The Kremlin Conspiracy

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Oleg dutifully delivered his message on dozens of calls as Zakharov and other members of his staff did the same. Oleg was relieved to learn the whole thing had been an FSB exercise, and he was honored and excited to be part of the rapid response team. That evening, he even got to be in the room as Prime Minister Luganov once again addressed the nation on live television. Luganov denounced Malenchenko by name while praising the police and first responders of Ryazan. He encouraged the nation not to worry and provided an update on how many Chechen terrorists had been killed and how proud he was of the resolve of the Russian people in the face of such “savagery and barbarism.”

  National public opinion polls moved quickly and dramatically. By the end of that fateful week, Luganov’s approval rating had shot up from a mere 4 percent to 21 percent. Images of Russian bombers devastating Chechnya filled the evening news. Two weeks later, Chechen rebel leader Ramzan Zakayev was killed by a Russian sniper, and Luganov’s approval ratings doubled to 45 percent. By the time the presidential elections were held later that fall, Luganov won in a landslide, capturing more than 63 percent of the vote.

  The Russian people were terrified no longer. The terrorists were dying in massive numbers. Not a single new attack had occurred on Russian soil. Luganov was being praised by presidents and prime ministers all over the world for being tough on terror. Oleg Kraskin was ecstatic. He found himself an increasingly trusted member of the inner circle. What’s more, he would soon be married and become a member of President Luganov’s family.

  While driving home from the Kremlin several nights after the election, eager to meet Marina and take her to dinner and the ballet to celebrate, Oleg heard an odd and disturbing story on the radio. The body of Vasily Malenchenko had been found in a Dumpster on the outskirts of Moscow. The reporter had been shot in the back of the head, execution-style.

  Four days later, Oleg read a small item buried deep inside Novaya Gazeta. The body of the Ryazan chief of police had also been found, in a parking garage in downtown Moscow. No one knew why the officer was in Moscow, the story noted. He had not been scheduled to visit the capital. He was actually scheduled for a minor surgical operation in Ryazan the following morning. There were no suspects at this time, nor was there any known motive. But one thing was clear: the chief had not been mugged or set upon by a gang of youthful hooligans. He had been hog-tied. His throat had been slit. His tongue had been cut out, and his body was riddled with twenty-three bullets. Someone was sending a message. But who? And why?

  THE FRONT RANGE, COLORADO—19 MAY 2001

  Marcus Ryker tore north on Interstate 25 like a man possessed. Someone was going to die tonight, but it was not going to be him.

  Weaving in and out of traffic—racing up the shoulders on either side of the highway when he had no other choice—the twenty-one-year-old rising college senior blew past the posted speed limit of sixty-five miles an hour. He was soon doing eighty, eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five. Yet he kept pushing the accelerator closer and closer to the floor and would not let up.

  Colorado Springs rapidly dissolved in the rearview mirror. The exit for Monument, population two thousand, was coming up fast, and the rusted maroon ’78 Mustang he’d bought from his uncle was shaking violently.

  So was his girlfriend.

  Elena Marie Garcia had known Marcus since the sixth grade. They’d started dating in the tenth. No one knew his love of speed and risk-taking better than she. But this was insane.

  “Marcus, for heaven’s sakes, slow down—you’re gonna get someone killed!” Elena screamed as he veered around a sluggish oil tanker, a Greyhound bus, and two minivans clogging his way.

  She pleaded with him to calm down and tell her what had just happened, what in the world that phone call could possibly have been about. But she wasn’t getting through, and for a moment she wondered if he could even hear her at all.

  Elena had never resisted—never even flinched at, much less criticized—any of his crazy adventures. Maybe she’d raised an eyebrow once or twice, but she was almost as much an adrenaline junkie as he was—almost, though not quite. Coming from a staid and quiet home where nothing exciting or unexpected ever seemed to happen, she felt energized by Marcus’s passion for life and absolutely loved trying to keep up with him.

