Petrovin put down the glass, and his eye narrowed. “Jesus, that’s bold, even for the Cheka.”
“To state the obvious, it would be smart for Tiron to lie low for a while.”
“I’ll tell him, most certainly. But … May I ask how this involves you?”
“The Barsukovs are applying pressure. Not just to Tiron.”
He nodded and smiled. “We all know that. I must ask again—why does this involve you?”
“Lachko looks for whomever he can squeeze. Any connection is enough for him. I’m sorry to say, he knows me very well.” I hoped that would get him off the subject.
“What’s he want?”
“The database and code that run Ratko’s laundry. He thinks I know how to find them.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
“You going to give them to him?”
“I don’t have them yet. If I get them, I’ll try to make a deal. That’s what he’d expect me to do.”
The eye narrowed again. “What kind of deal?”
“Depends on the cards I’m holding. Lots of interests to be taken into account.”
“Including Tiron’s?”
“Including Tiron’s.”
He smiled again. I returned it, which made my jaw ache. “Perhaps you’d like to play a card or two.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Rad Rislyakov.”
He watched me while he sipped his vodka. I sat still. If I didn’t move anything, most of the pain receded to a low-level throb.
“Vodka’s excellent,” Petrovin said after a while. “Tastes like home.”
“Help yourself.”
I slid over the bottle, and he poured.
“What caused you to join the Cheka?”
How much did I want to tell him? I thought—very briefly—about the truth, but as so often I pulled back to the sanitized version of my life story. No sense of liberation with a fellow Russian, even one who would barely remember the Soviet years. “I had a difficult childhood, no parents, lived in orphanages. My only skill was languages. That got the Cheka’s attention, and I didn’t think twice. They offered a way out … a way forward, something better even if I didn’t know what it was. Don’t put too much weight on the hard luck story, though. I also said there’s honor in serving one’s country. I meant that, too.”
“If you had it to do over, would you do different?”
I reflected on that. I knew the answer, but the question still demanded consideration. “I’ve never met anyone who’s been offered that chance, so I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Regret, remorse—sugar-coated poisons. You get dealt five cards in life, maybe seven, depending on the game. Sometimes you get to draw three more. You play them the best you can. I realized a long time ago, the goal is not so much to win but to avoid having to fold unnecessarily. Stay in the game. Make the other guy go out first. The only honest answer I can give you is, no, I wouldn’t make changes. No guarantee that whatever changes I made would lead to a better set of cards.”
“You might not look like you do this afternoon,” he said with a smile.
“I look like hell, true, but I haven’t folded yet.”
“You’re making me rethink my lifelong Chekist stereotype. Do you have family?”
I thought again for a while before I said, “No. Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t step over a line. I couldn’t help thinking you’d make a good father.”
“That’s quite a compliment, especially for a would-be ex-Chekist.”
He nodded and went silent again. He was trying to make up his mind about something, and it wasn’t easy for him. Best thing I could do was stay out of the way. I poured a little more vodka and sipped slowly.
“Suppose I dealt your life-hand a wild card, the kind that could change everything you believe, every assumption you’ve made?”
“That would be some card. Guess I’d have to see it.”
“It will also make you immediately and desirably expendable, in the eyes of your former colleagues.”
“At least one of them already feels that way. Will I have to fold my hand?”
“Based on what you’ve told me, I don’t think so. Although it could well cause you to play differently from here on.”
“All right, I’m game. But tell me something first. How did you lose your eye?”
“You remember Andrei Kozlov?”
“Of the Central Bank?”
“That’s right. I was with him when he was assassinated in 2006. I was collateral damage—or maybe they just missed, in my case. We were working together at the time.”
“And you believe the Cheka was responsible?”
“Who else?”
“The jury said it was the former chairman of VIP Bank, if I remember correctly. Kozlov had suspended his license.”
His voice took on a hard edge, bordering on bitter. “We both know two things. There is no rule of law in Russia, and nothing has happened since the fall of the Yeltsin government that wasn’t cleared in Lubyanka.”
“I haven’t signed on to that platform yet, and I didn’t mean to start an argument. I was asking … You take a lot of chances. You’ve already paid a big price. What are you in this for? Love, honor, duty, revenge, money—what?”
