The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“What about Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo? Doesn’t he have Berezovsky and Alekseeva? And since that name has come up, he wants Colonel Castillo, too.”

“Who ‘he,’ Sergei? Who ‘wants Colonel Castillo, too’?”

Murov smiled, but now his eyes were cold.

“Frank, we never lie to one another,” Murov said.

True. But we obfuscate as well as we know how—and we’re both good at it—all the time.

“So far, that’s been the case, Sergei,” Lammelle said.

“That being the case, you’re not going to deny that Berezovsky and Alekseeva left Vienna on Castillo’s airplane, are you?”

“Several people I know have told me that, so I’m prepared to believe it. But I don’t know it for a fact.”

“Or that Castillo works for you?”

“It’s my turn to ask a question. You didn’t answer my last question: Who ‘he’ that wants Castillo?”

Murov took a moment to organize his thoughts, and then asked, “How much of the history of the SVR do you know, Frank?”

“Not nearly as much as I should,” Lammelle said. “I know that the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki used to be the First Directorate of the KGB, and there’s a story going around that the reason it’s so powerful is because, in addition to his other duties to the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin runs it.”

“You do know how to go for the jugular, don’t you, Frank?”

“Excuse me?”

“My question was: How much of the history of the SVR do you know?”

“Putin doesn’t run it? For a moment there, I was beginning to think that Putin was he who wants Castillo, too.”

“Once more, Frank: How much of the history of the SVR do you know?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Sergei, what you think I should know about it?”

Murov looked at him carefully and pursed his lips as he framed his reply.

Finally, he asked, “Would you be surprised to learn that its history goes back beyond the Special Section of the Cheka? Back beyond the Revolution?”

“I don’t know. I never gave that much thought.”

“Where do you think the Cheka came from?”

“I know it really became important in 1917—1918?—when Felix Dzerzhinsky took it over.”

“Did you ever hear that Dzerzhinsky was an oprichnik?”

“I don’t know what that is. But I have heard that Dzerzhinsky had been locked up and nearly starved to death by the Bolsheviks until just before he was given the Cheka.”

“That’s what you and I would now call ‘disinformation,’ Frank. I think it unlikely that he ever spent a day behind bars. Dzerzhinsky was in fact an oprichnik.”

“And I told you I don’t know what that means.”

“I’m about to tell you. In 1565, Ivan the Terrible moved out of Moscow, taking with him a thousand households he’d selected from the nobility, senior military officers, merchants, and even some serfs. Then he announced he was abdicating.

“The people left behind were terrified. Ivan the Terrible was really a terrible man, but those who would replace him were as bad, and before one of them rose to the top, there would be chaos.”

Where the hell is he going with this history lesson?