The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“I did not know of General Sirinov’s plan to tweak the American lion’s tail, and Sirinov had no reason to suspect that I even knew Charley, much less that I was the one who had been instrumental in upsetting it.

“He did learn, of course, that Charley had flown the aircraft into MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Charley was thus added to Sirinov’s list of people to be dealt with when the opportunity presented itself.

“Next, friend Charley messed up another SVR operation. Sirinov sent a team—under Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia Major Alejandro Vincenzo—to Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Komogorov, his FSB man in charge of operations in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, to eliminate a man who knew too much and had also made off with sixteen million dollars of the SVR’s money. When that escapade was over, Vincenzo and his men were dead, and Charley had the sixteen million dollars.

“Since Komogorov needed somebody to blame for that disaster, he decided to blame it on me, reasoning that if I were dead, I couldn’t protest my innocence. So he paid a large sum of money to my trusted assistant, the late Mr. Howard Kennedy, to arrange for me to be assassinated in the garage of the Sheraton Hotel in Pilar, outside Buenos Aires.

“When that was over, I was alive and Komogorov wasn’t. Corporal Lester Bradley had put an Indian beauty spot on his right eye. The others on his team were taken out by others working for friend Charley. And Mr. Kennedy went to meet his maker shortly thereafter.

“All of this tended to reduce the all-powerful, faultless image of both the FSB and the SVR, which meant that the power of Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich was becoming questionable.

“Sirinov dec

ided to settle the matter once and for all. With a great deal of effort, Sirinov ordered the simultaneous assassinations of a man in Vienna known to be a longtime deep cover asset of the CIA; a reporter for one of Charley’s newspapers who was asking the wrong questions about Russian involvement in the oil-for-food program; Liam Duffy, who had interrupted a previously successful SVR drug operation in Argentina and Paraguay; and—”

“So they’re all connected,” Alex Darby said.

“Oh, yes. Please let me finish,” Pevsner said. “And the assassination of another of Charley’s men, a policeman in Philadelphia, who knew the Muslims who planned to crash an airplane into the Liberty Bell were not smart enough to conceive of, much less try to execute, an operation like that by themselves and suspected the SVR was involved.

“When only the assassinations of the CIA asset in Vienna and of the journalist were successful, Sirinov had to report this failure to Putin. So far as Vladimir Vladimirovich is concerned, there is no such thing as a partial success. And Sirinov knew that the only thing worse than reporting a failure to Vladimir Vladimirovich was not having a credible plan to make things right.

“And he had one: Dmitri and Svetlana had been ordered to Vienna to participate in a conference of senior SVR officers. The cover was the presence in Vienna of Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s wax statue of Peter the First, which the Hermitage had generously loaned to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

“The Tages Zeitung journalist whom he had managed to eliminate was going to be buried with much ceremony in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany. There was no question that Eric Kocian and Otto Görner, managing director of Gossinger G.m.b.H. would be there. With a little bit of luck, so would Karl von und zu Gossinger, who was not only the owner of the Gossinger empire but Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who had been causing the SVR so much trouble. All three—plus at least some of Charley’s people who would be with him—could be eliminated at the same time.

“Tom’s train would pass through Marburg on its way to Vienna. So Sirinov dispatched a team of Hungarians—ex-Államvédelmi Hatóság—to Marburg, with orders to report to Polkovnik Berezovsky. Sirinov knew Dmitri—Tom—could be counted upon to supervise their assassination assignment with his well-known skill for that sort of thing. And then catch the next train to Vienna.

“Well, that turned out to be an even greater disaster for General Sirinov, as we all know.”

“Through God’s infinite mercy,” Svetlana said very seriously.

She crossed herself.

“Svet,” Pevsner said seriously, “you may very possibly be right, but there’s also the possibility that it was the incompetence of the CIA station chief in Vienna that saved Charley and Kocian from the ministrations of the Államvédelmi Hatóság.”

“It was the hand of God,” Svetlana said firmly.

“Possibly, Sweaty, it was the hand of God that contributed to Miss Eleanor Dillworth’s incompetence,” Delchamps said. “Same result, right?”

Svetlana looked at him coldly, not sure—but deeply suspecting—that he was being sarcastic.

“Eleanor is not incompetent,” Alex Darby said loyally.

“Come on,” Delchamps said. “She was incompetent in Vienna. The rezident there ... what was his name?”

“Podpolkovnik Kiril Demidov,” Barlow furnished. “He used to work for me.”

“Demidov was onto Dillworth,” Delchamps said firmly. “Maybe he didn’t know it was Tom and Sweaty, but he knew that—Jesus Christ!—Dillworth had a plane sitting at Schwechat airfield ready to haul some defector, or defectors, away from the Kunsthistorisches Museum.”

“You don’t know that,” Darby protested.

“I know that your pal Eleanor should have known that Demidov was going to take out the Kuhls. And once that happened, she didn’t have a clue what to do next. I asked her. She said she was ‘waiting for instructions from Langley.’”

“If I may continue, gentlemen?” Pevsner said a little impatiently.

“I didn’t trust her, Edgar,” Tom Barlow said, ignoring Pevsner. “I don’t know if it was that I thought she wasn’t professional or what.”

“It was the hand of God,” Svetlana insisted.