The restaurant had changed hands many times over the years, but now it was called Café F, and it was a high-dollar gastro-pub, attracting hipsters and tourists. Most of the hipsters didn’t know it, because even Russian hipsters didn’t think about such things, but Café F was only two blocks from Lubyanka Square — the headquarters of FSB, Russian State Security, and before that the HQ of the KGB. The café had been the location of a popular watering hole for KGB, FSB, and military intelligence types. To a man, the personalities who now ran Russian State Security and controlled the nation had once sat at the bar in the front room by the door, downed shots of vodka, and complained about their bosses and the direction their nation was heading.
The venerable dive two blocks from the back door of the FSB building had turned into a posh local eatery and was even shilled to tourists on TripAdvisor.com. To the old guard still around it was a goddamned shame that somehow the edgy insider joint from the old days had morphed from a smoke-filled spy haunt into a swanky date-night destination.
But not tonight. Tonight the new-money clientele of Café F had been shuffled away at six p.m., a sign had been put up out front explaining that a private party was being thrown, and soon after that cars and trucks full of armed men began pulling up out front. These were security officers and advance-detail men, most of them driven over from Lubyanka, but by nine p.m. bodyguards had arrived from the Kremlin, just a kilometer to the southwest.
By ten p.m. there were three dozen armed men blocking Krivokolenny Lane and manning the rooftops and filling the sidewalk out in front of the closed restaurant. The building had been swept with dogs and bomb-detection equipment, and it had been swept again for listening devices and pinhole cameras, and only when the advance men and the security shift leaders pronounced the location clear did the arrival of the principals begin.
Most came in armored SUVs and armored limos, but Pyotr Shelmenko was head of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and he landed in a helicopter in Revolution Square, which was three blocks to the northwest. From here he walked with an entourage of twelve armed men. When he got to the restaurant he left most of his security unit out on Krivokolenny, and he went through the door of Café F with just a pair of close protection officers. Inside, Shelmenko grabbed a vodka at the bar and greeted several men around him with bear hugs.
These were the top men of the siloviki, the former intelligence and military officers who were now the billionaires in charge of the Russian government, both behind the scenes and in the public eye.
The nation’s foreign minister, Levshin, was there, as was Pyshkin, minister of the interior. Both men had served in the KGB in the 1980s. Arkady Diburov, the head of Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas concern, showed up in the middle of a phalanx of silver Cadillac SUVs, and he didn’t make it through the alcove in front of the restaurant before finding himself in deep conversation with Mikhail Grankin, the director of the Kremlin’s Security Council, who happened to be entering at the same time.
Security men were not allowed inside the bar itself; it was a long-standing rule of the get-together that had the effect of making the street outside look like the front lines of a war zone throughout the evening. Dozens of men with rifles stood outside cars and scanned the area. Inside, chiefs of staff and aides-de-camp filled the front room and bar area of the café, while the back room was completely reserved for the siloviki. Diburov and Grankin followed the other principals inside, and soon sixteen men were in the back, drinking vodka and sitting at simple tables, chatting quietly.
The oldest was the eighty-one-year-old interior minister, and the youngest was Grankin at only forty-five.
This was the twenty-third consecutive year of this event, although there had been quite a few additions to and subtractions from the guest list along the way. The first meeting, in ’94, was well before the siloviki wrestled power away from the more democratic government types and installed the first in a series of presidents in the Kremlin. Back in the beginning of the annual meetings they all just came to lament their fall from grace, or to use the get-together to help one another bolster their new fledgling companies, concerns, and holdings, in order to use their networks in the military and intelligence communities to navigate the difficult days of Russia’s return to a market economy via brash and brazen criminality.
But by 1999 every single one of the attendees was a millionaire, some many times over, and they had taken control of the Kremlin, and since that year the annual meeting on Krivokolenny Lane had taken on even more importance as vital matters of state were discussed and decided on. Most of the last seventeen years had been good times for these men, and often this event at the café two blocks from the Lubyanka was a raucous affair, with much back slapping, tears of laughter, jokes about one another’s mistresses, and invitations to parties, palaces, and private islands tossed around between them.
But not this night. Tonight the men were somber, quiet. Worried.
Angry.
The Russia of just a few months ago seemed like a distant memory now. Oil prices and gas prices had nose-dived, and the American government had placed economic sanctions on nine of the sixteen men in the room, blocking their movements out of Russia and freezing foreign assets that could be identified. These men weren’t broken, but they were damaged, to be sure, and every one of the others wondered if he might be the next man in the crosshairs of the West.
The Russian economy had dipped significantly due to these two events, and these problems had revealed just how weak an economic system Russia had. Prices had risen, employment was down, potholes in the street weren’t getting fixed in Moscow, and garbage wasn’t getting picked up with regularity in Saint Petersburg.
The public was furious, the nation was unstable, the siloviki were feeling the pressure.
The sixteen men drinking and smoking in this small room needed a scapegoat, and their scapegoat arrived at eleven p.m.
Six armored vehicles from the Kremlin pulled up to the barricade blocking off Krivokolenny Lane from the main streets. The motorcade barely slowed before the wooden lane blockers were moved and the vehicles were allowed through. In front of Café F, all six stopped as one.
Valeri Volodin looked out through the bulletproof glass of his limousine as his security team formed around the vehicle, and he waited for his door to be opened. He wasn’t looking forward to tonight. Back before he was in charge of things he enjoyed the annual visit to the old bar, the get-together with the powerful men of the intelligence and military. This used to be a place of great plots, alliances, and allegiances, of multimillion- and even billion-dollar deals and decisions that would change the course of men’s lives.
Or end them.
But now, as president, he loathed these evenings. Even when things were going well, which they had been until just months before, the others in the siloviki sat stoically while he held court and gave them a rundown on events at the Kremlin that would interest them, as if he were some sort of PR man, a talking head on the television. At the end he took questions from men who should have been more than satisfied to just enjoy the billions of dollars he’d helped them make, and they should have been climbing over one another to be the one to get to shine his shoes.