The Kingmaker

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

It took twenty minutes before the van jolted to a stop. One of the guards swung open the door, and we were both shoved out. We were then pushed and dragged inside a big, multistoried building that didn’t seem to have many windows. I didn’t like that not-many-windows thing. Buildings that don’t have a lot of windows don’t have them for a reason.

We were led to some stairs in the back that went down to a basement. The inside of the building had an institutional look and air to it, like a hospital. Or, considering the circumstances, like a prison. We took a left at the bottom of the stairs and then walked down a hallway before we were shoved into a starkly empty room.

Our gags were removed, but neither of us said a word. We were both stunned. We just stood with our hands and ankles cuffed, staring at the white walls and contemplating our fates. We remained like this for nearly five minutes before a door opened behind us. I spun around and saw four really big goons enter, then the diminutive figure of Viktor Yurichenko.

Viktor immediately said, “Alexi, Alexi, it is so tragic that it has come to this. I am truly sorry it had to be this way.”

Alexi said nothing, so Viktor angrily shouted, “But you’ve been a damn fool! You never should have dealt with the Americans.”

When Alexi still didn’t answer, Viktor walked around me, until he faced him. His eyes narrowed into angry slits, then he barked something in Russian that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t need to. It was probably the Russki version of “shit” or “damn it,” and I started chuckling.

I tried to stop myself, but the chuckles kept bubbling out of my chest. Viktor walked in front of me and slapped me as hard as he could. The truth was that it wasn’t all that hard, and I chuckled even harder, partly because this whole thing was funny as hell, and partly because I was so damned nervous, it was either laugh or faint.

Viktor yelled something in Russian at his goons, and two of them rushed over and forced my partner to bend over. Then one pulled off the wig, and the other began yanking at the elastic, skinlike rubber of the mask. It came off in chunks and pieces, and after about thirty seconds of tugging they had most of it off. Those modern Hollywood disguise kits, you can’t believe how authentic-looking they can be.

I didn’t know the guy under the mask, except that he was a federal prisoner chosen for this job because he had identical physical measurements to Alexi’s. He’d been doing hard time for three counts of armed robbery and the CIA had cut him a deal. Since he was a three-time loser serving a life sentence, if he took this job and it worked, the President of the United States would get him a pardon.

At that moment he looked absolutely bewildered, since his role in this operation wasn’t supposed to end this way. The CIA had positioned him in that bathroom for an entirely different purpose. The real Alexi was supposed to join Katrina in a stall in the ladies’ room, they’d both don chubby babushka disguises, and then saunter out together. That touch was mine, of course. I mean, it had worked for me in the mall, right? I was supposed to leave right behind them.

Only that plan hadn’t considered the fact that there’d be a bunch of SVR goons inside the bakery. The way that plan was supposed to end was that the convict disguised as Alexi would emerge from the men’s room a few minutes after Katrina, Alexi, and I made our escape. He’d then hurry to the subway, get off after a few stops, dodge into a restroom, get out of his Alexi costume, then go to a linkup point where the CIA would meet him and get him back to the States and freedom.

But we all know what they say about the best-laid plans, right? The minute I knew the SVR had agents in the bakery, I realized it was time for plan B. Which was a bit of a problem, because there wasn’t any plan B. With both Alexi and Katrina in the bathroom, I was the only one left that the SVR watchers could observe. When I saw Alexi and Katrina leave in their disguises, I had to buy them at least two or three minutes to make it to the CIA van idling three blocks away, so they could make their getaway. Had I gotten up and followed them out, the whole thing would’ve collapsed.

I felt pretty proud about the self-sacrifice I’d made to get them a chance at a new life. There’s a certain nobility in that, right? It’s like that classic Dickens line “ ’Tis a far better thing I do,” and all that crap. But as I stared at the enraged face of Viktor Yurichenko, I remembered how that same novel opened: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” “The worst of times” were on their way.

“Who are you?” Yurichenko growled at the prisoner.

I said, “Let him go. He’s nobody. He was a federal prisoner hired to do this job. He had no idea what the operation was about, or even why he’s here. He was promised freedom if he just hid in that bathroom and then walked out two minutes after he heard a knock on the door.”

