Rasputin's Shadow

by Raymond Khoury

  We’re all just cattle.

  A profound sadness seeped through him as the screen shifted to a close-up of the grieving widow, all in black, doing her best to appear dignified and defiant despite knowing, Sokolov was sure, that any lingering aspirations of protest would be relentlessly snuffed out of her.

  Sokolov’s fingers tightened against the glass.

  Unlike other opposition leaders, the man they were burying hadn’t been an egomaniac lusting for power, or a bored oligarch looking to add another trophy to his gilded life. Ilya Shislenko hadn’t been a wistful Communist, a messianic environmentalist, or a raving leftist radical. He was just a concerned, ordinary citizen, a lawyer who was determined to try to make things right. If not right, then at least better. Driven to fight those in power, the ones he’d publicly branded as the party of liars and thieves—a label that was now firmly embedded in the psyches of those campaigning against the government. Committed to fight the rampant corruption and embezzlement, to get rid of those who’d stolen the country from the ones who’d enslaved it for decades, those who now ruled it with a gold-plated blade instead of an iron fist, those who’d pillaged its formidable wealth and stashed their billions in London and Zurich. Putting his life on the line to give his fellow countrymen some of the dignity and the freedom that many of their neighbors in Europe and elsewhere around the world enjoyed.

  How proud Sokolov had felt when he first read about him. It had breathed new life into his weary, sixty-three-year-old lungs, seeing this charismatic young man feted on the news channels, reading glowing profiles about him in The New York Times, listening to his rousing speeches on YouTube, watching as the protest marches he’d led grew and grew until the unheard-of started to happen, until tens of thousands of angry, fed-up Russians of all ages and means braved freezing temperatures and menacing riot police and started congregating in Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere in the capital to hear his words and shout out their agreement and express their having had enough of being treated like mindless serfs.

  And if listening to his words wasn’t exhilarating enough, if seeing those crowds back in the home country didn’t make his heart thunder, what made it all the more rapturous was that this inspirational leader, this exceptional and courageous man, this savior of saviors, was none other than the son of Leo’s own brother. His nephew, and apart from him, the last surviving member of his family.

  The family that he had all but obliterated himself.

  The screen cut back to footage of his nephew’s last speech, footage that Sokolov suddenly found almost unbearable to watch. Looking at the young man’s poised features and the irresistible energy he radiated, Sokolov couldn’t help but imagine how that would have changed after he’d been arrested, couldn’t block out the horrors that he knew had befallen the man. As he had so many times since the news of his death had broken, he couldn’t avoid picturing his nephew—that beautiful, shining beacon of a man—thrown in some dark hole at Lefortovo Prison, the bland, mustard-colored detention center close to the center of Moscow where enemies of the state had been incarcerated since the days of the tsars. He knew all about its sordid past, about how dissidents held there were force-fed through their nostrils to get them to be more compliant. He knew about its dungeons and its “psychological cells,” the ones with the black walls, the solitary twenty-five-watt bulb switched on 24/7 and the constant, maddening vibration that roared in from the neighboring hydrodynamics institute with such vigor that you couldn’t even set a cup on a table without it skittering off. He also knew about its monstrous meat grinder, the one they used to pulp the bodies of its victims before they were sluiced into the city’s sewers. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been imprisoned there, as had another Alexander, the ex–KGB agent Litvinenko, who’d been given a chain-smoking informer for a cell-mate during his incarceration there—a thoughtful little gift from his former employers, given how much he couldn’t stand cigarettes—before being murdered by way of polonium-laced tea after running off to London following his release.

  The death of Sokolov’s nephew hadn’t been anywhere near as sophisticated. But, Sokolov knew, it was undoubtedly far more painful.

  Undoubtedly.

  He shut his eyes in a futile attempt to block out the wrenching images of what he knew they would have done to him in there, but the images kept coming. He knew what these men were capable of; he knew it well and fully and in all of its gory, inhuman detail, and he knew they wouldn’t have spared his nephew any of it, not when a decision had been taken high up, not when they needed to get rid of a major thorn in their side, not when they wanted to set an example.

