Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

Did I mention the cow being out of the barn?

"It was no secret that I could not stand him, and that I had told my sister that she would be a fool to marry him. So far as they knew, she was Evgeny's loyal, faithful wife, who hadn't spoken to me or my family since we failed to show up for their wedding."

"Causing her great embarrassment," Svetlana chimed in. "Women don't forget insults like that."

"So Evgeny's wife was appointed the rezident in Copenhagen," Berezovsky said. "Which of course gave us the opportunity to defect that we took. I detect the hand of God in that."

"Excuse me?" Duffy blurted.

Castillo saw the look on Duffy's face.

Write this down, Liam, because there will be a quiz:

All Communists are godless, but not all Russians--not even all senior SVR officers--are Communists. Some of the latter are almost as devout as the Pope.

"There had to be divine intervention," Berezovsky said. "It was all too much for coincidence, a series of coincidences. There was my assignment to Berlin, which placed me in contact with the Marburg Group. Then Svetlana being sent to watch me, and her seeing Charley's photograph in the Tages Zeitung and"--he stopped and looked at Castillo--"her convincing me that eliminating you would be counterproductive. And, finally, you being on the 'Bartok Bela.' "

"The what?" Duffy asked.

"The train to Vienna from Marburg," Berezovsky explained. "My sister and I were on our way to Vienna to defect. Charley . . ."

"Carlos," Svetlana corrected.

" . . . was on the train. He had his airplane; he could have flown to Vienna--he should have flown to Vienna. But he was on the train. If he hadn't been on the train, to save us from that incompetent CIA station chief in Vienna, Svetlana and I would have been arrested in Vienna. Our Lo

rd and Savior put Carlos on that train."

Castillo looked between Duffy and Berezovsky, and thought:

Actually, Billy Kocian put me on that train--"The dogs have suffered enough from the miracle of travel by air," he said.

If you want to chalk it up to divine intervention, Dmitri . . .

But why the hell not?

He's right. There were a lot of odd coincidences.

I expected to meet him in either Vienna or Budapest. If we had flown to Schwechat, the SVR would've bagged both of them in the West Bahnhof.

And I never would have seen him or Svetlana again.

She wouldn't be sitting here on the arm of my chair, her fingers playing with the hair on my neck.

Was there more to Jack and me being on the train than Billy's concern for the puppies? To this entire sequence of events?

Jesus Christ! Am I starting to believe him?

"Are you a Christian, Comandante?" Berezovsky asked.

"I'm Roman Catholic," Duffy replied.

"My father's brother was a priest," Berezovsky said. "He taught me there were only two kinds of sins. One commits a sin. Or one fails to do what he knows he is called upon to do--the sin of omission. In this case, I know what the Lord is calling upon me to do: help Carlos deal with the chemical factory. I am going to resist the temptation of sin, as I had planned to do."

"Excuse me?" Duffy asked.

Uh-oh!

Has the Reverend Berezovsky gone too far?