Red Templar (11 page)

18

The apartment occupied by the late Ostap Obelovich Cheburashka and his wife, Tatanya, was located in one of the older high-rises in Novoye Devyatkino. The simple lock had been easily slipped with a credit card. The apartment was a three-room affair with a living room/dining room, a kitchen and a bedroom. Presumably there were toilet and bathing facilities elsewhere on the floor. A mezuzah was stuck to the doorframe, and a menorah sat on an old, scarred sideboard, the nine candles no more than inch-long stubs. Ostap Obelovich had died just in time. Beside the menorah were pale, overexposed photographs of a young man and his wife, the man the picture-perfect proletarian worker, the young woman virginal and expectant. Khrushchev’s Russia and the new Five-year Plan, a plan that had gone on forever and finally come to nothing. The apartment smelled of borscht and cigarettes and lemon vodka and failed dreams. Somewhere along the way Ostap Obelovich had lost the young wife, because there was no sign of her in the apartment. The bed was single, the clothes were all his and there was dust everywhere.

In the bedroom someone had laid out a lace doily on Ostap Obelovich’s dresser, atop which lay a ring, a watch, a worn plastic wallet and a bar of medals. The watch was an old Pobeda “Victory” from before World War II, probably given to Ostap by his father, Holliday guessed. Among the medals, he recognized the Afghan medal of valor. There was also a photograph in another silver frame, this one showing an older, bearded Ostap, half in and half out of the turret of an Ob’yekt 166K T-62K main battle tank. Holliday recognized the terrain—Afghanistan, not too far from Kabul. ’Seventy-nine to ’eighty-nine, a decade of loss, frustration and in the end humiliation and the first real sign that the Russian bear was a little sickly and not the threat that it once had been. If the CIA had been keeping a more careful watch, they would have seen the first critical chink in the armor that led to the collapse of Karl Marx’s perfect state a few years later.

The final truth of the man named Ostap Obelovich Cheburashka stood half-hidden in the shadows beside the dresser. A thing of worn leather straps and rivets and pink-enameled aluminum that had served as Ostap Obelovich’s right leg, almost certainly taken in Afghanistan, where Holliday had lost his eye. Different war, different time, same place, which was how it always was, going back to the days of Alexander. People killing and dying for the same pieces of land for millennia. A leg lost for what? Some posturing general in the Kremlin? It was all a waste, no matter which side you were on.

“Bad thoughts?” Eddie asked quietly.

“Sad ones,” said Holliday. And then he did what a good soldier always did—put the thoughts away and got down to business. Twenty minutes later, with the dead man’s passport, transit papers, veteran’s identification and wallet, they left the apartment and headed to the next address on their list. Holliday had left the watch, the ring and the medals behind. By midafternoon they had three new identities and headed back to the dacha in Novoye Devyatkino.

They spread their haul out on the plain maple table in the kitchen. They’d had enough time to get into all six of the apartments on the list with little or no difficulty, but they’d abandoned two, one because of the advanced age of the deceased—there was no way any of the three men would pass as Pyotr Fomitch Kalganov, a ninety-three-year-old retired schoolteacher, or Ismail Gasprinsky, a Crimean Tatar with a bit of Cossack thrown in.

“Okay,” said Holliday, “I’m Dimitri Valentin, Victor is Ostap Cheburashka and Eddie is Vladislav Nikolayevich Listyev, and his story is that he is the bastard child of a professor and his young African student at Patrice Lumumba University. He’s lived his whole life in Russia, which is why he speaks the language so well.” Holliday picked up one of the transit passes allowing the bearer to travel outside his own city. “And just thank God these are probably the only documents we’ll need to show, because trying to doctor the passports just won’t work, and from the looks of it the late Dimitri Valentin spent his whole life working at the Leningrad Steelworks before he got laid off in 1990. If we get seriously looked at by anyone, my advice is to run like hell, because these things won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny.”

“Ahora bien,”
said Eddie.
“¿Qué hacemos?”

