Commander-in-Chief

11

The café on Krivokolenny Lane was legendary, but to only a select few here in Moscow. To most it was just one of thousands of simple eateries in the city. It certainly wasn’t much to look at: just three rooms that didn’t get sufficient light from the street, walls with worn wood paneling, and simple wooden tables upon which dim votive candles burned in cheap glass holders. The building that housed it was old, dating back to before the Second World War.

The restaurant had changed hands many times over the years, but now it was called Café F, and it was a high-dollar gastro-pub, attracting hipsters and tourists. Most of the hipsters didn’t know it, because even Russian hipsters didn’t think about such things, but Café F was only two blocks from Lubyanka Square — the headquarters of FSB, Russian State Security, and before that the HQ of the KGB. The café had been the location of a popular watering hole for KGB, FSB, and military intelligence types. To a man, the personalities who now ran Russian State Security and controlled the nation had once sat at the bar in the front room by the door, downed shots of vodka, and complained about their bosses and the direction their nation was heading.

The venerable dive two blocks from the back door of the FSB building had turned into a posh local eatery and was even shilled to tourists on TripAdvisor.com. To the old guard still around it was a goddamned shame that somehow the edgy insider joint from the old days had morphed from a smoke-filled spy haunt into a swanky date-night destination.

But not tonight. Tonight the new-money clientele of Café F had been shuffled away at six p.m., a sign had been put up out front explaining that a private party was being thrown, and soon after that cars and trucks full of armed men began pulling up out front. These were security officers and advance-detail men, most of them driven over from Lubyanka, but by nine p.m. bodyguards had arrived from the Kremlin, just a kilometer to the southwest.

By ten p.m. there were three dozen armed men blocking Krivokolenny Lane and manning the rooftops and filling the sidewalk out in front of the closed restaurant. The building had been swept with dogs and bomb-detection equipment, and it had been swept again for listening devices and pinhole cameras, and only when the advance men and the security shift leaders pronounced the location clear did the arrival of the principals begin.

Most came in armored SUVs and armored limos, but Pyotr Shelmenko was head of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and he landed in a helicopter in Revolution Square, which was three blocks to the northwest. From here he walked with an entourage of twelve armed men. When he got to the restaurant he left most of his security unit out on Krivokolenny, and he went through the door of Café F with just a pair of close protection officers. Inside, Shelmenko grabbed a vodka at the bar and greeted several men around him with bear hugs.

These were the top men of the siloviki, the former intelligence and military officers who were now the billionaires in charge of the Russian government, both behind the scenes and in the public eye.

The nation’s foreign minister, Levshin, was there, as was Pyshkin, minister of the interior. Both men had served in the KGB in the 1980s. Arkady Diburov, the head of Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas concern, showed up in the middle of a phalanx of silver Cadillac SUVs, and he didn’t make it through the alcove in front of the restaurant before finding himself in deep conversation with Mikhail Grankin, the director of the Kremlin’s Security Council, who happened to be entering at the same time.

Security men were not allowed inside the bar itself; it was a long-standing rule of the get-together that had the effect of making the street outside look like the front lines of a war zone throughout the evening. Dozens of men with rifles stood outside cars and scanned the area. Inside, chiefs of staff and aides-de-camp filled the front room and bar area of the café, while the back room was completely reserved for the siloviki. Diburov and Grankin followed the other principals inside, and soon sixteen men were in the back, drinking vodka and sitting at simple tables, chatting quietly.

The oldest was the eighty-one-year-old interior minister, and the youngest was Grankin at only forty-five.

This was the twenty-third consecutive year of this event, although there had been quite a few additions to and subtractions from the guest list along the way. The first meeting, in ’94, was well before the siloviki wrestled power away from the more democratic government types and installed the first in a series of presidents in the Kremlin. Back in the beginning of the annual meetings they all just came to lament their fall from grace, or to use the get-together to help one another bolster their new fledgling companies, concerns, and holdings, in order to use their networks in the military and intelligence communities to navigate the difficult days of Russia’s return to a market economy via brash and brazen criminality.

But by 1999 every single one of the attendees was a millionaire, some many times over, and they had taken control of the Kremlin, and since that year the annual meeting on Krivokolenny Lane had taken on even more importance as vital matters of state were discussed and decided on. Most of the last seventeen years had been good times for these men, and often this event at the café two blocks from the Lubyanka was a raucous affair, with much back slapping, tears of laughter, jokes about one another’s mistresses, and invitations to parties, palaces, and private islands tossed around between them.

