Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  “I’m fine, just worried about tomorrow,” the young woman said walking over to the couch. “Do you really think tata can convince the European leaders, especially the German chancellor, to join us in the war?”

  “We can convince them,” Kamila said reassuringly. “The general, you, me, and your father. Together we will do it.”

  “I mean, he already got better, I can see that. Yet, he is not his old self. I’m just worried that the heads of state want to see a strong leader which he is not. Not anymore.”

  The mother nodded and took her daughter’s hand. “You’re right, they will want to see leadership. Nobody likes a ride on a sinking ship. But we simply have to have faith in your father, in the general, and in our ability to present a winning team.”

  ✽✽✽

  Mark got ready for bed early. Just like every other night, he plugged the charger into his phone and went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He kept thinking of his modern-day St. George. He was not a Russian, and for quite some time in his adult life, he had struggled to understand this weirdest of European peoples who seemed to place so little value on their freedom. And yet, they had fought for freedom from oppression so valiantly during the first half of the 20th Century. He hoped that his Russian partner would come up with suitable candidates. Once we find our holy warrior, we will bring the most corrupt regime in world history down for good, he thought.

  ✽✽✽

  For the first time in five days, Roman Konstantinovich Kuvayev came home before midnight. He had conferred with the GRU chief and Bortsov, the FSB director. All three had supported a ban of TLKS as the next action step and gotten approval from the president himself. Fortunately, this kind of thing fell into FSB’s purview. Bortsov would be up all night. Well, better him than me, Kuvayev thought.

  “Moy sladkiy muzh, my sweet husband is coming home to his lonely wife,” Lyudmila exclaimed positively surprised as he entered their large Garden Ring apartment. She walked toward him wearing high-heeled slippers and an extravagant nightgown she had brought back from a shopping trip to Milan in spring.

  “You look tired,” she said caressing his cheek.

  He nodded. “I am, my love. I am.”

  “The children are sleeping. Come, I’ll take you to bed, and I’ll do something nice for you. Something that helps you relax. You will sleep, and tomorrow you will go back and win the war.”

  Thirty-Nine

  Kuvayev woke up to the usual sounds of morning traffic on the Garden Ring, the deep bass of modern high-powered diesels was occasionally disturbed by the clattering of an old two-cycle engine. The increasing frequency and urgency of the honking outside told him that it was already late in the morning. He fished his phone from the nightstand. It was 09:24, way past his usual time.

  “Good, you’re awake,” Lyudmila said entering the master bedroom. “I didn’t want to wake you, you were so tired last night. Did you sleep well, my dear?”

  “Yes,” Roman said and stretched. “Thank you, my love, for looking out for my health. But the driver must already be waiting, no?”

  “I called your office at seven, he will be here in thirty minutes. You have time to shower and get dressed. If he waits a little bit, so what. You’re the boss,” she reminded the powerful director of SVR of his position.

  Kuvayev grinned. “You’re right. I’m the boss. They wait for me.” He got out of bed, and while Lyudmila went into their shared walk-in closet to fetch out a suit and tie for him, he went into their large en-suite bathroom. He looked down at his feet and the warm black Brazilian slate underneath. Then he turned sideways and looked into the large mirror that, like an old Hollywood dressing room, had mirrored light bulbs all around.

  He looked at the man in the mirror. That man still looked slightly tired. Yet, he realized how far he had come. A humble civil servant’s son from beyond the Ural was now at the head of the mighty SVR. Not a bad achievement, a rare achievement in modern Russia. Had he not met Lyudmila and had he not gained her family’s favor, he might still have capitalized on his resourcefulness and intelligence. But in no way would he be at a similar station in life. He might be a mid-level manager or head of something or other in a ministry, maybe own a small company doing this or that. He had worked hard to come this far, but he had also profited from other people’s protection.

  He had seen other men die for such a career, or after such a career. In fact, he was the first head of post-Soviet GRU to move on to another posting. His three predecessors had passed while in office. One had fallen from a window, the other had been crushed to death in a car accident. The third, his immediate predecessor had died after a ‘long struggle’ of an undisclosed illness at age sixty-two.

