Scorpion Winter (27 page)

“The SVR. Gabrilov.”

Ivanov shook his head and exhaled smoke. “Gabrilov is back in Moscow.”

The fact that Ivanov was here meant that he had ordered it, Scorpion thought. Gabrilov was probably being beaten to a pulp in a Lubyanka cell by the FSB that very minute. The SVR had played with fire, and now the Kremlin was reining them back in. He looked at Ivanov, sitting there so calmly. The Russian was waiting to tell him something, and he wasn't sure he wanted to hear it.

“All right, Checkmate. I know you want to tell me. It's probably why you came to Kyiv. So let's have it. Who set me up?” Scorpion asked.

Ivanov smiled. A tiny sign that he was enjoying their mental chess game and appreciated Scorpion's having figured it out.

“It was the CIA's Kyiv Station. One of yours. Somebody in the Company doesn't like you.”

Scorpion didn't say anything. He wanted to tell Ivanov to fuck off, but it made too much sense. Back when he was about to die, he had realized there was another player in the game. He didn't want to believe it, but it had the feel of truth. But why? If the Russkies wanted Davydenko to win, Washington sure as hell didn't. What the hell was going on?

“You could be feeding me black info,” Scorpion said.

“If I thought it would work, I would.” Ivanov smiled. “But it might bring you back to Moscow. Don't come to Russia, Scorpion. After going to so much trouble to save you, I wouldn't like to have to kill you anyway.”

“I wouldn't be too crazy about it myself. What's going to happen to them, to Viktor and Iryna, when Davydenko wins?”

“They'll make noise, and when the noise dies down, they'll be arrested. Not for Cherkesov; something else. Corruption perhaps.” Ivanov shrugged. “There's a lot of corruption in this country.”

“As opposed to Russia?”

“Or America?” Ivanov grinned, showing his teeth. They both smiled.

“And Russia controls Ukraine?” Scorpion said.

“There are people who believe Ukraine is part of Russia. That someday we'll get it back. I've heard people at the highest levels say such things.”

“Still, you opposed the SVR in this.”

“I opposed their tactics. Not necessarily their goal.” Ivanov glanced out the window at the traffic on the M03 highway and beyond to the buildings and the endless snow-covered plain. “Maybe they would be better off. Look at their history. This is a tragic country.”

Scorpion thought about Alyona and Babi Yar and Olena, the woman in the trailer-restaurant, and the millions starving to death in the Holodomor. He thought about Gorobets with his Black Armbands and what was coming.

“Yes, it is tragic,” he said, looking up. A highway sign up ahead read:
AEROPORT BORYSPIL 6 KM.

T
hey put him in a private airport holding room, empty except for bottles of Svalyava mineral water on a console and a few plastic chairs. The walls and everything in the room was white, even the plastic chairs. There was nothing personal there. It was a place where people waited, their lives elsewhere.

Even before he reached the center of the room, Scorpion spotted two hidden cameras. They were taking no chances, he thought. In addition to the cameras and bugs, they had a half-dozen FSB and SBU plainclothesmen and
militsiyu
stationed outside the door to make sure he got on the plane. He had less than an hour till his Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.

He asked to go to the men's room. On the way, he pickpocketed a cell phone from one of the SBU plainclothesmen. After asking the guards to wait outside and checking the stalls to make sure they were unoccupied, he called the Dynamo Club and asked for Mogilenko. A rough-sounding man's voice got on the line.

“Idi na tsuy huesos,”
he was told. Fuck off. “What do you want with Mogilenko?”

“Ya frantsoos,”
Scorpion told him. I'm the Frenchman.

After a long minute, Mogilenko came on the line.

“
Tu es fou, salaud?
Or should I call you Kilbane? I knew you weren't French,” Mogilenko said.

“I need a favor,” Scorpion replied in French.

“When I cut off your head and balls, you'll consider it a favor,
fils de pute
. Where are you? No matter how far you go, it won't save you.”

“
Écoutez
, don't be stupid. This is business,” Scorpion said.

“
Va te faire foutre
,” Mogilenko said, telling him to fuck off. Then after a moment, “What do you want?”

“You know Kulyakov? Prokip Kulyakov.”

“Maybe. What about him?”

“Be too bad if someone did to him what you were planning to do to me,” Scorpion said.

“He has friends.”

“So do I. Fifty thousand of them.”

“What is this? A joke? A miserable fifty thousand
hryvnia
?”

