Czar of England (SOKOLOV Book 6)

by Ian Kharitonov

  One of Frolov’s authoritarian predecessors had paved the way, abolishing presidential term limits.

  But for Frolov, it wasn’t enough.

  He wished to do away with any pretense of democracy altogether, not caring what backlash it would entail from the West. Once and for all, it would solve the problem of succession, with Frolov passing the crown on to his children.

  Frolov intended to usurp the Russian throne by creating a quasi-theocratic dictatorship. The new form of government would cement his rule. He, the Czar, would control the executive branch, while the Patriarch’s role would be elevated to official leader of state religion and ideology, granting the Holy Synod the legislative and judicial functions.

  That way, he would stay in the Kremlin for life and enjoy unlimited power. Under his watch, the perestroika—rebuilding—would be complete and a resurgent Russia would rise to crush the West in the new Cold War.

  “May the Lord give you the strength to succeed, Saveliy Ignatievich.” Both men were atheists but Frolov had become highly superstitious lately, so he found the Patriarch’s words reassuring. “It’s come to my knowledge that there are evil forces working against you.”

  “The conspiracy? It’s been uncovered and dealt with by the FSB.”

  “From what I heard, it originated from your enemies in the West, didn’t it?”

  “England, to be precise. No need to worry, Your Holiness. Directorate S will handle it. The vipers will be squashed in their nest.”

  5

  Monaco, the micro-state wedged between the French and Italian Rivieras. Cruising along the flowing Monte Carlo traffic filled with luxury vehicles and supercars, Eugene Sokolov drove his Lamborghini Urus past the boutique-lined Place du Casino to Avenue Princesse Grace and pulled up in front of the Michelin-starred Blue Bay restaurant. Leaving the overpowered crossover to a valet, he got out from behind the wheel. He was dressed in a silk shirt and stressed jeans that hugged his broad shoulders and narrow waist, his rugged good looks also etched in his weathered but handsome face. Tall and athletic, he had a short torso and long legs with muscular shins, typical of the horsemen and seafarers in his Cossack lineage which traced back to almost 3,000 years of Scythian heritage.

  Posing as a successful businessman, he found himself in an unfamiliar role, but one he had to adapt to.

  His arrival in the Principality had spurred considerable gossip among Monegasque high society, especially its female section. There was no shortage of rich Russians in Monaco, but Sokolov remained an enigma. Nobody knew the origins of the man or his wealth. He shirked attention and avoided glamorous events, which only compounded the mystery.

  His phone chirped and he glanced at the screen.

  A notification from a banking app popped up.

  A transaction had just been completed, the money deposited to his freshly opened account.

  Incoming Transfer: €3,000,000.00.

  The amount could make anyone’s heart race, but it hardly stirred any emotion in Sokolov. To him, it was just a number. A weapon in a new kind of war. In fact, it constituted a minuscule fraction of the three hundred million U.S. dollars at his disposal.

  The restaurant’s terrace was surrounded by a breathtaking Mediterranean seascape that matched his azure-blue eyes. The view alone justified the prices.

  Waiting for him at a reserved table was his older brother, Constantine. Lean, fit, wearing black. A historian by profession, exiled from Moscow, he’d been a leading Kremlinologist at a CIA-affiliated U.S. think tank.

  “Nice Škoda,” Constantine remarked about the Lamborghini, making fun of the fact that both brands belonged to the VW Group. “Did your Audi fanboyism stop you from getting a Ferrari?”

  “Too small for me. I wanted to go for something less flashy, like a used Toyota, but couldn’t find a dealership around these parts. Besides, one has to blend with the surroundings in the game we’re playing, so consider it camouflage.”

  Constantine nodded. Personal gain meant nothing to either of them. Both knew that the resources went to advancing their strategy.

  “The money has been transferred,” Sokolov informed his brother.

  “Good. Now we can move on to the next stage,” Constantine said.

  They celebrated with the chef’s signature seven-course tasting menu—though the portions of each exquisite dish were extremely tiny.

  It felt surreal, as if nothing else existed beyond that heavenly Côte d’Azur setting where every bit of life had to be savored. But there was a hybrid war raging on in the real world outside, waged by the Kremlin, and the thought always occupied the back of Sokolov’s mind. It was the very reason he and Constantine had come to Monaco.

  The three-million-euro deposit was the final step in their preparation.

  Together, they’d founded their own private intelligence company, BRF. The acronym stood for the Brotherhood of Russian Freedom, in homage to the covert anti-communist organizations run by Russian emigrés who had fled to Europe from the October Revolution.

  The Sokolov brothers saw themselves as successors of their Cossack ancestors, carrying the torch of the White Guard’s fight against Bolshevism in a world where the Kremlin’s shadow loomed large.

  With Russia still suffering under despotic rule, all semblance of democratic opposition stamped out, somebody had to continue the century-old struggle. The Western world seemed incapable of standing up to the Kremlin aggression as President Frolov wreaked havoc and stoked division across America and Europe. No tribunal at the Hague would be forthcoming for all the terror and atrocities committed by the Russian regime. They entertained no illusions of any foreign government helping them in their battle. European bureaucrats in particular were too blinded by either greed or fear to take any action against Frolov and his cronies.

