Ted Bell - Tsar

Inside the building were a plethora of high-cost secrets and state-of-the-art communications technology. Nevertheless, a large portion of the funds budgeted had been expended toward the construction of the wall that surrounded the building. On their way down to the Situation Room, Sergei assured the president that his new wall could withstand the assault of any tank on earth.

“I’ll have to ask our tank commanders about that,” Rostov said. Long experience had made him skeptical of Russian military claims.

But during the brief tour, Rostov found himself deeply impressed with the new Situation Center. As was his habit, he chose not to show it.

He casually asked one of the nearby officers, a young colonel, exactly what situations the Situation Center had been designed for.

“Why, practically any situation at all, Mr. President,” the man replied, beaming proudly.

“So, did you follow the American Senate hearings on arms appropriations on C-SPAN last night?” Rostov asked, matching the underling’s toothy smile tooth for tooth. “That was a situation worth following!”

“Well, not a lot, sir,” the man said, fumbling for words. “Some situations are-”

A general stepped forward to cover the younger man’s embarrassment. “That’s more the job of the SVR, Mr. President.”

SVR was the External Intelligence Service. Of course, Rostov knew it well. When Rostov had been head of the KGB, he had been personally responsible for that service’s complete overhaul.

“Really?” Rostov said, eyeing the general with some amusement, “The SVR’s job, is it? Isn’t that fascinating? One learns something every day.”

Embarrassed eyes were averted as Rostov smiled his shy, enigmatic smile, nodded briefly to everyone in the room, and took his leave. Korsakov was waiting upstairs.

“The man’s a fool,” Sergei Ivanov said in the elevator. “My apologies, sir.”

“That ridiculous little general? Yes. Somebody’s son or nephew, isn’t he?”

“He is. Putin’s nephew.”

“Get rid of him, Sergei. Energetika.”

Energetika was a maximum-security prison on a desolate island off the Kronstadt naval base at St. Petersburg. The facility was unique in the history of Russian prisons. It had been deliberately built atop a massive radioactive-waste site. Prisoners who entered those walls had a death sentence on their heads whether they knew it or not.

Rostov’s predecessor, the steely-eyed prime minister who’d overstayed his welcome, was a guest there even now. Rostov wondered briefly if his old comrade Putin had any hair left at all now.

The elevator came to a stop, and they stepped off.

“We’ve come a long way, Sergei Ivanovich. Eight years ago, we had more important things to do, even in the military sphere, than build fancy administrative buildings. But the GRU is the eyes and ears of the Russian Army, the entire Russian state to a significant degree. Its workers deserve such modern conditions.”

It was true. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet intelligence services had embarked on a decade of serious decline. The much-feared KGB, where Rostov had spent his former life, had been an institution in free fall. A great many Soviet spies had defected and sold their secrets to Western intelligence agencies. Communism was dead. MI-6, the formidable British intelligence service, had simply declared its mission accomplished, packed up, and headed home.

Better dead than red, the Brits and Americans used to say.

That era was clearly over.

The Dark Rider, Count Ivan Korsakov, had appeared to save Mother Russia.

With Rostov at his side, Korsakov would now restore Russia to her rightful place in the world.

On top.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Count Ivan Ivanovich Korsakov, KGB code-named Dark Rider, said from behind his crimson curtain.

His bottom-of-the-barrel voice, amplified, had a disembodied quality that added to the anxiety of everyone within earshot. He could see them, but they could not see him. Few people, beyond his closest confidants in the Kremlin, were ever privileged to gaze upon Korsakov’s countenance. He moved and worked in the shadows.

Never interviewed by the media, never photographed, he was rich beyond measure. The most powerful man in Russia was a very private man.

But everyone in the New Russia and, to some extent, nearly everyone on the planet felt the emanations of that vastly powerful intellect. In the dark, secret chambers at the heart of the Kremlin, Count Korsakov reigned as a virtual Tsar. Inside those thick, red brick walls, erected in the fifteenth century, it was even whispered that one day Korsakov might lose the “virtual” part of that title.

President Rostov, and his siloviki, the twelve most powerful men in Russia, filed into Korsakov’s private conference room. This splendid gallery, with its huge gilded chandeliers, had been allocated to the count by presidential fiat. It was for Korsakov’s personal use whenever matters of state security needed to be discussed at the new GRU headquarters.

The gilt-framed pictures adorning the paneled walls depicted the count’s great passion, airships. From an engraving of the first hot-air balloon ever to fly, the one that soared above Paris in 1783, to oil paintings of the great Nazi zeppelins, they were all there. One huge painting, Korsakov’s favorite, depicted the German ZR-1 on its infamous night raid over London, its gleaming silver hull glowing red from fires raging in the streets below.

The room was dominated by a table Rostov himself had ordered built from his own design. It was long and could easily accommodate up to twenty-five people on all three sides. It was the shape that was so unusual. The table was a great equilateral triangle, fashioned in gleaming French-polished cherry wood. At the triangle’s point, of course, stood the count’s large leather armchair, now occupied by Rostov. It was the president’s idea of a small joke: there could be only one head at this table.

Behind Rostov’s chair hung the very same red velvet curtain made famous during Stalin’s reign of terror. At the Kremlin during certain kinds of gatherings, Stalin would sit behind this very curtain, listening carefully to conversations, words of which could often come back to haunt those who uttered them. At the end of the room opposite Stalin’s red curtain hung a beautifully carved and gilded two-headed eagle, the ancient symbol of Imperial Russia.

Now, behind the old worn curtain sat Count Korsakov. Like Stalin before him, he was the wizard who pulled the strings of true power.

The Twelve seated themselves along the three sides of the brilliantly polished table. Place cards identified their seating assignments, and the solid gold flatware and elegant red china permanently “borrowed” from the palace of Peterhof meant breakfast would be served. At that moment, a troupe of waiters, resplendent in white jackets with golden epaulets, appeared and began serving.

Rostov entered only when they were all seated, taking his place at the “point.” He smiled as a servant seated him, warmly at some, coolly at a few, pointedly ignoring others completely. The tension increased dramatically when one of the Twelve who’d been ignored accidentally elbowed his goblet, spilling water across the table. A waiter quickly mopped up the mess, but Rostov’s icy stare sent the man even lower in his chair.

Beside each golden water goblet on the table was a small gift, presumably from the count. Rostov picked up his present and examined it: a small gold cloisonné snuffbox bearing the image of Ivan the Terrible. Rostov got the joke. This was clearly to be a very special occasion. It was even Fabergé, he saw, turning it over in his hand.