“You know what would happen, Roscoe, if you refused an offer like this from your Commander in Chief?”
“No, sir.”
“A couple of things come immediately to mind,” the President said. “Like, for example, I ask your pal C. Harry Whelan to come see me, the way I asked you. And I tell ol’ C. Harry that I first thought of you to provide this service to your Commander in Chief, but then I heard something that really shocked me about you.”
“What would that be, Mr. President?”
“I wouldn’t make any wild accusations, of course, but I would tell ol’ C. Harry that I heard that the IRS was looking into the one million dollars you recently deposited into your account at the Riggs National Bank and ask him if he had heard that your columns were for sale to the highest bidder. I sort of think that would excite ol’ C. Harry’s journalistic curiosity, don’t you, Roscoe?
“I’d tell ol’ C. Harry I didn’t believe for a second that the million dollars had come from Somalian pirates and/or Mexican drug lords, but you never know, and the IRS was going to find out. And suggest to him that if he found out where that money had come from before the IRS did, he’d have two scoops.”
The President let that sink in a moment.
“‘Don’t make any hasty decisions’ has always been my motto, Roscoe,” the President went on. He turned to Supervisory Special Agent Mulligan. “Get those two goons of yours to take Mr. Danton back to the Watergate. He’s got some thinking to do.”
He turned back to Roscoe Danton.
“Give me a call, Roscoe. Before five, and tell me what you’ve decided to do.”
[THREE]
Lorimer Manor
7200 West Boulevard Drive
Alexandria, Virginia
1155 8 June 2007
If it had been anyone else but Miss Louise Chambers, the silver-haired septuagenarian who proposed the motto for Lorimer Manor and rammed it through the Management Committee and then insisted it be applied, there probably would have been no motto.
“Ask not what Lorimer Manor can do for you, but what you can do for Lorimer Manor” sounded socialist at best, the naysayers complained.
But Miss Chambers prevailed, in large part because she had early on enlisted the support of Mr. Edgar Delchamps. It was whispered about that she had plied him with most of a half-gallon of twenty-four-year-old Dewar’s Scotch whisky before seeking his support, but however she got it, she had it.
And while the personal courage of the ladies and gentlemen of Lorimer Manor, all of whom were retired from the Clandestine Service of the CIA, could not be questioned, none of them was willing to take on the most carnivorous of all their fellow dinosaurs, as Miss Chambers and Mr. Delchamps were universally recognized to be.
What Edgar Delchamps decided he could do for Lorimer Manor was enlist the contribution of someone who was not a resident of Lorimer Manor, but who had laid his head on one of its pillows often in the past and was sure to do so again in the future.
He went to David W. Yung, Junior, and announced, “Louise Chambers tells me she has a hole in her schedule, noon on the first Friday of each month, so you’re elected.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know Louise is chairwoman of the Lorimer Education and Recreation Committee, right?”
“So what?”
“I told you: She has a hole in her schedule, which you’re going to fill by either doing magic tricks—pulling a rabbit out of a hat, for example—or delivering some sort of educational lecture.”
“Why should I do that? I don’t live there.”
“Because you’re interested in the welfare and morale of the senior citizens, and also because if you don’t, Louise will booby-trap your new electric automatic flushing toilet. She was very good at that sort of thing in her prime.”
“As a matter of fact, there is something I could talk to the old folks about, but you’d have to help me.”
“Help you how?” Delchamps inquired dubiously.
“Move charts onto the easel, that sort of thing.”
“What the hell, Two-Gun, why not?”
Edgar Delchamps was arranging charts and diagrams on the easel and David W. Yung, Junior, Esquire, was standing at his lectern preparing to deliver this month’s lecture, “How to Turn the Gaping Gaps in the IRS Code to Your Advantage,” to the ladies and gentlemen residing in Lorimer Manor when Miss Louise Chambers got quickly out of her La-Z-Boy recliner, walked to his lectern, and whispered in his ear.
“David, dear,” the elegantly attired septuagenarian said, “I think you and Edgar should see to your journalist friend. It appears to me that something has him scared shitless.”
Two-Gun looked at the door to the recreation room, saw Roscoe J. Danton’s face, and immediately agreed with Miss Chambers’s analysis of the situation.
“You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” he announced to his audience, and started toward the door. Miss Chambers and Mr. Delchamps followed him.
“What’s up, Roscoe?” Two-Gun asked.
“You two bastards got me into this mess,” Roscoe replied. “And you sonsofbitches are going to have to get me out of it!” He heard what he had said, and added, “Please excuse the language, ma’am.”
“Hell, a man who doesn’t swear is like a soldier who won’t… you know what,” Louise said. “And you know what Patton said about soldiers who won’t you know what.”
“Tell us exactly what’s bothering you,” Delchamps said.
“I was kidnapped,” Roscoe announced.
“Who kidnapped you, dear?” Louise asked.
“The Secret Service,” Roscoe announced.
“But you got away, obviously,” Louise said. “Good for you!”
“Why did the Secret Service kidnap you?” Two-Gun asked.
