Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  “He thinks it is a little strange to do interviews so late in the evening, but he agreed. One hour.”

  Anton Zukov lived on Vokzal’naya Ulitsa, about three blocks from the railway station. The apartment building was a Constructionist-era monstrosity that looked like a tin can cut in half. It was reddish stucco over concrete, with a garden area between the curving, crumbling arms of the structure. Once upon a time the garden was probably supposed to be a communal effort tended to by the building’s occupants, but by the state of the shrubbery it looked as though the plot had died along with the Soviet Union. The lobby had suffered in the same way. There was nobody at the reception desk, and two elevators, one of which had its door gaping open and cables dangling from the ceiling. It was obviously under repair, but it looked as though it had been that way for a very long time. Zukov lived on the ninth floor, and after a ten-minute wait the elevator arrived and took them ponderously upward with enough rattling and pausing that Eddie and Holliday agreed that it was the stairs on the way down.

  Zukov answered the door. He had an egg-shaped head with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, developing jowls, a small mole to the left of his wide, downturned mouth, gold wire glasses and a tweed jacket. He looked like an English professor from a Midwestern university. He took one look at Eddie and smiled thinly.

  “Vy ne iz gazety Vy?”You are not from the newspaper, are you?

  “Nyet,” said Eddie.

  Holliday took the black Serdyukov automatic out of his pocket and held his arm loosely at his side. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

  “An American with a gun and a black man who speaks Russian. How intriguing.” He stood aside. “Do come in. Make yourself comfortable.”

  “After you,” answered Holliday.

  “As you wish.” Zukov nodded. He led them down a narrow hallway. On Holliday’s left a pair of large urns flanked what appeared to be a dark, brooding self-portrait of the French artist Nicholas Poussin. The interior of the apartment was even more surprising-contemporary white leather furniture in a conversation square looking toward a wood-burning fireplace, more art on the whiter walls and good rugs covering a dark cherry hardwood floor.

  They sat down across from one another on the white leather couches. Zukov pulled out a blue-and-yellow pack of cheap Belomorkanal cigarettes and lit one with a giant agate lighter on the glass coffee table in front of him.

  “Tell us about the Kremlin Egg,” said Holliday.

  Zukov’s braying laugh caught both Holliday and Eddie by surprise. The Russian man began choking on his cigarette smoke and coughing. Finally he sat back against the leather cushions, perched his glasses up on his forehead and wiped his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

  “What’s so funny?” Holliday asked.

  “You’ve been talking to Genrikhovich, haven’t you?” Zukov asked, grinning broadly.

  “You know this man?” Eddie asked.

  “Of course I know him. I know him just like you know a scab on your knee you want to pick off.”

  “The egg,” reminded Holliday, the automatic pistol in his lap.

  “Genrikhovich believes the Kremlin Egg holds some kind of secret that Rasputin took with him to his grave and which the Leningrad Four discovered.”

  “The Leningrad Four?” Holliday asked.

  “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the president; Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow; and Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov, head of the FSB. They were boyhood friends in St. Petersburg, they were all in the KGB and they have all risen to great power. Genrikhovich thinks they’re part of some ancient society called the Order of the Phoenix or something equally melodramatic.”

  “There is no Order of the Phoenix?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “The Kremlin Egg?”

  “It was never here. It always remained in the Kremlin Armoury. It wasn’t part of the evacuation, something I could never make Genrikhovich believe, I’m afraid. He said Golitsyn’s son would back up everything he said.”

  Holliday only knew of one person named Golitsyn. “Anatoliy Golitsyn? The KGB defector who exposed Philby and the Cambridge Five spy ring back in the sixties?”

  “The very one.” Zukov laughed. “Except Anatoliy Golitsyn never had a son, only a daughter.”

  “What did Genrikhovich say to that?”

