Temple of Spies

by Ian Kharitonov

  He ordered a soda, and no sooner had the waiter brought the beverage than Sokolov heard the sputtering of an engine in the street. He peered outside through the nearest window and saw a tuk-tuk—the local variety of a motorized rickshaw—pull over at the hotel’s entrance.

  A teen got out from the back of the shabby three-wheeled vehicle. The Thai kid, inconspicuous in his checkered shirt, baggy pants and baseball cap, walked through the front door, toting a rucksack. He stopped at the reception desk, opened the flap of his rucksack and extracted a manila envelope from within its depths. He exchanged a few phrases in Thai with Umaporn as he handed her the envelope. Then the young courier bowed and marched back to the waiting tuk-tuk, which zoomed away, coughing black exhaust as soon as he clambered inside.

  Sokolov left his drink untouched and crossed the lobby. Umaporn surrendered the envelope, given to her just seconds ago by the errand boy. Thanking her, he collected it and quickly withdrew from the lobby.

  He noted the handwritten marking, scrawled on the envelope in crude letters:

  For S.

  Ironically, it must have implied Song, but inside he hoped to find something for Stacie and himself.

  As soon as he returned to the Royal Suite, he ripped the envelope open. To his satisfaction, he discovered two passports within it. He studied both carefully with mixed impressions. The IDs hadn’t been forged, but rather stolen.

  One passport was British, in the name of Calum McKinley. Staring from the mugshot, Mr. McKinley hardly shared any likeness with Eugene Sokolov. If anything, the physiognomy appeared vaguely similar to the features of Alex Grib. Quite unfortunately, McKinley had a bald patch on the top of his head. Sokolov would have to make do. He examined the other passport, which gave him more reason to cheer.

  Emphatically, he presented it to Stacie.

  “Stacie Rose, I hereby pronounce you Federica Buonamano.”

  “You what?”

  “From now on, you’re a citizen of the Italian Republic, at least for the time being.”

  With incredulity crossing her face, she plucked the little burgundy-covered booklet from his grasp and inspected it suspiciously. Her eyebrows arched.

  “Are you kidding? This woman looks nothing like me!”

  “You bear a passing resemblance, and believe me, it’s more than enough.”

  She giggled. “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s beside the point. Lots of people look different from their own photos. Especially those women who are always changing their hairstyles, applying layers of make-up, wearing contact lenses, and undergoing cosmetic procedures that can make them unrecognizable over the years. The real Federica Buonamano has your hair color and face shape, which is a big plus. Border officials are too overworked to analyze each passport picture for discrepancies.”

  Sokolov recounted the search-and-rescue effort surrounding the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. The resulting investigation had exposed Phuket as the world’s biggest marketplace for fake IDs. Two Iranians had boarded the missing plane using EU passports stolen from tourists visiting Thailand.

  “Some foreigners even sell their passports to locals for a quick buck,” Sokolov explained. “When you show your passport to immigration officers, they are mainly concerned whether it has all the required entry or exit stamps and a valid visa. Sometimes they run the passport number through an Interpol database, but the flood of international passengers is so huge that they only do it if they have strong misgivings. This passport is genuine. That’s the most important thing. Nobody will have reason to question your integrity as the legitimate holder. Don’t worry, we can work on your Federica Buonamano look. You are a photo model, anyway.”

  Stacie pouted. “All right, I believe you, Eugene Sokolov. Or what should I call you now?”

  Sokolov grinned. “Mr. McKinley.”

  “Well then, Mr. McKinley. I’ve already been fooled once trying to reach Hong Kong. How could I trust anyone if it happened again? Although I look into your eyes and see that you’re an honest man.”

  “Oh, there’ll be plenty of fooling. But this time, you’ll be the one doing it.”

  4

  Located twenty kilometers north of Patong Beach in a rural area of Phuket, surrounded by 42 acres of land, stood the Holy Trinity Church. The newly built cathedral measured 25 meters in height, topped by a six-meter-tall golden cupola, making it the largest church of the Moscow Patriarchate in Thailand.

