The Expediter by David Hagberg

Author:David Hagberg [Hagberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction, Suspense, Espionage, Crime
ISBN: 9780765311115
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2009-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY–SEVEN

McGarvey figured that Turov wouldn’t wait long to make contact, because he would want to get out of Tokyo as soon as possible. If it was going to happen it would probably be tonight, or certainly no later than tomorrow.

For the moment he couldn’t do much but wait.

After he finished his beer, he took a shower, changed into some fresh clothes, and propped himself up in the large bed with the information on Turov that Rencke had downloaded to his sat phone.

The Russian’s real name was Nikolai Boyko, born of Jewish parents in Leningrad, both of them dead now. His mother had been a housewife and his father an engineer at one of the electrical generating plants. When it came time for the teenaged Nikolai to get his internal passport he listed his ethnic origin as a Great Russian and not a Jew. That was in the late seventies when a series of pogroms had raged across the Soviet Union. Had he identified himself openly as a Jew his future would have been at an end before he’d even started.

It was a period of we don’t ask you don’t tell, when competent people were needed to help fight the Cold War. It was the same year he’d been kicked off the soccer team for unnecessary roughness. In every subject he was at the top of his class, but little else showed up in Rencke’s research until Boyko was accepted at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy to study ballistic missile engineering, which could have eventually led to a career in the navy and eventually command of a nuclear submarine.

His grades at the academy were nothing short of stellar, easily at the top of his class in every subject, though his name did not appear on the rosters of any of the academy’s sports teams, including soccer.

Here Rencke’s report became somewhat speculative, based, he wrote, on fragments of testimony given at a closed hearing about the deaths of four seniors. This was in Boyko’s senior year.

It was in the late winter of 1987, Boyko was twenty-four, and ready to graduate in the spring. He had evidently nurtured a grudge against the four who had apparently harassed him the entire five years. Jew baiting, it was called, but it was a rare sport at the academy because so few Jews had ever been accepted.

Boyko sat in the upper bleachers of the gymnasium watching the gymnastics team working out. A number of the athletes were of Olympic potential so their practices usually drew a fairly large crowd.

One of them, a cadet named Anatoli Shuskin, on the weight-lifting team, had been the instigator among the four who had given Boyko such a hard time. After each of his successful lifts that night the audience roared its approval. He was sure to win the gold medal next year.

Afterward, when practice was over and the gymnasium began to empty, Boyko waited outside in the bitter cold, until the athletes started to emerge from the locker room, most

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