Rules of Vengeance

38

Lev Timken was not a man that you would care to observe making love. To begin with, he was obese. He was also short, ugly, and as hairy as a Mingrelian bear. But these unappealing physical attributes were nothing compared to his primal grunting. In the throes of passion, the man produced a gut-curdling bark that would make a horny elephant seal blush.

“Can’t you turn down the sound?” demanded Sergei Shvets.

From his position in the backseat of his BMW stretch sedan, Shvets enjoyed an unimpeded view of the advanced communications center built into the dashboard. At that moment the monitor was displaying a high-definition picture broadcast from Timken’s bedroom. “Sound and light,” as the men in Directorate S called it. Shvets had installed similar surveillance systems in one hundred apartments around the city. It was necessary to keep an eye on your adversaries.

His driver obediently lowered the volume.

“Christ, look at him,” said Shvets. “I believe that I’m doing the women of Moscow a favor. He has enough blubber on him to supply a village with oil to last a Siberian winter.”

“And enough fur to make a dozen coats.”

Shvets was parked across the street from Lev Timken’s apartment building on Kutuzovksy Prospekt. The building dated from the 1930s, when Stalin was on his quest to westernize Moscow, and it would not have looked out of place off the Étoile in Paris or the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.

Timken had made his fortune in the halcyon days of the ’90s, a KGB colonel in charge of weapons procurement and production. When the Communist Party ceased to exist, he claimed ownership of a raft of factories producing everything from bullets to bombers and sold their output to the highest bidder, usually budding African despots in need of a competitive advantage to oust their rivals from power. In short order Timken traded his uniform for a business suit and departed Army Southern Command in the unglamorous city of Minsk for the private sector and a shot at the big time in Moscow, or “the Center,” which was how Russians referred to their nation’s capital.

His fortune secure, he moved laterally into politics. A native of St. Petersburg and a former judo champion (weren’t they all, these days?), Timken allied himself to that other son of the north, Vladimir Putin, and rode the diminutive former spy’s coattails to power. It was a meteoric rise. A seat in the Duma. An appointment to the cabinet. Then the move to counselor, and a voice in making the really big decisions.

For the past three years Timken had served as first aide to the president, where his primary function was to hold hands with the myriad Western oil companies brought in to modernize Russia’s aging infrastructure and exploit the nation’s vast oil reserves. His work had met with so much success that he was a front-runner to succeed the president when he stepped down in two years’ time.

“What did we give her?” asked Shvets, eyes drilling the monitor.

“Cyanide.”

“We still use that?”

“Nothing works as quickly. Once the scent fades, it is almost impossible to detect in the blood. It will appear that Timken had a heart attack. Who will doubt it?”

Shvets angled his head to better view the writhing coils of flesh. “How will she administer it?”

“You do not wish to know.”

“Go ahead.”

The driver explained briefly. For once, Shvets had no comment.

Since the eleventh century, Mother Russia had been a land ruled and divided by clans. Stretching over eleven time zones and incorporating over fifty ethnic minorities, Russia was simply too large a landmass for one man, or one family, to govern. Ivan the Terrible relied upon his feudal lords to see his will carried out. Peter the Great, on the caste of noblemen called Boyars. Each granted his supporters large tracts of land in exchange for fealty and in doing so united their aims with his own and guaranteed their loyalty.

It was no different in the twenty-first century.

On the surface, Russia appeared as monolithic as ever. The new, modern Russia was a Western-style democracy boasting a popularly elected president and a bicameral legislature. But appearances were deceiving. Just below the surface, the country was a caldron of competing interests. In place of warlords, there were mafia chieftains. In place of Boyars, there were CEOs. Land was no longer the favored asset, but money, preferably shares of large corporations built on the plundering of Russia’s vast natural resources: oil, natural gas, and timber. And knee-deep in the intrigue was the nation’s intelligence service, the FSB, fighting with everyone else for the president’s favor.

Russia was, and would always be, a country ruled by clans.

Rapacious was the head that wore the crown, and no one was more so than Sergei Shvets, chairman of the FSB. Shvets had long ago set his sights on the pinstriped ermine of the Kremlin. Nothing short of the presidency would do.

On this cool, rainy morning in Moscow, three men stood in his way. One lay comatose in a London hospital bed. Another was touring a natural gas facility in Kazakhstan and was due back later that night. The third, Lev Timken, first aide to the president, was about to die.

Shvets watched as his agent uncoupled herself from Timken and placed her head between his legs. Timken’s mouth fell open, and Shvets could hear the man’s howls even with the volume turned off. Timken arched his back, his eyes bulging in ecstasy. The woman raised her head from his lap and kissed him on the mouth, lifting a hand to massage his cheek.

Shvets shuddered, imagining the capsule entering his own mouth, his teeth gnashing down on it and releasing the poison into him.

Timken pushed away the nude woman and struggled to stand. The woman remained on her knees, watching as Timken collapsed to the floor and lay still.

Sergei Shvets tapped his driver on the shoulder. “Yasenevo,” he said.

He looked out the window as they drove.

One down.

Two to go.