  Flavian, né Georgi Kirilenko, had it all to himself. He regarded it as his personal ranch. He’d never had it so good. But what the hell, he deserved it. Damned right he did. All those years serving the SVR in different hellholes around the globe had earned him the payoff. He led a comfortable lifestyle in one of the world’s most coveted travel destinations and got paid for it. Who needed heaven in the afterlife when he’d found paradise in the present life? He relished the island’s tropical coziness by day and satiated his bisexual tastes on Bangla Road by night. Indeed, Colonel Georgi Kirilenko, or Hierodeacon Flavian as he was now known, was enjoying his best years.

  He was sitting on a bench, watching as a pair of his horses grazed on a grassy field, when his cell phone buzzed. He dug the mobile from the pocket of his gray cassock. It was Javad Habibi, the Iranian.

  Flavian stroked his trimmed beard pensively. Javad Habibi was the key man in a human-trafficking syndicate operating in Phuket. The onus was greater than ever on the 45-year-old Iranian. Recently, the DSI had busted the gang’s Pattaya branch, arresting Habibi’s associates and confiscating over a thousand stolen passports. Habibi had been extra cautious ever since. Flavian was under direct orders from the Patriarchate to assist Habibi in any way possible, so he answered the phone, albeit reluctantly.

  “Yes?”

  “I got word from your Korean guy,” said Habibi in Persian-accented English, drawing out the syllables.

  “I see.” The man in question was Song, Flavian understood.

  “Maybe it’s no big deal, but … He suddenly ordered two items. I find it strange because he didn’t like to have it delivered to your place as usual.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he told me to send it to a hotel instead of picking it up from you. It’s him, of course, de message came from his device. I did like he said, but… I fink I must let you know.”

  “Yes, thank you. You said two items?”

  “For man and for woman. I give you de numbers.”

  “Okay.”

  Habibi broke the connection.

  Flavian fired up his brain cells. It was most unusual for Song to be acting that way. The Holy Trinity Church had always served as a dead drop site in such matters. Perhaps Flavian, like Habibi, was giving it too much thought. Better safe than sorry.

  He forwarded the passport numbers to his paid contact at the airport, a fifteen-minute drive from the church. Minutes later, the airline staff member informed him that the passports had just been used to purchase two business-class tickets to Hong Kong.

  Whatever was going on, Father Flavian decided to alert Father Mark in Hong Kong. What else were friends for? Their friendship ran a long way back to the days of the KGB spy school in Minsk.

  5

  Ninety kilometers per hour. The needle of the speedometer crept past the mark as Constantine pressed the accelerator. One hundred. He pushed the Audi Q5 further.

  Constantine hurried to beat the early evening rush heading out of Moscow. Failing to do that, he could get stuck for several hours as the highway came to a standstill. What he kept telling his students held true for Moscow’s insane traffic—it, too, was a problem rooted in the communist past: a combination of poor urban planning, lack of infrastructure, terrible road maintenance, and barbaric driving manners. Other motorists were darting between lanes, cutting in front of the Audi as they avoided potholes.

  Constantine was heading north-east, seventy kilometers away from the capital, to the town of Sergiev Posad, home of the Trinity St. Sergius Lavra. Darkness was alre
ady descending, and it was pitch black by the time he reached the town’s dimly lit streets, which were still marred by socialist architecture and Bolshevik names.

  The Trinity Lavra, a monastery founded in the early fourteenth century by St. Sergius, the patron saint of Russia, had flourished as the country’s main nexus of culture and religion for almost 600 years. Today, although it remained active, it had become little more than a landmark of a vanished civilization, and a tourist attraction. Constantine hoped to encounter few tourists or pilgrims at such a late hour. He parked the Audi off the Red Army Prospekt, blasphemously named in honor of the monastery’s looters, and walked to the ancient white walls of the religious complex, entering through the frescoed Holy Gates.

  He found his way around the alleys connecting a plethora of churches and chapels. Crossing the main plaza of the Monastic Square, he strolled past the Theological Academy and the Monastery proper toward the Trinity Cathedral. It was the Lavra’s most dominant church, as well as the oldest, built in 1422. The sanctum sanctorum.

