December

by James Steel

  The woman fired a look like a bullet at Bayarmaa, who curled her lip in return but stepped back from the door. The guard also withdrew deferentially and the woman pushed open both doors at once, marched purposefully into the room and slammed them behind her. Alex sat back down, feeling a slight tremor from watching the episode.

  It was five minutes before both doors were again wrenched open and she strode out. Sergey hurried after her: eyes wild, hair astray and hands outstretched imploringly. He put a hand on her elbow to stop her, but in one fluid movement she spun round and hit him hard with the back of her hand on his shoulder. He deflated instantly, ducking his head and hunching his shoulders. From this defensive posture he looked up at her with humble affection; his hands held meekly open in front of him as he mumbled some explanation. The woman listened to him with hands on her hips, mouth set firm, her gaze level and eerily calm.

  Sergey finished speaking and looked at her imploringly. She held his gaze for a long moment, neither assenting nor dissenting, before turning her head away. He fumbled in his suit pocket, pulled out a small jewelled box and pressed it into the palm of her hand. She glanced at it wearily, sighed, and tucked it into a little handbag hooked over one shoulder before walked away from him.

  As she moved past Alex, her head turned towards him and they looked at each other for a split second. The woman strode on and made her way down the stairs.

  She walked out of the gate in her long fur coat and stepped into the back of one of Sergey’s chauffeur-driven, black Range Rovers with tinted windows. As the driver moved off, she pulled the ornate box out of her handbag and turned it over in her hand, thoughtfully examining the gold whorls and the precious stones set into it.

  After looking at it for a while she flipped the clasp open with her thumbnail and took out the single folded sheet of plain, white paper. On it were two lines of Sergey’s appalling scratchy handwriting: cramped, unevenly spaced and with occasional spikes up and down.

  She recognised the verse. It was Pushkin:

  Past sorrow to me is like wine

  Stronger with every passing year.

  The woman closed her eyes for a moment in a look of pain. She folded the note, put it back in the box and looked out at the dark city sliding past.

  Sergey suddenly switched on his normal, manic persona and threw his arms open towards Alex: ‘Ah-ha! Grekov!’ He gestured into his office.

  Alex put his drink down and stalked through the open door, his dark brows knit in a frown of disapproval. He was not impressed by what he had seen of Sergey so far.

  The room was a long rectangle, dimly lit with a large boardroom table down the middle and elegantly curtained windows along the left-hand side. On the opposite wall and between the windows were enormous bookshelves running up to the high ceiling. Alex glanced at the titles—both Russian and Western, mainly literature but also poetry, art, science and technical manuals, architecture and travel.

  Sergey seemed oblivious to Alex’s glowering and rushed ahead, flamboyantly waving him past the table—‘No, no, no!’—to a large oriental day bed set on top of a waist-high brick platform, in the Central Asian style, against the far end of the room. The bed was covered in expensive oriental carpets and pillows and surrounded by a low rail.

  Portraits of various tsars, along with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, and other bearded Russians that Alex didn’t recognise, hung on the wall above the day bed.

  Alex perched awkwardly on the edge of one side of it, whilst Sergey busied himself opening a cast-iron door to a stove built into the brick base and chucking a couple of logs into it from a wicker basket. He slid onto the opposite side of the platform from Alex, stretching his legs out and chuckling, ‘I always like to warm up my butt a bit.’

  The platform was covered in a clutter of books, newspapers, laptops and DVDs. Sergey wriggled his backside and then fidgeted and pulled a DVD out from under him. He looked at it and then showed the simple cartoon front cover to Alex. ‘Vinni Puh?’ he said quizzically.

  Alex frowned. What the hell was he on about now?

  ‘Vinni Puh?’ Sergey said insistently. ‘Ah! No, you say, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’? This is the Soviet version from 1971. Used to watch them as a kid—much better, much deeper, complete with existentialist angst. Check it out on YouTube—Vinni Puh Goes Visiting.’ He looked at the cover again, laughed and chucked it aside.

