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By the late 1990s violence against members of officialdom or the legitimate professions was hardly ever necessary, but by then the growth of private armies meant that every underworld chieftain had to match all his rivals if need be. Among all the men of violence none matched the speed and unconcern of the Chechens if they felt they were being crossed.

From the late winter of 1994 a new factor had entered the equation. Just before Christmas that year Boris Yeltsin launched his incredibly foolish war against the homeland of Chechnya, ostensibly to oust the breakaway president Dudayev who was claiming independence for it. If the war had been a quick surgical operation, it might have worked. In fact, the supposedly mighty Russian Army took a pasting from lightly armed Chechen guerrillas, who simply headed for the mountains of the Caucasus and fought on.

In Moscow any semblance of hesitation the Chechen mafia might have felt toward the Russian state vanished. Ordinary life became almost impossible for a law-abiding Chechen. With every man’s hand turned against them, the Chechens became a tightly knit and fiercely loyal clan within the Russian capital, far more impenetrable than the Georgian, Armenian, or native Russian underworlds. Within that community the head of the underworld became both a hero and a resistance leader. In the late autumn of 1999 this was the former captain of the KGB, Umar Gunayev.

And yet as businessman Gunayev he could still circulate freely and live like the multimillionaire he was. His office was in fact the entire top floor of one of his hotels, a collaborative enterprise with an American chain, situated near the Helsinki Station.

The journey to the hotel was accomplished in Umar Gunayev’s Mercedes limousine, proofed against bullet and bomb. He had his own driver and bodyguard, and the three from the café came behind in the Volvo. Both cars drove into the underground garage of the hotel, and after the basement area had been searched by the three from the BMW, Gunayev and Monk walked to a high-speed elevator that took them to the tenth and penthouse floor. The electric power to the elevator was then disconnected.

There were more guards in the lobby on the tenth floor, but they finally found privacy in the Chechen leader’s apartment. A white-jacketed steward brought food and drink at a command from Gunayev.

“There is something I have to show you,” said Monk. “I hope you will find it interesting, even educational.”

He opened his attaché case and activated the two control buttons to release the false base. Gunayev watched with interest. The case and its potential clearly excited his admiration.

Monk handed over the Russian translation of the verification report first. It comprised thirty-three pages between stiff gray paper covers. Gunayev raised an eyebrow.

“Must I?”

“It will reward your patience. Please.”

Gunayev sighed and began to read. As he became more involved in the narrative he left his coffee untouched and concentrated on the text. It took twenty minutes. Finally he put the report back on the table between them.

“So. This manifesto is no joke. The real thing. So what?”

“This is your next president talking,” said Monk. “This is what he intends to do when he has the power to do it. Quite soon now.”

He slipped the black-covered manifesto across the table.

“Another thirty pages?”

“Forty, actually. But even more interesting. Please. Humor me.”

Gunayev ran his eye quickly over the first ten pages, taking in the plans for the single-party state, the re-commissioning of the nuclear arsenal, the re-conquest of the lost republics, and the new Gulag archipelago of slave camps. Then his eyes narrowed and he slowed his pace.

Monk knew the point he had reached. He could envisage the messianic sentences as he had first read them in front of the sparkling water of Sapodilla Bay in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

“The final and complete extermination of every last Chechen on the face of Russia ... the destruction of the rat-people so that they will never rise again ... the reduction of the tribal homeland to a wild-goat pasture … not a brick on brick nor a stone on stone … forever ... the surrounding Ossetians, Dagomans, and Ingush will watch the process and learn due and proper respect and fear of their new Russian masters. …”

Gunayev read to the end and put the manifesto down.

“It’s been tried before,” he said. “The Czars tried, Stalin tried, Yeltsin tried.”

“With swords, tommy guns, rockets. What about gamma rays, anthrax, nerve gases? The art of extermination has modernized.”

Gunayev rose, stripped off his jacket, draped it over his chair, and walked to the picture window with its view over the roofs of Moscow.

