“The Leningrad Four?” Holliday asked.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the president; Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow; and Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov, head of the FSB. They were boyhood friends in St. Petersburg, they were all in the KGB and they have all risen to great power. Genrikhovich thinks they’re part of some ancient society called the Order of the Phoenix or something equally melodramatic.”
“There is no Order of the Phoenix?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“The Kremlin Egg?”
“It was never here. It always remained in the Kremlin Armoury. It wasn’t part of the evacuation, something I could never make Genrikhovich believe, I’m afraid. He said Golitsyn’s son would back up everything he said.”
Holliday only knew of one person named Golitsyn. “Anatoliy Golitsyn? The KGB defector who exposed Philby and the Cambridge Five spy ring back in the sixties?”
“The very one.” Zukov laughed. “Except Anatoliy Golitsyn never had a son, only a daughter.”
“What did Genrikhovich say to that?”
“He said the son was illegitimate, by a secretary named Maria Ivanova, who worked for the KGB in Leningrad-pardon, St. Petersburg. According to Golitsyn there is even some connection to Putin or Stalin or something equally foolish. The boy took the mother’s name-Anatoliy Ivanov. According to Genrikhovich this spectral bastard works in Moscow and has an apartment on Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane in the Arbat district.”
“Did you check it out?” Holliday asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I had neither the time nor the inclination. Genrikhovich loves to weave endless tales of dark conspiracies, secret societies, the KGB infiltrating the Church, the Romanovs, anything to get attention. Anatoliy Ivanov was nothing but a figment of the man’s fevered imagination. He is, as you Americans say, a fruitcake.”
“So we’ve been screwed,” said Holliday.
26
Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian FSB, stared out the window of his seventh-floor office and looked down at Lubyanka Square. The statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky was gone, but people still avoided walking in front of the old All Russian Insurance Company building the statue had faced. The memories of the blood-soaked dungeons and torture chambers in the basement were too fresh for some Russians. It looked cold outside, and a harsh wind was blowing scraps of newspaper and dust from the gutters. Winter was coming.
Bortnikov turned away from the windows and walked back to his desk. The office had once belonged to Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD and later the KGB, a small, round-faced bald man with a pointy chin and a small mouth who looked far more like a bookkeeper than he did Stalin’s favorite goblin, and the man responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian people at Stalin’s command.
Everything was the same as it had been in Beria’s time; the parquet floors had been maintained, as had the waist-high silver birch wainscoting that ran around the large, high-ceilinged room. The dark green paint on the walls above the paneling was unchanged, and even the small electric brass button beneath the desk was still there, used to summon the guards who would escort his new victims to the basement cells.
Bortnikov sat down at his desk and smiled grimly at the heavyset, gray-haired man across from him. “So, Tikhonov, what can you tell me about Holliday and his Cuban friend?” Alexander Tikhonov was director of the FSB’s Special Purpose Center, a catchall subdirectorate useful for everything from disposing of bodies to manufacturing letter bombs and arranging traffic “accidents.”
“We’re assuming that they reached Yekaterinburg. Apparently they stole a crop-dusting plane, which we have since discovered was actually being used to smuggle drugs from Afghanistan.”
“Has the owner been arrested, questioned?”
“It was attempted. The man resisted and was killed.”
“Too bad. I thought that Holliday was an Army Ranger. How is it that he could fly an airplane?”
“It was the Cuban. His name is Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso. According to our friends in Yasenevo he flew MiGs, among other things.” Yasenevo was a town just beyond the Moscow Ring Road and was home to the headquarters of the SVR, Russian Foreign Intelligence.
“Edimburgo?”
“Presumably his mother liked Scotland.”
“He speaks Russian?”
“Fluently.”
“How did Holliday meet him?”
“This past summer. The Cuban was a river pilot in South Sudan. It is a long story, I’m afraid.”
“All right, enough about this peculiar Cuban. Yekaterinburg. .”
“The stolen aircraft was found in a field a kilometer from the town of Sredneuralsk. There are several taxis there. Presumably they took one to Yekaterinburg.”
“Are we sure of that?”
“They booked themselves into the Yekaterinburg Hyatt using the Michael Enright and Simon Toyne passports they bought in Odessa.”
“And they weren’t caught?”
“As Kafka said, ‘Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.’” Tikhonov smiled. “The information was received too late. Twenty-four hours too late. They are gone.”
“So we are slime now, Tikhonev?” Bortnikov laughed. “In Stalin’s day you would have been taken to the basement here and given a single bullet to the back of your head.”
“In Stalin’s day I never would have said such a thing, tovarich Bortnikov,” Tikhonev said, using the old Russian word for “comrade.”
“I will have a conversation with Director Skorik about his failure to have identified the use of the passports.” Vladimir Skorik was head of the FSB Information Security Center. One of the center’s primary functions was to monitor foreign passport use within the Russian Federation. Holliday and the Cuban had apparently slipped through the cracks for a vital twenty-four hours.
“They never visited the church?”
“No. We had two men outside and two in. They never set foot in the church or the museum.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” replied Tikhonev.
Bortnikov leaned back in his chair. “What will they do now, I wonder?”
“If they didn’t go to the church, perhaps they’ve given up,” said Tikhonev. “Maybe they’re looking for an exit strategy.”
“I doubt it. From what I can gather about Holliday he is not a quitter.” Bortnikov sighed. “Nevertheless, you may be right. I want their photographs at every border crossing out of the Federation and at every highway roadblock. Cover the airports, domestic and international, as well as the train stations. I want them caught, Tikhonev, and caught soon.”
“I think it’s crazy,” said Holliday. “It would never work.” They were standing in the green-tiled basement preparation room of Dimitri Chaplitzky’s mortuary. Dimitri’s brother, Ivan, their waiter at the Central Hotel in Sredneuralsk the day before, was also with them, along with his dark-suited, dour-faced brother. Dimitri Chaplitzky bore a remarkable resemblance to Ichabod Crane in Walt Disney’s version of the Headless Horseman tale. As well as the two brothers, there were two of Dimitri’s clients, both dead, both male, both extremely ugly and both turning the color of Stilton cheese.
