23

Monday, January 25, 2021, 11:45 AM, Moscow Standard Time

It was a normal gray and sleeting January Thursday in Saint Petersburg when the staff of the Internet Research Agency was distracted from its monitors by a loud crash and mumbled fearful apologies. Almost all heads moved in synchrony toward the source of the noise, a group of people gathered near the entrance.

“I’m so sorry,” said Gorsky, the titular manager of the Agency, from a prone position on the ground, after having tripped over a cardboard box in the aisle.

“For god’s sake, Gorsky, get off the ground,” Vyacheslav Viktorovich said, annoyed. “You look even more ridiculous than usual.” He turned back to an impeccably dressed shorter man behind him, framed by two menacing thick-necked security men in bulky suits. “Remind me never to hire in-laws again, Gospodin Prezident.”

Gorsky clumsily got to his feet. “M-m-many welcomes to the Internet Research Agency, uh… s-s-s-sir,” the sweating bald man said in an oleaginous but quavering voice, to the man standing behind Slava Viktorovich. “We are… most honored by your presence. Please, come this way.”

Slava and the President, followed by the two thick-necks, strode imperturbably behind the now visibly limping functionary, ignoring the wide-eyed stares and slack jaws of the mostly youthful people around them, all manning workstations and laptops.

Gorsky turned as they walked on and said, “I apologize… there is no big board or other central display to show our progress, but I assure you it has been great. If we had had more advance notice of your visit we might have been able to pull something together….”

The group reached what appeared to be the functionary’s office, a rather filthy and binder-strewn warren.

The functionary turned with a sad apologetic smile and said, “I only have one chair in my office…”

Slava Viktorovich cut him off. “We only want to talk to Mr. Antonov. He is your star programmer, eh? I understand that in this field, the stars are the ones who matter, no?”

The functionary quavered at this. “We have a very strong team here, which I have the honor of leading, thanks to you, of course, Slava Viktorovich.”

“If you want to continue in that position, you will find us Mr. Antonov and a suitable conference room of less…” he looked around the office with some distaste… “filth, and then you can return to this disgusting place to do whatever it is you do. Unless, of course,” he said, glowering at Gorsky, “you are no longer interested in being employed here.”

“Instantly,” Gorsky replied. “We have a basement conference room that should suit the purpose.”

“Take us there immediately.”

Gorsky escorted the group to an interior stairwell and beckoned for them to follow him.

One of the thick-necks leaned over toward him. “If there is any funny business, no one will miss you.”

“This is the sad truth,” Slava Viktorovich said. “Certainly my sister would not notice for some months.”

Gorsky took all this in with a craven nod and a resigned air. “The conference room is to the right,” he said. “I will go get Mr. Antonov now.”

The rest of the group walked into the room and arranged itself around the conference table, with the President at its head, at the far end of the room, and his two security men flanking him from behind.

“It is rather a dreary and disorganized facility,” the President said.

“Yes,” Slava replied. “If you would like, I can have it cleaned up.”

“Perhaps these computer people require this sort of atmosphere to function most effectively?”

“That’s what they tell me every time I tell them to shovel this place out, though I have a feeling they are simply lazy.”

“Almost. 2014. Yes, Mr. President, the results have been impressive. Naturally I do not take the credit for myself. It was you who made the decision to proceed with this effort; I merely carried out your design. Though I think even you have been surprised at how stunningly effective it has been.”

“I think you are being modest. But it must be admitted that luck has played its part. Who knew a decrepit office building in Olgino would be more fatal a weapon against our enemies than all the arms the Russian nation has ever possessed? Between luck and design, give me luck every time.”

“Luck is always good to have, Vladimir Vladimirovich. But I think some people make their own luck. …Ah, here is Mr. Antonov. Genius escorted by… its opposite. Gorsky, you may take an early lunch.”

“Yes, sir.” Gorsky bowed and backed away from the door, closing it in front of him. From behind the closed door the people in the room could hear a noise that sounded like a human being smashing into something loud and painful, followed by what sounded like the whimperings of a small wounded animal retreating toward the stairs. Antonov slipped into the chair nearest the door, opposite the President.

“The only reason I don’t fire that idiot is, I feel like it would change the luck of this place,” Slava said to no one in particular. “So, Antonov. Do you have any idea why we are here?”

