Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"It is only recently--since I have met you, as a matter of fact, Friend Charley--that I have been--my family has been--in any danger from the FSB."

" 'He's pals with Castillo. Kill the bastard!'?" Castillo said sarcastically.

Pevsner looked at his wife.

"Tell him, Aleksandr," she said. "Or I will. You are alive because of Charley. He is now our family."

Pevsner considered that a long moment, then waved his hands, signaling, Okay. If that's what you want, you tell him.

"The Communist Party, Charley, was very wealthy," Anna began. "Another state within a state, if you like. There was more than one hundred billion--no one really knows how much, and I'm speaking of dollars; no one cared then or now for rubles--some in cash and some of it in gold and platinum. Tons of gold and platinum. The Communists had no intention of turning this over to a democratically elected government. They planned to take power again, and they would need the money to do this.

"The first thing they did was authorize what was then the KGB to go into business in Moscow--regular businesses, car dealerships, real estate, everything. The idea wasn't to make money--although that happened--but to find places to hide the money.

"But what to do with the gold and platinum? It had to be taken out of the country and hidden somewhere.

"So how to do that?" Anna asked rhetorically, then gestured at her husband. " 'Ask Comrade Polkovnik Pevsner of the KGB and Aeroflot. He has spent more time out of the Soviet Union and been more places than just about anybody else.' "

"And I was a respected oprichnik," Pevsner interjected, "one who was trusted by them. So when they came to me, I suggested that I knew where to hide it. Saudi Arabia, the U.S., places like that. And I even had a cover story. I would leave the KGB, it would be arranged for me to buy several Ilyushin transports, and I would grow rich transporting small arms around the world and bringing luxury cars and French champagne into Russia. No one would notice--and no one did--that when my Ilyushins left Moscow or Saint Petersburg, several of the wooden crates ostensibly holding Kalashnikov rifles or ammunition for them actually held gold bars. Or platinum."

"Jesus Christ!" Castillo said.

"And, to make sure everybody believed that I had really left the Oprichina, it was arranged for Anna and the children to escape."

"What did you do with the gold and platinum?"

"After taking my agreed-upon fee of five percent--"

"You took five percent of a billion dollars' worth of gold?"

"I took five percent of a lot more than a billion dollars' worth of gold, Charley. And about twice that much of platinum."

He saw the look on Castillo's face.

"Is true," he said, chuckling. "And when that was over, I began to spend a very great deal of money ensuring that no one I formerly knew would ever see me or hear of me ever again. So you'll understand my annoyance, Friend Charley, when I heard that a young American colonel--no, a young American major--was looking for me because he thought I'd stolen a worn-out, old 727 from an airfield in Angola. At the time, I was buying four new 777s--through other people, of course--more or less direct from Boeing."

He smiled and reached out and touched Castillo's arm.

"Who would have thought the night we met in Vienna that one night we would be sitting together halfway across the world, as Anna put it, as family?"

"Jesus Christ, Alek!" Castillo said.

"If I tell you what I know about--and what I can learn about--the chemical factory outside Kisangani, you will not tell anyone where you got the information?"

"You have my word."

"And maybe you will be able to convince your superiors to do something about it?"

"It'll go, if I have to take it out myself."

Pevsner nodded his approval.

"You heard about the factory from your journalist? Is that what started you on this? 'If it's rotten, Aleksandr Pevsner will certainly know something about it'?"

"Actually, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky told me about it."

Pevsner clearly bristled at that. "All you had to say was 'None of your business. ' I don't find that funny. In the old days, I knew Berezovsky. Despite what he tried to do to you, he's a good man."

"Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky told me about the factory," Castillo said. "I don't lie to friends. If you don't believe me, you can ask your cousin Svetlana."