Viktor was now staring at me. Remember when I mentioned that Viktor sort of looked like a skinny Santa Claus, with those big smile creases around his eyes and mouth? Let’s amend that. He now looked like a cranky old man with giant hemorrhoids that were killing him.

“A common prisoner?”

“Yes.”

He looked over at one of his goons, and before I could say anything, there was a pistol shot and the poor guy slumped to the floor, the front of his forehead blown clear across to the far wall.

I yelled, “You bastard!”

Then suddenly I felt a searing pain on the back of my neck, and I crashed down onto the floor. I felt groggy, and rolled onto my back and looked up. A goon lifted me off the floor like a sack of feathers. He held me steady while another goon came over. This goon looked like his creator got confused about where his legs and arms were supposed to go, because he had short skinny legs and huge stumps for arms that hung from massive arched shoulders. I tried tensing my muscles to protect my organs, but it didn’t seem to matter. The guy had fists like concrete blocks. He kept pounding me in the stomach, and every time he hit me, I could feel the pulverizing force right down to my toenails. This went on for about thirty seconds, which doesn’t sound like a long time, but when you’re a punching bag it’s a very long time.

Then Viktor barked something and he backed away. I was almost past caring by that time. A few more punches and I would’ve suffocated.

I was moaning and trying to draw breath when Viktor lifted my chin and stared into my face. “They don’t like it when you call me names,” he said, very calmly. “I advise you not to do that again.”

I mumbled something, but it was incomprehensible, because I’d literally been punched silly. I had vomited, and it was hanging off my lips. I could barely draw any breath.

Viktor said, “Felix has quite a punch, doesn’t he?”

I think I nodded, and he asked, “Where is Alexi?”

“Gone,” I gasped.

“Liar. He isn’t gone. All our border crossings and airports have his photo. They know to stop him. How were you trying to get him out?”

I didn’t say anything, so Viktor said a few words to his goons again, and we went through the punching-bag routine again, only Viktor must’ve ordered Felix to pull his punches a bit, because this time I didn’t feel them all the way down to my toes. Only my knees.

Anyway, at least forty minutes had passed since Alexi and Katrina had left the bakery, so there wasn’t any tangible reason to keep taking this beating. I finally moaned, “All right… all right.”

Felix stepped back, and Viktor’s smug face reappeared. “Where?”

“On, uh, on the Secretary of State’s… uh, on his plane.”

He barked something at another goon, who immediately sprinted out of the room. We stood for the next two minutes without anybody saying a word. To say that the air was thick with tension would be an understatement. I kept glancing down at the poor guy whose cranial fluid was making a big puddle on the floor.

Finally Viktor stared at me. “You sacrificed yourself for Alexi and the girl, yes?”

I didn’t need to answer.

He chuckled and rocked back and forth on his heels. “How very, very stupid, Drummond. If Alexi escaped, I will never forgive you.” He peered more closely into my face. “You understand that, don’t you? I won’t kill you, but you’ll wish I would. You’ll pray every night to die. You’ll become my solace.”

Suddenly the door burst open and the goon rushed in. He said something in rapid-fire Russian and Viktor just glared at him. I was in big trouble.

I almost shuddered from the expression on his face-a mixture of bitterness, hurt, and fury that coursed straight up from his soul. I didn’t have to guess what the news was. I already knew. The Secretary of State had canceled his appointment with the foreign minister and took off at 6:20. Alexi and Katrina had accompanied him, of course.

This was great for them. This was exceedingly bad for me.

I said, “It’s done. Let it go.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, I think because he was choking on his own bile. I doubt if he’d ever lost at anything, chess or espionage. Losing gracefully is an acquired skill. Defeats pile up on top of defeats and eventually you lose the outrage for the next one that comes along. Viktor obviously hadn’t built up that immunity yet. I vaguely realized that if I didn’t make him think of something else, he might break his word and have Felix come over and punch my nose through the back of my head.

I asked, “If he was a traitor, why do you care? He’s got nothing more to tell us, right?”

The goon who held me tightened his grip, and Felix took a step in my direction.

Instead, Viktor’s neck snapped up. “You don’t understand, do you? Of course you don’t. Alexi was like my blood. I treasured him. I raised him. I took him in when he was a sniveling little pig farmer’s son. I, uh-” He suddenly stopped talking. He became emotionally tongue-tied, and I realized he really did look upon Alexi as his own child. Perhaps a wayward child, but don’t most parents love their kids, warts and all?

