Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I’d really rather not have to do that. So if you will identify those numbers for us, it will save us some time and might do a lot to convince me you meant it when you said you’d tell me anything I want to know. Right now, your hiding that chip from me brings that promise into question.”

  She reached for the pack of Marlboros and put a cigarette in her mouth. Davidson struck a wooden match and held it out to her.

  She lit the cigarette. She took a deep puff, held it, looked at the burning tip of the cigarette, and exhaled through both nostrils as she sighed and shrugged her shoulders.

  Castillo found this to be erotic.

  She turned and met his eyes, which had the same effect.

  “The money is, so to speak, our retirement money,” she said.

  “Is that list encrypted?”

  She nodded.

  “And are you going to decrypt it for me?”

  “It’s simple substitution,” she said.

  She picked up one of the ballpoint pens and demonstrated with underlines on the numbers as she spoke.

  “The first block on the second line, the second block on the fourth, the third block on the sixth . . .”

  She raised her eyes to Castillo. “You understand?”

  He nodded.

  “Is the key,” she said. “The alphabet is reversed.”

  “Cyrillic?” Castillo asked.

  She nodded again and pushed the sheet away from her.

  Davidson took it, lifted the lid of his laptop computer, pushed several keys, waited a moment while watching the screen, then began typing.

  “You have the Cyrillic alphabet in there?” Svetlana asked, surprised.

  “No, but we’re trying to fool you into thinking we do,” Castillo said. “And while Jack’s doing that, we will turn to Subjects Two and Three on our agenda for this evening.”

  She took another drag on her cigarette, then crushed it out as she simultaneously exhaled through her nostrils and looked into Castillo’s eyes.

  He felt it in the pit of his stomach.

  “Something else you promised and didn’t deliver,” Castillo said, “is the reason why you have defected. You said I wouldn’t believe you when you told me. Has it got something to do with these bank accounts? Or is there something else?”

  “The money is not the reason we defected,” she said calmly. “The money permitted us to defect. Is it your intention to take the money?”

  “Would you believe me if I said no?”

  “I don’t know,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Before you start telling me the things I’m not going to believe, let’s talk about Alekseeva. Starting with his full name.”

  “Evgeny Alekseeva, Colonel, SVR. I think that would be ‘Eugene’ in English. It’s from the old Greek word for ‘noble.’ Evgeny’s parents were always proud of their bloodline.”

  What the hell does that mean?

  “And he is—or was—your husband?”

  “Is.”

  No shit!

  Well, that may—or may not—affect my interest.

  “Any children?”

  “If I had children, I would be with them here or back there.”

  “Why didn’t Evgeny come with you?”

  “He is perfectly happy where he is.”

  What the hell does that mean?

  “And, apparently, you were not?”

  “I was not.”

  “You had trouble with your husband? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “I was not happy. He was. That often causes problems. Are you always happy with your wife?”

  She looked deeply into his eyes.

  She’s probing. . . . How am I supposed to respond?

  When in doubt, try the truth. . . .

  “I’m supposed to be asking the questions, Colonel,” Castillo said. “But since you’re curious, no wife. Not ever.”

  She shrugged.

  “Where is your husband now?”

  “He may be dead, or under interrogation, or perhaps he’s packing his bag to come looking for me.”

  “He didn’t know what you were planning?”

  “If he suspected what Dmitri and I were planning, he would have denounced us.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “He would be doing what he thought he had to do.”

  “And if he comes looking for you and finds you, what do you think he would think he had to do?”

  “The SVR would, of course, prefer to have us back home, but getting us there might be—probably would be—dangerous. So he would kill me. And, of course, Dmitri and his family.”

  “As I said, a nice guy.”

  “So obviously, the thing Dmitri and I have to do is not get found.”

  Castillo picked up the phone and punched one button.

  “Bob, get on the horn to Major Miller, tell him I need yesterday (1) the agency’s file on Evgeny Alekseeva, Colonel, SVR. I spell.” He did so, and looked at Svetlana to see if he had it right, which of course caused him to look into her eyes.

  She nodded.

  “And (2) tell him to get quietly onto NSA and get me all Russian traffic on the same guy. All of his aliases, too. If he’s moving, I want to know all about it.

  “And I just thought of (3): Call Two-Gun and our cryptologist and tell them to hold off sending the data on that chip to NSA; I think we can decrypt it here. Got it?”

  There was a pause as he heard it read back.

  “If you got it, how come I didn’t get no ‘Hooooo-rah!’ ?” Castillo asked, and hung up the phone.

  Davidson raised his eyes from his laptop and, shaking his head, smiled at him.

  Svetlana looked at Castillo as if wondering why he wasn’t in a straitjacket.

  “Which brings us back to Question One, Colonel: the reasons I won’t believe why you’ve defected. If it wasn’t to make off with the money, then what?”

  “Dmitri and I realized that things weren’t really changed, that they were going back to the way they were, and that we didn’t want to be part of it anymore.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Castillo confessed.

  “How much do you know about the SVR, about Russia?”

