"Jesus." Gray stared at the photograph. "I wouldn't want to run into this guy in a dark alley."
With nothing but hard angles and sudden planes, Nikolai Trusov's face seemed chopped out of a log with an axe. The face was over-featured, with a broad and blunt nose and a jutting long chin with a slightly off-center cleft. His cheekbones were so rocky they threw shadows on the face below. Blond eyebrows had vanished in the photographer's flash. The brows were low and sunk deeply, and under them were flat, expressionless eyes. His forehead appeared too small because curly yellow hair was brushed forward. Hair on the sides of his head was short. His ears were button-sized and tight against his head. His mouth was crooked, and the left side might have been about to smile while the right was set in a stiff pedagogic line. It was a brawler's face, a dangerous face.
"What happened to him, do you think?" Adrian pointed at Nikolai Trusov's forehead. "A meat cleaver, looks like."
"He took a mean shot, that's for sure."
Trusov's forehead had a shallow trench in it, a furrow that ran from an inch above his right eye to disappear under the hairline. The groove was covered with puckered skin three shades darker than the rest of his face. The bone on both sides of the furrow was irregular, with chinks and facets. Skin alongside the fracture was pleated from surgeon's stitches. Gray guessed that the depression was half an inch below the curve of his forehead and crown. The trough and the corrugated skin added to the asymmetry and dissonance of Trusov's face.
"This injury would've killed most people," Gray said. "Did General Kulikov give an explanation?"
"So far he has found only Trusov's Spetsnaz file."
"Aren't a Russian soldier's files all in one place?"
"You'd think so, but not this guy, and I don't know why." She slid out a stack of paper from the envelope. "These were also faxed to me this morning from General Kulikov. It's Trusov's Soviet Army record from 1977 when he joined the Spetsnaz to 1988 when he left it."
"But he was in the Red Army before and after those dates, wasn't he?" Gray's wet shirt was clinging to his back, chilling him. His daughters were still staring at Adrian.
"He was already a Red Army sergeant when he entered Spetsnaz training, according to this."
She flipped through several pages. They were copies of military forms, some with unit formation signs printed alongside the letter-head. They were in Russian and Gray could make out nothing from the mass of Cyrillic letters. General Kulikov was being cooperative, but even so a number of lines had been blacked out with a heavy pen on each page before they were faxed to the United States.
She went on. "In 1988 he was transferred from the 1st Brigade, 1st All-Arms Army of the North West Front to a Spetsnaz training brigade in the North Caucasus military district at Rostov. He trained for eighteen months at Rostov. He was taught explosives, hand-to-hand combat, communications, parachuting, survival, and the like. But he taught rifle marksmanship."
"So he was already a shooter?"
She held up a page from the file, as if he could read it. "Trusov won a gold medal at the 1976 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck in the biathlon. Shooting and skiing."
"That's an asinine sport."
She looked up from the file. "You'd think a sniper like you would love that sport."
"I'm talking about the skiing part of it. If God wanted man to ski He wouldn't have invented the snowmobile."
After a moment she said, "Is that another attempt to be funny?"
"Probably." Gray exhaled slowly. "Where did Trusov go after his commando training in Rostov?"
"To a Spetsnaz company in the 3rd Army of the GSFG, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. He was posted there until a little while after the Afghanistan invasion, when his Spetsnaz company was transferred to the Turkestan Military District. The file shows he was in Afghanistan four years. That's where he killed the seventy-eight people."
"They weren't people," Gray corrected her. "They were enemy soldiers."
"I see now why you went to law school," she said with a school-teacher's inflection. "To learn to distinguish, which is what law school is all about. Not to understand, not to appreciate, not to sympathize, but to distinguish. It is one of the lesser talents."
"Were I to give it any thought at all," he said with seeming indifference, "I would conclude you are a bonebrain."
Her face turned a gratifying pink, and for a moment Adrian appeared to be chewing on her tongue. Then she said in the tone and cadence of a typewriter, "I'm not going to get into a kindergarten name-calling match with you. I know Russians and you know sniping. You and I are going to concentrate on finding Nikolai Trusov."
"I was being childish," Gray said equably. "But that doesn't mean you aren't a bonebrain."
Gray had a good nose, a trained nose. It had saved his life more than once in Vietnam. Adrian was wearing a perfume that was somehow both faint and arresting. The fragrance was not flowery but was darker and more veiled, maybe an exotic spice. It seemed to be dulling his senses. Calling her names, for Christ sake.
She gamely continued. "Here's more bad news. Nikolai Trusov has obtained a copy of your Marine Corps file, the same one I've read."
Until that revelation, a slight — admittedly an exceedingly slight — chance had remained that the Russian sniper's actions were unconnected to Gray, that the killer's plan, if indeed he had a plan, was impersonal, and that mad coincidence was playing a ghastly trick on Gray. No longer. Intelligence — knowing the enemy — was the heart of sniping. The Russian now knew more about Gray than Gray had let anyone learn in twenty-five years.
"How'd he get the file?"
"A Freedom of Information Act request, just like anybody else can get your file." She slid the photograph and file back into the envelope. "I mentioned that the fingerprints have produced results. Pete Coates and I have been wondering how Trusov is funding himself. Soviet soldiers are usually penniless, and even the Red Army sponsorship that sent his father and him here for the surgery would not have given him enough money to rent an apartment like he did and do the traveling he is doing."
Gray rubbed the back of his neck. He never used to get stiff like this, not playing high school football or in boot camp.
"Two weeks ago a cash machine near Great Neck was smashed and over ten thousand dollars was taken."
"I read about it in the paper. The robber used a backhoe."
"Instead of a hoe there was a pneumatic breaker hammer, like a big jackhammer, installed on the hydraulic arm. A Con Ed crew had been using the John Deere to tear up a concrete road to install electric lines underground. Sometime during that night he hotwired the tractor and drove it a block to a First New York cash machine. He used the breaker hammer to tear away the front panel and spring the money cartridge from the machine, then rupture the cartridge. He walked away with the money."
"Fingerprints?"
"The robber did nothing to hide his prints. They were all over the John Deere. But the FBI drew a blank when they tried to match them."
Gray said, "So when General Kulikov sent you Trusov's prints, you forwarded them to the FBI?"
"All this morning. The FBI just reported that Trusov is the cash machine robber. So we know how he bankrolled himself."
They sat for a moment watching Joe Leonard lashing into a heavy bag. Then she asked, "Have you ever been to Russia?"