Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“The head of the KGB at that time was Yuri Andropov, who was also a member of the Central Committee and had ambitions of his own. He provided intel to the Central Committee that the CIA had instigated the Prague reform, that we were running Dub?cek and were planning a coup, and that NATO was about to move to support Czechoslovakia and break up the Warsaw Pact.”

“Were we?”

Harris shook his head. “The truth was that the U.S. was ass-deep in Vietnam. We had our own problems. The Company had nothing to do with Dub?cek or the Prague Spring, but Andropov had a majority of the Central Committee convinced they were on the brink of either the dissolution of the Soviet Union or nuclear war and that it was all a CIA plot. He demanded that the Soviet Union crush the Czechs. Preparations were made for a Soviet intervention.

“In August, 1968, Russian tanks led a massive invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. The Prague Spring was over. Reforms were ended. KGB agents arrested thousands of reformers, many of whom were killed. Thousands more were imprisoned and tortured. Most were never heard from again. Dub?cek was hauled to Moscow and forced to sign a protocol that basically restored Soviet-style communism to Czechoslovakia.

“But there was a problem. Something called the ‘Kalugin Papers’; internal KGB documents that proved beyond any doubt that the CIA had nothing to do with the Prague Spring, NATO wasn’t planning anything, and Andropov had fabricated all his intel. Guess who was Kalugin’s superior within the KGB and had the documents?”

“Of course,” Scorpion said.

“Leva.” Harris nodded, taking a sip of his drink. “Now Andropov had a problem. The Soviet Union had already invaded and was widely condemned in the West. Andropov couldn’t afford to have the Central Committee learn he’d deliberately sold them a bill of goods. Kalugin, who was based in Washington, was easy. His body was found a few days later floating in the Potomac River. Leva, on the other hand, was no case officer like Kalugin. He had friends. And he wasn’t just Andropov’s problem, he was Brezhnev’s too. Neither of them could afford to let it get out to any of their competitors in the Politboro or the Central Committee.

“Plus, Leva was Brezhnev’s droog- his buddy. Brezhnev had bounced Leva’s son on his knee how many times? In those days in Russia, you didn’t just get rid of somebody. The whole family would disappear into the Gulag and never be heard from again. But Brezhnev didn’t want to do that with what was in effect his own godchild. The boy was eight years old and adored his father. So to save the child and both their asses, Brezhnev and Andropov did a deal. They sent Leva to the Gulag, to Strafnaja Kolonija 9, a prison camp in Siberia so secret, even most KGB officers didn’t know it existed. The mother and the rest of the family disappeared in the Gulag. That was common at the time. But the little boy, Leva’s son, they sent him back to Ukraine.”

“Jesus,” Scorpion said, looking up. “It’s Gorobets.”

Harris nodded. “Gorobets. Even after Brezhnev and Andropov and the Soviet Union itself were all long gone, the KGB, now the FSB, knew that if Gorobets ever entertained even the slightest anti-Russian thought-and of course, how could he, raised as a pro-Russian patriot? — they would kill his father.

“Except, one fine day, who comes strolling in out of the hot sun on the Calle de Serrano into the American embassy in Madrid? A walk-in. The one-in-a-million you don’t plan for because it’s impossible, it doesn’t happen. That same little boy, all grown up and the most important person in the Svoboda party-if not the whole damn country of Ukraine. And he wants revenge.”

“You believed him?”

Harris brushed the thought away as though it were a fly.

“Of course we didn’t believe him. You have no idea how long and how hard it was to find out and vet everything I’m telling you. Two years. After that thing in Rome, we had Rabinowich working on it full-time for months.”

“What made him turn?”

“That was the part we had to get right. It was quite an odyssey. Brezhnev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union-and after he died, Andropov, who became General Secretary-kept an eye on the boy. They guided him into the KGB, and after Ukrainian independence, the SBU. He was Leva’s son, all right. He had no father or mother. The Gorobets you know, the ruthless Gorobets of the Black Armband thugs, is a child of the KGB; they made him.

“The problem was, he was old enough to remember his parents. He still loved them. That hole in him had never been filled. And someone had survived. An aunt. Tetya Oksana, Aunt Oksana.”

“What happened two years ago that made him walk into the embassy in Madrid?”

“Somebody gave him something. Someone in the Metro in Kiev pressed it into his hand, and by the time he turned around, they were gone. It was a cross. One of those Ukrainian crosses; you know, with the two crossbars and the extra slanted crossbar where they would’ve nailed Jesus’ feet. I’ve seen it. A little silver thing about this big,” holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “It was cheap. The kind of thing you could pick up for a buck in a flea market.

“At first, he told us, he almost threw it away. But the way it came to him, and something inside-because they had never told him what had happened to his family-made him keep it. That night he got together with Tetya Oksana-by then she was an old woman living in a retirement home. She told him. He understood that all those years his father had been alive, but someone giving him the cross meant his father was finally dead.

“Mind you, it took us a while to vet what had happened. As best as Rabinowich was able to tease it out, Leva died after all those years in the prison camp, and a fellow prisoner, Pyotr Shunegin, gave it to a Dr. Ghazarian who came to the camp once a month. He in turn smuggled it out and passed it along through a kind of underground Armenian network from city to city in Russia till someone in Kiev-we don’t know who-handed it to Gorobets in the Metro along with a message letting him know it was his father’s before disappearing into the crowd.

“Tetya Oksana filled in the rest for him. What happened to his family. How they died in the Gulag. How his father had been alive all those years and still kept in prison, long after Brezhnev and Andropov were dead and there was no more Soviet Union-just to make sure Gorobets would always do what they wanted.”

“He wanted revenge?”

“Big-time,” Harris said. “He was already the head of the SBU and a power in the Svoboda party. He wanted to do something dramatic, but we changed his mind. We convinced him he could hurt them more and be infinitely more valuable where he was and as he was.

“Don’t you see what we had? He was the ultimate AOI,” meaning Agent of Influence. “The holy fucking grail of intelligence. Not only could he direct Ukraine, the largest country in Europe, in the direction we set, but he was a direct pipeline into the SBU, the SVR, and right to the very top of the Kremlin itself!” He looked at Scorpion. “Gorobets is the single most important asset, the most important secret, this country has. And you were about to destroy him by exposing him on YouTube and TV! We had no choice.”

Scorpion looked around the bar. It was the in-between hour, between postlunch and happy hour, and except for Harris’s men by the doorway and one group by the fireplace, they were the last customers.

“Why did Gorobets really save Iryna? Was that you?”

Harris nodded. “After the election, Kozhanovskiy is history. Gorobets will trump up some charge against him-or maybe he won’t have to, Christ knows there’s more than enough corruption in Ukraine to go around-and put him into prison. We need a viable opposition. Iryna Shevchenko is perfect. Good-looking, idealistic, daughter of a national hero. You couldn’t order up better out of central casting. Maybe she goes to prison for a while, but if she didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her.”