Don Winslow - Satori

Haverford took out a photograph that showed a young Voroshenin in an army greatcoat and soldier’s peaked cap. Tall and thin, with the typical wire-rimmed spectacles of the left-wing Russian intellectual, he sported an open, happy grin that was unusual for an earnest revolutionary.

The great year of 1917 found him home, now an agent in the Petrograd division of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, the VchK, the “Cheka.” Violence was rife in the hungry city – demobilized soldiers shot, robbed, and raped. Mobs looted churches, stores, and the homes of the rich. The wives and daughters of bankers, generals, and Tsarist officials sold themselves as prostitutes to feed starving families.

Nicholai knew all about the Petrograd Cheka.

“You needn’t enlighten me,” Nicholai said. “My mother told me the stories.”

The Cheka began the Red Terror, a war of extermination against its “class enemies,” shooting dozens, sometimes even hundreds of “White” Russians in any single day, without trial or due process. Voroshenin cheerfully participated in the slaughter. “Why bother with a Commissariat of Justice?” he asked once in a party meeting. “Let’s just call it the Commissariat for Social Extermination and get on with it.”

They got on with it.

His tortures became the stuff of nightmares. He tied captured White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces, he shoved prisoners into nail-studded barrels and rolled them down hills, he peeled the skin off captives’ hands to create “gloves” of flesh. His name became a tool that mothers used to frighten their children.

In 1921 he helped suppress the mutiny at the naval base at Kronstad, accomplished with great bloodshed. Then he turned his attention to striking workers in the starving, freezing city. Through the firing squad, the truncheon, and the torture cell he reestablished order, then began tearing down sections of the city to provide fuel for the rest of it. All this activity brought him to the attention of the rising power in Moscow, Joseph Stalin.

“He next shows up in China,” Haverford went on. “In, of all places, Shanghai.”

It was, after all, at Stalin’s insistence that the Nationalists slaughtered the Communists there in 1927, and Uncle Joe thought Chiang Kai-shek could use an adviser experienced in such matters.

Nicholai was just a small boy when this happened, but he nevertheless remembered it. He used to prowl the streets of Shanghai, knew the “Reds” from the “Greens,” and when the shootings, stabbings, and beheadings of thousands of young Reds occurred, it was for him childhood’s end.

“We lose track of him for the next fifteen years,” Haverford said. “No one knows where he was or what he was doing, but it’s a pretty fair bet that he was involved in the Trotsky assassination in Mexico as well as Stalin’s staged murder of Sergei Kirov as a pretext for his great purges of the 1930s.”

The purge turned on Voroshenin himself. The dictator’s paranoia led him to imprison and execute his most gifted and ruthless subordinates, especially those who had stories to tell, and Yuri was tossed into Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison.

Voroshenin’s career should have ended there, with a bullet in the back of his head. But, as noted, he was a survivor who used all his craft, guile, and courage to survive his interrogations. He became a source of information too valuable to kill, and he sat in his cell for three long years, listening to the screams of less talented men, hearing their executions, and waiting for a moment of opportunity.

“Prison teaches you patience,” Voroshenin later said.

“It does,” Nicholai agreed, to Haverford’s blush.

Hitler opened the prison door when he invaded Russia. Faced with destruction, Stalin could no longer afford to keep his best people locked up. Voroshenin was quickly rehabilitated and released.

Yuri landed on his feet again.

Rather than be sent to the killing grounds of the war against Germany, he used his former connection to the Kuomintang to be assigned back to China, and found himself reunited with Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing. His assignment was not to help the Generalissimo fight the Japanese, but to track down Mao and his Communists, whom Stalin accurately viewed as a potential future rival.

Voroshenin had no problem fighting against his brother Marxists. No longer a true believer, he had lost his faith in Lubyanka, and was now a hardened cynic, believing in the advance of nothing except Yuri Voroshenin. To that end, he would ally himself with anyone, and as easily betray them.

Haverford showed Nicholai another photograph of a khaki-clad Voroshenin standing outside a Daoist temple with Chiang. Bareheaded, his hairline receding into a widow’s peak, his skin pale and drawn from the years in prison, there was still a vitality about him. His shoulders were wide, if a little stooped, and he had certainly put on no weight since his youth. A handsome man, powerful, he loomed over Chiang as both men pretended to study a map for the benefit of the photographer.

“Our man Yuri stayed with the Nats through the whole war and then some,” Haverford said. “When Stalin called all his agents back from China, he was afraid they’d been contaminated by Mao, so he had them purged.”

Again Voroshenin’s head should have been the first on the block, but he was the first to inform on his comrades and became the supervisor, rather than the prime victim, of the purge. Voroshenin personally conducted the interrogations, directed the torture, supervised the executions, in some cases pulling the trigger himself.

And now he was back in China.

“This is the man,” Haverford said, “that Stalin chose to represent him in China.”

It was a deliberate slap in the face, but what could Mao do about it? Isolated abroad, struggling to create a government and a viable economy at home, he needed Russian aid. If that meant swallowing his pride, the Chairman was willing to smile and bow and do it.

For the time being.

Nicholai listened to the biographical sketch of the Russian murderer and torturer, but much of it was redundant. From his mother, the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna, he already knew a great deal about Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin.

The question was how to accomplish the mission.

Beijing at the start of 1952 was perhaps the most tightly guarded city in the world. The Chinese secret police were everywhere, and the “Order Keeping Committees” – volunteer snitches and informers – were on every block and in every factory.

Worse, foreigners were a rarity in the country. Mao used the Korean War as a pretext to deport “spies” and “agents,” and the very few Westerners who remained were kept under constant surveillance.

“Why do you think that I – as opposed to another one of your ‘assets’ – have a chance to succeed at this?”

The question had been much discussed in rooms at Langley, and now Haverford debated with himself how much of the answer he should share with Nicholai Hel.

“The assignment requires someone who is fluent in Chinese,” Haverford said, “but who could pass for Russian if the moment demanded it.”

“You doubtless have many such people on your payroll,” Nicholai observed.

“True,” Haverford answered. “But in addition to being multilingual, the man must also be brilliant, unflappable, and a trained killer who can do the job without the benefit of a gun or other standard weapon. At this point the list of available candidates gets very short.”

Nicholai understood the thinking. A gun would be very hard to arrange in a police state, and in any case, Voroshenin wouldn’t be likely to let an armed assassin anywhere near him. That made sense, but Nicholai knew that there were other qualifications that narrowed the pool of candidates down to him, and he wondered if Haverford knew of the very personal motivation he had to kill Voroshenin. Certainly Haverford was manipulative enough – he wouldn’t blink at it. But Nicholai doubted that he knew – there was really no way that he could. No, Nicholai thought, he chose me for other reasons.