Brian Freemantle - No Time for Heroes

‘Simple, dear sir!’ said Robertson, pleased with the question. ‘I’ve already told you. Size. It can only be a Makarov because this shell’… he produced the spent casing in its glassine bag… ‘won’t fit anything but a Makarov. They modified the shell. It’s fractionally larger than any other 9mm slug. You can’t fire an ordinary 9mm round from a Makarov, and the Makarov will only fire a Russian-manufactured 9mm bullet.’ He tossed the pouch up and down. ‘And that’s what this is. Guaranteed one hundred percent Russian.’

Reluctant as Cowley was to accept it, the ballistic evidence took them closer to a tie-in with the Russian Mafia. ‘What about casing marks?’

‘Pretty as a picture,’ promised Robertson.

‘So if we get a suspect weapon, we could make a match?’

‘We’d testify right up to the Supreme Court,’ assured the co-ordinating expert.

‘The effects list mentioned a notepad being tested for impression from previous writing?’ Cowley reminded.

‘A blank,’ said Robertson. ‘We put it through every test, chemical as well as electronic. Not a register.’

‘It was a new pad?’

‘Half used.’

‘Why didn’t something show?’

‘Because careful Mr Serov did not use a single piece at a time. The only way to keep the unused pages as clean as they are would have been to remove three or four leaves every time from beneath whatever he wrote.’

Which could also have been the action of an intelligence officer, accepted Cowley. ‘Anything else?’

‘We’re taking the clothes apart, for alien fibres, dust, whatever we might find. And we scoured the ground cleaner than it’s ever been: it’ll take a while to go through that. We’re not looking for anything specific, after all. Just something that shouldn’t be there.’

‘You still want that area sealed?’

Robertson shook his head. ‘What we haven’t got now we ain’t never going to get.’

Cowley remembered the blood-gouted shape of Serov’s body: before the covering tent was dismantled he’d advise the DC highway authority to clean it up, to prevent a macabre photograph appearing somewhere. ‘Thanks for identifying the weapon.’

‘Hope it helps,’ said the huge man.

‘So do I,’ said Cowley, sincerely. For the moment, it compounded the problem.

Leonard Ross sat hunched forward over a yellow legal pad, making notes like the trial judge he had once been, not interrupting Cowley’s briefing. Only when it finished did he say: ‘You think we’ve finally got to face it’s Russian Mafia?’

‘I don’t see how we can avoid it.’

‘What about defections and spying?’

‘I don’t buy it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Instinct. Which is fallible and why we’ll have to take it as far as we can.’

‘Isn’t there a significance in Redin being present at the meeting?’

‘It was his job to be there, since the security changes.’

Ross nodded, accepting the qualification. ‘I’ll personally ask the CIA Director,’ he decided. ‘He’ll still lie if he wants to – and he probably will if it’s a cross-over that went wrong.’

‘I’d hoped you would,’ said Cowley honestly. The Director had a better chance than he did of being told something like the truth, if there was anything to tell.

‘We’ll give it another twenty-four hours before we make the Mafia connection,’ decided Ross. ‘And then only to Hartz. I don’t want anything to go public, making it official, so don’t mention it to the DC people in case it leaks.’

‘From what’s being published so far, the media don’t need any official confirmation of it being Mafia.’

‘Give me an opinion about the meeting with Pavlenko,’ insisted Ross. ‘Strict diplomatic formality? Or obstruction?’

Cowley hesitated, wanting to get the answer right. ‘Bordering on obstruction.’

‘You want me to bring pressure through the State Department for access to the embassy and Massachusetts Avenue?’

‘That was my initial intention: why I wanted to speak to you before I got back to Pavlenko and tried for access at my level,’ said Cowley. ‘But I’m not sure it would achieve any practical purpose. They’ll lie and conceal anything they don’t want to come out and I won’t have any authority to challenge them. And pressure from State wouldn’t cut much ice, either.’

The FBI Director looked surprised. ‘But you’re telling me the investigation will collapse unless there’s co-operation. So what’s your point?’

‘We need an official Russian investigator,’ insisted Cowley. ‘A professional who’ll know what we want and doesn’t buckle under officialdom.’

The Director shook his head, although not in refusal, looking quizzically across his desk. There was the vaguest of smiles. ‘And you know just the guy?’

‘If we’re right, we’re going to need him.’

The strongest surviving legacy of Russia’s failed but struggling-to-resurge communism is the doctrine that nothing works – or will be allowed to work – unless there is a personal benefit between those who seek and those who provide: the what’s-in-it-for-me philosophy.

Ironically for someone whose total honesty now made him an outcast, Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov was an expert at the system. He had begun his education as a personal-fine-on-the-spot beat officer with ambition, and had manipulated favour-for-favour and reward-for-reward on his way through the ranks to uniformed colonel in charge of a Militia district, where he had established the tribute-accepting reign he had abdicated to Yevgennie Kosov. Danilov had, however, operated by a strict code of personally acceptable morality. He’d never become involved in the protection of vice rings or drug dealing or gun running, or with the violent, sometimes murderous enforcement of some black marketeers. Indeed, he actually investigated and prosecuted as many as he could.

With a strictly Russian logic, Danilov had never considered himself truly corrupt; he’d believed instead he was being practical and pragmatic in an environment beyond improvement or change. He had never been a member of the Communist Party – which protected the most corrupt of all – nor did he ever accept its political ideology. Most of all he despised its obvious inefficiency: if the party couldn’t provide, a man had to provide for himself, according to his own integrity. With the help, of course, of the always available entrepreneurs. The essential factor, Danilov’s justification for the compromises he’d made, was that no-one got hurt or suffered in the arrangements he reached with the people who could obtain things other people wanted. If those providers made a profit and others – like Danilov – benefited along the way from ensuring there was no official interruption, everyone benefited. It was simply a slight variation on the free market economy political leaders were today advancing as the salvation of the country.

Anatoli Nikolaevich Metkin’s disadvantage was not knowing of Danilov’s previous expertise and more particularly how Danilov could use the stultifying bureaucracy under which Metkin was trying to bury him.

The responsibilities Metkin had set out would have buried Danilov if he’d attempted to fulfil them absolutely. But they weren’t if he combined another Communist inheritance with the first, building his own bureaucratic mountain and threatening an avalanche to engulf others.

Metkin’s vagueness about Danilov’s new accommodation had been part of the theatre. The man personally showed Danilov to a long, L-shaped room on the same floor as his own secretariat to convey the gloating impression Danilov would always be under his supervision. The room was internal again, with no natural light, and completely bare of furniture. There were no bulbs in any socket, but there were jack points in the walls, for telephones. But there were no telephones.