The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  He walked through the lobby, past the FSB security checkpoint, and toward the restricted elevator at the back. While the rest of the building was occupied by the FSB, Sergey’s boss had taken over the top floor for his own operation.

  Sergey waited for the elevator, and the soldier standing by the door looked at him. Sergey saw his eye drop to the grass stain on his pants.

  “What are you looking at?” he said.

  The soldier snapped to attention. “Nothing, sir,” he said.

  The elevator opened and Sergey stepped in.

  When he reached the top floor, Medvedev’s secretary, a pretty little thing by the name of Svetlana, directed him to the sofa in front of her desk.

  “How are you today, sweetheart?” Sergey said.

  She didn’t look up from the document she was reading. That was all right. She could ignore him all she wanted. She was wearing a bright red scarf around her neck and a tight, white dress. Her outfit brought to mind a schoolgirl, or perhaps a nurse. Sergey imagined the sound it would make if he gave her ass a sharp smack.

  He stared at her and grinned. She did her best not to notice, but he saw the blush. She couldn’t hide from him. He knew all her secrets. If she had even the faintest idea of the things he’d seen, she’d have fled the room.

  But her innocent little mind had no clue.

  And she just sat in her seat placidly, the national flag hanging from a gold pole next to her.

  Sergey watched her work. He liked to make her uncomfortable.

  There was a sound in the office, and Sergey turned to the door.

  “Who’s he inside with?” he said.

  Svetlana looked up at him over the top of her glasses. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Sergey shrugged. “Get off your ass and get me a coffee then,” he said.

  She got up and went to a fancy capsule coffee machine and put a cup in the receptacle. She pressed the button, and it whizzed to life.

  “You take milk?” she said.

  “If you’re offering,” Sergey grunted.

  “I thought so,” she said, and something about the way she said it bothered him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I thought you took milk,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said in her saccharine voice, but there was something defiant in her eyes.

  She had spirit. He’d grant her that much. He’d have liked to bend her over the counter right there, pull up her skirt, and teach her a lesson.

  Of course, he could do nothing of the kind here. Not to her.

  This was hallowed ground, and she was already claimed by the boss.

  Sergey knew better than to mess with that. His boss, Mikhail Medvedev, was, apart from the president, possibly the most powerful man in the country. He’d just been named head of the Dead Hand, after the previous holder of the title found his head on the wrong end of a high-powered sniper bullet. Every plot and plan to increase the president’s personal power would be under his direct oversight.

  No one fucked around here.

  One slip up and the president could be dethroned. He had so many enemies gunning for him that the threat was constant.

  This was where the Russian leadership was secured, and where it could all be lost.

  So even a man like Sergey remembered his manners in the waiting room. He watched her making the coffee, her neckerchief neatly tied like a proper little Young Pioneer. Pionerskiy galstuk they used to call them when he was a schoolboy. They weren’t seen much any longer, but he’d never seen Svetlana without it.

  “Why do you wear that?” he said when she came over with his coffee.

  “The boss likes it,” she said. “Reminds him of his childhood,” he says.

  “You always wear what he likes?” Sergey said, allowing a lecherous smile to cross his face.

  She ignored him. “I see you had an accident,” she said.

  As well as the grass stain, some blood splatter had gotten on his white shirt.

  “You watch your mouth,” he said.

  He began opening the buttons at his cuffs to roll up his sleeves when the door to the office opened.

  Three men stepped out. One was Medvedev, towering over the other two, who were both Chinese.

  And the Chinese were not happy. They stormed past Sergey toward the elevator, and Svetlana had to jump from her seat to push the button for them.

  Medvedev lumbered after them like a sickly ogre, his red eyes darting toward Sergey.

  Sergey made to stand, and Medvedev practically pushed him back into his seat as he passed.

  “Gentlemen,” Medvedev said. “Don’t be like this. We’re friends.”

  “You’ve crossed a line,” one of the Chinese said in his atrocious accent. “Bringing Ying’s daughter into this? It’s despicable.”

  “We needed an absolute guarantee you were going to follow through,” Medvedev said.

  “And you got it,” the Chinese said. “But at what cost to our relationship?”

  The elevator arrived, and as the two men entered it, Medvedev spread out his enormous hands. “It is what it is,” he said as the doors shut.

  Sergey was a man whose life depended on his ability to identify threats. This was a situation he wasn’t sure how to read. Something was brewing. That much was clear. Whenever the Chinese were in town, something was in the works, and with Yiu Ling, and now these two, he sensed it was going to be something big.

  And as everyone knew, anything big also had the potential to be very dangerous.

  Medvedev wasn’t about to let him in on all the plans, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t pay attention.

  He already knew Ying was from MSS. The Ministry of State Security, the Chinese intelligence agency, was their equivalent of the GRU or the CIA. If he had to guess, these two were too. They’d been dressed in the expensive tailored suits the MSS lackeys all seemed to like. They carried the obligatory Mont Blanc briefcases.

  Sergey nodded. He’d bet rubles to kopeks they were MSS.

