General Murov thought their uniforms made them look like aging San Francisco hippies. Or Wanna-Be-Warriors at a Soldiers of Fortune convention.
Murov was far more elegantly attired. When he had been the cultural attaché of the Russian embassy in Washington he had regularly watched J. Pastor Jones and C. Harry Whelan, Junior, on Wolf News to keep abreast of what the American reactionaries were up to.
Their programs were in part sponsored by Jos. A. Bank Clothiers and the Men’s Wearhouse. Eventually, their advertisements got through to him and he investigated what he thought were their preposterous claims by visiting an emporium of each.
There he found that not only was the reasonably priced clothing they offered superior to that offered for sale in Moscow, but that they really would give you two suits — or an overcoat and a suit, or two overcoats, or a half dozen shirts and neckties and a sports coat and slacks — absolutely free if you bought one suit at the regular price.
He found this fascinating because recently, having nothing better to do, he had been flipping through the SVR manual on rezident operations and had come across an interesting item buried in the manual as a small-font footnote. It stated that anything purchased, including items of clothing, deemed by the rezident as necessary to carry out intelligence missions could be billed to the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.
Murov had turned almost overnight into a fashion plate. And he was not only happy with the way he looked — as the spokesman for Men’s Wearhouse said he would be — but convinced that the SVR man who had written the footnote was right on the money. How could one be a really good spy wearing clothing that made one look as if one was drawing unemployment?
This of course applied to the staff of the rezident, the junior spies, so to speak. They shouldn’t look like they were drawing unemployment, either. He went to the management of both Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank and asked them if he could throw a little business their way, what could they do for him? Not in terms of free sports coats, but in cash?
A mutually agreed upon figure—5.5 percent of the total — was reached, and Murov sent his staff to both establishments with orders to acquire a wardrobe in keeping with the high standards expected of SVR spies, and not to worry about what it cost, as the bill would be paid by the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.
President Castro handed General Murov the humidor of Cohibas, and Murov handed General Cosada the case of Kubanskaya.
“Fidel sent these for you,” Raúl said.
“How kind of him.”
“I really appreciate the Kubanskaya, Sergei,” Raúl said. “You can’t get it in Cuba.”
“I understand we’re selling a lot of it to Venezuela,” Sergei replied.
“Yeah, but between us, it’s hard to get from there, too. Fidel is a little overenthusiastic about that ‘Drink Cuban’ program of his. It means we’re supposed to drink rum and it’s treasonous to the revolution to import spirits made anywhere else. So I have to remember to hide my Kubanskaya when he comes by the house. And whenever I take a chance and get the Bulgarians to slip me a case on the quiet through their embassy here, the sonofabitches are on the phone next day asking, ‘So, what are you going to do for Bulgaria now?’”
“Bulgarians do tend to be a bit greedy, don’t they?” Sergei asked rhetorically. “Did you ever see them eat?”
“I’d hate to tell you what Fidel calls them,” Raúl said.
“How is Fidel?”
“He sends his regards along with the cigars.”
“Well, thank him for the Cohibas when you see him.”
“I will. You’ve heard he’s stopped smoking himself?”
No, Murov thought, but if I had to smoke these, I’d stop smoking myself.
Among other intelligence Murov had acquired while he was the rezident in Washington was that all the good cigar makers had fled from Cuba immediately after the revolution. The really good ones had gone to the Canary Islands, where they continued to turn out Cohibas and other top-of-the-line cigars.
The Cuban Cohibas were not really Cuban Cohibas, in other words. When Murov saw the humidor of Cuban Cohibas, he had immediately decided to take it to Moscow, where he would give them to people he didn’t like, and he hoped ol’ Raúl wouldn’t expect him to light up one of the ones he had given him.
“No, I hadn’t,” Murov said.
“He said he feels better now that he’s stopped smoking.”
“Well, I can understand that,” Murov replied, and mentally added, If he was smoking these steadily, I’m surprised they didn’t kill him.
