Scorpion Winter

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Tysons Corner

Virginia, U.S.

There were two up, two down, four outside, and two cars mobile. Bob Harris was taking no chances, Scorpion thought. They were to meet at the Tysons Corner mall, just off the Beltway outside Washington, D.C. Not that all the firepower and agents doing surveillance from every angle surprised him. Harris was the CIA’s National Clandestine Service deputy director, and their meetings hadn’t always been friendly. Scorpion watched from the second floor of the mall as Harris looked around, checking that his men were in position before getting on the escalator.

He hadn’t changed much. A touch older, a little sleeker, but still the fair-hair-just-starting-to-gray postgraduate in a Jermyn Street style blue pinstripe suit that screamed Capitol Hill. He watched Harris come toward him, a determined smile painted on his face, like he wanted to sell him a condo.

“Are you wired?” Scorpion asked.

Harris grimaced. “You didn’t have to be so skittish,” he said. “We could have done this at Langley.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Scorpion said. Not that it made much difference whether Harris was wired. He had to assume that several of the agents had mobile receivers and that anything he said was being recorded.

“Now what? Do we walk or go sit at a California Pizza Kitchen?” Harris letting his snobbery show.

“Don’t be a prick. We walk,” Scorpion said.

“How are you doing?” Harris asked, glancing sideways at him. “Are you all right?”

“Please don’t pretend you give a damn. Lying always gets things off on the wrong foot.”

Harris stopped walking and looked at him. “I don’t think you realize what’s been going on here. The President himself has been involved. He wants to know, are you okay?”

“He’s feeling guilty?”

“He said it was the toughest decision he’s ever had to make. I think it really got to him.”

“Tell him I’m fine.” That was true enough. He had spent the last three weeks in Lausanne, Switzerland. The clinique was very private, very discreet; the kind of place where movie stars and dictators went when they didn’t want anyone to know where they were. Thanks to Akhnetzov paying him the rest of his fee, he could afford it.

From his room he could see Lake Geneva and the snow-covered Alps in a jagged line across the horizon. During the day he worked with the physical therapist, doing rehab. The doctors said he had been lucky. There were no scars on his genitals, and as the pain receded, he would be sexually active again. He also spent some time with a dentist replacing the teeth that had been knocked out. At night he would walk up the steep rue du Petit-Chene to the Place St. Francois in the old town, stopping at a bistro for dinner. It was there that he read in the International Herald Tribune that Davydenko had won the election in Ukraine.

That night, thinking about Kiev and Iryna, he couldn’t get to sleep. Several times, he started to call her, then stopped. Toward the end of the second week he met a French female graduate student studying at the Ecole Polytechnique. She was pretty and funny and approached sex as if it were an equation she was dying to solve, and he was able to prove to himself that sexually, at least, he was still functional.

Harris frowned as a trio of teenage girls walked by. They wore tight jeans and tops and talked nonstop, all three on their cell phones, with eyes only for the shop windows and any boys as they passed the video games store.

“What about the girl? This Iryna Shevchenko?”

“What about her?”

“You had an affair?”

“Christ, you take it to the edge, don’t you?” Scorpion said, walking so rapidly Harris had to hurry to keep up.

“Take it easy,” Harris said.

“It’s none of your damn business!”

“You’re wrong,” Harris said, his voice cold. “It is business.” He looked around the mall as if scouting a battlefield. “Look, if you promise not to go crazy on me or throw whiskey in my face,” referring to the last time he and Scorpion had met, “can we find someplace civilized and get a drink?”

“Someone tipped the SBU about where I was in Kiev. I need to know why.”

“I know. But it’s a problem,” Harris said, trying his most winning smile, the one that got half the female interns in Washington to drop their pants when he was younger. “What do you say? Truce?”

“I won’t waste any more whiskey by throwing it in your face,” Scorpion said. “But I won’t promise not to kill you.”

