Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Of Lenin,” Castillo said. “To prove you didn’t buy this place because of your admiration for the late Reichsforst-und-Jägermeister.”

  He threw Pevsner a stiff-armed Nazi salute.

  “Charley, you’re not teasing him already?” a tall, svelte blonde asked in Russian as they walked into the library.

  “Teasing him?” Castillo replied as he walked to her and kissed her cheek. “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and has a house made from the same plans as Hermann Goering’s hunting lodge . . .”

  “We didn’t realize that until we bought the place, and you know it,” she said, laughing. Her attention went to Castillo’s arms. “What are you doing with that puppy?”

  “Trying to get rid of it,” Castillo said. “You don’t happen to know of some kind and gentle young lady of thirteen or so who would take it off my hands, do you?”

  “You’re serious? You brought that for Elena? What is it?”

  Castillo gestured at Max.

  “A little version of him. By way of Marburg, Germany, and Vienna,” Castillo said, looking at Pevsner as he spoke, and not being surprised when he saw that Pevsner’s eyes had turned to ice.

  “Let me see it,” Anna said, taking the puppy from Castillo, then holding it up and rubbing noses with it. “Charley, he’s precious! Elena will be crazy with him. Thank you so much!”

  “The small horse is the father?” Pevsner asked, indicating Max. “It will grow to be the same?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Anna picked up a telephone, waited a moment, and then said, “Will you ask the children to join us in the library, please?” She hung up and turned to Castillo. “Alek said you might be bringing someone with you and . . .”

  “I know,” Castillo said. “Your husband always thinks the worst of me.”

  “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck . . .” Pevsner said.

  Castillo laughed.

  A maid rolled a bar service into the room.

  “What can we offer you, Charley?”

  “I’m feeling Russian. Is that vodka I see?”

  “How do you want it?” Pevsner asked.

  “In a glass would be nice,” Castillo said straight-faced.

  Anna laughed.

  “I meant, from the freezer, or with ice, or room temperature,” Pevsner said, shaking his head.

  “From the freezer, please,” Castillo said.

  Pevsner wagged a rather imperious finger at the maid and told her in Spanish to bring a bottle from the freezer.

  “Your Spanish is getting better,” Castillo said.

  “Better than what?” Pevsner asked suspiciously.

  “Better than it was,” Castillo replied.

  “What does he eat?” Anna asked.

  “Puppy chow,” Castillo said, and took a plastic zip-top bag from his jacket pocket and laid it on a small table. “I have more in the hotel. And I am assured it can be found in any supermarket in the country. This is Royal Canine Puppy Chow For Very Large Dogs. Max loves it.”

  “I’ll have to write that down,” Anna said, and went to an escritoire that looked as if it belonged in the Louvre and did so.

  “I have a little trouble picturing you, Friend Charley, traveling the globe and caring for a puppy,” Pevsner said.

  “He brings out the paternal instinct in me,” Castillo said piously.

  “What were you doing in Germany. Visiting home?”

  “Actually, I had to go to a funeral.”

  “How sad,” Anna said. “Family?”

  “Employee,” Castillo said. He met Pevsner’s eyes. “He died suddenly.”

  Three adolescents entered the room and politely, shyly, made their manners to Castillo. The girl kissed his cheek and the older boy shook his hand.

  “Oh, where did that puppy come from?” Elena Pevsner said. She took him from her mother, matter-of-factly held him up to examine his belly, and finished. “He’s adorable. What’s his name?”

  “That’s up to you, sweetheart,” Castillo said.

  It took her a moment to take his meaning. “Really?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “Oh, Charley, thank you ever so much!”

  “Honey,” Castillo said, picking up the bag of puppy chow. “Why don’t you take him someplace, get two bowls, put the bowls on newspaper, put water in one, and this in the other?”

  “How much do I give him?”

  “Honey, you’re lucky. Dogs are like people. Some are pigs and eat whatever is put in front of them—then get sick and throw it up. The others, like Max and Nameless here, are gentlemen. They take only what they need, when they need it.”

