by Val M Karren
I plopped down in an easy chair and pulled the telephone onto my lap. From my book bag, I took an address book, worn and battered but filled with names, numbers and email addresses of my contacts around the world. Finding the phone number I needed, a Virginia area code, I dialed and waited for an answer.
“How can I direct your call?” a nondescript operator’s voice asked.
“Special agent Hal Parker,” I replied with no niceties or greetings.
“Connecting you now,” the operator answered flatly.
After a few rings of an extension telephone I didn’t know the number to, I heard the agent answer.
“Please identify yourself,” the man’s voice said.
“Turner, Peter, 52-48-76,” I revealed.
A moment passed.
“Mr. Turner, this is special agent Parker. What is your status?” the contact questioned.
“Santander has made contact. Will meet tonight at 19:00 in Arlington. Please advise instructions,” I waited for a response.
“Are you positive?” Parker questioned in a bit of disbelief.
“Absolutely. No one else could have known the details but him,” I confirmed.
“No updates. Proceed with caution. No wires, no surveillance. Make contact and try to ascertain where he is staying. Call back no more than sixty minutes after the meeting,” were Parker’s instructions.
“Understood,” I confirmed and hung up the telephone.
I took a cab from downtown across the river on the Roosevelt bridge and up Wilson Boulevard until just passed the Court House metro station. The cab dropped me across the street. Not wanting to create any suspicion on Del’s part, I did not hesitate to cross the street and darted out in front of the oncoming traffic and lighted the curb and sidewalk in front of Ray’s The Steaks. I walked right in at seven o’clock and looked about the waiting area. Empty. I approached the hostess at her podium and stood without knowing what to ask.
“I am here to meet my party. Sanning?” I propositioned, not sure if he would use a name he had already been known by.
The cute blonde in her server’s uniform looked over her reservations lists and shook her head with an apologetic look on her face. He blonde bob shook from side to side with her head. “Are you sure it’s tonight?” she asked back.
“Oh, I’m sorry, It’s not Sanning, it is Streltsiy. Can you check again please?” I tried to sound forgetful and a bit spacey as if I met people every day at upscale steak houses as a habit.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Streltsiy has arrived and is waiting for you. Please follow me,” she smiled and showed me to the back of the restaurant, that wasn’t full, but was certainly far from empty… and then I saw him with a beer in hand, sipping carefully from a full mug. When he saw me, his face lit up and he quickly stood up from his chair.
“How the hell are ya, kid?” he bellowed and gave me a manly bear hug. I can’t say I wasn’t pleased to see him again, “How’s the shoulder? Kid, you look great! You look smarter than when I last saw you! You got your color back!”
“Del, the last time you saw me I was on the floor of the Tretyakov Gallery bleeding out!” I reminded him, “of course I’m going to look a little bit better.”
“C’mon sit down. I understand celebrations are in order! Heard you passed your thesis off for a degree.” He snapped his fingers for the waitress and ordered me a tall Pepsi with lots of ice. I chuckled remembering the fuss he made in Moscow two years ago about ice with the clueless waiter.
“Del,” I started, “of course nothing I learn about you will ever surprise me again, but how do you know that I passed my thesis defense and how did you get my home address?"
“How do I know about your thesis? Who doesn’t know about your paper? The whole community has been talking about it. It’s making the circles and you are going to be a very hot asset in the intelligence community as soon as that diploma is placed in your hands. I thought I’d try to be the first to get an offer in!” he said as a matter of simple business. “Are you hungry?”
“Sure, why not? I’ll call my father after I’ve celebrated with you,” I said with some sarcasm and opened the menu.
“So, kid. I had to lay pretty low after the shootout at the Tretyakov. I heard about a week later that you had made it stateside again but you didn’t leave any details on the answering machine. What happened with you? How did you get on?" Del asked.
“Well, it wasn’t anything crazy. Woke up in the hospital with big Bertha as a nurse. The embassy helped me get a plane ticket booked and I flew home maybe ten days later. Thank God, there was no more drama! I couldn’t have handled it.” I fibbed.
“That’s funny. Could have sworn I saw you on TV shaking hands with Boris Yeltsin at the Kremlin hospital. You looked pretty shell shocked,” he said with a wink at me as he sipped his beer again.
