Coercion

by Tigner, Tim

  “Yes Sir, General.”

  “Are you sure you can handle Ferris alone, Sergey?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “That’s good. I’d just as soon not involve the Irkutsk office. I will make the decision on what to do with him when I see you tomorrow morning, based on what Ferris does between now and then. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sir. I’m your man, Sir.”

  “We’re about to find out. If you start getting tired, Sergey, just remember that in twenty-four hours you’ll be a hero. Don’t make a fatal mistake before then.” Yarik hung up without waiting for acknowledgement.

  This was bittersweet news. Yesterday Yarik had made a point of lavishing praise on Victor to Vasily, and now he looked like a fool. On the other hand, now he could have his way with an American spy. Overall, it was probably a net gain. How big a gain would depend on Ferris’s stamina. Instinct told him it was going to be good.

  Then there was Sergey. Yarik didn’t buy the young agent’s tale of going the extra mile. He found if far more likely that Sergey had temporarily misplaced his pager, or had forgotten to check it until he had already picked Ferris up. That was all right. Yarik could appreciate a man taking an advantage when presented. Just so long as there were no other anomalies. On second thought…

  Yarik called the office and had them transfer his call to the Hotel Irkutsk. He identified himself, reconfirmed what Sergey had told him, and left a message with his mobile number for whoever was at reception: He was to be discretely informed immediately if Mr. Potapov had any change of plans. Then he hung up and pressed 1 on his speed dial.

  “Karpov.”

  “It’s Yarik. I have some bad news. Apparently the American private eye escaped Victor’s explosion and hopped on a plane. He arrived in Irkutsk ninety minutes ago using a Soviet passport. Fortunately, my redundant security measures at Sheremetyevo compensated for this shortcoming.”

  “Why didn’t the bomb work?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Victor yet.”

  “I see. Don’t mention this to him. I’d like to bring it up myself.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Why were you employing redundant security, Yarik? Is there something else I should know?”

  “Just instinct. Ferris’s bio raised my defenses.”

  “I love those instincts of yours. We’ll come back to the bio later. Where is Ferris now?”

  “He’s staying at the Hotel Irkutsk under the name of Alexander Potapov. My man is going to watch him for the next twenty-four hours. We will probably pick him up together early tomorrow morning after he leads us to whatever fountain of information brought him here. That way we will be able to cut off the source as well. I’m planning to interrogate Alex personally, and should have everything there is to know by noon.”

  “Excellent. See you at nine.”

  Yarik closed his phone. Victor was not going to be happy.

  When the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, two people with dogs were waiting to get on. They seemed ready to give him a piece of their minds for holding up the elevator, but obviously thought better of it when they got a look at him. Regardless, Yarik had been made. He had to abort.

  Yarik cursed under his breath as he rode the elevator down with the dog walkers. A pair of pooping pooches had just granted Orlov a stay of execution.

  K.G.B. Runs Commerce Unit, U.S. Says

  “A State Department report based on classified Central Intelligence Agency data, asserts that the U.S.S.R. Chamber of Commerce and Industry is headed by a K.G.B. lieutenant general and is systematically engaged in commercial espionage in the west.”

  Clyde H. Farnsworth, The New York Times, page A6[v]

  Chapter 20

  Irkutsk, Siberia

  The Boardroom at Irkutsk Motorworks was as dilapidated as its product line. Chairs once grand were now wobbly and frayed, the laminated table had long since given up its shine, and even the walls seemed somehow sad. To Vasily, this room represented Russia’s state of affairs, and the very sight of it steeled his will. It was a disgrace, it was a shame, and it was about to change. The people of Russia deserved better.

  Igor and Yarik sat to Vasily’s left and right. The Knyaz were about to meet. As the wall clock ticked nine, Vasily’s watch beeped twice, and the telephone rang. He pressed the speaker button and began. “Victor?”

  “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  “Good afternoon, Victor. How are you?”

  “I’m just fine, Sir. Things are going well at my end.”

  “Yes, we know. Things are going well here too. This afternoon I’ll be sitting down with the management of Irkutsk Motorworks to discuss the status of our Acula engine production. They’ve already cranked out a dozen, and I expect to learn that they will be ready for full-scale production within the month. But that’s just details. Today I want to talk about the big picture.”

  Vasily paused to let the tension build. “I am pleased to announce that our technology transfer is virtually complete.” Igor and Yarik knocked on the tabletop for Victor’s benefit, and Vasily continued. “For this reason it is time to bring you,” Vasily looked at Igor and then Yarik, “fully up to speed on our American operations. I’ve asked Victor to put together a technological overview and update. He will walk you through it while I manage the overheads.” With that, Vasily turned on the projector and switched off the lights. “You’re on, Victor.”

  “Thank you. As Vasily mentioned, our technology transfer is now complete. We all know the concept behind Vasily’s master plan: using Russia’s core competencies in manufacturing and espionage to transform our nation into an economic superpower. What you don’t know are the specifics of how we’re accomplishing that. I’ll start today by giving you the thirty-second synopsis.

