Brian Freemantle - In the Name of a Killer

‘Which syndicate?’ asked Danilov, already guessing the answer.

‘The Dolgoprudnaya. They’re very organized. A brigade. Six months ago they not only stole my lorries, they broke the arms of both drivers and both mates. People are frightened to work for me now.’ Agayans leaned across the desk, adding more brandy to Danilov’s glass. ‘I need help, Dimitri Ivanovich. I want things to be like they were before. I wanted to come to you, but I didn’t want to inconvenience you at your new place.’

Danilov nodded his thanks for the discretion. ‘What about others like yourself?’

‘The same,’ confirmed Agayans.

A mess in which he did not want to become involved, decided Danilov, at once. He’d come, finally, intending merely to re-establish contact and benefit in a way he believed would still retain his integrity, offering to buy at a price the man would fix what he’d known Agayans would have for sale: barely illegal, according to Russian standards. This was an entirely new dimension: territory upon which he couldn’t intrude. Kosov controlled the Militia district now. He had no power here any longer: no excuse for interceding. So what was he going to do? What reason could he even give for his presence there, that evening? Where was his escape? Lamely, regretting the words as he uttered them and swerving as he spoke, Danilov said: ‘I’m sorry. I wish … I had no way of knowing …’

Agayans appeared to miss the mid-sentence change of direction. ‘So I am glad to see you. I know you’ll help.’

Danilov guessed the other man would spot an obvious lie with the quickness of the entrepreneur he was. Slowly Danilov said: ‘You know I am not in this district any more. My influence is limited: hardly any at all. I can speak to Kosov: will speak to him. But there can’t be any promises.’ It was the best he could do: all that he could do.

Agayans regarded him sombrely across the desk. ‘I see.’

‘Kosov is a friend,’ exaggerated Danilov, hopefully. ‘He will listen.’

‘He’s owned by the Dolgoprudnaya,’ stated Agayans, simply. ‘He’ll listen to them first.’

‘Let me speak with him.’

The Armenian lifted and dropped his shoulders, in resigned defeat. ‘You didn’t know about my troubles, before this evening. So why did you come again, Dimitri Ivanovich?’

Danilov shook his head, positively. ‘It doesn’t matter, not any more.’ Objectively he doubted that a new washing machine and access again to clothes she couldn’t buy in the shops would have helped his problems with Olga anyway. He was going to have to resolve the situation with his wife and Larissa soon. He wished he knew how.

Russian intelligence control every airport, so Colonel Kir Gugin knew within an hour about Angela Hughes’s departure for Washington forty-eight hours after her husband’s recall, aware even that it was Ralph Baxter who accompanied the solemn-faced woman to Sheremet’yevo. The following day, the exit of Pamela Donnelly, the other woman with whom Hughes had been involved, was recorded with equal efficiency.

Gugin decided the entire operation had gone perfectly. The Americans would be in turmoil. Should he leave it there? Or sow more seeds? There was no urgency.

Barry Andrews arrived outside the FBI building half an hour before the scheduled appointment, so he killed time in the nearest coffee-shop, which ironically was at the Marriott Hotel in which Cowley had stayed, a few days earlier. A proper hotel, he recognized, angrily: not like the shit-hole into which he’d been booked across the river, at Pentagon City. Wrong to show the annoyance, though: have to calm down before the interview. It didn’t matter where he was staying: only there for a couple of days.

It was still early when Andrews presented himself in the reception area of the Bureau headquarters. The clerk said Personnel were expecting him.

Nadia Revin enjoyed what she did and did it well. But entirely on her own terms, only accepting clients whom she approved in advance, after meeting or at least seeing them. She did not actually consider herself a whore. Whores didn’t choose. She did. It elevated her from the level of the streets. She had never ever taken a person physically ugly or misshapen. Or fat: fatness was ugly. And most certainly never a drunk. They always had to be Western, of course, preferably American because of the payment in dollars. Englishmen often carried dollars, too, which made them acceptable. French she found mean. And Italians too effusive: during lovemaking several had actually tried to kiss her, which she’d found repugnant.

Nadia was beautiful and knew it, although not conceitedly: how she looked and how she dressed, always in black-market Western clothes, was all part of a profession in which she was an expert and about which she had an ambition she was determined to achieve. She kept her hair blonde and extremely long, well past her shoulders, because men seemed to like it that way and it allowed her to wear several different styles, all of which she knew went well with the deep blackness of her eyes and her high Slavic cheek-bones. She was not big-busted and glad of it, because she thought of big breasts, which usually sagged, as she thought of fatness, although she knew some clients with tit obsessions were disappointed. As someone offended by fatness, Nadia was fastidious about her own weight, consulting scales daily, using her dollars on the uncontrolled open market to buy the vegetables and the fruit her one-meal-a-day diet dictated. Of course she never touched alcohol. Drugs, of every sort and so easily available on the streets of Moscow, were even more unthinkable: heavy, normal smokers were on her list of rejected bed partners. She was long-legged, and that appeared to heighten her almost to six feet, although she was no more than five foot nine inches tall. The impression was largely conveyed by the way she held herself, extremely upright, chin and head high, flat stomach held taut. From Western films and magazines, she knew it was a model’s stance: she’d practised for several months, until it was now quite natural and automatic.

She liked sex and knew all its variations. But while always ensuring every client was completely satisfied, she was as careful in its practice as she was about everything else. The dollars ensured Western-manufactured, black-market condoms which were far more sensitive than the thicker Russian product, and Nadia always insisted the men wore them, to protect herself from any sexual infections but particularly against AIDS. For the same reason she refused to engage in oral sex, although she never objected to a client performing cunnilingus upon her: she actually liked it. Occasionally men who described her figure as boyish wanted anal sex, which she allowed but again insisted upon a condom. She would not participate in group sex, even in a gathering as small as herself with two men, because she was aware of the physical dangers of the profession: she believed she could resist one man if a situation became ugly but not two. Neither had she ever participated in pornographic photographs, still or movie.

Nadia’s preference — indeed the basis of her ambition — was a career as a selective call-girl. She rarely lingered in the foyers of the Western-currency hotels, like other whores: that would have identified her with them and she wasn’t one of them. Instead she waited in the tasteful apartment on Uspenskii Prospekt, near the Hermitage Gardens, waiting for telephone calls from well rewarded receptionists at the Savoy and the Metropole and the Intourist and the Moskva. She only actually went to the places after receiving the telephone message and even then, initially only to meet her prospective client, before deciding whether to accept him.