  He had, in fact, once confided to her that this was one of the reasons he had fallen in love with her in the first place. It wasn’t just her warm brown eyes, her long jet-black hair, or her soft mocha skin. It was her zest for life. Together they’d hiked more fourteeners than she could remember, both in the blazing heat of summer and in the brutal Colorado winters. They’d skied some of the steepest mountains and the biggest moguls. They’d gone white-water rafting through some of the most intense rapids in any river in any state within two hundred miles of Monument. They’d taken flying lessons, and Marcus had earned his private pilot’s license. They’d even taken skydiving lessons the summer after their junior year in high school—without their parents knowing—and laughed until they cried when they finally hit the ground alive and intact.

  But as Marcus screeched around corners and blew through red lights and stop signs, Elena burst into tears. She was grasping the door handle for dear life, but she had stopped trying to make sense of what had come over this man she loved.

  The evening had started off magically enough. Marcus had arrived at her house at precisely 5:00 to pick her up for a big fund-raising banquet put on by the Air Force Academy to raise money for children of parents killed in action. It was being held at the Broadmoor, the swankiest hotel in the Springs, and they’d been given two free tickets. It was a great treat for the two college students, home and working hard for the summer. Marcus had looked handsome, decked out in a snazzy black rented tux. Given that they’d skipped their high-school prom to go white-water rafting with friends, it was the first time she remembered him wearing anything but jeans, a T-shirt, and Timberland boots. His wavy blond hair was freshly trimmed. His rugged, chiseled face—the heritage of his Dutch roots—was freshly shaved. His blue eyes danced with anticipation of the evening ahead, and he had brought her a bouquet of dazzling red and blue and purple wildflowers that he had picked in the foothills.

  She’d loved that he had noticed and complimented not only her dress and shoes but new pearl earrings and necklace, which she’d saved for and bought herself. She’d loved watching him banter with her bow tie–wearing, corporate lawyer father and her every-hair-in-place, every-syllable-just-so, church organist mother. She’d loved how he’d listened to her giggling younger sisters like he had all the time in the world for them.

  They’d arrived at the Broadmoor, taken in the glamorous surroundings, and enjoyed the hors d’oeuvres being passed around by stewards. It was all going so well. And then Marcus had taken an unexpected call on his cell phone, and the trajectory of the night took a sudden and devastating turn.

  Now the man she planned to marry once they both graduated from the University of Northern Colorado the following year turned the wheel hard to the right and went barreling around one more corner, tires squealing. Then they were on Marcus’s street. They tore into his cul-de-sac, and when he slammed on the brakes and came screeching to a stop on the freshly mowed lawn of his childhood home, Elena silently thanked God for the seat belt she was wearing, fully convinced that otherwise she would have been thrown through the windshield.

  Marcus immediately shut down the engine and pulled the keys out of the ignition. “Go next door—now,” he told her. “Call 911. Then call your father, and don’t leave the Matthews’ house till this thing is over. Do you hear me?” With that, he threw open the door and bolted across the lawn.

  “Till what’s over?” she yelled after him. “What’s wrong?”

  Marcus didn’t answer. Yet he didn’t seem angry—not at her, at least. His voice had seemed surprisingly calm given the way he’d been driving. But there was a sense of authority and urgency Elena had never seen or heard in him before.

  As he disappear
ed from view around the far side of the house, Elena just sat there for a moment, in shock. But then she heard the sounds coming from inside the house, and it began to dawn on her what was unfolding. She heard something glass smash against a wall. She heard pots and pans striking walls and countertops. The man who was now Marcus’s stepfather was throwing things. She heard him shouting obscenities so loudly that fathers and mothers up and down the street were emerging from their doors to see what in the world was going on. Children were standing frozen in their yards, staring at the Ryker house, unable to continue playing.

  A flash of fear rippled through Elena. She imagined Marcus’s stepfather suddenly rushing out the front door and finding her—alone—in the rusty old Mustang in the middle of his finely manicured lawn. She needed to go, now.

