Authors: Al Ruksenas
He looked thoughtfully at his friend and confidant, whose eyes were still fixed intently on the Chief Executive. The President returned to his chair and slowly sat down, measuring his sage adviser’s argument.
“
That’s what I like about you, Victor. You’re always so sure of everything. I am too, of course—in public. I’m expected to. But I have to admit I’m sometimes unsure in private. Aren’t we all?”
“
Not all of us, Mr. President.”
The Chief Executive dismissed his friend’s haughtiness. It was a tolerated trademark.
“
What about the news media?”
“
Even though much of the media editorialize that Taylor is not suitable, it will be those same editors who will smell blood when they know that they have, in fact, been the ones to sway you in making a critically wrong decision—in chiding you away from Taylor. It will have been their decision, not yours!” Sherwyck raised his voice for emphasis. “They will lose respect for you! How many times in the past have we seen this?”
The President nodded his head.
“
Like it or not, sir,” Sherwyck said softly after an interval, “the most important decision is the one which asserts your authority. Names and positions shift all the time. People forget what stand you took yesterday and don’t care what stand you might take tomorrow. But they will remember determination or weakness. They will support strength, even if it is wrong and they will condemn weakness, even if it is right.”
The President glanced back at Sherwyck. It was not so much his friend and adviser’s words or logic that affected him. It was Sherwyck’s demeanor, his fixed gaze, his commanding stare, his sense of assurance about the future. After several moments the President rose from his chair.
“
Thank you for your time, Victor. I appreciate your views, as always.”
Victor Sherwyck took his cue. He rose also and approached the President, extending his hand. “Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for the wonderful brunch.” He firmly shook the President’s outstretched hand and bowed his head slightly. “If there is anything more I can do, anytime.” The formality of the surroundings belied their more familiar social relationship.
“
I know, Victor, thank you. I appreciate it.”
Sherwyck walked out of the Cabinet Room. His meal had been barely touched.
The President followed his friend part way until he saw him disappear past the door. He then turned to look out one of the imposing windows lining one side of the Cabinet Room. A large, black crow making a raucous noise in a branch of a tree near the window had caught his attention. No other birds were nearby, nor was there any evident reason for the crow’s persistent cries.
“
Now, there’s something,” the President murmured as he idly observed the bird’s cackling. “First time I’ve seen a crow around the White House.”
***
Meanwhile, Victor Sherwyck was returning past the guardhouse to his waiting limousine. One of the officers watched him pass then turned to his partner on watch inside the glassed checkpoint on Pennsylvania Avenue. “You know, Frank, there’s something strange about that Sherwyck guy.”
“
Strange?” His partner’s eyes were fixed on his computer screen where he was reviewing that day’s schedule of appointments.
“
Yeah, you ever notice that?”
“
I’ve been here a long time, Steve.” He made an entry into the computer. “I’ve seen a lot of people come through here from every corner of the world. ‘Strange’ is a relative term—you know what I mean?”
“
I know what you mean, Frank. But there’s just something about this guy.” He watched Sherwyck climb into his limousine and the chauffer close the door behind him.
His fellow
‐
officer studied the adjusted entries on the screen, then said in a preoccupied tone: “Your job’s to guard the President’s ass, not pick his friends.”
As Sherwyck’s limousine departed the White House grounds, the crow leapt with its flapping wings from the tree outside the Cabinet Room. It bounded along the roofline of the White House, ascended in a southerly direction towards the Washington Monument, then west along the reflecting pool above the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River, turning in a lazy loop southward along the river towards Sherwyck’s estate near Alexandria, as if anticipating the route Sherwyck’s limousine would take along the George Washington Memorial Parkway.
***
The President watched the large black bird for the few moments it was visible through the window, then returned to the Oval Office where he summoned his chief of staff and senior adviser. When they arrived he greeted them heartily: “Gentlemen! I’ve made my decision on the new Secretary of Defense. After giving it much considered thought and weighing all relevant factors, there can be only one choice—Philip Taylor!”
George Brandon and Paul McCallister looked dumbfounded at each other.
“
It’s settled, gentlemen. Have the Press Secretary prepare a statement for release after Ron’s funeral.”
When the two advisers left the Oval Office, Brandon reminded McCallister that the President had just met with Victor Sherwyck.
“
It figures,” McCallister intoned.
Chapter 18
Oleg Alekseev was the Second Secretary of the Russian Embassy in Washington, whose position was a thinly veiled cover for espionage. He was the ranking intelligence officer of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. As such, he was the first to receive news of the death of the American Secretary of Defense, Ronald Stack.
It was Alekseev’s duty to analyze the situation and cable Moscow a rationale as to why the death occurred. Nothing in the Russian view was accidental. There had to be reasons behind everything— especially a case where a Cabinet officer in the American government, surrounded by security—dies in an accident. Something like that was hard to fathom. It was intrinsically suspicious, since accidents were a favored means of assassination in the former USSR.
Alekseev, dour looking in his ornate, wood
‐
paneled office, seemed even more melancholic when he furrowed his brow, as an intelligence aide—a cultural attaché by title—described what happened at the Washington intersection when the steel beam fell on the Secretary’s limousine.