  “I began the quest for suitable technologies by encouraging speculation within the KGB ranks that the Americans were hiding their military industrial complex within what was traditionally civilian industry. Once interest was aroused, I was able to manipulate my peers into doing the bulk of our research for us. That research yielded a list of five projects suitable to Knyaz purposes. I put a year into infiltrating and investigating the five companies that owned them, and then selected the three most suitable to our needs and capabilities. I have spent the last four years stealing those technologies, transferring them to Russian hosts, and sabotaging the American inventors.”

  Igor knocked his approval and then said, “What ever happened to the other two, Victor?”

  “One was disqualified because their patent estate was too profound and well established for us to pretend to have gotten there first. The other was dismissed both because we didn’t have a factory that was a good match here in Siberia, and because we didn’t find a good candidate for Peitho coercion.”

  Yarik raised his eyebrows. “No good Peitho candidate? How is that possible?”

  “The technology was tightly controlled by a cohort of elderly, single men. They were in it for the science, rather than the money. You could say that the project was their family. We still could have found a way to make it work, but given that we already had three very ambitious projects, we decided to let it get away. Simple risk-versus-reward analysis.”

  “I see.”

  “Getting back to the three we did go with, the first was MicroComp. Next slide please. MicroComp was developing the next generation of microchip, one roughly a tenth the size of the current industry standard and ten thousand times faster. I am pleased to announce that by the end of the day we will be back on track at MicroComp.

  “You may recall that we recently had a hiccup when MicroComp management transferred our Peitho agent to another department, closing us out at a crucial final stage. I quickly identified his replacement from among the team’s other members, and I implanted his daughter Monday. I’ll call him tonight with the good news. He should be able to get me the final code and schematics by Tuesday, and then I’ll send MicroComp spiraling downward with a series of in
explicable setbacks. The company anointed to produce MicroComp’s technology here in Russia is RuTek, located in Krasnoyarsk. Before Knyaz AG acquired it, RuTek only produced elementary circuit boards. Nothing special. Two years from now they’ll be a member of the Global 100.”

  “Excellent,” Vasily said, as the two others knocked their approval.

  “We ended up handling the second company, PhotoZ, differently from the others. PhotoZ was still just a small group of closely-knit friends with a private company and tightly guarded revolutionary technologies—something like the discarded company I mentioned earlier, the one with no Peitho candidate. The difference with PhotoZ was that their technology, though not yet commercialized, was fully developed. The icing on the cake was that PhotoZ had not yet filed for patents.”

  “Why not?” Igor asked.

  “They figured their own secrets were safe and no one else was close so they were holding back their applications until just before launch in order to maximize patent life.”

  “Big mistake.”

  “Indeed. In light of those circumstances, I decided to take them out altogether. Before they filed.

  “Luckily for us, PhotoZ President Paul Zeigler took the whole company to Jamaica on his yacht for Christmas. That gave us the opportunity to steal everything in one midnight raid. Then we blew up the yacht and burned the laboratory to the ground. Took us fourteen months to decrypt their work, but we’ve got it now.

  “It’s my prediction that the technology we acquired free-and-clear that night will turn out to be our greatest hit. The photovoltaic bricks SibStroy is producing in Novosibirsk are not only going to bring the new Russia tens of billions of dollars, but I’m convinced they will also lead to a major reshuffling of global power.”

  “How so?” Yarik interrupted while Vasily smiled a proud, understanding smile.

  “Well,” Victor said, “given that we are going to make solar power the energy of the future, we are also going to greatly reduce the world’s dependence on petroleum products. This will take the Middle East out of the power game. Within a decade the UAE will be populated by nomads again, and that’s only the beginning.

  “Power is a zero-sum game, so each loss creates another gain. I think we need to set aside some time in the near future to plan how President Karpov can best leverage the shifts and instability to reap those gains. The transformation is not only going to be huge, it’s also going to be hugely complicated. We need to start planning well in advance.”

  “Agreed,” Vasily said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve already got some guys looking into it under the pretext of advances in nuclear power.”

  “I see,” Victor said, his voice flat. “Well, lets move on to the next slide then. Now that the PhotoZ project is all wrapped-up, I just have United Electronics and its partner Irkutsk Motorworks on my list.

  “Irkutsk Motorworks, as you will see when you take the tour after lunch, is already refining its Acula production.”

  “Why Acula?” Igor asked. “Why call an aircraft engine a shark? A ship’s motor perhaps, but…”

  “You’ll understand once you see it.

  “Anyhow, while Irkutsk Motorworks is ramping up Acula, United Electronics is losing ground on the UE-2000. I had arranged for their only prototype to explode amidst the engineering staff at the weekly test run, but a software glitch shut the engine down before my sabotage had a chance to kick in. It was a setback, but a temporary one, I assure you.

  “I was, however, fully successful with another explosion. This one took out Alex Ferris, the P.I. who had been snooping around after I eliminated his brother.

  “On that positive note, gentlemen, I can conclude my report on the technology transfer.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not really concluded, Victor.” Vasily’s tone was intentionally accusatory. He didn’t like being hard on the boy, and he knew Victor’s life had not been easy, but this was a war and he was the general.