But not this night. Tonight the men were somber, quiet. Worried.

Angry.

The Russia of just a few months ago seemed like a distant memory now. Oil prices and gas prices had nose-dived, and the American government had placed economic sanctions on nine of the sixteen men in the room, blocking their movements out of Russia and freezing foreign assets that could be identified. These men weren’t broken, but they were damaged, to be sure, and every one of the others wondered if he might be the next man in the crosshairs of the West.

The Russian economy had dipped significantly due to these two events, and these problems had revealed just how weak an economic system Russia had. Prices had risen, employment was down, potholes in the street weren’t getting fixed in Moscow, and garbage wasn’t getting picked up with regularity in Saint Petersburg.

The public was furious, the nation was unstable, the siloviki were feeling the pressure.

The sixteen men drinking and smoking in this small room needed a scapegoat, and their scapegoat arrived at eleven p.m.

Six armored vehicles from the Kremlin pulled up to the barricade blocking off Krivokolenny Lane from the main streets. The motorcade barely slowed before the wooden lane blockers were moved and the vehicles were allowed through. In front of Café F, all six stopped as one.

Valeri Volodin looked out through the bulletproof glass of his limousine as his security team formed around the vehicle, and he waited for his door to be opened. He wasn’t looking forward to tonight. Back before he was in charge of things he enjoyed the annual visit to the old bar, the get-together with the powerful men of the intelligence and military. This used to be a place of great plots, alliances, and allegiances, of multimillion- and even billion-dollar deals and decisions that would change the course of men’s lives.

Or end them.

But now, as president, he loathed these evenings. Even when things were going well, which they had been until just months before, the others in the siloviki sat stoically while he held court and gave them a rundown on events at the Kremlin that would interest them, as if he were some sort of PR man, a talking head on the television. At the end he took questions from men who should have been more than satisfied to just enjoy the billions of dollars he’d helped them make, and they should have been climbing over one another to be the one to get to shine his shoes.

Volodin distanced himself from organized crime and wrapped himself tighter in the flag of Russian nationalism.

His approval rating had dipped, but despite the fact he was the leader of an ostensible democracy with many enemies, Volodin wasn’t going anywhere. He retained control over the media, the defense ministry, the intelligence services, and, more important, he retained the support, if not the love, of the oligarchs he had made rich and powerful in exchange for their support and compliance, and the siloviki, the former intelligence officers who now held power over the nation.

Volodin was not in a good place politically, but he was essentially a dictator, so it didn’t really matter.

Now things weren’t going as smoothly as far as the national picture went, and he knew the sixteen other members of the siloviki who would be here this evening would be a particularly surly bunch. His talk would be met with more skepticism and fewer toasts than usual.

Volodin told himself he didn’t need this bullshit. He owed these men nothing. It was they who owed him everything for his careful management of their lives and careers.

But he did not tell his driver to leave. This yearly summit was set in stone; if he missed it he would be perceived by these weaklings as intimidated, and he could not let that happen.

And in truth, he did need them.

Volodin had been owned by a Russian organized-crime syndicate as far back as the late 1980s, even if he never actually admitted this to himself. They’d propped up his career in KGB, and then FSB, and then they’d advanced his business interests in the 1990s. The siloviki meetings had been more important for the other men than they had for him, because he had the protection of the Seven Strong Men.

Now that protection was gone, the Mafia group to which he had been tied wanted him dead, so his siloviki brotherhood was more important now: a necessary evil.

A gentle rapping on the window of his limousine brought him back to the moment, and he opened the door and climbed out into the cold night.

Volodin entered the café and looked around at the familiar confines; Café F had the same floor plan and tables and wall paneling as had all the other iterations of the venerable locale — it looked much the same as it did forty years earlier, the first time Volodin set foot inside the door.

In his twenties he shoveled hot borscht into his mouth at the bar on quick lunch or dinner breaks, before rushing back two blocks south and returning to his office. He’d spent entire evenings at a table in the corner here, designing plans and operations, and he’d met with coworkers from KGB or colleagues at GRU here, and he’d made plans of a tactical nature here long before he was entrusted to make plans of a strategic nature at the Kremlin.

