Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  32

  As soon as the SUV started down the driveway, Falcone opened the envelope. There were four single-space pages. He skimmed a page of instructions about the Blackphone 4 and decided Drexler had told him all he needed to know. He turned to the other pages and followed his lawyerly habit: scan first to get the gist, then go over details.

  Drexler had written a script for the eight-minute op, which put Chamberlain in one place in the hotel giving orders to the GSS men in other places in the hotel. The walk-through in the gym, synchronized with images of the hotel on the monitor, had an eerie quality. It was like watching a rehearsal for a play that had been staged many times before. It had all looked so automatic, so thoroughly choreographed, like so many plans that Falcone had seen long ago in Vietnam and more recently in the White House Situation Room. Nothing could go wrong.

  Each man had a code name: Iceman for Ivanisov, Buggy for Beckley, Rambo for Reilly, Pepper for Pickens. Domino was also in the script but did not get any ordinary name and seemed to operate independently. Chamberlain had an uneasy feeling about Domino.

  He reread the instructions, focusing on the details and trying to envision the actions. But the quest for the visas crowded his mind. He had accepted the mission knowing what had to be done but not knowing how it would be done. He had assumed that his role would be what Drexler’s script described: director-on-location. Carlton had sent him to Drexler, and Drexler had provided what was expected: plan, personnel, cover story, communications, transportation. Now, for Falcone, came the hard part: Russian visas. Can’t get them by walking into that drab consulate and standing in line, figuring out the size of the bribe.… Then came the answer. Viktor Fedotov, Russian ambassador to the United States. He could cut the red tape, order visas immediately. But only under extreme duress. So extreme he’d be willing to risk his job. Or maybe his life.

  For Falcone there would also be risk, for him as a lawyer and for Sullivan & Ford. He knew that if he used the extreme duress that was taking shape in his mind, he would be guilty of the crime of illegal coercion, the polite term for blackmail. Well, it’s to save the world, right?

  * * *

  Viktor Fedotov had appeared in Washington soon after Boris Lebed became President. Fedotov, a petroleum oligarch, had become a billionaire with the aid of Putin and Lebed, thus making enough rubles to buy the ambassadorship. While Lebed was continuing Putin’s anti-America crusade, Fedotov was making friends, particularly among members of Congress who were interceding for constituents involved in Russian financial deals.

  On the very day that Falcone became President Oxley’s national security adviser, Fedotov had called him on his private cell phone number and invited him to lunch at the Russian ambassador’s residence. Falcone eagerly accepted, as much for official business as for personal curiosity. He had been there twice for receptions, which inevitably were full of people talking loudly, drinking high-grade vodka, and scooping up Sevruga caviar. He never got a chance to see much of the interior of a building whose Beaux-Arts architecture and décor put it on the National Register of Historic Places.

  Falcone was intrigued by the ironic history of the mansion. It was built in 1910 for the widow of the designer of the Pullman railroad car. In 1913 Czar Nicholas II bought the building to serve as the Russian Embassy, supposedly because it was near the White House. After the Russian Revolution, the building faded from diplomatic history until 1933, when the United States recognized the Soviet government. Moscow dispatched a properly communist architect to get rid of the capitalistic grandeur, but he balked, deciding to preserve the extravagant golden décor down to “the last hair of the last Cupid.”

  Fedotov had taken Falcone on a tour of the first-floor rooms, all of them red-carpeted and heavily laden with golden pilasters and garlands. Fedotov then led Falcone to a small, red-walled room overlooking a small garden. After vodka toasts to their countries, they had lunch, served in grand style by liveried waiters. The meal began with an oyster soup topped by osetra caviar and moved on to beef Stroganoff, accompanied by a Georgian wine with an unpronounceable name. Finally came small crystal bowls full of a delicious dessert whose name unfortunately translated into English as “dried paradise apple.”

  Falcone, growing hungry from memory of that lunch, turned his mind to a more recent recollection about Fedotov.

