Coercion (4 page)

“
The Peregrine has hatched
.”  Victor had been just twenty-two when he heard those words for the second time.  He was standing in a dimly lit smoky room, watching horny fraternity guys make their last ditch efforts to score liquor-loosened sorority girls while Pink Floyd blared numbingly in the background.  Graduation was but twelve hours away.

A
stunning coed with long blond hair walked through the crowd to Victor as though he were starring in a beer commercial.  She put her arms around his neck, gave him a knockout smile, and started to dance without saying a word.  It was the kind of sultry, undulating dance that calls up images of Arabian nights, and sets your blood afire as your throat goes dry.  After a nice wide-eyed stare, Victor ripped his gaze from Blondie’s cleavage and began to gyrate.  She ran her tongue across her lips to focus his eyes and then mouthed the code in Russian.

Victor dropped his beer on the frat house floor as his mind balked beneath the weight of a dozen questions and the burden of things to come. 
She steadied him as his knees grew weak, while his erection stayed his bladder.  Now he understood… 

Once Victor stabilized,
Blondie stepped back to scoff at him.  Then she locked his eyes in a sober stare.  “Remember, even at a party, you still serve
The Party
.”  Then she turned and dissolved into the crowd while reality closed around him like an iron fist.  After years of establishing deep cover in the US, Victor was being activated.

He had come to the US five years earlier, a boy of seventeen.  Once they implanted him with surgical precision, the KGB had withdrawn from Victor’s life like a disease in remission
.  They wanted his roots to grow, wanted him to branch out, blend in, and develop.  Oh, he had often sensed their presence—watching him, measuring him, judging his competency for things to come.  It didn’t really bother him.  Life as a student had made his future with the KGB seem removed and abstract.  He had put it out of his mind as something distant and foreign, like the threat of lung cancer when you light up a cigarette. 

Victor knew that college in America was one long job interview, a test.  Now that he was graduating, it appeared the results were in.  How had he scored?  That was no simple question.  Oh, his grades were great, and his student leadership outstanding, but Victor was never sure what the men in Moscow were really looking for
.  The price of failure on the other hand was crystal clear.  He supposed they wanted it that way.

At least reacting to activation did not require much effort on his part.  There were no bags to pack or bills to pay; they would take care of everything.  V
ictor simply had to show up at the Air Canada desk, ready to go anywhere.  He hoped Blondie would be accompanying him on the trip—a last wish sort of thing—but it was not to be.  Eight hours after graduation Victor found himself on the loneliest flight he ever took.  Cyprus was a fine place to make a man disappear.

He landed with a backpack over his shoulder and his heart on his sleeve.  During disembarkation on the Larnaca tarmac, Victor stepped back in the aircraft doorway so he could scan the waiting crowd while the other passengers descended the staircase.  What was it going to be?  Whom would they send?  Would he ever leave this island?

A newspaper dipped, a perfectly-coiffed head looked up, and piercing eyes arrested his gaze:
Father
.  Women flushed, men flinched, doors opened, doubts vanished—Vasily Karpov changed things just by walking into a room.  The General’s charisma had little effect on Victor, however.  He was immune.  All he ever felt was fear, the fear of letting the Great Man down.  Was it a good sign that his father had come personally, or a bad one?  Victor swallowed hard even as he drew his hand away from the ceramic knife in his sleeve.

Five minutes later, after a welcome as warm and tender as a court summons, Victor was sitting in silence.  He was in the defendant’s chair, and about to be read his sentence.
 
Just get it over with
.

He worked hard not to fidget as his father turned the jeep left
out of the airport and accelerated toward the Troodos Mountains.  Now that Victor knew he had a future, he was trying to take his mind off the fact that he was about to have it dictated to him.  There was nothing on The General’s face, no indication, good or bad, of things to come.  If his father ever had a heart, he had lost it long ago.

They were a thousand meters up and looking down on the drifting mist when
Vasily finally spoke.  His words were the biggest surprise so far—yet but a subtle whiff of what was to come.  “You’re one of the few people on this planet who has lived in both superpowers, Victor.  Tell me, son, which do you prefer?”

