Ed Kovacs - The Russian Bride

Dennis knew that the current deceptions were so clever that with a little luck, the Americans would never learn what actually happened. Eventually, they might come to suspect the truth, but it would be far too late by then. The chances were excellent that Dennis and his fellow vor v zakone, “thieves-in-law,” were about to pull off the biggest scam in the history of the planet.

Dennis glanced at his laptop screens, then sharply craned his neck at the sound of the backhoe going silent. He checked his watch, then yelled, “What now?”

A rail-thin Russian worker walked up to him holding a tape measure. “We’re at fourteen feet.”

The Moscow Marriott Grand was one of the better hotels in the city center. Security was tight; goons in black suits packing heat lurked everywhere, and one had to walk through a metal detector to enter from the street. An efficient staff provided good service, and the generous breakfast buffet in the lobby was top-notch and usually packed with foreign businessmen in town on a never-ending pursuit of rubles, regardless of which country Vladimir Putin was destabilizing at the moment.

“Are you sure you wish to place your knight there?” asked Viktor Popov with a sly smile.

Kit Bennings was dangling his white knight over position e8. The chess set was a small travel size that barely fit on the table crowded with a coffee urn, plates of cheese, pastries, yogurt, fruits, and piles of ham, bacon, and sausage. Viktor enjoyed large breakfasts; Kit had stopped after half a croissant.

“Not trying to psych me out, are you?” said Kit, smiling. He placed his knight in the e8 square.

They sat at a table as far from the buffet as possible, giving them a bit of privacy from the other guests, since most of the hungry diners liked to sit close to the goodies.

“In this instance, no. Just trying to prolong the game a bit. But, alas…” Viktor moved his knight. “Checkmate.”

“Damn… I didn’t see that coming.”

“It would seem there have been a few things you and your government haven’t seen coming lately,” said Popov, smirking.

Kit glanced at the general. The old man never missed a chance to dig in the needle.

“You’re not too sharp this morning, Major. And you look terrible. A pretty Russian girl keep you awake last night?”

“I prefer American women, General.”

“Perhaps you will change your mind about that.”

Viktor Popov was a very tall, large man, who at sixty-seven was still physically intimidating and in incredibly good shape. A deep bass voice enhanced the command presence he conveyed, keying even strangers to the fact that he was an authority figure. One moment Popov could be absolutely charming, the next he would snap orders with a tone that suggested dire circumstances if the instructions weren’t carried out immediately.

His longish gray hair was combed back and meticulously held in place with hair gel, suggesting he paid attention to his looks. His gray eyes moved slowly, always lingering, as if they didn’t want to miss a detail, however insignificant. Big hands betrayed enlarged knuckles, suggesting Popov had been no stranger to fisticuffs in the past. A bone-colored raw-silk Burberry blazer that must have cost a hundred thousand rubles looked as good on Popov as it would have on a young male catwalk model; the general was a bit of a dandy.

“Smart,” “slick,” and “deadly” were three words Kit Bennings had written in a report after his first meeting with former KGB general Viktor Popov.

Viktor poured them shots from a carafe of vodka—not an uncommon sight at Russian breakfast tables. “Hair of the dog,” he said, holding up his small crystal vodka glass. “To beautiful Russian girls.”

Kit didn’t want the drink, but social protocol called for it. “To beautiful women everywhere.”

They clinked glasses and drank. Bennings had been meeting Popov regularly every week. As an attaché, he was expected to solicit relationships with knowledgeable foreign nationals, including military and intelligence types. A kind of camaraderie without trust had developed, at least for Kit, and he sometimes would not even bother to pump Viktor for any information. Since they were both avid pilots of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, they often argued over performance specs between Russian and American craft. But today Bennings didn’t feel like talking airplanes.

“Speaking of beautiful Russian ladies,” said Viktor, “and at the risk of offending you, I have a favor to ask… for you to consider.”

Bennings quickly went more alert. A favor?

“It goes without saying that I’m not recording this conversation, you’re not,” said Viktor as he placed a sophisticated bug detector on the table and ran a check, “and it seems the esteemed intelligence agencies of Mother Russia aren’t recording, either.”

Now he had Kit’s full attention, and Bennings didn’t mask his wariness.

“My niece Yulana,” Viktor said, handing Kit a photo. “She’s twenty-eight, beautiful, divorced, and wants to move to the United States. I’m not talking about visiting as a tourist. She wants to live there. So I want to help her do that. Legally. I’ve given you much valuable information these last few months and asked for nothing in return. But I was hoping you could be of help in this matter.”

“There are people at the embassy I can pass this on to….”

“No, no, you misunderstand me. The U.S. State Department and myself are no longer on such good terms. My name can’t be connected to this.”

Kit handed the photo back to Viktor. “I’m sure you know that I’m not in any position to order or even politely ask the consular folks to grant your niece a visa. But I can keep your name out of it, forward the paperwork, and request that she gets a fair hearing.”

“I was thinking of a different approach.” Viktor’s eyes locked onto Kit’s; they were like two predators sizing each other up.

“I truly appreciate the tidbits you’ve given to me, General Popov, but you haven’t shared any earth-shattering information since we’ve been meeting,” said Kit firmly. “Give me something juicy and I can make the visa happen.”

“I don’t have anything ‘juicy’ for you Americans right now.”

At this point, Bennings wished he were recording the conversation. He knew what a sly fox Viktor Popov was, since he had studied his background closely.

Viktor Popov had met many foreign “businessmen” at the Marriott Grand for meals and drinks since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like many former high-ranking KGB officers, Popov had scrambled to position himself to cash in on the chaos of the early 1990s, as mob wars raged across Moscow and criminals penetrated literally every division, agency, and department of the Russian government.

Incredibly, the huge arsenals of the Russian military were simply plundered. With the help of his scientist wife, who worked and lived in Samara—a large industrial city on the Volga River with major defense plants—Popov had looted an entire warehouse full of electromagnetic pulse and directed energy weapons and sold them on the black market. He brokered the sale of an entire squadron of Mi-28 helicopters based in Kyrgyzstan, to Kenya. Trucks, munitions, secrets, technicians—he sold, rented, and bartered what he could to capitalize himself for bigger things and to grow and groom a legion of loyal minions, all operating under a criminal code, the principal tenets of the Russian mobs, the vor v zakone —“thieves-in-law.”

The newly installed Russian reformers in the 1990s had been wrong: it wasn’t a revolution for the people, it was a revolution for the Mafia. And Viktor Popov, like so many others, had intended to cash in on it.