  My God, her eyes are shining!

  Like Randy’s eyes.

  I just did a good thing,

  But if no good deed goes unpunished . . . ?

  The maid appeared with a bottle of vodka encased in ice.

  “Can Max come?” Aleksandr, the oldest boy, asked.

  “If I can have him back,” Castillo said.

  The children left the room. Max trotted after them.

  “That was a very nice thing for you to do, Charley,” Pevsner said as he handed Castillo a small glass of the vodka. “Thank you.”

  “My son has his brother,” Castillo said. “I thought Elena would like one.”

  “You saw your son?” Anna asked.

  “His grandfather brought him to our ranch for quail hunting. I hunted with him, and then I started to teach him how to fly.”

  “And he doesn’t know?” Anna asked softly.

  Castillo shook his head.

  “Oh, Charley!” Anna said, and went to him and laid her hand on his cheek and kissed him. “I am so sorry.”

  Castillo shrugged.

  “Me, too, but that’s how it is.”

  “Would you think me terribly cynical if I suspected there’s more to your visit than bringing the children a puppy?” Pevsner asked.

  “Alek!” Anna said warningly.

  “I don’t know about cynical. I guess it’s to be expected of an oprichniki. I know you guys have to be careful, even of your friends. Or maybe especially of your friends.”

  If looks could freeze, I would now be colder than that ice-encased bottle.

  He raised his vodka glass to Pevsner and drained it.

  “Mud in your eye, Alek!”

  Anna’s face had gone almost white.

  “What did you say?” Pevsner asked coldly.

  “About what?”

  “Goddamn you to hell, Charley!”

  “You’re not supposed to have secrets from your friends,” Castillo said. “I remember you telling me that. Several times.”

  “You are on very thin ice, Friend Charley.”

  “Speaking of ice,” Castillo said, raising his glass. “That was just what I needed. May I have another?”

  He went to the ice-encased bottle of vodka and refilled his glass.

  “Can I pour you one? You look like you could use it,” Castillo said, and then asked, “How come you never told me you are a card-carrying member of the Oprichina?”

  “Was a member,” Anna said very softly.

  Pevsner glared at her, then moved the glare back to Castillo, who went on: “Okay. Was an oprichniki. Did you formally resign? Or just not show up for work one day as the Kremlin walls were falling down?”

  “What do you want, Charley?” Pevsner asked very softly.

  “I want you to tell me everything you know about Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky.”

  Anna sucked in her breath. Her lips looked bloodless.

  God, I hope she’s not about to pass out!

  “Berezovsky, Dmitri, Colonel. The Berlin rezident,” Castillo pursued. “A high muckety-muck of the Oprichina. Tell me about him, Alek, please.”

  “Why are you interested in Berezovsky?”

  “Fair question. He had a man who worked for me at the Tages Zeitung killed. And he tried to take out two people very close to me. Oh, and me. I’m always curious about people
who want to kill me.”

  “If Berezovsky wanted you . . . eliminated . . . you wouldn’t be standing here,” Pevsner said.

  “Well, you’re wrong. He did, and here I am. You should not believe your own press releases, Alek. The SVR isn’t really that good.”

  “Why did he try to kill you, Charley?” Anna asked.

  He saw that some of the color had returned to her face.

  And there was something about her carriage that told him that she had abandoned her just-a-wife-who-doesn’t-have-any-idea-what’s-going-on role.

  And Pevsner has seen that, too. He’s not trying to shut her up.

  “I don’t really know. I think he was trying to send a message for the SVR. Maybe make a statement. ‘We’re back, and we’re going to kill everybody who gets in our way.’ ”

  He gave that a moment to register and then went on. “I know why he took out the reporter for the Tages Zeitung. He was getting too close to the connection between the Marburg Group who made all that money sending medicine and food to Iraq, and what’s going on in the African chemical factory. I want you to tell me everything you know about that, too.”

  That was a shot in the dark.

