Legends

“You do remember!”

Stella looked from one to the other; she could almost hear her father instructing her that in the life of espionage operatives, questions would always outnumber answers.

Samat started to reach into a cardigan. Martin thumbed back the hammer on the handgun. The click reverberated through the room. Samat froze. “I absolutely must smoke a cigarette,” he said weakly. He held the cardigan open and reached very slowly into an inside pocket and extracted a pack of Marlboros. Pulling one cigarette free, he struck a wooden match and brought the flame to the end of the cigarette. His hand shook and he had to grip his wrist with the other hand to steady it and hold the flame to the cigarette. Sucking it into life, he held it away from his body between his thumb and third finger and watched the smoke spiral up toward the overhead light fixture. “What else do you remember, Jozef?”

Martin could almost hear the husky voice of the Russian interrogator, who went by the legend Arkhip Cheklachvili. He repeated what Cheklachvili had told him back in Moscow; at moments his own voice and that of the interrogator overlapped in his head. “Prigorodnaia’s tractor repairman drove me to Moscow in the village’s tow truck. His intention was to take me to a hospital. At a red light on the Ring Road, not far from the American Embassy, I leaped from the cab of the truck and disappeared in the darkness.”

“Yes, yes, it all fits,” Samat blurted out. “Mrs. Quest sent us word … she told my uncle Tzvetan and me … that the FBI counterintelligence people stationed at the Moscow Embassy found you wandering in the back streets off the Ring Road. She said you couldn’t remember who you were or what had happened to you … she spoke of a trauma … she said it was better for everyone if you couldn’t remember. Oh, you fooled them, Jozef.” Samat started to whimper, tears glistening on his skeletal cheeks. “If she had suspected you of remembering, you would not have been permitted to leave Moscow alive.”

“I sensed that. I knew everything depended on convincing her I was suffering from amnesia.”

“It was the Oligarkh who ordered them to torture you,” Samat said with sudden vehemence. “He was convinced you had betrayed the Prigorodnaia operation. He needed to know to whom. Mrs. Quest needed to know to whom. It was a matter of damage control. If rot had set in, we needed to burn it out, so my uncle said. I tried to reason with him, Jozef. I told him you might have denounced the operation when you came to realize what it consisted of—but only to people on the inside. Only to Crystal Quest. I swore you would never go to the newspapers or the authorities. I told him you could be brought around to see things from our point of view. After all, we all worked for the same organization, didn’t we? We all marched to the same music. It wasn’t our business to pass judgment on the operation. The CIA gave us a compass heading and off we went. You were a soldier like me, like my uncle; you were the link between us and Mrs. Quest; between us and Langley.”

Martin had to lure Samat into filling in the blanks. “It was the scope of the Prigorodnaia operation that sickened me,” he said. “Nothing like that had ever been attempted before.”

Samat’s head bobbed restlessly; words spilled out, as if the sheer quantity of them filling the air could create a bond between him and the man he knew as Jozef. “When the CIA found my uncle Tzvetan, he was running a used-car dealership in Armenia. What attracted them to him was that his father and grandfather had been executed by the Bolsheviks; his brother, my father, had died in the camps; he himself had spent years in a Siberian prison. Tzvetan detested the Soviet regime and the Russians who ran it. He was ready to do anything to get revenge. So the CIA bankrolled him—with their money he cornered the used-car market in Moscow. Then, with the help of CIA largesse, I’m talking hundreds of millions, he branched out into the aluminum business. He made deals with the smelters, he bought three hundred railroad cars, he built a port facility in Siberia to offload alumina. Before long, he had cornered the aluminum market in Russia and amassed a fortune of dozens of billions of dollars. And still his empire grew—he dealt in steel and chrome and coal, he bought factories and businesses by the dozens, he opened banks to service the empire and launder the profits abroad. Which is where I came in. Tzvetan trusted me completely—I was the only one who understood how the Oligarkh’s empire was configured. It was all here in my head.”

“Then, once Tzvetan had established himself as an economic force, the CIA pushed him into politics.”