Finally they came to the Royal River Hotel, the only major hotel on the western bank of the river. A new hotel, it was immensely popular with European and Australian tour groups. Tourists clustered around white tables on the hotel’s landing, their shorts and open-necked shirts garish splashes of color that clashed sharply with their sunburnt skin.
Gennady Perchenko stood and shuffled to the Riva’s gunwale. Ignoring the proffered hand of a bellman, he stumbled to the dock and told the driver to wait, in both English and mangled Thai. He approached the waterside bar’s host, a tuxedoed man with a deeply pocked face and slicked back hair. As the maître d’ led Perchenko to the only unoccupied table, he spoke quietly from the side of his mouth, his thin lips barely moving.
“There is no word yet, you should wait.”
Perchenko bristled at the order from this man who was no more than a cutout in the spy trade, a disposable piece of garbage whose worth was so small it was un-countable, yet he knew the man was right. He must wait.
As a slim waitress set a Rum Collins on his table, Perchenko thought, as he had every night since coming to Bangkok, about how he had gotten into his current situation.
He had been a successful diplomat under the old Soviet regime, a functionary of some standing who might have one day reached a cabinet position. The coup, the collapse of the Soviet government, and the subsequent formation of the Russian Federation had all but crushed his career. In the sweeping changes that washed across his homeland like a tsunami wave, Perchenko had found himself tumbling in the swirling black eddies. Former allies in the Politburo vanished, others switched loyalties so fast that even they had no idea in what they believed. Gennady watched assignment after assignment pass him by. The old cronyism had been replaced by a tougher but more subtle system of political patronage that left him idle while other men flourished.
It was at that time that a hand reached out and dragged him back onto the crest of the wave. Later he realized that that hand belonged to the very devil himself: Colonel Ivan Kerikov, Director of Department 7, KGB Scientific Operations. Kerikov was a shadowy figure in the stygian world of espionage, a man no one claimed to know yet the list of those who feared him was lengthy.
A full month before the Bangkok Accords were announced, Kerikov had invited Perchenko to his offices in a nondescript building near the Moskva Hotel, far from KGB headquarters. He was told about the upcoming meetings and given a choice — attend as Kerikov’s agent or never receive another posting in the foreign service.
Perchenko did not question how Kerikov knew of the impending meetings, nor did he question the meaning of the word “agent,” he simply accepted and began making preparations.
Five weeks later, Gennady was told by his superior in the Foreign Office that he would represent the federation in Thailand. Gennady innocently asked if Kerikov had any final orders. His superior shot him a scathing look, then sharply denied that he’d ever heard of Kerikov.
The full extent of Kerikov’s power became apparent in Bangkok when the Taiwanese ambassador took Gennady aside and explained that he too was working for Kerikov and would follow Perchenko’s orders. At that moment, Perchenko began to fear for his life. Engineering his posting to the conference was one thing, but Kerikov seemed to control people outside of the Russian Federation. Perchenko couldn’t, nor did he wish to, understand that level of dominion.
At first, Perchenko simply had to attend the rounds of meetings and pay attention, but a week ago, the situation changed. Kerikov contacted Gennady through the maître d’ at the Royal River and instructed him to delay the final signing of the Accords. No explanation was given and the fear that Gennady had built of Kerikov had prevented him from ever asking for one. If Ivan Kerikov wanted the Bangkok Accords stalled, that was exactly what Gennady would do.
So Gennady stalled — and waited for some sort of inquiry from his superiors in the Foreign Office. Their silence, he assumed, was another sign of Kerikov’s influence. Perchenko could easily handle the pressure put on him by the other delegates, and the assistance given by the Taiwanese ambassador made the situation even easier. Still, he wanted some sense of Kerikov’s final plan. How long would he have to delay the meetings and what was the ultimate goal?
As Perchenko watched the maître d’ wend his way through the crowded tables to seat a group of Dutch tourists, he knew the answers wouldn’t be found here.
“Yes,” he muttered, “I must wait.”
Moscow
Colonel Ivan Kerikov dragged his hard, flat gaze from the face of the man across his desk and lined up the glowing tip of the nearly spent cigarette to the fresh one pressed between his thin lips. As soon as the smoke filled his lungs, he ground the old cigarette into an overflowing ashtray and stared again at his guest. The man seemed to shrink under Kerikov’s scrutiny.
Through the cloud of acrid smoke Kerikov continued his assessment of his guest. Though he had never met the man before, he was cut from the same mold as so many other bureaucrat accountants that Kerikov seemed to know the man intimately. The accountant wore the uniform of a KGB major, but the tailoring was poor so it hung loosely across his thin shoulders and sunken chest. The few decorations seemed to be more apology than a statement of valor. His skin was pasty white and, had Soviet doctors not perfected cheap ocular surgery, Kerikov was sure that this man would sport thick-lensed glasses. Kerikov remembered with distaste that the auditor’s handshake was limp, like squeezing a plastic bag of entrails.
Kerikov had not been surprised when this man had presented himself to his secretary an hour earlier. In fact, he had been expecting a general audit from the KGB’s Central Bureau, of which this man was the vanguard, here merely to pave the way for the dozen or so other little ferrets who would tear through Kerikov’s budgetary reports with the anticipation of hounds tracking a fresh scent.
This audit was a long time coming. After the collapse of the old Soviet Union, every sector of the government had been reevaluated. The budgets, once lavish under Brezhnev and Andropov, had dwindled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and accountability had risen. Every ruble and kopek now had to be tracked and disbursed. Financial discrepancy was unacceptable. It was an indication of the power of the KGB that they were the last of the major organizations to fall victim to the auditor’s slashing pens.
Kerikov had known a full six months earlier that the auditing teams were interested in the affairs of his particular division of the KGB, Department 7, Scientific Operations. It was only a cruel quirk of fate that this interest coincided with a massive amount of new spending, which he was now forced to justify to the thin major sitting on the other side of his oak desk.
As the auditor busied himself in his imitation leather expandable briefcase, Kerikov reflected on the easier times Scientific Operations had once enjoyed.
Born in the tumult of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, Department 7 had been established by Stalin himself to help assimilate captured enemy technology into the Soviet army. As the Russian forces advanced into Germany and liberated various factories and laboratories, members of the newly formed Scientific Operations were there to see that secret works were preserved and brought back to a huge facility near the Black Sea port of Odessa.
If a site was deemed important to the members of Department 7, they gave the order and whole buildings were dismantled, packed up and shipped back to Russia, oftentimes with the original staffs kept as virtual slave labor. In this fashion, a deuterium plant was taken from outside Berlin and reestablished, giving Russia her first source of heavy water, a critical component in the building of fission bombs. A factory outside of Warsaw that produced Zyklon-B, the nerve agent used in the death camps, was shipped to a remote site in the Ural Mountains and began stockpiling gas weapons by the summer of 1945. Officers of Department 7 seized a Heinkle workshop just as the staff were destroying their accumulated research. The papers and models captured from that raid led to the development of the MIG-15, the Soviet’s first jet fighter.