The Honorable Spy by Douglas Brown

Author:Douglas Brown [Brown, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cheetah Publishing LLC
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Outside St. Petersburg

July 14, 1905

If anyone knew how to smile in the faces of her victims, it was Svetlana Petrovna Rachkovskaya.

The news of an imminent plot against the Tsar had diverted her completely from the treaty once she had Beletsky’s deposition. Stating that she would never forgive herself if anything happened to the royal family, she had spent weeks crisscrossing Russia and looking up her contacts in the anarchist movement, all under her revolutionary pseudonym Svetlana Petrovna Kutuzov. She had dragged MacKenzie along with the undercover name Peter Ivanovich Kutuzov, posing as her cousin.

The plot was proceeding with the utmost secrecy, for Svetlana and MacKenzie’s efforts uncovered nothing. They had learned from Beletsky that it would be discussed at the meeting of the People’s Revenge on July 14. This particular political party was one of the more radical of the anarchists, devoted to violence against any aristocratic target or anyone in authority. It was whispered, “Heaven help the Okhrana agent who infiltrates them.” Svetlana seemed determined to go anyway.

She and MacKenzie arrived at the villa where the People’s Revenge would meet with hats pulled down and collars turned up. The party had scheduled the meeting for Bastille Day in commemoration of the French Revolution. She had learned from Monsieur Beletsky that the plot involved a bomb and the Tsar’s yacht, but she had also admitted to MacKenzie that she had no idea how exactly the anarchists planned to employ it.

The anarchists had all manner of elaborate methods for delivering bombs: dropping them from bridges or chimneys, putting them in basements, throwing them into carriages stopped by roadblocks... To best combat the plot, she and MacKenzie would again appear as revolutionaries at this meeting to learn details.

In the days prior, Svetlana had made no secret of her disgust for Doctor Ivanov, the owner of the villa. He made a profitable living treating aristocrats’ maladies while using the home he had built with those funds to host meetings for those who would do his patients in. His credentials as an associate of those aristocrats seemed reasonably sure to deflect suspicion, and if she could have had him arrested without blowing her cover, MacKenzie did not doubt she would’ve done it.

Inside the spacious yellow brick house, though, an orchestra of Russian instruments played loud enough to drown out the treasonous talk to anyone eavesdropping outside. The balalaika players particularly enjoyed themselves at the gathering. They played the rustic Russian folk songs of the peasants the People’s Revenge wanted to base their communal society upon.

MacKenzie noticed the amiable greeting Svetlana gave the butler who waited at the door to the drawing room. No doubt she forced herself to smile at one she despised by imagining him shivering in rags up to his waist in freezing water mining for gold.

“Your name?”

“Svetlana Petrovna Kutuzov.”

The butler gasped. “The Svetlana Petrovna! I almost feel ashamed to ask you the password, but this meeting is barred for anyone who does not know it.”

Svetlana graciously waved her hand. “That’s all right.

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