The Bear and the Dragon Read online

  “You still be the National Command Authority, oh great man,” Robby told him with a grin and a lower-Mississippi accent. “I just be da XO, which means Ah gits all the shit details.”

  “So, think of this as PCO School, Rob, and thank God you have a chance to learn the easy way. It wasn’t like that for me—”

  “I remember, Jack. I was here as J-3, remember? And you did okay. Why do you think I allowed you to kill my career for me?”

  “You mean it wasn’t the nice house and the drivers?”

  The Vice President shook his head. “And it wasn’t to be a first-black, either. I couldn’t say ‘no’ when my President asks, even if it’s a turkey like you. Later, man.”

  “See ya at lunch, Robby,” Jack said as the door closed.

  “Mr. President, Director Foley on three,” the speakerphone announced.

  Jack lifted the secure phone and punched the proper button. “Morning, Ed.”

  “Hi, Jack, we have some more on Moscow.”

  “How’d we get it?” Ryan asked first, just to have a way of evaluating the information he was about to receive.

  “Intercepts,” the Director of Central Intelligence answered, meaning that the information would be fairly reliable. Communications intelligence was the most trusted of all, because people rarely lied to one another over the radio or telephone. “It seems this case has a very high priority over there, and the militiamen are talking very freely over their radios.”

  “Okay, what do you got?”

  “Initial thinking over there is that Rasputin was the main target. He was pretty big, making a ton of money with his female ... employees,” Ed Foley said delicately, “and trying to branch out into other areas. Maybe he got a little pushy with someone who didn’t like being pushed.”

  You think so?“ Mike Reilly asked.

  “Mikhail Ivan”ch, I am not sure what I think. Like you, I am not trained to believe in coincidences,” replied Lieutenant Oleg Provalov of the Moscow Militia. They were in a bar which catered to foreigners, which was obvious from the quality of the vodka being served.

  Reilly wasn’t exactly new to Moscow. He’d been there fourteen months, and before that had been the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the New York office of the FBI—but not for Foreign Counter-Intelligence. Reilly was an OC—Organized Crime—expert who’d spent fifteen busy years attacking the Five Families of the New York Mafia, more often called LCN by the FBI, for La Cosa Nostra. The Russians knew this, and he’d established good relations with the local cops, especially since he’d arranged for some senior militia officers to fly to America to participate in the FBI’s National Academy Program, essentially a Ph.D. course for senior cops, and a degree highly prized in American police departments.

  “You ever have a killing like this in America?”

  Reilly shook his head. “No, you can get regular guns pretty easy at home, but not anti-tank weapons. Besides, using them makes it an instant Federal case, and they’ve learned to keep away from us as much as they can. Oh, the wiseguys have used car bombs,” he allowed, “but just to kill the people in the car. A hit like this is a little too spectacular for their tastes. So, what sort of guy was Avseyenko?”

  A snort, and then Provalov almost spat the words out: “He was a pimp. He preyed on women, had them spread their legs, and then took their money. I will not mourn his passing, Mishka. Few will, but I suppose it leaves a vacuum that will be filled in the next few days.”

  “But you think he was the target, and not Sergey Golovko?”

  “Golovko? To attack him would be madness. The chief of such an important state organ? I don’t think any of our criminals have the balls for that.”

  Maybe, Reilly thought, but you don’t start off a major investigation by making assumptions of any kind, Oleg Gregoriyevich. Unfortunately, he couldn’t really say that. They were friends, but Provalov was thin-skinned, knowing that his police department did not measure up well against the American FBI. He’d learned that at Quantico. He was doing the usual right now, rattling bushes, having his investigators talk to Avseyenko’s known associates to see if he’d spoken about enemies, disputes, or fights of one sort or another, checking with informants to see if anyone in the Moscow underworld had been talking about such things.