He entered the back room now, shook hands that weren’t as firm as usual, exchanged bear hugs that were not as long, strong, or demonstrative as they had been in years past.

He shook hands with Derevin, the president of the massive oil concern Rosneft, and he drank a vodka with Bogdanov and Kovalev, former KGB rezidents and now directors of the state-run mining and timber concerns.

Though these men still addressed Volodin using his patronymic, Valeri Valerievich, he felt the malevolence in the room, and although he couldn’t say he did not expect it, this was a new feeling for him.

A year earlier the group was cautious. Estonia had not gone well, but this was before his annexation of the Crimea, when the Ukrainians put up surprising resistance, and a phone call from the President of the United States to Volodin revealed that the Americans knew about Volodin’s ties to organized crime.

Volodin had then pulled his troops back to the eastern and southeastern oblasts of Ukraine, and he’d kept them there, giving in to the blackmail of the Americans. To the men in this room this looked like Volodin had suffered a defeat, but Volodin knew they simply did not understand the full dynamics of the events.

Estonia had not gone well, Ukraine was still in question, Volodin could concede these facts, but he knew the men were angry about the economic problems that most affected them. And these, Volodin was adamant, were not his fucking fault.

He addressed the men in the back room of the café for a half-hour, most of it extolling the good things that had happened in Russia during the past year. Virtually all of his examples involved his successes in reining in his opposition, quashing media and Internet outlets that spoke ill of the Kremlin, the siloviki, and the governmental decrees and decisions that Volodin claimed perpetuated the success of the sixteen men in the room — seventeen including Volodin himself, who was essentially the crown prince of the siloviki.

At the end of his planned speech he tacked on a few minutes more of extemporaneous talk, mostly because he was putting off starting the Q&A portion of the event.

As he neared the end, a round of vodka shots was passed around. Every year there was a toast to him before the beginning of the questions.

But he was still speaking, wrapping up by talking about the new breeze of nationalism blowing across the nation and how this benefited the status quo, when he noticed that Levshin had begun drinking his vodka, not waiting for the toast.

Diburov noticed this, too, and he downed his own.

Around the room, others began reaching for the glasses on the table in front of them.

This was an insult.

As Valeri Volodin offered a high, reedy spasiba, thank you, at the end, he saw that almost all the glasses were empty, facedown on the table.

These men had been his peers, his equals, for most of his adult life, but in the past few years Valeri Volodin had become a reverential figure among them. He was not their equal, this he knew.

But now he saw they were treating him as if he was their lesser. Beneath them. Who the fuck do they think they are?

A combination of fury and paranoia began to well up in the pit of his stomach.

Slowly, he nodded his head. In a measured tone he said, “I see the malice. You express it clearly. So… which of you would like to begin? Who among you wants to start off by telling me how you would have steered the national economy in a manner that would have brought the past year to a different conclusion? Who here would have been a better steward for Mother Russia? You, Levshin? Are you the one to say your face should be on every newspaper and not mine?”

Levshin looked back at Volodin with a placid smile. “Of course not, Valeri Valerievich. You were chosen to lead because of your skills, your abilities. No one is denying this.”

It was a smooth backhanded compliment, Volodin knew. “Chosen to lead” indicated to Volodin that the foreign minister was pointing out that he didn’t think Russia’s president could have made it into that role without the help of the other men in the room.

Volodin said, “You are my foreign minister. This precludes you from complaining too much about international events, because you are our conduit to the rest of the world.”

Levshin simply said, “I follow your instructions, Valeri Valerievich.” Again, he was smooth, but there was ice in his words.

Bogdanov sat at a table right in front of Volodin. He spoke up now. “We are concerned about the oil prices, but no one blames you for this. But the sanctions… these are a direct result of the attack in the Ukraine. This was your decision, and you are in day-to-day control. I speak for those of us caught up in the sanctions. We are angry, Valeri. We could have weathered the storm caused by the drop in oil prices. But our international relations have been a disaster.”

Volodin shook his head vigorously. “Events in Ukraine have not gone according to plan, but we hold several oblasts along our border and we now control Crimea. The Black Sea Fleet is secure in a way it has not been in a generation.”

He saw that he wasn’t going to be getting a round of applause for the stalemate he’d entered into in Ukraine, so he spoke of other foreign initiatives.

“We have reached out in positive ways to the Chinese.”