  It took a moment for Victor to respond. “How so?”

  “Yarik, why don’t you give Victor the news.”

  “As you wish. We’re going to have to rename Mr. Ferris Mr. Phoenix, Victor, because he appears to have risen from the ashes.”

  “What?”

  “He arrived here, in Irkutsk, early this morning using a Soviet passport. He’s at the Hotel Irkutsk now, under the name of Alexander Potapov.”

  Vasily held up his hand, indicating to Yarik that this was enough. “Victor, what do you have to say about this?”

  There was a painful silence before Victor came back on. He was trying to sound calm and cool but an uncharacteristic inflection was obvious. “I put a bomb on the ignition of the car that Ferris drives. It blew up. Those facts are certain. The press identified the victim as Alexander Temogen Ferris of San Diego. That is also certain. For reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, I did not hang around to witness the explosion personally, so I cannot give you a first-hand account of Ferris’s fate, other than to say that I have not seen him since then.”

  “It would appear that you haven’t seen him because he was on a plane. But believe it or not, that may actually be a good thing. Victor, tell me about Mr. Ferris.”

  “Alexander Temogen Ferris grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, which is where his American father met his Russian mother. He was a banker, she worked at our consulate.”

  “I know it well,” Vasily chimed in with a flickering smile. “But please, continue.”

  “So he’s a polyglot, got the Swiss German, French, and Italian trio plus his native English and Russian. He went through ROTC in college—same school as me—but got scooped up by the CIA upon graduation. I suspect they wanted his native linguistic skills. I know he wanted revenge. The Libyans killed his parents when they bombed that hotel in Rome in seventy-four. Don’t know if Ferris got revenge, but I know he worked primarily in the Middle East. He left the CIA a year ago to open his own shop, Alex Ferris, International Private Investigations.”

  “Any special skills?”

  “He’s really good at getting on your nerves. He’s a cocky bastard. Aside from that, I understand the CIA put him through a lot of military training: jump school, SERE, stuff like that, leveraging the skills he developed in ROTC.”

  “SERE?”

  “Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape,” Yarik chimed in. “My kind of stuff. It’s the US Army’s course on surviving behind enemy lines—both before and after you’re caught. They do a good job.”

  “If your rookie caught him, it can’t be that good, Yarik. Tell me, is he married?”

  “No,” Victor said. “No girlfriend either. If he had one, I would have Peithoed her as insurance. As far as I know he’s never had a serious relationship, although the women line up.”

  “Is he gay?”

  “No. Just a loner I think. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  Vasily put both palms flat on the table and said “He’s perfect,” more to himself than anyone else. “Yarik, I want you to go ahead with your plan to follow Ferris for the day to learn what he’s up to. Then bring him back to Academic City for interrogation as discussed. I also want you to ensure that Ferris is … undamaged. I intend to put him to good use.”

  Yarik did not inquire about the use. He simply nodded and said, “As you wish.”

  “Victor, we’ll let you know how this turns out.”

  “Please.”

  “I have other news, if we’re finished with this,” Yarik said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I learned from an informant that one of our engineers here at Irkutsk Motorworks has a mistress down in Suhbaatar, a small town two hours south of here just over the Mongolian border. He sneaks off to meet her there on the weekends. She’s Mongol, so I don’t have a file on her, much less any control over her. She could be a spy, or she could be a nobody, although I am strongly inclined toward the former because she’s way out of his league. Given what the engineer knows, this could be a serious security leak.” Yarik paused to look them each in th
e eye.

  Vasily knew Yarik sometimes felt a bit insecure about being the brawn rather than the brains of the operation. He tended to use occasions like this to remind others of his importance. That was fine with Vasily.

  “Management confirmed that the engineer is expendable. I am driving down to Suhbaatar this afternoon to deal with him and his mistress.”

  “What about the informant?” Vasily asked.

  “I checked into him as well. He’s an alcoholic looking for favors to help offset some other mistakes he’s made. He’s even more expendable than lover-boy.”

  “Enough said.” Vasily paused. “All right, it’s my turn.” He was eager to drop his bomb.

  “As we move toward the climax of our operation and the culmination of decades of work, things are going to heat up and start moving fast. We won’t be able to control everything, and we don’t need to. But we do need to ensure that nothing can derail us. We will have the power of the people behind us, and all the momentum money can buy—those wheels were set in motion long ago. But as we approach the election a rival may concoct a lawsuit to derail my inevitable victory.”

  Vasily gave them a second to absorb the implications, certain that he alone had thought to consider this potential vulnerability. “Now, I’ve had a constitutional expert research this, and I am confident that our presidential petition will pass any standard challenge. However, there is an element of uncertainty. No matter what we do, we can not possibly foresee everything that could be thrown at the courts during groundbreaking times like these.

  The solution … anyone?” Vasily looked from Igor, to Yarik, to the speakerphone.

  “Control the courts,” Igor offered.

  “Exactly,” Vasily replied, and turned to smile at his friend with a mischievous look. “That is why you, Igor, are going to implant the Chief Justice.”