Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“I’m good,” said the new man. “I’m wiped. I’ll probably just walk around, see what Moscow’s like these days.”

“Well, be careful, buddy,” the second officer said. “They got street crime now, you know. Some parts of the city you don’t want to walk around at night, being a foreigner and all.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said the new crew member.

The second officer stood up and said, “I gotta use the john.”

When he emerged from the lavatory, he heard a sharp rap on the plane’s exterior. A beefy uniformed agent from FSB Frontier Control came aboard.

“Passport,” the Russian barked.

The second officer handed his passport over and watched as the agent scanned it with a handheld device.

Then the second officer turned to look at his colleague, but the other pull-down seat was empty.

No one was there.

As the Russian entered the cockpit to check the passports of the pilot and co-pilot, the second officer looked around, bewildered. He got up, glanced into the cockpit, but the new guy wasn’t there either. He yanked open the door to the cargo compartment, but there was barely enough room for someone to squeeze in between the rows of igloos.

The guy wasn’t there.

Very strange.

Colonel Harry Middleton strolled along the Old Arbat, a cobblestone street that had been converted into a pedestrian mall crowded with shoppers and peddlers, bearded minstrels playing strange-looking guitars and teenagers just hanging out. There were souvenir shops selling ornate lacquer palekh boxes and Russian nesting dolls painted with the faces of foreign leaders and pop stars.

He’d visited Moscow once before during the height of the Cold War. Everything looked and felt different now: colorful instead of gray; boisterous and teeming instead of quiet and ominous. The rusty old Volgas and Zhigulis had been replaced by Ferraris and Bentleys. But the immense Stalinist tower that housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still there, at the end of the Arbat, just as it was half a century earlier. Maybe the changes didn’t really run all that deep after all.

The last twenty-four hours had been tense and exhausting, but he suspected the next twenty-four hours would be even worse.

Just getting into Moscow had involved calling in a stack of chits. Like an old friend from his time in Kosovo, an Apache helicopter pilot with the U.S. army’s 82nd Airborne Division who’d taken his retirement from the army and risen up the ranks of an international air-freight company-and was willing to add a fourth crew member to a Moscow flight. And another old friend, a wily KGB careerist named Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin, who’d been in Kosovo at the same time and became one of Middleton’s most-valued sources inside Russian intelligence.

They’d gotten him into Moscow, but Middleton knew that if anything went wrong, they wouldn’t be able to get him out.

Now Middleton found himself staring at the display window of an antiquities shop across the street from the old Praga Restaurant. The shop window was a jumble of dusty curios-brass kaleidoscopes and bad copies of icons and Russian-made Victrolas and shabby oil paintings.

He wasn’t inspecting the antiques, of course. He was watching the reflection in the plate glass. But so far he hadn’t detected any followers. It was only a matter of time before Russian intelligence took notice of a foreigner walking the streets of Moscow. A foreigner who’d somehow managed to slip into Russia without leaving any fingerprints in the databases. If he were brought in for questioning…

Well, it was better not to think about that possibility.

Middleton pulled opened the heavy front door. A shopkeeper’s bell tinkled pleasantly. No electronic entry alert here. The place looked, even smelled, a century old, musty and mildewed. Middleton half expected to see Aleksandr Pushkin, who once lived on this very street, browsing the wares.

Behind a crowded dusty glass counter was an elderly man with a pinched, severe face and oversized round black-framed glasses.

“ Dobryi dyen’ ,” the clerk said.

“Good afternoon,” Middleton replied. “I’m interested in icons.”

The clerk raised his eyebrows, and his big round glasses rose along with them. “Ah? Anything in particular, sir?”

“I’m particularly interested in the Novgorod school.”

The flash of recognition on the old man’s face disappeared quickly. “Yes, of course, sir,” he said. “They are some of our finest. But there are very few and they’re quite costly.”

“I understand,” Middleton said.

“Please,” the clerk said, gesturing toward a maroon velvet curtain that divided the front of the shop from his back office. “Please to follow me.”

It was dark in there, and even mustier, and dust motes swam in an oblique shaft of light that came in from between the curtains.

The Russian took out a battered leather briefcase from a file drawer and popped open the clasp. Inside, the case was lined with black egg-carton shell foam. Set snugly in a cutout at its center was a brand-new SIG Sauer P229, a compact semiautomatic pistol, with a matte black finish.

Middleton checked it quickly, pulled back the slide and was satisfied. “Chambered for 9mm,” he said.

The old clerk nodded, pursed his lips.

Middleton peeled five hundred-dollar bills from the roll of cash in his front pocket and set them on the counter. The Russian scowled and shook his head. He held up two fingers. “Two thousand,” he said.

“That was not the deal,” Middleton protested.

“Then I am so sorry that we cannot do business today,” said the Russian.

Middleton sighed, then put down another fifteen bills. He hated being held up this way, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice. “I assume you’ll throw in a box of ammo,” he said.

The Russian produced an ancient-looking, dog-eared box of Winchester cartridges from another drawer. About twenty or thirty bucks back home. “Today we make special deal,” the clerk said. “Only five hundred dollars.”

Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin was a Russian bear of a man, short and rotund, with a neatly trimmed goatee that adorned a fleshy, ruddy face. He extended his short arms and gave Middleton a hug.

“Garrold!” Korovin exclaimed. This was as close to “Harold” as Korovin was able to say. He escorted Middleton into a large, comfortable room that looked like an English gentleman’s club. Oriental carpets covered the floor; here and there were leather chairs in which doddering old men snoozed behind tented copies of Pravda . Except for the choice of newspaper, it could have been Boodle’s in London.

Actually, it was a men’s club of sorts, only the men were old KGB officers. In this nineteenth-century townhouse on a narrow street off Pyatnitskaya Street, former and retired Russian intelligence officers gathered over vodka and sturgeon and cabbage soup to reminiscence about the bad old days.

“Ruslan Maksimovich,” Middleton said, stumbling slightly over the unwieldy patronymic. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

In a lower voice, Korovin said, “I trust my friends at the airport treated you with the proper deference.”

Korovin, who’d spent more than three decades in the KGB, was a legendary operative who knew how to pull strings that most people didn’t even know existed. His web of contacts extended even into the facilities maintenance operations at Domodedovo Airport, where a refueling crew had smuggled Middleton off the cargo plane and into central Moscow. A risky infiltration, to be sure, but Middleton knew he could trust Korovin to make the plan go off flawlessly.

The old KGB man’s directions had been precise. And they’d been relayed to Middleton using the simplest, yet most modern, of all spy trade-craft techniques: Korovin had written an email, but instead of sending it, he’d saved it as a draft, on a Gmail account for which both men had the password. The email account was one of many set up by Wiki Chang, back at the Volunteers’ small office headquarters in Virginia. Intelligence agents no longer needed things like microdots and burst transmitters, not when they could use the good old Internet.