The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“Whatever he did, it made Poppa an important apparatchik. Important enough to get his son into law school at Leningrad State University and then into the KGB, where he promptly began to suppress the local dissidents. Then, he told another so-called journalist, he was next assigned to East Germany, to a minor administrative position.”

“I wondered about that,” Castillo said.

“Do you think, having learned how to suppress Russian dissidents, that the KGB might have had him doing the same thing in East Germany?”

“Which, of course, he would like to keep quiet,” Castillo said. “In the interests of friendship between the Russian president and a now-reunited Germany.”

“Think about it, Karl. After serving in a ‘minor administrative position’ in the KGB in East Germany, he went back to Leningrad State University, if we are to believe what he told these reporters, where he worked in the International Affairs section of the university, reporting to the vice rector. Do you suppose he got that job because he was such a good student the first time he was there? Or because—having been all the way to East Germany—he was an expert in international affairs? Or maybe because the KGB wanted somebody with experience in suppressing dissidence suppressing dissidence at the university?”

“Where are you going with this, Eric?” Castillo asked, softly,

Kocian held up a hand, signaling him to wait, and then went on: “After a year of that—in 1991, if memory serves, and it usually does—Putin was put in charge of the International Committee of the Leningrad Kommandatura—excuse me, Lenin no longer being an official saint of Russia, Leningrad was Saint Petersburg once again.

“That made it the International Committee of Saint Petersburg Kommandatura. Where he handled international relations and foreign investments. To show that he had put all the evil of the Soviets behind him, Mr. Putin resigned from the KGB two months after getting that job. Correct me if you think I’m wrong, but if he resigned from the KGB in 1991 wouldn’t that suggest he was in the KGB until 1991? I mean, how can you resign from something you don’t belong to?”

Castillo chuckled but didn’t reply.

“Would you be cynical enough to think, Karl, that the man in charge of foreign investments in Saint Petersburg would be in a position to skim a little off the top and spread it around among what in the former regime had been deserving apparatchiks?”

“That evil thought might occur to me,” Castillo said. “Okay, what else?”

“Well, he did such a good job building foreign goodwill and attracting foreign investment that Putin suddenly found himself first deputy chairman of the whole city of Saint Petersburg, and, soon after that, he was summoned to Moscow, where he served in what he told the reporters who interviewed him were various positions under Boris Yeltsin. What they were was not mentioned. A cynical man might suspect this was because he might have been involved again with the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, otherwise known…”

“As the KGB,” Castillo said and laughed.

“Or the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti…”

“FSB,” Castillo said, still chuckling.

“…The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation,” Kocian finished, nodding, “which replaced the evil KGB, and of which Putin became head, and remained head, until he assumed his present role as an international statesman.”

“You think he was personally involved in the oil-for-food scam, Eric?”

“Up to his skinny little ass,” Kocian said, bitterly. “Both as a source of money for the FSB and personally.”

“Can you prove it?”

Kocian shook his head.

“But I’m working on it. I think I may be getting close to getting something I can print.”

“You think he knows that?”

“We have more spies per square meter in Budapest than Vienna and Berlin did in their heyday. Of course he knows.”

“And the people who tried to whack you? They were Spetsnaz sent by the FSB?”

“Whack meaning ‘kidnap’? Or ‘assassinate’?”

“Assassinate. Kidnap is ‘grab’ or simply ‘kidnap.’”

Kocian nodded.

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. They weren’t Russian. They were German, which makes me think they were sent by the KSB. The KSB is too smart to send Spetsnaz. They might be identified and Putin wouldn’t like that. More than likely, as we were discussing yesterday, former East German Stasi. What about the people who—what was that word you used, ‘whacked’? I like it—whacked Mr. Lorimer?”

“They were professionals,” Castillo said. “No identification on them. They had Swedish Madsen submachine guns. The CIA guys in Montevideo and Buenos Aires are trying to identify them. I don’t think we’re going to get lucky. They could be Stasi, or not.”

“If you’re really not CIA, Karl, how do you know what the CIA is doing? Or, for that matter, that they’d tell you the truth about what they’re doing or have found out?”