“I hate to tell you this, Alek,” Delchamps said in Russian, “but I think you just pissed Ace off.”
After a moment, during which Pevsner looked carefully at Castillo, he said, “More important, Edgar, I once again underestimated my friend Charley. I tend to do that. It probably has something to do with his sophomoric sense of humor. No offense was intended, Charley.”
“Offense taken, Polkovnik Pevsner,” Castillo said. “In other words, screw you, friend Alek.”
Pevsner shook his head, and smiled.
“Let me continue,” Pevsner said. “Not long ago, all was right in the world of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. He had both finally taken over the KGB and its successor organizations and was president of the Russian Federation.
“He could start to restore the Russian Empire. With a good deal of help from me, he had managed to keep most of the KGB’s money out of the hands of those misguided souls who thought it belonged to the people of Russia.
“He would have to deal with me, eventually, of course. I knew too much, and I had too much of what he considered the KGB’s money. But that could wait—what does Charley say?—could ‘sit on the back burner’ until the right time came.
“He was so happy with the way things were going that when General Sirinov came to him with an idea to tweak the American lion’s tail at little cost and with minimum risk—using a group of converts to Islam; there would be minimal Russian involvement—he told him to go ahead.
“What he was going to do was have the Muslims crash an airliner into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. There was an old American airplane sitting deserted on a runway in Angola. This plane would be stolen, equipped with additional fuel tanks, flown to Philadelphia, and ...”
He made a diving gesture with his hand.
“I always thought he came up with that idea himself,” Tom Barlow said.
“He could have,” Pevsner said. “But Sirinov has the better imagination. It doesn’t matter. I think of the both of them as one, as Putin-slash-Sirinov.”
“Point taken,” Barlow said.
“Enter friend Charley,” Pevsner said, waving a hand in Castillo’s direction. “A lowly U.S. Army major who, not having a clue about what was going on, jumped to the conclusion that the evil arms dealer Vasily Respin or the smuggler Alex Dondiemo or even the more mysterious and wicked Aleksandr Pevsner had stolen the 727 from the field at Luanda, Angola, for their criminal purposes and set out to reclaim it.”
Everyone was aware that “Dondiemo” and “Respin” were two of the identities Pevsner used when he thought it was necessary.
“When this came to my attention through a man I had working for me and at that point trusted—Howard Kennedy—”
“That’s the ex-FBI agent who was beaten to death by parties unknown in the Conrad Casino in Punta del Este?” Darby asked.
“That’s the fellow. Kennedy looked into Major Castillo and reported what he had learned to me. Some of this—for example, that Major Charley Castillo was also Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, majority shareholder of the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., empire and that he was working directly for the American President—made me rethink my original solution to the problem.”
“Which was?” Delchamps asked.
“An Indian beauty mark,” Pevsner replied matter-of-factly, tapping the center of his forehead with his index finger.
“That sometimes takes care of problems like that,” Delchamps said.
“God wouldn’t let you kill my Charley,” Sweaty said seriously.
“Possibly. I never underestimate the power of divine intervention,” Pevsner said. “But at the time, I thought it was just common sense. My primary motive was to avoid drawing attention to myself. But, now that I think about it, at the time, I was asking God’s help to avoid taking anyone’s life unnecessarily, so perhaps, Svetlana, you’re right, and God was involved.”
Charley smiled when he saw Alex Darby’s face. It showed that he was having difficulty with Sweaty’s and Pevsner’s matter-of-fact references to the Almighty.
They don’t sound much like godless Communists, do they, Alex? Maybe more like members of the Flaming Bush Church of Christ in Porter’s Crossroads, Georgia?
“So,” Pevsner went on, “I arranged to meet Charley in Vienna, to see if I could reason with him, come to some kind of understanding—”
“What you did, Alek,” Castillo interrupted, “was have that sonofabitch Kennedy blindside me while I was taking a leak in the men’s room of the Sacher Hotel bar. Then he dragged me, at gunpoint, up to the Cobenzl.”