“Close enough,” Harris said, and signaled to one of his men. A few minutes later a car pulled up at one of the entrances and drove them out of the parking lot and across the street to the Tysons 2 Mall. They walked into the Ritz Carlton and went into the lobby bar, still busy with the lunch crowd, found an empty table and sat down. Two of Harris’s men sat at a table near the doorway. Scorpion didn’t bother to check; he was confident Harris had every entrance and exit covered.

“It’s like a spooks’ convention,” Scorpion said, looking around the crowded bar. “Is there anybody left minding the store at Langley?”

“This is the place,” Harris agreed as the waitress came over. She was slim and good-looking enough to help justify the price of the drinks. “What’ll you have?”

“Belvedere Bloody Mary,” Scorpion said, thinking it was too bad you couldn’t get Stoli Elit or Nemiroff in the States.

“The same,” Harris said.

They waited till the waitress walked away. There was no one near their table. Scorpion wasn’t worried about bugs. Harris and the other spooks wouldn’t be there if they were being listened to.

“You said there was a problem,” he said.

Harris toyed with the triple dish of nibbles the waitress had brought. He looked uncomfortable.

“Look, maybe in some cosmic accounting sense, I-we-owe you. I’ll give you that. But frankly, if that’s all it was, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about it or you.” His eyes were blue and very cold. “It’s worse than that. If I tell you anything, I have to break protocol, every rule we have, and then I have to trust you. A Green Badge!” he said, referring to the fact that within CIA facilities, CIA personnel wore blue badges, while contractors and other nonemployees wear green badges. “And even if I could trust you,” his eyes narrowed as he looked straight at Scorpion, “what happens next time you go off in the wild blue yonder and get captured by the opposition? Then I not only have to trust that you won’t reveal something against someone you don’t like, on a matter of the highest national security, but you won’t do it under torture! You see my problem?” he finished, just as the waitress returned with their drinks.

Scorpion didn’t say anything. He watched the waitress as she wiggled to another table, wondering whether she had heard Harris’s last words about torture. She’s probably used to hearing all kinds of bizarre talk around here, he thought.

“You set me up, you son of a bitch,” he said, his voice soft, controlled, but intense. “You, Rabinowich, and Shaefer practically sent me an engraved invitation to Ukraine. You begged me to go and then you cut me off and then you sold me out. I was a couple of minutes away from a bullet in my head, so I’m supposed to give a shit about your problem? I’m your problem, Bob old buddy. If you really want to worry about something, I’d worry about me.”

Harris nodded grimly. He let his gaze wander around the bar at the gilt-framed paintings and men in expensive suits sitting over drinks.

“You look around and you’d think we live in a civilized world,” Harris said, “but that’s not true at all, is it? Who pointed you at us? Checkmate?” meaning Ivanov and the FSB.

Scorpion smiled. He took a long sip of the Bloody Mary and put it down on the table.

“I was wondering when you’d bring that up. Did I think he was feeding me black info? The thought occurred, but no, I didn’t think so. You know why?”

“You tell me,” Harris said.

“Because when I was laying there in that freezing cell, tortured to within an inch of my life, I realized there was another player in the game. Only I had neutralized them all: Kozhanovskiy, the Syndikat, the SBU, Gabrilov and the SVR, the Guoanbu’s Second Bureau, Shelayev, the Chorni Povyazky. Christ, I got to everyone but the Boy Scouts. But there was someone else, someone I didn’t know about. When Checkmate told me, I knew it was true.”

“What made you so sure?”

“The dog that didn’t bark.”

“What?”

“Sherlock Holmes. As a fail-safe, in case something happened to me, I uploaded the video of Shelayev’s confession to YouTube. Guess what? Nobody knew about it. It disappeared. This isn’t China. Who on earth could have gotten Google to take it off? Who has that kind of leverage over an American corporation? The minute Checkmate said it, the person I thought of was you.” His eyes focused on Harris like a laser.

Harris finished his Bloody Mary. The waitress started toward them, and he waved her off.

