“The real work will start after the war,” Beria had told him, periodically polishing his pince-nez as he spoke over brandy and cigars. “Stalin will soon appoint me to the politburo, putting us further on the inside.”
Dimitrov loved the reference to “us.”
“A lot is going to happen. We will liberate the workers and destroy the bourgeoisie of every nation on earth: Europe first, then Asia, and the best prize of all, the United States. The day is coming. Westerners are weak and without backbone. They are too soft and sentimental. We must not hesitate to weed out the weak in our midst. Their absurd sense of virtue will destroy them. We are the future. To achieve it, all potential enemies must be destroyed. One must keep one’s focus on the greater good.”
Beria had flicked the ashes on the floor and dipped the sucking end of his cigar in the brandy.
“Ivan Vasilyevich, my dear comrade, we Georgians are the leaders of the future. Stalin, Beria, Dimitrov. Loyal men like you will rise with me.”
He lowered his voice almost to a whisper as he bent close to Dimitrov’s ear.
“Stalin will not live forever….”
He put his hand on Dimitrov’s knee. For a brief moment, the gesture seemed like a sexual pass.
And if it were? Dimitrov asked himself, knowing the answer.
Beria lifted his snifter and swallowed the remnants. Dimitrov did the same, and Beria poured again, remaining silent for a long stretch.
“You know, Ivan Vasilyevich, we have the greatest intelligence service on the globe, the best spy network in the history of the world. I know. I built it. Others might claim otherwise but Stalin knows it was I who made it happen. We will win, make no mistake about it. The West will boil in its own corruption.”
Beria shook his head in contempt.
Two weeks earlier, he had returned from Yalta, where Stalin had met Roosevelt and Churchill to discuss the future course of the war and its aftermath.
“Stalin played them like a violin, but Churchill is the more dangerous of the two, distrustful and suspicious. Roosevelt is a naïve fool. Besides, he seemed weak and not attentive. The days of the Western countries are numbered, Ivan Vasilyevich. There is a world for us to take.”
Beria’s nostrils flared as he sniffed the brandy. He nodded as if he were answering a question in his mind. He took a deep pull on the cigar and blew the smoke into the air.
“We are moving fast for other reasons,” he whispered. “The Americans are making a super bomb, something to do with splitting the atom. Roosevelt has promised Stalin that, if the bomb works, he will share the process with the Russians. Churchill has not been informed. He would be the fly in the ointment. The Germans are working on it as well, and we need whatever secret technology we can capture, not to mention the uranium deposits in Saxony and Czechoslovakia and the lab in Dahlem, hence the speed of this offensive.”
He lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper.
“Stalin has given me the mission of building such a bomb.”
“Congratulations, comrade. I salute you.”
Dimitrov lifted his glass in tribute. Beria nodded and sipped. For a long moment, he was lost in thought.
“They leak like a sieve,” he said, no longer whispering. “Stupid democracies! They have no real insight into espionage; they are amateurs. We are light-years ahead of them.”
Beria chuckled, showing small teeth in a tight smile.
“In Yalta, we had every room in their residences bugged, heard every conversation that took place privately between Roosevelt and Churchill. My own son, Sergo, did the translations. I can tell you that Churchill despises us; he is our nemesis. Roosevelt, naïve idiot, believes that we will be allies forever. We will play the game as long as we can, but make no mistake, Ivan Vasilyevich, the big war is ahead, and we have already organized our army. We are placing people in readiness everywhere — agitators, organizers, propagandists, assassins.” Beria chuckled. “We are everywhere; you cannot imagine how deep we are embedded.”
He paused and shook his head.
“But for now, we must be clandestine. We must smile and pet our Western friends. Keep the knife hidden inside the velvet glove, especially in America. Now we are beloved: the brave Russians who sacrificed to get rid of the Nazi scourge! We must keep that love affair going as long as we can after the war. But our people are in place, burrowing below the surface, like moles. We need moles, Ivan Vasilyevich, hidden weapons ready for use, while our people eat away at their diseased entrails.”
Beria took a sip of his brandy and looked deeply into Dimitrov’s eyes.
“Your command of English will be an asset, Ivan Vasilyevich.”
“And French, Spanish, and Italian, comrade,” Dimitrov said with pride, reminding Beria of his other natural skills. He was not averse to blowing his own horn, when and where appropriate.
“We will need all of your many skills in the future, Ivan Vasilyevich. We will be giving orders in all of your languages. And you will come with me however high we climb.”
Dimitrov felt his heartbeat accelerate, a thrill rising up from his crotch.
“I will serve you with my life, comrade.”
Beria reached out with his glass and clinked it against Dimitrov’s. After a long pause, Beria drank, then roused himself, stood up, threw his still-lighted cigar on the carpet and ground it down with his foot.
“Now, Ivan Vasilyevich,” he said smiling. “Let us treat ourselves to the women of the establishment.”
What followed, Dimitrov decided, was an experience that would linger in his memory for years. It was the ultimate bonding experience between the two men. They fucked the mother and her two daughters in each other’s sight. The women had been quickly compliant. Beria had simply pointed his pistol at the head of one of the twins.
“Will it be this gun?” Beria snickered. “Or this?” he said, opening his fly.
Chapter 2
An NKVD soldier brought the man into the office. Dimitrov sat behind his desk, the file open. The soldier placed the disheveled and dirty man in SS uniform in a chair in front of the desk. His rank was Obersturmbannführer, a comparatively high rank for someone still so young-looking. He was tall, blond, with cerulean blue eyes deeply embedded behind high cheekbones. Despite his condition, the man exuded arrogance. Cleaned up, he would look like the Aryan ideal.
“So you are an American,” Dimitrov said in English.
The man nodded and smiled.
Dimitrov noted that his teeth were surprisingly white, his lips moist, and two dimples appeared at either end of his smile.
“Your English is quite good, General,” the man said, as if it were the compliment of a superior.
“And yours equally, Obersturmbannführer,” Dimitrov said, offering a soldier-to-soldier greeting. Normally, he would never address an SS officer by his rank. “But then, you are an American.”
“By birth, not by choice, General.”
Dimitrov studied the man, glanced again at his file, then lifted his face and grinned. He reached into the side pocket of his overcoat and offered him an American cigarette, a Lucky Strike, which had been taken from a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer.
“Well, well, this one has traveled far,” said the American, pulling the cigarette from the pack and smelling it.
Dimitrov lighted it, and the American sucked deep and blew out a cloud of smoke.
“Nobody makes a better cigarette,” the American said.