Laura Caldwell - The Good Liar

Michael stepped outside the hotel and walked to Red Square, where gray snow edged itself along the perimeter. He walked through the square, admiring, as he always had, the brightly colored, funhouse cupolas of St. Basil’s. The square was different now than it used to be. In the past, the cathedral and the Kremlin stood stark against the bleakness that used to permeate Moscow, making the square almost eerie, sinister. Now the square boasted a skating rink and a new mall filled with designer stores. Michael preferred the old Red Square, but it remained an excellent place to stroll and to search for a tail.

He crossed the square twice, stopping to gaze occasionally at the star atop the Kremlin tower. Yet he was always aware of all the people around him, most of them tourists, along with stylish Russian youths and a few babushkas seeking alms. Each person who came into his sightline turned away in time. He wasn’t being tailed. At least not right now.

Michael walked to the metro station with its arched marble doorways, bronze sculptures, ornate chandeliers and vaulted, chrome ceilings. Michael had always been intrigued by the stations. They’d been Stalin’s pride, built in the thirties, forties and fifties, and they were intended to display preeminent Soviet architecture and art, to show the privilege of the Russian lifestyle. Whether the opulent stations were optimistic, delusional or simply deceiving, he had never been able to decide, but he could certainly see their beauty.

He took one of the long, long escalators downward, studying the mosaic walls while methodically glancing over his shoulder, memorizing the faces of the other commuters. At the landing, he looked at a portrait of Stalin receiving flowers from a group of children. He walked to another lengthy escalator and took it farther into the bowels of Moscow. The landing boasted a mosaic of Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, made of colored glass.

The Muscovites pushed past Michael, no one stopping to notice the art, much less him. Two minutes later, he boarded a train, rode two stops and disembarked. Once street side again, he held out his hand and waited for a car to stop. Muscovites didn’t take cabs, they simply waited until a driver headed in their direction pulled over. A fare would be negotiated, usually a few hundred rubles, and off they went. It was sort of an elevated level of hitchhiking.

A car pulled over. Inside, it was cramped and smelled of cigarettes. The driver was a grim woman in her sixties who wanted no talk, only cash, which was fine for Michael.

After a mile, Michael asked her to stop. He took a minibus in the opposite direction. He got out after a few miles and took another metro ride on a different line, all the while calmly watching anyone he came into casual contact with. There was no indication that he was being tailed. Even if he was, the Moscow Metro was the best place in the world to lose a tail because there were so many levels in the stations, so many trains.

Finally, he disembarked again and went to the street level. Using an international cell phone he’d rented at the airport, he dialed a man he knew as Sebastian Bagley, a Trust operative stationed in Seattle. Sebastian, a man about ten years his junior, was probably the smartest person Michael had ever met, and one of the most humble. Sebastian and Roger Leiland were his two best friends at the Trust, and Sebastian, like Roger, had a medical background. But a long time ago, Sebastian became enthralled with computers and technology. Once he was a member of the Trust, Sebastian had willingly become backup staff, running things behind the scenes. He had never suffered dreams of glory, he just wanted to do an exceptional job, and as such he was a preeminent Trust staffer. Luckily, Michael had enough seniority that he got to work with Sebastian whenever he requested.

“It’s Andrew Marson,” he said when Sebastian answered, giving one of the aliases he used in the field.

“You’re ready,” Sebastian said calmly.

“Trotsky in his office?”

“Yes.”

“His usual staff in place?”

“Yes. How do you feel?”

Michael smiled. No other backup ever asked an operative how they felt. And he wasn’t sure if Sebastian did this for anyone else but him, but he liked it. It was nice to have someone give some small measure of appreciation for what he now had to do.

And so finally, he walked a half a mile to the squat concrete office building where he was to meet Radimir Trotsky.

Radimir Trotsky was a high-ranking member of the Mafiya, the Russian mob, and he was one of the most dangerous. Since the Soviet collapse, Michael had shifted his focus to the Mafiya, and he had not been satisfied with that shift. In days past, he’d felt his work made him an honorable warrior. Now he felt like a beat cop chasing gangsters. And these gangsters were even more brutal than the KGB had been. It was part of the reason why he wanted out of the game. But the Trust didn’t let people out, and it was only as a favor to him that they were letting him step down. Or they were trying to let him step down. The fact was, no one knew the Mafiya like he did, and Radimir Trotsky needed to be dealt with. Now.

Trotsky had seemingly come out of nowhere six years ago. They knew little about his early years. From what they could tell, he’d been raised in a small town in Siberia, and eventually became a hockey star for one of Russia’s many pro teams. A knee injury sidelined him for good, but he used his star power to get into business with Boris Petrov. Trotsky took easily to Petrov’s petroleum and cigarette running, the prescription-drug counterfeiting. But it was in the back office—with the skull bashing, the threats, the physical intimidation—that Trotsky’s hockey skills really came in handy. Brutality was highly praised and rewarded in the Russian Mafiya, leading Trotsky right to the top of Boris Petrov’s organization, where he became Petrov’s right-hand man.

Then Trotsky turned his sights on the U.S. He’d always had exceptional language skills and a particular affinity for English. So when Boris started looking toward the lucrative streets of New York, Trotsky was the man he sent. In the last few years, Trotsky was believed to have ordered the killings of at least twenty-nine men and five women who had crossed him in one way or another. And that was what the Trust cared about—the loss of American life, the potential for much greater loss. They cared even more when Trotsky stepped on the wrong toes, those of the oil and cigarette companies, many of whom had representatives in the Trust.

Michael hadn’t been watching the Mafiya for a while, but had been told by the Trust that Trotsky was still the poster boy for everything that was so keenly dangerous about the Russian mob—they had no code of ethics, and they were unbelievably ambitious. They would stop at nothing to get what they wanted, and what they wanted was money, power and control in the United States. Their kill-or-be-killed tactics worked, and they always carried out their threats. So the people who dealt with them gave them anything they wanted. But Michael was about to stop that. Or at least a piece of it. The Trust had asked Michael to get back in the game for this one mission because of his expertise. Michael had accepted because, from what he’d learned in the past, it was the right thing to do.

He entered the building through the glass-and-steel doors. He gave the name of Sergei Kovalev to the young man at the front desk who had feral eyes and, Michael could tell from the way he sat, a pistol tucked in the back of his jeans. Sergei Kovalev, thanks to Michael’s painstaking work in creating him over the last few decades, had a reputation as a quiet but very wealthy and respectable Russian businessman. A few phone calls to Trotsky’s people indicating Sergei wanted to join forces had led to this meeting while Trotsky was in the country. To get within even a block of Trotsky would have been impossible but for Sergei.