Tom Clancy: The Bear and the Dragon

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.

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 Switzerland 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.