Hidden Prey

from the training comment. “We’ve heard he’s a big shot.”
    She was nodding. “His father is important in oil. Very important. Not so much oil itself, as, em, support machinery.”
    “Pumps?” Reasons suggested.
    “Maybe pumps,” she said. “But bigger than that. Pipelines, refineries. Systems. There is so much oil in some places in Russia, you can get it out of the ground with a stick. Getting it from the stick to Europe . . . that is the problem.”
    “Okay.”
    But she expanded: “So you see, Maksim Oleshev not only controls money, he controls workers—jobs in factories, jobs in pipeline construction. These are votes. Some people think his power could be destabilizing.”
    “So what’s his son doing in Duluth?” Lucas asked.
    “The son went his own way,” she said. “He was a government official before his father came to power in oil.”
    “He was in the KGB,” Lucas said.
    She nodded. “Yes. Of course. Then in the merchant marine.”
    “That seems like an unlikely job change, from spy to sailor,” Lucas said dryly.
    She looked up at him and said, “First, he was not a spy. He was an analyst and an, mmm, I don’t know the English. An arranger. Second, you were not in Russia in the nineties. People had no jobs. The government collapsed. The intelligence services collapsed. High, important men were selling shoes in the markets. If somebody said, ‘Here is a job,’ you took it. Oleshev, we think, had contacts in the merchant marine through his covert service, from being an arranger. Perhaps he . . . knew something about some of them. Anyway, he got a job. He was good at it, the crew says. He started as a third officer, which is nothing, and would have had his own ship soon.”
    “Really,” Lucas said.
    “Really. It’s true.” Her eyes were opaque, giving away nothing, but she smiled sweetly. “In fact . . . I will tell you some things, but if they appear on paper and I am asked, I will deny them.”
    “Between us, then,” Lucas said.
    “Yes. One line of speculation in Moscow is that Oleshev was a courier for his father, perhaps working toward some unknown agreement with American oil service companies. The Moscow government would oppose this, if they knew about it. You see, the best oil service companies are American, but the Moscow government wishes, understandably, that Russian companies begin to develop the capacity to provide these services. But how can this be done if all the contracts go to America?”
    Lucas said, “But then . . . the obvious agency to kill Oleshev would be your Moscow government. The American companies wouldn’t do it—they’d want Oleshev to succeed. His father wouldn’t do it. And our government would probably like to see American companies get the business. So it’d be you guys. What do they call it? The SVR?”
    She shook her head. The mention of the SVR didn’t faze her: “Ah. But I can tell you, from the highest sources, that the SVR knows nothing. They would like to know something, because there are many people shouting at them, but they do not. And Maksim Oleshev claims that there was nothing to know; that he had no business dealings with his son. Therefore, the problem must be here.”
    “You believe that? He had no dealings with his son?”
    She cocked her head to the side, pushed out a lip. Then, “I don’t know. In Russia, the family is important. If your father has a billion dollars, why cover yourself with dirt in some old ship? But that is what Maksim says.”
    “So what’s the Moscow speculation on the kind of problem it might be?” Lucas asked.
    She ticked them off on her fingers: “One: An American thug sees a man in the dark and kills him in course of a robbery. Two: Rodion Oleshev is dealing with the Russian criminal underground, perhaps as a courier of drugs or financial instruments. There is a falling-out, andthey kill him, or a rival gang kills him. Maybe Russian, maybe American. That’s my favorite. Three: Maksim Oleshev is lying, and his son was working for him. Four: Something else. What, we don’t know.”
    Reasons said, “You can probably scratch the American thug. That’s a terrible place for a strong-arm robbery, down by the docks. You can’t see a thing in the dark, there’s no way to get out of there in a hurry, nobody has much money, and a lot of the people you might try to rob are meaner’n shit themselves.”
    “And he was probably shot with a silenced pistol,” Lucas said. “In my