The Mark of the Assassin

to be commended, Mr. Osbourne.
    Oh, you've missed quite a few, but you've made an excellent start."
    "So they were KGB hits?"
    "Yes, they were."
    "Were they carried out by the same man?"
    "Absolutely."
    "What is his name?"
    "He had no name, Mr. Osbourne. Only a code name."
    "What was his code name?"
    Drozdov hesitated. He had defected, betrayed his service. But revealing
    code names was the intelligence equivalent of breaking the Mafia's
    omerta. Finally, he said, "October, Mr. Osbourne. His code name was
    October."
    THE SUN APPEARED BRIEFLY between broken clouds, warming the countryside.

Michael unbuttoned his coat and lit a cigarette. Drozdov followed suit,
    brow furrowed as he smoked, as if searching for the best place to start
    the story. Michael had handled many agents. He knew when it was best to
    push and when it was best to sit back and just listen. He had no
    leverage over Drozdov; Drozdov would talk only if he wanted to talk. "We
    weren't very good at killing people, contrary to popular belief in the
    West," Drozdov said finally. "Oh, inside the Soviet Union we were very
    efficient. But outside the Soviet bloc, in the West, we were quite awful
    when it came to wet affairs. One of our top assassins, Nikolai Khokhlov,
    had second thoughts while attempting to kill a Ukrainian resistance
    leader and defected. We tried to kill him and botched that job, too. For
    the longest time the Politburo simply gave up assassination as a tool of
    the trade."
    Drozdov dropped his cigarette butt in the mud and ground it out with the
    toe of his Wellington. "In the late 1960s, this changed. We looked at
    the West and saw internal strife everywhere: the Irish, the Basques, the
    German Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Palestinians. Also, we had our own
    business to attend to--dissidents, defectors, you understand.
    Assassinations, as you know, were handled by Department Five of the
    First Chief Directorate. Department Five wanted a highly trained
    assassin, permanently based in the West, who could carry out killings on
    short notice. That assassin was October."
    Michael said, "Who is he?"
    "I came to Department Five after he was in place in the West. His file
    said nothing of his real identity. There were rumors, of course. That he
    was the illegitimate son of a very senior KGB officer: a general,
    perhaps the chairman himself. These are all rumors, nothing more. He was
    taken by the KGB at a very early age and given intensive schooling and
    training. In 1968, as a teenager, he was sent into the West through
    Czechoslovakia, posing as a refugee. He eventually moved to Paris. He
    posed as a homeless street urchin and was taken in by a Catholic
    orphanage. Over the years he established an airtight French identity. He
    went to French schools, had a French passport, everything. He even
    endured his mandatory service in the French army."
    "And then he started killing."
    "We used him primarily to promote instability in the West, to make
    problems for Western governments. He killed on both sides of the divide.
    He stirred the pot, so to speak. Blew on the flames. And he was very
    good at his job. He prided himself on the fact that he never botched a
    single assignment. He wouldn't use any of the devices we offered to make
    his work easier, the cyanide-tipped bullets or the weapons that
    dispensed poison gas. He developed his own signature method of killing."
    "Three bullets to the face."
    "Brutal, effective, quite dramatic."
    Michael had seen his work close up; he didn't need a description from
    Drozdov of the effect of the assassin's chosen method. "Did he have a
    control officer?" Michael asked evenly. "Yes, he would only work with
    one officer, a man named Mikhail Arbatov. I tried to replace Arbatov
    once, but October threatened to kill the man. Arbatov was the closest
    thing to family October ever had. He trusted no one except Arbatov, and
    he barely trusted him."
    "A Mikhail Arbatov was murdered in Paris recently."
    "Yes, I saw that. The police said street thugs probably killed him. The
    newspaper accounts described him as a retired Russian diplomat living in
    Paris. There's one thing I've learned in this life, Mr. Osbourne. You
    can't trust what you read in the newspapers."
    "Who killed Arbatov?"
    "October, of course."
    "Why?"
    "That's a very good question. Perhaps Arbatov knew too much about
    something. If October feels threatened, he kills. It's the only thing he
    knows how to do. Except paint. He's rumored to be quite