“So tell me, Sergei,” Raúl said, “what brings you to Havana?”
“I need about a dozen of your best DGI men,” Murov replied. “For a month, maybe a little longer.”
“To do what?” General Cosada asked.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to entertain three people now in Argentina, and I need your people to assist them in getting on the plane to Moscow.”
“What three people?” Raúl asked.
“Former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, U.S. Army, Retired.”
“Why don’t you go to the Venezuelans?” General Cosada asked. “I know they don’t like the American. For that matter any Americans.”
“Have you already forgotten Major Alejandro Vincenzo, Raúl? Sic transit gloria, Major Alejandro Vincenzo?”
“I don’t like to think about Alejandro,” Castro said. “But no, I haven’t forgotten the loss of my sister Gloria’s second-oldest son. But it momentarily slipped my mind that that bastard Castillo was responsible for what happened to him.”
“Raúl,” Murov asked, “does the fact that that bastard Castillo killed your nephew in Uruguay change our conversation from ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI?’ to ‘What can the DGI do for the SVR?’”
President Castro considered that a moment.
“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t. Where we are now is ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI, in exchange for what the SVR wants the DGI to do for the SVR?’”
When Murov didn’t immediately reply, Castro went on, “I wouldn’t want this to get around, Sergei, but neither Fidel nor I ever really liked Vincenzo. But he was our sister’s kid, and you know how that goes: We were stuck with him.”
“And between you and me, Sergei,” General Jesus Manuel Cosada said, “the sonofabitch was always sucking up to Fidel. He wanted my job.”
“But then why did you send him to Uruguay?” Murov asked.
“Sending him there,” Cosada said, “is not exactly the same thing as sending him there and hoping he got to come back.”
“Jesus Christ, Jesus!” Raúl said. “If Gloria ever heard you say that, you’d be a dead man!”
“I asked why you sent him, feeling the way you apparently felt, to Uruguay,” Murov said.
“Well, when the Iraqi Oil-for-Food people told us what they wanted…”
“Which was?” Murov asked.
“They wanted the UN guy, Lorimer, dead.”
“Because he ripped them off for sixteen million dollars?”
“Well, once he’d done that, they knew he couldn’t be trusted. And he knew too much, too many names. He had to be dead. They didn’t seem to care too much about the money,” Raúl said.
“Which got Raúl and me to thinking…” Cosada said.
“What would happen if we sent Alejandro down there with the Hungarians…” Raúl said.
“For which they were offering us a lot of money,” Cosada picked up. “And they took out Dr. Lorimer…”
“But then we told them there was no sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds in his safe.”
“And somebody tipped the Uruguayan cops to what the Hungarians had done, and where to find them.”
“And Alejandro brought us the bearer bonds,” Raúl said. “Getting the picture?”
“Brilliant!” General Murov
said.
“The Oil-for-Food people were not about to make a stink. They would have gotten the important part of what they wanted — Lorimer dead — and the money wasn’t that important to them. The money those rag-headed Iraqi bastards made from Oil-for-Food is unbelievable, except it’s true.”
“So that’s what happened,” Murov said.
“No, that’s not what happened,” Raúl said. “What happened was this goddamn Yankee Castillo killed Alejandro and killed the Hungarians and made off with our sixteen million dollars. The notion of that thieving Yankee sonofabitch sitting naked in a cell in Lubyanka getting sprayed with ice water — I presume that’s what you have in mind for him — has a certain appeal. I don’t like it when people steal sixteen million dollars from me. Tell me what you have in mind, Sergei.”
“Well, so long as they were in Argentina—”
“‘Were in Argentina’?” Cosada interrupted.
“Jesus Christ, Jesus, for Christ’s sake stop interrupting my friend Sergei,” Raúl snapped.