“Dollars,” Scorpion said.

There was a moment of silence.

“It must be admitted, you are
un type inhabituel.
” An unusual type. “What you did to my men on the bridge was
exceptionnel
. Kulyakov's SBU. It's a complication.”

“How much more complicated?” Scorpion asked.

“Seventy-five.”

“A hundred thousand. Half now, half when it's done. In five minutes I'm getting rid of this cell phone. Text me a bank account number.”

“Maybe you come back to the club and we discuss it,” Mogilenko said.

“One more thing,” Scorpion said. “It has to take a long time. A work of art.”

“What did he do, this Kulyakov?” Mogilenko asked seriously.

“The same to a woman. Young, beautiful like Marilyn Monroe. You'd have liked her,” remembering the photograph of Alyona in the café.

“This changes nothing between us,
salaud
. You still owe me,” Mogilenko growled.

“At the end, he needs to be warmed up. Use
l'essence
.” Gasoline. “And he has to be still alive when you do it.”

“One hundred thousand. Half now, the rest within twenty-four hours of Kulyakov's . . .” He hesitated.
“. . . sortie de grand.”
Grand exit. “And Kilbane, on the second payment, don't make me wait.”

“D'accord,”
Scorpion said, ending the call.

On the way back to the waiting room, he slipped the cell phone back into the SBU man's pocket. He had just finished transferring the money for Mogilenko with his laptop when Iryna came in.

She looked the way she had when he first met her. She wore a black sheath dress, pearls, the Ferragamo purse, the pixie cut that, if anything, made her more striking, and then there were those stunning lapis lazuli eyes. It was as if she hadn't been touched by prison or anything else that happened. When she saw him, she gave a little cry and ran into his arms. He could feel her trembling as he held her.

“I've been crying since yesterday. I thought you were dead,” she sobbed. He let her cry, holding her tight. Finally, she pulled back and looked at him. “I'm a mess. I wanted to look good for you.”

“You look damn good. You look as good as anything I've ever seen,” he said.

“I thought I'd never see you again. Then they told me you were at the airport. I don't understand.” She shook her head. “Not any of it.”

“The Russians. I'm their insurance policy. In a way, it's funny.” He half grinned. “Sometimes you need your enemies more than your friends.”

Her eyes scanned his face as if there were an answer for everything there, if she could just find it.

“What are you talking about? Insuring them against what?”

“In case Gorobets ever decides to do any original thinking that isn't first preapproved in Moscow.”

“The Russians know about Shelayev? Is that why there wasn't an attack?” He watched her wrinkle her brow and figure it out. “I see,” she said, fishing in her purse for a cigarette.

“For what it's worth,” he shrugged, “you should feel good. We stopped the invasion. Without you, it wouldn't have happened.”

She lit the cigarette and exhaled. “But we're losing the election. The latest polls . . . they're going to elect that idiot, Davydenko. Can you imagine?”

“Idiots get elected all the time. Welcome to democracy.”

“What do we do now?” she said, and it was like opening a floodgate. He couldn't help himself. He had to ask it.

“If we hadn't been captured, would you have come to Krakow?”

She got up, tossed the cigarette on the floor and stepped on it.

“Damn you,” she said. “Don't you understand anything besides yourself? Can't you see what's happening? This isn't America. Once Gorobets takes over, democracy is dead. Ukraine is finished. Viktor is a fool! He's listening more to Slavo than to me these days. If I leave, there's no opposition. Only Gorobets. My father,” she choked, “would roll over in his grave. I can't.”

She grabbed both his hands tightly. Her eyes burned like blue fire. “Stay here. Stay with me. We'll fight it together.”

“I can't,” he said. “I'd always be on the run. Too many people want me dead.” That was true enough, he thought. Mogilenko and the Syndikat, even with their deal. Gorobets. Kulyakov and the SBU, the SVR, even the CIA. “A whole alphabet wants me dead. Even worse, they would use me against you.” He looked into her eyes. “It won't work. Either you get on the plane to Frankfurt with me or we're done. I can't stay.”

She leaned back and let go of his hands.

“You work for the CIA, don't you? That's what they could use against you, us, isn't it?”

“No, I told you. I'm independent.”

“But you were with the CIA at one time?”

He nodded.

“Of course. It had to be something like that,” she said. “Politically, it's impossible. We're impossible.”

It's worse than that, Scorpion thought. It was the CIA that betrayed them to Kulyakov.

