(Ufa, Russian Federation, December 1991)
Milo Dragović’s onetime contemporary Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only leader called “the Great Communicator.” While Reagan swaggered through Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union was already on one knee, symbolically telling an absent Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” his own countrymen were united through his sheer oratorical skills.
Now, 1000 miles from his native country, his breath exploding from his gaping mouth like an assembly line of ghosts, he slipped on slush as he ran for his life. His younger wife was in better shape- Back home, she jogged five kilometers daily. But she was no less scared than he; She just refused to show it.
How could they turn on him so fast?
His people, as always, were united but now against him. What initiatives and policies that had served so admirably well for 11 years were now suddenly, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, out of vogue. Sure, prosperity could’ve been better, it always can be, but his people were still better off than they were in 1980. Who cared about 2000 political enemies getting “disappeared” or “re-educated”?
The clergy and damned human rights groups, for starters, plus the Soviet Politburo’s slow but sure withdrawal of any support. Still, how could the people turn on him so damned quickly?
On, on, his wife exhorted him and Milo Dragović’s 69 year-old body struggled to move at even his present crab-like pace. His lungs felt thick and the colder the air of Ufa grew, the more they burned. Eleven years of hiding in the presidential palace had made him as soft as a dumpling.
On, on, Irina’s shoves and tugs told him and his leaden legs somehow kept moving. They were finally exposed but they also knew they had to leave the armored BMW when their chauffer and last remaining bodyguard was killed. Neither of them knew how to drive so it was either stay in the car and wait for the sniper to find them with his armor-piercing rounds or become moving targets.
Dragović stopped and put his pudgy hands on his aching knees, his breath now ragged wheezes.
“Go. I’m… just holding you back.”
“Where you go, I go.” She kneeled down and looked into his gray eyes with her pale blue ones. Unlike Dragović, she was a pure Russian and as such was equal parts of all four elements, each one more untamed and irresistible than the last. She wasn’t a human being at the mercy of nature but a force of nature unto herself.
“Then we will both die,” he gasped. His lungs burned less with the respite even though they still felt like half-filled sandbags. “At least if we separate… you have a chance.”
“You will not talk like this,” she said. “I will not listen to you when you talk like this. If you die, we die.” For emphasis, Irina pulled from her sable coat’s right pocket a 7.62 X 25 mm Tokarev that she took off one of their dead bodyguards. 19 years ago, Irina Svetyana was a silver medal-winning biathlete for the Soviet delegation at the Sapporo Winter Olympics. Now 40, her only concession to her age was the severity in her demeanor and in her cheekbones owing to some very good plastic surgery. “Now move, my love. Move.”
He drew himself to his full height of 5 feet, 8 inches and took a couple of exploratory steps. His ample legs felt as if they were made of rubber but at least the burning in his lungs was slightly mitigated. He began trotting, his wife’s iron arm locked in his to keep him from losing his balance and footing in the snow clogged streets.
Presently, they came upon the Nesterov Art Museum on ul Gogolya west of the main street. Ufa was renowned for being a far-flung but cosmopolitan city with a strong bent for science and the humanities. The Nesterov Art Museum was known even in Moscow and Dragović’s native country as a must-see destination for any tourist in Ufa. He looked at the imperial-style eight columns and cheerful yellow paint job, the modest but still-imposing steps. Well, when in Rome…
Even as they entered the building, they donned sunglasses as they paid their admission. Still, sunglasses couldn’t hide the distinctive scar on Dragović’s right cheek, the one shaped exactly like a lightning bolt earned during his nation’s civil war in 1969.
Instinctively, Irina and Milo embedded themselves in the biggest crowds, all the while scanning their environment of anyone even remotely suspicious. But after today, with all four of their bodyguards picked off one by one and in broad daylight, their justified paranoia made weeding out the nonsuspicious much more inclusive. There’d been horrified witnesses, sure, but since Milo and Irina were obviously the real targets, the better half of human valor made for very few Good Samaritans. Which was fine by them. The last thing they needed was to be discovered and held in custody by the Ufa police. That’s how they got Nicolae Ceausescu and his own wife when they tried to flee two years ago.
Milo took a break from his paranoid search and lowered his sunglasses to admire a 15th century Russian icon. He was already ahead of the game compared with Ceausescu, Hitler and Mussolini. Ceausescu was machine gunned minutes after a two hour show trial on a military base, Hitler died in a bunker and Mussolini was also machine gunned then hung upside down like a side of beef at an abandoned gas station.
And their women also died with them, he darkly concluded.