“As soon as I heard about Checkmate being in Kyiv, I knew you’d be knocking at my door,” Harris said. “You know what the DCIA called it? ‘Our moment of truth.’ That’s what he said. Twenty-plus years in the Company and neither of us had ever faced anything like this.” He shook his head. “I met with the President. He’s thrilled you’re alive, but he’s not sure that lets him off the hook. It bothered him. A lot.”

“Yeah, I know how tough you guys have it. West Wing chicken sandwiches, Ritz Carlton and all,” Scorpion said, looking at the spot on Harris’s throat where a single blow would end it. “Cut the bullshit, Bob. Why’d you set me up?”

Harris smiled grimly. “I guess it’s time to-what was it the old-timers used to call it-to ‘fallen die hose, ’ to drop your pants.” He leaned forward. “I need your word. What we say now never leaves this table. Never. No matter who, no matter under what circumstances, no matter anything.”

Scorpion looked at him sharply. “Or else what?”

Harris glanced at the two men he had stationed by the door. Scorpion followed his glance.

Go to hell, he thought, but didn’t say it. If Harris was this serious, it meant that what he was about to say went higher up. If he wasn’t lying, it went all the way to the Oval Office. It might also explain why people he had trusted-Rabinowich and Shaefer-had gone along. Also, he didn’t need a war with the CIA. “I’ll want something in exchange,” he said.

“What?” Harris asked.

“I’ll tell you when we’re done.”

Harris exhaled sharply. “God, you’re a pain in the ass. You want another?” indicating the drinks.

“You’re buying,” Scorpion said.

Harris waved the waitress over and gestured for another round. They watched her walk away in her tan Ritz-Carlton-worth-the-money skirt and top. Harris hesitated.

“I have your word?” he began.

“For Chrissake, let’s have it,” Scorpion said.

“I t was a walk-in,” Harris said. “Can you believe that? A walk-in! Like having a single dollar bill in your pocket and, as a throwaway, you give it to the clerk and you win the lottery.”

“Where was this?”

“Madrid. An all-expenses-paid NATO and wannabes’ conference. Tapas and whores. That’s not the story.”

“What’s the story?”

“The father. Let’s call him ‘Leva.’ Leva Nikolaevych. But you need the context. In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev becomes General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian parents from Dnipropetrovsk oblast. He was a protege of Nikita Khrushchev, who, although Russian, was himself born near the Ukrainian border. Brezhnev brings with him several key Ukrainians whose loyalties belong to him. Among them is a certain KGB agent, our Leva Nikolaevych. Leva is instrumental during the period when Brezhnev is jockeying for power with Suslov, Kosygin, and others. He gets very close to Brezhnev, who will eventually consolidate all the power in his own hands. Life is good.

“Fast-forward to 1968. In Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dub?cek launches a wave of reform that came to be known as the ‘Prague Spring.’ This created a major crisis for the Soviet Union. You have to remember, 1968 was a time of great unrest: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the resulting student protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, demonstrations and protests all around the world, the riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Within the Russian Politboro there were serious disagreements as to how to deal with Czechoslovakia. They feared a wave of revolt and reform that if unchecked could lead to the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Some argued for a hands-off attitude, others for political and economic pressure, still others wanted a full-scale military invasion to crush the reform.

“The head of the KGB at that time was Yuri Andropov, who was also a member of the Central Committee and had ambitions of his own. He provided intel to the Central Committee that the CIA had instigated the Prague reform, that we were running Dub?cek and were planning a coup, and that NATO was about to move to support Czechoslovakia and break up the Warsaw Pact.”

“Were we?”

Harris shook his head. “The truth was that the U.S. was ass-deep in Vietnam. We had our own problems. The Company had nothing to do with Dub?cek or the Prague Spring, but Andropov had a majority of the Central Committee convinced they were on the brink of either the dissolution of the Soviet Union or nuclear war and that it was all a CIA plot. He demanded that the Soviet Union crush the Czechs. Preparations were made for a Soviet intervention.