She put her hand to his cheek. “You look like hell,” she said. “So why am I so damned attracted to you?”

“Maybe you just like men who are trouble. It's very Slavic.”

She looked at him curiously. “We never fought, did we? Does that mean we don't love each other? Not even enough to fight?”

“I don't know what it means. Right now I feel like I lost a game I didn't know I was playing.”

“I'd have walked to Krakow to be with you if I wasn't tied hand and foot to this country,” she said, and a shiver went through him. “I'd've crawled,” she said softly.

“It would have been worse if the Russians had come in. We saved a lot of lives,” he told her.

“Not everyone,” she said, and he knew she was thinking of Alyona.

“No, not everyone.”

One of the FSB men who had been in the car with him and Ivanov came in.

“
Gospodin
Reinert, the plane is boarding,” he said.

Iryna came close to Scorpion. She smelled of cigarettes and Hermès 24 Faubourg, and it took everything he had not to put his hands all over her. The FSB man watched them from the open doorway, the sounds of the terminal flooding in. A boarding call for group two for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt came over the loudspeaker.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Someone tipped the SBU to where we were,” Scorpion said.

“Do you know who?”

“Yes, but not why,” he said, thinking he was going to find out if it killed him.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Tysons Corner

Virginia, U.S.

T
here were two up, two down, four outside, and two cars mobile. Bob Harris was taking no chances, Scorpion thought. They were to meet at the Tysons Corner mall, just off the Beltway outside Washington, D.C. Not that all the firepower and agents doing surveillance from every angle surprised him. Harris was the CIA's National Clandestine Service deputy director, and their meetings hadn't always been friendly. Scorpion watched from the second floor of the mall as Harris looked around, checking that his men were in position before getting on the escalator.

He hadn't changed much. A touch older, a little sleeker, but still the fair-hair-just-starting-to-gray postgraduate in a Jermyn Street style blue pinstripe suit that screamed Capitol Hill. He watched Harris come toward him, a determined smile painted on his face, like he wanted to sell him a condo.

“Are you wired?” Scorpion asked.

Harris grimaced. “You didn't have to be so skittish,” he said. “We could have done this at Langley.”

“No, we couldn't,” Scorpion said. Not that it made much difference whether Harris was wired. He had to assume that several of the agents had mobile receivers and that anything he said was being recorded.

“Now what? Do we walk or go sit at a California Pizza Kitchen?” Harris letting his snobbery show.

“Don't be a prick. We walk,” Scorpion said.

“How are you doing?” Harris asked, glancing sideways at him. “Are you all right?”

“Please don't pretend you give a damn. Lying always gets things off on the wrong foot.”

Harris stopped walking and looked at him. “I don't think you realize what's been going on here. The President himself has been involved. He wants to know, are you okay?”

“He's feeling guilty?”

“He said it was the toughest decision he's ever had to make. I think it really got to him.”

“Tell him I'm fine.” That was true enough. He had spent the last three weeks in Lausanne, Switzerland. The clinique was very private, very discreet; the kind of place where movie stars and dictators went when they didn't want anyone to know where they were. Thanks to Akhnetzov paying him the rest of his fee, he could afford it.

From his room he could see Lake Geneva and the snow-covered Alps in a jagged line across the horizon. During the day he worked with the physical therapist, doing rehab. The doctors said he had been lucky. There were no scars on his genitals, and as the pain receded, he would be sexually active again. He also spent some time with a dentist replacing the teeth that had been knocked out. At night he would walk up the steep rue du Petit-Chêne to the Place St. Francois in the old town, stopping at a bistro for dinner. It was there that he read in the
International Herald Tribune
that Davydenko had won the election in Ukraine.

That night, thinking about Kiev and Iryna, he couldn't get to sleep. Several times, he started to call her, then stopped. Toward the end of the second week he met a French female graduate student studying at the École Polytechnique. She was pretty and funny and approached sex as if it were an equation she was dying to solve, and he was able to prove to himself that sexually, at least, he was still functional.

Harris frowned as a trio of teenage girls walked by. They wore tight jeans and tops and talked nonstop, all three on their cell phones, with eyes only for the shop windows and any boys as they passed the video games store.

“What about the girl? This Iryna Shevchenko?”

“What about her?”

“You had an affair?”

“Christ, you take it to the edge, don't you?” Scorpion said, walking so rapidly Harris had to hurry to keep up.

“Take it easy,” Harris said.

“It's none of your damn business!”

