Some of what Lammelle knew about the Russian dacha on the Eastern Shore he had learned more recently. At five-thirty that morning, he had met with J. Stanley Waters, the CIA’s deputy director for operations, and several of his deputies in The Bubble at CIA headquarters in Langley. Only the people in The Bubble—plus of course DCI Jack Powell—knew that Lammelle had accepted Sergei Murov’s invitation to go boating in Maryland.
The meeting had been called both to guess the reason Murov wanted to talk to Lammelle—probably it had something to do with Congo-X, but no one was sure—and to prepare Lammelle for it.
To that end, the latest—just taken—satellite photos of the compound were shown. “Photos” was probably a misnomer, as these were satellite motion pictures. The infrared and other sensors showed life in only four of the rental cottages, including the two known to house the Russians’ communications center. The analysts agreed there was no significant change from the data taken over the past week.
The NSA at Fort Meade reported they had been unable to pull anything of interest from the ether—that is, any reference to Lammelle, Murov, or a meeting between the two—and that the level of traffic between Moscow, the dacha, the embassy in Washington, and the Russian Mission to the United Nations in New York City was normal. Nothing had been sent either in a code, or by any technical means the Russians erroneously believed had not been detected or cracked at Fort Meade.
The FBI liaison officer reported that the FBI agents tracking Murov had seen nothing out of the ordinary in his behavior, and that the FBI agents on-site—one of the two state troopers stationed around the clock at the gate was always an FBI special agent—had similarly seen nothing of special interest.
Lammelle had closed the meeting with a reminder that the visit had to be kept a secret. Secrecy was important because Senator Homer Johns (Democrat, New Hampshire), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who loved to be on TV and despised the CIA, would—should he learn of the meeting—love nothing better than to call DCI Powell to ask about the meeting, then quickly leak the secret to CNN and/or C. Harry Whelan, Jr., the syndicated columnist, who didn’t like the CIA either.
There were three Mercedes-Benz automobiles lined up in the circular drive before the three-story brick mansion: a CLS 550 sedan—the pilot car—then an elegant twin-turbo V12 CL600—obviously the ambassador’s vehicle—and then another CLS 550—the chase car.
The precautions are necessary, Lammelle thought, not to protect the ambassador from the Americans, but from his fellow Russians.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov would be delighted to sacrifice a half-dozen of his associates if that was the price for taking out the ambassador.
“It looks as if the boss is about to go to work,” Murov said. “Why don’t we say hello?”
This is not a coincidence, Lammelle decided. The ambassador probably waited until the gate reported their arrival before he came out of the house.
Obviously, he wants me to know that he knows I’m here, and, as important, to know that he knows Murov invited me.
“What a pleasure to see you, Mr. Lammelle,” the ambassador said, offering his hand.
He was a ruddy-faced, somewhat chubby fifty-five-year-old.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Ambassador,” Lammelle said.
“Sergei tells me you’re going boating,” the ambassador said.
“That’s not exactly true, Mr. Ambassador. Going out on the river in February may be sport for a Siberian, but for an American it’s insanity.”
The ambassador laughed.
“What I thought I would do, Mr. Ambassador, is look through a window in the hunting lodge and watch Sergei turn to ice.”
“I’m not a Siberian, Frank. I was born and raised in Saint Petersburg,” Murov said.
Which at the time was called Leningrad, wasn’t it, Sergei?
“In that case, I suggest we both look out the windows of the hunting lodge at the frigid waters.”
The ambassador laughed again, and laid his hand on Lammelle’s arm.
“If I have to say this, the door here is always open to you.”
“That’s very gracious of you, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Perhaps if you’re still here when I get back, we can have a drink,” the ambassador said, and then gestured for his chauffeur to open the door of the Mercedes.
“I don’t think that’s likely, but thank you, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Give my best regards to the President and Mr. Powell when you see them, please.”
“I’ll be happy to do so, Mr. Ambassador.”
And say “Hi!” to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for me, please, Mr. Ambassador, when you get the chance.
“I thought we’d have breakfast in the hunting lodge, rather than in the house, if that’s all right with you, Frank,” Murov said as they watched the ambassadorial convoy of three luxury cars roll away.
“Fine with me, Sergei,” Lammelle said.
Murov waved him back into the Caravan for the short ride to the hunting lodge, which was a small outbuilding that had been converted into a party room. There was a table that could seat a dozen people. A small kitchen was hidden behind a half-wall on which was a mural of two old-time sailors—one Russian and the other American—smiling warmly at each other as they tapped foam-topped beer mugs with one another.
Lammelle thought: In the professional judgment of our best counterintelligence people, somewhere on that mural and on that oh-so-charmingly-rustic chandelier with the beer mugs overhead and God only knows where else are skillfully concealed motion picture camera lenses and state-of-the-Russian-art microphones. All recording for later analysis every syllable I utter and every movement and facial expression I make.
And as much as I would love to roll my eyes and grimace for the cameras before giving them the international signal for “Up yours, Ivan,” I can’t do that.