“What now?” Holliday said. Eddie nodded. Holliday turned to Genrikhovich. “Good question,” he said. “What now?”

There was a long silence. Genrikhovich pursed his lips and pushed his spectacles higher up his long, thin nose. He nodded finally and began to speak.

“I have thought on this,” said the Russian. “And again we are linked to history. The Kremlin Egg, the one that actually sits in its display cabinet in the Kremlin Armoury with all the other great treasures of the Romanovs, is a fake—brilliantly made, certainly, but a fake nevertheless. We know this fake was made sometime between 1904 and 1934 for some purpose—most likely to keep whatever secret it holds safe and away from people like Stalin or more likely Lavrenti Beria, who we discovered was involved at least as far back as 1944, when he received the third sword.”

“Polaris, Sword of the North,” said Holliday.

“Precisely,” said Genrikhovich. “He may well have deciphered whatever the message was on the sword, or perhaps not. If the message led him to the Kremlin Egg, as I think it did, then he would have been frustrated by the copy.”

“That doesn’t do much for us,” said Holliday. “The egg could have been switched at any time—the mark on the base indicates when it was made; it gives us no clue as to when the egg was exchanged.”

“Not anytime, Colonel Holliday—it could only have been exchanged on one occasion.”

“When?”

“Stalin had used the Romanov eggs and other czarist treasures as a way of getting foreign currency. He even ordered five hundred paintings and sculptures in the Hermitage to be auctioned. This is how your Armand Hammer, the baking soda tycoon, came into possession of so many of the eggs.”

“Is there a point to this?” Holliday asked, a little irritated. Genrikhovich had an annoying habit of going the long way to get where he was going.

“Context, Colonel Holliday. As you know perfectly well, history is context.”

“Jesucristo.”
Eddie groaned softly.

“Go on,” Holliday said.

“On the twenty-second of June 1941, the Third Reich declared war on the Soviet Union. The following day preparations for the evacuation of the Hermitage began. By the first of July, less than two weeks later, two heavily armed and guarded trains took over one-point-five million objects from the Hermitage to safety. By the twentieth of July almost everything had been removed. Stalin, ever the pragmatist, decided that the Kremlin treasures should be crated up and removed as well, the Kremlin Egg among them. They remained hidden away until October of 1945, when the treasures were returned to the Hermitage and to the Kremlin Armoury. That is the time I think the real Uspenski Cathedral Egg was switched with the forgery—while they were in hiding.”

“Where were they hidden?” Holliday asked.

“The town of Sverdlovsk, which is ironic, really.”

“How so?”

“You may know of Sverdlovsk under its original name,” said the Russian. “And the name it is known by today—Yekaterinburg.”

“Where the Romanovs were murdered,” said Holliday. He’d read a spy novel about it once. The book had an odd title. Then he remembered.
“The House of Special Purpose.”
He nodded.

“Quite so,” said Genrikhovich. “Comrade Lenin’s euphemism for the Ipatiev House. The czar and his entire family were shot in the basement there in the early-morning hours of July 17, 1918. Which is doubly ironic.”

“Why?” Holliday asked.

“There were three places in Sverdlovsk where the Hermitage and Kremlin treasures were stored—an art gallery, a Catholic church and the Ipatiev House, which by then had been made into an antireligion museum.”

“The Kremlin Egg had been stored there?”

“I checked the inventory ledgers—the crate with the egg was listed as being warehoused there for the duration.”

“What are the odds of there being anyone there who’d know anything?”

“Quite good, actually.” The Russian smiled. “The House of Special Purpose was demolished in 1977 by order of Boris Yeltsin, but in late 1999 an Orthodox church was built on the site, the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land. There is a museum to the Romanovs there—its director is the son of the staff member from the Hermitage who was in charge of the Ipatiev House inventory during the war.”

“So we go to Yekaterinburg?”

“That would be my suggestion.” Genrikhovich nodded.

“How do we get there? The FSB will be watching the train stations and the airport.”

