Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“. . . the Oprichnina was in charge of everything? Only the names changed and the Oprichnina walked through the raindrops of the purges they had over there at least once a year?”

“My son,” the archbishop said, “you’re again putting together things that don’t belong together. Yes, the Oprichnina remained—remains—in charge. No, not all the Oprichniki managed to live through all the purges. Enough did, of course, in order to maintain the Oprichnina and learn from the mistakes made.”

“Excuse me, Your Eminence,” Torine asked. “Are you saying the Oprichnina exists today?”

“Of course it does. Russia is under an Oprichnik.”

“Putin?” D’Alessandro blurted.

“Who else,” the archbishop replied, “but Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?”

“And that Mr. Pevsner, Swe… Svetlana, and Colonel Berezovsky were—are—Oprichniki?”

Nicolai Tarasov raised his pudgy hand above his bald head.

When Torine looked at him, Tarasov said, smiling, “Yes, me, too. I confess. If there were membership cards, I would be a card-carrying Oprichnik.”

“How do you get to be an Oprichnik?” D’Alessandro asked. “Like the Mafia makes ‘made men’? First you whack somebody, then there’s a ceremony where you cut your fingers to mingle blood, and then take an oath of silence?”

“One is born into the Oprichnik,” the archbishop said. “Or, in the case of women, marries into it. Only very rarely can a man become an Oprichnik by marrying into it. There is no oath of silence, such as the Mafia oath of Omertà, because one is not necessary. It is in the interest of every Oprichnik to keep what he or she knows about the state within the state from becoming public knowledge.”

“May I have your permission, Your Eminence, to make a comment?” Aleksandr Pevsner asked. It was the first time he’d said anything.

The archbishop nodded.

“But please, my son, try to not get far off the subject,” he said.

“The Oprichnina has not endured for more than four hundred years without difficulty,” Pevsner said. “From time to time, it has been necessary to purify its membership—”

“Purify it? How was that done, Mr. Pevsner?” Jake Torine asked.

“I recently found it necessary to purify my personal staff of a man—an American—who betrayed the trust I placed in him.”

“Howard Kennedy?” Torine asked.

Pevsner did not respond directly, but instead said, “As I was saying, we have found it necessary to purify our ranks from time to time and also to place under our protection certain individuals who have rendered one or more of us—and thus the Oprichnina—a great service.

“This was the case with our Charley. Before he met Svetlana and Dmitri, I very seriously considered eliminating him as a threat. God in His never-failing wisdom stayed my hand, and Charley lived to save my life at the risk of his own. Knowing that others, in particular Vladimir Vladimirovich, still wanted our Charley out of the way, I sent word to Vladimir Vladimirovich that I considered our Charley my brother.

“Ordinarily, that would have been enough to protect our Charley, as a friend of the Oprichnina, but Vladimir Vladimirovich apparently decided that our Charley posed a threat he could not countenance and/or that I no longer had the authority to categorize Charley as a protected friend of the Oprichnina.

“He sent Dmitri and Svetlana to eliminate our Charley in Marburg, Germany. That operation turned out disastrously for Vladimir Vladimirovich, as you all know. Not only did Dmitri and Svetlana decide not to eliminate our Charley, but enlisted his aid in helping them to defect.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich had SVR agents waiting in Vienna to arrest Dmitri and Svetlana. Instead, our Charley flew them to Argentina and ultimately brought them here.”

“Can I jump in here, Your Eminence?” Vic D’Alessandro asked.

“I was afraid this would happen,” the archbishop asked. “But yes, my son, y

ou may. Try to be brief.”

“Thank you,” D’Alessandro said.

“Dmitri—”

“Please call me Tom, Vic.”

“Okay. Tom, why did you defect? From all I’ve ever heard, all the intelligence services in Russia live very well, and I’m guessing that you Oprichniks lived pretty high on the hog. So why did you defect?”