  Bursting out the passenger-side door, she raced to the Matthews’ house in her ball gown and matching heels and pounded on the front door. Mrs. Matthews was there, trembling and alone with her cats. But she knew Elena and quickly pulled her inside, locking the door behind them both. The police had already been called, the woman assured her, but she handed over the phone so Elena could call her father.

  Don’t die, and don’t get arrested.

  For years, that’s what his mother had told him. She’d said it every time he left the house. She’d been saying it since he’d entered puberty. But now, as he raced to the backyard, adrenaline surging, Marcus knew full well that before the night was finished, it was going to be one or the other.

  Stripping off his tuxedo jacket and bow tie, he unbuttoned his collar, ripped the silk lining out of his jacket, then tore the lining into two long strips. As his stepfather’s cursing grew all the louder and more vicious, Marcus wrapped the strips of fabric around his hands to protect them, then began scrambling up a wooden trellis covered with his mother’s climbing roses, now in full bloom. Reaching the top, his hands scraped and bloodied from the thorns—though not nearly as badly as they could have been—Marcus pulled himself up onto the roof of the screened-in porch and moved toward the window of the master bedroom.

  Roger DuHaime, the man who had terrorized their lives for the last eighteen months, was pounding furiously on the bedroom door. He was demanding to be let in and threatening to get an ax and smash the door down if his wife didn’t comply immediately. Marcus’s mother was cowering in a corner, shaking uncontrollably. Her blouse was ripped and splattered with blood. Her nose appeared broken, and Marcus could see bruises and welts on her face and arms. As he scanned the room, he could see that the lock on the bedroom door was engaged and that his mother had tried to push the heavy oak dresser against the door for extra protection, though she hadn’t gotten it very far.

  Marcus rapped on the window. Startled, Marjorie Ryker whipped around, fear in her eyes. She didn’t move. She didn’t say anything. She just gripped a cordless phone in her right hand. She shouldn’t have been surprised to see her son on the roof. She had, after all, warned him not twenty minutes earlier not to come through the front door.

  “He just snapped,” she’d whispered to Marcus over the phone, the sense of urgency in her voice palpable. “I think he really means to do it this time.”

  She had apologized over and over again for interrupting his date, his special night, but Marcus would have none of it. He’d told her to lock herself in her bedroom, call the police, and wait for him to get home and take care of everything. That’s when she had begged him not to come into the house, not to get into a confrontation with Roger. “Don’t get in his face, Marcus—he’ll kill you,” she’d warned him in no uncertain terms. “He’s been drinking all day. He’ll kill us both.”

  But Marcus had dismissed her warnings. He’d told her he was coming. He’d protect her. Everything would be okay. All he asked was that she unlock and open her bedroom window so he could get her out quickly when he arrived.

  Yet now that the moment had come, she seemed completely caught off guard. She just stared at him. She hadn’t opened the window, nor had she unlocked it, nor was she about to. Instead, she was backing away from him, terror growing in her eyes.

  It occurred to Marcus that his mother couldn’t see his face. The sun shining over the Rocky Mountains was illuminating him from behind, making just a silhouette.

  “Mom, it’s me, Marcus. Open the window,” he said.

  But then came a chilling new sound. It was not that of an enraged man pounding on the bedroom door with his bare fists. It was that of an ax splintering the wood. Marcus couldn’t wait any longer. He slipped off his polished black dress shoes, plunged one fist in each, and then, wearing the shoes like boxing gloves, punched his way through the window.

  For a moment Roger stopped hacking at the door and demanded to know what was happening. But when his wife didn’t respond, he started attacking the door all the more furiously. Marcus scraped the glass away from the window frame, then put his shoes back on, reached in, and unlocked the window. As he climbed inside, he immediately moved to his mother’s side. Her eyes registered both the relief of seeing her son and the simultaneous fear that at any moment her husband would smash through that door and hack them both to death.