“The President told them to.”
“Cutting to the chase, Roscoe,” Delchamps said, “why did the President tell the Secret Service to kidnap you?”
Roscoe told them.
“Frankly, Roscoe,” Delchamps said, “I don’t see that as much of a problem.”
“Actually, I would suggest that it offers a number of interesting opportunities, scenario-wise,” Louise said.
“That’s because the President is not sending you two to Mogadishu,” Roscoe said. “With the choice between lying to the President or having Castillo kill me for telling the truth.”
“Well, I’ll admit that Mogadishu isn’t Paris,” Louise said, “but the current scenario sees Charley going to Budapest before he goes to Mogadishu. I’ve always loved Budapest.”
“Roscoe, you know that Charley’s not going to kill you unless he has a good reason,” Delchamps said. “But since you’re concerned, what we’ll do is see what our so-far-unindicted co-conspirators have to say.”
He took his CaseyBerry from his pocket and punched the buttons that set up a conference call between the secretary of State, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and himself. He also activated the speakerphone function.
When green LEDs indicated the circuit was complete, he said, “Langley, Foggy Bottom, this is Mission Control. We may have a little problem.”
Neither Secretary Cohen nor DCI Lammelle saw any great problems in Roscoe’s situation. To the contrary, Mr. Lammelle saw it as a great opportunity to provide the President with disinformation.
“I don’t see where Roscoe has any choice but to do what the President wants him to do,” Secretary Cohen said.
“Except tell him what’s really going on, of course,” Lammelle said.
“Looking at Roscoe’s face,” Delchamps said, “I suspect he’s considering another alternative. Like, for example, going to the President, telling him what’s really going on, and placing himself, so to speak, at the mercy of the dingbat in the Oval Office
.”
Roscoe, who had in fact been considering that alternative, did not reply.
“You know what would happen in that happenstance, Roscoe?” Delchamps asked rhetorically. “Two things. One, the President would tell you to join Charley and do what he told you to do. Two, Sweaty would consider that what you had done had placed her Carlos in danger and she would come after you with her otxokee mecto nanara.”
“With her what?”
“It means latrine shovel,” Louise explained. “I don’t know about you, dear, but I wouldn’t want any woman, much less a former SVR podpolkovnik protecting her beloved, coming after me with an otxokee mecto nanara.”
Thirty minutes later, after his third stiff drink of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt Scotch whisky, Roscoe called the White House, asked for and was connected with the President, and then read from the sheet of paper on which Edgar Delchamps had written his suggestions vis-à-vis what Roscoe should tell the Commander in Chief:
“Mr. President, sir, after serious consideration, I have decided to accept your kind offer to serve my Commander in Chief to the best of my ability.”
He did not read the last four words Mr. Delchamps had suggested: “So help me God.” That was just too much.
[FOUR]
Office of the First Director
The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki
Yasenevo 11, Kolpachny
Moscow, Russia
1710 8 June 2007
General Sergei Murov had known when, in February, he had been relieved of his duties as cultural counselor of the embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C., and ordered home that he stood a very good chance of being summarily executed.
His family has been intelligence officers serving the motherland for more than three hundred years, starting with Ivan the Terrible’s Special Section, and then in the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and finally the SVR. He knew the price of failure, even when that failure was not due to something one did wrong.
It was presumed that if there was a failure, and if it wasn’t due to someone doing something wrong, it was because someone had not done what should have been done.
General—then-Colonel—Murov’s failure had nothing to do with culture. He had been the SVR’s man, the rezident, in Washington. His cultural counselor title had been his cover. It had been no secret to the FBI or the CIA, or even to some members of the Washington Press Corps, that he been the ranking member of the SVR in the United States. A. Franklin Lammelle, then the deputy director for operations of the CIA, had met his Aeroflot flight from Moscow at Dulles, greeted him warmly, and told him he thought it appropriate he greet the new rezident in person, as they would be “working together.”
Murov knew he was more than likely going to be held responsible for not doing what should have been done to prevent the failure of several of the most important kinds of operations, defined as those conceived and ordered executed by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.
Those operations had turned out disastrously. The first was intended to show the world, and, perhaps more importantly, the SVR itself, that Putin was back running the SVR and that the SVR was to be feared. It called for the assassination of people—a police official in Argentina; a CIA asset in Vienna; and a journalist in Germany—who had gotten in the way of the SVR in one way or another, followed by the assassinations of the publisher and the owner of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.
The latter was so important to Putin that he ordered the Berlin rezident to take personal control of the action.
Only the CIA asset and the journalist lost their lives. The Berlin rezident and his sister, who had been the Copenhagen rezident, not only defected but tipped off the Americans to a secret biological warfare operation run by the SVR in the Congo. The Americans promptly bombed the Congo operation into oblivion. The Vienna rezident responsible for the CIA asset elimination was found garroted to death outside the American embassy in Vienna.
In an attempt to double down, Putin then ordered General Vladimir Sirinov of the SVR to exchange a small quantity of the biological warfare substance, dubbed Congo-X, for the two rezidents who had defected, and the American intelligence officer who had aided their defection.