If anyone had walked into the museum carrying a sniper rifle, the crowd could be counted on to raise a cry of alarm. So far, nothing but the usual hubbub of typical art aficionados like Dragović.
But in the end, he knew that as much as the caprices of their eagle-eyed hunter, what kept him alive was Irina. Ufa was her native city and she knew most of the streets and alleyways.
The couple let themselves be swept into a tour group. Both knew Russian fluently and they learned from snatches of conversation that they took a train from neighboring Samara to tour Ufa. Then Milo saw Irina lower her sunglasses, her right hand shifting in her matching sable muff. Following her line of vision, he saw a tall, very heavily-muscled man, possibly German, standing at an exit. His eyes radiated cruelty as he slowly began to advance on them.
Irina was about to pull out the Tokarev but Milo held her hand and shook his head. “This way,” he murmured as he pulled her away from the blonde giant.
Still believing in safety in numbers, Milo drifted with Irina to a smaller and looser knot of people until he, too, saw someone walking toward them from another exit. All the exits were covered, he realized. His next epiphany was that his only chance of survival would be if by some miracle his 40 year-old wife could singlehandedly kill a cadre of professional killers. What an ironic end for the Butcher of Central Europe, as he was also called.
The entrance perhaps. Milo saw no reason why that, too, wouldn’t be covered but it was all he could think of. Five minutes ago, it seemed as if getting inside a building was their only hope. Now, this museum threatened to be their mausoleum.
Now completely exposed with no human cover, Milo and Irina hustled back to the main entrance and stopped short when they saw the stocky, platinum blond walk in. The noose was cinched and Dragović knew that a blood bath that favored them was the only way out. Why hadn’t he accepted that Glock that Irina had taken off the other slain bodyguard?
“Leaving so soon? You just got here!” The man at the entrance spoke in perfect Russian but with a German accent. He began walking toward them. One hand remained in a slash pocket as if keeping a rifle or shotgun tucked between his body and black leather trench coat. “I heard the museum’s collection is a bit region-specific although their collection of Russian icons is to die for.”
“Let us pass and you can live,” Irina said evenly.
The blond man stopped as if he chose to and casually scratched his ear with his free hand. To the museum-goers, it still looked and sounded as if the three were actually having a discussion about art. Dragović looked behind him and at all sides and noted that all their pursuers had stopped.
“I’ll give you one chance to take those guns out of your muff and to show me your hands.”
“Or what? You’re obviously trying to kill us.”
“Only your bodyguards. You’re coming back to Eastern Europe with us to stand trial. If you’re smart enough to cooperate.”
“Either way, it’s a death sentence.”
“Resist and it’s a certainty.”
The next thing Dragović knew, the black sable muff fell flat to the ground. Irina had pulled out both hands simultaneously and pointed the Glock and Tokarev at the stocky blond. Keeping the Russian semiauto trained in him, she quickly swiveled her head and alternately pointed the German pistol at the other goons. People began to walk away quickly, to run even more quickly and the once-serene murmuring got faster and more high-pitched.
Surely they wouldn’t kill us in front of all these witnesses! No matter who he was and no matter what he’d done, murder was still murder and they weren’t back home. There was no mob justice in peaceful, cosmopolitan Ufa. This was part of the reason Irina had spirited him back home.
Eventually, the space between the three was completely clear and the herd mentality of the witnesses quickly knew enough to get away from the other stone-faced men in black leather who weren’t running. A lone security guard was foolhardy enough to try to occupy the No Man’s Land between the three principals.
“Pahzhalustah. Put your guns down,” the middle-aged man said in a quavering voice. Dragović noted the Russian rent-a-cop wasn’t armed with anything other than handcuffs and a night stick. He was sure that that fact hadn’t been lost on the few still left at the museum.
“Mr. Security Guard, I noticed you’re married. Do you have children?” He never looked at him but past him, right into the barrel of Irina’s Tokarev.
“None of your business. What does that have to do…?”
“Do you have children, sir?” the blond asked in a sharper tone of voice.
“Two. I have two. One still at home,” the security guard said, still looking. By now he was looking very paranoid and just realizing he was in way out of his depth and was now looking for a graceful exit out of this standoff.
“Then I strongly urge you to leave or the only way your children will continue to know you is through photo albums and your wife’s tearful recollections.”
“The police should intervene…”
“We are the police,” the German said and with his free left hand he produced from his other slash pocket a badge and ID.
“Interpol,” the guard read.
