"All of this tended to reduce the all-powerful, faultless image of both the FSB and the SVR, which meant that the power of Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich was becoming questionable.
"Sirinov decided to settle the matter once and for all. With a great deal of effort, Sirinov ordered the simultaneous assassinations of a man in Vienna known to be a longtime deep cover asset of the CIA; a reporter for one of Charley's newspapers who was asking the wrong questions about Russian involvement in the oil-for-food program; Liam Duffy, who had interrupted a previously successful SVR drug operation in Argentina and Paraguay; and-"
"So they're all connected," Alex Darby said.
"Oh, yes. Please let me finish," Pevsner said. "And the assassination of another of Charley's men, a policeman in Philadelphia, who knew the Muslims who planned to crash an airplane into the Liberty Bell were not smart enough to conceive of, much less try to execute, an operation like that by themselves and suspected the SVR was involved.
"When only the assassinations of the CIA asset in Vienna and of the journalist were successful, Sirinov had to report this failure to Putin. So far as Vladimir Vladimirovich is concerned, there is no such thing as a partial success. And Sirinov knew that the only thing worse than reporting a failure to Vladimir Vladimirovich was not having a credible plan to make things right.
"And he had one: Dmitri and Svetlana had been ordered to Vienna to participate in a conference of senior SVR officers. The cover was the presence in Vienna of Bartolomeo Rastrelli's wax statue of Peter the First, which the Hermitage had generously loaned to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
"The Tages Zeitung journalist whom he had managed to eliminate was going to be buried with much ceremony in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany. There was no question that Eric Kocian and Otto Gorner, managing director of Gossinger G.m.b.H. would be there. With a little bit of luck, so would Karl von und zu Gossinger, who was not only the owner of the Gossinger empire but Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who had been causing the SVR so much trouble. All three-plus at least some of Charley's people who would be with him-could be eliminated at the same time.
"Tom's train would pass through Marburg on its way to Vienna. So Sirinov dispatched a team of Hungarians-ex-Allamvedelmi Hatosag-to Marburg, with orders to report to Polkovnik Berezovsky. Sirinov knew Dmitri-Tom-could be counted upon to supervise their assassination assignment with his well-known skill for that sort of thing. And then catch the next train to Vienna.
"Well, that turned out to be an even greater disaster for General Sirinov, as we all know."
"Through God's infinite mercy," Svetlana said very seriously.
She crossed herself.
"Svet," Pevsner said seriously, "you may very possibly be right, but there's also the possibility that it was the incompetence of the CIA station chief in Vienna that saved Charley and Kocian from the ministrations of the Allamvedelmi Hatosag."
"It was the hand of God," Svetlana said firmly.
"Possibly, Sweaty, it was the hand of God that contributed to Miss Eleanor Dillworth's incompetence," Delchamps said. "Same result, right?"
Svetlana looked at him coldly, not sure-but deeply suspecting-that he was being sarcastic.
"Eleanor is not incompetent," Alex Darby said loyally.
"Come on," Delchamps said. "She was incompetent in Vienna. The rezident there… what was his name?"
"Podpolkovnik Kiril Demidov," Barlow furnished. "He used to work for me."
"Demidov was onto Dillworth," Delchamps said firmly. "Maybe he didn't know it was Tom and Sweaty, but he knew that-Jesus Christ!-Dillworth had a plane sitting at Schwechat airfield ready to haul some defector, or defectors, away from the Kunsthistorisches Museum."
"You don't know that," Darby protested.
"I know that your pal Eleanor should have known that Demidov was going to take out the Kuhls. And once that happened, she didn't have a clue what to do next. I asked her. She said she was 'waiting for instructions from Langley.'"
"If I may continue, gentlemen?" Pevsner said a little impatiently.
"I didn't trust her, Edgar," Tom Barlow said, ignoring Pevsner. "I don't know if it was that I thought she wasn't professional or what."
"It was the hand of God," Svetlana insisted.
"But once I saw the picture in the Frankfurter Rundschau of Charley getting off his private jet," Barlow went on, "I decided that Svetlana and I were going to leave Europe on that aircraft if I had to give him Sirinov and all the ex-Allamvedelmi Hatosag people."
"And from that moment, until we walked into Alek's house here, everything went smoothly," Svetlana said. "Does no one see the hand of God in that?"
"I do," Castillo said.
When Sweaty looked at him, he sang, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."
"Don't mock God, Charley!" she snapped furiously and moved away from him on the couch.
"Well," Pevsner said, "Dmitri and Svetlana were not intercepted in Vienna, and that was the end of that. Except of course that Liam applied the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye principle to Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseev, who had come to Argentina in search of Tom and Svetlana."
"Not quite," Delchamps said. "Alex's good buddy, Miss Dillworth, sicced a reporter-a good one: Roscoe J. Danton of The Washington Times-Post-on Charley. He came to Alex's apartment just before we got out of there."
"A reporter? What did he want?" Castillo asked.
"He wanted you, Ace. He probably wants to know why you stole Sweaty and Tom out from under Miss Dillworth's nose. And if Dillworth told him about that, I wouldn't be at all surprised if she told him you left the Vienna rezident-what was his name? Demidov?-sitting in a taxi outside our embassy with an Allamvedelmi Hatosag garrote around his neck, and her calling card on his chest."
"I had nothing to do with that, as you goddamn well know. The story going around is that some old company dinosaur did that."
"You sound like you think I had something to do with it," Delchamps said.
"Do I?" Castillo said sarcastically.
"Funny thing about those old company dinosaurs, Charley. You're too young of course to know much about them. But they really believe in what it says in the Old Testament about an eye for an eye, and if they do something like what happened to Demidov, they never, ever, 'fess up to it."
"Changing the subject just a little," Tom Barlow said. "I think we should throw this into the facts bearing on the problem: Just as soon as Sirinov and/ or Vladimir Vladimirovich heard that the Americans had taken out the Fish Farm, they realized that information had to have come from me."
"You don't know that," Castillo argued.
"In our profession, Charley," Tom said, "we never know anything. All we ever have is a hypothesis-or many hypotheses-based on what we think we know."
"Touche," Castillo said.
"We all forget that at one time or another," Barlow said.
Castillo met his eyes, and thought, That was kind of you, Tom.
But all it did was remind everyone in this room that I am the least experienced spook in it.
Which, truth be told, I am.
"One of the things I was tasked to do in Berlin was make sure that the Fish Farm got whatever it needed," Barlow went on. "It's not hard to come up with a hypothesis that Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich reasoned that since Polkovnik Berezovsky knew about the Fish Farm and it was destroyed shortly after Polkovnik Berezovsky defected to the Americans, whose CIA had looked into the matter and decided the factory was indeed a fish farm, Polkovnik Berezovsky told the Americans what it really was."
"You knew what the CIA thought?" Charley asked.
"Of course," Barlow said.
"You had… have… a mole?"
"Of course, but you don't need a mole to learn things like that," Barlow said. "Actually you can often learn more from a disgruntled worker who wouldn't think of betraying her country than from an asset on the payroll."