  “Look at yourself,” Medvedev said, turning to him. “You look like you just walked in from the fields.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  Medvedev brushed past him back into his office, and Sergey got up and followed.

  He stood by the door, waiting to be offered a seat. The boss was in a mood, the meeting hadn’t gone well, and it wasn’t the time to take liberties.

  Medvedev slumped into his enormous leather throne and ran his hands through his white hair.

  “It’s done?” he said.

  Sergey nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “No problems?”

  “He ran. I had to follow him into a park.”

  “But the prick’s dead?”

  “Dead and in the river, sir.”

  Medvedev nodded. He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small, grocery store bottle of vodka. He unscrewed the cap and took a long drink.

  These were the moments Sergey knew to be careful. He’d spent many years in Medvedev’s service and knew from experience how quickly things could turn. One minute, it would be all laughs and jokes and shots of vodka, and the next, someone would be lying dead in a pool of blood.

  The violence was sudden, unpredictable. It kept you on your toes.

  One thing he had to admit about Medvedev, he wasn’t afraid to do his own killing.

  Medvedev took another sip from the bottle and wiped his mouth. “Your little friend’s incompetence cost us,” he said.

  “Genadi Surkov was no friend of mine,” Sergey said, betraying no hint of emotion.

  “You two drank together,” Medvedev said.

  “I drink with a lot of people, sir.”

  Sergey didn’t move a muscle. He stood still as a statue while Medvedev’s beady eyes crawled over him. Then Medvedev nodded.

  “I remember the two of you,” he said, wagging his finger as if he’d caught Sergey in a lie. “Thick as thieves, you were.”
/>   Sergey said nothing. He had his gun beneath his coat, but it was unthinkable to draw it on the boss. He came from the old school. He knew what it took to survive in the service of a man like Medvedev. He was the type of boss who, if he decided he wanted to kill you, you let him.

  You’d rise farther if you thought like that, and Medvedev was the type who knew how to tell the difference.

  “Tatyana Aleksandrova is still alive,” Medvedev said.

  Sergey nodded. He’d figured as much.

  “Two border guards were found dead last night,” Medvedev went on. “It looks like she slipped into Belarus. She could be anywhere now. London, Washington, New York.”

  “I see,” Sergey said.

  “She received a phone call before she crossed the border.”

  “Did we intercept it?”

  “She used an encrypted exchange to mask the route. We’re working on it.”

  Sergey nodded.

  Medvedev pulled two glasses from the drawer beneath his desk and poured a little of the vodka in each.

  “Sit,” he said, pushing one of the glasses toward Sergey.

  Sergey sat and picked up the glass.

  He waited for Medvedev to drink then did the same.

  “You saw the Chinese I was meeting with,” Medvedev said.

  Sergey nodded.

  “We’re working on something with them. Something stressful.”

  Sergey nodded. He knew better than to ask questions. The less he knew, the safer he was.

  Medvedev drained his glass and Sergey did the same. The boss poured two more.

  “I’m sending you to America,” Medvedev said. “Something important for the president. Do not fuck it up.”

  Sergey nodded.

  “We’ve had enough fuck ups lately.”

  24

  Svetlana Tolkalina was born in Moscow’s Belyayevo district to working-class parents. She was a shy girl, well behaved, did well in school, and graduated with honors from the local secretary’s college. When she landed an administrative job at the prestigious Lubyanka, her family was thrilled.

  Her mother always feared she was plain, with pale skin and dark hair, but she had the effect of growing prettier to people over time, as they got to know her better. She had soft, delicate features and her expressions were mild. She laughed quietly. She ate quietly. She never flirted.

  If there’d been a boy she liked, she avoided him like the plague. It meant that when she entered Medvedev’s service at the age of twenty-two, she had yet to lose her virginity and had only been kissed once in her life.

  She was an innocent, a child.

  Even the kiss had been an unmitigated disaster.

  The boy, a high school classmate named Ravil, invited her to the graduation ball. Svetlana said no, but when her mother found out, she forced her to call him back and apologize for her rudeness.

  Her school wasn’t fancy, but somehow, someone’s father had managed to rent a boat that would host the party as it cruised up and down the Moskva River. The girls in her class took the event seriously. They spent thousands of rubles on dresses and shoes and purses. They spent the day of the event getting manicures, and pedicures, and fancy hairdos.

  None of that was in Svetlana’s nature, and she refused to waste her father’s money. She borrowed a dress from her older cousin, did her own hair and makeup, and the only money she brought to the party was cab fare. She wouldn’t have brought anything, but she regarded the cab fare as an emergency precaution, something she might need if Ravil turned out to be less of a gentleman than her mother thought he’d be.

  Svetlana dreaded the night for weeks. When it came, she was very quiet. She spoke little to Ravil in the taxi. At the party, she danced only when she couldn’t avoid it.

  She drank a little of the sparkling wine that was provided by the school, far less than Ravil, and on the upper deck, as the lights of the city sparkled along the river banks, he planted his mouth on hers in a moment of madness that he somehow thought would be romantic. She objected. He was drunk.