“Not particularly,” Antonov replied. He was thirtyish, with long slack brown hair parted to one side, tinted squarish glasses, and wore a tee shirt that advertised a rock band that was not among the favorites of the regime. The President could not have missed the reference, but as was almost always the case, his demeanor suggested nothing about his attitude toward it or the young man whom it adorned.

“The President has been – I don’t think this word overstates the case – delighted by the work of the Agency, and we have been informed that its latest triumphs have been largely your doing.”

Slava cut him off. “We don’t have time for fake modesty. What we want to know is how you have achieved these… effects. We’d like a summary of the progress over the past four years. We get summaries from Gorsky, of course, but they are, as you might expect, next to useless. We would like to go to the source, so to speak. So anything you can tell us would be most welcome.”

“Where should I begin?” Antonov asked.

“Tell us how the program has evolved since, let us say, late 2016,” the President suggested.

“Okay,” Antonov said. “That was a little before I joined up, but I can take it from early the following year.”

“Start there, then,” Slava said. “How and why did you join up?”

“I was in Petersburg then, working as a programmer for a secondary gas company. I hated the company, I hated the people, I hated the work, but my girlfriend was here, so I had moved from Moscow to be with her. Then all the news broke about what was going on in Olgino, how a building full of trolls had changed history and disrupted the richest country in the world. That sounded more like fun. Also, it paid better.”

“So you joined as a programmer?”

“No, at first I joined as a simple troll, in January, 2017. New Year’s. At that time, it paid better than coding did. I knew how to Photoshop and make memes. So, I started doing that, targeting various elections and referenda. I seemed to hit a nerve with some of them. Everyone here – except maybe myself – loved that work. They would troll all day, hanging out on HeadSpace and Tooter and all that, talking with American retirees and political malcontents, whipping them up into a frenzy. But it wasn’t my thing. It seemed too easy, but at the same time not very significant. And there were not too many important elections going on. I had missed the big ones, 2016 and Brexit. All the trolls would finish up their shifts, often very late at night to match the American workday, then they would go out drinking till 10AM. They would go on and on about how they had elected the US President, how they’d destroyed his opponent, and how it was too bad I had just missed the big party, and there would never be another one like it.”

“But obviously there was.”

“Yes, eventually. But back then I didn’t see how we’d be able to replicate that success, nor did I think it was my job to do it, frankly. But I went about my job of trolling.”

“This trolling seems to have been tremendously successful once again in 2020,” Slava Viktorovich said.

“I don’t know if we can say it was, or if we would be taking credit for something that was going on anyway in America,” Antonov said. “There was such a ravenous appetite on the part of ‘low-information’ Republican voters for anything that would make their President look good – or far better, make the Democrats seem to be satanic anti-American inhuman beasts – that they were doing a far better job than we ever could have, in my opinion. It was not even like taking candy from a baby. It was more like giving a baby heroin, then watching the baby turn into a drug kingpin overnight, selling more heroin to all the other babies in the country. There was no challenge. After the way the Cold War ended, with the Republicans so proud to have ‘vanquished’ the USSR, now they became willing and eager puppets for us. It was too easy.”

“You have a degree in US-Canada Studies. Odd for a computer person,” Slava said.

“A lot of us started with computers as a hobby,” Antonov answered. “Have to go where the jobs are.”

“Why do you think Republican voters switched to being pro-Russian?” Slava asked him.

“I can only guess. But the Republicans had been accusing Democrats of being traitors, anti-American, anti-God, corrupt, sick, for so long – they even had a list of degrading adjectives to call the Democrats during the 1990s, drawn up by an adulterous Republican Congressman who impeached the Democratic President, essentially, over an affair – that their voters began to believe them, and started to salivate like Pavlov’s dogs at the prospect of new false or exaggerated accusations against Democrats. The insiders knew they were exaggerating, or in many cases, lying, but their constituents had a deep hunger to belong to a tribe, and to hate and want to kill everyone outside their tribe. The Republican party had tapped into something very deep and primal. They were riding a tiger, and they thought they could control it. The rise of ‘conservative’ (really, radical nihilist) political talk radio created a localized network for the metastasis of this mania, and then Wolf News was created. Then, of course, the Internet came upon the scene, and the entire thing became completely pandemic among a certain segment of the population. The capacity for nuance and critical thought was destroyed. You were either with the Republicans, or you were the devil. I wrote my thesis about this period at Moscow State University.”

