Palace of Treason

43

President Putin sat at his desk in the birch-paneled president’s office in the Kremlin Senate Building. He wore a dark-blue suit, a light-blue shirt, and a silvery-blue necktie. He drummed his short fingers on the desk as he read the urgent and sensitive blue-stripe SVR report about the fire and centrifuge crash that had occurred two days ago at the uranium facility in Natanz. Overhead imagery from the Russian Defense Ministry’s YOBAR satellite was included in the folder. Infrared pictures revealed a miles-long tail of climbing, superheated smoke billowing southeast from the site. That was a toxic plume that would kill anyone downwind — Iranians, Afghans, and Pakistanis alike. Synthetic aperture radar on the bird saw through the pall of smoke to reveal a (radioactive) caldera where the roof of Hall C had melted and collapsed. A technical endnote equated the intensity of the Natanz heat bloom to that of the 2014 eruption of the Kelud volcano in East Java.

Kakaya raznitsa, who cares, thought Putin, flipping the folder closed and tossing it into an out box of white Koelga marble. He didn’t give a shit; global imbalance, confusion, and chaos suited him and Russia just fine. Maybe this fire was the work of the Americans or the Israelis, or maybe those Persian babuiny, baboons, didn’t know how to handle uranium. Well, he had long since received the money from Tehran for the shipment, and “investors’ deposits” had been made — Govormarenko had already divvied up the euros. Never mind; when the Iranians were ready to rebuild, Russia would step up with equipment and expertise to assist. At à la carte prices.

And let them try to rile up the Caucasus — no chance, he had his domestic audience well in hand. Ninety-six percent of Russians approved of his recent military initiatives in Ukraine; ninety-five percent of them believed that America was goading fractious Kiev to persecute ethnic Russians in that country. Ninety-two percent believed — no, knew — that the same situation existed in Russian enclaves in the Caucasus, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Opportunities would present themselves. They always did.

He would keep an eye on the oligarchs. They were rumbling about their money troubles in the face of Western banking sanctions. Nothing a few corruption trials and prison sentences wouldn’t smooth out. Massive gas and oil deals with China, India, and Japan would take the teeth out of the sanctions soon enough. And he would continue to defame and stress the NATO weak-sister coalition. Conditions were right to shatter the Euro-Atlantic alliance once and for all, which would be redress for the dissolution of the USSR. With NATO razed to the ground, the Czech-Polish missile shield proposal would no longer be a worry.

As President Putin contemplated his suzerainty, his Slavic soul lifted. He regarded his opinions as revealed truth. He alone was keeping the barbarians at the gate at bay. Russia would be feared anew; Russia would be respected once again. He did not dwell on the stern measures that were required to achieve his goals — Ukrainian orphans had smoldered in the street before, and if necessary, they would do so again. This was his; it belonged to him. His soul took wing and soared over the crenellations of the Kremlin wall, past Bolotnaya Square where thousands had protested in vain, and then dipped its taloned wings and ghosted along the river and over the gray V-shaped roof of Lefortovo Prison, where Russian traitors went to die. Catching a draft, it soared higher over the Lubyanka, protecting them all with sword and shield, and, tilting, sailed over Tolstoy’s roof in Khamovniki and over the Doric façade of the State Conservatory, where Sofronitsky, God’s pianist, astounded mortals but was never allowed to play outside Rodina. An updraft carried Putin’s soul over the Mednoye Forest, where Vasili Blokhin executed seven thousand men in twenty-eight days, and then over the Yasenevo pines to the glass and metal tower among the trees — SVR headquarters — spinning faster around the trees and then steadying, sailplaning up to and through a window with blinds drawn against the afternoon sun to fill the office with the breath of scything wings, Putin’s soul come for a visit.

Unaware of the spectral visitor, the new Chief of KR brushed a strand of hair behind an ear and threw the report on the Natanz fire into the out basket on the corner of her desk.