“You're wrong,” Harris said, his voice cold. “It is business.” He looked around the mall as if scouting a battlefield. “Look, if you promise not to go crazy on me or throw whiskey in my face,” referring to the last time he and Scorpion had met, “can we find someplace civilized and get a drink?”

“Someone tipped the SBU about where I was in Kiev. I need to know why.”

“I know. But it's a problem,” Harris said, trying his most winning smile, the one that got half the female interns in Washington to drop their pants when he was younger. “What do you say? Truce?”

“I won't waste any more whiskey by throwing it in your face,” Scorpion said. “But I won't promise not to kill you.”

“Close enough,” Harris said, and signaled to one of his men. A few minutes later a car pulled up at one of the entrances and drove them out of the parking lot and across the street to the Tysons 2 Mall. They walked into the Ritz Carlton and went into the lobby bar, still busy with the lunch crowd, found an empty table and sat down. Two of Harris's men sat at a table near the doorway. Scorpion didn't bother to check; he was confident Harris had every entrance and exit covered.

“It's like a spooks' convention,” Scorpion said, looking around the crowded bar. “Is there anybody left minding the store at Langley?”

“This is the place,” Harris agreed as the waitress came over. She was slim and good-looking enough to help justify the price of the drinks. “What'll you have?”

“Belvedere Bloody Mary,” Scorpion said, thinking it was too bad you couldn't get Stoli Elit or Nemiroff in the States.

“The same,” Harris said.

They waited till the waitress walked away. There was no one near their table. Scorpion wasn't worried about bugs. Harris and the other spooks wouldn't be there if they were being listened to.

“You said there was a problem,” he said.

Harris toyed with the triple dish of nibbles the waitress had brought. He looked uncomfortable.

“Look, maybe in some cosmic accounting sense, I—we—owe you. I'll give you that. But frankly, if that's all it was, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about it or you.” His eyes were blue and very cold. “It's worse than that. If I tell you anything, I have to break protocol, every rule we have, and then I have to trust you. A Green Badge!” he said, referring to the fact that within CIA facilities, CIA personnel wore blue badges, while contractors and other nonemployees wear green badges. “And even if I could trust you,” his eyes narrowed as he looked straight at Scorpion, “what happens next time you go off in the wild blue yonder and get captured by the opposition? Then I not only have to trust that you won't reveal something against someone you don't like, on a matter of the highest national security, but you won't do it under torture! You see my problem?” he finished, just as the waitress returned with their drinks.

Scorpion didn't say anything. He watched the waitress as she wiggled to another table, wondering whether she had heard Harris's last words about torture. She's probably used to hearing all kinds of bizarre talk around here, he thought.

“You set me up, you son of a bitch,” he said, his voice soft, controlled, but intense. “You, Rabinowich, and Shaefer practically sent me an engraved invitation to Ukraine. You begged me to go and then you cut me off and then you sold me out. I was a couple of minutes away from a bullet in my head, so I'm supposed to give a shit about your problem? I'm your problem, Bob old buddy. If you really want to worry about something, I'd worry about me.”

Harris nodded grimly. He let his gaze wander around the bar at the gilt-framed paintings and men in expensive suits sitting over drinks.

“You look around and you'd think we live in a civilized world,” Harris said, “but that's not true at all, is it? Who pointed you at us? Checkmate?” meaning Ivanov and the FSB.

Scorpion smiled. He took a long sip of the Bloody Mary and put it down on the table.

“I was wondering when you'd bring that up. Did I think he was feeding me black info? The thought occurred, but no, I didn't think so. You know why?”

“You tell me,” Harris said.

“Because when I was laying there in that freezing cell, tortured to within an inch of my life, I realized there was another player in the game. Only I had neutralized them all: Kozhanovskiy, the Syndikat, the SBU, Gabrilov and the SVR, the Guoanbu's Second Bureau, Shelayev, the Chorni Povyazky. Christ, I got to everyone but the Boy Scouts. But there was someone else, someone I didn't know about. When Checkmate told me, I knew it was true.”

“What made you so sure?”

“The dog that didn't bark.”

“What?”

“Sherlock Holmes. As a fail-safe, in case something happened to me, I uploaded the video of Shelayev's confession to YouTube. Guess what? Nobody knew about it. It disappeared. This isn't China. Who on earth could have gotten Google to take it off? Who has that kind of leverage over an American corporation? The minute Checkmate said it, the person I thought of was you.” His eyes focused on Harris like a laser.

