He looked at his watch.
“And we need to do it fast.”
“Yes, sir,” said Uckley, swallowing.
He looked hard at Uckley. The young man returned the stare, but seemed scattered, his thoughts not quite together.
“You’ve had SWAT training, I assume?”
“Yes,” Uckley said, barely remembering the frenzied week four years earlier at Quantico.
“All right, good. You’re clear? I mean, absolutely clear? There’s a mother and two little girls in that house. I’m sure they are lovely people. But you must understand what’s important, you and the men you take into that house.”
Uckley looked away, through the window. The mountain gleamed.
“The men in that house are important. The mother, the two girls—” Dick hesitated a second, then plunged ahead in full adult awareness of the ruthless thing he was about to do. Did he have to say it, actually put it in words? Uckley shot a squirrely look back at him. Dick could tell from the hurt and confusion lurking in his eyes that yes, he did have to say it.
“Look, I have two daughters myself. There’s nothing more precious to me in the world than the two of them, and certainly that’s true for this Hummel too. But you’ve got to think hard here, Uckley. You have to see through to what’s important. You have to weigh the potential immediate loss against the other, far greater, far more devastating loss. That’s what we’re paid to do.”
Like an idiot, the young federal agent simply looked at him.
“The mother and the two girls aren’t important. You may have to lose them. If it comes to it, you’ll have to lose them rather than risk losing the prisoners. The Delta people are very good; they’ve been trained to take down a building and set free the hostages. But they’ll shoot for the head, and you’ve got to stop them. You’ve got to take prisoners, Jim. Do you understand that?”
Uckley said he did.
The answer to all problems is vodka, Gregor Arbatov had decided. It was Russia’s main contribution to the culture of the world, more important than Tolstoi, more passionate than Dostoevski, more lasting than world communism.
He now sat with a glass of it in a dark bar called Jake’s on Route 1 in the seedy little Maryland town of Laurel, not far from Columbia. He was exceedingly happy. A beautiful American lady of perhaps sixty with perhaps half her own teeth and none of her own hair and a tattoo had just brought him a refill, with a golden smile and a hearty laugh. He loved her. She was a saint. Saint Teresa of the Order of the Vodka. She reminded him of his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in years.
But what he loved most was what the vodka did to him. It blurred his terrors, it mellowed his brain. It seemed to leak straight through his skull and penetrate to the very center of the organ itself, mollifying, subjectifying, calming, soothing, as it went.
“Ah, Miss. Another, please.”
“Sure, hon. You surely do sop it up.”
He smiled. His teeth were not terribly impressive either. Her eyes were merry.
“You kinda cute,” she said, handing the glass down to him. “Bartender’s a close personal friend of mine. He said this one’s on the house.”
Gregor smiled. Somewhere under the bulge of his gut that hung down over his lap his dick stirred.
But then he thought of young Klimov. Trying to kill him. And his dick withered.
Clouds came across his wide face; fear flashed in his little eyes. The waitress was gone. The only thing that was there was the whisper of the blade as it darted by him, and the thrum of its vibration as it plunged into the car roof.
Gregor blinked, came out of it, and dived into the vodka.
Yes, so much better.
Gregor sat back. He had figured it out.
It was Klimov. Really, he could almost sympathize with the younger man. He wished to move his least productive agent out. He could not simply fire him, the time had passed for that, he had fired too many others, if he fires him then it reflects poorly on Klimov. Therefore, with a little ingenuity, perhaps aided by the intercession of his powerful uncle Arkady Pashin of GRU, he penetrates the Pork Chop security arrangements, sets up a phony meet, and then arranges for his rotten apple to die.
The results are interesting and beneficial to everyone except poor Gregor, who in theory is now dead, six inches of Spetsnaz blade cleaving his fat chest. But Klimov has eliminated his bad apple in a dramatic way, with a minimum of personal embarrassment. He can be protected in this maneuver by the importunings of Pashin, watching over his little nephew, wielding his great power and influence like a sword. At the same time, Pork Chop has been discredited. To what purpose? Perhaps whoever controls Pork Chop has accumulated too much power in the higher ranks and must therefore be destroyed by a rival. Surely the rival in question would be, again, Pashin.
Good God, realized poor Gregor, he had been targeted for execution by a senior general in the GRU, one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.
There was only one answer: vodka.
“Miss. Another one.”
Gregor swallowed the liquid. It dashed down his throat. He felt his face burning red. He looked at the empty glass in his fat hand.
Lumbering with agility that might have surprised his many enemies in this world, Gregor made it to the men’s room, pulled out a pocketful of change, and with studied labor and enormous effort called the one person in the world he felt he could trust, Magda Goshgarian.
The phone rang time and time again. Finally, her groggy voice came on.
“Magda!”
“Tata! I am stunned. What on—”
“Magda, listen please. I need a favor. I will be continually in your service if you can help me. Please, I cannot begin to tell you how—”
“Stop sniveling, Tata. Are you drunk? You sound pathetic.”
“Magda, something is going on.”
“Yes, it is. Young Klimov wants to bite your head off.”
“No, something else. Magda, I am — indisposed.”
“Is it a woman, Tata? Some American bitch with a baby in her belly that came from your tiny dick?”
“No, no. It has nothing to do with women. It has to do with the fact that I must stay clear of the embassy for a few days now while I sort some matters out.”
“You’re going over. Tata, don’t you implicate me, they are watching me too. I swear, Tata, if you go, you’ll leave such a mess—”
“No, I swear. I swear on my father’s grave and the great Marx’s image that I’ll remain true. It’s just that for technical reasons, I am indisposed tonight. Alas, I have cipher clerk duty in the Wine Cellar tonight. I—”
“Tata, I—”
“I know you did it last night. But since you have therefore rested today, you are therefore automatically my replacement. I call merely to ask you to take the duty for me. You can tell Klimov I called you from my afternoon pickup and that it was going very slowly for me and that I was afraid therefore I would not be back in time and that I therefore asked you to take the watch. And that you have not heard from me since. I think you’ll find him surprisingly agreeable.”
“Tata, I—”
“Please, darling. I’ll buy you a dinner. I’ll buy you the most extraordinary dinner in some ridiculously expensive Georgetown restaurant. I have a little squirrel fund hidden away, that’s all, and I can afford it, I promise.”
“Tata—”
“Magda, you know you cannot deny me one single thing. It is not your nature to deny me.”