  A shadowy figure exited the Trinity Cathedral. A priest, wearing a gold-colored cope over his cassock, was leaving after the night service.

  It must be him, Constantine thought.

  “Father Mikhail!” he called.

  The black-bearded, black-cassocked priest froze, turning his head.

  “Father Mikhail, may I have a word with you?”

  “I’m listening.”

  Constantine approached the middle-aged priest in front of the Cathedral’s stone wall, both men silhouetted by the outdoor illumination. The priest eyed him intently.

  “You know who I am,” said Constantine. “And you also know why I’m here.”

  “I don’t follow you. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Ilia. The person I must meet. Metropolitan Ilia. Where is he?”

  “I’m sorry but Metropolitan Ilia is dead. He entrusted his pure soul to God a few months ago.”

  “We both know full well that he’s alive. All these months he’s been hiding somewhere inside the Lavra. If he’s no longer staying here, then I’d like you to tell me where I may find him. You can drop the act, Father.”

  “Young man, I shall call the police unless you leave at once!”

  Constantine was growing frustrated but he understood why the priest felt so protective of Ilia. Constantine’s actions had placed Ilia in mortal danger, both of them falling for an elaborate ruse conducted by the then-FSB Director Saveliy Frolov.

  “It’s all right,” said a voice behind Constantine. “Don’t worry, Mikhail. This young man is my disciple. He’s a friend. I’m so glad to see you, Constantine. I had a vision today. An archangel told me that you would arrive here to visit me.”

  Constantine turned around to face his former mentor. Wrinkled, white-bearded, his frail body supported by a cane, Ilia appeared much older than Constantine remembered him. But his eyes were as lucid as ever. A knot tightened in Constantine’s chest. At one point, Ilia had become something of a father figure to him. He’d seen his real father die live on television as a kid. And during their last meeting, he’d seen Father Ilia bleed to death, shot before his very eyes. Or so Constantine had believed. He suppressed the painful memories, grateful that the old priest was alive.

  “Come, my child, let’s go for a walk.”

  Cane tapping against the stone walkway, Ilia ambled toward the nearest bench.

  “I remember the first time when you came to seek guidance. You had so much youthful energy. You wanted to right the wrongs, to cure the ailments that our country has been suffering for a century.”

  “I was too naïve, Holy Father.”

  He helped Ilia ease his body to the bench and sat next to the old man. In the semi-darkness, he listened to Ilia’s soft voice.

  “You shared my passion, Constantine. You dreamt of a tribunal against communism. Their overdue Nuremberg Trials which they had escaped. A taste of justice at The Hague. Tell me, have you given up the fight?”

  “A Russian renaissance breaking out of Soviet slavery? It was but an illusion. I know I’m fighting a lost cause. Even so, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. Especially now. This time, it’s my brother who could find himself in great peril.”

  “Eugene? I remember him.”

  Constantine nodded. “Gene has stumbled upon something even I can’t understand. It is because of my ignorance and inexperience that I request your help once more.”

  “If there’s any way I can help you, I will. What is your question?”

  “How could the Moscow Patriarchate get mixed up with North Korean communists?”

  Ilia sighed. “Sometimes it takes a lifetime to see the truth. I was trapped in a web of deceit for too long, I believed I was acting for the greater good. I let my illusions take over me, and no one is guiltier than me for imposing my own illusions upon you. Half-truths can be even more dangerous than lies. It ends here. A mortician can embalm a rotting corpse only so much until it finally decomposes.”

  Constantine was only beginning to grasp the implications of what Ilia was saying, but the old priest’s words frightened him.

  “When communism formally fell in Russia, for a brief moment the KGB archives erupted like a volcano,” said Ilia.

  “They sealed the lid pretty quickly,” Constantine replied.

  “Some damaging evidence flowed out nonetheless. Remember what I told you about the ties between the KGB and the clergy?”

  “You said that the church was rife with KGB infiltrators. A significant number of clerics were KGB agents. You wanted to weed them out.”

  “Yes, that is exactly what I said. And it’s a bitter pill to swallow. Forgive me, Constantine.”

