Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

“Then what is?” he said.

“We misjudged him. We thought of him as what we think he is, rather than what he believes he is.”

“Which is?” Castillo asked.

“Tsar of all the Russias. Vladimir the Terrible. Cast in the mold of Ivan the Terrible. Chosen by God to restore Russia to its former magnificence.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Castillo asked.

There was not a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

“Perfectly. Absolutely,” Pevsner said.

“Where did this come from, Aleksandr?” Castillo asked. “Your notion that Putin thinks of himself as . . . Ivan the Terrible reincarnate?”

“The first time I thought of it—and dismissed it—was during the funeral.”

“The imperial family’s funeral?”

Pevsner nodded.

The waiter pulled the cork from a wine bottle with a popping sound, and poured a little for Castillo to taste.

I probably shouldn’t take this.

But what the hell?

“You know Saint Petersburg?” Pevsner asked.

Castillo nodded, and Pevsner went on: “Renamed Petrograd from Saint Petersburg in 1914, then renamed Leningrad in 1924, and then back to Saint Petersburg in 1991, after the Soviet Union became the Russian Federation.”

Castillo vaguely remembered seeing photographs of the funeral. He hadn’t paid much attention to it.

“On July 17, 1998, eighty years to the day after the Tsar and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks, they were interred—as ‘The Royal Martyrs Tsar Nicholas II and his beloved family’—in the Royal Vault of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

“His Holiness Patriarch Alexis came from Moscow to preside, and President Boris Yeltsin represented the government of the Russian Federation.

“The arrangements—moving what was left of the bodies from where they had been tossed down a well in Yekaterinburg, some nine hundred miles east of Moscow, and DNA examination of the remains to prove it was indeed the Tsar and his family, were handled by one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, then the KGB’s man in Saint Petersburg . . .”

“Now, that’s interesting,” Castillo interrupted.

“. . . who was very visible during the interment,” Pevsner finished.

“Yeah,” Svetlana said. “That caught my attention, too. I thought he was being blasphemous.”

“And that was my initial reaction, too,” Pevsner said. “But then, as I said, I dismissed it, deciding that either possibility was improbable.”

“Either possibility?”

“That he was being blasphemous, as Svetlana thought, or that he had gone back to the Lord.”

“But?”

“I began to think of it again a few days ago in San Carlos de Bariloche,” Pevsner said. “When I was trying very hard, and failing, to see how Vladimir Vladimirovich’s intention to eliminate us tied in with the kidnapping of Colonel Ferris. When I finally realized it had nothing to do with that—the kidnapping had nothing to do, except possibly as a diversion, with eliminating us—everything suddenly began to be clear.”

“Tell me how,” Castillo said.

“Who is Vladimir’s greatest enemy? I don’t think anyone would argue it’s not the United States. Can he engage in a war against the United States? No. If he could, he would. Can he, at virtually no cost to himself, cause the United States trouble? Weaken it? Yes, he can. And is.”