Red Moth

In the Tsar’s Secret Service

In the Tsar’s Secret Service, Pekkala and Kovalevsky had both trained under the guidance of Chief Inspector Vassileyev.

But within days of completing their course of instruction, Kovalevsky disappeared. One day he was there, in the stuffy, stone-walled basement of Okhrana headquarters where Vassileyev conducted his lessons, and the next he was gone, without a word of farewell or forwarding address.

‘What has happened to him?’ asked Pekkala, staring at Kovalevsky’s empty desk.

‘He has been chosen for Myednikov’s Special Section,’ replied Vassileyev.

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Most people haven’t,’ said Vassileyev, and he went on to explain.

The Myednikov section trained men for duties so secret that their very existence was denied. They lived in the twilight of Russian society, without recognition, without family contact, without even their own names to track the passing of their lives.

‘What are these men? Assassins?’

‘Certainly,’ replied Vassileyev. ‘They are killers when they need to be. But that’s not all they are. As part of Myednikov’s Section, Kovalevsky will be trained to move unnoticed through the streets of this city, and of all the cities of the world. In London, New York, Rome and Paris, there are apartments where the rent is always paid but no one ever seems to come or go from them. The addresses are known only to Myednikov and it is there that his men will find not only food and shelter but also money, weapons, passports and everything they need to change identities as easily as snakes can shed their skins. They are travellers through all the walls and wires of the world, thrown up by the governments to offer the illusion of safety. For men like you and me, the bars of such cages will hold. But they cannot stop Myednikov, or anyone who’s trained by him. He is like the boatman on the river Styx. There are journeys all of us will make some day, but not without a guide to bring us to our final destination. For some of us, those guides are Myednikov’s men.’

‘Will I ever see him again?’ asked Pekkala.

‘It is doubtful,’ replied Vassileyev. ‘You may pass an old man in the street, or sit beside a soldier on a train or drop a coin into the hand of a beggar, and any one of them might be your old friend Kovalevsky. You will never know, unless he’s there to save your life, or else to end it.’

In later years, after Pekkala took up his duties as the Tsar’s Personal Investigator, he would hear an occasional rumour about the man known to have been Myednikov’s finest pupil. Once‚ the Tsar confided to Pekkala that Kovalevsky had arrived in a fishing boat in the city of Trondheim in Norway, to rescue an Okhrana agent whose cover had been blown.

‘And he had even filled the boat with fish,’ laughed the Tsar, ‘which he managed to sell at a profit!’

In another story, which took place at the Hotel President in Paris‚ Kovalevsky had appeared, wearing the short red tunic of a bell boy, at the door of a Spanish diplomat, who had been acting as a courier of military secrets between a Russian agent and the government of Japan. When the diplomat opened the door, Kovalevsky sprayed the man in the face with potassium cyanide, using a woman’s perfume vaporiser. The poison constricted the blood vessels supplying oxygen to the brain, causing immediate loss of consciousness and death within two minutes. The lethal vapour ensured that the diplomat would not survive, but it also put Kovalevsky himself at risk of exposure to the cyanide. Anticipating this, Kovalevsky had brought with him an antidote, which consisted of a vial of amyl nitrate and two syringes, one containing sodium nitrite and the other containing sodium thiosulphate.

After inhaling the vial, Kovalevsky stabbed himself in the chest with the two syringes, staggered out of the service entrance to the hotel, dropping his red tunic along the way, and vanished into the crowds along the Champs-Elysees. By the time the diplomat was discovered dead on the floor of his room, the effects of the cyanide had worn off, leaving no trace. An autopsy showed the only likely cause of death to be a heart attack.

After the storming of the Winter Palace by Red Guards in October of 1917, Kovalevsky disappeared, probably on the orders of Myednikov himself.

Soon afterwards, the roster of Myednikov’s agents was discovered in the infamous Blue File, which contained documents kept by the Tsar for his personal use, whose contents had been known only to him. Within the Blue File, Bolshevik agents discovered the names and covers of operatives working under the highest levels of secrecy, including Myednikov’s men. With their identities revealed, members of the organisation were quickly tracked down and liquidated by the newly formed Bolshevik Secret Service, the Cheka. Its director, Felix Dzerzhinsky, personally undertook the hunt for Kovalevsky.

Dzerzhinsky was so determined to catch and kill the man he considered to be the most dangerous of all Myednikov’s agents that when a Bolshevik operative stationed in Paris reported that a waiter at the famous Brasserie Lipp bore a resemblance to Kovalevsky, whom the agent had known as a child, Dzerzhinsky had the waiter gunned down in the street without conducting any further investigation as to the waiter’s identity.

Dzerzhinsky had risked an international incident, which could have pulverised the already fragile relationship between France and the fledging Soviet government. But Dzerzhinsky’s instincts turned out to be correct. French authorities, while expressing their displeasure at a targeted killing on their own soil, conceded that Kovalevsky’s expertise could have posed a serious threat to the new Russia. Kovalevsky’s death was officially confirmed and his file was sent to the warehouse known as Archive 17, the graveyard of Soviet Intelligence.