The old man's lips thinned. "Thank you, Remo, for having such confidence in me," he said acidly.
"No offense," Brandy said carefully as she eyed Chiun, "but he doesn't look very dangerous."
"I am not," Chiun sniffed. "I am but a poor homeless old man who has given everything to an adopted foundling who repays the kindness he has been shown with baseless suspicion. While you are thinking of more unsolved mysteries to blame on me, I will be waiting in the car."
As the old man breezed between them, Remo said, "It was just a passing thought. Besides, I never blamed you for the Titanic, the Hindenburg or the Lindbergh kidnapping."
"See?" the Master of Sinanju said knowingly to Brandy. "Where I actually deserve credit, he gives none."
With that he swept from the room.
"Don't listen to him," Remo assured the FBI agent. "Now he's just bragging."
As the trio headed to the door, Anna Chutesov shook her head. "Men," she muttered.
"Tell me about it," Brandy agreed.
"Maybe we better keep the top up for the ride across town," Remo said as he pulled the office door shut. "One stiff breeze and both your Bella Abzug hats could get blown into the Timothy Leary Memorial Pot Plantation."
Chapter 19
General Boris Vanovich Feyodov hated his country with every fiber of his existence. It was a hatred forged from betrayal and humiliation. A personal, visceral loathing that could not help but be stronger than everyday antipathy.
This attitude was newly born. The old Boris Feyodov had loved the old Mother Russia. It was this new bastard incarnation of the nation he loved that Feyodov so reviled.
The son of a field marshal who had fought in the Great Patriotic War, Feyodov had learned early on that rank equaled privilege. For the family of Marshal Gregori Feyodov, there were no food lines, no stores with empty shelves. Their needs were small, of course, as was right for all good Communists, but those needs were always met. There were houses and cars and an old Armenian woman who helped his mother with the cleaning. Once every year there was a summer vacation at a Party dacha on the Black Sea.
By studying his father, young Boris Feyodov had come to understand exactly how the world worked. When Boris came of age, his father had pulled strings, getting his son an early commission in the Red Army. Clever, resourceful and possessed of an innate sense to know whom to stroke and whom to avoid in the Party leadership, Feyodov had quickly climbed the ranks. All who watched his rapid rise to general could not help but be impressed by the way Feyodov played against both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Communist system. The little boy from Smolensk, son of the great Field Marshal Gregori Feyodov, was truly a virtuoso. His instrument? Communism itself.
Feyodov achieved the rank of general in the 1970s, back during the time of SALT and detente. Back then, it was understood that the West was in its death throes. Capitalism was bloodied and reeling, desperate to appease. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was respected and feared. When the great Russian bear arched its mighty back, men from Washington to Peking to all points in between quivered like frightened children. At that time to be a Russian general was to be a god among men.
It was as a god that General Feyodov assumed command of the Sary Shagan Missile Test Center. The collection of hangars and bunkers was his own personal Olympus. He strode through halls and across tarmacs, head held high, never out of full uniform. The soldiers under his command worshiped him, and the civilian workers were terrified of him.
It was at Sary Shagan that Feyodov's true reputation began to grow. Until the time of his appointment there, he had always been his father's son. Certainly he was clever enough, but Party leaders assumed that he had gotten where he had largely because he was son of a field marshal. That was only partly true. Sary Shagan was the turning point of Party sentiment toward the younger Feyodov.
There was never a challenge sent to the base that was not accepted by its commander. Projects sent there were completed on time and under budget. The iron-handed rule of General Boris Feyodov kept order and garnered results.
When in the 1980s the Americans announced their desire for a missile defense program, Boris Feyodov and Sary Shagan were given the task of producing a Soviet version.
Feyodov had driven the team of scientists like dogs. The men worked, slept and ate at the Kazakhstan facility. Only one weekend every four months were they allowed to go to visit their families off base.
The work schedule was brutal, even by Feyodov's normally harsh standards. If questioned, the general would have claimed that he was only doing his duty. But the truth was, he had another motivation. One he dared not speak aloud.
Like a religious visionary, Boris Feyodov had detected something that had gone unnoticed by his countrymen. The son of Field Marshal Gregori Feyodov had seen the end.
The West was no longer timid. Unlike the cowardly days of the sixties and seventies, America had now gone on the offensive. Challenges to Soviet authority that would not have been dared a generation before were becoming common. Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada. For the first time in years, Mother Russia had begun to lose ground. Feyodov was one of the first to smell change in the air. And it terrified him.
