The Third Bullet

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He felt his anxiety level raise six degrees. “Is it shoot on sight or anything like that?”

“No,” said Stronski’s man. “Person of interest. The instructions are ‘detain for questioning.’ They had these all over the place four days ago.”

“Figures. Three days ago I went and saw a cop, and his eyes lit up when he looked at me. I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling he’d seen me before and was interested in continuing the relationship. I thought it was time to blow town fast. I’ve spent the last four days in a crummy room in the crummy suburbs, sneaking out at night to buy clothes from used-and-maybe-washed places.”

“And here you are now. The underground man. You could be some Raskolnikov lurking in an alley with an ax. Who’d notice you except for the height?”

“Where is Stronski?”

“You never know where Stronski is. He hides well. He was a sniper.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Swagger.

“We’ll disappear you.”

It became a progression of squalors. He was shunted from place to place in darkness, by friends of Stronski’s, who had no names and issued no instructions. Some spoke English, most did not. He stayed in a room in a brothel and heard people fucking all night. He stayed behind a Laundromat in a room of near-unbearable heat with lint floating in the air. He stayed in the cellar of a Star Dog place that sold imitation American hot dogs. He had one. It was good.

Always, it was the same: at a certain time in the evening, a new man showed, picked him up, and drove him through dismal streets to another dismal hovel. Without a word, he was dropped, entered, shown by his new host his deluxe suite for the night, and there he spent the next twenty-two hours. A farmhouse, a suburban garage, another brothel, the rear of a pawnshop, on and on, for what seemed weeks but was shy of one. Time doesn’t fly when you’re not having fun. He lived in a cold fusion of nerves and shallow sleep, knowing in his heart of hearts that he was exactly where no man should be, hunted in a country whose language he didn’t speak, whose streets he didn’t know, and whose culture baffled him. He knew also: I am too old for this. But it was a thing he had to do. He had given his word. Crazy with honor? Nah. Stubborn was all, an old crank’s privilege.

Food was brought or bought, but nowhere within the whole elaborate structure of escape and evasion was there a cash economy, and no one wanted or would accept payment.

On the seventh day, he was dropped at a bar and told “fourth booth.” He entered a dark place full of bitter, isolated drinkers, found his way through the low lighting and the cigarette smoke, slid into booth no. 4, and indeed, there was Stronski.

“My friend,” said Stronski. “Still alive by the narrowest of margins. They’re hunting you everywhere.”

“Do we know who ‘they’ are?”

“Powerful enemy, whoever. The Izmaylovskaya have called in a lot of favors and essentially control a large part of the police apparat. You never know which cop is your friend, decent, honest guy, and which is Izzy, who will make a call and send the killers on your tail in a second. The main thing is, we have to get you out of here. That is why I have you moved around, wait until the novelty of manhunt has worn off and watchers aren’t so watchful.”

Swagger nodded. “Good strategy.”

“I think,” Stronski said, “now it’s good to go. You rest tonight, tomorrow you will be taken to truck yard and hidden in long-distance trailer north, out of Moscow. Long ride, my friend, over seven hundred miles. You’ll make it out soft route on the Finnish border. I have friends there too. Finland, Sweden, you home safe with warm memories of Mother Russia.”

“No,” said Swagger.

“No? What the fuck, brother? Is it money? No money. It’ll cost you nothing! This isn’t about money, at least your money. This is business. I back you, I give you my loyalty, no matter what it costs short-term, people have to know Stronski can be trusted. That’s my long-term. I got you into Lubyanka, I’ll get you out of Russia, everyone says you go to Stronski, you get what you bargained for. He is man of trust. In my business, that’s money in the bank.”

“That’s not it. I still have business here. There’s a last detail that has to be nailed down, and I’m not leaving until I’ve nailed it.”

“Swagger, are you nuts? These Izzy birds are gunning to kill you. They are not going away soon. They will in time track you down, it has to happen. Somebody will see, somebody will call, gunmen will show. Don’t matter if you’re in nice restaurant, in park, in orphanage, it don’t matter. In they come, blazing, killing any and all in the way, and that’s you on the floor, leaking. Nobody wants to leak.”

“I don’t want to leak. But I can’t move on unless I cover one more thing.”

“Goddamn, Swagger, you are a stubborn bastard.”

“I need to get back into the Lubyanka.”