Still, it didn’t add up. A piece was missing, and I didn’t know what it was.

I said, “You knew he was a traitor. For twelve years you knew. Why didn’t you stop him?”

He stared at me with pure hatred. “Because it was useful, you idiot.”

I was thoroughly baffled. “Useful? I… I don’t get it.”

“Of course you don’t. What was Alexi reporting to your people?”

“About some cabal he thought was undermining Russia and causing wars and revolutions.”

“A cabal?” Viktor asked.

“He said it helped undermine the Communists and get Yeltsin into the presidency. It helped him get reelected. It sparked the wars in Chechnya and Georgia and Azerbaijan.”

He was chuckling long before I was done. “And you believed this garbage?”

“Uh, well…” I stammered.

“Of course you didn’t,” he snapped. “Surely your people had that figured out. Poor Alexi… so brilliant and attractive and, well, troubled in his head. Yes?”

I nodded.

Then he really chuckled. “For twelve years Alexi told your people these wild stories and the more he elaborated, the more crazy he sounded.”

“But you believed him, too, didn’t you? You helped Alexi search for this cabal. You infiltrated Yeltsin’s organization, you dispatched Alexi to find them. You gave him resources and you were involved.”

A look of amazement crossed his face. “Alexi told you this?”

“Yes.”

The surprise gave way to curiosity. “Did he say he ever found these people?”

“No. But you know that… he was reporting back to you. You were involved in every step of the search.”

“Oh really?”

“Alexi told me-you directed him to find these people. He reported everything to you.”

“Ah, yes, that’s true,” he said, slapping his side, like what a stitch that was. “Alexi thought he came so close, so many times. Then, mysteriously, the evidence would disappear.”

I was shaking my head, now completely confused. “What are you talking about?”

“He was always the good son, and he wanted his adopted father to see what he’d done. He so wanted me to be proud of him that he rushed in to tell me every time he got close. Unfortunately, he was about to destroy the most important work of my life. I had to prevent that, of course. So I sabotaged his operation.”

“You mean, you-”

“Of course, you idiot. This cabal, as you call it, these are my people.”

“But-”

“But nothing,” he sneered, obviously knowing what I was about to say. “Let me ask you something.”

I nodded.

“Do you know I put Kim Il Sung in power? I went into North Korea with him when the Great War ended. I disposed of his enemies and gave him the weapons to build a liberation army. I even persuaded Mao to send the Chinese army in to save him when your army chased him out of the South. Do you know I was the man who recruited Fidel Castro? I met him in Mexico when he was just an angry young punk with a big ego. I gave him the guns and told him how to run Batista off that island. Ho Chi Minh was another of my creations. I had his rivals assassinated and helped him rise to the top of the nationalist movement. I helped him run the French out, and orchestrated every inch of our support for his war against your army.”

He paused to let me absorb all that. I had picked up bits of it in the intelligence files, but it wasn’t the same as listening to him brag about everything he’d done. It isn’t often you hear from a man who’s changed the course of world history. It was chilling.

“And there were other leaders, other nations. The Congo, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe. I was the man who knew how to orchestrate revolutions and wars, to make sure the right man rose to the top. I was the kingmaker. That was Stalin’s nickname for me. Khrushchev’s also. Brezhnev thought I walked on water. Andropov, too.”

“You must’ve been busy as hell,” I said, wondering where this was going.

He gave me a sardonic look. “I woke up one day and realized something quite shocking, Drummond. I was working for idiots. I was the man building their empire, while they were destroying my homeland. They were stupid, venal men, all of them. Stalin nearly buried Russia. He made that idiotic bargain with Hitler and nearly got us all killed. Then Khrushchev, who was so clumsy in his dealings with your Kennedy, he nearly got us blown into a nuclear dustpile. And Brezhnev was nothing but a common thief. He wasn’t even a smart thief. We were lurching from bad to worse. Do you know what it feels like to serve a system that produces such garbage for leaders?”

“No,” I admitted, and I meant it, too.