“We drive to Tosno; it is about fifty kilometers from here. They will not be watching the train station there. It is the first stop on the St. Petersburg–Moscow line.”

“I thought the highway police had roadblocks every few miles.”

“That was in the old days. They’re lucky to have the manpower for a roadblock every hundred kilometers now, if that. And I know how to deal with the highway police. By necessity they are little more than uniformed thieves. A handful of rubles will be our passports as long as we keep your Cuban friend hidden in the back of the van. He is too much of a curiosity, I am afraid.”

“When can we leave?”

“Early tomorrow morning. The Red Arrow leaves St. Petersburg every day at one in the afternoon. It stops in Tosno twenty-five minutes later. We must be there to meet it.”

“Red Arrow?” Eddie asked.

“A very famous train,” said Genrikhovich, smiling. “Its nickname is
Letayushchii Bordel.
”

The Cuban laughed. “The Flying Brothel?”

19

Brinsley Whitman Havers, at thirty-eight, was the youngest assistant to the assistant national security adviser in the history of the White House. It was an accomplishment of which he was immensely proud, especially since he had been born Paramahansa Kumar Aggarwal in May Pen, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, bastard stepson to Rambhan Kundgolkar Aggarwal, a wholesale dealer of Trout Hall oranges.

His mother, Aishwarya Vrinda Aggarwal, had been only seventeen when she married the much older Rambhan Kundgolkar, who, in the final analysis, was unable to consummate the marriage, let alone impregnate his young bride. It was hardly surprising then that Aishwarya Vrinda separated from her family in Mangalore by ten thousand miles and, consequently lonely, would look elsewhere for love. Even less surprising that she would find it in the figure of a well-known “randy man” about town named Nedrick Samuels, whose friendship was mistrusted by most husbands and resisted by few wives.

Paramahansa Kumar was the result of the illicit liaison, a responsibility unacknowledged by young Nedrick, who discreetly removed himself to St. Ann Parish as soon as Aishwarya Vrinda began to show evidence of her infidelity. In the old days back in Mangalore, Aishwarya Vrinda would almost certainly been whipped, either by her husband or by her own father, but considering his own inabilities, Rambhan Kundgolkar decided to accept the child as his own, despite the fact that the boy was several shades darker than anyone in the Aggarwal family had ever been.

On the death of her husband when Aishwarya Vrinda was twenty-eight, she liquidated all of the older Aggarwal’s assets and moved to East 28th Street in New York City, where she opened an Indian grocery called Aggarwal’s. Five years later both she and her son were bona fide American citizens. Their red-and-gold Jamaican passports were ceremoniously burned in the trash barrel behind that first store. Soon, Aggarwal’s resided all over the state.

At the age of eighteen, before enrolling in Harvard Law School and with his mother’s permission, Paramahansa Kumar Aggarwal legally changed his name to Brinsley Whitman Havers and left his past, and what was left of his Jamaican accent, behind. He casually let his fellow students know that he was actually Brinsley Whitman Havers III, cultivated the nickname “Whit” and never looked back.

And here he was, summa cum laude from Harvard, a thirty-eight-year-old boy wonder in the White House coming down from the second floor of the West Wing for a meeting with his boss and the national security adviser himself.

Whit Havers reached the bottom of the stairs, turned to his left and knocked on the door of the national security adviser’s office.

“Enter,” came the gravelly voice of General George Armstrong Temple, the NSA himself. Whit did as he was told and stepped into the office. There were tall windows on two sides, to the north looking down the main drive from the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, and to the west overlooking West Executive Avenue, now closed to public traffic. Like most of the windows in the White House, the panes in the national security adviser’s office were bulletproof.

The general had no desk. Instead, he worked at a long conference table set with twelve armchairs. The general was in his shirtsleeves, which were rolled up to his elbows. His trousers were held up with braided leather suspenders. Bright red half-lens reading glasses sat on the end of his blown-out drinker’s nose.

