“There’s the motive we were looking for,” said Bob. “I think I get it now. He thought he was doing the right thing. They all say they’re doing the right thing, the motherfuckers.”
Jerry lay against a rock, having pulled himself to it from the path. He was in agony, and the bone sprouting from his thigh meant he wasn’t going anywhere soon. His Sig, originally pulled as a show of bravado, lay next to him.
“You move for that gun,” yelled Bob, “and I’ll cut you in half. Offhand, pick it up by the barrel and toss it my way.”
Jerry did it.
“Now the knife. You cowboys all have them folders you think is so cool. You dump it now.”
Out came the knife, and it was tossed.
Bob came out of cover, the Sten gun leveled, and approached.
“Jesus Christ,” said the agent, “where’d you get the fucking World War II shit? What is this, Bridge on the River Kwai?”
“Shut up,” said Bob. “And listen hard. I’m going to lay out two possible futures for you. You get to pick what happens next.”
“I’m bleeding out, man.”
“Nah, you just got a busted leg. You won’t be dead for at least a day, though it’ll be a long day.”
“Christ, it hurts,” Jerry said.
“Cry me a fucking river. My friend Reilly and I are going to walk another couple of hours, and a helicopter is going to pick us up. It will fly us to Uzhgorod, and there a private jet will fly us to Moscow. In Moscow, she’s going to write the story of Mili Petrova, and her newspaper is going to publish it. All the dirty wash gets hung out to dry. Now, you can help us, that’s one possibility, and if you do that, we’ll make a phone call to a number you give us. Too bad you dropped your phone as you ran, too bad I found it, but that’s how it goes. Okay, I make that phone call, and I’ll give your people a GPS position, and they’ll get here fast enough to get some plasma into you. Maybe the Carpathian wolves get here first, I don’t know, but I can’t make no guarantee about that. The other way is just the same, except I don’t call nobody, and you become the den chew toy. Or you dehydrate out. Or you bleed out. I don’t know, I don’t care. But you ain’t going home on this op, that I will guarantee you.”
“Swagger, I’m just an action guy. Low-level. An operator. They just give me targets, that’s all.”
“Then you’re dead.”
“But I know enough to warn you that you are betraying your country if you go that way. It’s not too late. You’re the macho man still, if that’s what this is all about. I don’t care. I’ll be beta, it’s fine. Just don’t fuck this up for your country.”
“You ain’t my country. Not with a shoot-on-sight license for Reilly and me.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Jerry.
“I’ll lay it out for you, and you pitch in. I think I got it figured.”
“I tell you, I don’t know stuff. I just run a rifle.”
“Bullshit. First, you wouldn’t go on an op like this without a convincing reason. Second, if you get this info back to them, they can take steps to be ahead of the shit storm, not behind it.”
Grudgingly, Jerry nodded. “I fill you in, you make that call?”
“If I tell you I will, I will.”
“All right, I’m down with it.”
“Near as I can figure, in ’31 or ’32, a kid named Basil Krulov, son of a Soviet trade delegate in Munich, went to some classes at the university under a professor named Groedl, a kind of guru on genocide, racial hygiene, all that crazy Nazi shit, right?”
“I don’t know any of that stuff.”
“Take it from Ms. Reilly here, he did. She has the records.”
“My husband dug them out of the KGB archives,” she said.
“It changed Krulov’s life. He bought in a hundred and fifty percent. He went back to his country in ’33, graduated University of Moscow in ’35, and began his climb in Stalin’s outfit. But his heart belonged to Adolf, at least in the war-on-Jews department. Somewhere in there he contacted Groedl and volunteered to do what he could to help the Nazis whack the Jews. He reasoned that he wasn’t betraying Russia, since it wasn’t military info he was giving but Jewish intelligence. So that’s what he did. He became the Nazi Race Department’s own personal mole in the Kremlin. He must have shit a brick when the nonaggression pact came, but he kept playing. Deep in the war, his mentor, Stalin, gives him orders to kill his hero Groedl, but he can’t, so he snitches out that mission. Groedl gets wasted anyway, because Mili’s so damn good, but Krulov knows that if anyone looks too carefully at it, they’ll see for sure Mili Petrova was betrayed, and it had to be Krulov. So he uses his power to erase her from history. Right so far?”
“I told you, this is news to me. I didn’t know anything about it. Maybe if I’d have known, I’d have played it differently.”
“He gets through the war, everything’s fine. No news or suspicion of his treason ever comes out. He’s the aces. But I’m guessing sometime in ’46 or ’47, some American intel team is going through recovered Nazi records, and they get proof that Krulov was a Nazi spy. So now they own him. He has to dance their jig or they burn him and he catches one behind the ear.”
“I just know they recruited him in ’47. They said he was a walk-in. That’s where the story begins for me.”
“So for the next nine years, he’s our number one guy in Russ. I’m guessing it was so top-top they didn’t even run him out, because they thought the Agency had security problems.”
“It’s something rinky-dink in the Pentagon. Office of Defense Procurement Review. The dope they got from Krulov was slipstreamed into Agency product, that’s how they got it into policy play. It still works that way.”
“Then in ’56, someone separates Krulov from his head. Right? It’s all over. But is it?”
“He had a son,” said Jerry. “Guy named Strelnikov, mother’s remarried name, still the son of Krulov. Who got high in the government, became a billionare when Communism fell, and is now getting back into government.”
“And he’s your guy.”
“I don’t know when Strelnikov went active for us. Mid-’60s, early ’70s, maybe. But I see why now. If it comes out his dad was a Nazi spy, they will look at him hard, and he’s finished. He never gets anywhere. He’s a bus conductor for life. I didn’t get that part. I thought it was idealism.”
“It was leverage. So this whole thing is about protect your asset. Here’s what you geniuses never got. Strelnikov, like his father before him, because of his father before him, still wants to destroy the Jews. He was never a Communist, he was never a Nazi. He was only a genocide guy. He wants to live up to his dad’s heroism, be the man at the tip of the spear in the war against the Jews. He was really still working for RHSA fifty years after RHSA was dust and burned steel. You didn’t care, you even helped him, because the stuff he was giving you was so good. You made a deal with a guy, but you never looked at him carefully enough to realize he was the devil. And now he’s about to become trade minister. Now he’s even more vulnerable to the revelation that Daddy was a spy, which will lead to the fact that he’s a spy, and it all goes back to Basil’s need to bury Mili’s heroism to protect his own ass. She won the war, and yet she’s the one you birds are betraying.”
“Why does he want to be trade minister?” Reilly asked.
“They don’t know. It has them worried,” said Jerry. “It’s not in the main target area. The econ stuff he’ll get us is great, but they think it’s a loss of opportunity. They don’t want econ, they want strategic. But nobody could talk him out of it, and that’s what he’s going to do. Maybe it’ll pay off long-term. I can tell you, nobody’s going to get off the Strelnikov train yet.”