He seemed to consider my answer, as though it were the naive babbling of a child. He sighed. “I was helping them destroy Russia. You Americans, you had the right idea. You ran your empire like an elite country club. You took only the rich and talented… Japan, Western Europe, Taiwan, Canada. We… well, we were taking in useless leeches. Eastern Europe, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Yemen, Ethiopia-what do all those places have in common? They are all impoverished messes. They were needy orphans that drained our wealth and energy. We got nothing from them. Nothing. And our own people were becoming poorer and poorer. This is not how these things are supposed to work, is it?”

I shrugged. Having never been in the empire-building business, what the hell did I know?

“It had to end,” he said, moving across the floor and waving his hands. “But how? Who had the skills to end it? I did, I suddenly realized. Poor Gorbachev, he never understood what was happening. Everything started going wrong. The Poles began striking under that mustachioed idiot Lech Walesa, and for some odd reason our intelligence services couldn’t seem to stop them. Very strange, eh? All of our power, and we couldn’t stamp out this rebellious movement. Then our great Red Army couldn’t seem to win in Afghanistan. Think about that, Drummond. Do you really believe that the Russian army was that incompetent against a bunch of fourth-world tribesmen? Or that we couldn’t have smashed Walesa and his people?” He chuckled. “We looked incompetent only because some very patriotic generals and officials deliberately made it seem that way. The whole point was to begin the fraying of the empire, to lose the war, to give Russia its own Vietnam. Then came the problems in Georgia, then Chechnya, then this man Yeltsin comes out of nowhere and threatens Gorbachev’s grip.”

“You were behind all that?” I asked, staggered by the scale of his plot, which was obviously more fantastic than Alexi had imagined.

“Of course. Oh, there were others, certainly… Many others, actually. Patriots who knew we had to sweep away the old system, to destroy the old order so we could rebuild.”

“But Alexi? Why didn’t you tell him? He was like your son, right?”

He stared down at the floor a moment, almost as though he was embarrassed by this admission. He said, “How could he have embraced what we had to do? He hadn’t seen how the Marxist idiots misruled, hadn’t experienced the cruel bite of their incompetence. He was too naive to understand at that time. Oh, I would’ve told him eventually.” He paused and seemed to wonder if he’d made the right choice. Then his indecision evaporated. “But Alexi served a vital purpose.”

“And what was that?”

“When he first came to me with his suspicions, I realized something. Everything was so vulnerable in the beginning. It could’ve been stopped so easily by forces inside Russia or by the West. We were so fragile in the beginning, secrecy was our only protection.”

“So?”

“You still don’t see it, Drummond?” he snapped, angered that I couldn’t jump to what he considered obvious conclusions. Like a lot of ridiculously smart people, those of us with average intelligence taxed his patience. “Alexi was the first outsider to detect it. With his extraordinary intellect, he was the only one who noticed that history was not flowing on a logical path. I was quite proud of him, actually. So I decided to use Alexi as a watchdog. He would keep me and my people on our toes. It was perfectly safe, of course, because he kept me informed of everything. But if Alexi couldn’t find us… well… then nobody could.”

I was suddenly awed by the sheer deceitfulness of this man. To him the whole world was a chessboard to be ordered as he wanted. Even Alexi was just one more pawn to be shuffled from square to square.

“That’s cold,” I said, unable to help myself.

“Cold?” he asked, shaking his head. “No, Drummond. I gave Alexi a historic role. He who serves in ignorance still serves, yes? Knowing we had a worthy opponent made us much more cautious. Without Alexi we might have become sloppy.” He paused and seemed curious. “Tell me something. How did you uncover poor Milt? What led you to him?”

“The second time you tried to kill us,” I admitted.

“Ah.” He nodded his head, obviously piecing the rest of the story together. He really was frighteningly brilliant. “I thought that was it. After the attempt in Moscow, I debated whether to try again. I just… well, I couldn’t have you and that girl sniffing around Alexi. You have to understand, Drummond, when you set the board, the pieces have to move by the rules. You and that girl were upsetting the rationality. You, nosing around in things that weren’t your business, and her becoming romantic with Alexi. What else could I do but eliminate you?”

I was thinking there were plenty of other things he could’ve done, but then I had very strong prejudices in this matter.

I said, “Yeah, well, we cross-indexed all the documents the CIA supposedly got from your vaults. When we found a few only Martin had seen, it all fell into place.”

