Command Authority (53 page)

Three glasses of red wine had already been poured and sat waiting on the table in front of the men. Castor took his glass and drank a slow sip. Oxley and Ryan did not touch theirs.

Neither Jack nor Ox had been handcuffed or tied, which surprised Jack greatly. So far, none of this was going the way he had imagined it. It was almost as if Castor were happy to have the visitors.

Castor said, “Jack, you might not believe this, but I did not know a thing about what happened in Corby until Sandy told me this morning. I looked it up on the news, and the only conclusion I can come to is that clearly some associates of mine double-crossed me, the same as they did you.”

“Sandy told you I went to see him yesterday?”

“He did.” Castor shrugged. “No, no. I know what you are thinking. Sandy is not aware of any of this at all. He is just a good company man, and a decent lapdog. He has been a faithful servant for many years. He knows there is more than meets the eye, but he is not so curious about my private dealings with Russia’s elite away from Castor and Boyle.”

Castor pointed at Ryan with his wineglass. “You, on the other hand, young Ryan. You are the curious one. I must say how terribly impressed I am with everything you have accomplished. Obviously, I underestimated your abilities.”

“And I overestimated your character.”

Castor’s eyebrows rose, and he looked to Oxley. “You’ve been talking, I see.”

Ox said, “
You’ve
been talking, ya fuck. I owe you not a bleedin’ thing.”

“I could have left you to rot, you bloody fool! Or I could have let them shoot you!”

“You should have done just that, you old bastard.”

“It’s not too late, Bedrock. They just might get you yet.”

Jack was utterly confused by the back-and-forth.

Castor looked at Ryan, and then back at Oxley. “What does he know?”

“He knows I was shanghaied by the Stasi while trying to help out his father. He knows I was then passed to the Russians. He knows I went in the gulags, and he knows I came out a few years later.”

“And clearly he thinks this is somehow my fault.”

Ox said nothing.

Castor crossed his legs. To Jack, it appeared an affectation. He wasn’t as relaxed as he pretended to be. The short, biting argument with Oxley was evidence of that.

Castor said, “Jack, I had nothing to do with our friend Victor here getting waylaid by the East Germans in Berlin. It was bad luck. That was all. I spent years, literally
years
, trying to find out what happened to him.”

Ryan looked to Ox, and Ox conceded Castor’s remarks with a half-nod.

Oxley said, “Castor wasn’t dirty then. He didn’t turn dirty till the Iron Curtain fell down and a bunch of money poured out. That’s when he became one of them.”

Castor shook his head vigorously. “I wasn’t one of them, Jack, old boy, I was an opportunist. I’d spent the years looking into Oxley’s disappearance, something of a personal mission, because MI5 had given him up for dead. I made contacts throughout the region in this endeavor. In Hungary. In Czechoslovakia. In Russia. Here in Zug. When the Iron Curtain fell, I was in a position of leverage over some powerful individuals. I used that leverage. Simple as that.”

Jack said, “Malcolm Galbraith told you about the stolen KGB money Zenith was involved with.”

“He told me bits and pieces, indeed. Others told me other things. But by the time Galbraith told me about the Russian account, the money was long gone from RPB. Zenith got it out via diamonds.”

“Diamonds?”

“Yes. Zenith’s control officer transferred the entire two hundred four million into another account at the bank, an account owned by a diamond man in Antwerp. Philippe Argens. He met with Zenith here in Zug, passed him two hundred million in uncut diamonds, and Zenith returned to Russia.”

“What happened to the diamonds?”

“The Russians in control of the black fund kept them until 1991, and then they sold them back to Argens. Slowly, they liquidated their assets. A few million here, a few million there. It worked for both sides. Argens was able to hide the transactions, so he effectively laundered money for years. And the Russians had the assets they needed to buy up state-run businesses when Russia was nationalizing everything and offering it in rigged auctions for peanuts.”

“A quarter-billion dollars buys a lot of peanuts,” Ryan admitted. “Who stole the money in the first place?”

Castor smiled. “This is where the bargaining starts, my boy.”

“What bargaining?”

