The archbishop took his turn by asking, “And didn’t you think it was a little odd that Lenin appointed Dzerzhinsky to head the Cheka and kept him there when there were so many deserving and reasonably talented Communists close to him?”
D’Alessandro put up both hands in an admission of confusion.
“The Cheka,” the archimandrite went on, “was reorganized after the counterrevolution of 1922 as the GPU, later the OGPU. A man named Yaakov Peters was named to head it. By Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, who was minister of the interior, which controlled the OGPU.
“Dzerzhinsky died of a heart attack in 1926. After that there were constant reorganizations and renaming. In 1934, the OGPU became the NKVD — People’s Commissariat for State Security. In 1943, the NKGB was split off from the NKVD. And in 1946, after the Great War, it became the MGB, Ministry of State Security.”
“What you’re saying, Your Grace,” D’Alessandro said, “is that this state within a state…”
“The Oprichnina,” the archimandrite furnished.
“… the Oprichnina was in charge of everything? Only the names changed and the Oprichnina walked through the raindrops of the purges they had over there at least once a year?”
“My son,” the archbishop said, “you’re again putting together things that don’t belong together. Yes, the Oprichnina remained—remains—in charge. No, not all the Oprichniki managed to live through all the purges. Enough did, of course, in order to maintain the Oprichnina and learn from the mistakes made.”
“Excuse me, Your Eminence,” Torine asked. “Are you saying the Oprichnina exists today?”
“Of course it does. Russia is under an Oprichnik.”
“Putin?” D’Alessandro blurted.
“Who else,” the archbishop replied, “but Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?”
“And that Mr. Pevsner, Swe… Svetlana, and Colonel Berezovsky were — are — Oprichniki?”
Nicolai Tarasov raised his pudgy hand above his bald head.
When Torine looked at him, Tarasov said, smiling, “Yes, me, too. I confess. If there were membership cards, I would be a card-carrying Oprichnik.”
“How do you get to be an Oprichnik?” D’Alessandro asked. “Like the Mafia makes ‘made men’? First you whack somebody, then there’s a ceremony where you cut your fingers to mingle blood, and then take an oath of silence?”
“One is born into the Oprichnik,” the archbishop said. “Or, in the case of women, marries into it. Only very rarely can a man become an Oprichnik by marrying into it. There is no oath of silence, such as the Mafia oath of Omertà, because one is not necessary. It is in the interest of every Oprichnik to keep what he or she knows about the state within the state from becoming public knowledge.”
“May I have your permission, Your Eminence, to make a comment?” Aleksandr Pevsner asked. It was the first time he’d said anything.
The archbishop nodded.
“But please, my son, try to not get far off the subject,” he said.
“The Oprichnina has not endured for more than four hundred years without difficulty,” Pevsner said. “From time to time, it has been necessary to purify its membership—”
“Purify it? How was that done, Mr. Pevsner?” Jake Torine asked.
“I recently found it necessary to purify my personal staff of a man — an American — who betrayed the trust I placed in him.”
“Howard Kennedy?” Torine asked.
Pevsner did not respond directly, but instead said, “As I was saying, we have found it necessary to purify our ranks from time to time and also to place under our protection certain individuals who have rendered one or more of us — and thus the Oprichnina — a great service.
“This was the case with our Charley. Before he met Svetlana and Dmitri, I very seriously considered eliminating him as a threat. God in His never-failing wisdom stayed my hand, and Charley lived to save my life at the risk of his own. Knowing that others, in particular Vladimir Vladimirovich, still wanted our Charley out of the way, I sent word to Vladimir Vladimirovich that I considered our Charley my brother.
“Ordinarily, that would have been enough to protect our Charley, as a friend of the Oprichnina, but Vladimir Vladimirovich apparently decided that our Charley posed a threat he could not countenance and/or that I no longer had the authority to categorize Charley as a protected friend of the Oprichnina.
“He sent Dmitri and Svetlana to eliminate our Charley in Marburg, Germany. That operation turned out disastrously for Vladimir Vladimirovich, as you all know. Not only did Dmitri and Svetlana decide not to eliminate our Charley, but enlisted his aid in helping them to defect.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich had SVR agents waiting in Vienna to arrest Dmitri and Svetlana. Instead, our Charley flew them to Argentina and ultimately brought them here.”
“Can I jump in here, Your Eminence?” Vic D’Alessandro asked.
“I was afraid this would happen,” the archbishop asked. “But yes, my son, you may. Try to be brief.”
“Thank you,” D’Alessandro said.
“Dmitri—”
“Please call me Tom, Vic.”
“Okay. Tom, why did you defect? From all I’ve ever heard, all the intelligence services in Russia live very well, and I’m guessing that you Oprichniks lived pretty high on the hog. So why did you defect?”
“Because we came to the conclusion that sooner or later, Mr. Putin was going to get around to purifying us. We knew too much. We had family members — Aleksandr and Nicolai — who had, Vladimir Vladimirovich could reasonably argue, already defected.”
“I don’t think Vladimir Vladimirovich, if he could get his hands on us, would have actually fed us to starving dogs or thrown us off the Kremlin wall,” Aleksandr Pevsner said, “but keeping us on drugs in a mental hospital for the rest of our lives seemed a distinct possibility.”
“What did he have… does he have… against you?”
“You didn’t tell them, Charley?” Pevsner asked.
Castillo shook his head.
“Would you have told them if they asked?” Pevsner asked.
“If they had a good reason for wanting to know, I would have.”
“You really have the makings of a good Oprichnik,” Pevsner said. “Well, now there is that reason, so I will tell them.
“In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was a polkovnik—colonel — in both the Soviet Air Force and the SVR. I was in charge of Aeroflot operations worldwide, both in a business sense and in the security aspect. These duties required me to travel all over the world, and to make the appropriate contacts. My cousin Nicolai was my deputy in both roles.
“When the USSR collapsed, the SVR — which is to say Vladimir Vladimirovich — learned the new government had the odd notion that the assets of the SVR should be turned over to the new democratic government.”
“What assets?” Torine asked.
“Would you believe tons of gold, Jake?” Castillo asked.
“Jesus Christ!” Torine said.
“Now that was blasphemous,” the archbishop said.
“I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” Torine said.
“You need Our Savior’s forgiveness, not mine.”
“Plus some tons of platinum,” Castillo said, chuckling. “Not to mention a lot of cash.”
Pevsner, his tone making it clear that he didn’t appreciate contributions from others while he was explaining things, then went on:
“As I was saying. When Vladimir Vladimirovich was faced with the problem of not wanting to turn over the SVR’s assets to the new democratic government, he turned to me. Nicolai and me. He correctly suspected that we would know how to get these assets out of Russia to places where they would be safe from the clutching hands of the new government.