Black Ops

encouraged him to also eliminate the policeman in Philadelphia.”

“I heard that much,” Duffy said.

“Why?” Castillo asked again.

“Because he knows that those black people in Philadelphia are being funded by oil-for-food money. And Sirinov probably heard that the policeman now works for you. That could also explain your presence on his list.”

“I dunno, Tom,” Castillo said dubiously. “That seems stretching. And when they tried to whack Britton, he wasn’t working for me; he was on the Vice President’s Protection Detail.”

“I could be wrong, of course, but let me run the scenario out. We’re working pretty much in the dark. I’m trying to put things together. My theory is that the decision to eliminate two people opened the door to eliminating the others. We don’t know that Sirinov knew that we—Svetlana and I—had been in touch with the Kuhls. There were only two meetings with them, and I’d be surprised if we were detected.

“But the SVR has known about them for a long time. I can see Evgeny reasoning that this would be a good time to terminate them on general principles.”

“Nice guy, Susan,” Castillo said.

Berezovsky said: “Colonel—or may I also call you ‘Carlos’?—he is ambitious and quite ruthless, something I strongly suggest you keep in mind. And he has an agenda.”

“An agenda?”

“Do we have to get into this?” Susan asked.

“I think we should,” Berezovsky said simply. He met her eyes for a moment, waited until, just perceptibly, she nodded, and then went on: “Evgeny was shamed by the breakup of the Soviet Union. By the near dissolution of the KGB. By what he regarded as the shameful behavior of Aleksandr—and there were others like Aleksandr—who not only left their successful careers in the KGB but left Russia to become very rich.

“He was determined to stay; to be faithful to the Motherland; to do what he could to restore the Soviet Union—he never really accepted the words ‘Russian Federation’—to what he thought of as its former greatness. And, of course, the KGB to its former, now greatly diminished, power.

“He was not alone. There were thousands like him, ranging from privates in the border patrol to highly placed KGB officers. Colonel Vladimir Putin, for example. They flocked to the ‘new’ SVR. It wasn’t what it once was—many of the brightest officers had left—but it could form the nucleus of what Putin and the others were determined would be an even better, stronger organization than the KGB had ever been.

“And they immediately set out to do so.

“Just about everyone who had remained loyal and was not a certified moron was promoted. I was reminded of Hitler after France fell, when he made field marshals of all those generals. Among those promoted before his time was Evgeny Alekseeva, first to lieutenant colonel and then, after his wife was promoted to lieutenant colonel, to colonel.

“I was not promoted, and as I was not certifiably stupid, I suspected that this was because Putin didn’t like me very much. I had once been his commanding officer, and my reports on him were not flattering. But I had too many friends for Vladimir to ship me off for psychological evaluation, as happened to others. I think he was hinting that I might do well to join Aleksandr wherever he might be.

“I therefore resisted as well as I could any foreign assignments when they were proposed to me. The result of that, of course, was I was given the assignment—one I think I would have killed for, literally—as rezident in Berlin.

“Meanwhile, Evgeny was having domestic problems. His wife wanted a divorce. In the new SVR as well as in the old KGB, an officer is supposed to control his wife. Divorce was and is frowned upon. If she left him—much less divorced him—his career would have been severely hurt.”

“And he didn’t have any proof that she had ever been unfaithful to him,” Svetlana said. “Because she had never been unfaithful. If he had been able to even credibly allege that she had been in someone else’s bed, that would have solved the problem. He just would have killed her, and that would have been the end of the problem.”

Castillo looked up at her on the arm of his chair and thought: If you think that speaking in the third person, Simply Susan, my love, is going to disabuse Duffy of his suspicion that Dmitri is talking about you, have another think.

That cow was out of the barn a long time ago.

“So,” Berezovsky went on, “they acted as if nothing was wrong, continued to live together. Then Evgeny, who has always disliked me, had one of his inspirations. Who better to watch the Berlin rezident than the rezident’s sister—who happened to be Evgeny’s own wife?”

Did I mention the cow being out of the barn?

“It was no secret that I could not stand him, and that I had told my sister that she would be a fool to marry him. So far as they knew, she was Evgeny’s loyal, faithful wife, who hadn’t spoken to me or my family since we failed to show up for their wedding.”

“Causing her great embarrassment,” Svetlana chimed in. “Women don’t forget insults like that.”

“So Evgeny’s wife was appointed the rezident in Copenhagen,” Berezovsky said. “Which of course gave us the opportunity to defect that we took. I detect the hand of God in that.”

“Excuse me?” Duffy blurted.

Castillo saw the look on Duffy’s face.

Write this down, Liam, because there will be a quiz:

All Communists are godless, but not all Russians—not even all senior SVR officers—are Communists. Some of the latter are almost as devout as the Pope.

“There had to be divine intervention,” Berezovsky said. “It was all too much for coincidence, a series of coincidences. There was my assignment to Berlin, which placed me in contact with the Marburg Group. Then Svetlana being sent to watch me, and her seeing Charley’s photograph in the Tages Zeitung and”—he stopped and looked at Castillo—“her convincing me that eliminating you would be counterproductive. And, finally, you being on the ‘Bartok Bela.’ ”

“The what?” Duffy asked.

“The train to Vienna from Marburg,” Berezovsky explained. “My sister and I were on our way to Vienna to defect. Charley . . .”

“Carlos,” Svetlana corrected.

“ . . . was on the train. He had his airplane; he could have flown to Vienna—he should have flown to Vienna. But he was on the train. If he hadn’t been on the train, to save us from that incompetent CIA station chief in Vienna, Svetlana and I would have been arrested in Vienna. Our Lord and Savior put Carlos on that train.”

Castillo looked between Duffy and Berezovsky, and thought:

Actually, Billy Kocian put me on that train—“The dogs have suffered enough from the miracle of travel by air,” he said.

If you want to chalk it up to divine intervention, Dmitri . . .

But why the hell not?

He’s right. There were a lot of odd coincidences.

I expected to meet him in either Vienna or Budapest. If we had flown to Schwechat, the SVR would’ve bagged both of them in the West Bahnhof.

And I never would have seen him or Svetlana again.

She wouldn’t be sitting here on the arm of my chair, her fingers playing with the hair on my neck.

Was there more to Jack and me being on the train than Billy’s concern for the puppies? To this entire sequence of events?

Jesus Christ! Am I starting to believe him?

“Are you a Christian, Comandante?” Berezovsky asked.

“I’m Roman Catholic,” Duffy replied.

“My father’s brother was a priest,” Berezovsky said. “He taught me there were only two kinds of sins. One commits a sin. Or one fails to do what he knows he is called upon to do—the sin of omission. In this case, I know