“I’ll tell you what I want in a moment, but for now, I will whet your appetite.” He sipped his wine and then looked into the glass. “It’s French, not Swiss, so it’s quite good.”

Neither Ryan nor Oxley had any interest in the wine.

Castor shrugged and said, “Even before Gorbachev came to power and started liberalizing things, the KGB realized they had a problem. Members of the First Chief Directorate’s leadership began meeting in secret, discussing the inevitability that their model could not continue much longer.

“They wanted a fallback plan. They could see the potential for a complete collapse of the system as far back as the mid-eighties. They began pulling money out of accounts set up to support communist revolutions in Latin America, or to bankroll communist dictators already in power.

“Later, my contact in this group told me ten percent of all the money earmarked by the Kremlin for Cuba and Angola for a two-year period had been skimmed by a single young KGB officer working for the leaders.

“He created this black fund, ready to support them in case they had to run. They studied what the smartest of the Nazis did after the end of the Second World War, and they learned from them, but the KGB had longer to plan and more resources to pull from. The Third Reich had only been around for a decade. By the late eighties, Soviets had been in power for seventy years.”

Jack leaned forward in rapt fascination. Castor seemed to be certain of his information, though Jack knew he had his own agenda here.

Ryan asked, “Who was Zenith?”

Castor said, “In order for the KGB graybeards to protect this covert operation, they moved staff out of the intelligence hierarchy, and set them up as their own private organization. A young officer was charged with setting up and protecting the assets in the West, and he brought on board an assassin from military intelligence, a man who had a lot of experience killing from his years in Afghanistan.”

Ryan said, “Roman Talanov.”

Castor nodded gravely. “
The
Roman Talanov. Of course, I’d never heard of him till Oxley told me when he got out of the gulag.”

“How do you know the rest?”

“The young KGB officer charged with protecting the assets realized his control over the man Zenith gave him greater power than the KGB graybeards in charge of the operation, so when the time came for the assets to be distributed to the men who came up with the plan in the first place, the KGB officer sent Talanov to kill them. It was a double cross of a double cross, you might say. There was a two-year period in the early nineties when former KGB and GRU big shots were falling off buildings, stepping in front of buses, turning up in the Moskva River, and committing suicide with guns that were curiously absent from the scene when the police arrived. This was all Talanov and his control officer tying up loose ends.”

Castor continued, “One of these men reached out to me in desperation, knowing I was British intelligence and I could protect him. General Mikhail Zolotov, of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Misha told me about the plan, the black fund, and he told me about the double cross perpetrated by the young officer overseeing the accounts. He told me everything but the names. We were working up to that point when he died in a boating mishap in the Gulf of Finland.”

“A boating mishap?”

“Indeed. Apparently, he went to sea and forgot to bring his boat along. He was found floating three kilometers offshore of Saint Petersburg.”

“Why didn’t you go to MI5 when he told you about this?”

Castor shrugged. “I wanted some of the money. So I went to the Russians.”

“Fuckin’ cunt,” Oxley mumbled. “He knew Talanov’s name from me, and he found Talanov in Saint Petersburg. He told him what he knew, told him he’d keep his mouth shut if he could be cut into the deal.”

“Why didn’t Talanov just kill you?”

“Because I had an ace in the hole and he knew it. I told him about his time in the gulag. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him there was video of him in his typhoid rage talking about Zenith and the KGB.”

Ryan stood up. “There’s a video?”

Oxley answered for Castor. “There’s no bleedin’ video. He just told Talanov there was for leverage.”

Ryan sat back down. “You told him you made copies, had them hidden here and there, and if something happened to you, they would get out.”

“That’s right. He paid me off, but then something even better happened. We went into business together. He’s been giving me tips for over twenty years, and I’ve been helping him in his business pursuits.”

“What business pursuits?”

Castor did not answer this. Instead, he said, “What is important for you to understand, lad, is this. I committed no treason.”

Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How the fuck can you possibly make that claim?”

“Easy. Victor Oxley was not an employee of MI5. He was a civilian. Run completely off the books. When he returned from the gulags and reported in, I merely flew to Moscow and spoke with him, then accurately told MI5 leadership that the man was not an agent of ours, and no further action would be necessary. No official assistance would be forthcoming.”

