“And just so you’re prepared,” Jonathan said, “some kids are involved.”
Anton Datsik stood at the corner of Wisconsin and M Streets in Georgetown and considered his options. A turn to the left would take him uphill toward the residential sections, and a right would take him downhill to the Potomac River. When the light changed, he decided to continue east — straight ahead — past the restaurants and chain stores that had ruined the most prime real estate in Washington, DC. This part of the city had evolved into a college town, pandering to the shallow tastes of trust-fund adolescents. He was old enough to remember the days of the Cellar Door and the Crazy Horse, trendy nightclubs that featured the most cutting-edge performers in an environment that was at once sleazy and trendy. Now, it had all turned to plastic.
His job this afternoon was to remain invisible as the events in Indiana and Ohio played themselves out. Any day that could be spent away from his office in the embassy of the Russian Federation was a good day.
Datsik had always admired the United States and its people. Compulsively friendly, they also seemed willfully naïve, a combination that resolved to charming. Unlike his bosses, he’d never wished them harm, but he was certain that harm was inevitable. Once fierce and self-reliant, they had evolved into a passive culture that valued politeness over victory. Such cultures always collapsed under the oppression of aggressors who valued power over peace.
The light turned, and he headed toward Thirty-first Street, Northwest.
Datsik considered himself a professional — not political — and he believed that it was not possible to be both. Professionals stayed focused on things that were important — what Americans liked to call the Big Picture.
Being of a certain age, Datsik had witnessed personally the speed with which political priorities can change. He’d witnessed the implosion of security services in his Motherland as the Soviet Union collapsed into disarray. He’d watched as the void of leadership seeded the grounds where the Bratva and the Organi-zatsiya flourished with a brutality that exceeded anything meted out in Russia after the reign of Yuri Andropov.
After Gorbachev and that fat drunk Yeltsin rolled over and gave a big blow job to successive American presidents, these so-called Russian mafia organizations grew fat and powerful skimming their shares off the billions of dollars the United States pumped into the new Russian Federation. Datsik never ceased to be amazed by the naïveté—the intentional myopia, it seemed — of the American public. Surely they did not believe that the great democratic experiment they were able to launch in 1776 was somehow relevant to the modern world.
Those US dollars created monsters of unspeakable cruelty, and those monsters were able to buy and sell politicians like the commodities they were. To do what the oligarchs wanted was to become wealthy beyond imagination. To cross them was to find oneself and one’s extended family tortured to death.
Those had been Datsik’s formative years. He’d been an officer in the KGB for five years when the KGB ceased to exist. He was not senior enough to know how the transition actually happened in the historical sense, but to him, it happened literally overnight. He went home one night as an officer, and then when he reported to work the next morning, he discovered that work no longer existed.
Throughout the former Communist states, every agency that once was responsible for keeping order either disappeared or dissolved into some weak imitation of its former self. For more than a few men and women less fortunate than he, the transition meant death at the hands of the angry mobs who stormed headquarters buildings and dragged the occupants out into the street. He’d witnessed no such violence himself, but he’d heard stories from multiple sources. It was all far too reminiscent of Benito Mussolini.
Being nonpolitical didn’t mean he couldn’t work a roomful of politicians. He sensed early on that those who lost power would soon grow hungry for that power to return, and he aligned himself with as many of them as he could. Hungriest of all, it turned out, were those who were ousted from the security services. Theirs was a special kind of power that was rooted less in money — although there was plenty of that — than it was in information. The kind of information that could make a man or ruin him.
The current leader of the Russian Federation came from that very group, and Datsik was pleased to find himself on the president’s good side when the dust settled and the flow of blood slowed.
The KGB became the FSB, the oligarchs who spouted democratic thoughts were ripped from power and stuffed in prison, and even the organized crime syndicates were finding it easier to operate elsewhere. Like all criminals, they thrived here in the United States and in the United Kingdom, where the fear of offending trumped the strict rule of law.
In the middle of the block that separated Thirtieth Street from Twenty-ninth Street, an overweight couple in their sixties made eye contact with him and the husband pulled a map from his back pocket. “Excuse me,” the man said. “Are you a local?”
Datsik smiled. It was the structure of the question that amused him. He in fact knew this city as well, if not better than, most locals, but the instant he opened his mouth to speak, they would hear the accent, and that might trigger questions he had no desire to discuss.
He said nothing, and kept walking.
Among the problems that remained in his Motherland were the Georgians and the Ukrainians. Among the former Soviet states that sought their independence, the Chechens in particular had focused on brutality as the best means to an end.
The hatred between Chechnya and Russia spanned generations, a mutual loathing so innate that it might have been genetic. Animals that they were, Chechen terrorists didn’t care who died in their attacks that were designed to slaughter by the hundreds or the thousands.
Now those animals were this close to having access to nuclear warheads, all because of a scheme devised by academicians in the hierarchy of American security to eliminate terrorists by arming them.
As a professional, it was his job to keep that from happening. And he was getting ever closer to his goal. Two of the Mitchells were dead, and the third would soon be found. Given the resources that Philip Baxter had promised to dedicate to the task, no one could remain invisible for long.
Mitchell. Did they really think that they could pull off such a quintessentially Middle American name? So desperate were the desires of Daud and Lalita Kadyrov to assimilate into American society that they studied the language and the customs, and, with some help from the United States government, they thought they could just shed the bonds of their past.
With Chechen pigs, that level of change was impossible. Their fellow separatists embedded here in the United States would never have allowed that to happen. Their plan was doomed from the beginning.
And now here was Datsik, cleaning up yet another mess — doing that at which he was best.
When his cell phone rang, he checked the number, and he knew that the final stage had begun. “Yes?” he said.
A female voice said, “I’m afraid there’s been a major complication.” She didn’t bother to identify herself because that would have been a waste of time for everyone. “It seems that our enemies got to the targets first.”
Datsik spat out a curse. “You told me that you didn’t know where they were. You told me that no one knew where they were because they were impossible to find.” This was devastating news.
“It’s not as bad as it might have been,” she said. “There was a gun battle, but the Mitchell boy seems to have gotten away.”