Doing so would violate the rules of proper spook deportment, and we can’t have that!
Unless we play by the rules, we would never learn anything from one another. Murov waved Lammelle into one of the two places set at the table, and a cook—a burly Russian man—immediately produced coffee mugs and set a bottle of Rémy Martin and two snifters on the table.
That’s really a little insulting, Sergei, if you thought I was going to oblige you by getting sauced and then run my mouth.
Or it could simply be standard procedure: “Put the booze out. The worse that can happen is that the American won’t touch it.”
“I asked Cyril to make eggs Benedict,” Murov said. “That all right with you, Frank?”
“Sounds fine,” Lammelle said, “but looking the gift horse in the teeth, can we get on with this? I really have to get back to the office.”
“Just as soon as he lays the eggs Benedict before us, I’ll ask Cyril to leave us.”
“I hardly know where to begin,” Murov said as he finished his breakfast.
The hell you don’t.
Item two on your thoughtfully prepared agenda—item one being put out the Rémy Martin—was to suggest you don’t know what you’re talking about and simply are going to have to wing it and thus be at my mercy.
“How about this?” Murov went on. “I think there are certain areas where cooperation between us would be mutually advantageous.”
“Does that mean, Sergei, that I have something you want, and you hope that what you’re going to offer me will be enough to convince me I should give it to you?”
Murov considered that a moment, then shrugged, smiled, and nodded.
“You can always see right through me, Frank, can’t you?”
“Only when you want me to, Sergei. If you don’t want me to ...”
“I know how to neutralize Congo-X,” Murov said.
Now, that’s interesting!
Starting with: How does he know that we’re calling it Congo-X?
“I didn’t know you had assets in Fort Detrick. Now I’ll have to tell the counterint
elligence guy there to slit his wrists.”
“I have people all over. Almost as many as you do, Frank.”
“Did your assets tell you that we’ve already just about figured out how to neutralize Congo-X?”
“They told me Colonel Hamilton has had some preliminary success,” Murov said.
I don’t think there’s an SVR agent inside Detrick.
What I think we have is some misguided noble soul, a tree-hugger—or a half-dozen of them—who is making his—or their—contribution to world peace and brotherhood among men by feeding anything they think is another proof of our innate evilness to the Russians, who are no longer godless Communists, and thus no longer a threat.
The proof of how good they are now is that when they reburied the tsar and his family in Moscow, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was there on his knees. Somehow that photograph of that born-again Christian made front-page news all over the world.
“Just for the sake of conversation, Sergei, what have I got that you want?”
“Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva.”
“Since you have assets all over, Sergei, I’m really surprised you don’t know that we don’t have either of them, and never have had.”
“But in a manner of speaking, Frank, if you have someone who has anything—a bottle of Rémy Martin, for example—wouldn’t it be fair to say you also have that bottle of cognac?”
“If you’re suggesting I have someone who has your two defectors, I don’t. And I think you know that, Sergei.”
“What about Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo? Doesn’t he have Berezovsky and Alekseeva? And since that name has come up, he wants Colonel Castillo, too.”
“Who ‘he,’ Sergei? Who ‘wants Colonel Castillo, too’?”
Murov smiled, but now his eyes were cold.
“Frank, we never lie to one another,” Murov said.
True. But we obfuscate as well as we know how—and we’re both good at it—all the time.
“So far, that’s been the case, Sergei,” Lammelle said.
“That being the case, you’re not going to deny that Berezovsky and Alekseeva left Vienna on Castillo’s airplane, are you?”
“Several people I know have told me that, so I’m prepared to believe it. But I don’t know it for a fact.”
“Or that Castillo works for you?”
“It’s my turn to ask a question. You didn’t answer my last question: Who ‘he’ that wants Castillo?”
Murov took a moment to organize his thoughts, and then asked, “How much of the history of the SVR do you know, Frank?”
“Not nearly as much as I should,” Lammelle said. “I know that the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki used to be the First Directorate of the KGB, and there’s a story going around that the reason it’s so powerful is because, in addition to his other duties to the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin runs it.”
“You do know how to go for the jugular, don’t you, Frank?”
“Excuse me?”
“My question was: How much of the history of the SVR do you know?”
“Putin doesn’t run it? For a moment there, I was beginning to think that Putin was he who wants Castillo, too.”
“Once more, Frank: How much of the history of the SVR do you know?”
“Why don’t you tell me, Sergei, what you think I should know about it?”
Murov looked at him carefully and pursed his lips as he framed his reply.
Finally, he asked, “Would you be surprised to learn that its history goes back beyond the Special Section of the Cheka? Back beyond the Revolution?”
“I don’t know. I never gave that much thought.”
“Where do you think the Cheka came from?”
“I know it really became important in 1917—1918?—when Felix Dzerzhinsky took it over.”
“Did you ever hear that Dzerzhinsky was an oprichnik?”
“I don’t know what that is. But I have heard that Dzerzhinsky had been locked up and nearly starved to death by the Bolsheviks until just before he was given the Cheka.”