“As I was saying,” Murov went on, “so long as the three of them, ‘the Unholy Trio,’ so to speak, are in Argentina, we can’t get at them. Not only are they protected by Aleksandr Pevsner’s private army, but that goddamn Irish cop Liam Duffy has my photograph on the wall of every immigration booth in the country.”
“So what are you proposing?” Raúl asked.
“Just as I got on the plane to fly here—”
“Speaking of flying, Sergei,” Raúl said, “we have to talk about the Tupolev Tu-934A.”
“What do you mean, ‘talk about it’?”
“Fidel wants one. He told me to tell you his feelings were hurt when you gave one to the late Fat Hugo…”
“I did not give one to Fat Hugo.”
“… and didn’t give one to him,” Raúl said. “And I can see his point.”
“Read my lips, Raúl. I did not give a Tupolev Tu-934A to Fat Hugo.”
“That’s not what we heard,” Cosada said.
“If you didn’t give one to Fat Hugo, what was that airplane our friend Castillo stole from him? A Piper Cub?” Raúl challenged.
“What Castillo stole from Fat Hugo’s island was General Vladimir Sirinov’s Tupolev Tu-934A,” Murov said.
“I don’t think Fidel’s going to believe that,” Raúl said.
“Raúl, listen to me. I don’t want this to get around, but we don’t have that many Tupolev Tu-934As. We don’t have enough for us. Do you think I would have come here on that Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet 100-95 if I could have talked Vladimir Vladimirovich into letting me use a Tu-934A? That so-called Superjet is a disaster. I didn’t uncross my fingers until we landed here, and I’m going home on Air Bulgaria. They’re flying DC-9s that are as old as I am, but their engines don’t fall off.”
“Well, I’ll tell Fidel what you said, but if I were you, I’d try real hard to get him a Tupolev.”
“Can we get on with this?”
“You’d be in a better bargaining position, Sergei, if you got Fidel one of those Tupolevs, but go ahead.”
“I thought you were the president now.”
“I am, but Fidel is still Fidel. He just doesn’t come to the office as often as he used to.”
“I found out just before I got on the plane to come here that Castillo and his fiancée, the former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and a couple of Castillo’s people, the Merry Outlaws, just left Bariloche for Cozumel.”
“Couple of questions, Sergei. Castillo’s fiancée?”
“He’s going to marry her. That’s what ‘fiancée’ means.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Unbelievable! He’s not a bad-looking guy. And no offense, Sergei, but every female SVR podpolkovnik I’ve ever seen looks like a Green Bay Packers tackle in drag.”
“This one doesn’t. Believe it.”
“Merry Outlaws?”
“That’s what President Clendennen calls Castillo’s people. If that’s good enough for him…”
“What are they going to do in Cozumel?”
“I gave that a good deal of thought before I understood.”
“Understood what?”
“What they’re going to do in Cozumel. It’s going to be a great big wedding. All the OOOR — and there’s a hell of a lot of them.”
“All the what?”
“Like ROCOR, which, as I’m sure you know, stands for Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.”
“No, I didn’t,” Raúl confessed.
“Me, either,” Cosada said. “What the hell is it?”
“We don’t have time for that right now, maybe later. OOOR stands for Oprichnina Outside of Russia.”
“And what the hell does Oprichnina mean?” Castro asked.
“I really don’t have the time to get into that with you either, Raúl. But trust me, there’s more of them than anybody suspects and they’ll all want to come to the wedding. The Berezovsky family — and Svetlana was Svetlana Berezovsky before she married Evgeny Alekseev and became Svetlana Alekseeva — is one of the oldest, most prestigious families in the Oprichnina.
“If anybody in the OOOR gets invited to the wedding, and they all will, they’ll go. Just the Oprichniks in Coney Island would fill a 747. And they’ll all bring their security people, now that I think of it. So two 747s from Coney Island alone.”
“Where the hell is Coney Island?” Cosada asked.