There was a loaded question.  On the one hand, a KGB General was asking a deep-cover Soviet mole to choose between the US and the USSR.  On the other hand, a father was asking his son if he would rather live in California or Siberia.  Only one thing was certain: whether general or father,
Vasily Karpov was all business.  Victor would have to answer truthfully, defensibly, and quickly.  He pictured the BMW he now drove—zero to sixty in under six seconds—then thought of the Lada he would have in Russia—zero to sixty if he was lucky.  Then there was the food…

“You don’t need to answer that,”
Vasily said, cracking what appeared to be a genuine smile.  “Actually, if you set aside language and the proximity of relatives, there is only one honest answer to the question.  The average American has ten times the purchasing power of the average Russian, and twenty times the choices.  And then there’s the weather.  What I really want to ask you is this: Why?  Why is that the case?”

Why indeed, Victor thought.  Both the US and Russia were superpowers.  The populations were roughly the same.  The Soviet Union, with more than double America’s
land mass, had far more natural resources.  Russia’s population was better educated, its single-party government less encumbered.  So what was it?  Why would his father be asking…?  It took a couple of minutes, the hot and sweaty kind, but when he got it, Victor knew he had the right answer.  But was it the correct one? “Bad management.”

“Precisely.”

Victor began to glow—for the first time in his life, he had said precisely the right thing to his father.  And his father, for the first time since Victor had met him, seemed to be human.  As it turned out, Vasily was just teeing him up for the punt.

“We’re going to change all that.”

The words hit Victor with near physical force, sending him reeling.  Father was not one to fantasize or speculate.

“Before I tell you how,
Son, let me ask you a few more questions.”

Victor just nodded, trying to arrest his spinning mind.

“Why is the Soviet Union considered a superpower?”

“The Red Army, our nuclear arsenal, the KGB…”

“Correct.  Now a tougher question: Are those criteria still appropriate?”

“To determine if a country is a superpower?”

“Yes.”

What did his father mean?
  By suggesting that military power was no longer appropriate, he was also implying that something else was.  What criterion could make a country more worthy of the superpower moniker than military might?  Again, the light bulb clicked on and the glow returned.  “No.  Now that nukes have leveled the field,
Economic
power would be more appropriate.”

“You’re absolutely correct.”

Another genuine smile
.  Victor braced himself for the next punt.

“When I was your age,”
Vasily continued, “I came to that same conclusion.  For months it tormented my mind like a broken tooth.  You see, Victor, for men like you and me, defining an issue is not enough.  We have to solve it.”

“Solve it?  How do you solve something like that?”  Victor couldn’t stop himself from asking.

Vasily’s smile began to melt.  “The same way you solve any other problem: by acting.

“I spent a couple of years planning, and then, for the last twenty years, I’ve implemented.  Thus far, I have managed to get most of the pieces in place.  A great chess match is about to begin, Victor: us against the world.  And you know what?  We’re going to win.”

Victor found himself tumbling through space again, but his father pressed on.  “We’re going to win because we’ll be the only ones who know the game is on.  A decade from now, the Soviet Union will be an
economic
superpower, and I will be at the helm.”

Vasily
finally paused, allowing Victor to swallow the princely news.  “Digestion will come later,” he said, “meanwhile, let me paint the broad strokes.

“You are the fourth, and you will be the final person to know of my plan.  As you might guess, Igor Stepashin and Yarik are the other two.  The three of you will know the general plan, and everything about your own area of contribution, but for security reasons none of you will have all of the specifics.  Those will be shared when the need arises.”

Victor nodded.

“I call us the
Knyaz
.”

“The Nobility?”

“We needed a name and I liked the irony.”

“A bastard and three orphans: nobility indeed.”

“Yet destined to rule,” Vasily replied, his tone making it clear that Victor was not to take this lightly.

“Why give us a name?”

“The moniker adds a layer of anonymity.  Yarik, Igor, and I learned at a young age of the tremendous tactical advantage a group gains by working together when nobody knows that its members are connected.  Deception is, after all, at the heart of all warfare.”

Victor realized that his confusion was apparent when
Vasily continued.

“For example, a key element of my plan has been to move the four of us through a series of positions
that provide the Knyaz with strategic advantage.  This was no small task, as the positions in question were all highly coveted.  But, with the others working in the background to subtly promote the one while simultaneously sabotaging his likely competition—”

“The
four
of us,” Victor interrupted.  “Are you telling me that the five years I spent in the US were part of
your
plan, the master plan you developed during your Academy years?  —to take over Russia?”