General Feyodov understood communism. He knew how to exploit the nuances of that system to his advantage. Without it, Boris Feyodov was hollow. And it was this fear of what might be that motivated him to push his men.
For more than a year he drove the scientists to complete their task, hoping that their work would hold together the splitting seams of socialism.
When the work was done on what was supposed to be the prototype for a line of high-tech Soviet weapons, the order to test had come down from the Kremlin itself.
At the time the head of the USSR had been in office for less than a year. This new general secretary was younger than any who had preceded him. Swiping away the cobwebs of fear, he had been appointed to give a smiling face to Russian communism. This fact alone was offensive to General Feyodov. Who cared if the hated West ever saw you smile?
Still, the order had given Feyodov hope. Especially after he learned what his target would be. The test had gone flawlessly. When the American space shuttle burst apart in the blue sky like a clod of white dirt, the general had allowed himself a moment of hope for his country. His first in several years.
The moment was short-lived.
As soon as the spacecraft was obliterated, Feyodov received the call. He was stunned when he recognized the uncultured voice of the general secretary.
"You are calling with congratulations, comrade General Secretary," Feyodov had said proudly.
"Yes," the general secretary agreed, in a way that made it sound as if the opposite were true. "I did not think you could do it," Russia's premier said.
"We are Russians," General Feyodov had said. "Proud sons of the Revolution."
"Yes, yes," the general secretary said. He actually sounded anxious. "Feyodov, I am beginning to rethink this program. It was instituted before I assumed this office. What we-what you-have done today..." He took a deep breath. "The Americans, Feyodov, will not understand."
Though tempted, Feyodov refrained from instructing the general secretary of the Soviet Union on the indifference he should feel toward the concerns of the Americans.
It was then that the general secretary had issued the most shocking order General Boris Feyodov had ever received. The general was commanded to obliterate every member of the team responsible for creating the particle-beam weapon.
Feyodov wanted to resist, but to refuse a direct order from the premier would be to invite the considerable wrath of a system that the general understood all too well.
In the end he had done his duty. The civilian scientists were killed on the spot. The technicians and military personnel were shot later on. When he was finished, knowledge of what had truly transpired that day was limited only to Boris Feyodov and the highest levels of the Kremlin.
The explosion that should have heralded a great new day for the struggling Soviet Union ended up sounding its death knell. The world began to unravel not long after.
The great technological advance Feyodov had helped usher in was minuscule when weighed against the achievements of the West. The Soviet Union simply could not afford the arms race with America. Funding to the military was cut. This included the Sary Shagan base.
For his obedience and silence, the general secretary eventually transferred General Feyodov to another post.
A new espionage agency was being created. If Russia could not beat its enemies with brute military force, it would do so with cunning. It was to be the most secret agency ever to exist. Formed ostensibly to battle internal problems, it would actually be an international force like none other. More clandestine than the KGB, Cheka or Shield, it would employ only three men: General Feyodov and a pair of very special field operatives.
The general secretary himself had blackmailed the Americans into turning over two of their top agents. When given his appointment to this start-up agency, Feyodov had his doubts that a pair of American agents would willingly work for the sworn enemy of their country. He was told by the premier that they were mercenaries, based in Communist North Korea, and thus were not beholden to any nation. To Feyodov's disgust he learned that the two men who would be his new stealth operatives worked purely for monetary gain.
And so General Boris Feyodov, late of the Sary Shagan Missile Test Center, had come to Kitai Gorod in Moscow to set up his clandestine agency in an ominous concrete building with bricked-up windows and no visible entrance.
And there he waited for the agents that never came.
It turned out that there was some problem with the contract of the two operatives. General Feyodov became head of an agency of which he was the sole member. Not that he had time to nurse this latest humiliation.
Almost before he had time to settle in, he was ordered to vacate his post as director. The Institute, as his agency was called, was being turned over to a special adviser to the head of Russia. A person who had been a field operative and who, because of some terrible secret, could no longer work abroad.
He had met his successor briefly. To make his disgrace complete, Feyodov had been shocked to find that it was a woman. A mere slip of a girl with cold blue eyes, an attitude of snide superiority and a fat briefcase locked with the seal of the Soviet president.