“Thank you; now go back to your lover.”
“Fuck you,” Lestov said, and he hung up.
“What’d your friend say?”
“Arouet works on Wall Street, just like he said. But he’s damned good at baccarat, and he was probably faking it at the fencing demonstration.”
“What was he doing here?”
“Like you said, looking for something about me,” Kurshin said. “Let’s go to bed; I’m tired. And in the morning, I’ll tell you what I have in mind to get my eleven million back.”
Martine smiled. “Will you give me a hint?”
“I’m going to ask for a rematch, and in the meantime, you’re going to take Mme Graves shopping.”
Twenty minutes later, in bed together in the middle of lovemaking, Kurshin put his hands around Martine’s neck and strangled her to death. She fought hard for a full minute before her strength faded.
Down the hall, he entered the housemaid’s bedroom, and as she was rising up from sleep, he strangled her, as well.
Back out on the patio, he took a drink of his beer still on the table and phoned Didenko again.
“Do you have the telephone number for Donna Graves?”
“Da.”
“Call her, and say that you’ve heard I’m on the way to Portugal. McGarvey will know where and why.”
“First let me tell you something about your brother.”
“Just do as I ask, General, and I’ll never bother you again.”
“No, I don’t think you will,” Didenko said.
22
McGarvey sat just inside the open balcony door of their suite watching the sky to the east behind the foothills as it started to lighten with the dawn. His pistol was on a low table next to him.
Pete had insisted that they get a couple of hours of sleep, because she suspected that Kallinger’s next and perhaps final move would come sometime today. “With this guy, we’ll have to be sharp.”
They’d lingered for a half hour at the casino before coming back to the hotel, and just as they were leaving, the manager called them into his office.
“There may be an irregularity with M. Kallinger’s line of credit,” he’d told them. “Possibly just a problem with the électroniques; such things have happened in the past. We will contact his bank first thing Monday morning. In the meantime, I am sorry, monsieur, but we cannot settle your account.”
“I think that you’ll find M. Kallinger has no account at that bank,” McGarvey told the manager.
“The man is a thief?”
“It looks like it.”
“You almost look relieved,” Pete told him as they walked back to their hotel.
“Had his credit been good, it would have meant he had some serious backing.”
“The FSB?”
“Possibly.”
“Same question: What does this guy want with you?”
“I don’t know, but he’s serious about whatever it is.”
His phone vibrated softly. It was Otto.
“The casino manager was right; there is no such account any longer, but it was in existence for about twelve hours — just long enough for him to establish his line of credit. But when it came time to collect, the account had disappeared.”
“On a London bank?”
“Alta-Bank of Moscow.”
“He made a mistake,” McGarvey said.
“Indeed he did, but it nails him as a Russian sleeper agent posted to London. It also means that he’s almost certainly Spetsnaz, and very well trained.”
“Can we put some pressure on the bank to find out who opened the account and then closed it so suddenly?”
“I could hack their mainframe, but it could screw up their legitimate account holders, and whatever name it was opened with would be false.”
“Then I’ll have to take the fight to him,” McGarvey said. “Right away this morning.”
“With care, Mac. Whoever this guy really is, he’ll expect you to come knocking. You could let it rest until Monday when the casino figures out that he swindled them. They’ll get the cops involved.”
“He won’t let it rest that long.”
Pete came out of the bedroom with her phone. “General Didenko wants to talk to you,” she said.
“Stand by,” he told Otto.
“Give me five seconds, and my darlings will have her phone.”
McGarvey laid his phone aside and took Pete’s from her. “Good morning, General. You’re something of a surprise.”
“I heard about your good luck. By now, I’m certain that the casino has discovered his account does not exist.”
“Did you set it up for him at the Alta-Bank?” “I’m not involved. He has more friends in Moscow than I do.”
“What the hell does he want with me?”
“Revenge for something he thinks you did a number of years ago.”
“If you’re not involved, why this conversation?”
“He came to see me a few weeks ago, to ask for my help.”
“With what?”
“You.”
“What did you tell him?” McGarvey asked.
“To forget about you. To get on with his life before he got himself too deep. But of course, he refused to listen. And that is all he got from me, you have my word on it.”
“You were an agent runner, Baranov’s handpicked successor. Why should I trust you?”
“I’m an old man, and I’ve been out of the business for a long time. I was sent to count the birches for a couple of years before I was allowed to come home, but only if I promised to stay completely below the radar. Which I have.” Being sent to count the birches was an old Soviet euphemism for being sent to a gulag in Siberia.
“The question is still on the table, General. Why did you call me?”
“To tell you that he’s on his way to Portugal. That and nothing more.”
It came to McGarvey immediately. “But your star operator, Arkady Kurshin, was no relationship to Kallinger, or whatever the hell his real name is.”
“He was an orphan. His trainers just seized the opportunity to make him think that Arkasha was his older brother.”
“Why tell me all this?”
“Because I want him to kill you, finish the job that Arkasha could not in that tunnel.”
“I’ll call for reinforcements.”
“No, you won’t,” Didenko said, and he hung up.
Otto was there on Pete’s phone. “You’re going to have to call for help, Mac, I shit you not.”
“If he’s going back to where I killed Kurshin, that’d be in the jurisdiction of the rural cops. He’d eat them alive. I’m talking about the SIM.” It was Portugal’s military intelligence service — Serviço de Informações Militares.
“First I need to find out what he wants.”
“It has nothing to do with the guy he thinks was his brother. He’s tired of doing nothing in England. He wants to graduate to their covert action service. In order to do that, he needs to make his chops. And if he can bag you, mano a mano, just like escaping across the desert with a prisoner, he’ll be over the top.”
McGarvey sat back in his chair and looked up at Pete. “It’s starting again because of Putin. The new Cold War.”
“The Ukraine and Poland are on a bigger scale,” Otto said. “But if they can start eliminating the old hands, the people who have the deep background and experience to understand what’s going on, they’ll be winning not only strategic victories but — to their way of thinking — taking the high moral ground. The old Soviet system was supposedly the most powerful in the world; Putin wants it for real this time.”
“All the more reason for me to face him alone,” McGarvey said.
“But he’ll be waiting for you. It’ll be a setup to his advantage.”