation. They burned for days, and the Peasant watched as the flames came nearer and nearer to his hiding place. He had no idea why this burning was happening, though he knew that at nightfall he’d have to make a run for it. But at midafternoon yesterday, the German officer was called to his communications hut, and several minutes later the Germans commenced an emergency evacuation. They’d waited until two panzerwagens were loaded with troops, which headed out immediately. The stragglers all arrived, and the third panzerwagen left.
“Yes, we noted the same thing. I was almost discovered when the signal to withdraw came. I don’t know what it means,” said Mili. “Were you able to get a weapon, any weapon?”
“This, only this. No rifles about, but I’m told this fell off a German truck two years ago, early in the war, and an old lady recovered it.” He pulled his treasure from his bag.
It was an M24 hand grenade, the famous potato masher, a gray metal can affixed to a wooden shaft with a screwcap at the end, which, removed, allowed access to the twine pull-fuse inside.
“It’s no sniper rifle,” she said. “But it’s a weapon.”
The Teacher said, “Sergeant Petrova, it’s not enough. It’s just—”
“Here’s the plan,” she said. “You have a pistol. It’s small but lethal at close range. With that I’ll get close enough.”
“You have to be very close.”
“I will shoot him or one of their officers. I will shoot Germans until I run out of ammunition, then I will pull the cord on the grenade and join Dimitri and my father and brothers.”
“It seems folly to me,” said the Teacher. “You will not kill Groedl. At best, you kill a few Germans. In a war where millions have died, what’s a few more or less Germans in exchange for someone like you, with all you have to contribute?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
If she waited until the Russian offensive and turned herself in to the army, her failure at her mission might doom her. Her failure at Kursk might catch up with her. Her traitor-antagonist in Moscow might destroy her. There was no going back.
“I have to finish my job,” she said. “Survival is not the concern here.”
“All right, then,” he said, sighing. “Try this for a plan. You kill Groedl. We all escape. We are all glorious heroes. We meet every year on your dacha outside Moscow and eat caviar and drink very fine champagne and laugh ourselves sick because life with a full belly is the best revenge.”
“That’s a fairy tale,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” said the Teacher. “It can happen. It’s only a matter of guns.”
They looked at him.
“I know where there are guns,” said the Teacher. “Lots of them.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv IV
The four P.M. Mossad meeting on EconIntel was before the director himself, as well as the section chief and several other department heads. It was organizational theater, full of balding late-middle-aged men in open collars, smoking like fiends, arguing and sniping at each other with the brio that office warfare brings out.