  The wording ‘long struggle’ had raised some eyebrows in the West, the man had been in office for only two years during which supposedly he had struggled with his illness. On the day of his death his successor, Kuvayev, was named and initiated. Not a day earlier, not a day later. Very subtle.

  He knew he had to work hard to continue enjoying the fruits of his lifelong journey, the Brazilian slate, the marble, the English suits, the house in Spain, Oxford or Cambridge education for his sons.

  Kuvayev decided for a cold shower. Since his times as a simple army conscript, a cold shower in the morning was his preferred way of waking up and getting ready for the day’s struggles.

  ✽✽✽

  Frustration so early in the day was too much for Mark Sanders to bear. He had texted his Krav Maga coach and personal trainer Jan Szimpla asking for a spontaneous sparring. The PT had agreed as long he could be done by noon and then head off to teach the new batch of Berlin police recruits in self-defense.

  On the way to Jan’s studio five blocks down Prenzlauer Allee, he kept racking his brains for the best way to disseminate the information their bomb contained. Also, he had said that he would ask Hardy to look into the sudden drop of raids on Polish insurgents. But he had no way of contacting Hardy. Could he simply walk into the U.S. embassy and ask for the CIA guy who probably was named like the author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles?

  As he maneuvered his son’s stroller into the courtyard of Jan’s building, he decided to stop his fruitless racking of brains. Something’s going to happen, sooner or later, he thought.

  ✽✽✽

  “Mamushka, the internet is not working,” a young boy’s voice screamed through the entirety of Kuvayev’s Garden Ring apartment. There was not one of the five bedrooms and other rooms in which it could not be heard.

  Roman Konstantinovich turned off the hair dryer to listen where the sound came from. He heard the clatter of his wife’s high-heeled slippers on the marble floor of the corridor and opened the bathroom door.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Lyudmila.

  “I forgot to tell you, Misha is a little sick and staying in bed today,” she said apologetically. “He’s playing some internet game with another boy from school who’s apparently playing hooky.”

  “Khorosho, I can already see him playing hooky in Oxford,” Roman grunted.

  Lyudmila shrugged and continued her journey down the long marbled corridor.

  He went to the master bedroom to find a navy suit, a tie with matching pocket square, and a white shirt with French cuffs laid out on his bed.

  ✽✽✽

  “Someone needed to let off some steam today, huh?” Jan Szimpla joked after his exercise with Mark. “You did well, though. You managed to control the aggression and channel it into some smart moves. So my efforts were not totally wasted.” The fit bald man laughed and tapped Mark’s shoulder appreciatively.

  “Thank’s, man,” Mark said smiling. “Indeed they were not.”

  As Mark, still in his sweaty gym clothes, pushed the stroller with his sleeping son onto the wide sidewalk of Prenzlauer Allee he caught sight of a woman racing down the bike track with two children standing upright in the load bed of her cargo bike. She paid no attention to him, she was fully concentrated on the road ahead and pe
daled as if Beelzebub himself was chasing her. He remembered seeing her and her brats a few weeks earlier when she nearly crashed into his son’s stroller at twenty miles per hour.

  Mark turned around and gazed after her as she raced toward Berlin’s Mitte district. He shook his head and just when he wanted to turn back, he noticed another familiar figure in his peripheral vision. A blond lumbersexual hipster with a well-groomed beard. This was the third time he had seen him. First outside Özgür’s, then when he was talking to Hardy, now outside his Krav Maga studio. Berlin was some sort of village sometimes. Yet, he promised himself to stay alert.

  ✽✽✽

  “Roman, your driver is downstairs. Before you go, can you look at Misha’s iPad, please? The internet is working, but his game is not. I checked, Komsomolskaya Pravda’s page is coming up right away,” Lyudmila begged as she hung up the intercom receiver.

  Roman put on his suit jacket, pulled out his French cuffs and walked over to his first-born’s room.

