The Kingmaker

CHAPTER TWENTY

I swallowed three more aspirins and lay down to nap before I organized our flight from Moscow. As both Napoleon and Hitler learned, planning a retreat from Moscow is a tricky affair that takes a clear mind and meticulous preparation. I’d woken up early, been shot at, wounded, and operated on, and was left feeling a bit groggy and foggy. I don’t know how long I slept, maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours, but I awoke to a hand shaking me.

My eyes cracked open, and I found myself staring at the handsome features of Alexi Arbatov. Instinctively, I jerked forward and nailed him in the forehead with a flat-handed punch. He flew backward, and I leaped out of the bed and jumped on him. He put up no fight, just went limp and passive. I flipped him over on his stomach, got one arm wrapped around his jaw and the other against the back of his head. I said, “Move and I’ll break your neck.” Not too original a line, but suitable for the occasion and, more important, authentic.

“Please… let go,” he replied, his words choked and strained, because I had rotated his chin nearly forty-five degrees to the right, poised for the quick jerk that would disconnect his skull from his spine.

“Of course… I let you go and you whack me.” I did, however, let his head rotate slightly back toward its natural position before I accidentally strangled him to death.

He mumbled, “You are being fool. Why did I not kill you when you were sleeping?”

It was a reasonable point-unless he was like one of those old western gunfighters who called their victim before they shot. The common perception is they did that out of some heroic sense of fair play. Wrong-it was the sadistic code of the Old West to let the victim have a miserable moment to contemplate his impending death.

Anyway, I released him from the lock, and he rolled over and sat up and began rotating his head. I stayed coiled, ready to strike. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but regarded me through sullen eyes.

He eventually said, “I have gotten report on attack an hour ago. We have big problem.”

“True.” I added, “But not the same problem. Mine is the number two guy in the SVR wants me dead. Yours seems to be how to murder me without causing the fingers to point back at you.”

He scratched an eyebrow. “This is not true.”

“No, and Stalin’s not dead, either. He and Elvis are hiding out together at some luxurious resort in Mexico, partying their asses off.”

He gave me a quizzical look. “Elvis?”

“It’s an old… oh, forget it.” I fell back onto the bed and wondered what this guy’s game was.

He insisted, “Major, I did not order this attack, but is big problem for me. I am meeting with you in morning and then you have ambush. Who else knows we have this meeting?”

“My co-counsel. Only I didn’t tell her till after the ambush.”

“There are others, though, yes? This must be true.”

His face did look exceedingly apprehensive, and whatever his angle was, I couldn’t see it. It didn’t mean there wasn’t one-only that I couldn’t see it. An important distinction, that.

I said, “If it wasn’t you, who tried to kill us?”

Straightening his clothes, he replied, “Police say they are Chechens. This is why it comes to my desk. Acts of domestic espionage must be reported to Viktor and me immediately.” He paused and then added, “But this is idiotic conclusion. Chechens do not kill Americans.”

Truly, his response surprised me. Were he trying to deflect blame, the easiest thing would be to say, “Chechens? Most definitely.”

Arbatov walked around and ruminated a bit, then finally stopped and faced me. “Did Bill talk about information I am giving to him?”

“No.”

He got a distracted look. “You know nothing about plot?”

This was getting surreal, however, I’d seen enough bad spy movies to know exactly how I was expected to respond. So I said, “Plot? What plot?”

“He tells you nothing?” He studied my face to see if I was being truthful.

“No, Arbatov, he never told me about any plot.”

He let loose a large sigh and walked over and stared at the curtain. I said, “Look, maybe you should tell me about this plot thing. If you’re really at risk, and your fate hinges on my client, maybe you should tell me everything.”

I could see his shoulders quake like he was chuckling, and, okay, so I did sound a bit ridiculous.

“Please.”

He remained quiet, so I said, “Okay, so this plot is huge and momentous. And I’m not a professional spy, so you can’t tell me.”

“I am sorry. I trust Bill and Mary. You, I do not know… or trust.”

“Well, back to square one then.” I couldn’t resist adding, “And for the record, I don’t trust you either, pal.”