“Very interesting,” the President said.

“Then this President came on the scene, and he hijacked the whole party. Up to that point, in 2016, there were things Republicans would not say or do. They would not be openly racist, or misogynist, or hateful toward immigrants. It was understood they faced a demographic challenge; the number of white native-born Christian Americans was declining, and they would have to appeal to Hispanics and African-Americans and be less insulting toward women and other marginalized but growing groups. But this President scoffed at all that and started saying things openly that previously had been only ‘dog whistles’ to the substantial racist and hateful element among the Republican base – that, ironically, had, at least in the South, been the old Democratic base back in Jim Crow days. And to the dismay of the other Republican candidates who had been so careful for so long to cover their own tracks and never to be open about their appeals to the haters, it worked! They fell like dominos before this candidate, who had never held office before. …I am sorry, I sometimes get carried away. You must know all this already.”

“Continue,” the President instructed him.

“This tiger the official Republican Party had created and ridden for at least thirty years, the hate that they had stoked and encouraged for their fellow Americans, suddenly turned on them and ate them all,” Antonov said. “Now there was nothing left of the Republican Party but this one man, and hatred of anything the Democrats did or stood for. Even if some of these things had been core values of the Republican Party previously, now they were to be utterly destroyed. Okomocare, for instance, had been cooked up by a Republican ‘think tank’ in the 1990s as a market-oriented way to get universal health care, and had been promulgated in a liberal state by a Republican governor, to universal acclaim. But when a similar program was proposed for the entire nation, consciously as a way of giving Republicans exactly what they wanted, to forestall Republican opposition, then a sudden ‘Tea Party Movement,’ later shown to have been organized and funded by Republican officials (though it certainly became real), arose to scream hatred at Democratic legislators, and opposition to that originally Republican proposal became a Republican article of faith. Okomo continued to try to placate Republicans, of course. He did not understand the game the Republican Party was playing. Their voters had told them that compromise with Okomo would be punished, period, no matter what form it took. He was to be stymied, and if possible, destroyed.”

“Okomo always assumed good faith. He did not understand game theory at all. I would love to have played poker against him. His Syria strategy was…” Slava said, raising his hands as if to indicate complete incomprehension.

“Very true,” Antonov said. “The only people who seemed not to catch on to the new rules of the game were Democrats, and Okomo above all. Ironically, it was his best attributes – his unflappability, his calm demeanor, his refusal to get upset or to think the worst of his opponents – that made it impossible for him to understand that he could never, ever persuade Republicans to work with him. He could not comprehend that logic and facts were useless when it came to them, that their Prime Directive” – he said these last two words in English – “was never ever to be seen negotiating with him.

“To finish, as Okomo was on the way out, the hate was redirected at his would-be successor. She had reached a very high level of admiration as Secretary of State – even a large number of Republicans respected her work. But that changed the instant she announced that she would be running for President again. The Republicans attacked her viciously, especially over the incident where four Americans were killed at a consulate in a war-torn country.”

“The party that got 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq was suddenly upset about 4 Americans killed in another country,” Slava said.

“The Republican Congress held hundreds of hours of hearings on it,” Antonov said. “They held almost no hearings on the Iraq War. In fact, I believe they had held 114 hours of hearings in the 1990s about the Democratic President’s alleged ‘misuse of the White House Christmas card list,’ and something like 3 hours on the entire Iraq War.”

“So, their ratio of outrage was thousands to one: 3 hours of hearings for 4,500 dead and trillions of dollars in expenditures in Iraq, and hundreds of hours of hearings over 4 dead under a Democratic administration,” the President murmured.

“And it worked,” Antonov said. “In 2016, it created just enough doubt in the few undecided voters. Or maybe it was our hacking, or maybe it was the FBI head announcing that there were ‘new emails,’ that turned out much later not to be new at all, a few days before the elections, or maybe it was that she failed to visit two critical rust belt states. But I think it was the Republican outrage factor that caused huge turnout among the base. That thousands-to-one ratio of outrage certainly should give you an idea of how easy it was to play on this Republican hatred of Democrats. Maybe we had swung the election in 2016 with our memes and our trolling, who knows – as many have said, when an election is that close, many things were ‘the’ deciding factor.

