Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

I shrugged. Having never been in the empire-building business, what the hell did I know?

“It had to end,” he said, moving across the floor and waving his hands. “But how? Who had the skills to end it? I did, I suddenly realized. Poor Gorbachev, he never understood what was happening. Everything started going wrong. The Poles began striking under that mustachioed idiot Lech Walesa, and for some odd reason our intelligence services couldn’t seem to stop them. Very strange, eh? All of our power, and we couldn’t stamp out this rebellious movement. Then our great Red Army couldn’t seem to win in Afghanistan. Think about that, Drummond. Do you really believe that the Russian army was that incompetent against a bunch of fourth-world tribesmen? Or that we couldn’t have smashed Walesa and his people?” He chuckled. “We looked incompetent only because some very patriotic generals and officials deliberately made it seem that way. The whole point was to begin the fraying of the empire, to lose the war, to give Russia its own Vietnam. Then came the problems in Georgia, then Chechnya, then this man Yeltsin comes out of nowhere and threatens Gorbachev’s grip.”

“You were behind all that?” I asked, staggered by the scale of his plot, which was obviously more fantastic than Alexi had imagined.

“Of course. Oh, there were others, certainly… Many others, actually. Patriots who knew we had to sweep away the old system, to destroy the old order so we could rebuild.”

“But Alexi? Why didn’t you tell him? He was like your son, right?”

He stared down at the floor a moment, almost as though he was embarrassed by this admission. He said, “How could he have embraced what we had to do? He hadn’t seen how the Marxist idiots misruled, hadn’t experienced the cruel bite of their incompetence. He was too naive to understand at that time. Oh, I would’ve told him eventually.” He paused and seemed to wonder if he’d made the right choice. Then his indecision evaporated. “But Alexi served a vital purpose.”

“And what was that?”

“When he first came to me with his suspicions, I realized something. Everything was so vulnerable in the beginning. It could’ve been stopped so easily by forces inside Russia or by the West. We were so fragile in the beginning, secrecy was our only protection.”

“So?”

“You still don’t see it, Drummond?” he snapped, angered that I couldn’t jump to what he considered obvious conclusions. Like a lot of ridiculously smart people, those of us with average intelligence taxed his patience. “Alexi was the first outsider to detect it. With his extraordinary intellect, he was the only one who noticed that history was not flowing on a logical path. I was quite proud of him, actually. So I decided to use Alexi as a watchdog. He would keep me and my people on our toes. It was perfectly safe, of course, because he kept me informed of everything. But if Alexi couldn’t find us… well… then nobody could.”

I was suddenly awed by the sheer deceitfulness of this man. To him the whole world was a chessboard to be ordered as he wanted. Even Alexi was just one more pawn to be shuffled from square to square.

“That’s cold,” I said, unable to help myself.

“Cold?” he asked, shaking his head. “No, Drummond. I gave Alexi a historic role. He who serves in ignorance still serves, yes? Knowing we had a worthy opponent made us much more cautious. Without Alexi we might have become sloppy.” He paused and seemed curious. “Tell me something. How did you uncover poor Milt? What led you to him?”

“The second time you tried to kill us,” I admitted.

“Ah.” He nodded his head, obviously piecing the rest of the story together. He really was frighteningly brilliant. “I thought that was it. After the attempt in Moscow, I debated whether to try again. I just… well, I couldn’t have you and that girl sniffing around Alexi. You have to understand, Drummond, when you set the board, the pieces have to move by the rules. You and that girl were upsetting the rationality. You, nosing around in things that weren’t your business, and her becoming romantic with Alexi. What else could I do but eliminate you?”

I was thinking there were plenty of other things he could’ve done, but then I had very strong prejudices in this matter.

I said, “Yeah, well, we cross-indexed all the documents the CIA supposedly got from your vaults. When we found a few only Martin had seen, it all fell into place.”

“Oh, that’s very clever, Drummond. Poor Milt. You’re probably wondering how we recruited him. Back when he was a college student majoring in Russian studies, he visited here with a student group. It was the sixties, when so many of your young people were disenchanted by Vietnam, and Milt was very vocal about the rottenness of your country. We barely had to recruit him. Fate plays funny tricks, yes? Who could’ve imagined that his college roommate would go on to become President? The only use I ever saw for Milt was writing a few books and articles that were damaging for your CIA and foreign policy. We made a trade. I provided him the information and he became famous as a writer.”

“Well, as we say in America, sometimes you fall into a pile of shit and find a brick of gold.”

He gave me a very unpleasant look, and Felix took a step toward me. “Metaphysically speaking,” I quickly added. “I mean, Martin was a really brilliant coup, wasn’t he?”

“Brilliant?” Viktor said. “Milt was a coward. He refused to do anything unless I shielded him. So I gave him the template for a cut-out. The day Morrison walked into his office he knew he’d found the perfect doppelganger. You remember, I hinted to you that Morrison brought this on himself. He was so ambitious, and so obsequious, he virtually volunteered himself.”

“And Milt became invaluable?”

“You can’t imagine,” Viktor said, chuckling some more. “Poor Yeltsin, he couldn’t believe the quality of the intelligence I gave him, the things I could get your government to do. Every time I provided him with your President’s talking papers before they met, he would howl with laughter.”

“Yeah, but you put him in power and you owned him anyway, right?”

“I would hardly say I owned Yeltsin, Drummond. He was certainly not the man I would’ve chosen for the job. His only qualifications were his availability and pliability. Not that it mattered. He was always a transitory figure. We never intended to build our new Russia around him.”

“No?”

“Of course not. He never knew about us. He was a caretaker we leveraged into place to keep the chair warm until we could prepare one of our own to take over. Yeltsin would take the blame for the inevitable aftershocks of such abrupt change, and then we would offer the people a savior, a sober, take-charge type who promised to clean things up.”

The shock of what he was saying literally hit me like a jackhammer. “You mean…?”

He smiled. “You Americans are so blindly stupid, it’s extraordinary you’ve gotten so rich and powerful. Where did our new president come from? He worked for me, in my bureau of the KGB. How else do you think he got the job?”

I was shaking my head in disbelief. “It will never work, Yurichenko. Eventually the world will learn. You can’t keep it hidden forever.”

He brought his hand up to his chin, the same way Alexi did. It was almost uncanny. “So what? It’s gone too far to stop. Why would anybody even want to stop it? What would they worry about? Another empire? It’s the farthest thing from our minds. The whole notion of empires is passe, wouldn’t you say? They all fail, don’t they?”

“But what you’ve done in Georgia and the other republics. The world won’t permit that.”