Chapter 24
Ciaparro and Ferrario were two professional bombers and well known by the fiercest Mafia families, for whom they had worked on various occasions as consultants. Ciaparro had trained as a soldier with the Engineering Corps and had been sent to Lebanon during the civil war.
There, his job was to remove mines. Some of his fellow soldiers had died there, but he had made it out. Then he went to work for SB Consulting. Its mission was to protect diplomats in Iraq, but there had been numerous cases when the SB mercenaries had massacred the civilian population. After working for SB Consulting, Ciaparro had joined a loosely organized team that placed bombs among both the Shiites and the Sunnis for the purpose of increasing their reciprocal hatred. The end goal was to widen the conflict until it drew in Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. It paid very well.
As for Luigi Ferrario, his resume was less impressive. He had made his reputation when very young as a member of the ultraright-wing Magliana gang in the late 1980s in Rome. He was an explosives expert and had an international network of contacts.
They had arrived at Lubyanka Square, They stopped to look at the building that in Soviet times had become the headquarters of the Cheka, the secret police that later became the KGB.
“When I came here all those years ago,” whispered Ciaparro, “every time you passed by this place you tried to stay away from this building. Those who were brought there often never came out
or, if they did, they were deported to Siberia. That’s what happened to the author Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. Now there’s a statue in his honor, put up after Gorbachev took over. They said the scariest part of the Lubyanka were the underground levels (I heard there were seven) with the “interrogation” rooms and the prisons. As young members of the Italian Communist Party we were convinced it was all western propaganda. Then the Russians revealed what had been hidden in there. In any event it’s still the headquarters of the KGB and Putin at one time was its head in Germany.”
Luigi Ferrario rubbed his hands – the wind was making him feel even colder.
“This building gives me the creeps. What time are we supposed to meet those two?”
“At 8 o’ clock. Let’s take a taxi. I’ll pay with the rubles they mailed me.”
Mauro Ciaparro approached the taxi stand. The first cab in line was an AvtoVAZ Lada Priora.
“Restaurant Aragvi, 6 Tverskaya” the elderly Italian said. The taxi driver smiled back at him and mumbled something in Russian along the lines of, “As if I didn’t know…”
“Nice car,” said Ciaparro. “We Italians are the ones who put the Russians in cars when we built the Togliattigrad factory that made the Zhiguli, which was really a FIAT 124. When you parked you had to take the wipers with you or they’d be stolen and you couldn’t find replacements.”
The evening traffic had intensified, but the taxi driver took the reserved lanes and in 15 minutes they were at the restaurant. Ciaparro paid with a 1,000-ruble bill, about 23 euros. The taxi driver sped off and kept the change.
Chapter 25
“Welcome to the oldest Georgian restaurant.” Andrei welcomed them with a big smile and led them to a private room where his colleague Valery and two breathtakingly beautiful women, Svetlana and Natasha, were waiting for them.
The women were obviously super de-luxe escorts who charged $1,000 a pop. The conversation was conducted in English, a language Ciaparro knew well. Ferrario could manage.
What interested him were Natasha’s blue eyes. She was seated next to him and had started pouring him vodka.
Andrei was acting like a tour guide. “This restaurant is a Moscow tourist landmark. It was built at the time of the Czars. Stalin came here frequently and it is rumored he had a tunnel built that connects his office in the Kremlin to the restaurant…”
“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Ciaparro.
“Who, Stalin?” asked Andrei, frowning.
“No, the taxi driver. He drove around in circles and then cheated me on the fare.”
“That’s normal. Like in Naples,” laughed Valery.
Andrei continued with his description of the restaurant and its famed Georgian cuisine and Tsinandali wines.
“We wanted you to come here because this is where mainly Russians go and not tourists. Unless you object, I ordered a typical Georgian menu without the usual Beluga caviar.”
A pair of heavy waitresses decked out in ribbons and colored aprons started bringing food to the table. The Italians dove in because they hadn’t eaten a thing except for the disgusting snack offered by the airline.
“These waitresses,“ Ciaparro said with a laugh while eating a blini, “remind me of the ‘dezhurnye,’ the policewomen who in the USSR watched who went in and out of hotel rooms. But then all you needed was a pair of Italian stocking and Celentano records for them to let you take a girl to your room.”
Andrei, Valery, Natasha and Svetlana joined in the laughter and they all toasted to friendship. The girls then got up with the excuse of having to “powder their noses” that really meant they were going to sniff some cocaine.
Left alone, Andrei asked the Italians, “Now that those silly girls are gone you have to tell us how you managed to pull off such a complex job as the one in Rome. How many people did it take?”
“How many?” asked Ferrario with a heavy Roman accent. “Just the two of us. How many did you think? Just as Mauro told you.”
“Unbelievable,” said Andrei. “Give us some details.”
“Well, first of all we were dressed as ACEA technicians. That’s the company in charge of power and water in Rome. We got to Termini Station at 4:00 a.m. The streets were empty. We parked the ACEA van near a manhole we knew led to the trains. We placed the explosives on the tracks acting in a way that anyone watching on closed circuit TV would have thought we were making repairs. Luigi and I were wearing latex facemasks that made it impossible to recognize us.”
“How many charges did you put down,” asked Valery.
“About ten,” asked Ciaparro. “They were all connected wirelessly to a contact on the track and there was also a timer. We put some charges on the ceiling vault.”
“And how about in Saint Peter’s Square?”
Ciaparro lit a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke because his doctor had found that he had a slight heart arhythmia. But this was a special evening and the food and the vodka were making him sleepy. He needed a little nicotine.