  He ignored Alex’s stony silence and proceeded to make tea in a small ornate copper pot by alternately spooning in tea leaves and pouring hot water from a kettle with a long thin spout. He muttered from under the shaggy fringe of hair hanging over his face, ‘I like the Kalmyks’ style with bay leaves,’ and added some.

  As he stirred the tea he looked up and said chirpily in English: ‘So you are enjoying my party?’

  Alex looked at him, startled, his anger disarmed by Sergey’s sudden switch of language. He struggled to reply in a more civil manner in English than he had intended: ‘Yes…you’re the life and soul.’

  Sergey stopped stirring the tea and stared at him. His smile cut out as if someone had switched off a light. He looked Alex gravely in the eye. ‘And do you know why I am the life and soul?’

  Alex looked straight back, again caught out by his change of tone.

  Sergey said very slowly, ‘Because in my soul I am alone.’

  There was a long moment before he nodded, looked down at the pot and went back to stirring it and adding water.

  The episode seemed to have brought a calmer mood on him. He started again in Russian: ‘So you are fucked off and wondering what you are doing at a party, sitting on a bed with a crazy Russian who wants to send you on a suicide mission to Siberia?’

  Alex couldn’t have put it more succinctly himself so he just waited for Sergey to answer his own question.

  ‘Well, you are at a party because I always do my business at parties. I love business, I love parties.’ He held his hands out and smiled. ‘For me they are one and the same. It also means that I can see everyone without suspicion.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, all of us oligarchs are powerful so Comrade Krymov likes to keep us all under surveillance. But me,’ he gestured to himself, ‘I invite the bastards to my parties. You have just been drinking Litvinenkos with Colonel Vladimir Ilarionovich Gorsky, the station chief of the SVR in London.’

  Alex narrowed his eyes and looked more intently at Sergey. The SVR was the foreign intelligence arm of the FSB—the Federal Security Service—the successor to the KGB.

  ‘We drink a lot of vodka together and he thinks he knows everything that goes on inside my head.’ Sergey shrugged. ‘He does know a lot of it but there are many rooms inside my head. So he tells me he thinks I am a clown who isn’t worth wasting any of his men on.’ Sergey nodded with satisfaction, seeming to take this as a compliment.

  Alex began to unwind some of his early anger. Maybe Shaposhnikov wasn’t such an idiot as he had first appeared.

  ‘So Harrington says to me that we have you “by the short and curlies”.’ He pronounced the idiom with mock hesitancy and then grinned.

  Alex replied curtly, ‘It wouldn’t be my first choice of operation.’ He decided the time had come to press for more reassurance on it. ‘I mean, what the hell chance does it have of succeeding? Krymov looks pretty well entrenched. He’s an unshakeable dictator.’

  Sergey seemed to ignore the question, put the lid on the pot, poured a little tea into an engraved silver thimble cup and sipped it. He made a face, lifted the lid and poured the cupful back into the pot and then replied, ‘Hmm, well, from the outside, yes, but then nothing is as it seems in Russia. There are significant weaknesses in my country at both an élite and a popular level.’ He made a horizontal slicing action with one hand high up and then lower down to indicate where the problems lay in Russian society.

  He was sounding like he might actually have a point. Alex was prepared to listen and leaned back against the rail on the bed.

  Sergey warm
ed to his theme. ‘You see, Russia is not a state as you know it in the Western sense. The Soviets and then the Yeltsin anarchy undermined the rule of law. Everything was so inefficient and fucked up that people had to develop alternative currencies, and “informal practices”,’ he made speech marks with his finger, ‘to make it work. It’s what you call the favour system or patronage networks.’

  He hurried on: ‘Look, there used to be two ideologies in the USSR—communism and criminalism. Now there is only one.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, we used to have a Communist Party that could actually control the KGB but now there is no Communist Party so the secret police have no limits on their power.’ He paused to consider the irony and then smiled. ‘Only in Russia would you get rid of communism and then bring back the secret police to run the country.’

