Countdown in Cairo

by Noel Hynd

  FORTY-EIGHT

  When her flight landed in Geneva, rain was falling. She noticed the drops on the window of the aircraft when it taxied to a halt and then again on the windshield of her cab as she took it to her destination.

  She didn’t go directly to Federov’s house. She knew better. She was traveling light, with only an overnight bag that was good for three days maximum. Worse, she had had to leave her gun with Fitzgerald in Cairo.

  To the cab driver, a Senegalese in a camo field jacket, she gave as an address one that Federov had given her over the phone. It was a corner in one of the better residential districts of Geneva, a corner that led to a quaint cul-de-sac of lavish homes behind high walls and gates. She was tempted to think of it as a gated community, but then again the entire Swiss confederation was a gated community. She put that thought out of her head and stepped out of the cab.

  The cab pulled away.

  Two children on bikes glided easily past her in the mist. She hung her overnight bag over her shoulder. Across the street a sturdy young man was standing at a rare phone box, appearing to be in conversation, and down the quiet street there were two men walking.

  More importantly, she had no followers.

  The man at the phone box hung up and again Alex waited. She looked back and forth in each direction. Then, about a hundred feet ahead, maybe more, she saw a hulking figure all in black, standing in the road in the twilight. The man was wearing a cap and a scarf, and something about him looked very Russian, even from a distance. Then again, she decided, from three thousand miles away, the man would have looked Russian.

  He raised a hand and waved to her. She turned toward him and waved back. The man at the call box walked in a different direction without ever directly looking at her.

  The man in black stood his ground. Alex walked toward him. It wasn’t Federov, she knew, but one of his entourage, one of the tough boys whom he kept employed around the clock. That was fine. She figured he was armed, and, for that matter, she felt better that he was.

  He seemed larger as she approached. He stood maybe six-four, a block of granite, with beautiful facial features: a Slavic Adonis. And idly—not that it mattered currently—Alex wondered whether he was one of the men who had so unceremoniously abducted her from Federov’s hotel a few months earlier. If he was, he gave no such indication.

  “Hello,” he said, managing half a smile as she drew within a few paces.

  She answered in kind. “Dobry den’! Dobry den’! Ya govoryu po roosskie. Hello. I speak Russian,” she said.

  He looked at her, grinned, and sniffed.

  “I speak Russian too,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He said his name was Nick but didn’t say much beyond that. Nor did Alex ask for more. Nick led her for a block and then turned down another side street. They followed a high brick wall until they came to a gate. There was no number outside, no name, no marking, but Alex recognized it from her previous visit. Beyond the iron gate stood Federov’s house, window shades drawn in every room, lights blazing almost everywhere. Sometimes she thought the whole world was unmarked to her, a series of ominous enigmas to be decoded as she went along.

  The man in black pushed a buzzer and waited. A voice came on in Russian. Alex’s escort mumbled something into a speaker. The two doors of the gate came heavily apart. The mist was thickening to a light rain and flirting with becoming sleet. Welcome back to winter and the darkness of a European November. Thank heaven they were at Federov’s doorstep and on their way indoors.

  She remembered quite well the first-floor landing of the house, the grand entrance hall, the study to one side, the living room to the other. Nick unwrapped the scarf around his neck and Alex unwrapped hers. He led her to the salon, a room she had been in before, and Alex was thinking how different her arrival was here this time as opposed to last.

  Inside the room, Federov sat in a leather chair in a corner, a light blanket upon him. Logs were burning in a fireplace. Yuri smiled at the sight of her and got to his feet with an effort.

  “Hello, Yuri,” she said.

  “Ah, my angel,” he said. Raising himself to his feet, she realized suddenly, was more of a struggle than it should have been. He had a heavy steel cane nearby on his left side. For a moment she needed to stifle a gasp. He looked maybe ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when she had last seen him in New York.