“Yes, Victor.  I am.”

Victor looked out the window toward the crude stone walls that divided the mountainside into farmable plateaus, but he did not see them.  His thoughts were focused on the window of his mind.  Only four people knew of his father’s plan, and Victor was now one of them.  Vasily was investing in him.  Was it conceivable that respect would follow?  For the second time in his life, he was learning that nothing was as it seemed, and he had the uneasy feeling that there was more to come.

He turned in the car seat to look at his father.  “I thought you sent me to the US to get rid of me—like the rich Americans who send their children to boarding school.”

Vasily did not have an answer ready for that one, so Victor enjoyed a moment’s respite while his father composed his thoughts.

“Any man can be a father, Victor.  Only I can do what our country needs me to
do.  Your compatriots’ need for a founding father trumped your need for a paternalistic one.”

“Is that why I didn’t know your name, didn’t know you were alive for the first sixteen years of my life?  Is that—
”

“Victor.  Now is not the time for this.”

Would it ever be?
  “So, I’m to stay in the US?”

“Yes.”

“Working for the KGB?”

“And the Knyaz.”

“And what will my Knyaz job be?”

“One that parallel
s your KGB assignment.”

“And that is?” 
Here it comes
.

“Your job within the KGB Illegals Directorate will be running a group of agents whose task is to accumulate defense intelligence at the contractor level.”

“You mean spying on missile manufacturers, and counting tank orders?”

“Yes,
but with a caveat.  You will be working from the inside.  Once the KGB sets you up under cover, I will require you to take their work a few steps further.  Your Knyaz job will be identifying revolutionary new technologies—civilian technologies—while they’re still in the developmental stage.  You will be stealing them for Russia, and then sabotaging the American companies that invented them so we can beat them to market.”

W
hile those words hung in the air like cannonballs over Victor’s head, Vasily pulled into the driveway of a rustic cliff-side cabin.  The next time Victor took note of his surroundings, he was seated in a wooden armchair on the cabin’s back terrace, looking out over the coniferous hills toward the Mediterranean Sea.  He had no recollection of how he had gotten there.  His mind was awash in image and revelation.

Vasily
took a seat next to him.  He pulled two freshly cut cigars and a silver lighter from his breast pocket and raised his eyebrows.  “Sometimes even Californians must yield to occasion.”

Victor managed a weak smile.

Vasily lit his cigar and sat on the edge of his chair amidst a cloud of blue smoke while Victor slid all the way back in his, holding the arms as if bracing for impact.  He wasn’t ready to light-up yet.  “The KGB is asking you to assume a role, to play a game with the Americans.  I’m making the game that much more interesting by asking you to do the same thing to the KGB.  It’s nothing traitorous mind you.  I’m not asking you to serve a different master—you’ll still be working for the People of the Soviet Union—I’m just changing your management.”

The lump in Victor’s throat grew to choking size—assisted, perhaps, by the
blue cloud—but still his father pressed on.  He always pressed on.

“I’ve given you a glimpse of the tasks that lie ahead of you, now let me show you a couple of the tools.  First the mundane.” 
Vasily handed him a large envelope.  “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted at Stanford.  You’re going to be an engineer.”

“Stanford…
”  The word dissolved the lump in his throat like water on Alka-Seltzer.  Victor instantly felt bubbly and refreshed.  Stanford sounded fantastic.  It felt odd to have his future dictated like a weather forecast, but as long as it called for sunny skies...

Engineering was
very appealing—Victor had always enjoyed making things work—and he was thrilled to be staying in California.  Victor lit his cigar.

“Now the magical,”
Vasily said, placing a large syringe on the arm of Victor’s chair.  Victor picked it up without comment.  The syringe was not much bigger than the cigar in his hand.  Instead of a needle, it ended in a tapered plastic tip that was reminiscent of the sharp end of a pencil.

“What you hold in your hand represents a decade of my life.  It took me that long to become the head of the Scientific and Technical Directorate, but it was worth it to have this secretly developed.”

“What is it?”

