“Whoever this assassin is, there is little doubt that his action was directed by TarankOv,” Kabatov said. “On that there can be no argument. Which brings us back to arresting the sonofabitch. Are there any more suggestions as to how we should proceed?”
“President Yeltsin wanted him arrested when he showed up in Nizhny Novgorod,” Zhigalin said. “We can go ahead with that plan.”
“He won’t show up there,” Yuryn said.
“Why not?” Kabatov asked.
“Tarankov found out that preparations were being made in Nizhny Novgorod for his arrest, so he retaliated by staging the raid on the Riga facility, and then assassinating President Yeltsin.”
“Do you know this for a fact?” Zhigalin demanded.
Yuryn shook his head. “If, as the Prime Minister suggests, Tarankov did order President Yeltsin’s assassination, that would be the reason. He knew about Nizhny Novgorod.”
“Assuming this is in fact true, how do we proceed?” Kabatov asked.
“Besides plugging the leaks so that Tarankov does not learn of our plans, we have to deal with two problems,” the FSK director said. “The first is the western media. They want to know what happened this morning on Red Square.”
“That’s already being taken care of,” Viktor Yemlin interjected from the end of the conference table. He was chief of the North American Division of the S VR, which was the foreign intelligence branch of the old KGB. Previously he’d worked as rezident for the KGB’s operations in Washington and New York.
Kabatov had no love for the old KGB or its successors the FSK and SVR. He’d come under investigation by the intelligence service when he served as ambassador to the United Nations eight years ago. Despite his position, and the fact that the charges against him were proven to be groundless, he’d been treated roughly. But Yemlin was an important moderate, despite his position and background.
“Well?” he said, his dislike obvious.
“Explosive ordnance used for the protection of President Yeltsin that is normally carried in one of the escort limousines was defective and detonated by accident, killing three presidential security service officers and the driver. President Yeltsin’s limousine was not touched.”
“Why hasn’t the President made a statement?”
“He died of a stress-induced heart attack this morning at 11:38 a.m. A body will be produced to lie in state, and his funeral will be scheduled for one week from today.”
Kabatov grudgingly admired the tremendous lie. “Can the SVR pull it off?”
“I’m told we can, Mr. Prime Minister,” Yemlin said. He was a distinguished looking man who reminded everybody of Eduard Shevardnadze with his kindly eyes and thick white hair. “But it will require the cooperation of everyone in this room.”
“How long can such a lie be sustained?” Zhigalin asked.
Yemlin shrugged. “Historians opening records a hundred years from now might find out. It was only recently that the truth behind the executions of Tsar Nicholas and his family came out.”
Kabatov nodded. “Very well, do it.”
Yemlin smiled faintly. “It’s already being done.”
Kabatov held back a sharp retort. Instead he turned to Yuryn, who was staring thoughtfully at Yemlin. “What is the second problem we have to deal with?”
“Tarankov’s next moves. If indeed he did order President Yeltsin’s assassination it may have signaled the start of his end game. Though how he’ll react to the SVR’s coverup is anyone’s guess, we need hard intelligence on his intentions. Without such knowledge trying to arrest the man will, in the very least, result in a blood bath. If we’d known ahead of time about his raid on the Riga facility and had tried to stop him, the people up there would have gotten in the way. There would have been a lot of deaths. Killing him would be easier than arresting him. But if you mean to go ahead, give me time to put a man on the train.”
“Do you have someone in mind?” Kabatov asked.
“I have any number of capable officers.”
“The reason I ask is because by your own admission Tarankov has his support in every government agency, at every level.”
“I have people who will do it,” Yuryn said.
“When can you start?”
“If it’s what you want, immediately,” Yuryn said.
“It is,” Kabatov said. “Arresting Yevgenni Tarankov is Russia’s only hope, and our most urgent priority.”
FIVE
Viktor Pavlovich Yemlin returned home to his spacious apartment on Kalinin Prospekt shortly after 7:00 p.m.” and poured a stiff measure of Polish vodka. He sat in his favorite chair, put his feet up and stared out the window at the lights of the city and the gently falling snow.
He was a deeply troubled man. In the old days, before his wife died of cancer, he would have enjoyed company at times like these.
Someone with whom to discuss his misgivings, his feelings of doom and gloom. But he had been a widower for so long that he had come to make peace with his solitude. In fact he rather enjoyed being alone, though he bitterly missed his only son, who’d been killed in Afghanistan.
He turned on the stereo with the remote control, and set the volume for the disc of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Minor, his favorite piece of music, and laid his head back.
In his late sixties, Yemlin was not the man he should have been. Born in 1930 in Kiev, his parents had moved to Moscow at the start of the Great Patriotic War, and at twelve he ran away with his brothers to help defend Stalingrad against Hitler’s army. After the war his parents died of heartbreak, because of seven boys Viktor was the only one to survive, and he’d survived flawed because his youth had been so dramatically cut short.
He was arrested and sent to count the birches in Siberia because he’d lied on his officer’s candidate school and Moscow State University applications. He claimed he was older than he was so that he could count his military service for bonus points.
Four years later the NKVD, which was the forerunner of the KGB, discovered his name and his heroism in military records, and immediately recruited him. He was sent first to Moscow State University where he was educated in political science and international law and politics, to the prestigious Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations, then to Officers Candidate School and the War College, and finally to the NKVD’s School One.
He worked on a number of projects for the NKVD and then the KGB in eastern Europe, until General Valentin Baranov recruited him for the real work of a spy: That of the grand schemes of the seventies and eighties in which the Soviet Union would take over the world with the strong right arm of its KGB.
In a series of brilliant missions from Mexico City (the Soviet Union’s largest and most active embassy and KGB station), to the United Nations in New York, and finally as resident of KGB operations for all of North America out of the Soviet embassy in Washington, Yemlin proved himself to be one of the most capable and effective intelligence officers the Komityet had ever fielded.
He’d never been considered for promotion to head the agency, because he didn’t have the right background or the correct political patronage for such advancement. But he was well respected by every KGB director he’d ever served under.
Now that the Soviet Union was no longer intact he should have been one of the bitter old guard for whom Tarankov’s message was a siren’s call to the old ways. Many of the men in the FSK and SVR were admirers of the Tarantula, hoping that a new Soviet Union would somehow rise out of the ashes of the old.
Instead, he had become a moderate. Years of living in the West’s openness with its cornucopia of ideas and consumer goods had changed him. So subtly at first that even he wasn’t aware of the differences in his outlook. But finally he understood to the depth of his soul that the great communist experiment of a world socialist movement had failed not because of corrupt, cruel leadership, but had disintegrated of its own ponderous, unrealistic weight.
