I’m pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my ass away by three whole points.”
“The bastard took me by one,” John told his Team-2 commander. “First man-on-man match I’ve lost since Third SOG.” And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He’d lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.
Is that him?" Provalov asked.
“We don’t have a photograph,” his sergeant reminded him. “But he fits the general description.” And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.
They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.
The guy looked about right. He’d come off the building’s elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the off-chance that this Koniev/Suvorov’s neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.
The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-class, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another identity? Provalov was sure he’d have more of those, and they’d all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.
The sergeant in the driver’s seat started up the van’s motor and got on the radio. Two other police cars were in the immediate vicinity, both manned by pairs of experienced investigators.
“Our friend is moving. The blue rental car,” Provalov said over the radio. Both of his cars radioed acknowledgments.
The rental car was a Fiat—a real one made in Turin rather than the Russian copy made at Togliattistad, one of the few special economic projects of the Soviet Union that had actually worked, after a fashion. Had it been selected for its agility, Provalov wondered, or just because it was a cheap car to rent? There was no knowing that right now. Koniev/Suvorov pulled out, and the first tail car formed up with him, half a block behind, while the second was half a block in front, because even a KGB-trained intelligence officer rarely looked for a tail infront of himself. A little more time and they might have placed a tracking device on the Fiat, but they hadn’t had it, nor the darkness required. If he returned to his apartment, they’d do it late tonight, say about four in the morning. A radio beeper with a magnet to hold it onto the inside of the rear bumper; its antenna would hang down like a mouse’s tail, virtually invisible. Some of the available technology Provalov was using had originally been used to track suspected foreign spies around Moscow, and that meant it was pretty good, at least by Russian standards.
Following the car was easier than he’d expected. Three trail cars helped. Spotting a single-car tail was not overly demanding. Two could also be identified, since the same two would switch off every few minutes. But three shadow cars broke up the pattern nicely, and, KGB-trained or not, Koniev/Suvorov was not superhuman. His real defense lay in concealing his identity, and cracking that had been a combination of good investigation and luck—but cops knew about luck. KGB, on the other hand, didn’t. In their mania for organization, their training program had left it out, perhaps because trusting to luck was a weakness that could lead to disaster in the field. That told Provalov that Koniev/Suvorov hadn’t spent that much time in field operations. In the real world of working the street, you learned such things in a hurry.
The tailing was conducted at extreme range, over a block, and the city blocks were large ones here. The van had been specially equipped for it. The license-plate holders were triangular in cross-section, and at the flip of a switch one could switch from among three separate pairs of tags. The lights on the front of the vehicle were paired as well, and so one could change the light pattern, which was what a skilled adversary