“In New York City. You know the place where they have — or had — the parachute tower? For ten dollars, you got to make sort of a parachute jump?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cosada said. “I think the parachute tower is gone, but I know where you mean.”
“Don’t take offense, Sergei,” Raúl said, “but I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Aleksandr Pevsner’s La Casa en Bosque in Bariloche is big, but not big enough for all those Oprichnik wedding guests. And there’s only a few hotels there. And Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria couldn’t handle one 747, much less a bunch of them. So what are they going to do? A cruise ship — maybe two cruise ships — is what they’re going to do. A cruise ship is sort of a floating hotel.”
“Where are they going to get a cruise ship?”
“The last I heard, Pevsner owned twelve of them,” Murov said. “Most of them are like floating prisons, but a couple of them, I understand, are very nice.”
“I’m an old man, Sergei,” Raúl said. “Not as swift as I used to be. You want to explain this to me in simple terms?”
“Aleksandr Pevsner owns the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort. Which — Cozumel — is also a stop for cruise ships. So they hold the wedding in the resort and put up the guests who won’t fit in the resort in one of his cruise ships. Or two of them. That’s what Castillo and Svetlana are going there for, to set this up.
“Dmitri Berezovsky didn’t go along with them to Cozumel now, but he’ll be there for the wedding. He’ll probably give the bride away; he’s her brother. So we go there now, and get set up ourselves. And when everybody is jamming the place, there’s all the wedding excitement, we snatch the three of them, load them onto an Aeroflot airplane conveniently parked at Cozumel International—”
“For a nonstop flight to Moscow,” Raúl finished.
“Where your boss will tie the Yankee sonofabitch who stole our sixteen million in bearer bonds to a chair in Lubyanka,” Cosada furnished.
“And spray him with ice water,” Raúl picked up.
“Until he is an ice sculpture,” Cosada said.
“How many men are you asking for, Sergei?” Raúl asked.
“Ten or twelve should do it.”
“General Cosada,” Raúl said, “make twenty-four of your best men available to General Murov immediately.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“As a matter of fact, Jesus, I think you better go with him,” Raúl added.
[THREE]
T
he Imperial Penthouse Suite
The Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort
Cozumel, Mexico
0945 11 June 2007
Castillo’s CaseyBerry vibrated and rang — the ringtone actually a recording of a bugler playing “Charge!”
“And how may I help the comandante on this beautiful spring morning?” he answered it.
There was a reply from Comandante Juan Carlos Pena, el Jefe of the Policía Federal for the Province of Oaxaca, to which Castillo answered, “Your wish is my command, my Comandante,” and then broke the connection.
Castillo then turned to the women taking the sun in lounge chairs beside the swimming pool. There were three of them: Svetlana Alekseeva; Susanna Sieno, a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead; and Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman.
“I’m afraid it’s back to the village for you, ladies,” Castillo said.
“What did you say?” Sweaty asked.
“El Comandante just told me to put my pants on and send the girls back to the village.”
Sweaty threw a large, economy-size bottle of suntan lotion at him and said some very rude and obscene things in Russian.
Max leapt to his feet and caught the suntan lotion bottle in midair. But to do so he had to go airborne himself, which resulted in him dropping from about eight feet in the air into the pool. This caused the ladies to be twice drenched, first when he entered the water — a 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres makes quite a splash — and again when Max, triumphantly clutching the bottle in his teeth, climbed out of the pool and shook himself dry.
With a massive and barely successful effort, the men attached to the ladies — Castillo; Paul Sieno, an olive-skinned, dark-haired man in his early forties; and John M. “Jack” Britton, a trim thirty-eight-year-old black-skinned man — managed to control what would have been hysterical laughter.
“Over here, girls,” Castillo said, as he went to the side of the penthouse and pointed downward, “you really should see this.”
Curiosity overwhelmed feminine indignation and they went and looked twenty-four floors down. So did Jack Britton, Roscoe J. Danton, and Paul Sieno.
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