Diburov parried this away. “Reaching out isn’t very specific, is it? Our pipeline talks with China stalled the day oil dropped below eighty U.S. dollars a barrel. It’s trading below sixty now, so China can buy from anywhere. They don’t want or need a pipeline now—”

Volodin did not wait for Diburov to finish speaking. He said, “And Saudi Arabia, long an adversary, is reaching out to us on many fronts.”

Now Levshin spoke up. “They are doing this because they have cash we need, and they think we are desperate enough to chance our policies on Iran and Syria to get it. Those are your policies, Valeri Valerievich, and it is through your mishandling of the economy that we are in such desperate need of their cash.”

Volodin’s eyes scanned the room, saw men sitting up straighter, looking to one another. Something was coming. A threat, a demand. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up, his palms begin to sweat.

He knew he needed to head this off.

For the first time this evening, Valeri Volodin looked to Mikhail Grankin, the head of his Kremlin Security Council. From what he had seen, Grankin had been the only man in the room to save his vodka for a toast to Volodin.

Grankin was young, only forty-five, a full twenty years below the average age in the room. He had been FSB, a bold and successful foreign intelligence officer, then he left intelligence work to serve under Volodin in Saint Petersburg. When Volodin came to the Kremlin a few years earlier, Grankin came with him, rising through the ranks from junior consultant to senior adviser on security matters. Volodin had been Grankin’s krisha, his roof, his benefactor.

And then, some months earlier, the head of the FSB had been killed by his own security force. Of course Volodin had been responsible for the death of Roman Talanov, and it was up to him to replace him. He sent Mikhail Grankin to Lubyanka to take the reins, not because he was smart and crafty, although he was. He was not necessarily the best man to lead one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world, but he was a Volodin confidant in the ways the fifteen other men in this room were not.

Grankin was siloviki, like the others, even though he was younger. His time in FSB had led him to riches and influence, but Volodin determined that Grankin was also young enough to be spared the hubris felt by every other man in this room.

Valeri Volodin no longer trusted the siloviki, nor did he trust the FSB, but he did trust Mikhail Grankin to comply with his wishes.

After a few months in power at Lubyanka to right the ship Grankin had left the FSB at Volodin’s request, and he came to lead the Kremlin’s Security Council, a small, tight group of men who advised Volodin on all matters of intelligence, diplomacy, and military. The hyper-compartmentalized and secretive president of Russia listened to Grankin and his small team, and he gave them directives, plotting the course for the nation.

Grankin, next to Volodin, was the most powerful Russian when it came to international affairs.

With a nod from the young Kremlin Security Council chief, Valeri Volodin turned his eyes back to the room and said, “Gentlemen. I can see you have all put your heads together and come up with a solution. But I am the president. So why not listen to my solution first?”

Shelmenko said, “You brought a solution to our problem with you tonight?” The skepticism was obvious in his voice. “Well, then, the boys and I can’t wait to hear it.”

After Grankin nodded to his president, urging him on, Volodin said, “You all want a change. I see this. A return to prosperity. I understand. Who wouldn’t? What if I told you there is an initiative I have been working on with Misha Grankin that will cause a transformation in the order of things? I wanted more time to perfect every note in this concerto, but I see from your faces that you men are not the type to wait. You’ve been sharpening your knives since last year’s meeting, and tonight your knives are out.”

Diburov sighed, blowing out smoke from his cigarette as he did so. “Details, Valeri Valerievich. Give us details. Without specifics this is just talk.”

“This is an operation of wide scope and immeasurable depth. I can’t give you details, but I can tell you that once it begins, you will know, and when it ends, that is to say when we all come back here in one year’s time, Russia will be a very different and much improved place.”

Pushkin called out from the back. “You are going to throw another lady punk band in prison for dancing in the Christ the Savior Cathedral?”

This line got the biggest, and perhaps only, real laugh of the evening.

Volodin even smiled at this, but his sharp, angular face showed the malice he felt.

He said, “I smile, Pushkin, not because you are funny, but because I am already picturing the reception you will get here next year when I remind the room of your comment. No. Something big is on the horizon. It involves our military, our intelligence organizations, and the diplomatic offices at the Foreign Ministry.”

Heads turned to the foreign minister. Levshin shrugged. “First I am hearing about this.”