“
Hmm,” was all he would say to indicate to the aide that he was listening. It gave him momentary mental distance to think of something else.
“
What do you think, sir?” Yuri Menshikov ventured.
“
Like we used to say,” Alekseev eventually responded: “Whoever had to be eliminated—was eliminated.”
He was trying to concentrate on rumors about the vanishing of the American Congresswoman’s daughter. When Alekseev first heard of her disappearance, he had made a mental note of it, skeptical of its veracity. She was probably being extra discreet in some romantic, high level and most probably illicit liaison. Now, with these new developments, he thought twice.
His skepticism was heightened when he was informed that a day or two later the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. General Benjamin Starr, was killed in a riding accident.
“
Those horse trails are for rental nags,” he thought. Alekseev knew the area. His spies had used it routinely as a dead drop for messages during the Soviet era. “No horse can gallop fast enough around there.”
His inbred suspicions increased. He would have to see again the report on the American Secretary of Defense and the report on the missing Congresswoman’s daughter. And he would have to find out more about the American General as soon as his sentinels reported.
But he did not trust his intelligence aide—the cultural attaché—to retrieve the reports for him. He would have to do it himself, unobtrusively. Alekseev did not want him or anyone else to make unnecessary and dangerous conclusions about the possible connection of certain events.
He did not know where his aide, Menshikov, stood in the ever changing corridors of power of the new Russian secret police. He smiled laconically. He did not know where he, himself, stood.
Oleg Alekseev only knew that he spent his career in the Soviet secret police with an obsession: an obsession on behalf of his wife, Natasha, who for decades was trying to find out what happened to her beloved older brother—Yuri Rudenko. Rudenko had disappeared on a secret mission somewhere in the Middle East when she was still a little girl. She had adored her older brother—little knowing who he was, but proud of his uniform and proud to see what apparent power he had over everyone around him. She matured in that elite circle of the Communist Party select—the
Nomenklatura
—and when she married Oleg Alekseev, whom she fell in love with at Moscow University, she urged that he join the KGB. He willingly did so, for he also knew where success in life lay in the Soviet Union.
Oleg Alekseev was a jaded man, but his love for his wife was real and stayed so over the years. His love for Natasha was the only constant in a tumultuous life of internal political intrigue. Her obsession over her brother, as it began to destroy her, became his obsession. He hoped by finding the answer to Rudenko’s disappearance, he could save his beloved Natasha from creeping insanity.
In truth, there was little of real value that he saw in the system and in his career. He just knew that he was on top of a social pecking order and it was always others who were “enemies of the state.” That was a major comfort to him over the years and a serious career accomplishment. Especially, when he saw many of his comrades putting each other in prison for various offenses, all capriciously defined.
They were all cannibals, indeed, but Alekseev prided himself in being a survivor, rising in the ranks—but carefully and not too ambitiously—for that itself could bring suspicion fueled by jealousy.
Another secret comfort Alekseev nurtured was his belief in God. He thought it could bring salvation in the godless system he served.
Natasha’s words from years past perpetually haunted him. “Find out what happened to Yuri and I promise you, I’ll believe in God too.”
So it was, that the only true goal in his career, indeed, in his life, was to find out what happened to his brother
‐
in
‐
law, Major Yuri Rudenko. The only advantage that Oleg Alekseev had was that, he, himself, was in the KGB. He knew that if he made even the most innocent inquiries as a regular citizen of the Soviet Union, he would have been in Siberia long ago, most likely even dead.
His position allowed him to ferret out bits and pieces of information, but that quest, was itself strange and dangerous. Alekseev considered himself lucky to this day that the first time he inquired internally about Rudenko many years ago, he gave no indication of personal interest, but, as a junior officer, appeared to be relaying a request from a commissar. No one bothered or dared to ask who the commissar was. That innocent ploy saved his life, because any secret police colleagues who pursued any question linked to Rudenko’s name or the nature of a particular mission into the Middle East—mysteriously disappeared. Naturally, any further inquiries suddenly ceased.
This never stopped Alekseev from his search for answers, it only intensified them. But it taught him to be redundantly sure that he was not connected to any of the initiatives. He also knew that his own sense of insularity could be illusory, especially since he was married to Rudenko’s sister.
To this day he had not learned what happened to Major Yuri Rudenko and he never gave the slightest indication that he was interested. He did, however, gather over time fragments of information that there existed a fanatical faction within the inner circles of the KGB that was held in awe by all others. It had no titles and its members were found in all departments, adding to the fear that it was omnipresent and could reach everyone around it with sudden, silent efficiency that surpassed even the KGB organization’s own reputation for ruthlessness.
Even as the Soviet system attempted reforms and abruptly collapsed, this nebulous inner circle within the KGB retained its fratricidal fanaticism. Rumors circulated and were embellished over the years that the circle was involved in some wild plan to take control of world powers in a very sudden and decisive way.
Rumors included the contention that the group was in league with some ancient devil cult; an odd observation in a system that was supposed to be atheistic, but a convenient folkloric metaphor to explain what was unexplainable.
Oleg Alekseev knew that there were certain factions left over from the old KGB that did not want to accept the reality of a new Russia, especially one groveling in the rubble of communism, as it struggled for an elusive democracy.