  For years the FBI had kept track of the comings and goings of Soviet diplomats—and potential walk-in spies—from an upper room in a National Geographic Society building across Sixteenth Street from the embassy. The FBI watchers later moved next door to a building that offered a better view of the embassy. When the Soviets built a new embassy elsewhere in Washington (on one of the highest elevations in the city), the Sixteenth Street building became the ambassador’s residence and, with the end of the Cold War, surveillance ended. But soon after Fedotov’s arrival, the FBI started watching his movements. And, during a routine intelligence briefing as national security adviser, Falcone learned why.

  Two blocks from the ambassador’s residence is Thomas Circle, a traffic roundabout named after a Civil War general whose bronze equestrian statue is the circle’s hub. The circle has long been a nighttime haunt of prostitutes who offer their services to circling motorists. When periodic police crackdowns drove the prostitutes off the street and into hotels, police strategy countered with ads on websites that invited customers to hotel room trysts. When they showed up, they met cops who arrested them for solicitation for prostitution. One Sunday nineteen men were arrested, among them Ambassador Viktor Fedotov. He had responded to an ad for a male prostitute.

  The State Department had a routine for handling such incidents, intervening to remind police that diplomatic immunity extended beyond parking tickets. The arrest paperwork disappeared. But the FBI and CIA usually learned about these erased arrests and filed them away as information that someday might be useful. The reason for the FBI surveillance on Fedotov was the development of a dossier with the idea that Fedotov, fearing exposure, might agree to be a spy.

  The news had surprised Falcone, not because Fedotov was gay but because he had been so naïve and reckless. During Falcone’s numerous encounters with Fedotov, both on official business and at social events, he had seemed to be a cautious professional, never straying beyond policy lines. At the same time he was amiable, putting a friendly face on Russia’s perpetual scowl. He spoke perfect American English and appeared frequently at Washington theaters and stadiums.

  After hearing the briefing, Falcone felt sorry for Fedotov, knowing that he was a target for FBI blackmail. Now Falcone was planning to become a blackmailer himself. Well, it’s to save the world, right?

  * * *

  “Sean! What a fine surprise!” Fedotov said on the phone. “It’s been ages. How is it going? Is there life beyond the White House?”

  “There certainly is,” Falcone replied, trying to sound as genial as Fedotov. “I am only a lawyer now, and I need a favor, an urgent favor. Can we meet … at the residence?”

  “Hmmm. Not the embassy? Interesting. Sure … Tonight? Drinks? Six thirty?”

  33

  Fedotov dramatically threw open both of the tall double entrance doors and said, “Welcome!” He was a lean man in his early fifties with thinning black hair and an easy smile. He wore gray slacks and a blue V-neck sweater over a white shirt. Falcone followed him to the library, whose curving bookshelves drew the eye to a pair of gold-framed glass doors opening to a terrace.

  On a small round table was a plate of blinis with smoked salmon and caviar, flanked by two crystal glasses and a bottle shaped in the form of the Russian imperial crown. “The drink of the czar’s Elite Guard,” Fedotov said, pouring the vodka.

  He handed a glass to Falcone, who raised it to Fedotov and said, “To peace and friendship.”

  “Also,” Fedotov said, laughing, “to an end of the Redskins’ losing streak.”

  They both downed the vodka with one motion. Fedotov poured again and motioned to the two chairs.<
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  Falcone picked up his glass and pointed to the doors. Fedotov nodded, frowning, and opened one of the doors. Falcone followed him into the dusk.

  “I need five visas,” Falcone said.

  “Is that all?” Fedotov said, laughing a bit more sharply than he had inside.

  “I need them right away. Without filling out those forms that ask so many questions.”

  “Such as ‘purpose of visit’?” Fedotov asked.

  “Such as ‘Have you ever been involved in armed conflicts?’”

  “Interesting,” Fedotov said. “For this you needed us to stroll in the garden, away from my secret microphones? Or eavesdropping by a Security Service officer hiding behind the drapes?”

