“You had trouble with your husband? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“I was not happy. He was. That often causes problems. Are you always happy with your wife?”
She looked deeply into his eyes.
“I’m supposed to be asking the questions, Colonel,” Castillo said. “But since you’re curious, no wife. Not ever.”
She shrugged.
“Where is your husband now?”
“He may be dead, or under interrogation, or perhaps he’s packing his bag to come looking for me.”
“He didn’t know what you were planning?”
“If he
“Nice guy.”
“He would be doing what he thought he had to do.”
“And if he comes looking for you and finds you, what do you think he would think he had to do?”
“The SVR would, of course, prefer to have us back home, but getting us there might be—probably would be —dangerous. So he would kill me. And, of course, Dmitri and his family.”
“As I said, a nice guy.”
“So obviously, the thing Dmitri and I have to do is not get found.”
Castillo picked up the phone and punched one button.
“Bob, get on the horn to Major Miller, tell him I need yesterday (1) the agency’s file on Evgeny Alekseeva, Colonel, SVR. I spell.” He did so, and looked at Svetlana to see if he had it right, which of course caused him to look into her eyes.
She nodded.
“And (2) tell him to get quietly onto NSA and get me all Russian traffic on the same guy. All of his aliases, too. If he’s moving, I want to know all about it.
“And I just thought of (3): Call Two-Gun and our cryptologist and tell them to hold off sending the data on that chip to NSA; I think we can decrypt it here. Got it?”
There was a pause as he heard it read back.
“If you got it, how come I didn’t get no
Davidson raised his eyes from his laptop and, shaking his head, smiled at him.
Svetlana looked at Castillo as if wondering why he wasn’t in a straitjacket.
“Which brings us back to Question One, Colonel: the reasons I won’t believe why you’ve defected. If it wasn’t to make off with the money, then what?”
“Dmitri and I realized that things weren’t really changed, that they were going back to the way they were, and that we didn’t want to be part of it anymore.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Castillo confessed.
“How much do you know about the SVR, about Russia?”
“Not much.”
“I think you think you know a good deal about Russia and the SVR,” Svetlana said.
“Is your ego such, Colonel,” she went on, “that you could accept that there’s a good deal you think you see that isn’t at all what you think it is, and that there is a good deal you don’t see at all?”
Castillo glanced at Davidson, who apparently not only could walk and chew gum at the same time but also had been often exposed to the wisdom of General Bruce J. McNab and just now had heard the same thoughts paraphrased by a good-looking Russian spook.
They smiled at each other.
“Did I say something amusing?” Svetlana snapped.
“Not at all,” Castillo said. “We just found it interesting that you are familiar with the theories of B. J. McNab, the great Scottish philosopher.”
“I never heard of him,” Svetlana said.
“I’m surprised,” Castillo said. “You’ll have to expand on what you said.”
“It’ll sound like a history lesson,” she said. “And I don’t like the idea of playing the fool for you.”
“I’m always willing to listen. Believing what I hear is something else.”
She looked at him intently, rather obviously trying to decide if he was indeed trying to make a fool of her.
“Do you have any idea, Colonel,” she asked, more than a little sarcastically, “how long what you would call the secret police have been around Russia?”
“No, but I think you’re going to tell me,” Castillo said, matching her sarcasm.
“What do you know of the boyars?” she asked.
“Not much.”
“Ivan the Terrible?”
“Him, I’ve heard of. He’s the guy who used to throw dogs off the Kremlin’s walls, right? Because he liked to watch them crawl around on broken legs?”
“That was one of the ways he took his pleasure. He threw people off, too, for the same reason.”
“Nice guy.”
She shook her head in tolerant disgust.
“Ivan the Terrible—Ivan the Fourth—was born in 1530,” she went on. She switched to English. “In other words, thirty-eight years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.”
He smiled, and she smiled back.
Castillo heard Davidson, who was bent over his laptop, chuckle.
Svetlana went back to Russian: “Ivan’s father, Vasily the Third, Grand Duke of Muscovy, died three years later, which made Ivan the Grand Duke.
“There was then no Tsar. The country was run by the boyars, who were the nobility, and each of whom had a private army, which they placed at the service of the Grand Duke of Muscovy. Everybody wanted to be the Tsar, but none was able to get everybody else to step aside to give him the job.
“The Grand Duchy of Muscovy—the most important one—was thus governed by
“This was fine, so long as he was a little boy. But he was growing up, and he might be difficult to deal with as an adult. So they began to impress upon him how powerful they were. One of the ways they did this would now be called ‘child molestation.’ They wanted to terrorize him, and when they thought they had succeeded, the boyars let him assume power in his own right in 1544, when he was age fourteen.
“They had frightened Ivan but not cowed him. He came to the conclusion that unless he wanted other people to run his life, he was going to have to become more ruthless than the boyars who were running his life and abusing him in many ways, including sexual.
“There is a lovely American expression which fits,” Svetlana said. “Ivan had gone through”—she switched to English—“ ‘the College of Hard Knocks’”—then back to Russian—“and had learned from his teachers.”