“That’s what you and I would now call ‘disinformation,’ Frank. I think it unlikely that he ever spent a day behind bars. Dzerzhinsky was in fact an oprichnik.”
“And I told you I don’t know what that means.”
“I’m about to tell you. In 1565, Ivan the Terrible moved out of Moscow, taking with him a thousand households he’d selected from the nobility, senior military officers, merchants, and even some serfs. Then he announced he was abdicating.
“The people left behind were terrified. Ivan the Terrible was really a terrible man, but those who would replace him were as bad, and before one of them rose to the top, there would be chaos.”
Where the hell is he going with this history lesson?
“So they begged Ivan to reconsider, to remain the tsar. He told them what that would take: the establishment of something, a ‘separate state’ called the ‘Oprichnina,’ within Russia. The Oprichnina would be made up of certain districts and cities, and the revenue from these places would be used to support Ivan and his oprichniki.
“To make the point that it would be unwise to challenge this new idea, Ivan first had Philip, the Metropolitan of Moscow—who had said the Oprichnina was un-Christian—strangled to death. Then Ivan moved to Great Novgorod, Russia’s second-largest city, where the people had complained about having to support the new state-within-the-state.
“There he killed all the men and male children, raped all the women, seized all the crops and livestock, and leveled every building. No one ever questioned the Oprichnina again.”
“Not once, in the next—what?—four hundred fifty give-or-take years?”
Murov ignored the sarcasm, and went on: “In 1825, after Tsar Nicholas the First put down the Decembrist Revolution, he realized the revolution would have succeeded had it not been for the assistance—more important, the intelligence—provided by trusted elements of the Oprichnina, so he made them into a separate state within the separate state. He called this the Third Section, or sometimes the Special Section.
“When the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and, finally, the Communists took over, Lenin, on December 20, 1917, formed from the tsar’s Special Section what was officially The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, but commonly known by its acronym as the Cheka. He placed an aristocrat named Felix Dzerzhinsky in charge.”
“The tsar’s secret police became the Cheka under an aristocrat named Dzerzhinsky?” Lammelle asked incredulously.
Murov nodded.
“Dzerzhinsky’s father had been one of the more important grand dukes under the tsar. One of the oprichniki. There were no more grand dukes, of course—or any ‘nobility.’ But there was the Oprichnina, and Dzerzhinsky was one of them.
“He apparently decided he could best serve Russia by serving Lenin. The family still lives on the estates they had under the tsar. That’s the point of this history lesson, Frank. To make sure you understand how important the Oprichnina remains even today.”
“I guess you wouldn’t know all these fascinating details if you weren’t one of them, huh, Sergei?” Lammelle said, more than a little sarcastically.
Murov either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it.
“My family has been intelligence officers serving the Motherland for more than three hundred years,” Murov said with quiet pride. “We have served in the Special Section, the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and now the SVR.”
“And Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is one of you, too, I suppose?”
“I’ve answered your question truthfully. Now answer mine: You’re not going to deny that Colonel Castillo works for you, are you?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Castillo does not now, nor has he ever, worked for the agency. That’s the truth, Sergei.”
“But you’re—how do I put this?—in touch?”
Lammelle shook his head. “No.”
“Do y
ou know where he is?”
Lammelle shook his head again. “No, but if I can find out, I’m going to warn him that Putin’s after him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to,” Lammelle said. “Are you going to tell me what that’s all about? Why does Putin want his head?”
“I didn’t say President Putin is in any way involved in this, Frank.”
Of course you didn’t.
Those cameras and microphones also are recording everything you say, aren’t they?
“Okay. Let me rephrase. Why does He Who Wants Castillo want him? And please don’t tell me ‘wants’ isn’t shorthand for ‘wants eliminated.’”
“There are several reasons, most of which—probably all of which—have occurred to you. For one thing, Colonel Castillo has left a great many bodies behind him in his travels around the world. Do I make my point?”
“That accusation would be a good deal more credible, Sergei, if you put names to the bodies,” Lammelle said.
“If you insist,” Murov said. “I suppose the first was Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia. You’re not going to deny Castillo was involved in that, are you?”
“As I understand that story, that was self-defense,” Lammelle said.
“Whatever the circumstances, Vincenzo and half a dozen others were shot to death in Uruguay by a commando team under Colonel Castillo.”
“There was a confrontation and Vincenzo lost. Sometimes that happens in our line of work, Sergei. The good guys don’t always win.”
Murov smiled.
“That comment can be interpreted in two ways, Frank, depending on who one thinks are the good guys.”
“I suppose it could.”
“In any event, Vincenzo’s death was an embarrassment to General Sirinov, who had to explain it to the Cubans.”
“General who?”
“Contrary to your beliefs, General Yakov Sirinov is the man in charge of the FSB and the SVR.”
“You mean he runs them for Mr. Putin?”
“President Putin has nothing to do with either the FSB or the SVR.”
The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Page 25