“Jeez, that’s right. Yeltsin! I forgot about that. Sure wish I had a picture of that.” I put on a bit of a show, trying to figure out how much he knew and how much info he was fishing for.
“So, I assume having been treated at the TsKB that you were under guard. That place is more a fortress than the Kremlin is, but doesn’t let in tourists!” he attested.
“Yes, I was kept under guard, they took a statement from me and then turned me over to the embassy. From there they booked me a flight home,” I extrapolated.
“And you had nothing to do with the shootout at the American embassy that made the international headlines,” he probed.
“Nope! Just one shootout a week for me, please! One bullet wound in my life time is enough for me, Del!” I lied.
“Funny, because I thought I saw a one-armed fellow that looked like you run from a crashed car into the embassy gates with two marines with pistols drawn,” he said with a cold stare on his face.
I balked, “C’mon, Del. What don’t you know? Why are you playing games with me,” I protested.
“I just wanted to see your face when I know you are lying to me. It helps me get a baseline for the rest of the conversation I want to have with you tonight. Does the Bureau have you on a leash? Did you already call them to let them know that I contacted you?” Del wasn’t guessing. I nodded my head in defeat as I sipped my tall glass of frosty cola.
“Was your call from Washington two years ago under duress as well?” he continued to shoot holes in every cover that was contrived for me to bring him in close enough to get him.
I didn’t even bother answering him anymore he obviously knew all the procedures and tricks that all the world’s intelligence and counter intelligence agencies use.
“Have they compensated you well? You certainly have enough experience and knowledge at this point to have started with them at a rather high level. No bachelor’s degree entry level position for you, I’m sure. Did they pay for your degree as well?” Del saw straight through the details of the last twenty-four months.
I piped up in my own defence. “You didn’t leave me many choices, Del. It was either full cooperation or be charged with aiding a terrorist organization or conspiring with them as a foreign agent. It was the fry pan in the States or the fire in Russia. Thought I might at least get some good education out of it instead of thirty years in Siberia. You would have done the same!”
“Absolutely, kid, absolutely.” Del agreed, “I’m glad it worked out for you. It’s like I said to you in Moscow, you’ve got skills and they needed some honing. I’m glad to hear you took the chance to get that training. Did they give you any security clearances for your research for the thesis? The material you’ve been able to dig up was not stuff you read in The Economist.” Just then the waiter brought our dinners and placed them in front of us both during an awkward silence.
“Tell you what, Del, I’m just going to eat this nice juicy steak and these perfectly browned potato wedges, and you can tell me MY life’s story while I listen. Geez! If you already know everything why do you invite me for a chat?” I griped at him as I sawed vigorously into the meat on my platter and cramm
ed a chunk of beef in my mouth and chewed with a look of defiance on my face.
“Kid, you gotta understand something about yourself. You’re a boy scout. You’re an idealist. If you had grown up in California you might even have become an activist with a granola smell to you. You can’t keep working for the Americans in the capacity you are now. Once you understand the depth of their corruption you’ll think the Russians still have the training wheels on. The folks you are working for don’t even know who they are serving and whose agenda they are forwarding,” Del expounded.
“Hmmm…” I answered chewing another piece of my steak while I crammed in potato wedge showing little interest in his lecture.
Del could see that his tactic wasn’t working and put his utensils down and came down off his own high horse and said with a stone-cold face, “Kid, we’re going after Zlobin and his entire network. We’re going to bring them down.” Del said with no inflection or emotion. He was done trying to sell anything to me. I stopped chewing the meat in my mouth and looked him straight in the eyes. I swallowed the half-masticated bite of meat and gristle with a bit of a gulp. I had to wash it down with a sip from my glass.
“Zlobin? You’re going after Zlobin and his entire empire?” I stammered in disbelief, stunned. Del only nodded back, void of any bravado and swagger. His eyes showed he was serious, but worried at the same time.
“I assume you know what you’re getting into, Del. This isn’t just some provincial gangster like Mr. P. who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. This is the most sophisticated, the most educated and arguably the most vicious group of criminals that have ever existed in the modern history of civilization. They have no rules! They are into everything. I estimate his network alone is siphoning a least a quarter of Ukraine’s state revenues into their own network. They pretty much own anything that is shipping to, from, in and out of any Black Sea port. Their network is massive!”