“You want him eliminated? Taken down?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not? It can be done.”

“It won’t work.”

“It usually does.”

Monk explained. A nation already in chaos plunged into the abyss, probably civil war. Or another Komarov, perhaps his own right-hand man Grishin, storming to power on a wave of outrage.

“They are two sides of the same coin,” he said. “The man of thought and words, and the man of action. Kill one and the other takes over. The destruction of your people continues.”

Gunayev turned from the window and walked back. He leaned over Monk, his face taut.

“What do you want of me, American? You come here as a stranger who once saved my life. So for that I owe you. Then you show me this filth. What has it to do with me?”

“Nothing, unless you decide so. You have many things, Umar Gunayev. You have great wealth, enormous power, even the power of life and death over any man. You have the power to walk away, to let what will happen happen.”

“And why should I not?”

“Because there was a boy, once. A small and ragged boy who grew up in a poor village in the northern Caucasus among family, friends, and neighbors who clubbed together to send him to university and thence to Moscow to become a great man. The question is, Did that boy die somewhere along the road, to become an automaton, triggered only by wealth? Or does the boy still remember his own people?”

“You tell me.”

“No. The choice is yours.”

“And your choice, American?”

“Much easier. I can walk out of here, take a cab to Sheremetyevo, fly home. It’s warm there; comfortable, safe. I can tell them not to bother; that it doesn’t matter, that no one over here cares anymore, they’re all bought and paid for. Let night descend.”

The Chechen seated himself and stared into some distance long past. Finally he said, “You think you can stop him?”

“There is a chance.”

“And then what?”

Monk explained what Sir Nigel Irvine and his patrons had in mind.

“You’re crazy,” said Gunayev flatly.

“Maybe. What else faces you? Komarov and the genocide carried out by his beastmaster, chaos and civil war, or the other.”

“And if I help you, what do you need?”

“To hide. But in plain sight. To move but not be recognized. To see the people I have come to see.”

“You think Komarov will know you are here?”

“Quite soon. There are a million informants in this city. You know that. You use many yourself. All can be bought. The man is no fool.”

“He can buy all the organs of the state. Even I never take on the entire state.”

“As you will have read, Komarov has promised his partners and financial backers, the Dolgoruki mafia, the world and all therein. Soon now, they will
be
the state. What happens to you?”

“All right. I can hide you. Though for how long even I do not know. Inside our community no one will find you until I say so. But you cannot live here. It is too obvious. I have many safe houses. You will have to pass from one to the other.”

“Safe houses are fine,” said Monk. “To sleep in. To move about, I will need papers. Perfectly forged ones.”

Gunayev shook his head.

“We don’t forge papers here. We buy the real thing.”

“I forgot. Everything is for money.”

“What else do you need?”

“To start with, these.”

Monk wrote several lines on a sheet of paper and handed it over. Gunayev ran his eye down the list. Nothing was a problem. He reached the last item.

“What the hell do you need that for?”

Monk explained.

“You know that I own half the Metropol Hotel,” Gunayev sighed.

“I’ll try and just use the other half.”

The Chechen failed to see the joke.

“How long until Grishin knows you are in town?”

“It depends. About two days, maybe three. When I start to move about, there are bound to be some traces left. People talk.”

“All right. I will give you four men. They will watch your back, move you from place to place. The leader is one you have met. In the front seat of the BMW, Magomed. He’s good. Give a list of what you need to him from time to time. It will be provided. And I still think you are crazy.”

By midnight Monk was back in his room at the Metropol. At the end of the corridor was an open area by the elevators. There were four leather club chairs. Two of them were occupied by silent men who read newspapers and would do so all night. In the small hours of the morning two suitcases were delivered to Monk’s room.

¯

MOST Muscovites and certainly all foreigners presume that the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church lives in a sumptuous suite of apartments deep in the heart of the medieval Daniovsky Monastery, with its white crenellated walls and its complex of abbeys and cathedrals.

