“Swagger, I’m just an action guy. Low-level. An operator. They just give me targets, that’s all.”
“Then you’re dead.”
“But I know enough to warn you that you are betraying your country if you go that way. It’s not too late. You’re the macho man still, if that’s what this is all about. I don’t care. I’ll be beta, it’s fine. Just don’t fuck this up for your country.”
“You ain’t my country. Not with a shoot-on-sight license for Reilly and me.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Jerry.
“I’ll lay it out for you, and you pitch in. I think I got it figured.”
“I tell you, I don’t know stuff. I just run a rifle.”
“Bullshit. First, you wouldn’t go on an op like this without a convincing reason. Second, if you get this info back to them, they can take steps to be ahead of the shit storm, not behind it.”
Grudgingly, Jerry nodded. “I fill you in, you make that call?”
“If I tell you I will, I will.”
“All right, I’m down with it.”
“Near as I can figure, in ’31 or ’32, a kid named Basil Krulov, son of a Soviet trade delegate in Munich, went to some classes at the university under a professor named Groedl, a kind of guru on genocide, racial hygiene, all that crazy Nazi shit, right?”
“I don’t know any of that stuff.”
“Take it from Ms. Reilly here, he did. She has the records.”
“My husband dug them out of the KGB archives,” she said.
“It changed Krulov’s life. He bought in a hundred and fifty percent. He went back to his country in ’33, graduated University of Moscow in ’35, and began his climb in Stalin’s outfit. But his heart belonged to Adolf, at least in the war-on-Jews department. Somewhere in there he contacted Groedl and volunteered to do what he could to help the Nazis whack the Jews. He reasoned that he wasn’t betraying Russia, since it wasn’t military info he was giving but Jewish intelligence. So that’s what he did. He became the Nazi Race Department’s own personal mole in the Kremlin. He must have shit a brick when the nonaggression pact came, but he kept playing. Deep in the war, his mentor, Stalin, gives him orders to kill his hero Groedl, but he can’t, so he snitches out that mission. Groedl gets wasted anyway, because Mili’s so damn good, but Krulov knows that if anyone looks too carefully at it, they’ll see for sure Mili Petrova was betrayed, and it had to be Krulov. So he uses his power to erase her from history. Right so far?”
“I told you, this is news to me. I didn’t know anything about it. Maybe if I’d have known, I’d have played it differently.”
“He gets through the war, everything’s fine. No news or suspicion of his treason ever comes out. He’s the aces. But I’m guessing sometime in ’46 or ’47, some American intel team is going through recovered Nazi records, and they get proof that Krulov was a Nazi spy. So now they own him. He has to dance their jig or they burn him and he catches one behind the ear.”
“I just know they recruited him in ’47. They said he was a walk-in. That’s where the story begins for me.”
“So for the next nine years, he’s our number one guy in Russ. I’m guessing it was so top-top they didn’t even run him out, because they thought the Agency had security problems.”
“It’s something rinky-dink in the Pentagon. Office of Defense Procurement Review. The dope they got from Krulov was slipstreamed into Agency product, that’s how they got it into policy play. It still works that way.”
“Then in ’56, someone separates Krulov from his head. Right? It’s all over. But is it?”
“He had a son,” said Jerry. “Guy named Strelnikov, mother’s remarried name, still the son of Krulov. Who got high in the government, became a billionare when Communism fell, and is now getting back into government.”
“And he’s your guy.”
“I don’t know when Strelnikov went active for us. Mid-’60s, early ’70s, maybe. But I see why now. If it comes out his dad was a Nazi spy, they will look at him hard, and he’s finished. He never gets anywhere. He’s a bus conductor for life. I didn’t get that part. I thought it was idealism.”
“It was leverage. So this whole thing is about protect your asset. Here’s what you geniuses never got. Strelnikov, like his father before him, because of his father before him, still wants to destroy the Jews. He was never a Communist, he was never a Nazi. He was only a genocide guy. He wants to live up to his dad’s heroism, be the man at the tip of the spear in the war against the Jews. He was really still working for RHSA fifty years after RHSA was dust and burned steel. You didn’t care, you even helped him, because the stuff he was giving you was so good. You made a deal with a guy, but you never looked at him carefully enough to realize he was the devil. And now he’s about to become trade minister. Now he’s even more vulnerable to the revelation that Daddy was a spy, which will lead to the fact that he’s a spy, and it all goes back to Basil’s need to bury Mili’s heroism to protect his own ass. She won the war, and yet she’s the one you birds are betraying.”