  “Misha, what’s this? Are you sick?” Roman said entering his son’s room. Half of the large room was brightly lit by the sun that shone through the enormous windows at an angle. Misha sat on his bed that was larger than the one Roman had bought for his parents from his first three salaries as a lieutenant.

  “Yes, papa,” the boy faked a cough. “My head hurts, and my stomach.” He tried to cover his lie in more lies.

  But he apparently underestimated his father who produced lies on one end of his business and saw through his opponent’s lies on the other end.

  Roman sat down on the bedside, looked at his son’s face, felt his wrist as if checking the pulse and said, “Well, based on my army medical training, I would say that we cure your headache with lying still at least until lunchtime. We treat your stomach problems by skipping lunch, and while your brother eats after school, you directly go on to lying still again.” He pointed upward at the bright white ceiling. “If you look straight up and nowhere else it’s best, at least that’s what the doctor who trained us always said when we had a headache.”

  “But I’m going to be bored,” Sasha said appalled by the proposed treatment. “Bored like hell,” he exclaimed.

  “You’re going back to school tomorrow, and you’ll do the homework in the afternoon. Tonight, I will check with your mother if you did it or not. If not, seriously, boy, you’re going to be in trouble,” Roman finished the role play.

  “Yes, father,” the boy sullenly said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Alright,” Roman replied and ran his hand through his son’s hair. “It’s not like I didn’t skip school maybe a day or two. But you need a good education. The well-educated and the well-connected control our world. You want to be on their side. Better yet, you want to be one of them.”

  “Yes, father,” the boy said.

  Roman said nothing. He knew his son would not understand what he just said for the next ten years. He hoped Misha would remember once he was the right age.

  Kuvayev pulled the iPad mini from his son’s lap. He tapped and swiped through the game, then closed it and opened the browser. He typed in the addresses of a few Russian websites, then The Guardian’s address, Le Monde’s, DIE WELT’s. That was about what he had on top of his mind in terms of international news sites. They all worked as expected.

  He tried to access the main page of the RN network, the network of television stations and online outlets that executed most of his agency’s active measures. The gray screen read ‘Safari could not open the page’.

  “Blyad,” he mumbled to himself and pulled out his smartphone. He tried again, Le Monde, The Guardian, DIE WELT, RN. The international outlets worked like they were supposed to, RN’s page could not be opened.

  “Can you fix it, papa?” Misha asked.

  “No, I can’t fix it,” Roman said harshly, dropped the iPad on the bed, and left.

  ✽✽✽

  Come lunchtime Mark felt like getting a treat after the session with his trainer. Spaghetti Carbonara at Trattoria Felice would be just what he needed.

  He made a wide loop following Knaackstraße. The water tower at the corner with Rykestraße cast a short shadow, the policeman on guard duty in front of the synagogue leisurely walked from left to right between the security bollards. His short-sleeved uniform shirt had sweat stains around the armpits.

  Mark read the daily menu of the French place next to Restaurant Pasternak, the dishes sounded delicious. Ofelia had claimed the owner was a woman from Paris. The prices were definitely Parisian, quite above Mark’s willingness to pay for a simple lunch.

  He and Xandi continued past Kollwitzplatz where two Prenzlmoms, well-off stay-at-home mothers from the Prenzlauer Berg district, sat on a bench and sipped from large steel coffee mugs. At first, they were deep in conversation about something, a new feminist hashtag maybe. Then they stopped talking. Both looked over in Mark’s general direction. With one eye they watched their children running around, with the other they watched the testosterone sweating Sanders pushing his son’s stroller past at a brisk pace.

  Mark chuckled as he noticed the moms looking at his triceps protruding from under his skin-tight T-shirt. He thought he knew what was on their minds. He imagined them ripping apart their life-partners, maybe a school teacher or a mid-level minion in a ministry, in the evening in heated passion. Or perhaps they would just do the job themselves during their kids’ naptimes.

  Damn, if only I had known what I know when I was twenty years younger, Mark thought.

