The Bear and the Dragon - By Tom Clancy Page 0,4

and the phone was already linked and synchronized with another such phone at NSA headquarters. She punched the # key to get a response.

“Watch Room,” a voice said half a world away.

“This is Station Moscow. We have an indication that Sergey Golovko may just have been assassinated.”

“The SVR chairman?”

“Affirmative. A car similar to his has exploded in Dzerzhinskiy Square, and this is the time he usually goes to work.”

“Confidence?” the disembodied male voice asked. It would be a middle-grade officer, probably military, holding down the eleven-to-seven watch. Probably Air Force. “Confidence” was one of their institutional buzzwords.

“We’re taking this off police radios—the Moscow Militia, that is. We have lots of voice traffic, and it sounds excited, my operator tells me.”

“Okay, can you upload it to us?”

“Affirmative,” Lieutenant Wilson replied.

“Okay, let’s do that. Thanks for the heads-up, we’ll take it from here.”

Okay, Station Moscow out,” heard Major Bob Teeters. He was new in his job at NSA. Formerly a rated pilot who had twenty-one hundred hours in command of C-5s and C-17s, he’d injured his left elbow in a motorcycle accident eight months before, and the loss of mobility there had ended his flying career, much to his disgust. Now he was reborn as a spook, which was somewhat more interesting in an intellectual sense, but not exactly a happy exchange for an aviator. He waved to an enlisted man, a Navy petty officer first-class, to pick up on the active line from Moscow. This the sailor did, donning headphones and lighting up the word-processing program on his desktop computer. This sailor was a Russian linguist in addition to being a yeoman, and thus competent to drive the computer. He typed, translating as he listened in to the pirated Russian police radios, and his script came up on Major Teeters’s computer screen.

I HAVE THE LICENSE NUMBER, CHECKING NOW, the first line read.

GOOD, QUICK AS YOU CAN.

WORKING ON IT, COMRADE. (TAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND, DO THE RUSSKIES HAVE COMPUTERS FOR THIS STUFF NOW?)

I HAVE IT, WHITE MERCEDES BENZ, REGISTERED TO G. F. AVSYENKO (NOT SURE OF SPELLING), 677 PROTOPOPOV PROSPEKT, FLAT 18A.

HIM? I KNOW THAT NAME!

Which was good for somebody, Major Teeters thought, but not all that great for Avsyenko. Okay, what next? The senior watch officer was another squid, Rear Admiral Tom Porter, probably drinking coffee in his office over in the main building and watching TV, maybe. Time to change that. He called the proper number.

“Admiral Porter.”

“Sir, this is Major Teeters down in the watch center. We have some breaking news in Moscow.”

“What’s that, Major?” a tired voice asked.

“Station Moscow initially thought that somebody might have killed Chairman Golovko of the KG—the SVR, I mean.”

“What was that, Major?” a somewhat more alert voice inquired.

“Turns out it probably wasn’t him, sir. Somebody named Avsyenko—” Teeters spelled it out. “We’re getting the intercepts off their police radio bands. I haven’t run the name yet.”

“What else?”

“Sir, that’s all I have right now.”

By this time, a CIA field officer named Tom Barlow was in the loop at the embassy. The third-ranking spook in the current scheme of things, he didn’t want to drive over to Dzerzhinskiy Square himself, but he did the next best thing. Barlow called the CNN office, the direct line to a friend.

“Mike Evans.”

“Mike, this is Jimmy,” Tom Barlow said, initiating a prearranged and much-used lie. “Dzerzhinskiy Square, the murder of somebody in a Mercedes. Sounds messy and kinda spectacular.”

“Okay,” the reporter said, making a brief note. “We’re on it.”

At his desk, Barlow checked his watch: 8:52 local time. Evans was a hustling reporter for a hustling news service. Barlow figured there’d be a mini-cam there in twenty minutes. The truck would have its own Ku-band uplink to a satellite, down from there to CNN headquarters in Atlanta, and the same signal would be pirated by the DoD downlink at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and spread around from there on government-owned satellites to interested parties. An attempt on the life of Chairman Golovko made it interesting as hell to a lot of people. Next he lit up his desktop Compaq computer and opened the file for Russian names that were known to CIA.

Aduplicate of that file resided in any number of CIA computers at Langley, Virginia, and on one of those in the CIA Operations Room on the 7th floor of the Old Headquarters Building, a set of fingers typed A-V S-Y E-N-K-O ... and came up with nothing other than:

ENTIRE FILE SEARCHED. THE SEARCH ITEM WAS NOT FOUND.

That evoked a grumble