Harris finished his Bloody Mary. The waitress started toward them, and he waved her off.

“As soon as I heard about Checkmate being in Kyiv, I knew you'd be knocking at my door,” Harris said. “You know what the DCIA called it? ‘Our moment of truth.' That's what he said. Twenty-plus years in the Company and neither of us had ever faced anything like this.” He shook his head. “I met with the President. He's thrilled you're alive, but he's not sure that lets him off the hook. It bothered him. A lot.”

“Yeah, I know how tough you guys have it. West Wing chicken sandwiches, Ritz Carlton and all,” Scorpion said, looking at the spot on Harris's throat where a single blow would end it. “Cut the bullshit, Bob. Why'd you set me up?”

Harris smiled grimly. “I guess it's time to—what was it the old-timers used to call it—to
‘fallen die hose
,
'
to drop your pants.” He leaned forward. “I need your word. What we say now never leaves this table. Never. No matter who, no matter under what circumstances, no matter anything.”

Scorpion looked at him sharply. “Or else what?”

Harris glanced at the two men he had stationed by the door. Scorpion followed his glance.

Go to hell, he thought, but didn't say it. If Harris was this serious, it meant that what he was about to say went higher up. If he wasn't lying, it went all the way to the Oval Office. It might also explain why people he had trusted—Rabinowich and Shaefer—had gone along. Also, he didn't need a war with the CIA. “I'll want something in exchange,” he said.

“What?” Harris asked.

“I'll tell you when we're done.”

Harris exhaled sharply. “God, you're a pain in the ass. You want another?” indicating the drinks.

“You're buying,” Scorpion said.

Harris waved the waitress over and gestured for another round. They watched her walk away in her tan Ritz-Carlton-worth-the-money skirt and top. Harris hesitated.

“I have your word?” he began.

“For Chrissake, let's have it,” Scorpion said.

“I
t was a walk-in,” Harris said. “Can you believe that? A walk-in! Like having a single dollar bill in your pocket and, as a throwaway, you give it to the clerk and you win the lottery.”

“Where was this?”

“Madrid. An all-expenses-paid NATO and wannabes' conference. Tapas and whores. That's not the story.”

“What's the story?”

“The father. Let's call him ‘Leva.' Leva Nikolaevych. But you need the context. In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev becomes General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian parents from Dnipropetrovsk oblast. He was a protégé of Nikita Khrushchev, who, although Russian, was himself born near the Ukrainian border. Brezhnev brings with him several key Ukrainians whose loyalties belong to him. Among them is a certain KGB agent, our Leva Nikolaevych. Leva is instrumental during the period when Brezhnev is jockeying for power with Suslov, Kosygin, and others. He gets very close to Brezhnev, who will eventually consolidate all the power in his own hands. Life is good.

“Fast-forward to 1968. In Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dub˘cek launches a wave of reform that came to be known as the ‘Prague Spring.' This created a major crisis for the Soviet Union. You have to remember, 1968 was a time of great unrest: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the resulting student protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, demonstrations and protests all around the world, the riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Within the Russian Politboro there were serious disagreements as to how to deal with Czechoslovakia. They feared a wave of revolt and reform that if unchecked could lead to the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Some argued for a hands-off attitude, others for political and economic pressure, still others wanted a full-scale military invasion to crush the reform.

“The head of the KGB at that time was Yuri Andropov, who was also a member of the Central Committee and had ambitions of his own. He provided intel to the Central Committee that the CIA had instigated the Prague reform, that we were running Dub˘cek and were planning a coup, and that NATO was about to move to support Czechoslovakia and break up the Warsaw Pact.”

“Were we?”

Harris shook his head. “The truth was that the U.S. was ass-deep in Vietnam. We had our own problems. The Company had nothing to do with Dub˘cek or the Prague Spring, but Andropov had a majority of the Central Committee convinced they were on the brink of either the dissolution of the Soviet Union or nuclear war and that it was all a CIA plot. He demanded that the Soviet Union crush the Czechs. Preparations were made for a Soviet intervention.

“In August, 1968, Russian tanks led a massive invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. The Prague Spring was over. Reforms were ended. KGB agents arrested thousands of reformers, many of whom were killed. Thousands more were imprisoned and tortured. Most were never heard from again. Dub˘cek was hauled to Moscow and forced to sign a protocol that basically restored Soviet-style communism to Czechoslovakia.