Legends

Lincoln’s remark startled Felix. “I guess I am,” he admitted warily. “You are … Lincoln Dittmann?”

“In the flesh.”

“Why are you calling?”

“I’m connecting the dots. I thought you could fill in some of the blanks.”

“Tell me what you know,” he said guardedly. “Maybe I’ll hint at what you don’t know.”

“I know what happened to Jozef Kafkor in Prigorodnaia, Felix. He was the cutout between Crystal Quest’s operations folks at the CIA and the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov. When Jozef figured out that Quest was part of the Prigorodnaia operation—when he figured out she originated the operation—he must have threatened to take the matter up with an assortment of congressmen or senators, at which point Jozef was tortured and starved by the Oligarkh’s hired hands, and eventually buried alive.”

“I’m hanging on your every word, Lincoln.”

“You were a counterterrorism wonk before they put you out to preretirement pasture, changing diapers for clients in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. I seem to remember you’d been posted to the American embassy in Moscow at one point in your career. Were you in Moscow when they brought in Jozef Kafkor, Felix?”

Lincoln could almost hear Kiick smiling. “It’s within the realm of possibility,” the FBI man acknowledged.

“With your rank,” Lincoln said, talking rapidly, leaving precious little breathing space between sentences, “you would have been the top FBI gun at the embassy. You would have picked up scuttlebutt about the DDO running a secret operation via a cutout. When Jozef turned up on your doorstep, it would have crossed your mind that he could be the cutout—his physical condition, the evidence of torture on his body, his mental state would have suggested that the DDO operation had gone off the tracks.” Lincoln came up for air. “Why were the Oligarkh and Samat exfiltrated?”

Felix actually sighed. “They’d been living on the edge for years—the Moscow gang wars, the Chechens, certain factions inside the Russian Federal Security Service, disgruntled KGB hands who found themselves out in the cold, Yeltsin’s political enemies, wannabe capitalists whom the Oligarkh had ruined on his way up, take your pick. And then Jozef Kafkor comes on the scene—Jozef and his scruples. Quest would have assured the Oligarkh she was the only one who heard his qualms, but the Ugor-Zhilovs, Tzvetan and Samat, must have had their doubts. After all, Quest had a vested interested in lying to them to keep the operation up and running indefinitely. When Jozef was rescued from the grave the Oligarkh dug for him and ended up wandering the streets of Moscow, the Ugor-Zhilovs didn’t swallow Quest’s story that he couldn’t remember the Jozef Kafkor legend. Samat cracked first. He didn’t like the idea of coming to the States. He thought he’d be safer tucked away in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan, so he got himself into Israel. The Oligarkh held on longer, but in the end he cracked, too, and they brought him in.”

“To the Witness Protection Program?”

“No way. He was too important for Quest to entrust to the FBI. Her DDO wallahs created a legend for the Oligarkh themselves and settled him somewhere on the East Coast of America.”

“Meanwhile you had Kastner and his two daughters in your protection program.”

“I liked Kastner.”

“If it’s any comfort, given that you lost him, he liked you.”

“You’re sprinkling salt in wounds, Lincoln.”

“And the day Kastner told you—he referred to you as his friend in D.C.—that he needed someone to track down Samat, you couldn’t resist tempting fate, could you? I can imagine how the scenario played out after Moscow. Someone like you would have been fascinated by the man found wandering behind the embassy, his body covered with sores. You would have been intrigued by the CIA’s immediate interest in him. You would have been curious to know what happened to Jozef Kafkor after he was smuggled out to Finland. You had friends at the CIA, you would have learned that the Jozef Kafkor exfiltrated to Finland on your watch had been reincarnated, so to speak, as Martin Odum; that this same Martin Odum wound up working as a private detective in Crown Heights. And so you gave Kastner Martin Odum’s name.” When Kiick didn’t confirm or deny this, Lincoln said, “Why?”

“Why not?”

“Come clean, Felix.”

“This Oligarkh character and his nephew Samat rubbed me the wrong way. Crystal Quest rubbed me the wrong way—I still remember how arrogant she was when the FBI was obliged to turn the Triple Border action over to her. And there is no love lost between the FBI and the CIA in general. On top of that, there have to be limits. I mean, ruining the Russian economy—”

Lincoln said, “How’d you figure it out?”