It was two o’clock in the morning, and traffic along the banks of the Moskva had eased considerably. Igor Stelin heard a car stop out front, but the Vysokta night porter didn’t bother looking up from his newspaper. There weren’t any visitors at this late hour, and he paid no attention to the regular tenants.
But when the front door swung open and three men came in, he immediately knew that they weren’t any of the building’s normal visitors.
The three were practically clones. They were young, with smooth, determined faces that looked a bit vacant. They wore gray suits and carried leather briefcases. They headed straight for the elevators without a glance at the old man at the front desk—as if they knew their way around the building perfectly.
Normally, Stelin would have asked them whom they had come to see, but he was paralyzed. These people were different, and as a good Russian, he could sense it.
They were siloviki.
Their ease, self-confidence, and indifference all spoke volumes.
Stelin felt as if he were nailed to the spot. In Russia, an ordinary citizen who got in a silovik’s way could pay a very high price, crushed by a blind, all-powerful administrative machine acting on orders from above.
Still, his sense of duty caused Stelin to stand up. He didn’t have time to do more. Before disappearing down the hallway, the third man in gray turned around and stared at him.
Even at that distance, the look in his eyes was clear: Igor Stelin had not seen them, and would never say he had. They were phantoms, protected by the law.
It only lasted a fraction of a second, then the man vanished.
Stelin slumped back onto his chair, defeated.
The three men stopped at the door to Irina Lopukin’s apartment. The hallway was deserted. From his briefcase, one took a set of lock picks and a stethoscope. A specialist, he had worked for years in the FSB department, charged with breaking into foreign embassies. No lock could resist him, and when he opened one, he left such minute scratches, they could only be seen with a microscope.
Irina’s deadbolt took him less than two minutes.
After a few clicks, the bolt slid back. The men pushed the door open and slipped into the apartment, closing the door behind them. One took out a floor plan. Lighting it with a tiny flashlight, he led the others to Irina’s bedroom. The team walked in single file. The flashlight kept them from bumping into the furniture.
They stopped at the bedroom door, which was ajar, and listened carefully. They heard nothing. Irina must have been asleep. FSB surveillance had shown that she was home, but she might have been reading or watching television.
The team leader took a pre-loaded syringe from his kit. It had a 3 mm needle so fine that an injection left no trace. He checked the syringe’s contents, then put on a pair of night-vision goggles so he could make out people and objects in the dark.
He nodded to the others to signify that he was ready, and pushed the door open. The bedroom lay in darkness, but he could see Irina sleeping on her side in the big bed. He walked over slowly, followed by one of his teammates. They observed her for a few moments, listening to her regular breathing. She hadn’t stirred at their entrance.
This was the most delicate moment of the operation.
The team leader leaned over the sleeping woman, who was wearing a nightgown and was covered by a sheet. Her neck was the only exposed part of her body. He gently slid the syringe’s needle into the skin above her collarbone, and pressed the plunger, injecting a powerful anesthetic.
The sting was so slight that Irina barely reacted, just brushed the injection site with her hand, as if to chase a mosquito away. The man had already withdrawn the syringe, so her hand met only empty air.
He straightened up, breathing hard. His partner had stepped around the bed, ready to pinion her in case she awoke.
She didn’t.
Irina looked as if she were simply sleeping. But without being aware of it, she was moving from natural sleep into an anesthesia that would last about half an hour.
The leader waited a few minutes, then switched on the bedside light and got rid of his night-vision goggles.
The others pulled the sheet off the sleeping woman and stretched her out, spreading her feet.
The leader took another pre-loaded syringe from his kit and slipped on a head lamp with a reflector to help him see clearly.
He massaged Irina’s right foot for a moment, then pressed on a vein to raise it. Deftly stabbing the vein with the second syringe, he quickly injected its contents. When he pulled the needle out, it didn’t even leave a drop of blood.
To be on the safe side, he rubbed the vein for a moment to make the nearly invisible puncture disappear completely. Then he covered Irina with the sheet again. They turned off the bedside lamp and left the bedroom.
To all appearances, she was sound asleep.
The anesthesia would wear off in a few minutes, but before it did, the 10 mg of deadly sodium fluoride would be silently circulating in her bloodstream.
She would never wake up. Before daybreak, the poison she’d been given would stop her heart. A doctor examining her could only conclude that she died of a heart attack. An autopsy would reveal nothing out of the ordinary.
The Lopukin problem had been taken care of.
