That was a shot in the dark.
But his eyes--and especially the tongue quickly wetting his lips--show I hit him hard with it.
The proof came immediately.
"In exchange for what?" Pevsner asked.
"Well, for one thing, it will keep our professional relationship where it is. The agency and the FBI will leave you alone . . . presuming you don't break any U.S. laws."
That's bullshit.
The agency and the FBI will no more obey the President's order to leave him alone than they obeyed Montvale's order to leave me alone. They will do whatever they can to silence him. The agency's skirts are the opposite of clean.
"How cynical are you, Friend Charley?"
"Well, probably not as much as I should be. But I can learn, I guess."
"I have personal reasons for not telling you all I know about Dmitri Berezovsky. I won't tell you what they are, and that's not negotiable. I will tell you what I know--which isn't much--about the chemical laboratory in the ex- Belgian Congo, and my price there is very cheap. You don't tell anyone--anyone including the agency--where you got it."
So Berezovsky wasn't lying. There is a chemical laboratory. His big chip to deal with me. Or was Svetlana the big chip?
"Why are you being so good to me, Alek?"
"That's why I asked how cynical you are. Are you capable of believing it's because I think what they're doing there is despicable?"
"Define despicable."
"Biological warfare that would kill millions of innocent people is despicable. Wouldn't you agree?"
"Why would you say that none of this has come out?"
"It has come out. The Muslims boast there will be a caliphate from Madrid to Baghdad and that they will kill how many millions of Christians--and, of course, Jews--as necessary to accomplish that. Nobody wants to believe that, so they pretend they didn't hear it.
"Exactly as they didn't want to hear that Hitler was murdering undesirables by the millions, and Stalin's starving Russians to death by the millions in the gulags, and Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons to kill several hundred thousand of his own people."
"So you're suggesting that there's nothing that can be done, that we should lie down and let these people roll over us?"
"I'm suggesting that the best that people like you and me can do is stop a little here, and a little there, and meanwhile try very hard to keep yourself and the people you love alive."
"Is that the voice of experience I hear?" Castillo asked without thinking, and hearing himself, immediately regretted the sarcasm.
Pevsner's icy glare showed he didn't like it either.
For a very long twenty seconds, he said nothing. Then: "As a matter of fact, it is. It is the experience of my heritage speaking."
He paused again, almost as long.
"Friend Charley, you're very good at what you do. God gave you an ability few have."
Where the hell did God come from?
There was no sarcasm in the way he said that.
Alex believes in God?
I'll be damned!
"You didn't come here and throw the Oprichina in my face without knowing something--probably a good deal, but not as much as you think you do--about it."