by Brian Haig
“But Alexi? Why didn’t you tell him? He was like your son, right?”
He stared down at the floor a moment, almost as though he was embarrassed by this admission. He said, “How could he have embraced what we had to do? He hadn’t seen how the Marxist idiots misruled, hadn’t experienced the cruel bite of their incompetence. He was too naive to understand at that time. Oh, I would’ve told him eventually.” He paused and seemed to wonder if he’d made the right choice. Then his indecision evaporated. “But Alexi served a vital purpose.”
“And what was that?”
“When he first came to me with his suspicions, I realized something. Everything was so vulnerable in the beginning. It could’ve been stopped so easily by forces inside Russia or by the West. We were so fragile in the beginning, secrecy was our only protection.”
“So?”
“You still don’t see it, Drummond?” he snapped, angered that I couldn’t jump to what he considered obvious conclusions. Like a lot of ridiculously smart people, those of us with average intelligence taxed his patience. “Alexi was the first outsider to detect it. With his extraordinary intellect, he was the only one who noticed that history was not flowing on a logical path. I was quite proud of him, actually. So I decided to use Alexi as a watchdog. He would keep me and my people on our toes. It was perfectly safe, of course, because he kept me informed of everything. But if Alexi couldn’t find us… well… then nobody could.”
I was suddenly awed by the sheer deceitfulness of this man. To him the whole world was a chessboard to be ordered as he wanted. Even Alexi was just one more pawn to be shuffled from square to square.
“That’s cold,” I said, unable to help myself.
“Cold?” he asked, shaking his head. “No, Drummond. I gave Alexi a historic role. He who serves in ignorance still serves, yes? Knowing we had a worthy opponent made us much more cautious. Without Alexi we might have become sloppy.” He paused and seemed curious. “Tell me something. How did you uncover poor Milt? What led you to him?”
“The second time you tried to kill us,” I admitted.
“Ah.” He nodded his head, obviously piecing the rest of the story together. He really was frighteningly brilliant. “I thought that was it. After the attempt in Moscow, I debated whether to try again. I just… well, I couldn’t have you and that girl sniffing around Alexi. You have to understand, Drummond, when you set the board, the pieces have to move by the rules. You and that girl were upsetting the rationality. You, nosing around in things that weren’t your business, and her becoming romantic with Alexi. What else could I do but eliminate you?”
I was thinking there were plenty of other things he could’ve done, but then I had very strong prejudices in this matter.
I said, “Yeah, well, we cross-indexed all the documents the CIA supposedly got from your vaults. When we found a few only Martin had seen, it all fell into place.”
“Oh, that’s very clever, Drummond. Poor Milt. You’re probably wondering how we recruited him. Back when he was a college student majoring in Russian studies, he visited here with a student group. It was the sixties, when so many of your young people were disenchanted by Vietnam, and Milt was very vocal about the rottenness of your country. We barely had to recruit him. Fate plays funny tricks, yes? Who could’ve imagined that his college roommate would go on to become President? The only use I ever saw for Milt was writing a few books and articles that were damaging for your CIA and foreign policy. We made a trade. I provided him the information and he became famous as a writer.”
“Well, as we say in America, sometimes you fall into a pile of shit and find a brick of gold.”
He gave me a very unpleasant look, and Felix took a step toward me. “Metaphysically speaking,” I quickly added. “I mean, Martin was a really brilliant coup, wasn’t he?”
“Brilliant?” Viktor said. “Milt was a coward. He refused to do anything unless I shielded him. So I gave him the template for a cut-out. The day Morrison walked into his office he knew he’d found the perfect doppelganger. You remember, I hinted to you that Morrison brought this on himself. He was so ambitious, and so obsequious, he virtually volunteered himself.”
“And Milt became invaluable?”
“You can’t imagine,” Viktor said, chuckling some more. “Poor Yeltsin, he couldn’t believe the quality of the intelligence I gave him, the things I could get your government to do. Every time I provided him with your President’s talking papers before they met, he would howl with laughter.”