  “He said the son was illegitimate, by a secretary named Maria Ivanova, who worked for the KGB in Leningrad-pardon, St. Petersburg. According to Golitsyn there is even some connection to Putin or Stalin or something equally foolish. The boy took the mother’s name-Anatoliy Ivanov. According to Genrikhovich this spectral bastard works in Moscow and has an apartment on Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane in the Arbat district.”

  “Did you check it out?” Holliday asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I had neither the time nor the inclination. Genrikhovich loves to weave endless tales of dark conspiracies, secret societies, the KGB infiltrating the Church, the Romanovs, anything to get attention. Anatoliy Ivanov was nothing but a figment of the man’s fevered imagination. He is, as you Americans say, a fruitcake.”

  “So we’ve been screwed,” said Holliday.

  “?Que?” Eddie said.

  “Vy byli rez’bovym,” explained Zukov.

  “Hijo de puta,” said the Cuban.

  26

  Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian FSB, stared out the window of his seventh-floor office and looked down at Lubyanka Square. The statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky was gone, but people still avoided walking in front of the old All Russian Insurance Company building the statue had faced. The memories of the blood-soaked dungeons and torture chambers in the basement were too fresh for some Russians. It looked cold outside, and a harsh wind was blowing scraps of newspaper and dust from the gutters. Winter was coming.

  Bortnikov turned away from the windows and walked back to his desk. The office had once belonged to Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD and later the KGB, a small, round-faced bald man with a pointy chin and a small mouth who looked far more like a bookkeeper than he did Stalin’s favorite goblin, and the man responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian people at Stalin’s command.

  Everything was the same as it had been in Beria’s time; the parquet floors had been maintained, as had the waist-high silver birch wainscoting that ran around the large, high-ceilinged room. The dark green paint on the walls above the paneling was unchanged, and even the small electric brass button beneath the desk was still there, used to summon the guards who would escort his new victims to the basement cells.

  Bortnikov sat down at his desk and smiled grimly at the heavyset, gray-haired man across from him. “So, Tikhonov, what can you tell me about Holliday and his Cuban friend?” Alexander Tikhonov was director of the FSB’s Special Purpose Center, a catchall subdirectorate useful for everything from disposing of bodies to manufacturing letter bombs and arranging traffic “accidents.”

  “We’re assuming that they reached Yekaterinburg. Apparently they stole a crop-dusting plane, which we have since discovered was actually being used to smuggle drugs from Afghanistan.”

  “Has the owner been arrested, questioned?”

  “It was attempted. The man resisted and was killed.”

  “Too bad. I thought that Holliday was an Army Ranger. How is it that he could fly an airplane?”

  “It was the Cuban. His name is Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso. According to our friends in Yasenevo he flew MiGs, among other things.” Yasenevo was a town just beyond the Moscow Ring Road and was home to the headquarters of the SVR, Russian Foreign Intelligence.

  “Edimburgo?”

  “Presumably his mother liked Scotland.”

  “He speaks Russian?”

  “Fluently.”

  “How did Holliday meet him?”

  “This past summer. The Cuban was a river pilot in South Sudan. It is a long story, I’m afraid.”

  “A
ll right, enough about this peculiar Cuban. Yekaterinburg. .”

  “The stolen aircraft was found in a field a kilometer from the town of Sredneuralsk. There are several taxis there. Presumably they took one to Yekaterinburg.”

  “Are we sure of that?”

  “They booked themselves into the Yekaterinburg Hyatt using the Michael Enright and Simon Toyne passports they bought in Odessa.”

  “And they weren’t caught?”

  “As Kafka said, ‘Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.’” Tikhonov smiled. “The information was received too late. Twenty-four hours too late. They are gone.”

  “So we are slime now, Tikhonev?” Bortnikov laughed. “In Stalin’s day you would have been taken to the basement here and given a single bullet to the back of your head.”

  “In Stalin’s day I never would have said such a thing, tovarich Bortnikov,” Tikhonev said, using the old Russian word for “comrade.”