This is certainly the impression, and it is a carefully cultivated one. In one of the great office buildings within the monastery guarded by fiercely loyal Cossack soldiers, the Patriarch does indeed keep his offices, and these are the heart and center of the Patriarchate of Moscow and All the Russias. But he does not actually live there.

He lives in a quite modest town house at Number Five Chisti Pereulok, meaning “Clean Passage,” a narrow side street just outside the central district of the city.

Here he is attended by a priestly staff of personal private secretary, valet/butler, two manservants, and three nuns who cook and clean. There is also a driver on call and two Cossack guards. The contrast with the magnificence of the Vatican or the splendor of the palace of the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church could not be greater.

In the winter of 1999 the holder of that office was still His Holiness Alexei II, elected ten years earlier, just before the fall of Communism. Still only in his early fifties then, he became the inheritor of a church demoralized and traduced from within and persecuted and corrupted from without.

From the very earliest days, Lenin, who loathed the priesthood, realized that Communism had only one rival for the hearts and minds of the teeming mass of the Russian peasantry, and he determined to destroy it. Through systematic brutality and corruption he and his successors nearly succeeded.

Even Lenin and Stalin balked at the complete extermination of the priesthood and the church, fearful they might inspire a backlash not even the NKVD could control. So after the first pogroms in which churches were burned, their treasures stolen, and the priests hanged, the Politburo sought to destroy the church by discrediting it.

The measures were numerous. Aspirants of high intelligence were banned from the seminaries, which were controlled by the NKVD and later the KGB. Only plodders from the periphery of the USSR, Moldavia in the west and Siberia in the east, were accepted. The level of education was kept low and the quality of the priesthood degraded.

Most churches were simply closed and allowed to rot. A few remained open, patronized mainly by the elderly and very old, i.e., the harmless. The officiating priests were required to report regularly to the KGB and did so, acting as informers against their own parishioners.

A young person seeking baptism would be reported by the priest he approached. After that he would lose his high school place and a chance at university, and his parents would probably be ousted from their apartment. Virtually nothing went unreported to the KGB. Almost the entire priesthood, even if not involved, became tainted by popular suspicion.

The Communists used the stick-and-carrot technique, a crippling stick and a poisoned carrot.

Defenders of the church point out that the alternative was complete extirpation, and thus that keeping the church, any church, alive was a factor that outweighed the humiliation.

What the mild, shy, and retiring Alexei II inherited, therefore, was a college of bishops steeped in collaboration with the atheist state and a pastoral priesthood discredited among the people.

There were exceptions, wandering priests without parishes who preached and dodged arrest, or failed to do so and were sent to the labor camps. There were ascetics who withdrew to the monasteries to keep the faith alive by self-denial and prayer, but these hardly ever met the masses of the people.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Communism the opportunity occurred for a great renaissance, a rebirth that would put the church and the word of the Gospel back at the center of the lives of the traditionally deeply religious Russian people.

Instead the turning back to religion was experienced by the newer churches, vigorous, vibrant, dedicated, and prepared to go and preach to the people where they lived and worked. The Pentecostalists multiplied, the American missionaries poured in with their Baptism, Mormonism, and Seventh-Day Adventism. The reaction of the Russian Orthodox leadership was to beg Moscow for a ban on foreign preachers.

Its defenders argued that root-and-branch reform of the Orthodox hierarchy was impossible because the lower levels were also dross. The seminary-trained priests were of poor caliber, spoke in the archaic language of the scriptures, were possessed of pedantic or didactic speech, and had no training in non-academic public delivery. Their sermons were delivered to captive audiences, few in number and elderly in years.

The opportunity missed was vast, for as dialectical materialism was proved a false god and as democracy and capitalism failed to provide for the body, let alone the soul, the appetite for comfort was pan-national and profound. It went largely unanswered. Instead of sending out its best younger priests on missionary work, to proselytize for the faith and spread the word, the Orthodox Church sat in bishoprics, monasteries, and seminaries waiting for the people. Few came.