He picked up his glass, saw it was empty, looked at the bottle, and put the glass back on the counter. “Not money. This suit is the most expensive thing I own. The rest—maybe some of all of the above. If we both live long enough to get to know each other better, I’ll tell you the story. That might explain things. I’d like to hear yours, too. That could explain more.”
The bitterness was gone and the relaxed grin back.
“Play the card,” I said, “if you’re still game.”
He paused, considering one more time, but not for long. “What I’m about to tell you only four people know. Used to be a few more, but the Cheka has been chipping away at our ranks, two so far this year. You’ll be on the list.”
“You’re repeating yourself. Tell the story.”
CHAPTER 33
“Fact number one—there was another corpse in the Valdai shelter with Anatoly Kosokov. Boris Gorbenko, an FSB colonel who was the point man on the 1999 apartment bombings. Fact number two—the bombings were an FSB operation from start to finish. Fact number three—Kosokov and Rosnobank financed them.”
Petrovin paused to pour some more vodka while I processed what he was telling me. Kosokov’s bank was a Cheka financing vehicle. The Cheka staged multiple bombings that killed three hundred people and pinned them on Chechen terrorists. There had been allegations at the time, but there almost always were, and I hadn’t paid them much attention. Now Petrovin was telling me the allegations were true. Kosokov financed the operation, and the Cheka started the second Chechen war. It should’ve sounded fantastic. Except it didn’t.
“You say these are facts. You have proof?” I said.
“We have Gorbenko—on videotape and a signed affidavit. You’d call it a confession. He was a weak man. We’d had our eye on him—he was one of the Cheka’s go-betweens with the Chechens. We wondered which side of the street he was playing. After the Moscow bombings we brought him in and sweated him, told him we’d let both the Cheka and the Chechens know he’d sold the other out. He turned, laid out everything, how he’d arranged for Gochiyaev to rent the storage spaces in the buildings, acquired the RDX explosive from Perm, how he directed Kosokov where and when to move money. He knew every supplier, every warehouse.”
“He could’ve told you what he thought you wanted to hear.”
Petrovin shook his head. “Remember the bomb that didn’t go off, in Ryazan? Putin was busy praising everyone involved for their vigilance, then two FSB agents were arrested for setting the explosives, and Patrushev tried to make that ridiculous claim about a training exercise?”
I nodded. Not the Cheka’s finest moment.
“Gorbenko tipped us to Ryazan, and we called the local police. He not only knew the location of the explosives and the time of detonation, he knew the names of the FSB operatives. We held those back. The local cops nailed them on their own, and they were exactly who Gorbenko said they’d be.”
“Why didn’t this come out at the time?”
“You know part of the answer. The Cheka slammed the lid on. Every attempt at the truth was corrupted. They wanted their war with Chechnya, they got it. They wanted Putin to replace Yeltsin. They got that, too.” His voice grew bitter again.
“And the other part?”
“We overreached. We believed Gorbenko, but we also knew he’d say anything to save his sorry skin, as you just observed. The Cheka was moving fast. If we were going to take them down, we needed everything ironclad. We sent Gorbenko to bring in Kosokov and the Rosnobank records.”
“Hold on a minute. This was 1999. If you don’t mind my saying so, you must have been a teenager.”
“True. I joined the CPS in 2004. Worked closely with a man named Chmil. He ran Gorbenko. He was murdered last year. Gunned down in his car at a stoplight. That’s why I said what I said earlier.”
“And Chmil told you all this, about Gorbenko?”
“He was still trying to build a case. I helped. And I’ve read the file. It’s closely guarded, even within CPS.”
I believed him. I also had the feeling their security wasn’t as good as they needed it to be, and Petrovin knew it, too. He wasn’t just playing with dynamite. He was tiptoeing through the entire Russian nuclear arsenal. His story was a conspiracy theorist’s dream come true. It went all the way to the top of the Kremlin. The apartment bombings and the second Chechen war put Putin in power. But if that was the case …
“Why hasn’t Ivanov run with it?”
“Patience. You’ll see.”
“All right. Go on.”
