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His good mother would always fight for him and even attack her far larger husband, whose height and girth eventually had been passed on to his son. And for her loyalty to her child the woman had been dealt with more cruelly. For hours afterwards they would lie on the floor and cradle each other, nursing wounds, sharing tears, speaking in French in low voices so the father and husband could not hear, for it would undoubtedly drive him into another rage.
Kuchin had lied to Alan Rice and later to Janie Collins or whatever her real name was. His father had not died from a fall at the cottage in Roussillon. Kuchin’s father had never been to Roussillon or even France at all. A poor family from rural Ukraine during that time would never have had the money nor the permission to travel abroad. They would never even have made it to the border. No proper papers, no reason to be leaving the Soviet empire. They would have been executed on the spot, their bodies left where they fell like trash flung from a truck as a message to others contemplating disobedience. And Kuchin had to admit, that message could be very effective. He’d later conveyed such messages himself.
It was only after he’d risen to his post in the KGB that out-of-country travel was possible for the most loyal, which included him of course. He had gotten special permission to take his mother to the town of her birth. By now she was clearly old before her time, and the years left to her were few. The cottage had been empty, and Kuchin, though he did not have much money back then, had found a way to purchase it for her. She lived there for five happy years until her death. Kuchin visited her when he could. She would call him by a French name that in her diminished mental state she believed to be his real one. A Soviet to the core, Kuchin would have killed any man who called him that, but when his old, failing mother did so he would merely nod and shed a tear or two and hold her withered hand, answering her queries like a nice little Frenchman looking to appease his beloved mama.
Kuchin stared out the window of his cabin, toward the not too distant coast. Yet his hearing was attuned to the swirl of rubber over crushed gravel that lay on the opposite side of the house. He checked his watch. Alan Rice should be here in no more than twenty minutes. His gaze returned to the nearby waters and another memory entered his thoughts. This time it was a happy one.
The Sea of Azov was far too shallow for his plan, of course. That was why one moonless night in October several decades ago, a grown-up and very strong Kuchin, now a valued member of the deeply feared Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB, had dragged his father from his shack, loaded him on a boat, and set off to deep water. Through the Strait of Kerch they had entered the Black Sea, which had an area over ten times the size of the adjacent Azov. More importantly, the deepest point there was over two thousand meters.
Kuchin had anchored down and he and three of his comrades who had come to help him had used the strongest fishing line they could find to tie up the old man. The senior Kuchin’s eyes bulged with the terror of what was happening to him. Attached to the line and the heavy metal cables that they’d draped over his head and shoulders were two fifty-gallon metal drums filled with sand. It was a favored disposal technique for the Soviet security forces. Indeed, some of the KGB officers had started terming this pairing the “golden slippers.”
Kuchin had looked into his father’s eyes one last time. The roles were reversed now. The large was now small and the young child was now a strong man more than capable of defeating the monster that had punished him relentlessly for so long. He spoke to him in two languages. First he said the words in French, which he knew the old man could understand, however grudgingly. And then in Ukrainian, which he knew would be crystal clear to the bastard.
Then over the gunwale the drums went and
seconds later the cables drew taut and the old man sailed overboard too, screaming in terror. In a few seconds it was finished. Kuchin took the helm and steered them back to where they had come. He looked back only once at the spot where the man who had plagued him would carry out the last few seconds of his life. And then he turned back and thought no more of him.
The SUV came into view. Alan Rice was here with the promised intelligence.
For Fedir Kuchin it was time to track down and catch another adversary who would dare seek to harm him.
CHAPTER
72
YOU DID NOT use the company jet, correct?” asked Kuchin.
“No. Like you said to, I rented a private plane under one of the corporate shells we have. Untraceable to you or me.”
“And you have stayed outside of the city in the safe house?”
“Yes. Just as you instructed. I’ve conducted business through secure phone and computer lines.” He paused. “You think people are after me?”
“No, they’re after me, but they can use you to help in that search. I could have killed you or kept you under wraps. I chose the latter.”
Rice looked like he might be sick.
Kuchin gripped his arm. “Now your report.”
“It was quite fascinating how we were able to crack this. The technology is really remarkable. We started with using—”
Kuchin raised a cautioning hand. “Alan, get to the point.”
“We found nothing on the data banks we could get into. No doubt if we had access to some of the Americans’ files or even Interpol’s it would have been a different story. But we don’t and thus we had to turn to other things. Now, in these alternative venues the data streams were immense and the server access protocols were complex, but—”
“The point,” snapped Kuchin.
Rice hurried on. “The thing we turned to was aftermarket surveillance feeds.”
“Aftermarket surveillance feeds? Explain this.”
“These days there are observational cameras everywhere. I’m not talking about people running around with their cell phones snapping away when a celebrity does something stupid and it gets posted online. I mean cameras at ATM sites, along streets, office buildings, courthouses, airports, train stations, and millions of other places. Hell, London is one big camera, particularly with the congestion charge enforcement requirements. The result is there are literally trillions of bytes of images out there and it ends up on enormous servers. It’s made the cops’ job easier. With just about any crime, at least in a public area, there’s a decent chance it was captured on film somewhere.”
“But how does that help us? Were there such cameras in the ancient town of Gordes?” Kuchin said skeptically.
Rice opened up his laptop and set it on a wooden coffee table. “No, we went at it from a different angle. You have to understand that a lot of this data is not locally stored. The capacity just isn’t there, particularly for smaller firms and average-size municipalities, and it’s hugely expensive to store and maintain even for megafirms and large cities. So what do folks do when confronted with a need that they are not equipped to handle or is too capital-intensive to take on alone?”
“They outsource it to firms who specialize in that area.”