“But by 2020, in my opinion, it was just child’s play to get these people to hate Democrats and believe absolutely anything. The real propaganda, the real hate-stoking work had already been done by Republicans and their lunatic fringe, starting 20 years earlier, with Wolf News and talk radio, and anything we were doing was like dropping bombs on the site of a nuclear blast – bouncing the rubble around.

“So, I quickly grew tired of my job, well-paid and easy and amusing though it was. After a month or two of trolling, I was bored and thinking of quitting. The money was good, but I didn’t think it was good for my… for my soul, I guess. It was depressing, frankly. But then one day I was fooling around at home with some hacking software. They wouldn’t let me do this at work, because it wasn’t my job.”

“Gorsky, no doubt?”

“Well, he wasn’t the only one. I could understand. They had numbers to hit – how many grandmothers to get enraged, how many gun nuts to inflame, how many fake events to set up to divide those crazy Americans, how many Tooter bots to unleash. Management needs those targets. It makes sense.”

“But you found a different way to hit those numbers?” Slava asked.

“Well, maybe a different set of numbers to hit. You see, I was fooling around with hacking when by accident I hooked into the computer camera of some guy in New Jersey or Delaware or Maryland, Mid-Atlantic region. I’ve never been to the United States, but I did study it years ago. Anyway, I hooked into the laptop camera of this poor shmo, and suddenly I was seeing things I really did not want to see.”

“When was this?”

“I think it was late March 2017.”

“Just a month in? So, you really had got bored with trolling quickly,” Slava said.

“I think normal people do. Anyway, I shut my laptop right quick and went to sleep. I don’t know if I dreamed it, or it just came to me when I woke up, but the next morning I called in sick and started trying to reverse-engineer how I had hacked into this guy’s camera. It came to me pretty quickly. Then I tried it on other people’s computers. It worked. I switched operating systems and found after a little noodling how to hack into the other one. It was all just curiosity, until I went out that night and was sitting at a bar, and the idea just entered my head fully formed. I left so fast I almost got arrested for not paying my bill. After I smoothed that over, I went home and called in sick again for the next day.”

“And what was the big idea?”

“Well, that was what I figured out the next day. For years the entire Agency had been focused on getting millions of Americans angry with each other, more or less one at a time, almost a retail approach. And it worked well in 2016, as everyone had been telling me over and over. But some of the platforms had put up some defenses against us. Tooter was getting rid of bot accounts pretty efficiently, and eventually even started to crack down on hate speech and conspiracy theories. But aside from all this, I thought, so you spend 45 minutes and succeed in turning some dedushka in Nebraska into a rabid hater? That’s one person. Even a planted fake HeadSpace story may actually convert only a handful of weak-minded or already ideological people. Why not go up the chain, to the top, wholesale? Why not go to the people who actually make policy, and get them to change, maybe permanently?”

“So how would you do this?” the President asked.

“Easily, it turned out. I took my camera-hacking software and I tried it out on the personal computer of a United States Senator.”

“Let me show you.” Antonov swiftly hooked his laptop into the projection screen of the conference room. A hazy close-up appeared on the screen of a heavy-lidded middle-aged man. Then the man backed away from the camera, and the picture came into distressing focus. Slava began to laugh.

“Gosbodi,” Slava said.

“Bozhe moi. This is shameful. This is disgusting,” murmured the President.

For a moment, they watched, transfixed. Then the plot took a certain turn, and the two senior men in the room gagged slightly.

“Svyataya mat’,” blurted Slava. “Why is the dog there?”

“Please, switch it off,” the President said.

“Gladly,” Antonov replied.

The men sat silently around the table for a moment, as though they had been struck in the head. Then the President cleared his throat.

“It is obvious that, disgusting though these images are, they have a certain… utility for the motherland. When did you find them, again, precisely?”

“March 2017.”

“And how did you proceed?”

“Well, I went back to work the next day and, after being bawled out for missing two days, I went straight to the head of coding, and I told him I had a powerful new tool for the nation. At first, he did not want to talk to me, because I was not technically in the programmers’ department. But then I showed him what you just saw, right here in this room, and when he was still doubtful, I went right online right here and hacked into the cameras of a few members of the American Congress.”

“With similar results?”

“For some of them.”

“I see. So, what did you do then?” asked Slava.

“We still did not know quite what to do with what we had. So, we went to Mr. Gorsky and asked if he knew anyone who knew about blackmail or ransomware. He told me he did not know about such things and to go back to work.”

