"You're serious, aren't you, Karl?"
Castillo picked up on that: I'm not Karlchen right now. The old man is impressed.
"Absolutely," Castillo said. "Have you got another hard drive?"
"A spare, you mean?"
Castillo nodded.
"Why?"
"Because what I really would like to do just as soon as I get this data off your drive and properly reencrypted is put it on another drive and send that in the diplomatic pouch to the United States. In case something happens to our copies."
Kocian considered that and nodded.
"There's a store across the river which sells them," he said. "They're expensive."
"Can we send somebody to buy one?"
Kocian nodded again. "Shall I have it put on my Tages Zeitung American Express card? Or are you going to pay for it?"
"Better yet, we'll have the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund pay for it," Castillo said. "Will this store take dollars?"
"Probably, at a very bad rate of exchange."
"Get one of the security guys in here. You tell him what store and I'll tell him to get a receipt," Castillo said and took a wad of currency from his pocket.
"You going to tell me what that fund-'the Lorimer Charitable and Whatever Fund'-is all about?"
"On the way to Buenos Aires. There's no time now." Castillo carefully pried the portable hard drive from the pages of Ot Pervovo Litsa, then connected it to his laptop computer.
"Okay, Eric, it's hooked up. Let me have the password."
"You trust that machine?"
"I won't erase your data until I'm sure it's in here," Castillo said. "But, yeah, I trust it."
"I put a lot of time and effort into what's in there," Kocian said. "I'd hate to lose it."
"Not as much as I would," Castillo said, "and therefore I am going to be very careful. Let's have the password."
Kocian gave it to him, then added: "Never in my worst nightmares did I see myself as a lackey of the CIA."
Castillo entered the password, decrypted the data on Kocian's hard drive, then transfered it to his.
When he saw that was working, he said, "I don't work for the CIA, Eric."
"So you say. But if you did, you wouldn't say you did, would you?"
"Probably not," Castillo said.
Kocian elected to change the subject.
"I really hate to destroy any book," he said. "But I had seen all the spy movies on the TV and hiding the hard drive in a book seemed like a good idea. And Ot Pervovo Litsa was a garbage book." He paused, then added, "Full of bullshit, like the dispatches from Washington you send all the time."
Is he trying to piss me off?
Or do my paraphrases from The American Conservative really offend his sense of journalistic integrity?
Castillo said, "You don't think Mr. Putin told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to those reporters?"
"You read it?"
Castillo nodded.
"In Russian or the translation?"
"In Russian."
"Then you will recall he told one journalist that practically right out of university, he went in the KGB and learned his craft by suppressing 'dissident activities' in Leningrad. That, I believe. I also believe that his father was a cook, first to the czars-where he cooked for Rasputin-and then to the Bolsheviks, most significantly Lenin himself, and then in one of Stalin's dachas outside Moscow, as he told other Russian journalists. He also said that his father served with the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. He was a little vague about what his poppa did in uniform."
Castillo nodded.
He dropped his eyes to his laptop and saw that the transfer of files procedure was just about finished.
He held up his hand to signal Kocian that he needed a moment and then typed in the encryption code.
Kocian waited until Castillo raised his eyes to him and then went on: "Do you think that Putin's father spent that time boiling beets for the Red Army in some field mess? Or is it more likely that Putin's father-whom the regime trusted enough to let him cook for Stalin-served as a political officer, making sure no officer strayed from the path of righteousness?"
"Good point."
"Whatever he did, it made Poppa an important apparatchik. Important enough to get his son into law school at Leningrad State University and then into the KGB, where he promptly began to suppress the local dissidents. Then, he told another so-called journalist, he was next assigned to East Germany, to a minor administrative position."
"I wondered about that," Castillo said.
"Do you think, having learned how to suppress Russian dissidents, that the KGB might have had him doing the same thing in East Germany?"
"Which, of course, he would like to keep quiet," Castillo said. "In the interests of friendship between the Russian president and a now-reunited Germany."
"Think about it, Karl. After serving in a 'minor administrative position' in the KGB in East Germany, he went back to Leningrad State University, if we are to believe what he told these reporters, where he worked in the International Affairs section of the university, reporting to the vice rector. Do you suppose he got that job because he was such a good student the first time he was there? Or because-having been all the way to East Germany-he was an expert in international affairs? Or maybe because the KGB wanted somebody with experience in suppressing dissidence suppressing dissidence at the university?"
"Where are you going with this, Eric?" Castillo asked, softly,
Kocian held up a hand, signaling him to wait, and then went on: "After a year of that-in 1991, if memory serves, and it usually does-Putin was put in charge of the International Committee of the Leningrad Kommandatura-excuse me, Lenin no longer being an official saint of Russia, Leningrad was Saint Petersburg once again.
"That made it the International Committee of Saint Petersburg Kommandatura. Where he handled international relations and foreign investments. To show that he had put all the evil of the Soviets behind him, Mr. Putin resigned from the KGB two months after getting that job. Correct me if you think I'm wrong, but if he resigned from the KGB in 1991 wouldn't that suggest he was in the KGB until 1991? I mean, how can you resign from something you don't belong to?"
Castillo chuckled but didn't reply.
"Would you be cynical enough to think, Karl, that the man in charge of foreign investments in Saint Petersburg would be in a position to skim a little off the top and spread it around among what in the former regime had been deserving apparatchiks?"
"That evil thought might occur to me," Castillo said. "Okay, what else?"
"Well, he did such a good job building foreign goodwill and attracting foreign investment that Putin suddenly found himself first deputy chairman of the whole city of Saint Petersburg, and, soon after that, he was summoned to Moscow, where he served in what he told the reporters who interviewed him were various positions under Boris Yeltsin. What they were was not mentioned. A cynical man might suspect this was because he might have been involved again with the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, otherwise known…"
"As the KGB," Castillo said and laughed.
"Or the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti…"
"FSB," Castillo said, still chuckling.
"…The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation," Kocian finished, nodding, "which replaced the evil KGB, and of which Putin became head, and remained head, until he assumed his present role as an international statesman."
"You think he was personally involved in the oil-for-food scam, Eric?"
"Up to his skinny little ass," Kocian said, bitterly. "Both as a source of money for the FSB and personally."
"Can you prove it?"
Kocian shook his head.
"But I'm working on it. I think I may be getting close to getting something I can print."
"You think he knows that?"
"We have more spies per square meter in Budapest than Vienna and Berlin did in their heyday. Of course he knows."