  He didn’t immediately take no for an answer, and she had to push him off her.

  She spent the rest of the night with her back to the wall, watching the dance floor, as Ravil and his friends snickered and made fun of her.

  In the pocket of her dress, her hand clutched the cab fare like her life depended on it.

  When the boat finally docked, she swore she’d never get in a compromising position like that with a man again. In secretary’s college, she took the bus home as soon as class was over, and avoided all dates and social gatherings like the plague.

  It was a cruel twist of fate then, that a girl who’d been so careful in college ended up in the office of a man like Mikhail Medvedev.

  When he saw her walk into his office, he didn’t see an office employee. He saw a sex toy, a human doll, something he could toy with, frighten, experiment with.

  He couldn’t form even the most basic human relationships, but possession was something he understood perfectly.

  He made up his mind he was going to torture this girl, abuse her, use her to fill the void in his psyche that made it impossible for him to understand emotions.

  By the time Svetlana realized this, it was too late.

  Quitting was not an option.

  Medvedev was one of the most powerful men in the country, and he’d decided that she was his personal property.

  She couldn’t refuse.

  She couldn’t run.

  And she couldn’t tell anyone.

  If there was any redeeming factor at all, it was that Medvedev was so utterly emotionally stunted that the games he played often resembled more the acts of a child than the fully developed fantasies of a sexual predator.

  His torments were simple.

  Not because he wanted them to be, but because he couldn’t conceive of more complex ones.

  He liked to tell her what to wear.

  He took control of her bank account and told her what to buy.

  He told her to ask his permission any time she wanted to eat, or use the washroom, or shower.

  He had dozens of cameras installed in her parent’s home, watching every aspect of their life, and he left her in no doubt that if she ever tried to escape, he would have every member of her family murdered in cold blood.

  He was a dichotomy. A paradox.

  In his political machinations, he was one of the president’s most astute and cunning advisors. He could look at a complex strategic situation and see all the thousands of facets at once.

  But when it came to Svetlana, he revealed a psyche so severely stunted that she came to think of him as a sort of monstrous child.

  25

  Lance sat alone in a bar in his Russian coat, sipping a stale beer, frequently checking his watch. His face was unshaven, and he still had a slight limp. His leg was healing, but it would be a few more days before he’d be putting on his dancing shoes. He chain-smoked and never said more than two words to the waitress.

  Across the street was one of the most secure and surveilled buildings on the face of the planet.

  The US embassy in Moscow.

  For seven decades, it had served as America’s Cold War fortress. It held more operational espionage equipment than any other place on earth. The top two floors had been correctly identified by Russian intelligence as a giant antenna, capable of sucking up every signal, digital or analog, the airwaves could carry. They called the building the Electronic Vacuum Cleaner because of the amount of information it could gather.

  Not that the Russians weren’t playing the same game. Since 1953, Geiger counters and other detection equipment inside the building had been going haywire. It turned out the Russians were blasting so many microwaves at the embassy, at times reaching up to four gigahertz, that DARPA had to recommend the staff wear gonadal protection. They even designed a lead-lined jockstrap for the men, although it was never put into use.

  Instead, six-inch-thick lead shielding was installed al
ong the entire west side of the building. No one on the American side knew how the Russians used the rays, but it was suspected they triggered covert listening devices.

  There certainly was no shortage of bugs. When the work was being carried out to install the lead shielding, the building’s concrete was found to be so riddled with microphones that the president ordered an entirely new building be built from the ground up. The new twelve-story embassy was built right next to the existing structure, and every part of the construction was carried out by American contractors, flown in on diplomatic jets, and given full consular status and protection.

  All the building supplies, the sand used for mixing concrete, the drywall, the lumber, the steel, even the paint, were flown in from the states and processed by the US diplomatic warehouse at Sheremetyevo under full diplomatic protection.

  As the press boasted at the time, the only Russian material used in the entire project was water, and even that was filtered three times by US equipment.

  The old building, the building Lance could now see from the window, remained in use, but only for routine consular functions. All sensitive business was conducted in the new building, where it was immune to all known Russian espionage capabilities.

  Lance had some false embassy credentials he could use to get in and out of the compound, but he still didn’t know who to approach once he got inside.

  He couldn’t just walk in and ask for the ambassador. That would raise the alarm, tip off the Russians, and completely waste the intelligence Larissa had risked her life for.

  In a situation like this, the last thing you wanted was to tip off the enemy. Lance had seen it play out too many times. Some inept Station Chief would find out about a planned attack and run around with his hands in the air, raising the alarm. Everyone would congratulate him for preventing the attack. Nine times out of ten, he’d get a promotion. Meanwhile, the plotters would go back underground, draw up new plans, and attack somewhere else.

  Tipping your hand didn’t save lives, it only warned the enemy of what you knew.

  If you really wanted to prevent an attack like this, the only way was to kill everyone involved. The plotters, the clients, the moles, the henchmen, everyone. You pulled out the roots, or you were wasting your time.