  He continued carefully, emphasising his points with slow hand movements. ‘So the combination of all these things means that the country is controlled not by the normal institutions of a Western state, but by factional networks controlled by the siloviki.’ He looked enquiringly at Alex, who nodded in understanding—the bosses who ran the security services.

  ‘But the point for our little expedition is that there are many different security services: FSB, GRU—military intelligence, MVD—Interior Ministry, OMON—riot police. They all have their own troops. Then there’s the Spetsnaz—Special Forces—army, airforce, navy and marines. Each has its little networks of politicians and companies that it controls.

  ‘Putin removed the constitutional checks and balances on the executive, and once you’ve done that you’re back to the law of the jungle. I’m telling you, the factions in the Kremlin are like lions fighting over a kill. Putin and Medvedev divided power between themselves and then fell out, so Krymov was put in place supposedly because he was so boring that he wouldn’t threaten anyone. But he was more cunning than they thought, was able to rally a faction behind him and spring a coup against both of them.

  ‘So, we have gone back to a situation more like the court of a tsar, with competing factional groups of boyars—the nobles. The Tsar divided the assets of the country between them. That used to be land and serfs but now it’s political parties, government ministries, oil and gas resources, mines and companies. Because of this, the leader of Russia appears to outsiders as an autocrat but only because of the support of élite factions behind him. They support him because he suits their interests. As soon as they are not getting what they want, then they’ll turn on him.

  ‘You can get a stable political system if you have an intelligent guy like Putin who can actually balance factions, but Krymov is so stupid he can’t write two words without making five mistakes. So now we have a fight between the various branches of the security services for the spoils of the economy.’

  Alex nodded; he could see what Sergey was saying and how it would open up conflict at an élite level.

  ‘OK, so who’s on your faction?’

  Sergey grinned. ‘Well, officially I’m on no one’s. Krymov thinks he’s my best friend and,’ he made an equivocating gesture with his hand, ‘despite what I said, I like him. We’re drinking buddies and he laughs at my jokes, so he doesn’t take me seriously and just lets me drift around making money. I don’t harm anyone. I’m safely neutral, you see, plus I am a businessman—I started out on a market stall—so I can actually run businesses, which the siloviki can’t, so sometimes it’s helpful for them to put a strategic sector in neutral hands. That’s why I’ve got ownership of all the TV stations—it was easier to give them to a fool like me than start a huge fight between different groups.’

  Alex saw a contradiction in Sergey’s motivation and looked at him quizzically. ‘But you’re making a lot of money out of all this?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Sergey nodded, unashamed.

  ‘So why are you starting a coup?’

  ‘Because Russia deserves better than this,’ he smiled, ‘Alexander…’ He frowned. ‘What’s your father’s name?’

  Alex was momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Nicholas.’

  Sergey started again in the correct respectful Russian manner. ‘Alexander Nikolayevich,’ he gave a self-deprecating smile and held up a hand, ‘all in good time. I will explain my motives later and you’ll meet our team tomorrow.’

  He carried on along his former line of thought. ‘So, anyway, as I was saying, that’s the weakness at an élite level. On a popular level it’s the same. Russia looks strong but in fact things are not so good if you look under the surface. Our main problem is the curse of abundant natural resources: we’ve got so much oil and gas that we don’t have to go through the tiresome business of actually developing a functioning economy—we just dig a hole in the ground and the money pours out. Basically we’re just a petro-state in the same way as any other Third World dictatorship. It leads to what I call the gangsterisation of the economy. You have an FSB man sitting on the board of all major companies. Now these guys are good at wiretaps, surveillance, hits—they can do that—but can they read a balance sheet? Do they have a feel for a market? Can they organise a supply chain? The fuck they can! They’re hoods, spooks! And they have successfully screwed the economy as a result!’

  Sergey grew more animated, jabbing his finger at Alex, his diamond earring flashing. ‘Do we have a thriving industrial sector? Do we export any manufactured goods at all apart from weapons? No! Do we have a service sector? No! Can you name one fucking Russian company that isn’t Gazprom, Lukoil or some other natural resources producer? A software company? A clothing brand? No! Because we are a fucking banana republic run by goons! Do I want that for my country? The fuck I do!’

