“With her what?”
“It means latrine shovel,” Louise explained. “I don’t know about you, dear, but I wouldn’t want any woman, much less a former SVR podpolkovnik protecting her beloved, coming after me with an otxokee mecto nanara.”
Thirty minutes later, after his third stiff drink of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt Scotch whisky, Roscoe called the White House, asked for and was connected with the President, and then read from the sheet of paper on which Edgar Delchamps had written his suggestions vis-à-vis what Roscoe should tell the Commander in Chief:
“Mr. President, sir, after serious consideration, I have decided to accept your kind offer to serve my Commander in Chief to the best of my ability.”
He did not read the last four words Mr. Delchamps had suggested: “So help me God.” That was just too much.
[FOUR]
General Sergei Murov had known when, in February, he had been relieved of his duties as cultural counselor of the embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C., and ordered home that he stood a very good chance of being summarily executed.
His family has been intelligence officers serving the motherland for more than three hundred years, starting with Ivan the Terrible’s Special Section, and then in the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and finally the SVR. He knew the price of failure, even when that failure was not due to something one did wrong.
It was presumed that if there was a failure, and if it wasn’t due to someone doing something wrong, it was because someone had not done what should have been done.
General — then-Colonel — Murov’s failure had nothing to do with culture. He had been the SVR’s man, the rezident, in Washington. His cultural counselor title had been his cover. It had been no secret to the FBI or the CIA, or even to some members of the Washington Press Corps, that he been the ranking member of the SVR in the United States. A. Franklin Lammelle, then the deputy director for operations of the CIA, had met his Aeroflot flight from Moscow at Dulles, greeted him warmly, and told him he thought it appropriate he greet the new rezident in person, as they would be “working together.”
Murov knew he was more than likely going to be held responsible for not doing what should have been done to prevent the failure of several of the most important kinds of operations, defined as those conceived and ordered executed by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.
Those operations had turned out disastrously. The first was intended to show the world, and, perhaps more importantly, the SVR itself, that Putin was back running the SVR and that the SVR was to be feared. It called for the assassination of people — a police official in Argentina; a CIA asset in Vienna; and a journalist in Germany — who had gotten in the way of the SVR in one way or another, followed by the assassinations of the publisher and the owner of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.
The latter was so important to Putin that he ordered the Berlin rezident to take personal control of the action.
Only the CIA asset and the journalist lost their lives. The Berlin rezident and his sister, who had been the Copenhagen rezident, not only defected but tipped off the Americans to a secret biological warfare operation run by the SVR in the Congo. The Americans promptly bombed the Congo operation into oblivion. The Vienna rezident responsible for the CIA asset elimination was found garroted to death outside the American embassy in Vienna.
In an attempt to double down, Putin then ordered General Vladimir Sirinov of the SVR to exchange a small quantity of the biological warfare substance, dubbed Congo-X, for the two rezidents who had defected, and the American intelligence officer who had aided their defection.
That, too, had turned out to be a disaster for him. The American intelligence officer who was supposed to have been kidnapped and taken to Russia, instead staged a raid on a Venezuelan island where Sirinov was waiting. He left the island in the highly secret Tupolev Tu-934A airplane Sirinov had flown from Russia, taking with him the Congo-X and Sirinov. On landing in Washington, General Sirinov, whom Putin expected to commit suicide under such conditions, instead placed himself under the protection of the CIA and began to sing, as the Americans so aptly put it, like a lovesick canary.
Colonel Sergei Murov was responsible for nothing that caused the multiple disasters. But he had done nothing, either, that might have caused the disasters not to happen.
That was enough, in his really solemn judgment, to earn him a bullet behind the ear in the basement of that infamous building on Lubyanka Square. Or at least an extended stay in Siberia cutting down trees and feasting on bean soup twice a day.
But that hadn’t happened.
General Vladimir Sirinov’s treason had been Murov’s salvation. Vladimir Vladimirovich had sent for Murov the day after he returned to Moscow, greeted him like an old friend — which in fact he was — and told him that he was going to “have to pick up the pieces and get what has to be done finally done.”
Murov was appointed to replace Sirinov as first director of the SVR, and his promotion to general came through the day he actually moved into Sirinov’s old office.
Vladimir Vladimirovich didn’t have to tell him specifically what he wanted; Murov knew. Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky; his sister, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA, Retired, in one of the rooms in the basement of the building on Lubyanka Square. He would be barely satisfied to hear they were dead, even if they were disposed of with great imagination — for example, skinned alive and then roasted while hanging head down over a small fire.
Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted them alive.
Murov didn’t think getting all three in the bag was going to be that difficult. He thought the negatives involved were outweighed by the positives.
The negatives were that none of the three were naïve about the SVR. They knew its capabilities and would be prepared for them. The “extended families”—Aleksandr Pevsner and Nicolai Tarasov in the case of Berezovsky and Alekseeva; Castillo’s former associates in the American intelligence community — would have to be dealt with, of course. That wouldn’t be easy. Both Pevsner and Tarasov were former colonels in the KGB, which had evolved into the SVR. Pevsner had what amounted not only to a private army but a private army of former KGB people and Spetsnaz officers and soldiers of unquestioned loyalty to him.
Murov not only had no one inside Pevsner’s estate in Bariloche, his home outside Buenos Aires, or even in the Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort in Mexico, or for that matter on any of the vessels of his fleet of cruise ships, he had little hope of getting someone inside Pevsner’s organization. All attempts to get people inside, which dated from the earliest days, had resulted in dead operatives.
Only once, when a former FBI agent in Pevsner’s employ had been turned by the offer of a great deal of money, had there been even a suggestion of success in that area. Pevsner’s assassination had been set up but had failed when the American, Castillo, got wind of it and ambushed the ambushers. The former FBI agent had been slowly beaten to death, possibly by Aleksandr Pevsner himself, in the Conrad, a gambling resort in Punta del Este, Uruguay.