Tsar (4 page)

“G
ood morning, gentlemen,” Count Ivan Ivanovich Korsakov, KGB code-named Dark Rider, said from behind his crimson curtain.

His bottom-of-the-barrel voice, amplified, had a disembodied quality that added to the anxiety of everyone within earshot. He could see them, but they could not see him. Few people, beyond his closest confidants in the Kremlin, were ever privileged to gaze upon Korsakov’s countenance. He moved and worked in the shadows.

Never interviewed by the media, never photographed, he was rich beyond measure. The most powerful man in Russia was a very private man.

But everyone in the New Russia and, to some extent, nearly everyone on the planet felt the emanations of that vastly powerful intellect. In the dark, secret chambers at the heart of the Kremlin, Count Korsakov reigned as a virtual Tsar. Inside those thick, red brick walls, erected in the fifteenth century, it was even whispered that one day Korsakov might lose the “virtual” part of that title.

President Rostov, and his
siloviki,
the twelve most powerful men in Russia, filed into Korsakov’s private conference room. This splendid gallery, with its huge gilded chandeliers, had been allocated to the count by presidential fiat. It was for Korsakov’s personal use whenever matters of state security needed to be discussed at the new GRU headquarters.

The gilt-framed pictures adorning the paneled walls depicted the count’s great passion, airships. From an engraving of the first hot-air balloon ever to fly, the one that soared above Paris in 1783, to oil paintings of the great Nazi zeppelins, they were all there. One huge painting, Korsakov’s favorite, depicted the German ZR-1 on its infamous night raid over London, its gleaming silver hull glowing red from fires raging in the streets below.

The room was dominated by a table Rostov himself had ordered built from his own design. It was long and could easily accommodate up to twenty-five people on all three sides. It was the shape that was so unusual. The table was a great equilateral triangle, fashioned in gleaming French-polished cherry wood. At the triangle’s point, of course, stood the count’s large leather armchair, now occupied by Rostov. It was the president’s idea of a small joke: there could be only one head at this table.

Behind Rostov’s chair hung the very same red velvet curtain made famous during Stalin’s reign of terror. At the Kremlin during certain kinds of gatherings, Stalin would sit behind this very curtain, listening carefully to conversations, words of which could often come back to haunt those who uttered them. At the end of the room opposite Stalin’s red curtain hung a beautifully carved and gilded two-headed eagle, the ancient symbol of Imperial Russia.

Now, behind the old worn curtain sat Count Korsakov. Like Stalin before him, he was the wizard who pulled the strings of true power.

The Twelve seated themselves along the three sides of the brilliantly polished table. Place cards identified their seating assignments, and the solid gold flatware and elegant red china permanently “borrowed” from the palace of Peterhof meant breakfast would be served. At that moment, a troupe of waiters, resplendent in white jackets with golden epaulets, appeared and began serving.

Rostov entered only when they were all seated, taking his place at the “point.” He smiled as a servant seated him, warmly at some, coolly at a few, pointedly ignoring others completely. The tension increased dramatically when one of the Twelve who’d been ignored accidentally elbowed his goblet, spilling water across the table. A waiter quickly mopped up the mess, but Rostov’s icy stare sent the man even lower in his chair.

Beside each golden water goblet on the table was a small gift, presumably from the count. Rostov picked up his present and examined it: a small gold cloisonné snuffbox bearing the image of Ivan the Terrible. Rostov got the joke. This was clearly to be a very special occasion. It was even Fabergé, he saw, turning it over in his hand.

“Good morning, comrades,” the familiar disembodied voice boomed from hidden speakers. It sounded as if a subwoofer somewhere needed adjusting. But the count’s tone was unmistakable. Heads will roll today, Rostov thought, smiling to himself, heads will roll.

“Good morning, Excellency!” the Twelve replied, nearly in unison and perhaps a bit stridently.

Of the thirteen men assembled at the table, only the Russian president was utterly silent. He smiled indulgently at the others, a smile of almost paternal amusement. The good news he carried allowed him to seem relaxed and in good fettle. The others at the table all exhibited a greyish pallor and seemed unable to control their darting eyes, nervous tics, and trembling limbs. This was despite the fact that many of them were wearing both the Hero of the Soviet Union and the Hero of Russia stars on their uniforms. Such was the enormous power of the one known within the Kremlin walls as the Dark Rider.

“Everyone enjoy the tour, I trust?” Korsakov said.

Heads bobbed and a number of
Da, da, da
’s could be heard. The president’s head was one of the few not to bob. He’d learned a trick early on, a way of not automatically agreeing with everything Korsakov said. He planted his right elbow squarely on the table and made a fist of his right hand, placing it firmly under his chin and keeping it there for the duration of any meeting. No mindlessly bobbing head for the president of Russia!

“L
ET US BEGIN
, comrades,” Korsakov said. “We welcome President Rostov home from the Barents Sea, and we anxiously await his report on the sea trials of our new Bulava missile systems. But our first order of business will be to clean up a little untidiness. At a Kremlin meeting one year ago today, I gave this group two very simple things to remember. I insisted that you pay your taxes. To the last ruble. And I insisted that you engage in no political activity that could in any way be construed as harmful to our beloved president. Does everyone here recall that?”

An uncomfortable silence descended upon the room. Even the waiters were aware of the tension and stepped away from the table. The president’s two security officers, a pair of bulky Ukrainians who’d remained by the door, now moved along one wall.

“Apparently, not everyone remembers. I would like for General Ivan Alexandrovich Serov please to stand.”

The general, old, bald, and gone to fat, managed to get to his feet, knocking over his water goblet again as he did so. His face had gone a deathly shade of pale, and his right hand, holding the snuffbox he’d been inspecting, trembled uncontrollably.