“Yeah, but you put him in power and you owned him anyway, right?”
“I would hardly say I owned Yeltsin, Drummond. He was certainly not the man I would’ve chosen for the job. His only qualifications were his availability and pliability. Not that it mattered. He was always a transitory figure. We never intended to build our new Russia around him.”
“No?”
“Of course not. He never knew about us. He was a caretaker we leveraged into place to keep the chair warm until we could prepare one of our own to take over. Yeltsin would take the blame for the inevitable aftershocks of such abrupt change, and then we would offer the people a savior, a sober, take-charge type who promised to clean things up.”
The shock of what he was saying literally hit me like a jackhammer. “You mean…?”
He smiled. “You Americans are so blindly stupid, it’s extraordinary you’ve gotten so rich and powerful. Where did our new president come from? He worked for me, in my bureau of the KGB. How else do you think he got the job?”
I was shaking my head in disbelief. “It will never work, Yurichenko. Eventually the world will learn. You can’t keep it hidden forever.”
He brought his hand up to his chin, the same way Alexi did. It was almost uncanny. “So what? It’s gone too far to stop. Why would anybody even want to stop it? What would they worry about? Another empire? It’s the farthest thing from our minds. The whole notion of empires is passe, wouldn’t you say? They all fail, don’t they?”
“But what you’ve done in Georgia and the other republics. The world won’t permit that.”
He was shaking his head. “We don’t covet our neighbors, Drummond. We simply tell them what we want and force them to provide it. If they get rambunctious, like the Chechens and Georgians and Armenians, we make examples of them. But why would we want Uzbeks or Tadzhiks or Kazakhs back as part of our country? They’d all go right back to sucking off the tits of the Russian people. We simply want their oil and cotton at prices we set. You see how much better this is?”
He was asking rhetorically, of course. He knew damn well what I thought. In fact, he was chuckling, enjoying the amazement on my face, which was when I realized the only reason he’d explained all this to me. The old man was sadistically letting me know he’d pulled off the biggest scam in world history, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. It was his little victory dance, his way of saying, “Okay, so you stole Alexi from me, but don’t kid yourself that it was any big thing, because in the scheme of everything you’re hearing it’s a pimple on a gnat’s ass. You sacrificed yourself for nothing, Drummond.”
It was creative cruelty at its best. And the very fact that he was explaining all this in the first place was also a sly way of informing me he intended to embalm me in Russia’s deepest, darkest corner, and never let me smell anything close to freedom again.
He suddenly turned to his goons and barked something in Russian. Then he turned and gave me that sweet, grandfatherly smile. “Well, Drummond, we will not be meeting again.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I growled, and he gave me a curious look.
Then he turned around and walked out the door, leaving me to ponder a future that was going to really, really suck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
You’d think that by the twentieth of April there’d be a hint of warmth in the air. I mean, April is a few weeks into spring-the ground should’ve been thawed, the trees should’ve been budding, and maybe even a few wildf
lowers should’ve had enough chutzpah to poke their stems out of the ground. Siberia’s different.
I blew hard on my hands and tried to warm them up before I spotted Igor heading in my direction. I quickly picked up my shovel and started doggedly hacking at the frozen earth. Igor had a thing for me, and I didn’t want to exacerbate it. He hit me once or twice a day just on general principle, and if I gave him more than general principle to go on, he beat me silly. I don’t know if Igor was even his real name. He was just so damned ugly that he had to be an Igor.
The other prisoners all kept their distance, I guess because they sensed there was something special about me, and they didn’t want any of that specialness to rub off. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t speak their language, so we had nothing to talk about, nor did we have anything in common since they were mostly thieves, murderers, and Mafiya scum, whereas I was an American Bar Association member who’d seriously underestimated his own limitations. But it was more than that. The guards had instructions to treat me differently, to hurt me on a regular basis, although nothing too serious, because I was supposed to survive. I was supposed to live to a ripe old age in this frozen hellhole with nothing to look forward to except beatings and constant pain, until I either went stone-cold mad or killed myself.