Del nodded again and said quietly, ‘We’ve done our homework.”
“Del, you just can’t show up one day with a cover story on your own and slip this guy a pill in his glass. I don’t think anybody outside of the most inner circle has actually even been able to specifically identify who Zlobin is! There are at least four different descriptions of the man and they don’t trust anybody from outside their own circles. You won’t even get close to him!” I explained in earnest trying to convince him of the fool’s errand he was starting off on.
“Kid, we know we can’t get close to him and assassination is not our goal. We want to slowly pick apart his different networks and expose the local corruption to local authorities and whittle him down, revenue stream by revenue stream. We hope to get through all the tangled webs that protect him from prosecution and let the Ukrainian authorities finally get him on their own terms. We are just going to work in the shadows on this one,” he said with an honest twinge of humility.
“Del, who are ‘we’? Who do you work for?” I asked again with a bit of defiance.
“I don’t work for anybody. I work with a network and we receive support from different intelligence agencies around the world to work on projects that they know they don’t have the resources or expertise to do themselves. We don’t have a name. We don’t have a list of operatives and we don’t have a pension plan,” he said with a sarcastic smile on his face, “and I am asking you now if you are interested to really make an impact, or are you satisfied with just making a difference?"
“I need to know what kind of impact you’re talking about Del,” I insisted. “Impact can go both ways. I need to know that I would be supporting the rule of law and not helping to create chaos and conflict.”
“Kid, tell me, is the Bureau still looking for that disc I took from Mr. P., the one with the radar tracking technology I explained to you about in Moscow?" Del asked changing the subject. “Do they still harass you to find me and try to get that disc for them?”
“Yes, that’s why I’m still on their payroll,” I admitted.
“Well, then you’ve got job security. As I told you in Moscow, the disc was destroyed. Nobody gets it. Somebody in the future might invent something just as useful to the rogue elements in the world, and we will steal it again and destroy it again. We don’t trust anybody with something so attractive. Somebody somewhere will always want to get their sticky fingers on it. It may be a measly twenty million dollars in the big picture of national defence budgets, but for one man, that’s a life of luxury, leisure, and power. Most people can’t resist that temptation. The FBI and CIA can keep searching for the disc from the Sokol plant, but I promise you, it will never be found.” Del was adamant.
“Del, why me?” I asked.
“Kid, are you so conceited that I have to tell it to you again so you get a big head about it? You’re an idealist and you’ve got the skills we need for this task. That’s all I’m going to say about it,” he was slightly annoyed at my youthful need for encouragement, unable to believe that I had something special in myself.
“What kind of protections are there?” I asked realizing that they work off the grid.
“None! In fact, you’ll be hunted by the same people next year that pay you to do a project this year,” he said as a matter of fact.
“Can I get out when I want to and need to?” I asked with reservations.
“As long as you don’t get your hands on the dirty money and think you can walk away with the spoils of a defeated target,” he replied in an accommodating voice.
“What do I tell the FBI?” I asked with some trepidation.
“Anything you want to. Tell them you’re going on vacation. Tell them you’re taking a different job, but don’t worry, they’ll have a very hard time finding you if you come along for the ride,” Del reassured me. “We have a client who will fund us for three years to bring down Zlobin. They’re offering all sorts of support that we’ve never had on a project before as they have also recognized these groups to be their largest security problem, just as you outlined in your thesis. This could very well create the momentum we need to put the internationals out of business and help the national agencies get control again and start to stamp out those cockroaches. This could be the beginning of the end for them.”
I sat without further questions of Del, just doubts about myself. I looked away as my thoughts raced in circles around my head. I reflected on my newly finished degree. What was I going to do with it? What kind of difference was I really going to make? Was the world really any safer because I wrote a paper? I thought of Dean Karamzin’s urgency to expose the local corruption. I thought of Yulia and her hope to continue Bolshakov’s work. I reflected of Major Dobrynin and his determination to do the right thing regardless of the consequences. I remembered the old lady on the bus in Nizhniy Novgorod whose grandson was going off to fight in Chechnya for nothing of value, nothing noble, but to extend corruption’s long arm of cruelty.
Del spoke again, bringing me back to the present moment, “Kid! Are you in?”