“Lovely spot,” Delchamps said. “I know it well. Just hearing ‘Cobenzl’ makes me think of fair-haired mädchen and hear the romantic tinkle of the zither.”
This earned him a look of mingled disbelief and annoyance from Pevsner.
After a moment, Pevsner said, “The moment I first saw Charley, I realized that it would be painful for me to have to give him a beauty spot. And, Svet, now that I think about, I did ask God to help me spare his life.”
Darby was now really confused. He kept looking at Delchamps and Duffy to get their reaction to Pevsner’s continued references to the Deity. But knowing of the genuine—if more than a little unusual—deep faith of Pevsner and the other Russians, their faces showed neither surprise or confusion.
“And that’s the way it worked out,” Pevsner went on. “Charley and I had a cigar and a little cognac watching night fall in Vienna, and then we went to dinner.”
“At the Drei Hussars,” Charley furnished. “Around the corner from the Opera House. By the time it was over, Alek and I were buddies.”
Pevsner gave him an annoyed look.
“Charley,” Pevsner continued, “said that he would do what he could with the President to call off the CIA and the FBI—they were then trying very hard to find me—if I would help him find the missing aircraft. I took a chance and trusted him.
“I admit that finding the missing 727 wasn’t difficult for me. I operate a number of airplanes in sub-Saharan Africa, and all of my crews always keep their eyes open for things in which they think I might be interested.
“Cutting a long story short, Charley was able to take the 727 back from the Muslims before they could do any damage with it. And, as he said he would, he got the President to call off the FBI and the CIA.
“I did not know of General Sirinov’s plan to tweak the American lion’s tail, and Sirinov had no reason to suspect that I even knew Charley, much less that I was the one who had been instrumental in upsetting it.
“He did learn, of course, that Charley had flown the aircraft into MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Charley was thus added to Sirinov’s list of people to be dealt with when the opportunity presented itself.
“Next, friend Charley messed up another SVR operation. Sirinov sent a team—under Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia Major Alejandro Vincenzo—to Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Komogorov, his FSB man in charge of operations in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, to eliminate a man who knew too much and had also made off with sixteen million dollars of the SVR’s money. When that escapade was over, Vincenzo and his men were dead, and Charley had the sixteen million dollars.
“Since Komogorov needed somebody to blame for that disaster, he decided to blame it on me, reasoning that if I were dead, I couldn’t protest my innocence. So he paid a large sum of money to my trusted assistant, the late Mr. Howard Kennedy, to arrange for me to be assassinated in the garage of the Sheraton Hotel in Pilar, outside Buenos Aires.
“When that was over, I was alive and Komogorov wasn’t. Corporal Lester Bradley had put an Indian beauty spot on his right eye. The others on his team were taken out by others working for friend Charley. And Mr. Kennedy went to meet his maker shortly thereafter.
“All of this tended to reduce the all-powerful, faultless image of both the FSB and the SVR, which meant that the power of Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich was becoming questionable.
“Sirinov dec
ided to settle the matter once and for all. With a great deal of effort, Sirinov ordered the simultaneous assassinations of a man in Vienna known to be a longtime deep cover asset of the CIA; a reporter for one of Charley’s newspapers who was asking the wrong questions about Russian involvement in the oil-for-food program; Liam Duffy, who had interrupted a previously successful SVR drug operation in Argentina and Paraguay; and—”
“So they’re all connected,” Alex Darby said.
“Oh, yes. Please let me finish,” Pevsner said. “And the assassination of another of Charley’s men, a policeman in Philadelphia, who knew the Muslims who planned to crash an airplane into the Liberty Bell were not smart enough to conceive of, much less try to execute, an operation like that by themselves and suspected the SVR was involved.
“When only the assassinations of the CIA asset in Vienna and of the journalist were successful, Sirinov had to report this failure to Putin. So far as Vladimir Vladimirovich is concerned, there is no such thing as a partial success. And Sirinov knew that the only thing worse than reporting a failure to Vladimir Vladimirovich was not having a credible plan to make things right.