“Now leave while you can. This isn’t someone trying to steal a painting.” The guard vanished as if he teleported Hopefully, Dragović thought, he’ll have the presence of mind to call the Ufa constabulary. At least with them, they’d live… until after their extradition.
“So. Now what?” the blond asked, still speaking in perfect Russian.
“You are going to get behind us and let us leave or I will kill every Goddamned one of you,” Irina said, constantly taking in all three, her severe ponytail whipping this way and that.
“I don’t recall seeing you in Sapporo. I’m more of a hockey man, myself. However, your athletic reputation precedes you. You always were a better skier than a shooter, I seem to recall reading. Your inability to consistently hit the bullseye is what cost you the gold.”
“At this range, tovarisch, I cannot and will not miss.”
“Oh, I am sure, Irina. I do not think all those years living in the presidential palace back home, in the lap of luxury, has atrophied your skills that much.”
Dragović was tired of remaining silent and letting his wife do all the talking. After all, talking was his strength, they were on his turf. He used to be a head of state and would negotiate with Brezhnev and his countless successors, for God’s sake.
“I have money, in a Swiss account. Over 200 million dollars, American. Name your price.”
“Do you honestly think it prudent to insult me with a bribe?”
“Think of the alternative,” Irina said, looking around them. “You could leave here a rich man or die here a pauper.” She pulled back the hammers of the Glock and Tokarev for emphasis. “I may or may not get every one of you but you will be the first to die.”
The German glared at her, obviously identifying the armed woman as the clearest and most present danger. He pointed a Ruger from under his trench coat. Irina fired the Tokarev and the blond staggered back and fell.
Irina haltingly took a step or two forward and she, too, fell as her husband stared at her in horrified rage. The German never got a shot off. He looked behind him. One of the other Germans, the heavily-muscled one, was still training his own Glock at his wife’s supine form. Irina was still alive but gasping for air through one good but one punctured lung. The German at the entrance was getting up, poking at a bloodless hole in his black shirt. The shot from behind spoiled Irina’s aim.
Dragović fell to his knees, sobbing. The tears were real but he had another reason for getting closer to the guns still clutched in his beloved’s hands. He curled his pasty, pudgy fingers over the Tokarev and whispered to her, “So it ends. But not like sheep…”
“…but like lions,” Irina gasped.
Dragović shot at the German again but took out the door behind him instead. Irina suddenly rolled over and evacuated the skull of her muscular attacker. The third German, a wiry brunette, riddled Irina with a series of quick bursts from his semi-auto. One round ricocheted and shattered Milo’s ankle and he went down on one knee. He unsteadily lifted the two and a half pound weapon and Hans Dietrich blew his brains out with his Ruger.
He looked dispassionately at his colleague’s semi-headless corpse in the distance then at the two bodies of what used to be the ruling couple of an obscure but oil-rich central European nation. Dietrich stepped over Milo Dragović’s body just in time to see a bolt of blood slowly strike against his scarred cheek.
“That’s for my father,” Dietrich said before spitting on both corpses.
(Nesterov Art Museum, present day)
“You have to understand, Herr Dietrich,” the head museum curator began, “we’ve never been plagued with a problem quite like this.”
The blood on the marble floor had long since been cleaned up but Dietrich nonetheless knew the curator of the Nesterov museum was standing in the precise spot where Mr. and Mrs. Dragović had died almost 18 years ago. Dietrich doubted that anyone would recognize the two “Interpol” agents who’d survived that day. His job in 1991 having been done, Dietrich and Günter left Fritz’s body behind before the Ufa police could get there.
This investigation and acquisition, if successful, would mark the first time that Dietrich had plucked from the gates of Hell a ghost that he had personally put there. If the witness sightings and surveillance videos were to be believed, then Milo and Irina Dragović had finally begun haunting the place of their untimely deaths.
Dragović had been dubbed by a less compliant western press as “the dragon of central Europe.” His casual butchery of his self-perceived political enemies also earned him the moniker “The Butcher of the Urals.”
Yet before he got in bad odor with his people and the Soviet Politburo for his excesses, he was also justly named “The Great Communicator.” Dragović’s oratorical skills were so refined and so effective his speeches were called “hypnotic” by even his most virulent detractors.
During his lifetime, it was said he could even mobilize the dead into doing his bidding. Well, Dietrich thought, let’s put that to the test and see if Dragović could live up to his own press.
It looked as if A.D.E.P.T. had the Moss kid and that he was now being protected. He had the power to unite the spirit world. So Dietrich and his employer decided they needed their own “Great Communicator.”
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