The Kazan was sunk, this was true, and the action in Lithuania was stalled. But the Northern Fleet had more subs, and reinforcements were on their way to Belarus. He saw the failures as mere speed bumps.
More damning, perhaps, was the fact that Western media was parading around a female Spanish terrorist who claimed Russia had organized the attack against the European Oil and Gas Conference and the bombing of the LNG facility in Klaipėda. Volodin knew this to be true, and it was in line with his assertions during the last siloviki meeting that he would engage in a campaign to boost energy prices in order to raise Russia’s standing in the world, but Grankin had assured Volodin the Russian contact with the Earth Movement group could in no way be tied back to the Kremlin.
Volodin could deny this to his siloviki, and he planned on doing just that when he got inside. They might not believe him, but he had to try.
No, Volodin did not want to come tonight. He knew things were dangerous for him politically, and here he would have to face the rage of the most powerful men in the nation.
But he had to come tonight. He had to come because fucking Limonov had run off with all his money.
In the spring when these affairs took place at Café F, the security was locked down tight. But tonight things appeared altogether different. He assumed the late word of the meeting was the reason that there was no roadblock at the end of the street and that he saw a few passersby walk down the lane as if it were just any other night.
Volodin wasn’t worried about security. His detail was here with him. They would protect their president. The other men could go to hell, for all he cared.
But his security officers were livid about the lack of controlled access to the street. They made phone calls and demanded answers about when the road would be blocked off.
Once the motorcade pulled up to the alcove in front of the café, Volodin looked in the window of the door. He saw Grankin at the bar, and next to him was Diburov.
Volodin’s security men told him to wait. He did as they said, sitting silently, thinking about what he would say inside, while his security men argued over mobile phones.
Finally Grankin walked to the window, looked out at his president, and motioned him in. Volodin just nodded in response, then he turned to his security men in the limousine with him.
“What the fuck is the problem?”
His lead security officer leaned back to him. “Mr. President, I don’t want you to leave the motorcade until they block off the street. I don’t know what is going on, but this isn’t the protocol.”
Volodin sighed. This was turning into a train wreck.
Diburov came to the window and looked at Volodin sitting there in his car, and Volodin looked back at him. He knew how this made him look. Weak, scared, afraid to face the music.
Volodin shouted at his men around him. “Damn it to hell! I’ll just go in. No one will say Valeri Volodin was afraid to meet with his own supporters.”
“It’s not safe, sir.”
“They aren’t going to shoot me, Pasha. They might want to, but they would never get away with it. They know that. Plus, they are weak men. They would never dare.”
Pasha said, “I’ll go with you.”
“All right, but only you. Security men are only allowed in the front room by the bar. I will not look scared in front of these bastards.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pasha opened Volodin’s door, and together the two men crossed the sidewalk and stepped into the alcove in front of Café F. Normally, one of the security men inside the building would hold the door for the president here, but the door did not open, so Pasha had to rush forward and do it himself.
The door seemed to be locked.
Pasha yanked again, embarrassed. Volodin looked through the glass at Grankin and Diburov. They just sat at the bar and stared back at him blankly. Volodin then turned to look to the right, at the main room of the café. He couldn’t see this space from his motorcade.
It was empty. No security, no siloviki, no waiters.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Pasha turned toward the president, took him by the shoulder, and spun him around. “Let’s go.”
A gunshot cracked close in the alcove, and Volodin recoiled all the way back to the locked door. His big security man on his right lurched back, blood splattered the glass behind his head, and he slid down the door to the pavement.
A figure with a gun stood in the darkness to one side of the alcove, just feet from Pasha’s crumpled body. Volodin froze in fear, but for only an instant. Then he started for his limousine, fifty feet away. He could see doors open up and down his motorcade and his detail rush forward. They would be with him in seconds.
He’d been so focused on the man with the gun in front of him, and his security men in the street, that he’d not seen the other figure in the dark, hidden on the other side of the alcove. This man stepped forward to Volodin as if he would give him a hug, and the Russian president flinched when he felt the presence.
The second man in the alcove drove a knife into Valeri Volodin’s gut.
The Russian president’s eyes shot open and then softened, his knees gave out and he dropped onto them, and then he pitched forward, the blade still protruding from his body.
The two men left standing in the alcove looked at each other for an instant; then the gunman shrieked, “Allah’u akbar!” and he shot his compatriot, the assassin of Valeri Volodin, in the forehead. Then the gunman turned his weapon on himself and began the pledge again, but before he could finish it he was cut down by a hail of bullets from Volodin’s protection detail.
Arkady Diburov and Mikhail Grankin left Café F via a back door moments later. They climbed into separate Mercedes sedans and rolled off into the night in opposite directions.
One hour later, Channel Seven news anchor Tatiana Molchanova appeared in the homes of most Russians watching television at eleven-thirty p.m. Her eyes were rimmed with red as if she had been crying.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Late-breaking news from Moscow. President Valeri Volodin has been assassinated at the hands of Chechen terrorists this evening, just blocks from the Lubyanka, the building where he worked as a young man to build a greater Russia. Apparently the president became separated briefly from his security detail, and he was attacked in the street. He received a knife wound to his stomach, and even though his bodyguards immediately killed the savage terrorists and took their president to the hospital, he could not be saved.”
Tatiana Molchanova wept openly on camera.
81
The President of the United States sat at his desk with the complete dossier on Arkady Diburov lying open in front of him. The new Russian president had been in office only four hours, and already he was going to conduct his first red-phone call with the President.
Ryan thought it a little awkward that this man was under economic sanction by the U.S. Justice Department, but the dossier spoke for itself. As the director of Gazprom, he had been the beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars that had been rerouted from oil receipts into shell companies around the world.
The guy was a crook, just like the man he replaced, Ryan knew. But Ryan did not yet know if the guy was a crook who would be willing to make a deal.
He’s siloviki, a billionaire, shadowy, but perhaps less so than Valeri Volodin.