I climbed off the bed and went to the chair where I’d thrown my uniform and started to get dressed, while he stared at the curtain and mulled his options. He finally spun back around and faced me, shaking his head, but desperation is the mother of all disclosures. He’d come to understand that truthfully and inevitably, he had no other options. The three guys resting in a Moscow morgue had joined us at the hip, a sort of literal version of a shotgun wedding.

Sounding tentative, he said, “The reason I first meet with Bill was to discuss with him about strange things happening in Soviet Union.”

I was racing to pull on my pants, since it seemed ridiculous to be standing in my underwear as the deputy head of Russia’s spy agency spilled his guts about some earthshaking plot. Surely, moments like this should be more dignified. I said, “Things like what?”

“You are knowledgeable about how the Soviet Union came to be ended?”

“Let me see… I think I recall something in the news about it.”

He ignored my sarcasm. “You do not wonder how this happens so fast… how my seventy-year-old nation explodes?”

“No.” I stopped dressing and stared at him. “I figured it was a big, rotten piece of garbage that had no reason to hold together. You build a house on a lousy foundation, sooner or later, it’s going to crash down.”

“Is too simplistic. Please do not get confused with your moral relativism. Your country expands in same way as Russia does. American armies march westward and conquer Spanish, Mexicans, Indians, Filipinos, Hawaiians. You defeat them, and you absorb them. Russia does this same thing. You have civil war and we have civil war. You have Ku Klux Klan, and negro demonstrations, and Puerto Rican terrorists, and we have separatist splinter groups. Yet, both nations outlive these things, yes?”

“Your point being?” I asked, not completely buying into his analogies, because frankly there was a world of difference. Well, maybe not a world, but enough to be significant.

He continued, “Inside one year, my country explodes into pieces. For seventy years, one government, one philosophy, one currency, then suddenly, one nation becomes fifteen. You see no oddity in this? This was not planned, was nobody thinking ahead about this. Suddenly, many, many millions of people are thrown into decades of deprivation and poverty and instability.”

“Had to happen sooner or later. It was a rotten system.”

“Major, please, I am not bemoaning loss of Communism. I am not some old apparatchik who misses old glories. I am like scientist, looking for reasons. How can this thing happen so fast? Forget your American prejudices and assumptions.”

“Keep going.”

“Was made to happen in this way. Impulses are there, yes, but big assistance was given. A glass statue can be frail, but somebody must knock it off table to make it shatter.”

“And what? You think we were behind it? Hey, pal, you’ve been reading too many of the brochures the CIA writes about itself.”

“Your CIA cannot do this… I know this. Was too vast, too knowing. This had to be an internal thing.”

All very interesting; however, it was time to bring the conversation back on track. I asked, “And this has something to do with why you met Morrison?”

“Yes. Viktor Yurichenko, my boss, heard my concerns, and he agrees something is propelling our country toward this cataclysm.”

I instantly found myself taking Arbatov more seriously, because Yurichenko had an incredible reputation, and if they both believed something stank to high heaven, maybe there was a turd in the punch bowl, geopolitically speaking, of course.

He continued in his earnest tone, “Then Viktor tells me to go look for plotters in trouble spots. I am doing this on pretext of assessing situations, but I am looking really for whoever is intervening in these factions, is prodding them, is organizing demonstrations and exacerbating local political anxieties.”

“And did you find them?”

“Was too hidden. But I was becoming even more convinced something was there.”

“Why?”

“Was too orchestrated. Someone knowing of our seams and stresses was tugging out stitches. You are knowledgeable about chaos theory, yes? Even in most frantic events there must be patterns, logical progressions, but to find these progressions, separate forces must be slowed and studied.”

“Okay, so?”

He was becoming animated, and clearly agitated, but whether from passion or frustration I couldn’t tell. He said, “This was our problem. Was happening too fast… overpowering Gorbachev and his government, avalanches of protests, and local political decisions, and criminal acts, and even revolutions. Everywhere this is happening, fires in every corner. There has to be some trigger, yes? There was too much synchronicity, too much unapparent coordination.”

“Unapparent coordination?”