I had thought December in Siberia was bitterly frosty, but by January I realized I didn’t know the meaning of cold. And February was even worse. My piss froze before it hit the ground. I’m not kidding. These yellow icicles were striking the permafrost and shattering into tiny crystals.
I’ve never been particularly big on Russian cuisine, but you wouldn’t believe all the things you can make with cabbage. There are cabbage broths and soups and salads, or just plain raw cabbage itself. Raw fish heads were the big treat, but they only threw those on our plates on Fridays. I tried to make friends by giving mine away, but for some odd reason that never seemed to work.
Anyway, Igor continued to head toward me, so I chipped away at the icy ground even more furiously. I whispered a prayer that he was heading toward somebody else. That’s the thing about Siberian prisons. After a while, you get pretty damned selfish. They’re pretty much dog-eat-dog places.
Every morning the guards came through the barracks and dragged out the corpses of poor buggers who had died of disease, or malnutrition, or had frozen to death in their sleep. And this being a prison, there were a few murders every week as well. We were each issued a single, threadbare wool blanket that had been used by generations of other prisoners. The trick was to try to collect two or three of them, so the multiple layers could protect you from the cold. The barracks were unheated, so in the morning you’d awaken covered by a layer of frost, so damned stiff you could barely climb out of bed. Your blanket would be gone, and you’d have to go through the rest of the barracks and find the culprit, and then you’d have to fight to get it back, because without it, you wouldn’t last long. The training I’d had in the outfit was the only thing that saved me. After I beat up four or five of the biggest badasses in the barracks, nobody wanted to go near my blanket.
Suddenly Igor was right behind me, and I tensed for the inevitable assault. What would it be? A rifle butt in the kidneys or the kick on my backside that would send me flying? Nothing happened. I slowly turned around and faced him. He hooked a finger. I put down my shovel and followed him like an obedient puppy, coughing and hacking the whole way, because I seemed to have caught a very nasty cold.
We ended up at the headquarters, one of only two buildings at Camp 18 that had wood-burning stoves. The second we walked inside I felt like my skin had caught on fire. I hadn’t been near heat in months, and the sudden sensation burned.
Three or four senior guards were huddled around a stove in the corner, and they all looked up when I entered. One got a pissed-off look and climbed off his stool.
“You are Drummond, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised to hear English. None of the other guards spoke English.
He pointed a hand toward a doorway. “You will go in there and take shower.”
I didn’t ask him why, because I’d been trained to comply immediately with every instruction. Given that it was me, it had taken a bit longer than normal to learn that lesson, and I had the scars to prove it.
I nearly passed out in the shower, my first in over five months. There was a small bar of coarse, sandy soap, and it took a lot of hard scrubbing to get all the dirt and grime off my body. I was actually bleeding in a few places, but what did I care?
I slipped back into my ratty, smelly clothes and walked out ten minutes later. The guards were all huddled around the stove again. The same guard got up, snapped cuffs on my wrists, then led me outside to a small truck with big tires. We climbed in the back and left. After about an hour, the truck stopped and we climbed out at an airfield, the same one I’d landed at five months earlier. Was it really only five months before? A big military Tupelov airplane was idling on the tarmac, and the guard led me stumbling toward the plane.
We took off a few minutes later, and while it was a long flight, I don’t remember much of it, because I was floating in and out of la-la land. I’d wake up every few minutes hacking and coughing, and it dawned on me that it wasn’t a cold but pneumonia. I hadn’t recognized the chills and fever before because I was always chilly and shivering anyway.
We landed at a military airport I didn’t recognize and left the plane for a military sedan. I had no idea what was going on nor did I ask. Russian prisons teach you that, too. Don’t ask questions: You might not like the way the answer’s delivered.