Ryan wanted to kill the old man in front of him. He said, “Even if that were true, you were an MI5 man working with the KGB.”

“Wrong again, young Ryan. The men I uncovered in my investigation were working very much against the wishes of the KGB. They may have been former employees, but they were private citizens by this point. They had stolen funds from KGB. They weren’t even ideologically connected to them.” Castor waved his hand to stress the next point: “I traded no secrets with any foreign intelligence agency, at any time, while I was at Five. When I learned details from Oxley upon his release, I resigned from Five, and then I reached out to Talanov, aka Zenith. I merely entered into an agreement with these men that I would keep their secret in return for payment. I certainly did not tell the Russians that a just-released
zek
had been an MI5 asset. I knew they would kill Victor if they were aware who he was and what he knew about Zenith, but I prevented it by keeping my mouth shut.”

Ryan turned to Oxley. “How did you get out of the gulag?”

“They were letting a lot of us political prisoners out at that point. I took a train to Moscow, I almost starved to death on the journey. Didn’t have a ruble in my pocket or an onion to eat. Staggered into the British consulate. Just a walk-in off the street. I waited in line nearly all day to see someone.

“I told the woman at the counter I was a British citizen, which caused a bloody ruckus. I was taken into a room, where I was interviewed by an SIS employee. I told him I’d been run off-book by MI5, but I gave him a name.”

Ryan looked to Castor, and Castor raised his hand. “I was on the next flight over.”

Ox said, “I also told the woman about Zenith, and she had a file faxed over from London. On it was a reference to the explosion at the Meisser restaurant in Rotkreuz. I told her I had been picked up by police there, and she jotted down my code name next to the mention of the incident in the report, intending to research it later.”

Jack said, “So when I showed you the file—”

“I knew exactly what it was. I was sitting in front of the woman when she made the note. Funny how you remember the little things.”

Oxley continued. “When Castor showed up, he told me I was lucky to be alive. The Americans sold me down the river. The KGB had been hunting me, but they didn’t know I was in the gulag. He told me I needed to stay off the radar, forever, because if the off-the-books op from the eighties got out, a lot of people would suffer.” Ox shrugged. “Firstly and mostly, me.”

Castor picked up the story here. “Oxley just wanted to live out his years in peace. I allowed him that. I said nothing to the Russians that he existed, and I said nothing to MI5 that he had reemerged.

“We had an agreement, the two of us. I sent him money every year, enough to keep him in the manner in which he has become accustomed, and he stayed quiet. He knew there were powerful people in Russia who could have ended him whenever the hell they chose. I kept that from happening.”

Ox said, “Now I am learning that no one in Russia knew a goddamned thing about me. It was all a lie.”

Castor shook his head. “At least I didn’t inform on you, you miserable fuck.” He turned to Ryan. “Victor and I have lived in a state of mutually assured destruction for some twenty years, haven’t we?”

Oxley mumbled. “I just wanted to come home and be left alone.”

There was one thing Jack didn’t understand. He asked Oxley, “Why did you agree to come help me in all this if your only intention was to be left alone?”

“Because once the Seven Strong Men attacked me, I knew the Russians were onto me, and I knew Castor here had reneged on his side of the bargain. It was over. I had to fight back.”

Castor looked into the fire. “Which brings me to you, Ryan. The Seven Strong Men had been following you during your Gazprom investigation. I tried to push you away from that affair, gently, through Lamont, and then more forcefully when I had you in my office to order you off the case. But the Seven Strong Men knew you were too close to stop looking. Then, the other night, one of their international operatives came to my house and said you were meeting with a man in Corby. They gave me the address, I realized you and Oxley had gotten together, and I told them who Oxley was. What he knew.”

“And at that moment they decided to kill him,” Jack said.

“Of course they bloody well did.” Castor leaned forward; his eyeglasses caught the firelight and it obscured Ryan’s view of his eyes. “Even after all this time, it’s not too late for bloody Bedrock here to ruin everything.”