  “Not much.”

  That’s not true.

  I know a good deal about both Russia and the SVR. And she knows I do.

  Which means she knows I’m lying to her.

  Which she expected me to do.

  So why does that bother me?

  “I think you think you know a good deal about Russia and the SVR,” Svetlana said.

  She’s reading my mind again!

  “Is your ego such, Colonel,” she went on, “that you could accept that there’s a good deal you think you see that isn’t at all what you think it is, and that there is a good deal you don’t see at all?”

  That’s a paraphrase of what General McNab has been cramming down my throat since the First Desert War: “Any intelligence officer who thinks he’s looking at the real skinny is a damn fool, and any intelligence officer who thinks he has all the facts is a goddamned fool.”

  Castillo glanced at Davidson, who apparently not only could walk and chew gum at the same time but also had been often exposed to the wisdom of General Bruce J. McNab and just now had heard the same thoughts paraphrased by a good-looking Russian spook.

  They smiled at each other.

  “Did I say something amusing?” Svetlana snapped.

  “Not at all,” Castillo said. “We just found it interesting that you are familiar with the theories of B. J. McNab, the great Scottish philosopher.”

  “I never heard of him,” Svetlana said.

  “I’m surprised,” Castillo said. “You’ll have to expand on what you said.”

  “It’ll sound like a history lesson,” she said. “And I don’t like the idea of playing the fool for you.”

  “I’m always willing to listen. Believing what I hear is something else.”

  She looked at him intently, ra
ther obviously trying to decide if he was indeed trying to make a fool of her.

  “Do you have any idea, Colonel,” she asked, more than a little sarcastically, “how long what you would call the secret police have been around Russia?”

  “No, but I think you’re going to tell me,” Castillo said, matching her sarcasm.

  “What do you know of the boyars?” she asked.

  “Not much.”

  “Ivan the Terrible?”

  “Him, I’ve heard of. He’s the guy who used to throw dogs off the Kremlin’s walls, right? Because he liked to watch them crawl around on broken legs?”

  “That was one of the ways he took his pleasure. He threw people off, too, for the same reason.”

  “Nice guy.”

  She shook her head in tolerant disgust.

  “Ivan the Terrible—Ivan the Fourth—was born in 1530,” she went on. She switched to English. “In other words, thirty-eight years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.”

  He smiled, and she smiled back.

  Castillo heard Davidson, who was bent over his laptop, chuckle.

  Svetlana went back to Russian: “Ivan’s father, Vasily the Third, Grand Duke of Muscovy, died three years later, which made Ivan the Grand Duke.

  “There was then no Tsar. The country was run by the boyars, who were the nobility, and each of whom had a private army, which they placed at the service of the Grand Duke of Muscovy. Everybody wanted to be the Tsar, but none was able to get everybody else to step aside to give him the job.

  “The Grand Duchy of Muscovy—the most important one—was thus governed by ad hoc committees, so to speak, of boyars, who ‘advised’ the Grand Duke what to do, whereupon he issued the Grand Ducal Order.

  “This was fine, so long as he was a little boy. But he was growing up, and he might be difficult to deal with as an adult. So they began to impress upon him how powerful they were. One of the ways they did this would now be called ‘child molestation.’ They wanted to terrorize him, and when they thought they had succeeded, the boyars let him assume power in his own right in 1544, when he was age fourteen.

  “They had frightened Ivan but not cowed him. He came to the conclusion that unless he wanted other people to run his life, he was going to have to become more ruthless than the boyars who were running his life and abusing him in many ways, including sexual.

  “There is a lovely American expression which fits,” Svetlana said. “Ivan had gone through”—she switched to English—“ ‘the College of Hard Knocks’”—then back to Russian—“and had learned from his teachers.”

  Again Castillo smiled at Svetlana, and she smiled back and Davidson chuckled over his laptop.

  “Ivan selected from among the boyars,” Svetlana went on, “a small number he felt were hard enough to deal with the others, and at the same time he could control, both by passing out the largesse at his control and by terrorizing them.

  “He also knew that if he had the church on his side, he would also have the support of the peasants and serfs, who were very religious—”

  “Wasn’t it some other Russian,” Davidson asked innocently, “who said, ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses’?”

  “No, Mr. Davidson,” Svetlana corrected him. “It was Karl Marx who said that. He was a German, a Jew with a strong rabbinical background, and what he actually wrote was ‘Opium des Volkes,’ which usually is mistranslated.”

  “I stand corrected,” Davidson said, and then wonderingly asked, “I wonder if my Uncle Louie knows that?”

  The question so surprised her that she blurted: “Your Uncle Louie?”

  “He’s a rabbi,” Davidson explained.

  Castillo chuckled.

  Svetlana shook her head again in disbelief.