“Gorbenko arranged a meeting with Kosokov at his dacha in the Valdai Hills. This was about two weeks after Ryazan, October sixth, rumors were flying all over. Also turned out to be the day that Rosnobank burned. Chmil figured Kosokov wouldn’t show, but he did. Gorbenko was wearing a wire, connected to a recording chip taped to his back. We didn’t want to risk any of our people in the neighborhood. Gorbenko was supposed to convince Kosokov to cooperate with us, or at least get him to own up that he’d been the Cheka’s banker for years and specifically for this operation. We promised what we could—money, a new identity in a new country. Chmil didn’t believe it would be enough. He was right. Would you like to hear what happened?”
“You have the recording?”
“We got lucky. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.”
Petrovin retrieved a laptop from his bag. He clicked some keys. Faint voices emerged from the little speakers, talking in Russian.
“That’s Gorbenko, speaking first,” he said.
“You’ll never make it, you know. They’ll have men at every border crossing.”
“Let me worry about making it. If the Cheka’s as smart as everyone says it is, we’d all still be working for the Party.”
“Don’t be a fool, Anatoly Andreivich. Look what they did to your bank. They’re shutting everything down, erasing all the tracks, eliminating all the links. You’re a very big link. You and I, we’re the only two who could expose everything.”
“I’m counting on that fact to keep me alive. You made your deal, Boris. You’re on your own with it. I’ll take my chances by myself.”
“You’re crazy! The CPS can provide protection. We can bring the Cheka down. Yeltsin will have no choice but to purge the entire organization when people see what they’ve done. It’s their one big weakness. No one will have difficulty believing they murdered innocent Russians to pursue their own ends. Especially once you and I lay out the evidence. Like the Katyn massacre. There’ll be national outrage.”
“National outrage? Russia today? Hah! Don’t make me laugh. Neither of us will live to see it, in any event. Like I said, you made your deal. Good luck to you. I’m taking my evidence with me. My life insurance policy.”
The crash of a door. A new, female voice.
“Tolik, I came as soon as I could. What the hell is going on? What are you doing here? Oh … Who the hell are you?”
Gorbenko said,
“No names. Better that way. Call me Leo. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
I recognized her voice, but I still asked, “Who’s that?”
He stopped the recording. “Kosokov’s mistress. Your friend Barsukov’s wife, Polina Barsukova. There’s more. Remember, Gorbenko—Leo—is in the kitchen now. We think some time has passed. But here she comes.” He tapped a key.
Polina’s voice again.
“Leo?”
“What the…”
“Move, out the door.”
“Kosokov, what the fuck is this? I have no time for…”
The shotgun roared.
Polina spoke again.
“One barrel left. Move!”
A couple of minutes of indistinguishable sounds.
Petrovin stopped the tape. “We’re pretty sure Kosokov and Polina are taking Gorbenko from the house to the barn.”
“Over there,”
Polina said when he started it again.
“What do you want?”
Gorbenko said.
“We’ll get to that. Open that trapdoor.”
Silence, punctuated by a couple of grunts before Gorbenko spoke again.
“Look, Kosokov, I can…”
The blast from the shotgun cut him off. The sound of a bang, a thump, and another. Then silence. The speakers died. Petrovin looked at me with a grim expression. “She shot him in the chest. The thumps are the body falling down the stairs. Bomb shelter underneath the barn. Concrete construction, stocked with all the staples—food, water, even vodka. Must’ve dated from Soviet times.”
I’d been luckier than I realized a few hours earlier. “The recording survived all these years?”
“Amazingly, yes. The chip wasn’t damaged by the blast, and no one searched the body. Gorbenko was supposed to call that night—one way or the other. When Chmil didn’t hear from him, he went to the dacha the next morning. Nothing there, except the ransacked house, some blood, and the burned-down barn. We didn’t know about the shelter, of course. It had snowed all night. No way to tell who or what had come or gone. He made a decision to leave everything as it was. Remember, no one knew we’d turned Gorbenko. Maybe he was right, I don’t know. The investigation died, with the Cheka’s help.
“Then two weeks ago, some kids discover a trapdoor in the foundation of the barn. Under the trapdoor they find the shelter, and in the shelter, what’s left of two ten-year-old corpses, one shot, one burned at the stake. The amazing thing is, the local police notified us—not the Cheka. We were able to secure the site.”