Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

She looked at him intently, rather obviously trying to decide if he was indeed trying to make a fool of her.

"Do you have any idea, Colonel," she asked, more than a little sarcastically, "how long what you would call the secret police have been around Russia?"

"No, but I think you're going to tell me," Castillo said, matching her sarcasm.

"What do you know of the boyars?" she asked.

"Not much."

"Ivan the Terrible?"

"Him, I've heard of. He's the guy who used to throw dogs off the Kremlin's walls, right? Because he liked to watch them crawl around on broken legs?"

"That was one of the ways he took his pleasure. He threw people off, too, for the same reason."

"Nice guy."

She shook her head in tolerant disgust.

"Ivan the Terrible--Ivan the Fourth--was born in 1530," she went on. She switched to English. "In other words, thirty-eight years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492."

He smiled, and she smiled back.

C

astillo heard Davidson, who was bent over his laptop, chuckle.

Svetlana went back to Russian: "Ivan's father, Vasily the Third, Grand Duke of Muscovy, died three years later, which made Ivan the Grand Duke.

"There was then no Tsar. The country was run by the boyars, who were the nobility, and each of whom had a private army, which they placed at the service of the Grand Duke of Muscovy. Everybody wanted to be the Tsar, but none was able to get everybody else to step aside to give him the job.

"The Grand Duchy of Muscovy--the most important one--was thus governed by ad hoc committees, so to speak, of boyars, who 'advised' the Grand Duke what to do, whereupon he issued the Grand Ducal Order.

"This was fine, so long as he was a little boy. But he was growing up, and he might be difficult to deal with as an adult. So they began to impress upon him how powerful they were. One of the ways they did this would now be called 'child molestation.' They wanted to terrorize him, and when they thought they had succeeded, the boyars let him assume power in his own right in 1544, when he was age fourteen.

"They had frightened Ivan but not cowed him. He came to the conclusion that unless he wanted other people to run his life, he was going to have to become more ruthless than the boyars who were running his life and abusing him in many ways, including sexual.

"There is a lovely American expression which fits," Svetlana said. "Ivan had gone through"--she switched to English--" 'the College of Hard Knocks'"--then back to Russian--"and had learned from his teachers."

Again Castillo smiled at Svetlana, and she smiled back and Davidson chuckled over his laptop.

"Ivan selected from among the boyars," Svetlana went on, "a small number he felt were hard enough to deal with the others, and at the same time he could control, both by passing out the largesse at his control and by terrorizing them.

"He also knew that if he had the church on his side, he would also have the support of the peasants and serfs, who were very religious--"

"Wasn't it some other Russian," Davidson asked innocently, "who said, 'Religion is the opiate of the masses'?"

"No, Mr. Davidson," Svetlana corrected him. "It was Karl Marx who said that. He was a German, a Jew with a strong rabbinical background, and what he actually wrote was 'Opium des Volkes,' which usually is mistranslated."

"I stand corrected," Davidson said, and then wonderingly asked, "I wonder if my Uncle Louie knows that?"

The question so surprised her that she blurted: "Your Uncle Louie?"

"He's a rabbi," Davidson explained.

Castillo chuckled.

Svetlana shook her head again in disbelief.