“Thank you, General. Now you, Alexei Nemerov. Stand up, please.”

Nemerov, a thin, waxy figure with wispy blond hair, stood, his eyes blazing behind his round steel-rimmed spectacles. He realized he’d been deliberately seated next to the general, and they now stood side by side. Both were visibly shaken, one with fear, the other with rage.

“Excellency, there has been some mistake,” Nemerov said, glaring at the red curtain as if his eyes could pierce it, as if his hands could reach the man behind it, strangle the life out of him before he could—

Korsakov’s voice was low and full of menace. “There certainly has been a mistake, Alexei! Both of you seem to have forgotten why you have risen to such exalted stations in our glorious New Russia. Sitting atop your billions, lounging in your villas at Cap d’Antibes. You are here today only because I trusted you. And you will be gone today because I no longer do.”

Rostov’s two bodyguards, who had entered the room unnoticed, now edged along the wall until they stood directly behind the two traitors. Each took a step forward, silent and unseen by their intended victims. The other eleven averted their eyes from the bloody drama sure to come.

Serov and Nemerov staggered against the table. Both felt the sudden press of cold steel at the bases of their skulls, and both closed their eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

“Where chaos reigns, order retreats,” Korsakov said. “Let order reign once more.”

It was a signal. The two gunmen fired simultaneously, the hollow-point Parabellum rounds spattering bits of skull and a fine mist of pinkish-grey brain matter into the air above the table, gobs of cerebral tissue spattering the shocked faces of the men seated directly across the table from the victims.

Before the two dead men could collapse to the floor, the president’s bodyguards had grabbed each corpse under the arms and quickly pulled them away from the table, dragging them toward the door now being opened by one of the waiters.

“Close the door, please,” Korsakov said when the bodies had been removed and the waiters had removed their unsightly broken china and cleaned up a bit of the mess. The bloody napkins used by the men most affected by the carnage were replaced with crisp white linen.

“And let’s continue. Please, gentlemen, enjoy your breakfast. I have a few more comments to make before the president gives us a report on the Barents Sea naval exercises. Anyone have any questions? No? Good. Let me tell you what this meeting is really all about. I promise you will find it most interesting.”

Here, Korsakov paused, giving the Twelve, now the Ten, a chance to compose themselves. When he saw that they were following Rostov’s lead and had begun to sip their short glasses of “little water,” what Russians called their beloved vodka, and push around the eggs and pickles and sausages on their plates, he continued.

“First, regarding our own internal issues, particularly the recent Chechen atrocities, I would say that we must learn to look at all problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results, and a good thing can lead to bad results. The massive loss of civilian life at Novgorod was regrettable, but we shall turn it to our advantage, believe me.

“The world is once more in chaos, gentlemen. That’s because it has no bipolar symmetry. Since the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been only one superpower, the United States of America. There is no longer any global counterbalance to enforce a sense of symmetric order on our planet. The Europeans try and predictably fail miserably. The Chinese would gladly try, but their nuclear arsenal is woefully inadequate, at least as of the moment. Everyone agree?”

There was murmured assent, everyone still too much in a state of shock over the recent violence to respond normally.

“Only two global powers have any realistic chance of challenging the United States, two governments capable of bringing back balance, restoring order and political symmetry: our own and, at some point in the future, the Chinese. Personally, I would much prefer our own humble motherland to take the lead on this battlefield.”

With laughter and applause, relaxation returned to the body language of the Ten. Although the smell of cordite and the coppery scent of fresh blood still hung in the air, the two dead colleagues were already fading from the collective memory.

“Good, good. So let me propose a notion to remedy this crisis, shall I? This morning, I tell you that our immediate goal is to stop the American encroachment on post-Soviet territories. To do that, I suggest that we reclaim the lost republics of our former Soviet Union. Not all at once, too provocative, but rather one bite at a time. We will begin perhaps with little Estonia, such a thorn in our side. A great deal of the groundwork there has already been done. At a subsequent meeting, I will inform you of the actual timing and strategy. Once the West has digested that and thinks we’re done, we will take them all back! Either by force or by subterfuge, but we will take them back.

“When we have accomplished the reintegration of our beloved motherland, we will look beyond those new boundaries, east and west. Because I tell you, gentlemen, the only way to protect our borders is to expand them!

“Returning our beloved Russia to her rightful place as the dominant world power will require nothing less than a new revolution! It will not be easy. As Chairman Mao once said, ‘A revolution is no dinner party.’ But we will prevail, gentlemen, we will prevail!”

Rostov got to his feet first, clapping his hands loudly. The other soon followed, leaping out of their chairs and applauding vigorously. This went on for at least five minutes, until Count Korsakov spoke again.

“Thank you all. I appreciate your sense of duty and love of country. But to achieve this glorious rebirth and revolution, we will need to keep the West from interfering. Keep their noses out of our nest. We will need a
ruse de guerre,
a trick, a distraction that prevents any counterattack by our enemies when our tanks roll. Any thoughts?”

General Arkady Gerimosov, who had perhaps drunk more “little water” than his comrades, spoke first.

“We could distract them by taking out New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Excellency? A most persuasive
ruse de guerre, non, mes amis?”

The laughter in the room was explosive, but not everyone thought it was funny. Some of them privately thought it was a seriously good idea. Korsakov was not amused.

“A most entertaining idea, General Gerimosov, but, as Napoleon once said, ‘There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the mind.’ And on that note, there being no further business until the president’s presentation later on, this meeting is adjourned.”

“Volodya?” Korsakov said, speaking privately to the president via an earbud in Rostov’s ear.