Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

Neither Secretary Cohen nor DCI Lammelle saw any great problems in Roscoe’s situation. To the contrary, Mr. Lammelle saw it as a great opportunity to provide the President with disinformation.

“I don’t see where Roscoe has any choice but to do what the President wants him to do,” Secretary Cohen said.

“Except tell him what’s really going on, of course,” Lammelle said.

“Looking at Roscoe’s face,” Delchamps said, “I suspect he’s considering another alternative. Like, for example, going to the President, telling him what’s really going on, and placing himself, so to speak, at the mercy of the dingbat in the Oval Office

.”

Roscoe, who had in fact been considering that alternative, did not reply.

“You know what would happen in that happenstance, Roscoe?” Delchamps asked rhetorically. “Two things. One, the President would tell you to join Charley and do what he told you to do. Two, Sweaty would consider that what you had done had placed her Carlos in danger and she would come after you with her otxokee mecto nanara.”

“With her what?”

“It means latrine shovel,” Louise explained. “I don’t know about you, dear, but I wouldn’t want any woman, much less a former SVR podpolkovnik protecting her beloved, coming after me with an otxokee mecto nanara.”

Thirty minutes later, after his third stiff drink of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt Scotch whisky, Roscoe called the White House, asked for and was connected with the President, and then read from the sheet of paper on which Edgar Delchamps had written his suggestions vis-à-vis what Roscoe should tell the Commander in Chief:

“Mr. President, sir, after serious consideration, I have decided to accept your kind offer to serve my Commander in Chief to the best of my ability.”

He did not read the last four words Mr. Delchamps had suggested: “So help me God.” That was just too much.

[FOUR]

Office of the First Director

The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki

Yasenevo 11, Kolpachny

Moscow, Russia

1710 8 June 2007

General Sergei Murov had known when, in February, he had been relieved of his duties as cultural counselor of the embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C., and ordered home that he stood a very good chance of being summarily executed.

His family has been intelligence officers serving the motherland for more than three hundred years, starting with Ivan the Terrible’s Special Section, and then in the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and finally the SVR. He knew the price of failure, even when that failure was not due to something one did wrong.

It was presumed that if there was a failure, and if it wasn’t due to someone doing something wrong, it was because someone had not done what should have been done.

General—then-Colonel—Murov’s failure had nothing to do with culture. He had been the SVR’s man, the rezident, in Washington. His cultural counselor title had been his cover. It had been no secret to the FBI or the CIA, or even to some members of the Washington Press Corps, that he been the ranking member of the SVR in the United States. A. Franklin Lammelle, then the deputy director for operations of the CIA, had met his Aeroflot flight from Moscow at Dulles, greeted him warmly, and told him he thought it appropriate he greet the new rezident in person, as they would be “working together.”

Murov knew he was more than likely going to be held responsible for not doing what should have been done to prevent the failure of several of the most important kinds of operations, defined as those conceived and ordered executed by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.

Those operations had turned out disastrously. The first was intended to show the world, and, perhaps more importantly, the SVR itself, that Putin was back running the SVR and that the SVR was to be feared. It called for the assassination of people—a police official in Argentina; a CIA asset in Vienna; and a journalist in Germany—who had gotten in the way of the SVR in one way or another, followed by the assassinations of the publisher and the owner of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.

The latter was so important to Putin that he ordered the Berlin rezident to take personal control of the action.

Only the CIA asset and the journalist lost their lives. The Berlin rezident and his sister, who had been the Copenhagen rezident, not only defected but tipped off the Americans to a secret biological warfare operation run by the SVR in the Congo. The Americans promptly bombed the Congo operation into oblivion. The Vienna rezident responsible for the CIA asset elimination was found garroted to death outside the American embassy in Vienna.

In an attempt to double down, Putin then ordered General Vladimir Sirinov of the SVR to exchange a small quantity of the biological warfare substance, dubbed Congo-X, for the two rezidents who had defected, and the American intelligence officer who had aided their defection.

That, too, had turned out to be a disaster for him. The American intelligence officer who was supposed to have been kidnapped and taken to Russia, instead staged a raid on a Venezuelan island where Sirinov was waiting. He left the island in the highly secret Tupolev Tu-934A airplane Sirinov had flown from Russia, taking with him the Congo-X and Sirinov. On landing in Washington, General Sirinov, whom Putin expected to commit suicide under such conditions, instead placed himself under the protection of the CIA and began to sing, as the Americans so aptly put it, like a lovesick canary.

Colonel Sergei Murov was responsible for nothing that caused the multiple disasters. But he had done nothing, either, that might have caused the disasters not to happen.

That was enough, in his really solemn judgment, to earn him a bullet behind the ear in the basement of that infamous building on Lubyanka Square. Or at least an extended stay in Siberia cutting down trees and feasting on bean soup twice a day.