“Yes… was made to appear uncoordinated.” Realizing he was a little over my head, he explained, “Imagine you are cancer researcher and twenty children from one small village get cancer. You search for similarities in children’s habits, what foods they eat, what liquids they drink… nothing can be found. Still, you are knowing something must be there, some force connecting these diseases.”

“Okay.”

“Then there is Yeltsin.”

“Right, then there was Yeltsin. What about him?”

“You never became curious how this secretary of one city was able to overturn entire political establishment of our Soviet nation? In your country, this would be like your New York City mayor seizing your government, tearing up your Constitution, burning your Bill of Rights, and inventing new government. Except under Soviet system secretaries were even less powerful, less important than your American mayors. How was this possible?”

“Because your people wanted freedom?” I suggested. “Because they were poor and wretched and wanted better lives? Because Communism sucked?”

He shook his head at my sophisticated insight and said, “You do not know Russians. We have famous reputation for suffering. What is your word? ‘Stoic,’ yes? Read our literature… is about suffering. Study our history. Consider Russia’s most fabled leaders: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Lenin, Stalin. In what way all these people are alike? All are mass murderers. Does America have such homicidal icons? Your George Washington, your Abraham Lincoln, your FDR, they were famous killers?”

I guessed he had a good point. “Okay, then how did Yeltsin do it?”

“I never learned, but was connected as well. How else can Yeltsin outmaneuver everybody?”

Until this point, he’d nearly had me convinced, nodding along nicely, following his logic, and so on. I fixed him with a stony look and said, “Look, we have a problem here. According to our intelligence, your boss, Yurichenko, approached Yeltsin near the beginning and struck a deal. Our people say Yurichenko helped him rise.”

“Yes, was true. When Viktor sees him breaking through, we know something is badly wrong, so Viktor cultivates this relationship with Yeltsin. He insinuates himself inside. We know Yeltsin has powerful allies, but who? Viktor was not able to discover this answer.”

“And what? When Yeltsin finally came to power, he rewarded your boss by making him head of the SVR?”

“Was big irony, yes? Viktor was very trusted by Yeltsin… this was his reward for Viktor’s help.”

“And you were giving all this to Morrison?”

“Pieces, only. I was not knowing in the beginning what I was looking for.”

“And why’d you go to Bill?”

“This was last resort for me. When I could not find what was happening, I wanted to discuss American interpretations of these developments. Sometimes, those looking into a house see better than those inside, yes?”

I had to take a moment to ponder all this. I had my pants on by then and that helped.

I asked, “Did Yurichenko know you were meeting with Morrison?”

He looked conflicted, as if this was something he was ashamed to admit. “No. Uh, Viktor would never permit this. We are very close, but Viktor is product of our old system and would consider it a most serious betrayal.”

“Do you know who in the CIA got access to your reports, knew of your existence?”

“Bill and Mary, of course. And only deputy directors of intelligence and operations were… uh, in the loop? This is correct?”

“I think that’s correct, although Morrison told me a CIA psychiatrist was involved as well. He said it was a standard practice to keep you from going nuts on them.”

“Then you see where I am having big problem?”

I nodded, but as I mentioned before, spies are con men, and maybe the SVR had a bunch of Hollywood types who worked in the basement and cooked up these things. Actually, that was too wild-assed for even me to believe.

He glanced at his watch. “I must now go back to office. I am telling everybody I am at lunch. I have appointments.”

He reached out to shake my hand. I took it, and he promptly sensed my reservations about him, because he gave me a shy, reticent smile, a gesture that conveyed that this was painfully difficult for both of us.

I recalled the description in Arbatov’s dossier, “magnetically charming,” and concluded that the CIA pegged him well. I was annoyed to find that I liked him, trusted him, and even wanted to believe what he told me.

But enough to stake my life on him? Well, no. Nor did I see where his revelation fit in the picture. It explained why he approached Morrison in the first place, but where was the connection to Morrison’s arrest, or to ten years of treachery?

More important, was there a connection to the ambush that morning? Regardless, the wise thing to do at that point was call the airline and book tickets. I made reservations for midnight so we could sneak out in the dead of night.