“Idiot,” Slava murmured. “Obviously, you did not let him stop you, so tell the President what you did next.”

“We understood that the actual power behind the Agency was Mr. Slava Viktorovich here, and he might be able to assist us in this area.”

“A valid assumption,” the President murmured.

“So, we got in touch with him, and when he heard what we had, he grasped the significance immediately, and flew in on his private jet and came to see us the next day. We did a live demonstration of how we could hack into the American politicians’ computers, and he had brought a cyber expert in to cooperate on how to ‘reach out and touch them,’ as he called it. It took us a week or two, but we were able to contact the Senator you just saw and to, let us say, bend him to our national purposes.”

“This explains a lot,” the President said.

“Yes,” Antonov replied. “He had been violently, publicly opposed to our preferred candidate prior to the 2016 election, insulting him on national television. But starting in late March of 2017, he began to be the number one supporter of the President… their President, that is.”

“Ours too,” Slava said, chuckling.

“Clearly this did not stop with this one man and his dog,” the President said.

“No,” Antonov went on. “Once we had our proof of concept, and our subject was playing golf with the other President and making nice with him, we tried it out on several others who had previously been doubters.”

“Yes,” Antonov replied. “He went rather quickly. I had wondered if the politicians from Utah would be harder to break, because as you may know they have a reputation for being very conservative morally. But it turns out that Utah is both the most religious state, and the number one consumer of online pornography in America.”

“Makes sense,” Slava muttered. “Catholics used to be the most observant Christians, and they were always a bit more… exciting. Certainly the girls.” He seemed to be looking out a nonexistent window, into the distance, toward some sunny Mediterranean shore of his espionage-packed youth.

“And this Senator has changed his attitude?” the President asked.

“He began to positively gush at some events over the virtues of the president. It was almost too much. We had to recalibrate our approach. But he quickly retired after that. I think he got spooked.”

There was a pause as the President stared at the image on the screen, a longtime opponent of all things Russian.

Antonov continued. “After doing him and a handful of others, we thought it over, and decided to ‘flip the script,’ as they say in America. We realized that if we could either create our own porn channel or take one over, this entire process could be streamlined.”

“And this is where our friend Slava became very useful, I think,” the President said.

“Exactly so, Gospodin Prezident. Because it turned out that he essentially already had control of the largest Internet pornography site in the world, we could simply insert our software into their servers and we would have a blackmail capability over tens of millions of people the world over. Of course, it had to be done in such a way as not to get out of our control, or we might lose our monopoly because the technology would be taken over by gangsters – my apologies, Mr. Viktorovich.”

“No offense taken, dear boy.”

“So, we had to bring the FSB into the process. But after a brief delay, things moved right along and we had material on a large number of senators and congressmen. By this time, we had figured out how to hack into phone cameras, which greatly facilitated our work. One of the ancillary benefits of working with the FSB, of course, was that it made Mr. Gorsky stop asking questions.”

“My sister, his wife, also enjoys that benefit. I wonder if the FSB was involved with that as well.”

The President interjected. “So over whom have you obtained leverage?”

“At first, we thought that Democrats might be the best targets, since they still tend to oppose our interests vigorously. But after we explored some of them, and then discussed our priorities, we decided that Republicans should be our first and major targets. Blackmailing all or most of the Republicans would ensure that their President would have complete control over his party. The other issue was that Democrats seem to care slightly less about being seen in compromising positions. Republican officeholders seem to have many more secrets than the average American, and far more concern about projecting an image of traditional morality.”

“Even with that President?” the President said, smiling.

“Even so. Apparently, while he is seen to be immune to even the most disgusting and provable gossip, his political allies do not have the same confidence in their own ability to withstand scrutiny. They have shown themselves to be most pliant when presented with video of their transgressions. Of course, we have pursued a number of Democrats who have been targets of opportunity, to foment division in their ranks between ‘Progressives’ and ‘moderates.’ But mainly it has been the Republicans.”

“Why have they not turned their cameras off or covered them or otherwise disabled them?”

“We have threatened them with retaliation if they do not keep their cameras operational and pointed towards whatever we think we want to see.”

“Have they any idea who is blackmailing them?”

