Tsar

The Russian mole, Dr. Stefanovich Halter, just as tweedy and natty as Hawke remembered him from Bermuda, pulled the door open. The smell of wood smoke inside was pleasant, and the weary British spy was pleased to come in from the cold.

“Alex,” Halter said, wasting no time on amenities, “prepare yourself.”

“Tell me, Stefan.”

“The man you’re about to meet is General Kuragin, the head of the Third Department, the Tsar’s private secret police. He’s waiting at a table in the kitchen. He’s a bit tight, I’m afraid.”

“Nikolai Kuragin?” Hawke said.

“Indeed. Know him?”

“I met him briefly at the winter palace. He’s the Tsar’s oldest and closest friend, is he not?”

“Well, let’s just say the general’s loyalty has never been above reproach and leave it at that.”

“Drunk, is he?”

“Not yet, but he’s working on it.”

“Take the bottle away.”

“Good cop, bad cop, as you Yanks say. I’m the good one. Listen, he’s got the Beta detonator with him. It’s one of only two in existence. It’s manacled permanently to his left wrist. He bloody sleeps with the damn thing.”

“Beta detonator? What the hell does it detonate?”

“Everything.”

“What do you mean, everything?”

“The whole bloody world, basically.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m deadly serious, Alex. Look, there’s no time to explain now, but Korsakov has basically hardwired the whole world with explosives inside computers. Zeta machines.”

“The Wizards? I own one.”

“Yes. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but it’s not. It’s bloody reality. Witness the demise of Salina, Kansas.”

“You said two detonators. Where is the other one?”

“Always with the Tsar. Kuragin’s is the fail-safe backup in case something untoward should happen to Korsakov.”

“Is our general feeling cooperative?”

“He will be when he learns how much we’re prepared to pay for the Beta detonator.”

“Am I doing the negotiating?” Hawke asked.

“We’ll double-team him. He wouldn’t have agreed to come here if he weren’t for sale, that I can promise you.”

“What’s our ceiling?”

“Fifty million U.S. dollars. But we’ll start the bidding at twenty. I’ve already transferred that amount to his account in Geneva.”

“I knew I’d gone into the wrong business,” Hawke said with a wry smile. “The kitchen is back this way, I assume?”

“LORD HAWKE, WELCOME,” General Kuragin said, getting somewhat shakily to his feet and extending his hand. “We met briefly under slightly grander circumstances a week ago in the country. The Tsar’s winter palace.”

“Indeed we did, general,” Hawke said, shaking the Russian’s skeletal hand and taking a seat at the old butcher-block table. The man’s splendid black uniform, heavy, deep-set dark eyes, and pale yellow skin gave him an uncanny resemblance to Himmler, if Hawke’s mental picture of the old Nazi was accurate. Halter joined them at the table, and Kuragin ceremoniously filled the glasses at each man’s seat from a half-empty carafe of vodka. Kuragin spoke first, and what he said brought Hawke upright in his chair.

“I understand you spent some time sharing a cell with my old friend at Energetika, Lord Hawke.”

“Putin is your friend? But you helped overthrow him.”

“Things in Russia are not always what they seem. There are wheels within wheels, Lord Hawke, believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you, general. Absolutely Byzantine.”

The general nodded, a fleeting smile on his lips. He’d actually taken the word as a compliment. Then he covered Hawke’s hand with his own, patting it as one would a child’s. The bony fingers were trembling, cold as ice.

“Putin was most impressed in his appraisal of you. In fact, it was Putin himself who insisted I meet with you today.”

“Really? Why?”

“Why do you think? Surely he brought you into his confidence. Made his future plans known to you that night in his wretched cell.”

“He did, indeed,” Hawke said, replaying bits of the long conversation in his mind.

“And?”

“Eliminate the Tsar and return to power,” Hawke said slowly, sitting back in his chair. This entire Russian affair was suddenly clicking into place like the encryption rotors inside an Enigma machine.

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Churchill had said of Russia, and truer words were never spoken. Hawke sat back, sipped his vodka, and studied the man.

General Kuragin was the one secretly protecting Putin inside the prison. And it was Kuragin who would orchestrate Putin’s return to power once the Tsar was safely out of the way. And it was Kuragin who would emerge from this latest coup even more powerful than from the last two or three.

Yes, it was all quite clear now. He’d finally found him. The man MI-6 had long ago dubbed the Third Man, the unseen power behind the Kremlin throne.

It was never Ivan Korsakov, as Hawke had gradually come to believe.

It was General Nikolai Kuragin.

Palace intrigue was a noble tradition in ancient Russia, and Hawke had managed to get himself tangled up in this bloody intrigue without even knowing it. He’d come to Russia suffused with confidence, ready to practice his craft, to spy on them, only to learn that he was merely a tiny pawn on their great board. And the Third Man, the grandest chess master of them all, had been using him all along.

Using the pawn to take out the king?

Kuragin smiled, his eyes like black slits behind the thick lenses, and Hawke had the disconcerting sensation that the man had been reading his thoughts.

“It was you, wasn’t it, general? You had me arrested and thrown into Energetika Prison for a bloody job interview!” Hawke said.

“Hmm. Let’s say I may have put the notion into the Tsar’s head. Of course, Korsakov had no idea you would live long enough to speak privately with our beloved former prime minister. No, Ivan the Terrible assumed you’d be impaled shortly after your arrival inside those forbidding black walls.”

“Ivan the Terrible,” Hawke said, smiling at the wily old spy. “Surprising you, of all people, would call him that. Your dear friend.”

“He’s a fucking monster,” Kuragin said with sudden ferocity.

“Impaling his enemies by the thousands is child’s play for him. Bringing about the total destruction of my beloved homeland by incurring America’s nuclear wrath is much more difficult. And yet that is precisely what he is about to do.”

“Unless you stop him.”

“Unless you stop him, Lord Hawke. I can never be seen as having anything to do with this, this…whatever you intend to do, for obvious reasons. I believe the current American expression is plausible deniability. I intend to have very plausible deniability, I assure you. Excruciatingly plausible.”

Hawke glanced at Halter, wondering how much he already knew of all this. Had Stefanovich Halter traveled all the way to Bermuda to take Hawke’s measure for Kuragin? It was surely possible they’d been planning a role for him even then. But Halter was giving nothing away. Men who’d spent their lives playing both sides of the scrimmage line were good at that kind of thing, else they paid in blood.