Private Moscow (Private 15)

I went into the main building and found a few late risers finishing breakfast in the dining hall. I recognized some of them from the previous night’s vodka session, and when they waved at me, I nodded in reply.

I finally found Dinara in the library, where she was working alone, hunched over her computer. She looked fresh, free of any sign of her abduction and traumatic ordeal.

“Morning,” I said.

She looked up and shifted awkwardly. “Good morning,” she replied. “Justine has sent us some information on Ernest Fisher and Robert Carlyle. I’ve been pulling out the highlights.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

She shook her head, and I grabbed a chair. The library was one of the few rooms that didn’t look as though it had undergone any refurbishment since the place had been converted from a school. Books were arranged on low, child-friendly shelves, and classroom tables had been pushed together in clusters of four to create reading areas.

Dinara was at the cluster nearest the windows, overlooking football goals and a playing field that was buried beneath snow. She had a series of applications open on her laptop, but she was currently working on a simple document that listed key moments in Ernie Fisher’s life, from his birth in Featherville, a tiny settlement in Idaho, to his appointment as the US ambassador’s chief of staff.

“That’s interesting,” I remarked. “He and Karl Parker were both born and raised in small Midwest towns.”

“And both enlisted in the Marine Corps within two years of each other,” Dinara observed.

“Fisher was a couple of years older than Karl,” I said. “Similar academic profiles too. Solid but nothing flashy. Certainly nothing to indicate their later achievements.”

“What about Robert Carlyle?” I asked.

Dinara opened a similar document and showed me the Washington financier’s potted history. “Born in Arminto, Wyoming, enlisted in the Marines aged eighteen,” she said.

“There’s a pattern,” I remarked.

I thought about the key I’d found in Ernie Fisher’s apartment.

“What if their similarities aren’t just in the past?” I asked. “What if the key is for a safe in a warehouse like the one Karl Parker had? Someplace secret. Completely off the books.”

“He was planning to leave,” Dinara remarked.

“So his next stop was going to be to collect his passport and whatever else he needed,” I surmised. “It will be somewhere close by. Like Karl’s, it will be in the city, someplace Fisher could get to quickly.

“Any idea how we find it?”

?

??Old-fashioned detective work,” I replied. “We canvass. It’s time-consuming, but I don’t see any other way. We start at the epicenter, Fisher’s home, and work our way out.”

CHAPTER 61

LEONID REGRETTED EVERY sip of vodka he’d had the previous night. His tongue felt like an old babushka’s pumice stone and his head was as tender as a steak put through a mangle. But he’d needed to blow away the residue of his brush with death. An inch or two above his protective vest and his drinking buddies would have been toasting his memory.

He’d blustered his way through the experience and brushed off Dinara’s concerns for his wellbeing, but deep down he’d been shaken. Why was he in this job? He could easily have got a quiet desk job as head of security for a big firm, but instead had chosen to put himself back on the front line without any real support.

Who wants to live forever? a small voice inside him asked.

Was that it? Did he have a death wish?

Leonid shook the thought from his mind, and focused on Erik Utkin’s apartment building. The Black Hundreds’ recruiter lived in Meshchansky District, on Shchepkina Street, in a traditional villa that had been split into large apartments. It was a lovely home in a great neighborhood, one that was beyond the reach of most Muscovites.

Leonid had relieved Larin, one of the ex-cops who lived at the Residence, and who’d staked out Utkin’s place overnight. Leonid had been parked fifty meters along the street from the yellow-fronted building for an hour when Erik Utkin finally emerged and climbed into a black BMW 6 Series.

Leonid followed Utkin across Moscow to Kapotnya, a neighborhood almost twenty kilometers from the city center. Kapotnya was one Moscow’s most crime-ridden, poverty-stricken areas, and even in the arctic conditions, there was clear evidence of drug use on the streets. Leonid drove by a group of scrawny men gathered around an oil-barrel fire, sharing a crack pipe. Soon afterwards he passed a couple of skeletal men shooting up in a bus shelter.

Erik Utkin finally stopped on the corner of Kapotninskiy Passage and Kapotnya Block, and Leonid pulled over a short distance behind him. Filthy tower blocks rose either side of the street, and the bare branches of the trees that lined the road looked like jagged scars against the ugly buildings. Utkin kept his engine running, but Leonid cut his to avoid the vapor of exhaust fumes attracting unnecessary attention.

Leonid could see the Black Hundreds’ recruiter through the BMW’s rear window. He had his head turned toward a gray high-rise apartment building to their right.