  When she was near to him, he took her arm. His grip was nowhere nearly as strong as when they had first met. In the nightclub in Kiev, his arm had been like a vice, the strongest and most ominous arm that had ever wrapped around her shoulders. Since then there had been others, but she would never forget his strength that first night in Kiev. Tonight, his grip was tentative.

  He drew her closer. She allowed him to kiss her on both cheeks, gallantly in European style. Then she drew back and he released her. There was a thin line of sweat across his brow. The room was cool, even though the fire was going nicely in the fireplace.

  “You’re not well,” she said in English. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  At best, he was a man in recovery; at worst, a man in steep decline.

  “Ah,” he said, raising a hand dismissively. “I had some bad elements inside me. Not just my personal nature, my soul, but my body too,” he said, trying to make light of it. “I had some surgery and am having some treatments. The doctors. Russian. American. French. In the end, what do they know, what can they do? If they’re not treating you like a pincushion with their needles, they cut you up like a piece of meat.”

  He slid back into the chair, landing heavily.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked.

  “I will be fine. No disease is stronger than Yuri Federov.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said.

  “You’ve traveled far. Would I lie?”

  “Yes, you would. May I ask you what’s wrong?”

  “You may ask, but I will choose not to answer. We can talk today of many things, and I will answer honestly. But my physical condition is off limits, hey. Maybe at a later date. So now, what else?”

  A woman appeared in modest uniform. Yuri introduced her. Her name was Marie-Louise. She looked very Swiss in a white blouse and a trim black pencil skirt that went to just above the knee. Not surprisingly, Marie-Louise was very pretty. She seemed to be Federov’s housekeeper and her obligations were probably limited to only that because these days he didn’t look fit enough to be keeping a live-in paramour.

  In fact, Alex hated to admit, he looked like a shell of himself. She reckoned if it wasn’t from illness, it was from medications. Heavy ones. She had always thought of him primarily as an evil man, perhaps beyond forgiveness, but now she felt sympathy and sorrow. Sometimes she didn’t understand her own emotions, her own sense of decency, just as at other times she had trouble understanding people who lacked the same. But the vision of him today was like getting punched in the stomach.

  “May we serve you some tea?” Federov asked.

  “That would be wonderful,” Alex answered.

  “And you’ll stay for dinner?”

  “That would be excellent too.”

  “I assume you have a hotel reservation?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. We will cancel it,” he said. “Your former room has been readied for you here—I insist. Unfortunately, this medication has left me very weak today, so I can barely even dream of pursuing you amorously. So you will sleep undisturbed.”

  “That will be a change,” she said.

  “My regret,” he said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then you’ll stay?”

  She drew a breath. “I’ll stay.”

  The tea arrived with biscuits. As Marie-Louise served them, Alex moved to the point of her visit.

  “I want to talk to you about Vladimir Putin, Yuri,” Alex said.

  Federov laughed cautiously. “Normally you want to talk to me about Chekhov or Dostoyevsky. Now you want to talk to me about Putin. How would
you say it in English? Your interests have declined several notches.”

  “Degenerated?” she suggested.

  “That’s it.”

  “But for professional purposes, I need to ask some questions,” Alex said. “There’s something so obvious, so apparent, it was in front of me the whole time, you with your company, the Caspian Group. You used to sell energy, right? And your power and influence in Kiev.”

  Federov shook his head. “So what about all this?” he asked.

  “I want to put a theory to you. About Kiev, what happened. And you. And Vladimir Putin.”

  “All hail the great Putin,” he said sourly, an echo of the 1930s propaganda posters that hailed “The Great Stalin.”

  “You can hail him all you want, Yuri,” she said, “although I’m not going to join you. Putin is taking the country in ominous directions, is he not? Much of what has happened recently is a great departure, isn’t it? Fifteen years after Boris Yeltsin’s standoff with the Soviet Union from a tank turret in Moscow, Russia isn’t just turning away from democracy, it’s sprinting full speed in the opposite direction and redeveloping its nuclear arsenal.”

  “If you say so,” Federov said.

  Then he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.