That, too, had turned out to be a disaster for him. The American intelligence officer who was supposed to have been kidnapped and taken to Russia, instead staged a raid on a Venezuelan island where Sirinov was waiting. He left the island in the highly secret Tupolev Tu-934A airplane Sirinov had flown from Russia, taking with him the Congo-X and Sirinov. On landing in Washington, General Sirinov, whom Putin expected to commit suicide under such conditions, instead placed himself under the protection of the CIA and began to sing, as the Americans so aptly put it, like a lovesick canary.
Colonel Sergei Murov was responsible for nothing that caused the multiple disasters. But he had done nothing, either, that might have caused the disasters not to happen.
That was enough, in his really solemn judgment, to earn him a bullet behind the ear in the basement of that infamous building on Lubyanka Square. Or at least an extended stay in Siberia cutting down trees and feasting on bean soup twice a day.
But that hadn’t happened.
General Vladimir Sirinov’s treason had been Murov’s salvation. Vladimir Vladimirovich had sent for Murov the day after he returned to Moscow, greeted him like an old friend—which in fact he was—and told him that he was going to “have to pick up the pieces and get what has to be done finally done.”
Murov was appointed to replace Sirinov as first director of the SVR, and his promotion to general came through the day he actually moved into Sirinov’s old office.
Vladimir Vladimirovich didn’t have to tell him specifically what he wanted; Murov knew. Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky; his sister, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA, Retired, in one of the rooms in the basement of the building on Lubyanka Square. He would be barely satisfied to hear they were dead, even if they were disposed of with great imagination—for example, skinned alive and then roasted while hanging head down over a small fire.
Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted them alive.
Murov didn’t think getting all three in the bag was going to be that difficult. He thought the negatives involved were outweighed by the positives.
The negatives were that none of the three were naïve about the SVR. They knew its capabilities and would be prepared for them. The “extended families”—Aleksandr Pevsner and Nicolai Tarasov in the case of Berezovsky and Alekseeva; Castillo’s former associates in the American intelligence community—would have to be dealt with, of course. That wouldn’t be easy. Both Pevsner and Tarasov were former colonels in the KGB, which had evolved into the SVR. Pevsner had what amounted not only to a private army but a private army of former KGB people and Spetsnaz officers and soldiers of unquestioned loyalty to him.
Murov not only had no one inside Pevsner’s estate in Bariloche, his home outside Buenos Aires, or even in the Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort in Mexico, or for that matter on any of the vessels of his fleet of cruise ships, he had little hope of getting someone inside Pevsner’s organization. All attempts to get people inside, which dated from the earliest days, had resulted in dead operatives.
Only once, when a former FBI agent in Pevsner’s employ had been turned by the offer of a great deal of money, had there been even a suggestion of success in that area. Pevsner’s assassination had been set up but had failed when the American, Castillo, got wind of it and ambushed the ambushers. The former FBI agent had been slowly beaten to death, possibly by Aleksandr Pevsner himself, in the Conrad, a gambling resort in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Getting at any of them when they were traveling was made next to impossible, as they traveled only by aircraft owned by Pevsner or Tarasov. Or, in the case o
f Castillo, on aircraft he owned or were owned by Panamanian Executive Aircraft, which he controlled, the crews of which were all former members of the USAF Special Operations Command—“Air Commandos”—or the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
On the other hand, there were some things that almost certainly were going to make things easier. The most significant of these was the incredible stupidity of Lieutenant Colonel Castillo. He fancied himself to be in love with former SVR Podpolkovnik Alekseeva.
When he’d first heard that, Murov had had a hard time believing it. Getting emotionally involved with someone with whom one was professionally involved was something an intelligence officer—and giving the devil his due, Colonel Castillo was an extraordinarily good intelligence officer—simply did not do.
But it was true. The fool actually wanted to marry her. The proof was there. The Widow Alekseeva had gone to the head of the Orthodox Church Outside Russia and asked for permission to marry. He in turn had gone to the Patriarch of Moscow. Murov had people there, and Murov had learned of it immediately.
Very conscious that he himself had an emotional, as well as a professional, interest in the players involved—he had known Svetlana and Dmitri Berezovsky since childhood; had in fact had a schoolboy’s crush on Svetlana when he was fourteen, and had been a guest at her wedding when she married Evgeny Alekseev, another childhood friend—Murov had proceeded very cautiously.
He had informed His Beatitude that the circumstances of the death of Evgeny Alekseev—which, of course, had made Svetlana the Widow Alekseeva and freed her to marry—were suspicious. That put the marriage on hold.
The bodies of Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseev had been found near the airport in Buenos Aires. Murov didn’t know the facts. It was possible that they had been killed by the Argentine policeman Liam Duffy as revenge for the failed attempt to assassinate him and his family. Duffy was known to have terminated on the spot individuals he apprehended moving drugs through Argentina. That interference with the SVR operation that funded many operations in South America had been the reason Vladimir Vladimirovich had ordered his termination.
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