  The Russians needed help on the forensic side, Reilly knew. At the moment they didn’t even have the dump truck. Well, there were a few thousand of them, and that one might have been stolen without its owner/operator even knowing that it had been missing. Since the shot had been angled down, according to eyewitnesses, there would be little if any launch signature in the load area to help ID the truck, and they needed the right truck in order to recover hair and fibers. Of course, no one had gotten the tag number, nor had anyone been around with a camera during rush hour—well, so far. Sometimes a guy would show up a day or two later, and in major investigations you played for breaks—and usually the break was somebody who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Investigating people who knew how to stay silent was a tough way to earn a living. Fortunately, the criminal mind wasn’t so circumspect—except for the smart ones, and Moscow, Reilly had learned, had more than a few of them.

  There were two kinds of smart ones. The first was composed of KGB officers cut loose in the series of major reductions-in-force—known to Americans as RIFs—similar to what had happened in the American military. These potential criminals were frightening, people with real professional training and experience in black operations, who knew how to recruit and exploit others, and how to function invisibly—people, as Reilly thought of it, who’d played a winning game against the FBI despite the best efforts of the Bureau’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence Division.

  The other was a lingering echo of the defunct communist regime. They were called tolkachi—the word meant “pushers”—and under the previous economic system they’d been the grease that allowed things to move. They were facilitators whose relationships with everyone got things done, rather like guerrilla warriors who used unknown paths in the wilderness to move products from one place to another. With the fall of communism their skills had become genuinely lucrative because it was still the case that virtually no one understood capitalism, and the ability to get things done was more valuable than ever—and now it paid a lot better. Talent, as it always did, went where the money was, and in a country still learning what the rule of law meant, it was natural for men with this skill to break what laws there were, first in the service of whoever needed them, and then, almost instantly afterward, in the service of themselves. The former tolkachi were the most wealthy men in their country. With that wealth had come power. With power had come corruption, and with corruption had come crime, to the point that the FBI was nearly as active in Moscow as CIA had ever been. And with reason.

  The union between the former KGB and the former tolkachi was creating the most powerful and sophisticated criminal empire in human history.

  And so, Reilly had to agree, this Rasputin—the name meant literally “the debauched one”—might well have been part of that empire, and his death might well have been something related to that. Or something else entirely. This would be a very interesting investigation.

  “Well, Oleg Gregoriyevich, if you need any help, I will do my best to provide it for you,” the FBI agent promised.

  “Thank you, Mishka.”

  And they parted ways, each with his own separate thoughts.

  CHAPTER 1

  Echoes of the Boom

  So, who were his enemies?” Lieutenant Colonel Shablikov asked.

  “Gregoriy Filipovich had many. He was overly free with his words. He insulted too many people and—”

  “What else?” Shablikov demanded. “He was not blown up in the middle of the street for abusing some criminal’s feelings!”

  “He was beginning to think about importing narcotics,” the informant said next.

  “Oh? Tell us more.”

  “Grisha had contacts with Colombians. He met them in Switze
rland three months ago, and he was working to get them to ship him cocaine through the port of Odessa. I heard whispers that he was setting up a pipeline to transport the drugs from there to Moscow.”

  “And how was he going to pay them for it?” the militia colonel asked. Russian currency was, after all, essentially valueless.

  “Hard currency. Grisha made a lot of that from Western clients, and certain of his Russian clients. He knew how to make such people happy, for a price.”

  Rasputin, the colonel thought. And surely he’d been the debauched one. Selling the bodies of Russian girls—and some boys, Shablikov knew—for enough hard currency to purchase a large German car (for cash; his people had checked on the transaction already) and then planning to import drugs. That had to be for cash “up front,” too, as the Americans put it, which meant that he planned to sell the drugs for hard currency, too, since the Colombians probably had little interest in rubles. Avseyenko was no loss to his country. Whoever had killed him ought to get some reward ... except someone new would certainly move into the vacuum and take control of the pimp’s organization ... and the new one might be smarter. That was the problem with criminals. There was a Darwinian process at work. The police caught some—even many—but they only caught the dumb ones, while the smart ones just kept getting smarter, and it seemed that the police were always trying to catch up, because those who broke the law always had the initiative.