  Marcus knew he was running out of time. His mother would never make it across the roof and down the trellis. She was obviously in great pain after the beating she’d just taken, and he feared she could fall off the roof and break her back or neck. Not hearing any sirens yet, Marcus told her to go into the bathroom and lock the door. At first she hesitated when he said he wasn’t going to join her. But when he calmly insisted even as the hole in the door grew, she complied.

  Splinters were flying through the room now. Marcus knew he had only seconds to act. He pushed the dresser in front of what was left of the door. Then he raced to his mother’s closet and flicked on the overhead light. Stepping onto a small wooden stool, he pushed away a row of shoe boxes, feeling around until his hands brushed the cold metal barrel of a Remington 870 Wingmaster. The dusty 12-gauge pump-action shotgun was more than thirty years old. It had been his father’s. His real father’s. After his death when Marcus was eleven, his mother had planned to sell it or give it away, just as she’d done with many of his things. Marcus hadn’t exactly begged, but he had made an impassioned and rather well-reasoned plea that the gun was a keepsake, a part of their family history, and that she should hold on to it until he was old enough to learn to hunt like his father and his grandfather before him. Impressed and surprised by his logic and articulateness at such a young age, she’d relented and tucked the gun away in her closet for safekeeping. Since then she’d probably forgotten about it.

  But Marcus never had. Every few months growing up, he’d secretly snuck into his mother’s room and checked to make sure the shotgun was still there, that she hadn’t given it away.

  As Marcus scrambled to find ammunition, and amid the murderous rage and deafening vulgarities, he could finally hear sirens in the distance. The police were coming, but it was clear they weren’t going to arrive in time. He continued working methodically through the cramped closet, shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer, until—in one of the shoe boxes—he finally heard what he needed. He ripped it open. Finding five shells, he quickly loaded two, pumped, then turned and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He dialed 911. When he heard the call connect and an operator’s voice come on the line, he stepped back into the bedroom and tossed the phone onto the bed just as Roger DuHaime smashed through the door and shoved the dresser aside.

  Suddenly Marcus was standing just a few feet away from a haggard, unshaven man in his late fifties. He wore a dirty pair of work jeans and a T-shirt stained with oil. His bare feet were tinged with the green of freshly cut grass. His filthy hands were shaking, and as he tightened his grip on the ax, he demanded Marcus put down the gun and tell him where his mother was.

  Marcus said nothing. He just stood there and locked eyes with his stepfather, holding the shotgun low, at his hip, aimed at the man’s chest. DuHaime was soaked in sweat. His hair, what was left
of it, was askew. His eyes were bloodshot and glaring with hatred but also confusion. He scanned the room, looking for his wife and not finding her. For a moment, it seemed he was going to come at Marcus, but Marcus did not move, did not flinch. Nor did he fire. He simply stood his ground and waited.

  Then DuHaime heard Marjorie crying in the bathroom. The moment he did, his mouth broke out in a twisted smile. He glanced behind him and began to back up, away from Marcus and toward the bathroom door.

  “This isn’t between you and me,” he growled. “This’s about your mother and me, and you’d best stay out of it.”

  Marcus remained motionless. But calmly and clearly, he told his stepfather to put down the ax, back out of the room, and leave the house, and no one would get hurt. The man just laughed. Marcus repeated the instructions and explained precisely what was going to happen if his stepfather did not put down the ax and leave the room and the house immediately. But his words had no effect. The man did not comply. His stepfather was swaying now, side to side. He was laughing. He raised the ax, mumbled something incomprehensible, and lunged at Marcus.

  Marcus didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger, not once but twice.

  Two shotgun blasts echoed through the neighborhood.

  Then all was quiet.

  Elena screamed as she burst out of the Matthews’ house, tears streaming down her face, and ran toward Marcus’s front door. She was stopped by one of the police officers who had just pulled up. A half-dozen squad cars filled the street, along with a SWAT vehicle and two ambulances. The chief of police was ordering his men to set up a perimeter around the house. Then he ordered all the neighbors back into their homes.