  “Please don’t be angry, Viktor. It’s a matter that I wish to not go through official channels.”

  “And may I ask why? I promise not to tell President Lebed,” Fedotov said with a smile.

  “And I promise not to tell,” Falcone said, draining his glass.

  “Tell what?” Fedotov asked.

  “Tell about what happened when you answered a certain advertisement on the Internet.”

  Fedotov stood for a moment, his face a mask, his dark eyes staring ahead. Then he went inside, returned with the bottle, and sat on a stone bench. Falcone sat down next to him and held up his glass.

  “I assume you know that E. M. Forster was in the same gay tribe I’m in,” Fedotov said, tilting back his head to drain the glass. “I don’t usually memorize quotes—but there is one from Forster that so fit me—fit my life—that I did memorize it.”

  “He said something … about betrayal … and friendship,” Falcone said. He refilled his glass.

  “Yes,” Fedotov replied. “Forster said, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Very powerful, no?”

  “Yes. Too powerful for me. I took an oath for my country.”

  “There are no oaths for not betraying friends, are there?” Fedotov’s voice roughened, as if Russian was trying to break through his English.

  “I need the visas for a purpose beyond my country—or yours. Someday you will understand. No one will be harmed. You have my word.”

  “Your word,” Fedotov said bitterly. “Your word. ‘Beyond my country.’ Yes. I can see that. One of those times when honor is wrapped in what? May I call it blackmail?”

  “Call it need. It’s wrapped in need.”

  “Very well,” Fedotov said, reaching out his hand. “You have the passports with you, I assume.”

  Falcone handed over his passport and the four others.

  “I will order expedited diplomatic visas. No one below me will question my order.”

  “And above you?”

  “Perhaps. But the Foreign Ministry gives me relatively little interest. As you know, I am sure, most of our governing is done by one man.”

  Fedotov slowly rose from the bench and said, “Someone from the consulate will deliver them to you by noon tomorrow. You still live in that Pennsylvania Avenue penthouse?”

  “Yes,” said Falcone. “Someday, when what I am doing is finished, I hope to see you there again.”

  Without speaking, Fedotov went inside. Falcone followed him to the entrance hall. Still silent, Fedotov opened one of the double doors. Falcone nodded and left.

  34

  Even after three months as a member of the faculty at Moscow State University, Leonid Danshov was still a novelty and a star. Students filled the lecture hall to hear him, an American professor who did not sound like a professor or, for that matter, like an American. The title of his subject, as listed in the catalogue, was Modern East–West Geopolitics.

  At first, few students signed up for what sounded like a dull elective that would probably echo other courses taught by professors who droned on about Russia’s world view in the Putin-Lebed era. But Lee—as he wished to be called—did not adhere to the catalogue title. “What I want to talk about,” he said in his first lecture, “is the lingering of the Cold War.”

  He spoke fluent Russian, complete with idioms and the occasional appropriate proverb, though there was a trace of the language of his parents’ birthplace, Ukraine. After introducing himself as an American committed to understanding the history of his adopted country, he took his listeners back to August 29, 1945.

  “World War II has been over for fifteen days, the war that you Russians call the Great War,” he said. “The Soviet Union has been the ally of the United States, Britain, and China. Stalin has met with President Roosevelt, President Truman, and Winston Churchill. Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan, albeit on the eve of Japan’s surrender. Agreements have been made about the postwar world. The Soviet Union seems to have gotten what Stalin wanted, a divided Germany, a divided Korea, a Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

  “Hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners of war are starving in camps scattered around Japan and Korea. American and British aircraft are dropping food and medical supplies to the prisoners. Then, on that August day in 1945, Soviet fighters spot an American B-29 Superfortress dropping supplies to a camp near Hamhung, Korea, a nation already coming under Soviet hegemony. The Soviets fire on the B-29, forcing the aircraft to land. Unknown to the plane’s crew, a new war has begun. It will be called the Cold War.”