  But his eyes—and especially the tongue quickly wetting his lips—show I hit him hard with it.

  The proof came immediately.

  “In exchange for what?” Pevsner asked.

  “Well, for one thing, it will keep our professional relationship where it is. The agency and the FBI will leave you alone . . . presuming you don’t break any U.S. laws.”

  That’s bullshit.

  The agency and the FBI will no more obey the President’s order to leave him alone than they obeyed Montvale’s order to leave me alone. They will do whatever they can to silence him. The agency’s skirts are the opposite of clean.

  “How cynical are you, Friend Charley?”

  “Well, probably not as much as I should be. But I can learn, I guess.”

  “I have personal reasons for not telling you all I know about Dmitri Berezovsky. I won’t tell you what they are, and that’s not negotiable. I will tell you what I know—which isn’t much—about the chemical laboratory in the ex- Belgian Congo, and my price there is very cheap. You don’t tell anyone—anyone including the agency—where you got it.”

  So Berezovsky wasn’t lying. There is a chemical laboratory. His big chip to deal with me. Or was Svetlana the big chip?

  “Why are you being so good to me, Alek?”

  “That’s why I asked how cynical you are. Are you capable of believing it’s because I think what they’re doing there is despicable?”

  “Define despicable.”

  “Biological warfare that would kill millions of innocent people is despicable. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Why would you say that none of this has come out?”

  “It has come out. The Muslims boast there will be a caliphate from Madrid to Baghdad and that they will kill how many millions of Christians—and, of course, Jews—as necessary to accomplish that. Nobody wants to believe that, so they pretend they didn’t hear it.

  “Exactly as they didn’t want to hear that Hitler was murdering undesirables by the millions, and Stalin’s starving Russians to death by the millions in the gulags, and Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons to kill several hundred thousand of his own people.”

  “So you’re suggesting that there’s nothing that can be done, that we should lie down and let these people roll over us?”

  “I’m suggesting that the best that people like you and me can do is stop a little here, and a little there, and meanwhile try very hard to keep yourself and the people you love alive.”

  “Is that the voice of experience I hear?” Castillo asked without thinking, and hearing himself, immediately regretted the sarcasm.

  Pevsner’s icy glare showed he didn’t like it either.

  For a very long twenty seconds, he said nothing. Then: “As a matter of fact, it is. It is the experience of my heritage speaking.”

  He paused again, almost as long.

  “Friend Charley, you’re very good at what you do. God gave you an ability few have.”

  Where the hell did God come from?

  There was no sarcasm in the way he said that.

  Alex believes in God?

  I’ll be damned!

  “You didn’t come here and throw the Oprichina in my face without knowing something—probably a good deal, but not as much as you think you do—about it.”

  He paused, obviously thinking, before going on: “You know how far back it goes?”

  Castillo nodded. “Ivan the Awesome.”

  “A terrible, tormented, cruel, godless man, who by comparison makes Stalin and Hitler and Saddam Hussein look like Saint Francis of Assisi,” Pevsner said. “But not all of the people he took off into the state within the state were like him. There were good, God-fearing people among them, who went with him because the alternative to being of unquestioned loyalty to Ivan was watching your family being skinned alive and fed to starving dogs.”

  “Your ancestors?”

  “Don’t mock me, Charley.”

  “I wasn’t. I was asking a question.”

  “Our ancestors, Charley,” Anna said softly.

  “Some of those who went with Ivan were minor nobility, and some were soldiers, like you and me.”

  “You were a soldier?” Castillo asked.

  “Former Polkovnik Pevsner of the Soviet Air Force at your service, Podpolkovnik Castillo. I was simultaneously, of course, a colonel in the KGB. My father and Anna’s father were generals. Anna’s mother was a podpolkovnik. My mother never served. Her father, of course, did. Are you getting the picture, or should I go on?”

  “What did you do?” Castillo asked.

  “Is that important?”

  “If you feel uncomfortable telling me, don’t.”

