discover the lion has circled around and is now behind you.'
'Hey, good analogy. I'll remember that.'
'Please do.'
My next question wasn't really important to the subject, but I had to know. 'Did you teach Khalil how to kill with an ice pick?'
He seemed at first surprised, then a bit uncomfortable with the question. I mean, it was not an abstract question. He hesitated, then replied, 'I believe I did.' He then inquired, 'Why do you ask?'
'Why do you think I asked?'
He didn't reply to my question, but let me know, 'That idiot had never seen an ice pick, and when I showed it to him, he was like a child with a new toy.'
'I'll bet.'
'So, did the victim die?'
'Oh yeah. But I think it took awhile.'
'How many stabs?' he asked.
'Just one.'
Boris seemed annoyed, maybe frustrated with his old student, and said, 'I told him two or three.'
'Kids don't listen.'
'He is not a kid. He's… an idiot.'
I asked him, 'Hey, what's with the Russkies and the ice pick? Didn't you guys whack Trotsky with an ice pick?'
Boris seemed interested in this subject and replied, 'Well, as you can imagine, there are a lot of ice picks in Russia, and so they become the weapon of convenience, especially in the winter.'
'Right. I should have thought of that.'
Boris regarded me a moment, wondering, I'm sure, if I was having some fun with him. He played along by picking up a sharp knife on the table, saying, 'If you do not know what you are doing with this, you will not deliver a fatal wound. You will get this stuck in a bone, or in a muscle, or you will deliver a few non-fatal wounds, and the other person will have an opportunity to run or attack. Even a deep abdominal wound is not fatal unless you hit the artery.' He explained, 'The knife is good mostly for the throat'-he put the blade to his throat-'the jugulars here, or the carotids. That is fatal, but it is a difficult cut to make if you are facing your opponent. You need to come up behind him for a proper throat cut. Correct?' He put the knife down and concluded, 'But the ice pick will easily penetrate the skull from any angle, and it will also penetrate the breast bone into the heart, even if the victim is wearing heavy winter clothing, and it will, in either case, cause a fatal wound, though not instantly fatal.'
He seemed to realize that he'd gotten carried away with this subject, and he forced a smile and said, 'Perhaps not good dinner conversation.'
'I brought it up. You just ran with it.'
'Try that cognac.'
I took a small sip to be polite. Boris, for all his alcohol consumption, seemed alert-maybe it was the sobering thought that he was marked for death that kept his mind focused. In any case, he said to me, 'You must take care of him this time. If you do not, you will never have a day of peace.'
'Neither will you.'
He ignored that and asked me, 'How did he get away last time?'
Boris had some skin in the game, so this was not simply a professional or academic question. I replied, 'I certainly can't tell you more than your CIA friends told you three years ago. If you don't know, they don't want you to know.'
And since the CIA was my next subject, I asked him, 'What did the CIA tell you about their interest in Asad Khalil?'
He stayed silent for a while, then replied, 'Very little. But I had the impression-based on my own training and experience-that the CIA's interest in Khalil was not the same as the FBI's interest.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning, of course, that the CIA wanted to use Khalil for their own purposes.'
'Which were?'
He shrugged and said, 'If you don't know, then they don't want you to know.'
Time to stir up some poop, so I pointed out to Boris, 'The CIA must certainly know that Asad Khalil is back in America. So has anyone in Langley called you and said, 'Hey, Boris, your old pal is back and he probably wants your head in his overnight bag. But we're going to protect you'?'
Boris had thought about that within one second of me telling him Khalil was back, and he'd been thinking about it ever since. He stayed silent awhile, then said to me, 'My relationship with them is complicated. In fact, it is nonexistent since my last debriefing. They have turned me over to the FBI, and that is why I have not heard from them, and why it is you who are here.'
Actually, that was not why I was here-I was freelancing. As for the FBI being Boris's nursemaid, there was often a disconnect between the FBI and the CIA in the post-Soviet resettlement program. Sometimes it was just a glitch, sometimes it was simply indifference on the part of the FBI. Boris had no value to the Bureau, or to anyone, and he was now in limbo. But if someone in the CIA or the FBI realized that Boris Korsakov had become lion's bait, then they'd be all over him. The problem with the system, as always, was faulty communication, firewalls between the agencies, and bad institutional memories. So that left John Corey having pickled beets with Boris Korsakov. Or… it was possible that the FBI and the CIA were already on this, and half the clientele of Svetlana were Federal agents, but they weren't telling Boris, as I had, that Khalil might come calling. Well, I'd know very soon if my visit here was captured on film by my colleagues.
Boris said to me, 'I assume that my unwillingness to become bait, as you call it, will not be held against me.'
'Of course not. We protect all citizens-hey, are you a citizen?'
'No.'
'Oh, well, then… gee…'
'But I hold an American passport.'
'Me too.' I suggested, 'Maybe you and I should go to Moscow with your wife.'
He informed me, 'I would rather be in New York with Asad Khalil than in Moscow with my wife.'
I let that go, and reassured Boris, 'If you don't want to be actual bait, we can still work out some sort of protective detail for you.'
He had another thought and said, 'You know, I am very safe here, and I have no plans to leave here… until Khalil is killed, captured, or flees… so I am not sure I need your protection.' He added, 'In fact, I pay very good money for my own protection.'
There was a subtext here, and I thought that Boris was realizing he did not want the NYPD or the FBI hanging around Svetlana for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, and some maybe not so.
It occurred to me, too, that Boris was coming to some of the same conclusions that I had come to-he wanted to kill Asad Khalil without police or FBI interference. And his reasons went beyond my simple reasons of revenge and permanent peace of mind. Boris, I suspected, wanted Asad Khalil dead because Khalil knew too much about Boris. And what Khalil knew might not comport with what Boris had already told the CIA three years ago, about his not knowing that Khalil was coming to the U.S. to kill American pilots. Therefore, Boris did not want Khalil captured alive and interrogated by the FBI and the CIA. Boris would not be the first defector-a non-citizen-to be shipped back to the old country. I may have been wrong about that, but it was certainly a reason for Boris to want to get to Khalil first.
Another reason, possibly, was the reward, which he may have known about. I said to him, 'There's a million-dollar reward for Khalil's capture-dead or alive. Did you know that?'
'I would assume that.' He added, 'Not a lot of money for this man… but I am not thinking about capturing him… I am saying I will protect myself.'
'Come on, Boris. I know what you're thinking. And if anyone can capture-or kill-Asad Khalil, it's you.'
He did not reply.
I advised him, 'But don't get overconfident. Khalil hasn't spent three years running a nightclub and drinking vodka.'