  “Ah, yes, and so, who else imports drugs?”

  “I do not know who it is. There are rumors, of course, and I know some of the street vendors, but who actually organizes it, that I do not know.”

  “Find out,” Shablikov ordered coldly. “It ought not to tax your abilities.”

  “I will do what I can,” the informant promised.

  “And you will do it quickly, Pavel Petrovich. You will also find out for me who takes over Rasputin’s empire.”

  “Yes, Comrade Polkovnik Leytnant.” The usual nod of submission.

  There was power in being a senior policeman, Shablikov thought. Real human power, which you could impose on other men, and that made it pleasurable. In this case, he’d told a mid-level criminal what he had to do, and it would be done, lest his informant be arrested and find his source of income interrupted. The other side of the coin was protection of a sort. So long as this criminal didn’t stray too far from what the senior cop found to be acceptable violations, he was safe from the law. It was the same over most of the world, Lieutenant Colonel Yefim Konstantinovich Shablikov of the Moscow Militia was sure. How else could the police collect the information they needed on people who did stray too far? No police agency in the world had the time to investigate everything, and thus using criminals against criminals was the easiest and least expensive method of intelligence-gathering.

  The one thing to remember was that the informants were criminals, and hence unreliable in many things, too given to lying, exaggeration, to making up what they thought their master wanted to hear. And so Shablikov had to be careful believing anything this criminal said.

  For his part, Pavel Petrovich Klusov had his own doubts, dealing as he did with this corrupted police colonel. Shablikov was not a former KGB officer, but rather a career policeman, and therefore not as smart as he believed himself to be, but more accustomed to bribes and informal arrangements with those he pursued. That was probably how he had achieved his fairly high rank. He knew how to get information by making deals with people like himself, Klusov thought. The informant wondered if the colonel had a hard-currency account somewhere. It would be interesting to find out where he lived, what sort of private car he or his wife drove. But he’d do what he was told, because his own “commercial” activities thrived under Shablikov’s protection, and later that night he’d go out drinking with Irina Aganovna, maybe take her to bed later, and along the way find out how deeply mourned Avseyenko was by his ... former ... employees.

  “Yes, Comrade Polkovnik Leytnant,” Klusov agreed. “It will be as you say. I will try to be back with you tomorrow.”

  “You will not try. You will do it, Pasha,” Shablikov told him, like a schoolmaster demanding homework from an underachieving child.

  It is already under way,” Zhang told his Premier.

  “I trust this one will go more smoothly than its two predecessors,” the Premier replied dryly. The risks attached to this operation were incomparably greater. Both previous times, with Japan’s attempt to drastically alter the Pacific Rim equation, and Iran’s effort to create a new nation from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic had not done anything, just ... encouraged, behind the scenes. This venture, though, was different. Well, one could not really expect great things to happen on the cheap, could one?

  “I—we have been unlucky.”

  “Perhaps so.” A casual nod as he switched papers on his desk.

  Zhang Han San’s blood went a little cold at that. The Premier of the People’s Republic was a man known for his detachment, but he’d always regarded his Minister Without Portfolio with a certain degree of warmth. Zhang was one of the few whose advice the Premier usually heeded. As indeed today the advice would be heeded, but without any feeling on the part of the senior official.

  “We have exposed nothing and we have lost nothing,” Zhang went on.

  The head didn’t come up. “Except that there is now an American ambassador in Taipei.” And now there was talk of a mutual-defense treaty whose only purpose was to place the American navy between the two countries, regular port visits, perhaps even a permanent base (to be built entirely, most certainly, from Taiwanese money) whose only purpose, the Americans would innocently say, was merely to be a replacement for Subic Bay in the Philippines. The economy on Taiwan had exploded after the renewal of full U.S. diplomatic recognition, with an influx of massive new capital investments from all over the world. Much of that money would—and should—have come to the PRC, except for the change in America’s outlook.