  “Things are much better than they used to be in Russia,” he allowed. “Now there is food in the supermarkets. There are many privileges. There were so many unsuccessful changes that what goes on now is justified. Putin’s priority is order, order, and more order. This comes as a relief to most Russians.” He paused. “But you are also right. Putin wishes to be the new czar. He rebuilds the Russian empire not on Western ideals but in his own image.”

  “As with many images of the past,” Alex said, “Putin brought back the Communist flag as a military symbol. He also restored the Soviet national anthem. In a recent speech, he referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century.’”

  Federov shrugged. “So, hey? Putin only says what many Russians think.”

  “But when you watch the antidemocratic alliances he’s building with Islamic countries like Iran and Syria, you also see how that worldview is playing out,” she said. “And at home, his rule is as ruthlessly effective as Stalin’s, or Peter the Great’s. Putin has his grip firmly upon all aspects of Russian life. Political speech. The press. Religion. The Russian Orthodox church enjoys favor with Putin officials, but most other religious groups draw harassment and threats. Other Christian churches are viewed as subversive. And then there’s the economy. The state took over the major Russian oil companies, businesses that operated with free market boldness during the Yeltsin years. And what about the Russian oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky? I had some conversations with one of my associates in Rome about Khodorkovsky.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was sentenced to nine years in a Siberian jail.”

  “That is Khodorkovsky’s problem, not mine or yours.”

  “Let’s backtrack,” Alex said. “Vladimir Putin is a national hero to many Russians, a man who stepped from shadows to resuscitate a Russia that others had run into the ground, looted, and left for dead. He has been the vital link amidst the chaos that followed the fall of Communism. But he is also a cunning strongman atop a clique of robber barons. He was a career officer in the KGB, an organization whose members never leave. Worse, Putin is anti-Western, undemocratic, and comfortable with criminals. Civil liberties he sees as societal weakness.”

  Federov shifted uncomfortably. His hand fidgeted with the handle of his cane.

  “Many people underestimated Putin right from the beginning,” Alex said. “Gorbachev provided the collapse of the old Soviet Union, and then Yeltsin became the shaky steward of the new democracy. But when Yeltsin introduced Putin to the world in the summer of 1999, announcing that Putin was his sixth prime minister in a year and a half, no one expected Putin to have any shelf life. Why would he? His predecessors had all failed to bring stability to Russia. So what would be different about him?”

  Federov snorted. “Quite a bit,” he said.

  “Obviously. And look at the mess he inherited. Chechnya had exploded and become an international Islamic cause. Crime and corruption were rampant, and a new class of billionaire gangsters controlled the nation’s resources and were becoming a major voting bloc in the parliament. Then there was also Yeltsin’s bumbling manner, a whitehaired figure atop the government, midway between a butt-pinching clown and a benevolent drunken grandfather. Nothing in 1999 suggested that Putin would last more than a few uneasy months. And the available information on Putin, a career KGB operative, was almost nonexistent. As a former spy, what defined him was his own obscurity. One prominent Western newspaper described him as standing six-five. They had it backward. He stands five-six. He’s a tiny man, Yuri, unlike yourself but like Napoleon or Stalin. And like Napoleon or Stalin, a successful commander does not have to be large in physical stature, only large in intellect and in the art of confrontation and intimidation.”

  Federov grunted anew.

  “So what did Putin do next?” Alex said. “He directed a new military campaign in Chechnya. The war had compromised Russia’s self-esteem. Putin did not just promise to restore Russian rule. He used violence as an instrument of governmental policy. So Russian troops destroyed much of Grozny, the Chechnyan capital. They launched murderous sweeps through the Chechen countryside that were reminiscent or the old Soviet or German sweeps of World War II. If you were in the way, you got killed. Putin’s language in speeches in Moscow was bellicose, vulgar, and unapologetic. He knew no rules in his efforts to reestablish Russian sovereignty over breakaway provinces. Russia’s losing streak was over and his popularity climbed. In 2000, Yeltsin resigned, and Putin was elected president in one of Russia’s rare modern elections.”