“And he had one: Dmitri and Svetlana had been ordered to Vienna to participate in a conference of senior SVR officers. The cover was the presence in Vienna of Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s wax statue of Peter the First, which the Hermitage had generously loaned to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
“The Tages Zeitung journalist whom he had managed to eliminate was going to be buried with much ceremony in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany. There was no question that Eric Kocian and Otto Görner, managing director of Gossinger G.m.b.H. would be there. With a little bit of luck, so would Karl von und zu Gossinger, who was not only the owner of the Gossinger empire but Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who had been causing the SVR so much trouble. All three—plus at least some of Charley’s people who would be with him—could be eliminated at the same time.
“Tom’s train would pass through Marburg on its way to Vienna. So Sirinov dispatched a team of Hungarians—ex-Államvédelmi Hatóság—to Marburg, with orders to report to Polkovnik Berezovsky. Sirinov knew Dmitri—Tom—could be counted upon to supervise their assassination assignment with his well-known skill for that sort of thing. And then catch the next train to Vienna.
“Well, that turned out to be an even greater disaster for General Sirinov, as we all know.”
“Through God’s infinite mercy,” Svetlana said very seriously.
She crossed herself.
“Svet,” Pevsner said seriously, “you may very possibly be right, but there’s also the possibility that it was the incompetence of the CIA station chief in Vienna that saved Charley and Kocian from the ministrations of the Államvédelmi Hatóság.”
“It was the hand of God,” Svetlana said firmly.
“Possibly, Sweaty, it was the hand of God that contributed to Miss Eleanor Dillworth’s incompetence,” Delchamps said. “Same result, right?”
Svetlana looked at him coldly, not sure—but deeply suspecting—that he was being sarcastic.
“Eleanor is not incompetent,” Alex Darby said loyally.
“Come on,” Delchamps said. “She was incompetent in Vienna. The rezident there ... what was his name?”
“Podpolkovnik Kiril Demidov,” Barlow furnished. “He used to work for me.”
“Demidov was onto Dillworth,” Delchamps said firmly. “Maybe he didn’t know it was Tom and Sweaty, but he knew that—Jesus Christ!—Dillworth had a plane sitting at Schwechat airfield ready to haul some defector, or defectors, away from the Kunsthistorisches Museum.”
“You don’t know that,” Darby protested.
“I know that your pal Eleanor should have known that Demidov was going to take out the Kuhls. And once that happened, she didn’t have a clue what to do next. I asked her. She said she was ‘waiting for instructions from Langley.’”
“If I may continue, gentlemen?” Pevsner said a little impatiently.
“I didn’t trust her, Edgar,” Tom Barlow said, ignoring Pevsner. “I don’t know if it was that I thought she wasn’t professional or what.”
“It was the hand of God,” Svetlana insisted.
“But once I saw the picture in the Frankfurter Rundschau of Charley getting off his private jet,” Barlow went on, “I decided that Svetlana and I were going to leave Europe on that aircraft if I had to give him Sirinov and all the ex-Államvédelmi Hatóság people.”
“And from that moment, until we walked into Alek’s house here, everything went smoothly,” Svetlana said. “Does no one see the hand of God in that?”
“I do,” Castillo said.
When Sweaty looked at him, he sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
“Don’t mock God, Charley!” she snapped furiously and moved away from him on the couch.
“Well,” Pevsner said, “Dmitri and Svetlana were not intercepted in Vienna, and that was the end of that. Except of course that Liam applied the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye principle to Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseev, who had come to Argentina in search of Tom and Svetlana.”
“Not quite,” Delchamps said. “Alex’s good buddy, Miss Dillworth, sicced a reporter—a good one: Roscoe J. Danton of The Washington Times-Post—on Charley. He came to Alex’s apartment just before we got out of there.”
“A reporter? What did he want?” Castillo asked.