“Jesus Christ! That’s the one place they look hardest for you. You’d be the one hundred thousandth killed there, but the first sniper. You want that record?”

“Of course not. But I don’t mean I’d go myself. I mean my representative. I have to get a man in there. Get him in there to check a certain thing. Then I am out of here.”

Stronski’s blunt face showed frustration. “Swagger, go home. Tell me what it is. I will find out. I will let you know. No need to die for something so small.”

“No, I have to debrief the guy who goes in. I have to see him, talk to him, ask him stuff so I trust him. So there are no doubts. That is why there is only one man for the job. That is you, Stronski.”

“Jesus Christ, you’ll get me killed too in your madness over something that happened fifty years ago. Crazy, man, crazy.”

“I have to trust the guy. I trust Stronski. Then we have to have a sit-down afterward in some safe place in Moscow for a debrief.”

He did trust Stronski. Also, knowing Stronski, he felt he could read the man’s face more than he could read a stranger’s.

“Money. You know the price that shit charges? And that was after haggling.”

“I don’t care.”

“Man, you don’t. I never thought I’d meet a guy who didn’t care about money, but that’s you, brother.”

“Maybe it won’t be as much. It’s just you, for under an hour, not the three of us in all night, prowling, two of us American. And you’re not in the big room, you’re in that other room, the counterespionage annex on the other floor.”

“If I do this, you’ll go home?”

“I’ll walk into the American embassy and turn myself over to the Marines. They’ll get me home easily enough. No Finland border stuff, no crawling through the snow. I’m way too old for that.”

Stronski shook his head in doubt.

“We’ll set it up,” Swagger said, “so that I meet you somewhere public close by the embassy. We have our debrief chat, that’s that, shake hands, and I walk into the embassy. They’ll cooler me for a day or so, but they’ll verify me through U.S. sources, the FBI will okay it, and I’m out of here. Does that work for you?”

“What makes you think I can do it? I am sniper, not professor. That Kathy, she was good, she would get it, but me? Suppose I can’t find it?”

“I’m sure you can.”

“What would it be?”

“There has to be a security sweep every few years. All services do that. I have to know to what degree the embassy in Mexico City, particularly the KGB suites, were penetrated in 1963. That was the game back then. Microphones all over the place, in the most amazing locations. Stalin’s eye, Lenin’s beard, the men’s room urinal. That place, the American place, all the places all over the world, they were radio stations broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, and not far away we had a little roomful of listeners writing it all down or monitoring the tape recorders. There were no secrets, at least not until cyber-cryptography came in, and that probably didn’t last too long either. I need confirmation that anything Oswald told the KGB goons wasn’t private. That is, it reached other parties.”

“I think I know who you’re talking about,” said Stronski.

“Yes. The red James Bond didn’t have to be red at all. He could have been a listener. And who was he listening for? He could have worked for the CIA.”

CHAPTER 11

It cost ten thousand dollars, and that was after much haggling. Give it to Stronski, he drove a hard bargain and finally got his price. Swagger was driven in the back of a delivery truck to a Bank of America ATM in downtown Moscow-he was too tense to ponder the ironies-and took out the money after having arranged it via satellite phone call with his banker in Boise. The miracle of modern satellite communications: he, in the back of a bicycle shop in Moscow, calls a man in Boise who calls Atlanta so that a computer transaction is verified back in Moscow, and the next day, with the PIN, Swagger walks away with the cash, gets in the delivery van, and heads back to the bicycle shop.

Then it was wait, wait, wait, more days fled by, days of nothingness and boredom that did nothing to alleviate the crush of anxiety. Too bad he no longer smoked or drank-either crutch might have provided some mercy-but it was a thing of staring at the ceiling as the plaster crumbled away while time decayed slowly. He cultivated an interest in a soccer team, wondered when the NFL would get to Moscow, tried not to think of his daughters and his son and the fine lives they were building, missed his wife, mourned his dead (always), thought about certain flavors, colors, and smells, and more or less concentrated on existence. His only companion was the pistol, brilliantly engineered by the Instrument Design Bureau, flawlessly manufactured by oligarch Ixovich’s IxGroup. He stripped it, examined it, dry-fired it, drew it, grew proficient and familiar with it, learned it in all the ways a man can learn a gun without firing it, which happen to be considerable.