An Aegean Prophecy - Jeffrey Siger [88]
It was as genuine a prayer as the Protos ever uttered.
21
The e-mail hit Yakov’s computer screen just as he was about to leave for home. His wife would give him holy hell if they were late for midnight services. But the message was from his ex-director back in the days when Yakov was new to the foreign intelligence game. Anatoly had plucked him from the crowd and made him chief espionage analyst for southern Europe and the Balkans, better known then as Section V. He at least must take a quick look at it, if only for old times’ sake.
Yakov began quickly scrolling through the message. The pace of his reading slowed, then slowed even more. He picked up the phone, pressed a speed dial button, and waited until the man now in charge of his old Section V duties in Russia’s new foreign intelligence service answered. ‘Artur, come to my office immediately.’
Yakov was reading the attachments when a man entered his office. ‘What is it, Director?’
‘Artur, do you remember about a decade or so ago, the man we called “the Balkan Butcher”?’
‘How could I forget him. But didn’t he die?’
‘So we thought. I’m not sure anymore. This just came in.’ Yakov pointed to the screen. ‘Read it.’
Yakov kept talking as Artur read. ‘Even if this monk, Zacharias, is the Butcher, if all he’s doing is running around creating political angst for the Greek Church, I’m not sure his past matters anymore. After all, we do believe in redemption, do we not?’ He smiled.
Artur did not answer, just kept reading.
Yakov didn’t mind, he was used to asking rhetorical questions and never expected them to be answered. ‘As for the symbolism of the photographs, I think it’s an intriguing intellectual exercise, but I’m not sure of what interest it is to us. One could argue from the placement of the carpet and the superimposed face of Satan in the photograph that it was the Protos the murdered monk was linking to Satan. But let us assume this Zacharias is Satan’s beast or even Satan himself, as I said before, does it matter? Yes, undoubtedly, the Butcher in his day qualified as the devil incarnate, but that was a long time ago. Now he’s someone else’s problem, and I see no reason to make him ours. And so what if this Zacharias is behind all of the bad publicity coming out of Greece? Would it not be better for us to bribe those same journalists to write retractions than risk being exposed as the eliminator of the source?’
‘I’m not so sure about that, Director.’
An actual answer to one of his questions caught Yakov off guard. ‘“Not so sure” of what?’
Artur kept reading through the attachments as he spoke. ‘We’ve received reports of someone attempting to locate the source of the dioxin used on the Ukrainian. At first we thought it was a journalist trying to wring yet another story out of the incident. Maybe even Yushchenko himself trying to find some way to revive his political fortunes with more emotional tales from the past.
‘But then we learned that someone actually was trying to buy dioxin from that same source, and not just any dioxin, but the exact formulation found in Yushchenko. At that point we inserted our operatives into the transaction. We wanted to know who was so interested.’ Artur turned to face Yakov.
‘We do not know who the buyers are. There have been no face-to-face communications, but we do know two things. One,’ he raised his right hand and popped out his index finger. ‘The language used by the buyers was Serbian, and two,’ out came the middle finger. ‘Delivery is to take place in Greece. In Ouranoupolis.’
Yakov’s pulse was racing but his voice was flat. ‘The gateway to Mount Athos. This changes everything.’ He drummed his forehead with the fingers of