“But we are not ready. Our plan is more aspirational in nature.”
“We have one year.”
“Yes, Mr. President. I was there. I heard you assure everyone that the world would be quite different in twelve months. But what if it’s not?”
Volodin chuckled. “Then we’ll both be sacked, of course.”
Grankin was not laughing. “Me they can sack. They can put pressure on you to have me replaced. But you? They can’t just remove the president!”
Volodin smiled. “You’re right.” With a shrug he said, “I’ll most likely be assassinated.” He held a finger up. “That reminds me, Misha. I want a list of the best offshore banking specialists known to the FSB. Your staff can compile it quite easily, I should think.”
Grankin cocked his head. “This is part of the operation? Something you haven’t told me about?”
“This is just one piece of my puzzle. I will work the diplomatic front, the military front, the cultural front, domestic avenues. Financial resources. There are many moving parts.”
“And you need to move some money, I take it.”
“Exactly so. But just give me the names of the people the FSB trusts the most. Men whose discretion is beyond reproach. Check with their leadership, and make sure you have a consensus from them.”
“I’ll have it for you in a week’s time, Valeri Valerievich.”
The motorcade pulled into Shvedskiy Tupik, a blind alley a kilometer from the Kremlin, and the limo pulled over to the curb in front of house number 3.
After shaking his president’s hand once more, Grankin climbed out of the limousine and entered his apartment, his security force converging on him around the pavement as he climbed the steps to his building.
Volodin looked out the window at the dead city as his motorcade headed back to the Kremlin. His mind was not as quiet as the roads here at half past three in the morning. The city looked dead as he thought over all he had learned this evening. His mistrust for the men he had been with his entire career was complete now. Any one of these sons of bitches would do him in if it benefited them to do so. Grankin was better than the others, but that was only because his debt to Volodin was more obvious. He’d follow along with the plan as long as it moved in his favor, but he’d go running off after a new krisha if the storms became too heavy.
Hell, Volodin thought to himself. Grankin didn’t need a krisha anymore.
Volodin looked forward to getting the list of the FSB’s most trusted minds in the world of offshore banking. There would be dozens of names; the FSB was always moving money and managing holdings for the siloviki, so there were quite a few men in the upper echelon of the industry they called on. But Volodin wasn’t interested in the names that would be on the list. He was looking for a name not on the list. One of the great financial minds of Russia who, quite simply, the FSB did not trust to move their money.
That was the person Volodin needed to find, because if the FSB trusted a man, that meant the FSB could control the man, and Volodin needed to find someone with a unique level of discretion to help him prepare his escape in case this whole thing went to hell.
12
Thirty-eight-year-old American Peter Branyon considered himself to be the luckiest man in the intelligence business. Not because he’d uncovered any particular nugget of information that would change the world. No, that hadn’t happened yet. But simply because of his current position. He was station chief in Vilnius, Lithuania, and it seemed like fate had given him one hell of a good opportunity to shine.
He’d come a long way in a short time, and he was smart enough to realize he hadn’t completely made it on his merits. A year earlier, one of the top men in the Ukrainian Intelligence Service was caught spying for the Russians, but not before he had passed on the names of many of the top CIA officers working in Ukraine.
As a result of this outing of CIA officers, dozens of men and women, all of them experts in the region and most of them Russian speakers, were recalled to the United States. Consequently, their roles had to be filled by CIA officers whose identities had not been revealed to the Russians. A massive reshuffling happened at the CIA’s Near East desk. The former chief of Lithuania Station was promoted to the more important Ukraine Station, and a case officer in Vilnius was promoted to run the CIA operation in Lithuania.
This man’s tenure at the top of Lithuania Station did not work out. He was a field man, fair to good in his role as a case officer but completely unable to manage an office full of case officers from the top, delegate with authority, and administrate effectively. He was brash and direct to the point of being rude, and consequently lousy at building liaison relationships with the Lithuanians. Within a few months of his taking over, the new CoS had alienated longtime partners and delivered no real guidance or discipline over the men and women in his station who were out in the field, running agents and operations in the nation.
Langley belatedly recognized they had the wrong man for the job, so they demoted the CoS back to case officer, moved him to Jakarta, and then they went looking for his replacement.
And they found Peter Branyon in Buenos Aires.
Branyon had been CoS in Argentina only a few months, but before that he made a name for himself in Chile and Brazil. He was a hard-charging case officer, able to recruit and manage many agents, and his work running a network of Chilean embassy staff at the Chinese embassy in Santiago had won him the appreciation of Langley. An operation he managed in São Paulo involved bugging business-class hotels and recruiting tipsters at an executive airport, and it led to solid intelligence material on many visiting government employees of several nations, including breaking up a Russian SVR operation to plant listening devices in the U.S. embassy and an Al-Qaeda terrorist plot against a synagogue in the city.
Pete Branyon earned his way to the top of the Argentina Station, no doubt about that, but the Lithuania posting had fallen in his lap only due to the misfortune of others. Any Central European nation was a huge posting for a young CIA station chief, but the Baltic was the center of the action these days, and for a number of reasons, Lithuania was the star of them all.
And that was even before somebody killed a bunch of Russian soldiers in the heart of the nation’s capital and blew up a natural gas facility on the coast.
Branyon told himself that although he might have lucked his way into his present predicament, he was going to make the most of it and prove that he merited the post.
To that end, in only seven weeks in the position Branyon had taught himself an impressive amount of Lithuanian, he’d taken a tiny and inefficient network of informants in the eastern part of the small nation and whipped them into shape personally. He acted not just as a station chief, but also as a case officer, unafraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty, and unwilling to sit at his desk in the embassy all day. But unlike the last station chief, Branyon led from the front, had no problem delegating a dozen different jobs to a dozen case officers under him, and had no compunction about demanding hard work and discipline from all his staff.
Branyon wasn’t really supposed to be as hands-on as he was, but he was getting things done, sending back nightly cables to Langley about his quick progress in the station.
The only ding on his time here was a worry by others about his personal security. He was CoS, and he was sitting in cars in gas stations a mile from the Kaliningrad border, or walking down blind dark alleys in the capital, looking to meet with petty criminals who might have information to sell about shady foreign elements in the city.