  The screen shifted to another point of view, this one coming from somewhere much closer to the rundown Astoria bar Sokolov was slouched in. It showed a protest demonstration that was currently under way in Manhattan, outside the Russian consulate. Hundreds of demonstrators, waving signs, shaking fists, attaching bouquets of flowers and tributes to the gates of adjacent buildings—the whole scene watched over by New York’s finest and a small army of news crews.

  The screen then cut away to show other, similar, demonstrations taking place outside Russian embassies and consulates around the world before returning to the one in Manhattan.

  Sokolov stared at the screen with deadened eyes. Within moments, he’d paid his tab and staggered out of the bar, vaguely aware of where he was, but dead certain about where he needed to be.

  Somehow, he managed to make it from Queens to Manhattan and all the way to East Ninety-first Street and the big, noisy throng that pressed against the police barricades. His chest heaved with anger, fueled by the intense passion on display all around him, and he joined in, making his way deeper into the crowd, pumping his fist in the air as he took up the familiar resounding choruses of “Izhetsy, ubiitsy” (Liars, murderers) and “Pozor” (Shame on you).

  Before long, he was at the front of the crowd, right up against the barricade that protected the consulate’s gates. The chants had grown louder, the fists pumping the air more vigorously. The whole effect, combined with the alcohol swirling through his veins, turned almost hallucinogenic. His mind wandered in all kinds of directions before quickly settling onto a very satisfying image, a revenge fantasy that spread across him like wildfire. It warmed him up from within and he found himself nursing it and allowing it to grow until it consumed him like a raging inferno.

  Through tired, foggy eyes he noticed a couple of men by the consulate’s entrance. They were eyeing the crowd and conferred briefly before retreating behind closed doors.

  Sokolov couldn’t help himself.

  “That’s right! You run and you hide, you godless swine,” he hollered after them. “Your time’s running out, you hear me? Your time’s running out, all of you, and you’re going to pay. You’re going to pay dearly.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he slammed his fist repeatedly against the barricade. “You think you’ve heard the last of us? You think you’ve heard the last of the Shislenkos? Well, think again, you bastards. We’re going to bring you down. We’re going to wipe you out, every single last one of you.”

  He spent the next hour or so there, screaming his tired lungs out and shaking his weak, tired fists. Eventually, his energy drained and he slunk away, his head bowed. He managed to make it back to the subway and then to his apartment in Astoria, where his doting wife, Daphne, was waiting for him.

  What he didn’t realize, of course, what he wasn’t conscious of even though he should have known better and would have known better had it not been for those four last shots of vodka, was that they were watching. They were watching and they were listening, as they always were, especially at times like these, at gatherings like these where crowds of undesirables could be taped and analyzed and catalogued and added to all kinds of sinister lists. CCTV cameras mounted on the walls and roof of the consulate had been rolling and powerful directional mikes had been recording and, even worse, undercover agents of the Federation had been roaming the crowd, mimicking the protesters
and their angry shouts and fists all while studying the faces around them and picking out those who merited a closer look.

  Sokolov didn’t know any of that, but he should have.

  Three days later, they came for him.

  2

  Federal Plaza, Manhattan

  I know they’re called spooks, but this guy was starting to feel like a real ghost.

  I’d been hunting him down for a couple of months already, ever since that day at Sequoia National Park, at Hank Corliss’s cabin. The day Corliss blew his brains out shortly after telling me who he’d reached out to in the matter of getting my son Alex brainwashed.

  My four-year-old son.

  Takes a particularly vile specimen of humanity to do something like that. Corliss was damaged, I’ll give him that. He was a living, breathing wreck of a human being. He’d been through a tragic, devastating nightmare while running the DEA’s operations in Southern California. Using my son, heinous as it was, came out of a twisted obsession he had for revenge. He’d paid the ultimate price for his misguided deed, but the depraved sicko who’d actually handled the dirty work—a CIA agent by the name of Reed Corrigan—was still out there.