  But the American President Ryan had taken his action entirely on his own, so the intelligence services claimed, contrary to political and diplomatic advice in Washington—though the American Secretary of State, that Adler man, had reportedly supported Ryan’s foolish decision.

  Zhang’s blood temperature dropped another degree or so. Both of his plans had gone almost as he’d calculated they should, hadn’t they? In neither case had his country risked anything of consequence—oh, yes, they’d lost a few fighter aircraft the last time around, but those things and their pilots regularly crashed to no purpose anyway. Especially in the case of Taiwan, the People’s Republic had acted responsibly, allowing Secretary Adler to shuttle directly back and forth between Beijing and its wayward province across the Formosa Strait, as though giving them legitimacy—something obviously not intended by the PRC, but rather as a convenience to aid the American in his peacemaking task, so as to appear more reasonable to the Americans ... and so, why had Ryan done it? Had he guessed Zhang’s play? That was possible, but it was more likely that there was a leak, an informer, a spy this close to the summit of political power in the People’s Republic. The counterintelligence agencies were examining the possibility. There were few who knew what emerged from his mind and his office, and all of them would be questioned, while technical people checked his telephone lines and the very walls of his office. Had he, Zhang, been in error? Certainly not! Even if his Premier felt that way ... Zhang next considered his standing with the Politburo. That could have been better. Too many of them regarded him as an adventurer with too great an access to the wrong ear. It was an easy thing to whisper, since they’d be delighted to reap the profits from his policy successes, and only slightly less delighted to pull away from him if things went awry. Well, such were the hazards of having reached the summit of policy-making in a country such as his.

  “Even if we wished to crush Taiwan, unless we opted for nuclear weapons, it would require years and vast amounts of treasure to construct the means to make it possible, and then it would
be a vast risk to little profit. Better that the People’s Republic should grow so successful economically that they come begging to us to be let back into the family home. They are not powerful enemies, after all. They are scarcely even a nuisance on the world stage.” But for some reason, they were a specific nuisance to his Premier, Zhang reminded himself, like some sort of personal allergy that marked and itched his sensitive skin.

  “We have lost face, Zhang. That is enough for the moment.”

  “Face is not blood, Xu, nor is it treasure.”

  “They have ample treasure,” the Premier pointed out, still not looking at his guest. And that was true. The small island of Taiwan was immensely rich from the industrious effort of its mainly ethnic-Chinese inhabitants, who traded nearly everything to nearly everywhere, and the restoration of American diplomatic recognition had increased both their commercial prosperity and their standing on the world stage. Try as he might, wish as he might, Zhang could not discount either of those things.

  What had gone wrong? he asked himself again. Were not his plays brilliantly subtle ones? Had his country ever overtly threatened Siberia? No. Did even the People’s Liberation Army’s leadership know what the plans were? Well, yes, he had to admit to himself, some did, but only the most trusted people in the operations directorate, and a handful of senior field commanders—the ones who would have to execute the plans if the time ever came. But such people knew how to keep secrets, and if they talked to anyone ... but they wouldn’t, because they knew what happened to people who spoke of things best left unspoken in a society such as theirs, and they knew that the very air had ears at their level of “trust.” They hadn’t even commented on the draft plans to anyone, just made the usual adjustments in the technical arrangements, as senior officers always tended to do. And so, perhaps some file clerks had the ability to examine the plans, but that was exceedingly unlikely as well. Security in the PLA was excellent. The soldiers, from private to the lower general ranks, had no more freedom than a machine bolted to the factory floor, and by the time they reached senior rank they’d mainly forgotten how to think independently, except perhaps in some technical matters, like which sort of bridge to build over a particular river. No, to Zhang they might as well have been machines, and were just as trustworthy.