Black Ops

“I don’t know about cynical. I guess it’s to be expected of an oprichniki. I know you guys have to be careful, even of your friends. Or maybe especially of your friends.”

If looks could freeze, I would now be colder than that ice-encased bottle.

He raised his vodka glass to Pevsner and drained it.

“Mud in your eye, Alek!”

Anna’s face had gone almost white.

“What did you say?” Pevsner asked coldly.

“About what?”

“Goddamn you to hell, Charley!”

“You’re not supposed to have secrets from your friends,” Castillo said. “I remember you telling me that. Several times.”

“You are on very thin ice, Friend Charley.”

“Speaking of ice,” Castillo said, raising his glass. “That was just what I needed. May I have another?”

He went to the ice-encased bottle of vodka and refilled his glass.

“Can I pour you one? You look like you could use it,” Castillo said, and then asked, “How come you never told me you are a card-carrying member of the Oprichina?”

“Was a member,” Anna said very softly.

Pevsner glared at her, then moved the glare back to Castillo, who went on: “Okay. Was an oprichniki. Did you formally resign? Or just not show up for work one day as the Kremlin walls were falling down?”

“What do you want, Charley?” Pevsner asked very softly.

“I want you to tell me everything you know about Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky.”

Anna sucked in her breath. Her lips looked bloodless.

God, I hope she’s not about to pass out!

“Berezovsky, Dmitri, Colonel. The Berlin rezident,” Castillo pursued. “A high muckety-muck of the Oprichina. Tell me about him, Alek, please.”

“Why are you interested in Berezovsky?”

“Fair question. He had a man who worked for me at the Tages Zeitung killed. And he tried to take out two people very close to me. Oh, and me. I’m always curious about people who want to kill me.”

“If Berezovsky wanted you . . . eliminated . . . you wouldn’t be standing here,” Pevsner said.

“Well, you’re wrong. He did, and here I am. You should not believe your own press releases, Alek. The SVR isn’t really that good.”

“Why did he try to kill you, Charley?” Anna asked.

He saw that some of the color had returned to her face.

And there was something about her carriage that told him that she had abandoned her just-a-wife-who- doesn’t-have-any-idea-what’s-going-on role.

And Pevsner has seen that, too. He’s not trying to shut her up.

“I don’t really know. I think he was trying to send a message for the SVR. Maybe make a statement. ‘We’re back, and we’re going to kill everybody who gets in our way.’ ”

He gave that a moment to register and then went on. “I know why he took out the reporter for the Tages Zeitung. He was getting too close to the connection between the Marburg Group who made all that money sending medicine and food to Iraq, and what’s going on in the African chemical factory. I want you to tell me everything you know about that, too.”

That was a shot in the dark.

But his eyes—and especially the tongue quickly wetting his lips—show I hit him hard with it.

The proof came immediately.

“In exchange for what?” Pevsner asked.

“Well, for one thing, it will keep our professional relationship where it is. The agency and the FBI will leave you alone . . . presuming you don’t break any U.S. laws.”

That’s bullshit.

The agency and the FBI will no more obey the President’s order to leave him alone than they obeyed Montvale’s order to leave me alone. They will do whatever they can to silence him. The agency’s skirts are the opposite of clean.

“How cynical are you, Friend Charley?”

“Well, probably not as much as I should be. But I can learn, I guess.”

“I have personal reasons for not telling you all I know about Dmitri Berezovsky. I won’t tell you what they are, and that’s not negotiable. I will tell you what I know—which isn’t much—about the chemical laboratory in the ex- Belgian Congo, and my price there is very cheap. You don’t tell anyone—anyone including the agency—where you got it.”

So Berezovsky wasn’t lying. There is a chemical laboratory. His big chip to deal with me. Or was Svetlana the big chip?

“Why are you being so good to me, Alek?”

“That’s why I asked how cynical you are. Are you capable of believing it’s because I think what they’re doing there is despicable?”

“Define despicable.”

“Biological warfare that would kill millions of innocent people is despicable. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Why would you say that none of this has come out?”

“It has come out. The Muslims boast there will be a caliphate from Madrid to Baghdad and that they will kill how many millions of Christians—and, of course, Jews—as necessary to accomplish that. Nobody wants to believe that, so they pretend they didn’t hear it.

“Exactly as they didn’t want to hear that Hitler was murdering undesirables by the millions, and Stalin’s starving Russians to death by the millions in the gulags, and Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons to kill several hundred thousand of his own people.”

“So you’re suggesting that there’s nothing that can be done, that we should lie down and let these people roll over us?”

“I’m suggesting that the best that people like you and me can do is stop a little here, and a little there, and meanwhile try very hard to keep yourself and the people you love alive.”

“Is that the voice of experience I hear?” Castillo asked without thinking, and hearing himself, immediately regretted the sarcasm.

Pevsner’s icy glare showed he didn’t like it either.

For a very long twenty seconds, he said nothing. Then: “As a matter of fact, it is. It is the experience of my heritage speaking.”

He paused again, almost as long.

“Friend Charley, you’re very good at what you do. God gave you an ability few have.”

Where the hell did God come from?

There was no sarcasm in the way he said that.

Alex believes in God?

I’ll be damned!

“You didn’t come here and throw the Oprichina in my face without knowing something—probably a good deal, but not as much as you think you do—about it.”

He paused, obviously thinking, before going on: “You know how far back it goes?”

Castillo nodded. “Ivan the Awesome.”

“A terrible, tormented, cruel, godless man, who by comparison makes Stalin and Hitler and Saddam Hussein look like Saint Francis of Assisi,” Pevsner said. “But not all of the people he took off into the state within the state were like him. There were good, God-fearing people among them, who went with him because the alternative to being of unquestioned loyalty to Ivan was watching your family being skinned alive and fed to starving dogs.”

“Your ancestors?”