He was at least a hundred pounds overweight, smoked cigars constantly and wheezed when he talked. There was a pool on the second floor based on how many months into the term he’d last before keeling over. Whit hadn’t entered the pool; the general was like Dick Cheney—his heart was made of concrete and his liver was made of cheese, but he’d probably outlive all of them. People as mean and hard as that never died; death was too scared to come within a mile of them.

The only other person in the room was J. Hunter Kokum, Whit’s boss, the assistant NSA. Kokum was in his sixties, pale as a ghost and thin as a scarecrow. In his spare time he raised Thoroughbreds in Kentucky. His last job had been as assistant director of plans at the CIA. Before that he was deputy director of the FBI.

Always a deputy, or an assistant, never the thing itself, which was just the way J. Hunter Kokum liked it. He was an éminence grise and the power behind the throne. He’d discovered that in political life it was safer that way. His family were oil billionaires.

“Sit,” said General Temple.

Whit sat at the chair closest to him, which happened to be the farthest away from the general.

“Tell the general about Pierre Ducos,” instructed Kokum.

“Well,” began Whit. He didn’t make it any further than that.

“Wait a second.” The general grunted. He lit a fresh cigar. “No iPad, no Zoom, no Android, no BlackBerry? Not even a goddamn file folder?”

“Whit likes to keep things in his head,” murmured Kokum, his voice mild, a faint smile on his thin lips. “He feels it’s safer that way.”

“Is that right?” Temple said, impressed. Kokum liked to show Whit off like a pet monkey, which the young man hated, but went along with because he knew that one of these days he’d have Kokum’s job. Not this president, maybe, or the next, but eventually.

“Ducos,” repeated Kokum.

“Pierre Armand Ducos, French. Parents Marie Yvette Ducos, deceased, and André Ducos de Saint Clair, one of the hereditary dukes of Burgundy, also deceased, making Pierre Ducos, their only child, heir to the dukedom and the title.”

“A duke.” The general wheezed, puffing on his cigar. “Goddamn royalty, what do you know?”

“Ducos is an
avocat
, supposedly a simple lawyer living in the village of Domme in the Aquitaine region of France. The village has less than a thousand inhabitants. Seven hundred years ago the town was a Templar stronghold. There was even a rumor that the Holy Grail had once been hidden there.”

“You said ‘supposedly a simple lawyer’? What does that mean?”

“Ducos handles the estates of three men, trustees of a company called Pelerin and Cie. Pelerin is a front, a shell company controlled entirely by Ducos. It has majority holdings in three Swiss banks, two banks in the Caymans, major holdings in Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co., MetLife and smaller holdings in several others. It has large holdings in the Standard Oil Investment Group, Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, LUKOIL. . . .”

“The big Russian oil combine?” General Temple said, staring.

“Yes.”

“Go on, son.”

I’m not your son, Whit thought. I’m not anybody’s son except my mother’s. He smiled. “The list is almost endless, sir. Pelerin has effective assets of more than a trillion dollars in virtually every country in the world, including China.”

“All controlled by some lawyer in west bum-bugger France? It makes no sense.”

“No, sir, it does not.”

“There is an explanation?”

“There are rumors, sir.”

“What rumors?”

“Rumors of an organization for which Ducos is as much a front as Pelerin and Cie.”

“The Rosicrucians, the Masons, Opus Dei, the Illuminati, the Dan Brown Fan Club, the goddamn Shriners?”

“No, sir.”

“The Bilderberg Group, the New World Order, the Republican National Committee? Spit it out, man; I don’t have all goddamned day.”

“Yes, sir. I am aware of that, sir. The problem is, General, for a secret society to be secret, nobody outside the society can know about it.”

“You said there were rumors. What rumors?”

“There seems to be a connection with the Cambridge Five—Philby, Blunt, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Leo Long.”

“That’s six,” said Temple.

