“Were you using me?” He almost melted when those wide dark eyes looked up at him and glistened with a tear. All he said was, “I already know the answer.” Then after a moment longer he said, “So what do we do about Amir?”
Fannie shrugged her shoulders. “You’re not talking about killing him, are you?”
“Would anyone miss him?”
“There would be a lot of questions.”
“Maybe we can be more creative.” He felt a pang of guilt talking so callously about a man who technically was helping in their preparations for war. Then he heard the little shit yell from the car, “Let’s go. There is much to do.”
Severov smiled, thinking, Yes, there is.
21
Vladimir Putin reclined on the balcony of his private residence. The leather-and-mahogany lounger was identical to one in his villa in the South of France. The unseasonably warm weather allowed him to enjoy his vast gardens and scintillating pools wearing only a sheer silk robe. It was not an image he broadcast to the media, but over the years he had grown used to his creature comforts. And he had earned them. As the leader of a resurgent Russia, he had a right to his lavish lifestyle.
Putin seldom drank, but since this was a special occasion, he treated himself to a snifter of Remy Martin Black Pearl Louis XIII cognac. There were fewer than eight hundred decanters of it in the world. That this single small bottle of cognac, aged for eighty-five years, cost more than his entire family had earned in the first twenty years of his life somehow made the taste even smoother.
In times such as these he sometimes thought about the multifamily apartment in Leningrad in which he’d grown up. His father rarely encouraged him to do anything to better himself, but his mother made him feel special. Along with the extra people in their small apartment was a small army of rats. One of his jobs was to keep the apartment clear of the vermin. He spent many hours chasing and killing them. One thing they had taught him was how ferocious they could be when trapped. It was a lesson he had learned well.
More importantly, he had learned not to work himself into a corner where he might be trapped.
If trapped, he’d learned to fight like a cornered rodent.
No quarter given.
His father had died when Putin was in his late thirties. He had seen his son rise through the ranks of the KGB and even witnessed the beginning of his political career. But he had no idea how far his son would go.
When he started in the KGB, Putin dreamed of being in a position of power in the agency. Promoted to colonel, he realized there was more he could do. As the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, his hometown, he started to see the potential of political power and moved on to Moscow, working as deputy chief of the Presidential Property Management Department. Just two years later he was the head of the FSB—formerly the KGB—and found himself in a position to really make changes.
It was about this time in his life when he found himself trapped like one of the rats from his childhood. An overzealous Russian general prosecutor named Skuratov had started looking into then-President Yeltsin’s inner circle. These were some of the people who had helped his rise. They could also be his downfall.
Putin had been able to remove Yury Skuratov after a video of him in a compromising position with two women in a hotel room appeared on national TV. Of course the video had nothing to do with the fact that Skuratov had initiated an extensive investigation with the French into money laundering by people close to Yeltsin, including the president’s daughter.
Putin smiled when he thought about how he had manipulated those around Yeltsin. The old man was ailing, and when those closest to him looked for a possible successor, he made sure they knew all he had done for them. They had decided the FSB head’s loyalty and quick action made Putin an excellent choice for prime minister—which would make him next in line for the presidency. Even if, by some miracle, Yeltsin lived out his term, the prime minister would have a huge advantage over anyone else in an election.
In August 1999, Putin slipped into the position. Even journalists approved of him at the time. One said, “He makes you feel as if he shares your opinions and has the same background as you.” Clearly, growing up as a poor child in Leningrad before it became St. Petersburg was appealing to the masses.
And as for Yeltsin’s oligarchs and top officials, he quickly cashiered those he deemed unreliable, replacing them with his own trusted cronies and KGB officials.
This was just another step in his country’s evolution. He had done other things that people would have found contemptible. But there was always a purpose to them. Deploying members of the FSB to blow up the four apartment complexes in Buynaksk, Volgodonsk, and Moscow in 1999 was an example. They’d killed and injured over 1,300 people, but he’d managed to blame it all on the Chechens. Using the crime to rally the nation, he had simultaneously tightened his own grip on power. He’d also used the staged attacks as casus belli for a second war with Chechnya. Those bombings had galvanized the country against the rebels, and the Second Chechen War made him appear to be a strong leader.
Soon he was more than a strong leader: He was a dictator.
He smiled and poured himself another snifter of the Louis XIII.
Over the years many men and women had attempted to stop him. That they had the temerity to try never ceased to amaze him. After all, his ruthlessness was well established and notorious.
When Alexander Litvinenko, a former security officer, had tried to expose Putin’s role in the apartment-complex bombings and other crimes, Putin quickly retaliated. Two of Litvinenko’s fellow spies slipped polonium-210 into his tea at the Millenium Hotel in London, and Litvinenko spent weeks dying an unspeakably agonizing death.
Then there was the case of the investigative journalist, forty-eight-year-old Anna Politkovskaya. She had attempted to dig up dirt on Russian atrocities in the Second Chechen War and on Putin’s murderous, dictatorial excesses—his dream of catapulting Russia “back into a Soviet abyss.”
Well, it was a shame about Anna. She had arguably been the most impassioned and the most beautiful investigative reporter of her generation. Three bullets, and she wasn’t impassioned or beautiful anymore. One tap to the head, two to the chest, and Anna was history.
Natalia Estemirova? A highly regarded human rights activist, she’d worked with Anna Politkovskaya on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Three years after Anna was killed, Natalia took two rounds in the head. She wasn’t a highly regarded activist anymore.
Paul Klebinov, the editor of Moscow’s edition of Forbes magazine, had the impertinence to expose corruption among Putin’s plutocratic supporters. He was shot to death in front of his office.
The thought of Klebinov’s demise brought a small wintry smile to Putin’s lips.
You can publish your exposés in hell now, Klebby old boy!
Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova? Stan, a top human rights attorney, had been Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. He was was looking into the murder of a young Chechen by the Russian military.
He was also shot dead for his efforts.
Anastasia was killed when she ran up to help her friend.
So many journalists, so little time.
Today, it would be a ballsy reporter indeed who dared to criticize Putin or his friends.
It never ceased to amaze him what a few hundred killings and beatings could accomplish. Not only was the Russian media terminally cowed, but Putin was now going after history itself, the rewriting of Russia’s past. He was achieving that by brute force as well. When the renowned human rights organization Memorial attempted to expose the atrocities of Stalinism, including the horrors of the Gulag—in the process, blackening the reputation of Putin’s preeminent idol, Josef Stalin—Putin made short work of them. Turning the entire force of Russia’s hopelessly corrupt legal system against Memorial, he now had that august operation on the brink of obliteration. They and their work would soon be flung down his own equivalent of the Stalinist “memory hole.”