Read Online No Time for Heroes by Brian Freemantle - Free Book Online

ice, either.’
    The FBI Director looked surprised. ‘But you’re telling me the investigation will collapse unless there’s co-operation. So what’s your point?’
    â€˜We need an official Russian investigator,’ insisted Cowley. ‘A professional who’ll know what we want and doesn’t buckle under officialdom.’
    The Director shook his head, although not in refusal, looking quizzically across his desk. There was the vaguest of smiles. ‘And you know just the guy?’
    â€˜If we’re right, we’re going to need him.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
    The strongest surviving legacy of Russia’s failed but struggling-to-resurge communism is the doctrine that nothing works – or will be allowed to work – unless there is a personal benefit between those who seek and those who provide: the what’s-in-it-for-me philosophy.
    Ironically for someone whose total honesty now made him an outcast, Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov was an expert at the system. He had begun his education as a personal-fine-on-the-spot beat officer with ambition, and had manipulated favour-for-favour and reward-for-reward on his way through the ranks to uniformed colonel in charge of a Militia district, where he had established the tribute-accepting reign he had abdicated to Yevgennie Kosov. Danilov had, however, operated by a strict code of personally acceptable morality. He’d never become involved in the protection of vice rings or drug dealing or gun running, or with the violent, sometimes murderous enforcement of some black marketeers. Indeed, he actually investigated and prosecuted as many as he could.
    With a strictly Russian logic, Danilov had never considered himself truly corrupt; he’d believed instead he was being practical and pragmatic in an environment beyond improvement or change. He had never been a member of the Communist Party – which protected the most corrupt of all – nor did he ever accept its political ideology. Most of all he despised its obvious inefficiency: if the party couldn’t provide, a man had to provide for himself, according to his own integrity. With the help, of course, of the always available entrepreneurs. The essential factor, Danilov’s justification for the compromises he’d made, was that no-one got hurt or suffered in the arrangements he reached with the people who could obtain things other people wanted. If those providers made a profit and others – like Danilov – benefited along the way from ensuring there was no official interruption, everyone benefited. It was simply a slight variation on the free market economy political leaders were today advancing as the salvation of the country.
    Anatoli Nikolaevich Metkin’s disadvantage was not knowing of Danilov’s previous expertise and more particularly how Danilov could use the stultifying bureaucracy under which Metkin was trying to bury him.
    The responsibilities Metkin had set out would have buried Danilov if he’d attempted to fulfil them absolutely. But they weren’t if he combined another Communist inheritance with the first, building his own bureaucratic mountain and threatening an avalanche to engulf others.
    Metkin’s vagueness about Danilov’s new accommodation had been part of the theatre. The man personally showed Danilov to a long, L-shaped room on the same floor as his own secretariat to convey the gloating impression Danilov would always be under his supervision. The room was internal again, with no natural light, and completely bare of furniture. There were no bulbs in any socket, but there were jack points in the walls, for telephones. But there were no telephones.
    Danilov began his fight back within minutes of Metkin leaving him, giving the man just enough time to re-enter his own suite before descending to the basement garage. There were six unused cars in their bays. The office in one corner, with I . A. Borodin lettered on the