Black Ops

Anna’s face was frozen.

“And while Anna and the children are decorating the Novogodnaya Yolka,” Pevsner said quickly, as if trying to shut off that line of conversation, “I need to have a word with Colonel Munz and Charley. And you, too, Svetlana, unless you’d rather help decorate the tree.”

“I told you I’ve already gotten my present,” Svetlana said, giving the present a farewell squeeze. “So I’ll go with you.”

The maid placed a plate with one solitary pancake on it before Svetlana and a plate with a stack of half a dozen pancakes and four strips of bacon before Castillo.

Svetlana watched as Castillo buttered his pancakes and poured maple syrup over them. She buttered her pancake, put maple syrup on it, and then sawed off a small piece and forked it into her mouth.

Then she reached over to Castillo’s plate and transferred two pancakes and two strips of bacon to her plate.

She caught the maid’s attention and said, “We’re going to need some more of this, if you’d be so kind.”

[THREE]

Janos was in the library when Pevsner, Castillo, Munz, and Svetlana walked in, followed by a maid pushing a cart with a silver samovar, a silver coffee thermos, and the necessary accoutrements on it.

Pevsner waited somewhat impatiently for the maid to leave, then gestured to Janos to arrange chairs in a circle around a small low table. When he had, everybody sat down.

Janos then served. He poured coffee for Castillo and Munz without asking, asked Svetlana with a gesture whether she wanted tea or coffee, then poured tea for her and Pevsner.

“Since the circumstances have changed somewhat—” Pevsner began. “God, what an understatement that was!” he interrupted himself, and then went on: “Under the new circumstances, certain things have to be discussed and dealt with.

“I will start with Janos. Svet, Janos has been protecting me and the family for years. We have almost died together. Most recently, I was betrayed and lured to the basement garage of the Sheraton Pilar—near Charley’s safe house—where Podpolkovnik Yevgeny Komogorov, whom you know, and several of his friends tried very hard to kill us both. Janos was severely wounded. Only Charley’s people kept us alive. The boy who just now delivered the lectures on tree syrup and the Novogodnaya Yolka took care of Komogorov.”

He laid his index finger just below his eyeball.

“From at least fifteen meters with his pistol. Bradley is a very interesting young man.”

“Why did Komogorov want you removed?” Svetlana asked. She didn’t seem surprised to learn of Bradley’s skill as a pistoleer.

“We’ll get into that later. Let me continue,” Pevsner said. “So, Svet, you may trust Janos completely.”

Svetlana nodded.

“Now we turn to Alfredo, which shames me,” Pevsner said. “He was advising me. Not about any of my business enterprises, but how best I could disappear in Argentina, how best I could protect Anna and the children, things of that nature. I repaid his faithful service, when others were betraying me, by suspecting Alfredo was among them. Charley was a far better judge of character than I; he knew Alfredo was incapable of what I suspected. Charley also knew what I was capable of when someone threatened my family, that I believed what the Old Testament tells us in Exodus, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ rather than in turning the other cheek.

“Charley sent Alfredo’s wife and children to his grandmother in the United States to protect them from me. And Alfredo went to work with Charley. And when the time came, when Alfredo had every right in God’s world to apply what it says in Exodus to me, he instead turned to Saint Matthew and turned the other cheek.”

Castillo was having irreverent thoughts: While this theological lecture by the Reverend Pevsner is certainly interesting—and Svetlana is swallowing it whole as if he just carried it down from Mount Sinai carved in stone—the truth is if Alfredo could have got a shot at you when your thugs were following him around, he damn sure would have taken it. And then, when you found out he was really a good guy after all and called off your bad guys, he didn’t whack you because (a) he doesn’t like killing people unless he has to, and (b) it would have caused more trouble than the satisfaction would have been worth.

Or am I the only near heathen around here? Is Alfredo a Christian in the closet? “As a good Christian, Aleksandr, I forgive you. Go and sin no more”?

Or am I committing the sin of looking in the mirror? Just because I have trouble believing a lot of the things I’ve heard in church doesn’t mean that Alfredo does. And Svetlana and Aleksandr sound like they’re perfectly serious.

Jesus, what did she say when I wisecracked that I wasn’t a Christian in good standing?

“I’ll fix that” is what she said.

Jesus Christ!

“Have you been able to find forgiveness for me in your heart, Alfredo?” Pevsner asked.

“Of course,” Munz said. “You thought you were protecting your family, and I knew how you felt about that.”

“And will you come back to work for me?”

“No.”

“You can name your salary.”

“This isn’t about money, and you know it. Or should. And anyway, it’s moot. I work for Colonel Castillo.”

“And there is some reason you can’t work for both of us?”

Munz chuckled.

“Yes, there is, and you probably know it as well as I do,” Munz said, and then went on to quote effortlessly: “Saint Matthew, Chapter Six, Verse Twenty-four, ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ That’s from the King James Bible. But there’s not much difference between that and other versions of Holy Scripture.”

I will be damned.

You have been looking in the mirror, stupid!

“You’re right of course,” Pevsner said after a moment. “But that’s going to cause a problem.”

“How so?” Munz asked.

“I was about to tell Janos to contact everybody and tell them that you are back, and that you speak with my voice.”

Munz considered that quickly and replied. “If it’s all right with Colonel Castillo, that’s probably a good idea.”

“How so, Alfredo?” Castillo asked.

Pevsner answered for him: “Before the Buenos Aires rezident learns that you have brought Dmitri and Svetlana here, we’re going to have to move Dmitri out of your safe house. The Cubans do most of the work for him, for the obvious reasons—and we’ve seen the proof—and while they might not know specific details, the Cubans know the Americans have something, most likely a safe house, in Mayerling Country Club, and if the Cubans know, the rezident knows.”

Munz nodded his agreement.

And the Central Intelligence Agency, which will also shortly be looking for Berezovsky and family, also knows about Nuestra Pequena Casa.

“Move them where?” Castillo asked. “Here?”

“No,” Munz said. “I think the thing to do is for Alek and his family to stay here. So far as I know, the rezident doesn’t know anything more than that Alek has a place in Bariloche, but they don’t know which one.”

“There’s more than one?” Castillo asked.

Pevsner nodded. “Plus two more that might be suitable in San Martin de los Andres, which is several hours by car and forty minutes in the helicopter,” he said. “One of them, come to think of it, is a fly-fishing estancia. When the fish are not in season, we have paying guests, who find it a beautiful, romantic, out-of-the-way place just to get away.”