“Oh, that’s very clever, Drummond. Poor Milt. You’re probably wondering how we recruited him. Back when he was a college student majoring in Russian studies, he visited here with a student group. It was the sixties, when so many of your young people were disenchanted by Vietnam, and Milt was very vocal about the rottenness of your country. We barely had to recruit him. Fate plays funny tricks, yes? Who could’ve imagined that his college roommate would go on to become President? The only use I ever saw for Milt was writing a few books and articles that were damaging for your CIA and foreign policy. We made a trade. I provided him the information and he became famous as a writer.”

“Well, as we say in America, sometimes you fall into a pile of shit and find a brick of gold.”

He gave me a very unpleasant look, and Felix took a step toward me. “Metaphysically speaking,” I quickly added. “I mean, Martin was a really brilliant coup, wasn’t he?”

“Brilliant?” Viktor said. “Milt was a coward. He refused to do anything unless I shielded him. So I gave him the template for a cut-out. The day Morrison walked into his office he knew he’d found the perfect doppelganger. You remember, I hinted to you that Morrison brought this on himself. He was so ambitious, and so obsequious, he virtually volunteered himself.”

“And Milt became invaluable?”

“You can’t imagine,” Viktor said, chuckling some more. “Poor Yeltsin, he couldn’t believe the quality of the intelligence I gave him, the things I could get your government to do. Every time I provided him with your President’s talking papers before they met, he would howl with laughter.”

“Yeah, but you put him in power and you owned him anyway, right?”

“I would hardly say I owned Yeltsin, Drummond. He was certainly not the man I would’ve chosen for the job. His only qualifications were his availability and pliability. Not that it mattered. He was always a transitory figure. We never intended to build our new Russia around him.”

“No?”

“Of course not. He never knew about us. He was a caretaker we leveraged into place to keep the chair warm until we could prepare one of our own to take over. Yeltsin would take the blame for the inevitable aftershocks of such abrupt change, and then we would offer the people a savior, a sober, take-charge type who promised to clean things up.”

The shock of what he was saying literally hit me like a jackhammer. “You mean…?”

He smiled. “You Americans are so blindly stupid, it’s extraordinary you’ve gotten so rich and powerful. Where did our new president come from? He worked for me, in my bureau of the KGB. How else do you think he got the job?”

I was shaking my head in disbelief. “It will never work, Yurichenko. Eventually the world will learn. You can’t keep it hidden forever.”

He brought his hand up to his chin, the same way Alexi did. It was almost uncanny. “So what? It’s gone too far to stop. Why would anybody even want to stop it? What would they worry about? Another empire? It’s the farthest thing from our minds. The whole notion of empires is passe, wouldn’t you say? They all fail, don’t they?”

“But what you’ve done in Georgia and the other republics. The world won’t permit that.”

He was shaking his head. “We don’t covet our neighbors, Drummond. We simply tell them what we want and force them to provide it. If they get rambunctious, like the Chechens and Georgians and Armenians, we make examples of them. But why would we want Uzbeks or Tadzhiks or Kazakhs back as part of our country? They’d all go right back to sucking off the tits of the Russian people. We simply want their oil and cotton at prices we set. You see how much better this is?”

He was asking rhetorically, of course. He knew damn well what I thought. In fact, he was chuckling, enjoying the amazement on my face, which was when I realized the only reason he’d explained all this to me. The old man was sadistically letting me know he’d pulled off the biggest scam in world history, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. It was his little victory dance, his way of saying, “Okay, so you stole Alexi from me, but don’t kid yourself that it was any big thing, because in the scheme of everything you’re hearing it’s a pimple on a gnat’s ass. You sacrificed yourself for nothing, Drummond.”

It was creative cruelty at its best. And the very fact that he was explaining all this in the first place was also a sly way of informing me he intended to embalm me in Russia’s deepest, darkest corner, and never let me smell anything close to freedom again.

He suddenly turned to his goons and barked something in Russian. Then he turned and gave me that sweet, grandfatherly smile. “Well, Drummond, we will not be meeting again.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I growled, and he gave me a curious look.

Then he turned around and walked out the door, leaving me to ponder a future that was going to really, really suck.