  Their crusade was also personal, because the Kremlin had taken away everything from them. Their family, their friends, their careers, and their country. They were driven by an intense fire burning inside them, knowing that they were facing off against pure evil.

  Their motto was to strike Frolov wherever he reared his ugly head.

  And they had the weapons to do it.

  Their main intel source was the Pavlova Papers, a mother lode of Mother Russia’s secrets. Thousands of documents detailing the Kremlin’s network of offshore companies and their illicit activities, including money laundered from the narcotics trade. The black ops budget, codenamed Moscow Gold, was being wielded by the Kremlin regime to wreak havoc in the civilized world. Terrorism, election-meddling, cyber-attacks—wholesale chaos.

  The Sokolov brothers had seized a chunk of Moscow Gold, the three hundred million dollars. Now they were putting it to good use, turning it against the cancerous Mafia state which had weaponized it.

  Fighting fire with fire, money with money.

  Establishing presence in various favorable jurisdictions offered them invisibility, freedom, zero taxation, and the kind of flexibility that no state-run spy agency could afford, bogged down by red tape. Over the last few months, they had built up assets, setting up companies and buying properties in countries like Andorra, Montenegro, the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, Liechtenstein, and now Monaco. Fast-tracked applications for citizenship through investment had yielded passports from the nations of St. Kitts and Nevis, and Malta, enabling visa-free travel to over 150 countries. They’d also stocked up gear, guns, and gadgets.

  They were modern-day nomad warriors. And they would follow the financial trail to find a chink in the armor and hit at the Kremlin’s weakness. One blow could be lethal.

  “So, where shall we start?” Sokolov asked. The Pavlova Papers gave them a wealth of information to pick out targets from.

  “We go big,” Constantine replied.

  It couldn’t get any bigger than the U.K.

  The British capital remained a magnet for dirty money. As the main playground of Russian billionaires, it had become colloquially known as Londongrad. The overpriced U.K. property market serve
d as a perfect vehicle for money laundering. Despite Downing Street’s pledge to create a hostile environment for the Kremlin kleptocrats, the financial flows still found their way to the City of London, a safe haven for hiding the looted riches. No matter how dodgy, the investments provided a much-needed boon to the economy in the wake of Brexit, so while the lawmakers acted tough, they were reluctant to truly crack down on corrupt Russian cash.

  Because of the influx of wealth, the Kremlin had been committing crimes on British soil with impunity for years.

  In 2006, former FSB officer turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko had been murdered in a most gruesome fashion.

  Litvinenko had felt sick after drinking tea at a London bar with his business associates—and FSB agents—Lugovoy and Kovtun.

  Initially, Litvinenko was admitted to hospital with what the doctors believed to be food poisoning.

  Over the next few days, his ailing health showed that it was anything but.

  The nausea and vomiting had been the early signs of something far more horrifying. As the sickness progressed, his internal organs started to fail. He was dying in agony as something destroyed his liver, kidneys, and bone marrow. Bleeding ulcers covered his mouth cavity and his hair had fallen out.

  All the symptoms pointed to acute radiation syndrome.

  And yet, when a team of experts was brought in, armed with Geiger counters, they found no traces of gamma rays.

  The medics and police were baffled.

  Then, a particularly painstaking British professor worked out the mystery. It weren’t gamma rays that were killing Litvinenko but rather alpha rays. The short-wave particles dealt damage when ingested and could only be discovered if one knew exactly what to look for.

  Blood and urine samples taken just three hours before Litvinenko’s death tested positive for an alpha-emitting substance, polonium-210, which had bombarded his living cells.

  One more day and the presence of polonium in Litvinenko’s body would never have been found, making foul play impossible to prove.

  The murder by radiation poisoning, as soon as it was established, led to the single culprit who could have carried it out.

  The Kremlin.

  Polonium-210 couldn’t be sourced from anywhere else in the world other than the Russian government-controlled Avangard nuclear facility in the town of Sarov. It was the proverbial smoking gun.

  Not content with just the killing, the Russian regime also engaged in cynical trolling.

  One of the assassins, Lugovoy, was made a member of the Russian parliament.

  Months later, the nuclear scientist who’d helped uncover the Litvinenko murder was stabbed to death in his kitchen with two different knives in what Scotland Yard regarded as a suicide.

  And on the one-year anniversary of Litvinenko’s ghastly death, the Kremlin had honored George Koval, the Manhattan Project spy who’d stolen polonium production secrets for the Soviets, with a posthumous award of the Hero of the Russian Federation.

  Then, in 2018, the Russians conducted a WMD attack in Wiltshire, England.

  Arriving from Moscow, a pair of highly trained GRU assassins utilized Novichok A-234, a nerve agent as toxic as VX, one of the deadliest chemical weapons ever devised. Their target was Sergei Skripal, a retired GRU officer living in Salisbury following a spy swap with MI-6. He and his daughter Yulia received a near-fatal dose of Novichok. Attempting to murder Skripal, the assassins had coated the handle of his front door with the poison, an oily liquid. A few hours after leaving home, the former spy and his daughter were found unconscious, slumped on a park bench, and rushed into hospital. Both survived the chemical attack but had to be put into induced comas as they fought for their lives.

