Ted Bell - Tsar

“I am in love with her. Love is exponential, Alex. You should know that at your age.”

“Let’s go, Harry.”

THE TANK WAS the secure conference room on the second floor. It was in the very middle of the building, accessible only from the third floor by a single private elevator. The lift had a keypad and required a retinal scan to operate. Outside the secure room were cubby holes for all cell phones and BlackBerrys. There was a metal detector at the door and two Royal Marines standing guard on either side. This single room was probably the most secure place on the Atlantic Ocean, Hawke imagined.

C looked up as Harry and Hawke entered. He smiled, got to his feet, and shook hands, first with Alex, then with Brock. Hawke noticed three other men at the table, plus, of course, Pippa Guinness. He’d also noticed Sir David’s black eye, courtesy of the Jamaicans on Nonsuch Island. It seemed better today but was still visible. Ambrose had been in bed ever since that night, but he was recovering nicely.

“Welcome, gentlemen. Would you like any coffee? Tea?” Sir David said.

Brock and Hawke both declined and took the last two seats available at the round table in the center of the small, completely sound-insulated room.

“I’d like to introduce our friend Professor Stefanovich Halter, just arrived from Moscow,” C said, smiling at a tall, portly man who immediately stood up and shook hands with Hawke and Brock. His face was handsome in a classical way, strong-boned, with sharp, dark eyes. “He’s here to brief you on the current political situation in Moscow and offer further assistance to Red Banner as we redouble our intelligence efforts there.”

“Please, call me Stefan,” the Russian said, in a pitch-perfect rendition of the upper-crust Oxbridge English accent. Hawke found it impossible not to notice his tattered tweed blazer and the old school tie, unusual here on Bermuda.

Professor Halter was known to Hawke only by reputation, but the man was legendary inside the British service. Twice posted to England by the KGB on long, deep-cover assignments in London and, later, teaching at Cambridge University, the elegant Russian spy had been recruited by MI-6 whilst at Cambridge. He was now a double agent on C’s payroll and had been working both sides of the aisle ever since, currently serving as a mole deep inside the KGB. When not operating inside Russia, he was a teaching fellow at Cambridge, with several doctoral candidates in Western studies under his tutelage.

Despite a number of incredibly close scrapes, this large, perfectly urbane and charming fellow had managed not only to survive but to play the most dangerous game at a level even few in it could understand.

He was currently working for President Vladimir Rostov’s new KGB in a far less esteemed job, having been caught in a compromising position with the wife of a high-ranking KGB officer. He’d been temporarily removed from the operational work he so loved and remanded to the analytical division, where he spent long hours developing and refining reports no one ever read.

Still, he was a treasured MI-6 asset inside the Kremlin and had been generous in helping Red Banner as it began to re-build a network in that savage city. Many of the former Russian agents who’d secretly played for England’s side were now dead, either of natural or other causes.

“Can’t help but admire your tie, Professor Halter,” Hawke said with a smile. It had a dark blue background and diagonal light blue stripes with the Eton College heraldic shields between the stripes.

“Old Etonian, are you?” Halter replied.

“Not me, my father. But I’m delighted to meet you. My father, in his unfinished memoir, speaks very highly of you.”

“Thank you, Alex,” the Russian said. “As it happens, I was deeply involved in one of your father’s rather ticklish adventures. That single-handed raid of his on the Arctic Soviet SOFAR installation during the Cuban missile crisis. It is still the stuff of legend, you know. How he survived that dreadful business, no one knows to this day.”

Hawke smiled, trying hard to remember his father as he had lived and not how he had died, murdered at the hands of drug-smuggling pirates aboard his boat in the Caribbean.

The Russian spy seemed to pick up on the younger man’s feelings and said brightly, “Well, Alex, Sir David thinks I might be of some help to you when you arrive in Moscow.”

“Any assistance will be most appreciated,” Hawke said.

“Yes, Alex,” C said. “I thought we’d just give Stefan the floor this morning, let him give us a bit of an update, and then I’m sure he’d be happy to take any questions. Does that suit everyone? And let’s keep it informal, shall we? If you have a question, pipe up.”

They all nodded, and Halter picked up a slender remote from the table. Suddenly, a slide appeared on a heretofore invisible wall-sized screen at the far end of the room. An old photograph of Vladimir Putin filled the wall.

“Dear Volodya,” Halter began. “Now wasting away at a hideous island prison off St. Petersburg called Energetika. A very bad business, indeed. A sad end, I must say, for a man who did do an enormous service for his country, despite his many flaws.”

“What service?” Brock said, somewhat aggressively. Putin, in his book anyway, was an ex-KGB tough busy building a police state when he’d been disappeared. Shutting down the free press, arresting dissidents like Kasparov, and throwing them into Lubyanka with no access to attorneys. Among other things.

“You have to look at it from the Russian perspective. Is he pro-democracy? Not exactly. But-the country was in free fall. A kleptocracy, run by criminals throughout the nineties, thieves who shipped countless billions offshore, bankrupting the country. Humiliated by the loss of the Cold War and what was seen as American arrogance. Putin restored order, gave the people back their pride, put the oligarchs in prison or at least out of the way. That’s a service.”

“If I may add to that,” Sir David said, “it was Putin who put the final nails into the Communist Party’s coffin as well.”

“Still, democracy never had a chance,” Pippa said, looking at Stefan for confirmation.

“Yes, actually, it did, Pippa. But there was no infrastructure to support it, and so, sadly, it led to chaos. And at any rate, as I say, Putin was never a Western-style democrat at heart. He was a professional KGB officer. You must remember the KGB, wherein he grew up, isn’t remotely interested in ideology. It’s interested in power. And law and order. And that, frankly, is what the Russians craved after all those years of drunken disorder inside the Kremlin and blood in the streets. They were shamed and humiliated. That’s why the country has now reunited so strongly against the West.”

Another slide appeared. The current president, Vladimir Rostov.

“Our fearless leader,” Halter said. “He’s basically pursuing Putin’s goals but with a much more aggressive anti-Western posture. I assume you’re all familiar with the term irredentism ?”

Hawke, Trulove, and Brock came up with blank stares.

“Irredentism,” Pippa Guinness said in a sing-song schoolgirl manner Hawke found especially irritating, “the annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity and/or prior historical possession, actual or alleged.”

“I was going to say that,” Harry Brock said, and Hawke smiled at him across the table.

“Can you use irredentism in a sentence, Harry?” Hawke asked.

“No. And you can’t make me.”

Both men laughed out loud, earning a stern look from C, who continued.

“Miss Guinness is quite correct. I believe Rostov is a determined imperialist who won’t stop until the old borders of the former Soviet empire are restored. Eastern Europe, the Baltics, et cetera. He, too, grew up as a KGB man in the Cold War. All he understands is conflict, the clash of two systems. He doesn’t give a bloody fuck about personal ethics, it’s all about the conflict. You’re either with us or against us.”