  Even by spook standards, this Corrigan had to be seriously depraved. And as a badged federal agent, it was my sworn duty to make sure his depravity never darkened anyone else’s life. Preferably by choking the life out of him with my bare hands. Slowly.

  Not Bureau standard operating procedure, by the way.

  Problem was, I couldn’t track him down. And the fact that my previous boss, Tom Janssen, was not the guy sitting here in his old office on the twenty-sixth floor of Federal Plaza and facing me from behind that big desk wasn’t helping either.

  Janssen I could count on.

  This guy—the new assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, Ron Gallo—well, let’s just say that in his case, the ADIC acronym that came with the job was a really nice fit.

  “You need to drop this, Reilly,” my new boss was insisting. “Let it go. Move on.”

  “‘Move on’?” I shot back. “After what they did?” I managed to avoid spewing out what I really wanted to say and, instead, settled for: “Would you?”

  Gallo took in a stiff breath, then gave me an even more exasperated stare as he let it seep back out, slowly. “Let it go. You got Navarro. Corliss is dead. Case closed. You’re just wasting your time—and ours. If the Agency doesn’t want one of their own to be found, you’re not going to find him. Besides, even if you did—what then? Without Corliss around to back you up, what proof have you got?”

  He gave me his signature deadpan, patronizing look, and much as I hated to admit it, the ADIC had a point. I didn’t have much to press my case. Sure, Corliss had told me he’d reached out to Corrigan to get it done. But Corliss was dead. As was Munro, his wingman in that whole sick affair. Which meant that even if I ever did manage to break through the CIA’s impenetrable omertà and actually get my hands on the spectral Mr. Corrigan, in strictly legal terms, it would be my word against his.

  “Get back to work,” he ordered me. “The kind we pay you for. It’s not like you don’t have enough on your plate, is it?”

  I tapped his desk hard with two fingers. “I’m not dropping this.”

  He shrugged back. “Suit yourself—long as it’s on your own dime.”

  Like I said re: the custom-tailored acronym.

  I left his office in a funk and, given that it was almost eleven and I hadn’t yet had breakfast, I decided it would be a good time to get some fresh air and smother my frustrations in a sandwich and a coffee from my favorite four-wheeled restaurant. It was a crisp October morning in lower Manhattan, with a clear sky and a brisk little breeze whistling in through the concrete canyons all around me. Within ten minutes, I was sitting on a bench outside City Hall with a bacon-and-fontina omelet roll in one hand, a steaming cup in the other, and a whole lot of unanswered questions on my mind.

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really worried about the legalities involved. I had to find him first, him and the shrink or shrinks who’d messed with Alex’s mind. It wasn’t just out of my need for justice and, yes, revenge. It was for Alex’s sake.

  As we’d done earlier this morning, we’d been taking Alex to see a child psychologist once a week since we all got back from California. The shrink, Stacey Ross, was good. Tess—Tess Chaykin, my live-in paramour, the fearless archaeologist-turned-bestselling-novelist I’d been with for five years—had taken her daughter, Kim, to see Stacey after that notorious night at the Met, the night of the Templar raid that Tess and Kim had witnessed firsthand. Kim had been nine at the time, and what she’d seen there had, understandably, affected her. Stacey had, according to Tess, done wonders for Kim, and we needed those wonders now. But Stacey needed to know what they’d done to Alex to figure out how to undo it properly. She knew everything we knew—I hadn’t kept anything from her—but it wasn’t much. Alex was improving under her care, which was heartening. But the nightmares and the nervousness were still around. Worse, I felt some of the awful stuff they’d planted in his brain about me—like making him believe he had a cold-blooded killer for a dad, and that wasn’t even the worst part—was still lurking around in there. I could sometimes see it in his eyes when he looked at me. A hesitation, an unease. A fear. My own kid, looking at me like that, even for a second, when I would happily die for him. It just gutted me, every time.