“That was a bit more complicated. We were dressed as ACEA technicians and the van had an extension arm with a bucket that I controlled from inside the van. Luigi got in the bucket and placed the charges around the colonnade. We did this before going to Termini Station. It was about 2:00 a.m. Two Vatican security guards on their rounds approached us. They asked us for ID and work permits. We had everything – of course it was all fake – and we told them we would be gone shortly. We said we had to inspect some cabling because we had received indication of a short inside the Vatican. They were more than happy to get back to their car and we finished the job. We even made them sign our work permits.”
“Fantastic,” exclaimed Andrei as the two women came back to the table, laughing and rubbing their noses. It was almost midnight and the restaurant was closing down.
“Well,” said Valery, “let’s go to my place where we can continue our evening in peace.”
They called for two taxis and upon arrival Andrei paid.
Chapter 26
“Here we are!” said Valery as he opened the door to the small apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. In Soviet times foreign journalists had to live in this compound. It was a place where the policemen at the entranceways controlled everyone’s comings and goings.
It was a studio apartment: a room with a sofa, a couple of small armchairs, coffee table upon which had been placed a tray with a few liquor bottles, and a screen that hid a bed. A samovar tea set was on a bureau.
Mauro Ciaparro, who was keenly interested in Russian antiques, gave it a glance over and noted that it was of high quality.
Svetlana was obviously familiar with the surroundings. She went to the entertainment center, put on a CD of popular Russian heavy metal music and turned the volume up to high. The effect was an acute aggravation of Luigi Ferrario’s tinnitus – a constant ringing in his ears that drilled through his brain and was the result of his having been too close to an explosion without adequate protection.
Andrei opened the small fridge and took out a bottle of vodka that he then passed around. The two women drank straight from the bottle and licked its neck while laughing and looking provocatively at the Italians. Ciaparro and Ferrario had by then consumed a tremendous amount of alcohol, but were not yet falling down drunk. It was very hot in the apartment. Natasha and Svetlana began stripping, until they were completely naked except for their stiletto heels.
Their skin was milky white and they had had full Brazilian waxes. They swayed to the music as they moved towards the Italians and removed the men’s pants and underwear. Then they unbuttoned the men’s shirts, sat on their laps, lowered themselves onto their erect penises and began thrusting slowly while kissing their necks.
Alcohol, food, and sex with goddesses. The Italians were in heaven. They buried their faces in the women’s florid and real (no silicone) breasts. Natasha and Svetlana moved in unison and exchanged a glance.
Andrei and Valery plunged injections of curare into the two Italian bombers’ necks, killing them instantly.
“Get dressed and get out,” said Andrei to the women. “If you talk, you’ll end up the same way.”
Meanwhile Valery had spread out two big black body bags. Andrei and Valery shoved the Italians into the bags and stuffed them into a large wicker container.
“Let’s go,” Valery said to Andrei. “Two garbage men are on their way. They’ll put this in the compactor. I’ve paid them well and it’s not the first time I’ve used their services.”
The Russians left the building and got into a taxi, destination Lubyanka Square. The policeman at the entrance examined their passes and spoke to someone for a few seconds over a microphone. An officer came to greet them and led them to an elevator headed for the third floor.
Although it was 2 a.m., the lights were on in many of the offices where agents were hard at work. The officer, walking at a slow pace, escorted the two guests to an office door and pressed on a button. A green light lit up. He pushed on a heavy wooden door and brought Andrei and Valery into a very large room.
At one end were a big desk and two chairs. Andrei was very familiar with this third floor office. It had once belonged to Lavrenti Beria and then to Yuri Andropov, who became the Communist Party’s secretary general.
As a KGB agent, over the years Andrei had witnessed sentences being passed on agents and Party members accused of betrayal.It had been his job: counterespionage on behalf of the Party and Mother Russia against western infiltration. His main opponents were the Americans who paid vast sums of money for sensitive information. Some innocent people had certainly suffered. But for Andrei it was a price worth paying for the ultimate goal. His success had made him relatively famous in certain circles.
Then Gorbachev’s counter-revolution had happened. Yeltsin had ordered cannon shots fired against Russia’s White House, ironically called like the one in America. It was the headquarters of the Russian Parliament and the last refuge of those who had refused to betray the government and the new Constitution of the Russian Federation.
Then it had been every man for himself. People with a good background in security went over to the side of the Russia Mafia, which came out of the shadow and penetrated all aspects of the new nation: industry, finance, international trade, information, entertainment.
Andrei had immediately found himself a “profession” that allowed him to move among all the sectors in which organized crime operated.
As for Valery, he was a subordinate – very loyal to Andrei and his employers. Sometimes Andrei wondered about him, but not trusting anyone completely was part of his training.
They walked the twenty yards that separated them from the desk at which was seated the director of the KGB who took orders only from the President of Russia.
While waiting for an invitation to sit down, Andrei smiled broadly and said, “All done. No more traces of the Rome operation.”
Andrei expected a smile in return and praise.
“You are idiots,” hissed the director. Andrei and Valery were stunned.
“You made a monumental fuck up that will cost us dearly on an international level. The Rome operation is now being blamed on the Russian Mafia because one of you retards let slip something that has spread throughout the western and Islamic worlds. You thought you could lay responsibility for the explosions on the Arabs. Instead you’ve created a gigantic mess that is boomeranging
on us. Things in Chechnya are boiling up again because they refuse to be blamed for something they didn’t do.”
The director paused for an instant and took a sip of water.
“Comrade director,” stuttered Andrei, “can I say something?”
“There are no comrades here and you do not have permission to speak,” was the director’s sharp reply. He then pressed a button. The office’s massive door opened and the officer who had previously escorted them entered. Four plain clothes agents followed him.
“Seize them and take them below,” ordered the director. “You know what to do.”