  With mounting uneasiness, he asked, “Why are you asking forgiveness, Father?”

  “I wasn’t honest with you, my child. I lied to you.”

  Constantine stared in disbelief. “How?”

  “I twisted the facts to suit my own needs. It wasn’t a large portion of church clergy who were KGB agents. All of them worked for the KGB.”

  “No …” Constantine breathed.

  “I know that because I did, too. I was a KGB agent myself.”

  6

  The shocking words rocked Constantine to the core, but it was just the beginning.

  I’m not a priest, he’d once told another man in France.

  Now he was.

  In the cold of the night, he listened to the confession of his former mentor. And indeed, Constantine was the only one who could abolish his sins.

  As if mindful of unseen eavesdroppers, Ilia spoke in a low voice.

  “The Moscow Patriarchate never existed until 1943. Whichever way you look at it, de jure and de facto, it is a creation of Joseph Stalin. He himself coined the term. Christianized in 988, Russia joined the Byzantine Church. Later, in 1453 the Russian Church declared autocephaly, becoming the Eastern Orthodox Russian Church. And so it lasted until the twentieth century. Then came the dirty, Germany-sponsored coup d’état, touted as the Revolution. Some wrongly assume that the Bolshevik regime was atheist. In fact, it was theomachist. Not just denying God’s existence, but fighting Him. And you don’t battle against something you don’t believe in. The so-called civil war waged by the Bolsheviks was a religious war, first and foremost. Members of a bizarre cult set out to destroy anyone who didn’t convert to their devilish ways. The murder of Czar Nicholas II, the Lord’s anointed sovereign, together with the Royal Family, was purely ritual, a sacrifice to Satan. The Red Terror forced millions to bow down in submission and worship the blood-red pentagram while many more millions endured inhuman suffering. The Bolsheviks burned icons and pillaged churches, ransacked monasteries and desecrated graveyards. They raped nuns to death, disemboweled priests and hanged them by their intestines, disfigured bodies, boiled and buried people alive, tore babies to pieces before the eyes of their mothers, shot, slashed, impaled and dismembered those who would not renounce the Christian faith. Even thinking about t
hese horrors may cause the sanest of men to lose their minds. But perpetrating such heinous acts? Or turning a blind eye like the world did? Truly, the end of days is nigh. May the Lord bless the souls of Russia’s martyrs.”

  Ilia crossed himself, gazing at the dark sky for a few moments.

  “As a result,” he continued, “by the end of the new wave of terror in 1937, all of the Russian clergy had been killed or imprisoned, the churches defiled or reduced to rubble. Effectively, the Orthodox Russian Church ceased to exist, annihilated.”

  “But what happened in 1943?” asked Constantine.

  “The war changed everything. Stalin and his cronies faced the gravest danger they had ever encountered. Millions of Russian men surrendered to the Germans, unwilling to shed their blood for the sake of Stalin’s hide.”

  Constantine remembered the sobering words once spoken by Eugene:

  Stalin’s peace was worse than Hitler’s war.

  “He had to throw them a bone,” Constantine surmised. “Slogans of world communism and proletarian paradise didn’t cut it anymore after a taste of that so-called paradise. So the Bolshevik deceivers made a U-turn toward patriotism and God.”

  “There’s something else you need to consider. The Nazis did a lot of evil when they came to Russia, but for propaganda reasons, they did not oppress Christianity. All across occupied Russia, a captive nation rediscovered faith. Despite the wartime hardships, people toiled to reopen their churches and organize parishes. The movement was popular, uplifting—and uncontrolled. If left unchecked, it could turn into a full-fledged second baptism of Russia. After twenty-five years of trying to eradicate Christianity and break the will of the people, Stalin could not allow it. He had to hold an iron-fisted grip on this and all other attempts at spiritual recovery. Thus, on September 3rd, 1943, he established an entity called the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. This new organization was a department of the NKVD, and later the KGB. As a wily conman, Stalin reworded the name of the Orthodox Russian Church which he had destroyed, to trick the common man into believing that it was the very same Russian Church which had existed for centuries.”