“He wanted you, Ace. He probably wants to know why you stole Sweaty and Tom out from under Miss Dillworth’s nose. And if Dillworth told him about that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she told him you left the Vienna rezident—what was his name? Demidov?—sitting in a taxi outside our embassy with an Államvédelmi Hatóság garrote around his neck, and her calling card on his chest.”
“I had nothing to do with that, as you goddamn well know. The story going around is that some old company dinosaur did that.”
“You sound like you think I had something to do with it,” Delchamps said.
“Do I?” Castillo said sarcastically.
“Funny thing about those old company dinosaurs, Charley. You’re too young of course to know much about them. But they really believe in what it says in the Old Testament about an eye for an eye, and if they do something like what happened to Demidov, they never, ever, ’fess up to it.”
“Changing the subject just a little,” Tom Barlow said. “I think we should throw this into the facts bearing on the problem: Just as soon as Sirinov and/ or Vladimir Vladimirovich heard that the Americans had taken out the Fish Farm, they realized that information had to have come from me.”
“You don’t know that,” Castillo argued.
“In our profession, Charley,” Tom said, “we never know anything. All we ever have is a hypothesis—or many hypotheses—based on what we think we know.”
“Touché,” Castillo said.
“We all forget that at one time or another,” Barlow said.
Castillo met his eyes, and thought, That was kind of you, Tom.
But all it did was remind everyone in this room that I am the least experienced spook in it.
Which, truth be told, I am.
“One of the things I was tasked to do in Berlin was make sure that the Fish Farm got whatever it needed,” Barlow went on. “It’s not hard to come up with a hypothesis that Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich reasoned that since Polkovnik Berezovsky knew about the Fish Farm and it was destroyed shortly after Polkovnik Berezovsky defected to the Americans, whose CIA had looked into the matter and decided the factory was indeed a fish farm, Polkovnik Berezovsky told the Americans what it really was.”
“You knew what the CIA thought?” Charley asked.
“Of course,” Barlow said.
“You had ... have ... a mole?”
“Of course, but you don’t need a mole to learn things like that,” Barlow said. “Actually you can often learn more from a disgruntled worker who wouldn’t think of betraying her country than from an asset on the pay
roll.”
“Your pal Dillworth, for example, Alex,” Delchamps said. “What is it they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off female’?”
“Eleanor is a pro,” Darby said, again showing his loyalty.
“She pointed Roscoe Danton at Charley,” Delchamps argued. “What hypothesis does that suggest?”
Darby looked at Delchamps angrily, looked for a moment as if he were going to reply, but in the end said nothing.
Castillo said, “What’s your hypothesis, Tom, about the stuff from the Congo suddenly showing up at Fort Detrick?”
“Well, it’s clear it’s got something to do with this,” Barlow replied. “What, I don’t know.”
“It could have something to do with Vladimir Vladimirovich’s ego,” Pevsner said.
“He couldn’t resist the temptation to let us know that we didn’t wipe the Fish Farm off the face of the earth?” Delchamps offered.
Pevsner nodded.
“If he’s got that stuff, he could have used it, and he didn’t,” Castillo said thoughtfully.
“So, what’s next?” Delchamps said. “I buy that stick-it-up-your-ass motive, Alek, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it.”
Pevsner nodded his agreement.
“So Charley has to tell those people in Las Vegas that he’s changed his mind about working for them,” Barlow said.
“Why would I want to do that?” Castillo replied. “The Office of Organizational Analysis no longer exists. I am in compliance with my orders to fall off the face of the earth and never be seen again. Sweaty and I are going to build a vine-covered cottage by the side of the road and live happily therein forever afterward.”
“There goes that sophomoric sense of humor of yours again,” Pevsner snapped.
“How so?” Castillo replied.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich is going to come after you. And Svetlana,” Pevsner said. “You ought to read a little Mao Zedong. He wrote that ‘the only real defense is active defense.’”
“Did he really?” Castillo said. “I wonder where he got that?”
The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Page 19