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.
Chapter Forty
Amran
Yemen
The four young men danced in a line, their old-fashioned muskets slung on their shoulders, waving their curved jambiya knives to the beat of the drums. They chanted the words of a tribal melody played by the drummers, an old man with an oud, and a barefoot musician with a meter-long khallool flute. Others in the crowd sitting on the floor joined in, a chorus of harsh male voices.
“We are the Hashidi
Born of bitterness and hate
We are the nails driven into solid rock
We are the flames of Hell
He who defies us will be burnt.”
There were cheers and the sounds of men banging the butts of their AK-47s and other weapons on the stone floor to show their approval, and shots were fired in the air outside. If the implied threat of the display troubled the bulky man in the military uniform of a Yemeni colonel seated on a pillow next to the full-bearded Sheikh al-Ahmari of the Hashid, he didn’t show it. The colonel wore the shaal turban of a sayyid, a descendent of the Prophet, of the Bakil. The Bakil were deadly rivals of the Hashid tribe, a fact that had been noted by every man in the room. The colonel was also director of the CSO, the Yemeni government’s internal security force, and thus doubly powerful.
“It is well, ahwadi, my brothers. Inshallah,” God willing, “we can make a truce between the Hashid and we of the Bakil,” Colonel Sayed al-Zuhrahi said. “The current conflict between the tribes and the government is in no one’s interest.”
“ Inshallah, but we of the Hashid are secure here in Wadi Qa’a al-Bawn. What is offered?” Sheikh al-Ahmari said. He gestured as a naadil came in with a tray of ginger coffee in thimble-sized cups and little bint al sahn honey cakes. The naadil had dark skin, a bad overbite with rotted, yellowing teeth and strange gray eyes. The naadil placed the tray on the floor in front of them, but instead of leaving, squatted beside a group of Hashid tribesmen cradling their AK-47s by the open window, their cheeks bulging with qat.
“If the Hashid and the Bakil were to unite, Sana’a would be ours. We could rule Yemen,” Colonel al-Zuhrahi said. The alliance he was proposing would end a long-simmering conflict between the two tribes. It would also create the most powerful player in the cockpit of competing factions and lawlessness that Yemen had become.
“We-or al Qaeda? For whom do you speak, sayyid, my brother?” Sheikh al-Ahmari said, looking at his advisors seated cross-legged on the floor, who nodded approvingly. He was challenging Colonel al-Zuhrahi to acknowledge that the Bakil tribe, like the Abidah, had been so infiltrated by al Qaeda that the alliance he was proposing would, in