  I had to find these guys and get them to tell me exactly what they’d done to him and how best to flush it out of him. But it wasn’t going to be easy, not without the support of a Bureau heavy-hitter wielding a big, heavy bat. None of the monster databases I had fed Corrigan’s name into—the public, commercial, criminal, or governmental ones—had given up a hit that fit the profile of the kind of creep I was after. Not that there were that many Reed Corrigans out there, anyway, but the few the system did cough up were relatively easy to check out and dismiss. All, that is, but one. A certain Reed Corrigan was one of three directors of a corporation called Devon Holdings. The company had a P.O. box address in Middletown, Delaware, and little else on record. It had, though, leased a couple of Beechcraft King Airs, as well as a small Learjet, back in the early 1990s. When I took a closer look at Devon, it quickly became clear that the two other officers listed with Corrigan were also ghosts, shabbily crafted ones at that—their social-security numbers were registered in 1989, kind of unusually late in life for guys who were company directors two years later. Devon was a sham paper company that, upon further investigation, led me back to—quelle surprise—the CIA.

  Peeling back the layers of such dummy corporations wasn’t too complicated. We used them a lot, as did other agencies, including the CIA. They were handy for establishing cover personas for agents and, beyond that, for all kinds of covert activities, like chartering and leasing planes for rendition flights of terrorist suspects or ferrying agents quietly across borders, which is what I suspected might have been going on here. Reed Corrigan was the fake identity my ghost agent had been using while working on whatever the Devon assignment involved, and it was an identity that he had evidently long ago discarded, which was standard practice once the assignment was completed or terminated.

  No name. No face.

  A ghost.

  This didn’t come as a huge surprise to me. Corliss had only muttered the name grudgingly, and it was suddenly clear to me that he had been a pro right to the bitter end by not giving up his buddy’s real name. He had no reason to sink him, not when the guy had come through for him. And while the fake name gave me a bone to chew on, it also gave my ghost something far meatier: advance warning that I was coming after him. Somewhere, on some server in some basement at Langley, a flag would have inevitably come up as soon as I started digging into the Corrigan persona, and he’d have been alerted about that—and about me. Which meant it was safe to assume he already knew I was gunning for him, while I didn’t know the first thing about him.

  Ku
dos to Hank Corliss for the posthumous flip-off.

  It had all got me wondering about how Hank Corliss knew Corrigan’s fake name, and how he managed to dredge it up under pressure like that. He had to be real familiar with it. Then I wondered if maybe it was the only name by which he knew him. It had to be one of two scenarios: either he only knew him as Reed Corrigan, which meant that they’d met under shady circumstances while my ghost was using his cover identity and didn’t feel a need to share his real identity with Corliss; or—and this seemed more likely to me, given that Corliss had reached out to Corrigan for help with his dastardly, off-the-books deed—he knew his real name, but they’d both been part of some assignment, some task-force bonding experience where my ghost had been using the name Corrigan.

  Either way, I needed help accessing the CIA’s operations records, and that’s not something they share with outsiders, not unless there’s a congressional hearing involved, and even then, I wouldn’t bank on it. I had to find a way into their files, and I didn’t have much in terms of where to start looking, not beyond the Devon link and the other thing Corliss had mentioned: that Corrigan had been involved with MK-ULTRA “back in the day,” as he’d put it. I knew a bit about that program already, of course—we all did. But after Mexico, I knew a hell of a lot more about it, and what I discovered pissed me off even more.

  MK-ULTRA was the code name of a secret, and highly illegal, CIA program that started in the early 1950s. It was all about mind control. The thinking was, the commies were doing it to our POWs, Manchurian Candidate–style, so we should be doing it too. Thing is, we didn’t have a lot of Soviet or Chinese POWs locked up anywhere close to Langley, so the good doctors at the Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence decided they’d experiment on the next best thing: American and Canadian volunteers. Except that these folks didn’t volunteer. They were just civilians and soldiers, a bunch of unsuspecting government employees, mentally ill patients, and hapless grunts—with a few hookers and johns thrown in—who had no idea about what was really being done to them.