“In August, 1968, Russian tanks led a massive invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. The Prague Spring was over. Reforms were ended. KGB agents arrested thousands of reformers, many of whom were killed. Thousands more were imprisoned and tortured. Most were never heard from again. Dub?cek was hauled to Moscow and forced to sign a protocol that basically restored Soviet-style communism to Czechoslovakia.

“But there was a problem. Something called the ‘Kalugin Papers’; internal KGB documents that proved beyond any doubt that the CIA had nothing to do with the Prague Spring, NATO wasn’t planning anything, and Andropov had fabricated all his intel. Guess who was Kalugin’s superior within the KGB and had the documents?”

“Of course,” Scorpion said.

“Leva.” Harris nodded, taking a sip of his drink. “Now Andropov had a problem. The Soviet Union had already invaded and was widely condemned in the West. Andropov couldn’t afford to have the Central Committee learn he’d deliberately sold them a bill of goods. Kalugin, who was based in Washington, was easy. His body was found a few days later floating in the Potomac River. Leva, on the other hand, was no case officer like Kalugin. He had friends. And he wasn’t just Andropov’s problem, he was Brezhnev’s too. Neither of them could afford to let it get out to any of their competitors in the Politboro or the Central Committee.

“Plus, Leva was Brezhnev’s droog- his buddy. Brezhnev had bounced Leva’s son on his knee how many times? In those days in Russia, you didn’t just get rid of somebody. The whole family would disappear into the Gulag and never be heard from again. But Brezhnev didn’t want to do that with what was in effect his own godchild. The boy was eight years old and adored his father. So to save the child and both their asses, Brezhnev and Andropov did a deal. They sent Leva to the Gulag, to Strafnaja Kolonija 9, a prison camp in Siberia so secret, even most KGB officers didn’t know it existed. The mother and the rest of the family disappeared in the Gulag. That was common at the time. But the little boy, Leva’s son, they sent him back to Ukraine.”

“Jesus,” Scorpion said, looking up. “It’s Gorobets.”

Harris nodded. “Gorobets. Even after Brezhnev and Andropov and the Soviet Union itself were all long gone, the KGB, now the FSB, knew that if Gorobets ever entertained even the slightest anti-Russian thought-and of course, how could he, raised as a pro-Russian patriot? — they would kill his father.

“Except, one fine day, who comes strolling in out of the hot sun on the Calle de Serrano into the American embassy in Madrid? A walk-in. The one-in-a-million you don’t plan for because it’s impossible, it doesn’t happen. That same little boy, all grown up and the most important person in the Svoboda party-if not the whole damn country of Ukraine. And he wants revenge.”

“You believed him?”

Harris brushed the thought away as though it were a fly.

“Of course we didn’t believe him. You have no idea how long and how hard it was to find out and vet everything I’m telling you. Two years. After that thing in Rome, we had Rabinowich working on it full-time for months.”

“What made him turn?”

“That was the part we had to get right. It was quite an odyssey. Brezhnev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union-and after he died, Andropov, who became General Secretary-kept an eye on the boy. They guided him into the KGB, and after Ukrainian independence, the SBU. He was Leva’s son, all right. He had no father or mother. The Gorobets you know, the ruthless Gorobets of the Black Armband thugs, is a child of the KGB; they made him.

“The problem was, he was old enough to remember his parents. He still loved them. That hole in him had never been filled. And someone had survived. An aunt. Tetya Oksana, Aunt Oksana.”

“What happened two years ago that made him walk into the embassy in Madrid?”

“Somebody gave him something. Someone in the Metro in Kiev pressed it into his hand, and by the time he turned around, they were gone. It was a cross. One of those Ukrainian crosses; you know, with the two crossbars and the extra slanted crossbar where they would’ve nailed Jesus’ feet. I’ve seen it. A little silver thing about this big,” holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “It was cheap. The kind of thing you could pick up for a buck in a flea market.

“At first, he told us, he almost threw it away. But the way it came to him, and something inside-because they had never told him what had happened to his family-made him keep it. That night he got together with Tetya Oksana-by then she was an old woman living in a retirement home. She told him. He understood that all those years his father had been alive, but someone giving him the cross meant his father was finally dead.