We drove into a big city I suspected was Moscow. Spring had made more of a dent here. At least there was no snow on the ground. I hadn’t seen bare earth since I left.
We pulled to a stop in front of a big building that looked like it had once been a former palace of some sort. I climbed out of the sedan, but not until the guard ordered me to, because, like I said earlier, I’d been thoroughly housebroken. We entered the building and went up two flights of stairs. The guard walked ahead of me and opened a pair of double doors, then indicated with an arm wave that I was to enter.
The heat from the building gave me that uncomfortable burning sensation again. Four people were gathered around a long table. On one side sat Harold Johnson, my old friend from the CIA, and General Clapper, my old boss. On the other sat Viktor Yurichenko and an older man I didn’t recognize.
Johnson and Clapper looked up when I entered. Clapper’s eyes popped open, because I’d changed somewhat since the last time we saw each other. I was skinnier, for one thing. Much skinnier. I’d guess I’d lost at least thirty pounds, and I wasn’t heavy to begin with. I looked like a dazed bird that had forgotten to head south for the winter and paid dearly for it. For a second thing, like all Camp 18 prisoners, my head was shaved to the skin. For a third thing, being continuously outdoors in subzero temperatures isn’t recommended by dermatologists. I had cold sores on my lips and my skin had cracked open in places, and the vitamin deficiency hindered the healing process. Finally, the steady beatings meant I was always sporting a black eye, or swollen lips, or a fresh bruise here and there.
“Jesus, Sean!” Clapper yelled. “What the hell have these bastards done to you?”
Johnson peered across the table at Yurichenko. “Viktor, this is unacceptable.”
Yurichenko finally turned and looked at me also. “Russian prisons are harsh places, Harold. I don’t make them this way.”
Johnson nodded back, then he turned and looked at me again. “Sean, your boss and I are here to try to negotiate your release. This is a very delicate matter. You’re being charged with three counts of murder and espionage. Those are serious crimes.”
I stood perfectly still. The espionage charge was obviously the most problematic. I had helped get Alexi out of Russia-guilty as charged. The three counts of murder baffled me until I realized this had to do with me killing the three hit men who tried to take me out. Very clever.
“Tha
t’s right, Sean,” Clapper quickly added. “The other gentleman here is the equivalent of a Russian superior court judge. He can take your case to the president to arrange a pardon, or he can decide there’s not enough evidence to have a trial.”
Well, wasn’t that interesting? I’d been in prison over five months, and now they were considering a trial. I stood mute, sensing I really had no role in this proceeding, that a great deal of discussion had already occurred, and I sure as hell didn’t want to harm the chances of success. I wouldn’t be standing here if they didn’t have something cooked up.
Yurichenko was giving me his grandfatherly smile, the one intended to warm the cockles of your heart. I felt a chill. I dreamed of getting my hands around his neck and choking the bastard to death.
Johnson ignored me and turned back to face Viktor, evidently continuing the conversation I interrupted when I came in. “The point is, Viktor, our President would consider it a very big favor if you would drop this. He asked me to emphasize how very beneficial this would be for both sides.”
Yurichenko was shaking his head, but mildly, like he wasn’t quite sure how that logic worked. “But, Harold, you have nothing to trade. Please forgive me for being selfish, but I must see some quid pro quo. We are both pros in this game. We both know how it works. I cannot give you something for nothing.”
“And do you have something in mind?”
“A simple trade-in-kind would be ample. I want Alexi back. Return him, and you can have Drummond.”
Johnson suddenly stared down at the tabletop, as though what he was about to say was very difficult. “We can’t do that. It’s not even negotiable. Besides, there’s a bit of a problem here.”
“And what would that be?”
“Before he came over here, Drummond made some tapes. They’re embarrassing for both of us, but they’re much more embarrassing and problematic for you. If those tapes get out, our relations would be grievously wounded. All these areas where we’re cooperating-the missile reduction pact, NATO participation for Russia-it would all go up in smoke.”