  After that sketch, he moved quickly to his view that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America “made a dubious claim of victory and immediately began to treat Russia as a conquered nation, not unlike Germany and Japan after the Great War.” The end of the Cold War, he said, “ushered in the beginning of what we have now—an unspoken acceptance by leaders in both nations to a renewal of distrust and confrontation. I am proud to have the privilege to speak freely in a nation where poet Osip Mandelstam once wrote … and died, a martyr to truth.”

  Western critics in the 1930s had compared Mandelstam to Pushkin, who had been silenced by the czar’s secret police for subversive writings. Mandelstam’s most famous poem, which circulated in the literary underground during Stalin’s long reign of terror, became known as his defiant “The Stalin Epigram.” It was a death certificate. Mandelstam’s poems disappeared from print. And he died mysteriously after being sent to a prison camp near Vladivostok in 1938.

  “As Mandelstam said,” Danshov continued, “‘only in Russia is poetry respected. In fact, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?’”

  Speaking slowly and reverently, Danshov ended his lecture with lines from the “The Stalin Epigram”:

  He forges his decrees like horseshoes—

  some get it in the groin, some in the forehead,

  some in the brows, some in the eyes.

  Mandelstam had been resurrected after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was well known in the new world of young Russian intellectuals. They flocked to Danshov’s lectures and his readings at smoky literary clubs and coffee houses in Moscow. Inevitably, whatever his topic, Danshov would recite those lines from the ode. Russian literary critics wondered whether he was reciting the poem to suggest that there were new Stalins ruling Russia—first the late Vladimir Putin and now the current forger of decrees, Boris Lebed?

  Colonel Nikita Komov wondered the same thing.

  35

  Komov’s interest in Leonid Danshov had awakened the Comrade X-ray that lurked in Komov’s soul. His dependence upon instinct and paranoia produced a kind of alchemy, which he used to transform his suspicions into reality—and action. As usual, Komov did not mention his suspicions to his superiors or to his FSB colleagues assigned to keeping track of U.S. intelligence activities.

  Over the years, he had created his own Special Investigations Unit, a group of about fifty FSB officers who reported only to him. Komov and his unit operated out of a suite of offices occupying most of the fourth floor in the Lubyanka, the building in downtown Moscow that had been the headquarters of the KGB and its infamous prison. T
he unit’s operations were disclosed only to Lebed, and only Lebed decided with whom, if anyone, he would share the information.

  Frequently, instead of targeting enemies of the state, the unit preyed upon politicians or financiers designated by Lebed. Those cases—involving blackmail, the planting of false evidence, and even sabotage—hearkened back to KGB days. The nickname for the unit, the Sons of Beria, commemorated Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, a notorious lecher who ran the vast Soviet internal police apparatus, the prison camp system, and a global espionage network under Stalin. Beria, believed by many to have poisoned Stalin, briefly took over the government after Stalin’s death. Beria was tried and convicted of treason and executed in 1953. The nickname did not please Lebed, but he invariably gave Komov what he wanted.

  Komov told an aide to bring him the FSB dossier on Danshov, setting in motion a series of orders that shortly produced the arrival in his office of a pompous deputy director, a master archivist, and a nervous technician wheeling a stand containing a laptop and a high-speed portable printer.

  Komov disdained computers, demanding that documents and photographs be presented to him on paper, not on monitors. When he was through with the printouts, he would put them in a burn bag modeled on the type used by the CIA; often he carried the bag himself to the incinerator chute.

  * * *

  The dossier showed that Danshov was forty-two years old and unmarried. As a professor, he lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment on the Moscow University campus. He had been born in Yonkers, New York, the only child of parents who had emigrated from what was then the province of Ukraine. They were among the thousands of Jews who fled anti-Semitic persecution in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

  Danshov enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of eighteen and was put on a career path that included assignment to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he learned Arabic. During the Gulf War, he served as an intelligence specialist in the Special Forces Group. He left the Army in 2000 as a Special Forces captain and went to Yale on a scholarship, while remaining in the Army Reserve. He stayed at Yale for his doctorate in Slavic languages and literature.