Joel Rosenberg - The Kremlin Conspiracy

“Wait over there,” said the stone-faced guard. “Someone will collect you.”

“The meeting is on?” Oleg asked, still not clear.

“Wait,” the guard grunted without emotion. “Over there.”

Oleg turned and saw a bench. But he could not sit. Instead he paced, then checked his watch, then reached for his pack of cigarettes and realized he had left them in the car. His appointment was in eight minutes. He had made it on time. The meeting had not been canceled. He could not explain why. But now he regretted his decision to come on an empty stomach. Anger and self-doubt made a toxic cocktail. He desperately needed a smoke. For the moment he would settle for a glass of water. He would get neither. Moments later a colonel in full dress uniform emerged from a side door, gave Oleg a plastic visitor’s badge he was to clip on his suit jacket, and ordered him to follow.

Oleg was led to a security post manned by no fewer than four guards armed with machine guns. The colonel ordered Oleg to take any metal items out of his pockets and put them in a wooden bin. These were passed through an X-ray machine, along with his briefcase, which was also checked thoroughly by one of the guards as well as by the colonel. Then Oleg walked through the magnetometer. He cleared it without setting off any alarms, but this was not enough. A guard patted him down, then made Oleg take off his shoes, which were carefully examined. Only when the colonel and all four guards nodded to one another in agreement that Oleg and his few possessions posed no threat, and only after each man had signed a logbook of some kind attesting as much, was a vault-like door unlocked electronically.

Oleg followed the colonel down a long hallway to the magnificent Troitskaya Tower, eighty meters high and built more than five centuries earlier. A guard standing ramrod straight held open a door, through which Oleg and the colonel exited into the open air. Dark clouds were moving in. Russian flags were snapping in the intensifying breeze. Oleg could feel no rain yet, but clearly a storm was coming.

Oleg had never been to the Kremlin before, not even as a tourist. He had little time or interest for museums and tours and until recently couldn’t have imagined a circumstance that might bring him there. Now here he was. To his left stood the Arsenal, a pale-yellow, two-story building commissioned by Peter the Great that currently housed the security services responsible for guarding the Russian capital and its senior leaders. To his right was the massive marble-and-glass complex known as the State Kremlin Palace. Neither of these buildings, however, was their destination. Instead, the colonel led him past dozens more heavily armed soldiers to another pale-yellow building, this one shaped like an enormous isosceles triangle. It was known as the Senate.

This was more heavily guarded than any of the other buildings, yet the two men entered without obstruction. Inside, the colonel led Oleg through the cavernous vestibule to a guard station where they checked in, and where both men and their few possessions again passed through metal detectors and X-ray machines. A smartly dressed aide in her early thirties was waiting for them. She did not smile, did not shake their hands, did not salute the colonel as others at the guard station had. She simply led the two men to an elevator, took them up to the third floor, and ushered them through more security checkpoints and a maze of corridors lined with paintings of all the Russian leaders of the past—from Alexander the Great and Peter the Great to Ivan the Terrible and Nicholas II—until they finally reached an anteroom flanked by security men in dark suits and ugly ties and jackets bulging from the weapons they carried underneath.

A rather dour-looking older woman wearing a frumpy gray dress and sporting a hairdo that struck Oleg as a throwback to the days of the Soviet Politburo sat at a desk behind a large computer screen and a bank of telephones. She looked up at Oleg and the colonel but said nothing. She just pushed a button on one of the phones and then nodded at two agents guarding a large oak door.

To the left of the door Oleg noticed a waiting area with nicely upholstered couches and chairs and a mahogany coffee table. But there would be no waiting. No small talk. No greetings of any kind. Not today. For no sooner had Oleg arrived than the security men opened the door and the colonel motioned him to enter. Alone.

Oleg did as he was instructed and to his astonishment found himself standing before the next president of the Russian Federation.

Aleksandr Ivanovich Luganov sat behind his desk, impassive and inscrutable.

For the moment, he was still merely Russia’s prime minister.

But Luganov was also the chosen—indeed, the openly anointed—successor of the nation’s current president, a man whose health had taken a serious turn for the worse in recent weeks. It seemed an unlikely choice. National elections were less than a month away. Luganov was not particularly well-known or well-liked among the Russian people, though with the president’s ill health, Luganov was already acting as chief executive in most ways that mattered. The latest polls showed barely 4 percent of the public supported a former FSB chief to be the nation’s leader. Yet Oleg hoped he could find a way to win. The people did not yet see what Oleg saw—a man of strength and great courage, a man willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the country safe and to restore the glory of Mother Russia, so battered and tarnished in recent years. No one seemed better suited or more prepared to lead Russia into the challenges of the twenty-first century. To say that Oleg felt intimidated in Luganov’s presence was putting it mildly.

Dressed in a dark-blue business suit, a crisp white shirt, and a navy-blue silk tie with small white polka dots, the man sitting behind the desk was relatively young—late forties—in excellent health and physically fit. He had the lean yet muscular physique of a wrestler or a judoka. His sandy-blond hair was thinning with a touch of gray at the temples. He was not tall—perhaps five feet six inches, a good two inches shorter than Oleg himself. But to Oleg, Luganov was a giant among men, and Oleg had no doubt the nation and the world would soon see and come to admire these qualities.

Luganov didn’t smile or nod, much less greet Oleg, who stood frozen in the middle of the spacious, dark-paneled corner office, unsure what to do next. Oleg’s eyes darted around the room, taking in the arched ceiling and crystal chandelier above them and then the glass-enclosed bookshelves lining the walls to either side. Behind the prime minister to the left was a Russian flag on a gold stand. Behind him to the right was another flag. It too bore the distinctive broad white, blue, and red stripes but also featured the Russian state seal, embossed in gold. On the floor a large potted plant stood next to a credenza, upon which sat a color television, its sound muted, showing live pictures from the site of the latest bombing. On the paneled wall behind the prime minister was mounted a glistening gold carving of the national coat of arms with its double-headed imperial eagle and mounted horseman slaying a dragon.

As Oleg’s eyes drifted downward, he intended to rest them on the ornate carpet and wait until he was spoken to, but when he mistakenly caught Luganov’s eye, the prime minister glanced at one of two large wooden armchairs in front of his desk. Tentative at first, Oleg finally took the hint and sat down, his eyes now riveted on the bank of phones and sheaves of papers spread across the vast oak desk. Oleg waited, but the man didn’t say anything. The silence grew more unbearable by the second. Again Oleg took the hint. He cleared his throat, dried his perspiring hands on the pant legs of his suit, and forced himself to look up, first at the tie, then at the mouth, and finally into the man’s piercing blue emotionless eyes.