When the men in gray passed by the night porter again, he went on reading his paper, keeping his eyes downcast. The three filed out into the darkness, heading for a black car parked a little distance away.
Stelin tried to concentrate on what he was reading. He was struggling to convince himself that he hadn’t seen anybody.
Malko awoke very early—ten past six—because the curtains in his embassy bedroom let in the springtime sun. It was going to be a beautiful day. He had slept badly, tossing and turning as he mulled over the pieces of information he was collecting.
Berezovsky’s murder was a textbook illustration of the cunning the Kremlin used in eliminating its enemies. No shots had been fired, no obvious violence used. Just a quick, invisible strike that left no clues.
How much did the British know about this? Malko wondered.
He found it hard to believe that MI5, with all its intelligence-gathering assets, was completely in the dark. British agents weren’t fools. Even if they were ordered to keep their mouths shut, they knew. That might be the most frightening aspect of the whole affair. Russia’s totalitarian regime was corrupting a true democracy, making it the passive accomplice to a state crime.
Malko took a shower and went down to the cafeteria. He was finishing his breakfast when the CIA station chief appeared.
“I was looking for you in your room,” Garden said. “I have news.”
“What’s up?”
“You have a seat on the British Airways noon flight.”
So the Russians were letting him leave Moscow! Or else they had prepared a sophisticated way to kill him on the way to the airport.
“What’s our setup?”
“We’ll drive to Sheremetyevo in two armored cars. I’ll come along in one, and we’ll have bodyguards in the other. I can accompany you as far as the customs gate. They won’t allow me to go beyond that.”
“Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” said Malko. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here in the embassy.”
“Okay,” said Garden. “We’re leaving at ten.”
Rem Tolkachev took the document with the red wax seal from the stack of freshly delivered papers. An envelope bearing the Moscow FSB logo, it contained a very brief account of the night operation he had ordered. It had gone off without a hitch. The Lopukin problem had been solved, permanently.
It would be just one of the many poisonings that marked the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. None of the killers were ever arrested, of course; though a few innocent people chose to plead guilty. If you torture someone enough, they’ll confess to anything.
Assuming everything else went well today, Tolkachev would finally be able to close the Berezovsky file and report to the president that his orders had been carried out.
It was now time for the second part of his plan.
Tolkachev phoned the head of FSB special operations on an encrypted line to check on his preparations.
“The arrangements are all in place, sir,” the officer assured him. “We have six vehicles, counting the two across from the embassy. Everything will go off as planned.”
“I hope so,” said the spymaster coldly. “As you are aware, this involves the elimination of an enemy of the rodina, to which the highest authorities attach enormous importance.”
Which meant that if the operation failed, the person in charge would be subject to sanctions that would end his career. Or his life.
Two armored Mercedes with diplomatic plates awaited in the embassy courtyard, their drivers ready. When Malko and Garden came down, four bodyguards were in the escort vehicle.
As the CIA station chief was heading for the lead Mercedes, Malko called out to him.
“Roy, I have an idea. Let’s you and I get into the second car. We can move two officers into the first one.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure, and it probably isn’t necessary,” said Malko, “but it doesn’t cost anything. If one of the vehicles is targeted, it’ll be the first one.”
The Russians might very well have snipers along the highway to the airport. Malko remembered that Afghan president Karzai had recently avoided being killed because he wasn’t in the car that a would-be assassin had shot at. Garden agreed, and ordered two of the bodyguards into the first Mercedes while he and Malko took their places in the second. The passengers couldn’t be seen through the tinted windows, so the Russians wouldn’t be aware of the switch.
Once everyone was seated, the metal gate slid open and the two vans emerged from the courtyard and took Bolshoy Deviatsky Pereulok, driving fast. Within twenty minutes, they were passing Belorussky Station on their way to Leningradsky Prospekt, the broad highway leading to Sheremetyevo Airport.
At that point, they had just a dozen miles to go.
Malko was scanning the highway, but he didn’t see anything suspicious. The green lights on Leningradsky Prospekt were very long, so as not to slow traffic.
A mile farther on, the light ahead turned green. That was perfectly normal, but Malko immediately noticed something strange. Instead of turning red, the light on the cross street stayed yellow, which would let cars coming from the right pull into the main flow of traffic. Fortunately, there was no traffic on the cross street.
That sort of thing happened often enough in Moscow, and Malko went back to watching the road. They were now just a few hundred yards from the intersection.
Suddenly, he was horrified to see a huge Ural truck roaring down the cross street toward them. Traveling at high speed, it would reach the intersection at the exact same moment as the embassy vehicles.