Legends

“If my uncle ingratiated himself with Yeltsin, it was because he was following Mrs. Quest’s game plan. When Yeltsin wanted to publish his first book, Tzvetan arranged the contracts and bought up the print run. The Yeltsin family suddenly discovered that they held shares in giant enterprises. Thanks to the Oligarkh, Yeltsin became a rich man. When Yeltsin ran for president of the Russian Federation in 1991, Tzvetan financed the campaign. Tzvetan was the one who funded Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard, the Presidential Security Service. It was only natural that when Yeltsin sought advice, he would turn to the leading figure in his inner circle, the Oligarkh.”

Martin began to see where the Prigorodnaia plot was going. “Yeltsin’s disastrous decision to free prices and willy-nilly transform Russia into a free-market economy in the early nineties unleashed hyperinflation and wiped out the pensions and savings of tens of millions of Russians. It threw the country into economic chaos—”

“The concept originated with Crystal Quest’s DDO people. My uncle was the one who convinced Yeltsin that a free-market economy would cure Russia’s ills.”

“The privatization of Soviet industrial assets, which looted the country’s wealth and funneled it into the hands of the Oligarkh and a handful of insiders like him—”

Samat was scraping his palms together. “It all came from the CIA’s Operations Directorate—the hyperinflation, the privatization, even Yeltsin’s decision to attack Chechnya and bog down the Russian army in a war they couldn’t win. You can understand where the Americans were coming from—the cold war was over, for sure, but America did not defeat the mighty Soviet Union only to have a mighty Russia rise like a phoenix from its ashes. The people at Langley could not take the risk that the transition from socialism to capitalism might succeed. So they got the Oligarkh, who detested the communist apparatchiki, who was only too happy to see Russia and the Russians sink into an economic swamp, to use his considerable influence on Yeltsin.”

Stella, watching Martin intently, saw him wince. For an instant she thought his leg must be acting up again. Then it dawned on her that the pain came from what Samat was saying: Martin had found the naked truth buried in Samat’s story. She had, too. “The CIA was running Russia!” she exclaimed.

“It was running Russia into the ground,” Martin agreed.

“That was the beauty of it,” Samat said, his voice shrill with jubilation. “We paid the Russians back for what they did to the Ugor-Zhilovs.”

Martin remembered what Crystal Quest had said to him the day she summoned him to Xing’s Mandarin restaurant under the pool hall. We didn’t hire your conscience, only your brain and your body. And then, one fine day, you stepped out of character—you stepped out of all your characters—and took what in popular idiom is called a moral stand.

At the time Martin didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about. Now the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place; now he understood why they’d convened a summit at Langley to decide whether to terminate his contract—or his life.

Samat, drained, puffed on the cigarette to calm his nerves. Martin’s found himself staring at the ash at the tip of Samat’s cigarette, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette. Martin associated the ash with the naked man kneeling at the edge of the crater, the one who had been caught in the black-and-white photograph peering over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror.

Samat, sucking on the cigarette, became aware of the ash, too. His words slurring with dread, he whispered, “Please. I ask you, Jozef. For the sake of my mother, who loved you like a son. Do not shoot me.”

“I’m not sure you should shoot him,” Stella said. “Then again, I’m not sure you shouldn’t. What is to be accomplished by shooting him?”

“Revenge is a manifestation of sanity. Shooting him would make me feel … perfectly sane.” Martin looked back at Samat, who was breathing noisily through his mouth, terrified that each breath would be his last. “Where is the Oligarkh?” Martin asked.

“I do not know.”

Martin raised the Tula-Tokarev to eye level and sighted on Samat’s forehead, directly between his eyes. Stella turned away. “When you lived in Kiryat Arba,” Martin reminded Samat, “you spent a lot of time on the phone with someone who had a 718 area code.”

“The phone records were destroyed. How could you know this?”

“Stella remembered seeing one of your phone bills.”