  “I was in charge of ensuring the loyalty of Aeroflot aircrew, service personnel working outside the Soviet Union for Aeroflot, and the transmission—the protection—of diplomatic pouches sent by whatever means.”

  “For all of Aeroflot?”

  “I was considered one of the very reliables,” Pevsner said. “And I was. But let me get back to what I was saying: In the beginning, it was the women who kept their faith—their faith, not the Church per se; after Ivan had Saint Philip, the Metropolitan of Moscow, strangled”—he paused to see if Castillo was following him, then went on—“the women understood that being too good a Christian was about as dangerous as harboring disloyal thoughts about Ivan, so while paying lip service to the Church, as was expected of them, aided by some clergy, they kept their faith private, within the family. You understand?”

  “I think so,” Castillo said.

  “It was impossible to really be a Christian—standing up to Ivan and the others we served over the years would have been suicide—but it was possible, here and there, from time to time, to act with great caution and, for example, warn the Jews of an upcoming pogrom so that some of them would survive, or arrange for someone about to be executed or sent to the gulag to make it out of Russia to China or Finland. . . . You understand?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “That’s what I meant, Friend Charley, when I said that the best that people like you and me can do is stop a little here and a little there.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “Because the opportunity was there. Half of what would become the FSB left as Soviet Russia started coming apart.”

  “Half of the Oprichina left?”

  “Not everybody. Probably less than one-quarter, one-fifth of the FSB—or the Cheka, or the NKVD, whatever, by whatever name—was Oprichina.”

  “In other words, a state within a state within a state?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Okay,” Castillo said. “So why, if you were a card-carrying oprichniki, and doing pretty well, did you leave?”

  “I told you, there was the opportunity.”

 
; “To swap the good life to make a few bucks as an arms smuggler, which would have not only most of the world’s police departments trying to put you in jail, not to mention your former pals in Moscow and in Saint Petersburg trying to whack you and your family, as an example pour les autres? Come on, Alek!”

  This time it was more than twenty very long seconds before Pevsner replied.

  “It is only recently—since I have met you, as a matter of fact, Friend Charley—that I have been—my family has been—in any danger from the FSB.”

  “ ‘He’s pals with Castillo. Kill the bastard!’?” Castillo said sarcastically.

  Pevsner looked at his wife.

  “Tell him, Aleksandr,” she said. “Or I will. You are alive because of Charley. He is now our family.”

  Pevsner considered that a long moment, then waved his hands, signaling, Okay. If that’s what you want, you tell him.

  “The Communist Party, Charley, was very wealthy,” Anna began. “Another state within a state, if you like. There was more than one hundred billion—no one really knows how much, and I’m speaking of dollars; no one cared then or now for rubles—some in cash and some of it in gold and platinum. Tons of gold and platinum. The Communists had no intention of turning this over to a democratically elected government. They planned to take power again, and they would need the money to do this.

  “The first thing they did was authorize what was then the KGB to go into business in Moscow—regular businesses, car dealerships, real estate, everything. The idea wasn’t to make money—although that happened—but to find places to hide the money.

  “But what to do with the gold and platinum? It had to be taken out of the country and hidden somewhere.

  “So how to do that?” Anna asked rhetorically, then gestured at her husband. “ ‘Ask Comrade Polkovnik Pevsner of the KGB and Aeroflot. He has spent more time out of the Soviet Union and been more places than just about anybody else.’ ”

  “And I was a respected oprichnik,” Pevsner interjected, “one who was trusted by them. So when they came to me, I suggested that I knew where to hide it. Saudi Arabia, the U.S., places like that. And I even had a cover story. I would leave the KGB, it would be arranged for me to buy several Ilyushin transports, and I would grow rich transporting small arms around the world and bringing luxury cars and French champagne into Russia. No one would notice—and no one did—that when my Ilyushins left Moscow or Saint Petersburg, several of the wooden crates ostensibly holding Kalashnikov rifles or ammunition for them actually held gold bars. Or platinum.”