“I do not think so, not yet, though one can never be sure. Their efforts to defund all intelligence programs aimed at combating our interference in elections quite obviously plays a role in this regard. They simply do not want any investigation into their own computers, because we have threatened them with exposure if they even attempt to investigate it. So, you see them absolutely smothering any attempts on the part of the intelligence community to increase their computer security and the like. It’s rather humorous, when you think about it.”

“So,” the President said. “You now have effective control over much of the Republican Party in Congress?”

“I would not say ‘control,’ it is something blunter than that. But yes, we have a large degree of influence over some otherwise very powerful people.”

“What of the President and the White House?”

“The White House is a little more difficult to hack into. We have succeeded in penetrating the computers of a number of the President’s advisers, particularly those with international or military positions. You may have noticed that many of his senior administration officials have left after serious ruptures with this President, but almost none of them went public with anything that could be described as truly damaging to him until far too late. Many American analysts have wondered why all these people, many of them patriots and military officials who have sworn oaths to the Constitution, not to the President, have been so reticent about criticizing him after leaving. Some think it is the nondisclosure agreements they have signed, which is an innovation of questionable legality pioneered by this administration. Others simply think it is some sort of old-fashioned sense of honor among public servants. I would like to think it has been, at least in some cases, the result of our hard work here.”

“Why have you concentrated so much on America? Most others here are focused on Ukraine and our other enemies in Georgia, the Baltics, the European Union. Why America?”

“I suppose, Gospodin Prezident, it is because I studied America, and the English language, in school.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because my family went through very hard times in the 1990s, and it seemed clear that America was a large part of the cause. My father was trained as an economist under the Soviet Union, but when the collapse came, the country was flooded with American economists promising instant transformation and prosperity. Instead we were poorer than ever before, and my father, who could not find a job in this new ‘shock doctrine’ economy, drank himself to death. I wanted to take some revenge on this country for what they did to my family. I find great satisfaction in how easily they have been turned against one another, how easily they fell into our trap. No matter what we do now, we can be sure that Republicans will be on our side, simply because Democrats are against us. They are permanently divided and weakened. I hope this has served the state.”

“It is quite impressive.”

Slava interjected: “Tell him the name of the operation.”

Antonov blinked. “Well… it’s not the official name or anything.”

“Tell him what you call it.”

“Well, internally, among ourselves, we started to call it ‘Operation O Face.’”

The President shifted in his seat and turned his head almost imperceptibly toward Slava Viktorovich.

“Unfortunately, we must leave now, as we have other business to attend to,” the President said. “Tell me, can you come to the Senate Building in Moscow and set my computer up to be able to monitor these people?”

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident.”

“If possible, I would like you to get into the other President’s laptop.”

“His phone would be much more useful. He apparently never uses computers.”

“His phone, then.”

“It may take some time, but I think it is within our abilities. If I had more time, I would detail some ideas we have had about how we might extend our blackmail scheme to the broader public. It is sort of another ‘flip the script.’ We started by shifting to the big guys from the small ones, but now the technology we have used on the elites can be turned on the society as a whole. We used to have to influence these people one at a time, or at best in small groups; we may have swung the last election in this way alone. But now we can dispense with bots. We can force an army of blackmailed Americans to broadcast whatever we want via Tooter or HeadSpace or any other social media channel we wish, and no one will be able to say it is not real people doing this.”

“Very interesting. We may discuss this further at some point.”

“Thank you, Gospodin Prezident.”

“Slava, shall we?”

The President rose from his chair. Antonov got up. Slava motioned to the two security agents, and they followed the president toward the door. Antonov moved to the other long side of the table so as not to impede their progress, and watched as the four visitors walked out the door and started up the stairs.

As the President walked up the stairs, Slava asked him, “Well, what do you think?”

The President replied, “Slava Viktorovich, this is a most dangerous tool. I think I would like this young man observed. At a discreet distance, of course. But constantly and without pause. I expect regular reports.”

“I was going to suggest the same thing, Vladimir Vladimirovich.”

“I also would like a briefing on our separate Deep Fakes effort, preferably within a month.”

“Da, Gospodin Prezident.”

The party reached the huge black-tinted utility vehicle. The doors opened from inside, and two further security men held the doors for their honored guests, and then got in beside them. The other two got into the front seats, and they all drove off toward the Congress Palace in what the President still thought of as Leningrad.

After a moment a look of consternation furrowed the President’s brow.

“Slava…was that a collie?”