  “All this is known by both of us, hey?” Federov said. “Where do you go with this?”

  “To you. And to Ukraine.”

  He seemed uneasy for the first time. “How?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” Alex said. “Putin took advantage of events over which he had no control. Russia’s oil and natural-gas reserves are the world’s largest. Russian coal, mineral deposits, and timber were gigantic assets as well. So suddenly the country that not long ago could not afford to fuel its air force and army was now swimming in petroleum and cash. The Russian stock market soared. Personal incomes quadrupled. A society that endured food shortages adapted to a consumer culture that bought what it wanted. French clothing, Belgian chocolates, American CDs and DVDs, Chinese electronics, Finnish cell phones, Italian shoes, Cuban cigars, and single-malt scotches. Rates of car ownership multiplied. Moscow’s roads, cluttered during Yeltsin’s time with pathetic old Zhigulis, were now packed with BMWs and Ford Mustangs. All of this was due to the stunning increase in energy prices. Petroleum. Natural gas. What was the name again of that conglomerate that you used to run, Yuri? The one where you kept all the records in your head. The Caspian Group.”

  Federov nodded. “That was it,” he said. “As you know.”

  “Wasn’t energy one of your main products? Something you sold? Gas, mostly. In Ukraine?”

  He nodded.

  “In 2004, Putin fixed his own reelection just to be sure,” Alex continued, “even while the Russian economy roared ahead. People in power were making millions. So Putin was seen as the steward of the new wealth, and the country was stable again, although dangerous and run by armies of bandits. And meanwhile, Putin cashed in on another world event, one that he opposed but which worked well to his benefit: the American invasion of Iraq.”

  Federov laughed. “Bush’s folly,” he said.

  “Of course. The war in Iraq was a great success,” Alex said, “for Putin, not necessarily America. By 2005, Russia had demolished the ragtag Chechnyan army. The few insurgent warriors who remained were either being captured and executed or, in many cases, coerced to join a pro-Russian government led by Ramzan Kadyrov, the
rebelturned-Putin-loyalist who replaced the chaos of conflict with a local dictatorship. Two underground Chechen presidents were killed. Pro-Islamic foreign fighters had been a radicalizing presence in the war, but now they had all fled to Iraq to join the war against the Americans. What had been a persistent problem for Putin was now a problem for George Bush. American soldiers got to fight the Islamists instead of Russian soldiers fighting the same Islamists.”

  She paused.

  “By this time, Putin’s approval ratings at home exceeded seventy-five percent,” she said. “That meant he could turn his attention to his next problem.”

  He grinned. “Ukraine,” he said with a homesick smile.

  She nodded. “Ukraine,” she confirmed.

  “In 2005, a peaceful revolution in the old Soviet republic of Georgia had overturned a pro-Russian election result much in the style of Putin’s reelection. A pro-West government was in power, eroding Russian influence. And then the tide of democracy spread. A Ukrainian opposition was organizing in Kiev. In the elections of 2004, Putin had supported a pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. Yanukovich had been convicted of robbery but had the support of the creaking old pro-Russian political machine built by Leonid Kuchma, the widely hated departing president. Putin jumped in as if the race were a domestic affair. He presided over a Soviet-style military parade in Kiev and committed Russia to an energy deal that pledged to sell natural gas to Ukraine at a deep discount through 2009. Natural gas is the lubricant of the Ukrainian economy. It heats Ukrainian cities and powers electrical plants and factories. Putin’s deal—to sell gas for less than a quarter of the market rate through Yanukovich’s first presidential term—was a subsidy-for-loyalty exchange, and promised Ukraine’s elite ample opportunity for graft. Right?” she asked.

  “Right,” Federov laughed. “Reselling subsidized Russian gas at high profits is a common way of doing business in Ukraine,” he said.

  “It’s a common insiders’ swindle, is what you mean,” she said.

  “That is what Westerners think,” he said, “but it is how business is commonly conducted in Ukraine.”