  ✽✽✽

  “Dima, you drive to the office fastest possible, on the sidewalks if you have to,” Kuvayev shouted at his driver from the backseat.

  “Da, Comrade General,” the driver said and hit the pedal. The powerful Diesel of the German luxury sedan roared.

  Kuvayev pulled out his phone and called Bortsov, his oppositive number at FSB. While Roskomnadzor, the executive agency for censorship, officially reported to the Ministry of Digital Development, it was effectively run by the state security agency. Bortsov had some explaining to do why Kuvayev’s propaganda networks were not available on the web anymore.

  “Comrade General, does the hurry have something to do with the internet? I got a TLKS message from my son that his school’s website is offline and he can’t upload his paper. Tonight’s the deadline,” the driver and bodyguard asked his passenger.

  “You got a what?” Kuvayev asked.

  “TLKS, this messenger, you know. It’s very popular with the young people. My son said,” he was not able to finish his sentence.

  “When did you get that message?” Kuvayev almost exploded.

  “Just a few minutes ago, while I was waiting, Comrade General,” the driver answered. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Blyad, blyad, blyad,” Kuvayev swore at the top of his lungs and punched the passenger seat’s backrest. He redialed Bortsov’s number, madder than ever.

  After three rings Bortsov answered.

  “Blyad, Bortsov, you fucking moron. TLKS is up and RN is down. What the fuck are you doing, you useless piece of shit,” he screamed into the smartphone. His driver sunk a little deeper into his soft leather seat and made an effort to look straight ahead down Tverskaya.

  “Roman Konstantinovich? Is that you,” the completely surprised Bortsov asked.

  “Of course, it’s me,” Kuvayev shouted.

  “If it’s about the TLKS ban, there are difficulties we are working on,” the state security man explained nervously.

  “But why is Russian-News network down?” Kuvayev growled through his clenched teeth.

  “RN is down? Oh, I did not know, Roman,” the even more nervous voice on the other side said. “I’m sorry, my staff will look into it.”

  ✽✽✽

  Domenico, the owner of Trattoria Felice, had just put the steaming plate of Carbonara down in front of Mark Sanders when his phone rang. The screen announced a TLKS call from ‘SB’. Mark swiped to accept.

  “You have a rare talent to alw
ays catch me eating,” he said while he put his AirPods into his ears and activated them in the phone’s menu. “Or are you watching me?”

  “Of course I’m not watching you. You’re too boring,” Svetlana said matter-of-factly. Mark again struggled with his business partner’s sense of humor.

  “I’ll eat while you talk,” he replied.

  “If you must,” Svetlana sighed. “I have exciting news. The Russian government is trying very hard to block TLKS.” She let that information sink in a little.

  Mark slurped in a long spaghetti, then licked the white Carbonara sauce from his lips. With a hum he signaled interest in the topic.

  “But they can’t,” Svetlana triumphantly exclaimed and apparently clapped her hands in joy.

  “They can’t?” Mark asked incredulously. “How is that possible? I thought the FSB was all-powerful.”

  “Apparently, there is someone with a stronger kung fu than the apparatchiks’.”

  “Pyotr Dernov?” Mark asked already knowing the answer, Dernov was the founder of TLKS and his successes with that service were widely discussed in the entrepreneurial circles Mark also had once belonged to.

  “One hundred points for the gentleman in the white dress shirt,” Svetlana joked.

  “Alright, at least now I know you’re not watching me. I’m wearing a T-shirt,” Mark said and laughed.

  “You left your house wearing only a T-shirt, are you feeling alright?” Svetlana asked with mock concern in her voice. “But the really interesting part is, I think we have found our dragon-slaying saint.”

  “Pyotr Dernov,” Mark said and nodded pensively.

  “Bing, bing, bing, the grand prize goes to the gentleman in the T-shirt,” Svetlana chanted. “In our circles,” Svetlana referred to the hacker scene, “he’s being celebrated as if he had invented the binary system, as if he had made the one and then the zero, as if he had made the heavens and the earth.”