“Mind you, it took us a while to vet what had happened. As best as Rabinowich was able to tease it out, Leva died after all those years in the prison camp, and a fellow prisoner, Pyotr Shunegin, gave it to a Dr. Ghazarian who came to the camp once a month. He in turn smuggled it out and passed it along through a kind of underground Armenian network from city to city in Russia till someone in Kiev-we don’t know who-handed it to Gorobets in the Metro along with a message letting him know it was his father’s before disappearing into the crowd.

“Tetya Oksana filled in the rest for him. What happened to his family. How they died in the Gulag. How his father had been alive all those years and still kept in prison, long after Brezhnev and Andropov were dead and there was no more Soviet Union-just to make sure Gorobets would always do what they wanted.”

“He wanted revenge?”

“Big-time,” Harris said. “He was already the head of the SBU and a power in the Svoboda party. He wanted to do something dramatic, but we changed his mind. We convinced him he could hurt them more and be infinitely more valuable where he was and as he was.

“Don’t you see what we had? He was the ultimate AOI,” meaning Agent of Influence. “The holy fucking grail of intelligence. Not only could he direct Ukraine, the largest country in Europe, in the direction we set, but he was a direct pipeline into the SBU, the SVR, and right to the very top of the Kremlin itself!” He looked at Scorpion. “Gorobets is the single most important asset, the most important secret, this country has. And you were about to destroy him by exposing him on YouTube and TV! We had no choice.”

Scorpion looked around the bar. It was the in-between hour, between postlunch and happy hour, and except for Harris’s men by the doorway and one group by the fireplace, they were the last customers.

“Why did Gorobets really save Iryna? Was that you?”

Harris nodded. “After the election, Kozhanovskiy is history. Gorobets will trump up some charge against him-or maybe he won’t have to, Christ knows there’s more than enough corruption in Ukraine to go around-and put him into prison. We need a viable opposition. Iryna Shevchenko is perfect. Good-looking, idealistic, daughter of a national hero. You couldn’t order up better out of central casting. Maybe she goes to prison for a while, but if she didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her.”

“But if she were to actually try to win an election, you’d see she’d lose?”

Harris threw a credit card down and motioned the waitress over. She came and took the card and the check.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“The asset is more important than the country.”

“Exactly.” Harris put his hand on Scorpion’s arm. Scorpion looked at it, and Harris removed his hand. “For what it’s worth, the President said it’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. To knowingly allow an American who is innocent and an absolute hero to be tortured and put to death in order to save a nasty son of a bitch because he’s too valuable to lose. He said he had to think long and hard. It challenged his sense of who he really is. He says he still thinks about it.”

Scorpion put his drink down.

“Yeah, well you can tell him for me to go-” He stopped. “I don’t give a damn what you tell him. So who’s running Gorobets? Not Kyiv Station? Too iffy.”

Harris nodded. “You’re right.” The waitress came. He signed the slip and retrieved his credit card. They waited till she left. “I’m sure a smart guy like you can figure it out.”

Scorpion snorted. It was in front of him all along and he hadn’t seen it.

“Shaefer,” he said. Bucharest was close enough, and yet not under the microscope like anything Gorobets did in Kyiv. He realized that was how Akhnetzov had gotten to him in the first place. Shaefer wanted to send in the best agent they could get, to aid and abet Gorobets while forestalling a Russian takeover. They needed someone who could stop a disaster from getting out of control and that might have led to the end of NATO or even war. Scorpion hated to admit it, but if he had been in Harris’s and Shaefer’s place, playing for the stakes they were playing for, he might have done the same thing.

“So are we done?” Harris said, pulling his things together to get ready to leave. “Nobody wants to kill anybody? All debts squared? I’m told Akhnetzov paid in full.”

“Where’s my quid pro quo?” Scorpion said.

Harris folded his arms across his chest.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Yemen.”

“Christ. It’s a powder keg. I don’t suppose I could ask you not to-” Harris stopped.

“You could ask,” Scorpion said.