Deep Strike by Barry Lando

Author:Barry Lando
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: KCM Publishing
Published: 2017-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY:

Moscow

It was noon when Doug Robb, aka Steve Penn, walked across the glittering marble lobby of the Four Seasons in Moscow and registered, giving his profession as “Private Investor.” He had flown all night on Lufthansa from San Francisco via Frankfurt. The lobby was crowded with people on the make from all corners of the globe, like the five young Qatari princes in jeans and t-shirts with their veiled wives and elder daughters. They mingled easily with elegant members of the Russian elite, sporting their leather coats and bodyguards and tall, long-legged blonds.

Those Russians were the new nomenklatura, the immensely privileged, immensely wealthy few, victors of the so-called “open lottery” that transferred the resources and industries that had once – in theory at least – belonged to all the Russian people. Instead, they were sold off at bargain basement prices to a favored few: billion-dollar industries going for a fraction of their real worth, massive fortunes created overnight. It was known that Russian President Kozlov got a piece of just about every deal that came down the pike.

With the scandalous help of compliant institutions, like Germany’s huge Deutsche Bank, Russia’s new billionaires were converting their ill-gotten rubles into hard currencies to be parked in safer havens abroad. Trophy real estate holdings in places like Palm Beach and Belgravia and Gstaad were particularly prized. That huge capital flight was a major reason that Russia, with a population more than twice that of France, had a gross domestic product only one quarter that of the Gallic state.

Moscow changed with every visit, thought Steve as he took the elevator to the 14th floor. His room looked out over the 18th-century spires and domes of the Kremlin and across the new cityscape of Moscow – a forest of towering cranes and skyscrapers, glitzy restaurants and apartment buildings and expressways – and enormous traffic jams. A brownish pall of smog hung over the city.

It was such an amazing contrast to the Soviet capital that he’d first come to almost thirty years ago as a twenty-three-year-old agent for the CIA. This was long before he’d met Maya. It was his first overseas posting, and was considered a plum assignment. It was due largely to his grandmother who’d been born in Kiev and immigrated to Seattle. She brought Steve to speak Russian even before he learned English.

He’d been assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow under cover as an agricultural attaché. His wife, Marilyn, had come with him and found the Soviets and their capital superb subjects for her watercolors. Those were exciting times. With his policies of glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev was sabotaging the foundations of the old Soviet Union. It was as if spring had suddenly come to a land frozen for decades in glacial silence.

His mission was to learn what was really going on under the surface, to find out whether real change was on the way and what form it would take. His team’s first major breakthrough came when they used

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