Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"May I speak, Colonel?" Berezovsky said.

"Colonel"? That sounds pretty serious.

"Of course," Castillo said.

"And does that 'what anyone knows, everyone knows' rule of yours apply to me and Svetlana, or would you rather hear what I have to say in private?"

"Let's hear it, Dmitri."

"Does the name Colonel Pietr Sunev mean anything to you?"

"Ol' Suitcase Nukes himself," Delchamps said. "Talk about egg on the agency's face!"

Castillo chuckled. "Yes, we have heard of him, Dmitri. Friend of yours?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. Or he was."

"I'm in the dark," DeWitt said.

"Dmitri's former associates," Delchamps furnished, "let the agency find out that about a hundred briefcase-size nuclear weapons had been cleverly smuggled into the States, and were scattered all over the States waiting to be detonated at the appropriate moment--"

"And," Darby picked up, "this was confirmed by a Russian KGB defector named Pietr Sunev--"

"Who then led the boys in Langley on a merry chase all over the country," Delchamps resumed, "during which they found no bombs, because there were none."

"But," Darby interjected, smiling, "Colonel Sunev was such a nice guy and a convincing liar--and knew how to work a polygraph--that the agency believed him so much that--"

"They never used more efficient--if less pleasant--truth detectors on him," Delchamps said.

"--believed him so much," Darby went on, "that they gave him not only a very substantial tax-free payment for his services but also put him in the CIA's version of the Witness Protection Program, which gave him a new identity--"

"As a professor of political science!" Delchamps interjected. "I always loved that little nuance."

"At a prestigious left-wing college--"

"Grinnell. In Iowa," Delchamps furnished.

"--from which one day the professor disappeared--with, of course, the money he had been paid. To turn up a week or so later in Moscow."

"That's the man," Berezovsky said.

"You guys done good with that operation, Dmitri," Delchamps said.

"That operation did go well," Berezovsky said. "And I would rather suspect that General McNab is aware of it."

"What you're suggesting now is that he thinks you're Sunev Two?" Castillo asked, now quite serious.

"The United States would be excoriated in world opinion," Svetlana said, "if a team of your Spetsnaz was killed or captured trying to destroy a fish farm in a country whose population is starving. It would be worse if your aircraft was successful in destroying it."

"Where are you going with this?" Castillo asked.

"I think it would be much smarter, my Carlos, for Dmitri and me to go with you tomorrow than for us to stay here and watch the waves go up and down."

"To do what?"

"To convince General McNab of the truth," Berezovsky said. "And to make ourselves available, if that should become necessary, to the appropriate authorities."

Delchamps grunted. "Let me give you a scenario, Dmitri. You go through agency debriefing, which means this time the use of the less pleasant methods of truth detecting, and they believe what you have to say. Which isn't much. What you have told us is hearsay. We believe you, but that won't count with the agency. What they are going to think is that here is the guy--"