  Sergey was suddenly disturbed by how carried away he had got, and poured out two small teas to calm himself down. He did this with a thin stream of liquid from a height above the cups, and then neatly snapped off the stream with a flick of his wrist. He put the ornate pot down and continued.

  ‘So, we are what you call a one-trick pony. Over half of all government revenue comes from oil taxes but they make money only when the price is over seventy bucks a barrel. When prices hit one forty-seven we were laughing, but now they’ve crashed we’re screwed. We didn’t share out the proceeds of the wealth when we did have it, so bastards like me are rich, but if you look at the provinces and the working class, they are desperately poor. I mean, the population is actually shrinking by seven hundred thousand people a year because of alcoholism, suicide, drugs and AIDS. We’ll lose a third of our population in the next fifty years. That’s not a healthy country! And those stupid fucking sheep signed all their freedoms away in the good times!’

  Alex frowned, unsure whom Sergey was talking about.

  ‘I mean the Russian people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of them, but Russians have never had much respect for democracy. They call it shit-ocracy!’

  Alex recognised the Russian pun on the words demokratia and dermokratia.

  ‘So, they effectively signed a non-participation pact with the government that said: “You let us enjoy the material benefits of the oil price boom, and we’ll turn a blind eye to whatever political violence you want to use.” It’s exactly like that thing about “When they came for the Jews, I did not protest because I was not a Jew”, blah-blah-blah.’ Sergey waved a hand to indicate the rest. ‘So now that times are hard, there’s no one left to protest for them.

  ‘Now Krymov has spent all the Stabilisation Fund on rearmament so we have twenty per cent inflation—that has really pissed a lot of ordinary people off!’

  Sergey was nearing the end of his tea ceremony now, adding salt in little dashes to the cups. He stopped to jab the tiny spoon at Alex.

  ‘And the final issue that will help our operation the most is the way that they have driven out foreign companies. Those are the guys that actually do know how to run a factory, a refinery, whatever.’

  He grinned lopsidedly. ‘Have you heard my joke about foreign investment in Russia?’

  Alex shook his head.

  Sergey smiled.
‘Well, at the beginning of the process the foreigners have all the money and the experience and the Russians have nothing.’ He paused and looked at Alex with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But by the end of the process the Russians have all the money and the foreigners have had an experience.’

  Alex couldn’t help grinning as Sergey bobbed his head about happily.

  ‘It’s good, yeah? So the siloviki get greedy and drive out ExxonMobil, Total, BP—all of them—so now there is no one left to run the oil refineries and we can’t even produce enough petrol for ourselves, in the largest oil-producing country on Earth!’ He was laughing now. ‘I mean, it would be funny but…’

  ‘You know, the same thing happened in Iran. We both had to introduce petrol rationing. Krymov used the OMON to suppress the riots when it was introduced but, believe me, with rationing and inflation, there are a lot of fucked-off ordinary people out there who want to see Krymov dead.’

  He finished making the tea and put the spoon down.

  ‘So, comrade, in answer to your question—do we have a chance of overthrowing Krymov? It will be tough, but yes, we do.’

  He picked up a small cup of tea and stretched out his arm to give it to Alex.

  Alex looked at him warily, thinking over what he had said and calculating the odds in his head. It tallied with what he had read in the papers and with what Harrington had said in his briefing.

  He reached out, took the cup from Sergey and sipped the bitter tea.

  Sergey smiled and drank.

  ‘OK, good—you passed the interview.’ He paused. ‘So now you are Director of GeoScan.’

  Alex frowned. What was the Russian on about now? His mind seemed to hop about everywhere.

  ‘It’s a UK-based international geo-survey firm. I have the details of your next survey mission.’

  He jumped off the bed, took a large portrait of Karl Marx off the wall, opened a money safe behind it and pulled a black leather document wallet out. He passed Alex the bulky folder and sat on the bed again.