“I call my brainchild the
Peitho Pill
.  It’s what’s going to make everything that I’ve told you possible.  With Peitho in your pocket, you will be able to work both jobs, and perform remarkably at each.  But I’m getting ahead of my self. Simply put, Peitho is the ultimate coercive tool.” 

As Vasily took a long pull on his Cuban, Victor found himself sliding forward in his chair.

“The syringe you’re holding is specially designed to implant the capsule you see here.” Vasily pointed to a vitamin-sized capsule at the base of the syringe’s tip.  “That capsule is Peitho.  I had originally conceived of a device that could be slipped into someone’s food—that’s when I named it the Peitho Pill—but it became clear early in the development stage that an injectable capsule would work better.  So, the design changed, but the name remained the same.

“In injectable form,
you don’t have to worry about how to get your target to swallow Peitho, and the capsule will stay in place until it’s activated by radio transmission.  It will sit harmlessly in place for years, rather than just a digestive cycle.

“
Getting back to the design, the tapered tip punctures the skin of the buttocks like a regular needle, but then it stretches the skin, so the residual blemish is little worse than a mosquito bite.”

“Why’s a small cut important?”

“Because we might not want the patient to know it’s there.”

Victor decided he would chew on that piece of information for a while before questioning it further.  There was a lot about this
coercive tool
that caught his interest.  “What’s the numbered ring above the taper for?”

“You rotate it to the approxim
ate weight of the patient.  It regulates the tip’s length, so you always implant Peitho at the appropriate depth.”

“It goes all the way down to ten kilos,” Victor said, more to himself than to his father. 
Vasily didn’t respond, and Victor wasn’t sure he wanted him to.

Victor found himself as much intrigued by the Peitho Pill’s engineering as the plans for its use.  That was a good sign, considering
Vasily’s Stanford revelation.  “So what’s in the capsule?”

“Peitho contains a bi-component acid, a poison, and a signal receiver.”

“What’s the poison?”

“You can think of it as cyanide.  It doesn’t really have a trade name, just a chemical formula.  It’s lethal within seconds, and leaves the same pathological markers as a heart attack.”

“Yeah, but what happens when the autopsy uncovers the signal receiver?”

“That won’t happen.  When Peitho receives the signal it mixes the two components of the acid, then the activated acid dissolves both the signal receiver and the capsule, releasing the poison into the bloodstream.  The acid itself even breaks down into
naturally-occurring compounds.  There’s nothing suspicious left to find, and regardless, the coroner is not likely to cut open the buttocks of a heart attack victim.”

Absolutely brilliant, Victor thought, as his mind continued to work the concept. 
One more course to digest in this feast of fantasy—puff, puff, choke
.  “Given the growing number of signals flying over the airwaves these days, what’s to prevent a random transmission from activating the pill and killing the person we’re exploiting?”

“Probability.  Peitho codes are fourteen digits long, so the odds of randomly hitting on the correct code are fourteen to the thirty-sixth power.  I don’t think they even have names for numbers that large.  On top of that it has to be cleanly transmitted, meaning there’s nothing else transmitted on that frequency for three seconds before or after the correct code.  Some nuclear launch sequences are less secure.”

“Why not just cut it out?  That can’t be any tougher than digging out a bullet, and Yarik seems to have that done all the time.”

“Why not indeed?  A brilliant engineer not much older than you solved that problem for me.  Dima designed Peitho’s coating to be photosensitive.  Visible light, which surgeons would use during any conventional procedure, and intensive x-rays, which doctors would use to pinpoint or even accidentally discover Peitho, will dissolve the capsule instantly.  To answer your question, the patient will die and Peitho will vanish before the doctor can get to it.”

“So what do you do if—”

“You find yourself on the wrong end on an implant?  There are two potential solutions: either destroy every record of your fourteen-digit Peitho code, or have Peitho surgically removed using red light, as in a photographic darkroom.  The buttocks are neither sensitive nor crucial, so precision isn’t imperative.  Look, Victor, don’t worry too much about the details
now, Yarik will take you through it all again
ad nauseum
this summer.  My goal today is just to get you acquainted with Peitho.  You’re going to be working a lot together.”

How true that last statement had been.  In the ten years since Victor had been introduced to Peitho, he had seen more of her than his father…  Tonight he and the goddess of persuasion had yet another date.