  Subsequently, a man from Amesbury, Charles Rowley, found the discarded Novichok container, disguised as a perfume bottle, and gave it to his partner, Dawn Sturgess. She sprayed some of it on her wrist.

  They were admitted to hospital in critical condition.

  The woman died.

  The Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings were only the most infamous examples of Kremlin-sanctioned murders.

  At least another dozen hits were carried out by the Russian regime inside the U.K.

  In each case, the British government had done its utmost to brush the killings under the carpet to avoid diplomatic scandals and media outrage.

  As they finished off the meal with coconut blanc-manger, Constantine explained, “There’s been a recent development leading to London.”

  “Another assassination?” Eugene asked.

  “Yes, but it wasn’t reported as such. The Governor of Krasnoyarsk has died in a helicopter crash in Siberia.”

  “Apparently, it was a tragic accident.”

  “The kind of accident that’s become a trademark of the FSB. At the same time, Duma member Leo Gromov has gone missing in Moscow.”

  “Missing?”

  “Vanished into thin air. Nobody has seen or heard from him for days. The same applies to Boiko, a prominent entrepreneur who disappeared in Moscow.”

  “And you don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “Not when all three names feature in the Pavlova files.”

  “Now that’s interesting. In what capacity?”

  “Each of them is—was—a beneficiary in three different shell companies registered in Cyprus, Jersey, and the Virgin Islands, where they siphoned money.”

  “Is there a connection?”

  “All three companies have the same front man acting as director. A Brit named Trevor Kendrick.”

  “So, what’s your plan?”

  “The U.K. is still awash with Russian money despite the polonium and Novichok attacks. We need to gain a foothold in Britain. Establish our own presence to fight the Kremlin subversion. Hit ’em where it hurts,” Constantine said, repeating his motto.

  “You’re suggesting that Kendrick might be someone who can help us do that?”

  Constantine nodded. “And perhaps we’ll learn what kind of power play is going on in Russia.”

  They got in touch with Jeff Monteith, asking him whether he had any intel on Kendrick.

  Monteith, a veteran Cold Warrior, had helped bring Constantine to the U.S. as a Kremlinologist for the Harry Richardson Foundation, a CIA front. Now that the Foundation had ceased to exist, with Monteith finding himself jobless, the roles had reversed. When called upon, he now provided information for Eugene and Constantine.

  The Harry Richardson Foundation had given way to the Brotherhood of Russian Freedom.

  Only this time, Monteith wasn’t accountable before the bean counters and paper pushers in Langley and D.C.

  Although he had no right to share any classified data, his wealth of experience and contacts proved invaluable.

  He’d also given them a crash course in modern espionage tradecraft. They communicated via encrypted mobile devices.

  “Did you say Trevor Kendrick?” Monteith asked, his stern face filling the screen. “He’s a notorious fixer working with Russian money. Well-known to spooks on both sides of the pond. Owns a $20-million home in Miami, Florida, so we’ve been keeping tabs on him.”

  “Fixer?” Constantine asked.

  “He funnels money for his clients who want to circumvent international sanctions and money-laundering laws. They send money to him offshore and he transfers it to his companies in the U.K. Shady stuff that no reputable business executive would touch with a barge pole, but he does it for a hefty commission. He’s suspected of having strong ties with Mikhail Dubrovsky. Does that name ring a bell?”

  “The exiled Russian oligarch living in London?” Sokolov wondered aloud.

  “The same.”

  “Interesting. Is Kendrick taking on new clients?”

  “Schemers like him are always on the lookout for fat cats to leech money off.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Constantine said. “Does anyone in the U.K. owe you a favor?”

  “I’m sure plenty of people still do,” Monteith replied. “If it weren
’t for America, they’d all be speaking German.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it, Jeff. Have you got any contacts you could use?”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Set up a meeting between Kendrick and two high net worth Russian individuals.”

  “Okay,” the former CIA man replied. “I could pull a few strings to arrange that.”

  6

  Monaco only had a heliport for air travel, so the brothers took a quick Eurocopter shuttle to Nice Airport where they boarded a chartered private jet.

  Two hours later, the Cessna Citation Mustang approached into London City Airport, offering a thrilling view of the murky Thames, London Eye, and Canary Wharf as it landed.

  After they disembarked, Eugene and Constantine were picked up by a chauffeured Range Rover waiting for them at the VIP Terminal, courtesy of Trevor Kendrick.

  The airport’s proximity to the city center meant that a forty-minute trip was all it took to reach Mayfair, where Kendrick’s office was situated. En route, the SUV drove past Big Ben on the Houses of Parliament, St. James’s Park, and Buckingham Palace.

  It made quite an impression, as intended. Kendrick himself was believed to be worth a few hundred million quid, and he wasn’t shy about making a statement, having his company headquartered in a prime location.