“Yes, sir, there’re some who say there were even more. At any rate, they were in a club called the Apostles, and in the end, of course, they were all working for the KGB. It’s also interesting to note that Colonel John Holliday’s uncle, Mr. Henry Granger, knew Philby, Blunt and Burgess through his dealings with MI6 during the Second World War.”

“I’m starting to get a bit of a brain freeze, lad. Remind me again who this Colonel Holliday is and his connection to Ducos.”

Whit sighed. He’d written a dozen position papers and briefs about this for Kokum, but it seemed that the general hadn’t read any of them. “On some level Ducos is no more than a trustee for Pelerin and Cie. Holliday is the one who has all the accounts, codes, passwords and what have you to actually access the funds involved.”

“And how did this colonel come by all these codes and passwords?”

“He was given a notebook with all the information in it.”

“Who gave it to him?”

“A monk in the Azores named Helder Rodrigues.”

“Why?”

“We have no real idea, and Rodrigues is dead. Murdered by a German white supremacist named Kellerman whose father was a Nazi.”

“A secret society so secret no one knows about it, a monk in the Azores with a trillion-dollar notebook, Nazis and a Frenchman. Pull the other one, boy.”

Whit bristled slightly at the use of the term “boy,” but he let it pass. Temple was old-school, and he was also his boss’s boss. “There is documentation for all of it, sir. I can bring it to you if you’d like.”

“Jesus, no,” said the general. It was Temple’s turn to sigh. “Look—Mr. Kokum tells me that all our best intelligence says Putin and some of his pals are in a snit. We want to know why. No fifty-page essays, just put it in a nutshell and toss it down the table if you would. Pretend it’s a rebuttal at the Debate Society finals, Harvard Lion Kings against Tufts Half Vote. You’ve got thirty seconds. Go.”

Whit was stunned. The rebuttal at the Lion Kings–Half Vote debate had been his moment of absolute triumph. How did Temple know about that? There was more to the general than met the eye. Which was why he was the national security adviser, of course.

“Ten seconds gone, Mr. Havers.”

Whit closed his eyes. He could do this. “Somehow Ranger Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday, formerly of the West Point Military Academy, has stumbled onto a secret the Russians have kept quiet since before the Russian Revolution. Putin is about to make a move to consolidate his power and turn Russia into a superpower again. Holliday could ruin everything for him.”

Temple turned to Kokum. “Do we want that?”

“Definitely not, General. In five years or less Russia will be the largest source of foreign oil available to us. The Middle East and North Africa have gone to hell ever since people started getting smart and realized their leaders had rocks in their heads. We need Putin. We need to keep him happy.”

“Do we have anyone in the area?” Temple asked blandly. He rolled his cigar around in the ashtray in front of him.

“Do we?” Kokum asked, turning to Whit.

“Yes, sir.”

“Who?”

“A man named John Bone.”

“Any connection to us?”

“No, sir, he’s a freelancer.”

“American?”

“Irish by birth. He lives in London. Right now he’s in Amsterdam on another assignment for us. That new WikiLeaks thing you wanted handled.”

“A bit of preventive medicine, as I recall,” Kokum said.

“Yes, sir.” Whit nodded.

“What’s his record?” Temple asked.

“Thirty-two professional fights, thirty-one wins, all KOs, one draw.”

“What was the draw all about?”

“The subject was hit by a car an hour and a half before the fight.”

“All right,” said the general, sticking the cigar back into the corner of his mouth. “Blue message to this fellow.” He nodded down the table toward Whit. “Your man here pulls the strings. Let’s see if he’s as good as he thinks he is.”

Kokum smiled thinly. “I don’t think Mr. Havers has the sort of experience required for this kind—”

“He’s the case officer, Kokum. Over and out.”

Jeezampeas!
Whit thought to himself, reverting to his mother tongue. He loved the arcane beauty of West Wing language. A “blue message” didn’t mean anything at all—it could have been red, white or pink. “Message” was the operative word. “Message” with a color as a prefix was a euphemism as clear as the old-fashioned “terminate with extreme prejudice.” It was a kill order. Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday was as good as dead.