  She went on: “So Ivan made a deal with the church. If they would”—she switched to English—“ ‘scratch his back, he would scratch theirs.’ ”

  When she got the now-expected chuckle from Davidson and exchanged the expected smile with Castillo, she went back to Russian: “The Metropolitan of Moscow found scripture which said that Ivan had a divine right to rule. Ivan developed an overnight religious fervor, and in January 1547, the Metropolitan presided over the coronation of Tsar Ivan the Fourth. He was then seventeen years old.

  “As soon as he was Tsar, his boyars began throwing into pits the boyars who he suspected weren’t so sure he had a divine right to rule. There, they were eaten by starving dogs.”

  “A really nice guy,” Castillo said.

  “The property—lands and serfs who belonged to the land—were split between the Tsar and the boyars who believed that it pleased God to have Ivan the Fourth as Tsar.

  “Over the next eighteen years, while Ivan did a really remarkable job of turning Russia into a superpower, he consolidated his power. He took care of the church, and the church responded by telling the faithful that Ivan was standing at the right hand of God, making the point that challenging Ivan was tantamount to challenging God.

  “Then he started separating the best of the good boyars from the bad ones. A good boyar was defined, primarily, as one who didn’t harbor any ideas about assassinating him and then taking over. Those he suspected had such ideas were removed from the scene in various imaginative ways—for example, by being skinned alive—which served, of course, to remind those that remained that even thinking of displeasing the Tsar was not smart.

  “The more clever boyars came to understand that the key to success was in getting close to the Tsar, most often by denouncing those who could be safely accused of having possibly treasonous thoughts. The most clever of the clever boyars further understood that getting too close to the Tsar tended to increase their risk of being tossed to the starving dogs or thrown from the Kremlin walls. The Tsar was naturally suspicious of anyone whose power seemed possible of threatening his own.

  “The point here is that as he passed out the serfs taken from the bad boyars to the good boyars, this increased the size of the good boyars’ armies. Soldiers, so to speak, were serfs equipped with a sword or a pike, who went into battle because they might live through the battle, and refusing to go into battle would certainly see them killed.

  “So he began to recruit a corps of officers from the merchant class, and even from the peasant class. They were treated almost as well as the good boyars, and realized that their good fortune depended on ensuring that the Tsar, who had appointed them to command the serfs he had taken away from the bad boyars, remained in power.”

  She paused to take another cigarette out of the pack, light it with what Castillo thought was great style, then exhaled.

  “By 1565,” Svetlana continued, “he thought he had arranged things as well as he could. First, he moved his family out of Moscow to one of his country estates. When he was sure that he and they were safe in the hands of his officer corps, he wrote an open letter—copies of it were posted on walls and, importantly, in every church—to Philip, the Metropolitan of the church in Moscow. The Tsar said he was going to abdicate and, to that end, had already moved out of Moscow.

  “The people, the letter suggested, could now run Russia to suit themselves, starting by picking a new Tsar, to whom they could look for protection. This caused chaos at all levels. The people didn’t want a new Tsar who was not chosen by God. The boyars knew that picking one of their own to be the new Tsar was going to result in a bloodbath. The officer corps knew that the privileges they had been granted would almost certainly not be continued under a new Tsar, and that the boyars would want their serfs back.

  “The Tsar was begged not to abdicate, to come home to Moscow. After letting them worry for a while, during which time they had a preview of what life without Tsar Ivan would be like, he announced his terms for not abdicating.

  “There would be something new in Russian, the Oprichina—‘Separate Estate’—which would consist of one thousand households, some of the highest nobility of the boyars, some of lower-ranking boyars, some of senior military of
ficers, a few members of the merchant class, and even a few families of extraordinarily successful peasants.

  “They all had demonstrated a commendable degree of loyalty to the Tsar. The Oprichina would physically include certain districts of Russia and certain cities, and the revenue from these places would be used to support the oprichniki and of course the Tsar, who would live among them.

  “The old establishment would remain in place. The boyars not included in the Oprichina would retain their titles and privileges; the council—the Duma— would continue to operate, its decisions subject of course to the Tsar’s approval. But the communication would be one way. Except in extraordinary circumstances, no one not an oprichniki would be permitted to communicate with the Oprichina.

  “The Tsar’s offer was accepted. God’s man was back in charge. The boyars had their titles. The church was now supported by the state, so most of the priests and bishops were happy. Just about everybody was happy but Philip, the Metropolitan of Moscow, who let it be known that he thought the idea of the Oprichina was un-Christian.

  “The Tsar understood that he could not tolerate doubt or criticism. And so Ivan set out for Tver, where the Metropolitan lived. On the way, he heard a rumor that the people and the administration in Russia’s second-largest city, Great Novgorod, were unhappy with having to support Oprichina.

  “Just as soon as he had watched Metropolitan Philip being choked to death, the Tsar went to Great Novgorod, where, over the course of five weeks, the army of the Oprichina, often helped personally by Ivan himself, raped every female they could find, massacred every man they could find, and destroyed every farmhouse, warehouse, barn, monastery, church, every crop in the fields, every horse, cow, chicken—”

  “At the risk of repeating myself,” Castillo interrupted, “nice guy.”

  The look she gave him was one of genuine annoyance.