“Who is it?” Luganov snapped.
“It’s Agent Kovalev, sir,” Nimkov replied. “Miss Slatsky needs to see you. She says it’s urgent. What would you have him do?”
“She will wait,” Luganov said, as angry as Oleg had ever seen him. “And tell Pavel I will not be interrupted again. I will let him know when I am finished. Until then, I am not to be disturbed. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly, Your Excellency,” Nimkov replied, and he passed the message on.
Both men were now towering over Oleg, and Oleg could bear it no longer. He would answer their questions. He would tell them what they wanted to know. He had to. What other choice did he have?
90
“Yes, Dmitri Dmitrovich, I deny it—I deny it all!”
Oleg, still sitting, leveled his icy gaze at the FSB chief. “I’m not having an affair, nor would I ever. How dare you imply that I would.”
He shifted to the president and lowered his voice to be—or at least to appear to be—respectful of a father and a leader.
“Her name?” he said. “Her name is Marina Aleksandrovna Luganova. I have loved her from the day we met in college, and I have never been unfaithful. Not once. Not ever.”
Now it was Luganov and Nimkov who were taken aback both by Oleg’s defense and the ferocity and deep sense of conviction with which he made it.
“I’d been working too long,” he said, his voice more subdued, regret thick in his voice. “I was never home. I missed Vasily, and I missed Marina even more. So I called her that evening from my office. Check the phone logs. I asked her to come down to the hotel and stay the night with me. I asked her to be discreet, to enter through a side door, to wear a scarf so no one could recognize her. The last thing I wanted to do was attract any attention to her or to you, Father.”
Luganov was so stunned that he physically backed up several steps. Nimkov was clearly caught off guard as well. He followed the president’s lead and stepped back from Oleg, though not quite as far.
“Is this true?” Luganov asked.
“It is,” Oleg said. “All of it. Call Marina. Ask her yourself. She will tell you. I’m not a traitor, and I’m certainly not an adulterer. I love this country and I love your daughter more than life itself, and I would do anything to protect them.”
The room was silent. The food and tea sat there cold and untouched. Nimkov picked up the phone on the desk, but Luganov grabbed the receiver from him. “I will do it myself. Sit down, Dmitri Dmitrovich. We will clear this up right now.”
Nimkov sat as Luganov asked the palace operator to connect him to his ex-wife’s home and get his daughter on the line.
Oleg winced and held his stomach. “Father, may I go to the restroom?”
Irritated, perhaps at the question, perhaps that Marina wasn’t already on the line, Luganov grunted his approval. Oleg stood and limped for the door. There was a bathroom down the hall. But Nimkov put out his hand and blocked his path.
“Use this one,” he said, pointing to the washroom connected to the study.
“It’s reserved for the president,” Oleg replied.
“Under the circumstances, I am sure he won’t mind. We wouldn’t want you to wander off.”
Oleg looked to his father-in-law, who again grunted his assent after cursing the operators and demanding things move faster.
“Don’t take too long,” Nimkov instructed. “We’re not finished.”
Oleg said nothing but hobbled into the lavatory and closed and locked the door behind him. He glanced around. There were no windows. Nor would there be any hidden cameras. He turned on the faucet so the men outside would hear water running. Then he unbuckled his trousers. He had duct-taped the small pistol Marcus had given him to his inner left thigh, just below the groin. This was why he’d been limping. He’d never injured his knee. Oleg waited several moments, then reached over and flushed the toilet to mask the sound of tape tearing from his skin.
Setting the gun on the vanity, he pulled his trousers back up and buckled them again. As he pulled all the tape away and tossed it into the toilet, he stared at the pistol.
So this was it, Oleg thought. He’d done everything Marcus Ryker had told him. He’d actually made it onto the grounds of the presidential palace—past dozens of armed bodyguards, even past the head of the FSB—with a loaded gun.
The question was whether he could go any further. Oleg had never killed anyone. Yes, he’d done his time in the army. But after basic training, he’d served as a clerk in the office of the chief counsel. Was he really going to walk through these doors and shoot not just one but two men in cold blood? Neither he nor Marcus had war-gamed a scenario in which a second person would be in the room—certainly not Dmitri Nimkov. Nor had they considered the possibility that the FSB would have actually made the connection between Oleg and Ryker in the Hotel National. Such a development complicated matters enormously. Now there was a very real risk that Marcus—and thus the American government—could be linked to what Oleg was about to do.
He hadn’t actually been sick to his stomach when he’d asked to be excused. Now he was. Was he really going to do this? Was he going to kill the father of his own wife, the grandfather of his only son? And even if he tried, would he be able to shoot the president before Nimkov could draw and fire back at him? Was it better to take out Nimkov first?
Doubts surged through him, but there was precious little time for indecision. Marcus had been clear—once he was alone in a room with Luganov, he should ask permission to use the restroom, retrieve the gun, and then come back into the room with the pistol drawn and fire immediately. Marcus had insisted he use the element of surprise to maximum advantage.
Oleg wanted to live. He wanted to see Marina and Vasily again. He wanted to hold them and grow old with them. But these were no longer options. Not if he went out of this room, gun blazing. For a moment he considered taking his own life right there in the lavatory. But that wouldn’t stop the war. And it was the coward’s way out.
Oleg thought again of Solzhenitsyn. How could he keep silent in the face of evil? How could he live with himself by burying the truth so deep or ignoring it so completely that it could “rise up a thousandfold in the future”? To do nothing might save his life, but did it not condemn millions of others? Only one thing would stop this terrible war from being set into motion and wreaking such mournful havoc on the whole of the Russian nation, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Oleg was the one man in a position to change the course of history. He knew that.
Yet, looking at himself in the mirror—at his exhausted, bloodshot eyes and the dark circles under them—he wondered. Could he pull the trigger? He wanted to, but was he fooling himself? Surely Marcus Ryker could do it. But could Oleg Kraskin?
91
Nimkov started pounding on the bathroom door.
“Oleg Stefanovich, that’s enough. I have more questions, as does your father.”
It was time to face his accusers and his fate. Oleg flushed the toilet one more time. He washed his hands and his face and dried them with a plush towel. Then he took off his tie, rebuttoned his suit coat, and opened the door.
Nimkov was standing there waiting for him.
“Before you say anything, Dmitri Dmitrovich, I am ready to talk,” Oleg said, holding up his hand. “In fact, there is much I want to tell you. Perhaps you will call it a confession. I don’t see it that way.”