He paused to let me absorb all that. I had picked up bits of it in the intelligence files, but it wasn’t the same as listening to him brag about everything he’d done. It isn’t often you hear from a man who’s changed the course of world history. It was chilling.
“And there were other leaders, other nations. The Congo, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe. I was the man who knew how to orchestrate revolutions and wars, to make sure the right man rose to the top. I was the kingmaker. That was Stalin’s nickname for me. Khrushchev’s also. Brezhnev thought I walked on water. Andropov, too.”
“You must’ve been busy as hell,” I said, wondering where this was going.
He gave me a sardonic look. “I woke up one day and realized something quite shocking, Drummond. I was working for idiots. I was the man building their empire, while they were destroying my homeland. They were stupid, venal men, all of them. Stalin nearly buried Russia. He made that idiotic bargain with Hitler and nearly got us all killed. Then Khrushchev, who was so clumsy in his dealings with your Kennedy, he nearly got us blown into a nuclear dustpile. And Brezhnev was nothing but a common thief. He wasn’t even a smart thief. We were lurching from bad to worse. Do you know what it feels like to serve a system that produces such garbage for leaders?”
“No,” I admitted, and I meant it, too.
He seemed to consider my answer, as though it were the naive babbling of a child. He sighed. “I was helping them destroy Russia. You Americans, you had the right idea. You ran your empire like an elite country club. You took only the rich and talented… Japan, Western Europe, Taiwan, Canada. We… well, we were taking in useless leeches. Eastern Europe, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Yemen, Ethiopia-what do all those places have in common? They are all impoverished messes. They were needy orphans that drained our wealth and energy. We got nothing from them. Nothing. And our own people were becoming poorer and poorer. This is not how these things are supposed to work, is it?”
I shrugged. Having never been in the empire-building business, what the hell did I know?
“It had to end,” he said, moving across the floor and waving his hands. “But how? Who had the skills to end it? I did, I suddenly realized. Poor Gorbachev, he never understood what was happening. Everything started going wrong. The Poles began striking under that mustachioed idiot Lech Walesa, and for some odd reason our intelligence services couldn’t seem to stop them. Very strange, eh? All of our power, and we couldn’t stamp out this rebellious movement. Then our great Red Army couldn’t seem to win in Afghanistan. Think about that, Drummond. Do you really believe that the Russian army was that incompetent against a bunch of fourth-world tribesmen? Or that we couldn’t have smashed Walesa and his people?” He chuckled. “We looked incompetent only because some very patriotic generals and officials deliberately made it seem that way. The whole point was to begin the fraying of the empire, to lose the war, to give Russia its own Vietnam. Then came the problems in Georgia, then Chechnya, then this man Yeltsin comes out of nowhere and threatens Gorbachev’s grip.”
“You were behind all that?” I asked, staggered by the scale of his plot, which was obviously more fantastic than Alexi had imagined.
“Of course. Oh, there were others, certainly… Many others, actually. Patriots who knew we had to sweep away the old system, to destroy the old order so we could rebuild.”
“But Alexi? Why didn’t you tell him? He was like your son, right?”
He stared down at the floor a moment, almost as though he was embarrassed by this admission. He said, “How could he have embraced what we had to do? He hadn’t seen how the Marxist idiots misruled, hadn’t experienced the cruel bite of their incompetence. He was too naive to understand at that time. Oh, I would’ve told him eventually.” He paused and seemed to wonder if he’d made the right choice. Then his indecision evaporated. “But Alexi served a vital purpose.”
“And what was that?”
“When he first came to me with his suspicions, I realized something. Everything was so vulnerable in the beginning. It could’ve been stopped so easily by forces inside Russia or by the West. We were so fragile in the beginning, secrecy was our only protection.”
“So?”
“You still don’t see it, Drummond?” he snapped, angered that I couldn’t jump to what he considered obvious conclusions. Like a lot of ridiculously smart people, those of us with average intelligence taxed his patience. “Alexi was the first outsider to detect it. With his extraordinary intellect, he was the only one who noticed that history was not flowing on a logical path. I was quite proud of him, actually. So I decided to use Alexi as a watchdog. He would keep me and my people on our toes. It was perfectly safe, of course, because he kept me informed of everything. But if Alexi couldn’t find us… well… then nobody could.”
I was suddenly awed by the sheer deceitfulness of this man. To him the whole world was a chessboard to be ordered as he wanted. Even Alexi was just one more pawn to be shuffled from square to square.
“That’s cold,” I said, unable to help myself.
“Cold?” he asked, shaking his head. “No, Drummond. I gave Alexi a historic role. He who serves in ignorance still serves, yes? Knowing we had a worthy opponent made us much more cautious. Without Alexi we might have become sloppy.” He paused and seemed curious. “Tell me something. How did you uncover poor Milt? What led you to him?”
“The second time you tried to kill us,” I admitted.
“Ah.” He nodded his head, obviously piecing the rest of the story together. He really was frighteningly brilliant. “I thought that was it. After the attempt in Moscow, I debated whether to try again. I just… well, I couldn’t have you and that girl sniffing around Alexi. You have to understand, Drummond, when you set the board, the pieces have to move by the rules. You and that girl were upsetting the rationality. You, nosing around in things that weren’t your business, and her becoming romantic with Alexi. What else could I do but eliminate you?”
I was thinking there were plenty of other things he could’ve done, but then I had very strong prejudices in this matter.
I said, “Yeah, well, we cross-indexed all the documents the CIA supposedly got from your vaults. When we found a few only Martin had seen, it all fell into place.”
“Oh, that’s very clever, Drummond. Poor Milt. You’re probably wondering how we recruited him. Back when he was a college student majoring in Russian studies, he visited here with a student group. It was the sixties, when so many of your young people were disenchanted by Vietnam, and Milt was very vocal about the rottenness of your country. We barely had to recruit him. Fate plays funny tricks, yes? Who could’ve imagined that his college roommate would go on to become President? The only use I ever saw for Milt was writing a few books and articles that were damaging for your CIA and foreign policy. We made a trade. I provided him the information and he became famous as a writer.”
“Well, as we say in America, sometimes you fall into a pile of shit and find a brick of gold.”
He gave me a very unpleasant look, and Felix took a step toward me. “Metaphysically speaking,” I quickly added. “I mean, Martin was a really brilliant coup, wasn’t he?”
“Brilliant?” Viktor said. “Milt was a coward. He refused to do anything unless I shielded him. So I gave him the template for a cut-out. The day Morrison walked into his office he knew he’d found the perfect doppelganger. You remember, I hinted to you that Morrison brought this on himself. He was so ambitious, and so obsequious, he virtually volunteered himself.”