  “I will have a conversation with Director Skorik about his failure to have identified the use of the passports.” Vladimir Skorik was head of the FSB Information Security Center. One of the center’s primary functions was to monitor foreign passport use within the Russian Federation. Holliday and the Cuban had apparently slipped through the cracks for a vital twenty-four hours.

  “They never visited the church?”

  “No. We had two men outside and two in. They never set foot in the church or the museum.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” replied Tikhonev.

  Bortnikov leaned back in his chair. “What will they do now, I wonder?”

  “If they didn’t go to the church, perhaps they’ve given up,” said Tikhonev. “Maybe they’re looking for an exit strategy.”

  “I doubt it. From what I can gather about Holliday he is not a quitter.” Bortnikov sighed. “Nevertheless, you may be right. I want their photographs at every border crossing out of the Federation and at every highway roadblock. Cover the airports, domestic and international, as well as the train stations. I want them caught, Tikhonev, and caught soon.”

  “I think it’s crazy,” said Holliday. “It would never work.” They were standing in the green-tiled basement preparation room of Dimitri Chaplitzky’s mortuary. Dimitri’s brother, Ivan, their waiter at the Central Hotel in Sredneuralsk the day before, was also with them, along with his dark-suited, dour-faced brother. Dimitri Chaplitzky bore a remarkable resemblance to Ichabod Crane in Walt Disney’s version of the Headless Horseman tale. As well as the two brothers, there were two of Dimitri’s clients, both dead, both male, both extremely ugly and both turning the color of Stilton cheese.

  “No, not crazy, please, misters. My brother, Dimitri, and me are doing it again and again.”

  “But how do you get past the roadblocks?”

  “It is simple, misters. Between here and Moscow there are only three major towns: Perm, Kirov and Nizhniy Novgorod.”

  “Okay.” Holliday nodded. “I get that.”

  “Yes, okay, okay, but listen to me. To the roadblocks between here and Perm we are a katafalk, how you say, hearse taking bodies back to Perm for insertion in the ground or krematsiya or whatever family wants. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Between Perm and Kirov we say the body is going to Kirov.”

  “And from Kirov to Nizhniy Novgorod. .”

  “Yes, yes. We have papers for all places.”

  “What if they look in the coffins?” Holliday asked.

  “They will not.”

  “Why?”

  “It is tradition in Russian Church not to embalm the bodies.”

  “But we’re not dead-yet,” Holliday said.

  “When we are. . moving other things we make sure they are not opening the grob, the coffin, another way,” said Ivan.

  “How?”

  Ivan nodded to his brother, who went to a tall stainless-steel refrigerator. He opened the door and removed a large plastic bag. He brought the bag across to one of the empty preparation tables and set it down. Holliday and Eddie stared. The bag was full of a variety of human feet in various stages of putrefaction.

  “Santa Maria, madre de Dios,” whispered Eddie.

  “Feet?” Holliday grimaced.

  “Yes, feets,” said Ivan, smiling. “Grieving families do not notice they are missing. We also have cousin with shoe store. Vy ponimaete, gospoda?”

  “Da.” Eddie nodded. “We understand.”

  Anton Pesek, sixty-something son of a high-ranking official in the Czech State Security Service, the Statni bezpecnost, and brought up during the Communist era, took the train from Prague to Moscow even though it involved the tedious business of buying a Belarus travel visa and then paying a bribe to the border guards. If it weren’t so predictable it might have been funny when the visa ended up being out of order, but as it was the process was simply boring. There had been several terrorist attacks, including a suicide bombing at Domodedovo, Moscow’s main airport, but so far no one had seen fit to plant bombs or seek martyrdom with a few pounds of Semtex strapped to their hairless holy chests at Belorussky railway station. Besides which, entering Moscow at the train station was much more discreet than at the airport, where video security abounded. As a professional assassin Pesek had to bear such things in mind.