Volodin snapped back, “Because you have no orders yet. You’ll get them soon enough.”

“This sounds like the fantasy of a man trying to stave off the ignoble end of his tenure.”

Volodin bit his lower lip, the shaking of his hands nearly visible now.

Mikhail Grankin stood suddenly, surprising everyone in the room, even Volodin. “With your permission, Valeri Valerievich, I would like to address the group for just one moment. I know you are too wise and careful to provide specifics, but I am willing to stick my neck out.”

Volodin made a dozen calculations in his head, then slowly he nodded. “Be as sparing as possible, Misha.”

Grankin turned to the room. “We will bring the West by the nose to the negotiating table.”

The men looked at one another. Confused. Unconvinced.

“Negotiating for what?”

“The Baltic.”

There was laughter, jeers, and hisses, but from only half of the group. The others sat silently, curious to know more.

Grankin talked for ten minutes only, but this was more than Volodin had been willing to do. He was short on the details of the operations, but he went to some length about the results he expected to attain. When it was over, a show of hands indicated the siloviki were at least willing to let the opening volleys of the plan play out, to see where it went.

Diburov muttered that things couldn’t get much worse, so he’d watch Volodin’s scheme for a while.

The meeting broke up at three a.m. The mood, while certainly not ebullient, at least was decidedly more upbeat than it had been an hour earlier.

Grankin shook Volodin’s hand in the little lobby in front of the bar. Volodin said, “Are you heading back to the office or to your home?”

“I am going home.”

“Good. Come with me, I will take you. We can discuss matters in the car.”

“Thank you, Valeri Valerievich.”

On the drive through the darkened streets of Moscow, Grankin addressed his president. “They were even bigger old pigs than I expected them to be. They showed you no respect, and you handled them expertly.”

“But?”

“But we are not ready. Our plan is more aspirational in nature.”

“We have one year.”

“Yes, Mr. President. I was there. I heard you assure everyone that the world would be quite different in twelve months. But what if it’s not?”

Volodin chuckled. “Then we’ll both be sacked, of course.”

Grankin was not laughing. “Me they can sack. They can put pressure on you to have me replaced. But you? They can’t just remove the president!”

Volodin smiled. “You’re right.” With a shrug he said, “I’ll most likely be assassinated.” He held a finger up. “That reminds me, Misha. I want a list of the best offshore banking specialists known to the FSB. Your staff can compile it quite easily, I should think.”

Grankin cocked his head. “This is part of the operation? Something you haven’t told me about?”

“This is just one piece of my puzzle. I will work the diplomatic front, the military front, the cultural front, domestic avenues. Financial resources. There are many moving parts.”

“And you need to move some money, I take it.”

“Exactly so. But just give me the names of the people the FSB trusts the most. Men whose discretion is beyond reproach. Check with their leadership, and make sure you have a consensus from them.”

“I’ll have it for you in a week’s time, Valeri Valerievich.”

The motorcade pulled into Shvedskiy Tupik, a blind alley a kilometer from the Kremlin, and the limo pulled over to the curb in front of house number 3.

After shaking his president’s hand once more, Grankin climbed out of the limousine and entered his apartment, his security force converging on him around the pavement as he climbed the steps to his building.

Volodin looked out the window at the dead city as his motorcade headed back to the Kremlin. His mind was not as quiet as the roads here at half past three in the morning. The city looked dead as he thought over all he had learned this evening. His mistrust for the men he had been with his entire career was complete now. Any one of these sons of bitches would do him in if it benefited them to do so. Grankin was better than the others, but that was only because his debt to Volodin was more obvious. He’d follow along with the plan as long as it moved in his favor, but he’d go running off after a new krisha if the storms became too heavy.

Hell, Volodin thought to himself. Grankin didn’t need a krisha anymore.

Volodin looked forward to getting the list of the FSB’s most trusted minds in the world of offshore banking. There would be dozens of names; the FSB was always moving money and managing holdings for the siloviki, so there were quite a few men in the upper echelon of the industry they called on. But Volodin wasn’t interested in the names that would be on the list. He was looking for a name not on the list. One of the great financial minds of Russia who, quite simply, the FSB did not trust to move their money.

That was the person Volodin needed to find, because if the FSB trusted a man, that meant the FSB could control the man, and Volodin needed to find someone with a unique level of discretion to help him prepare his escape in case this whole thing went to hell.