  Anton was a dapper man, slim, a little on the short side, with a well-trimmed Vandyke beard, hair graying at the temples. He had a predilection for slot machines, expensive shoes, American cigarettes, and Bacardi and Coke, the last two severely cut back lately after several queasy and somewhat frightening moments alone in hotel rooms and one emergency room visit while on vacation in Tuscany with his wife and fellow assassin of somewhat dubious sanity, the Canadian Daniella Kay.

  Pesek sported a two-inch scar on his neck, usually covered by the collars of his expensive Turnbull amp; Asser shirts. The scar was the result of a fight he’d had in Venice some years before with Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday. The knife, Pesek’s own, had come within half a centimeter of his right carotid artery, and had the blade come any closer or gone any deeper Pesek wouldn’t be worrying about his intake of Marlboros or Bacardi and Coke; he’d be occupying his assigned space in the family plot at Cemetery Sarka in Prague. Pleasant enough when the leaves turned in the fall, but it wasn’t on his list of preferred destinations.

  Holliday was his reason for being in Moscow, but not for revenge. Being injured or killed was part of the pact you made with the Old Man of the Mountain when you took up the assassin’s creed. Pesek bore the American no malice-he had in fact saved the man and his cousin Peggy from a fate worse than death in Prague’s notorious Pankrac Prison the year before.

  This time his assignment came from the chain-smoking priest Thomas Brennan, who ran the Vatican Secret Service for his odious master, His Eminence Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, the Vatican secretary of state. The job had been simultaneously irritating and interesting.

  “Holliday is on the trail of a holy relic that he must not be allowed to discover. All we know at the moment is that it involves the Kremlin Romanov Egg, also known as the Uspenski Cathedral Egg. He may well attempt to appropriate the egg.”

  “You mean steal,” Pesek had replied.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it at present?”

  “The Armoury at the Kremlin.”

  “Buona fortuna a lui.” Pesek, who spoke Italian as fluently as he did English or Russian, laughed. “There is no chance.”

  “Nevertheless, Mr. Pesek, we would appreciate your assessment of the situation.”

  “I am an assassin, not a thief, Father Brennan.”

  “We will pay you extra for your assessment.”

  “For whatever it is worth.”

  “For whatever it is worth. Regardless of your report it will be necessary to remove Colonel Holliday from the equation.”

  “You mean kill him.”

  “Yes, kill him.”

  Pesek lef
t the train station by taxi and traveled to the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, where he rented a large corner suite on the top floor that looked down Tverskaya Street and not only gave him a perfect view of the Spassky Tower and the main public entrance to the Kremlin, but also offered a bird’s-eye view of the Tverskaya metro entrance, Holliday and his new c?ernoch friend.

  Pesek settled down in the lavish living room of the suite with a bottle of ice-cold Coca-Cola and two small bottles of Bacardi. What was the old Japanese proverb? If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by. Eventually Holliday would come, and eventually he would die.

  27

  John Holliday strolled across the interlocking paving stones of Red Square and tried not to think of the decided queasiness in the pit of his stomach. The reaction didn’t come from the faint odor of rotting human feet that he was sure clung to his skin even after three showers. He knew that instead it came from sitting in on too many intelligence briefings, squinting at grainy photographs and trying to identify the types of missiles mounted on carriers paraded through the square on May Day each year, or identifying which bigwigs had appeared on the podium and which ones had been discreetly airbrushed out.

  The tall, thick walls of the Kremlin, the stone mass of the government-only GUM store, and the goose-stepping guards in their silly peaked caps marching back and forth like toy soldiers in front of Lenin’s tomb were as familiar to him as a recurring nightmare, even though he’d never been here before. It was like a monstrous case of vertigo that was way out of his control.

  The Chaplitzky brothers had taken Holliday and Eddie to the rural dacha village of Peredelkino, about twenty kilometers from Moscow. According to the Chaplitskys, the dacha, an outsize log cabin, had once belonged to an obscure Russian writer in the 1970s, but now it looked more like a warehouse, most of the rooms stacked with boxes of iPads, laptops, GPS units, BlackBerrys and other electronic devices.