Free Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland Page B

tray, voices seemed to clamor at him, telling the story of their deaths
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10
     
     
    THE FLAMES HAD burned down on the floor of the barn. Poppy-colored embers glowed among the ashes.
    Outside, lightning flashed across the sky.
    “Who is Grodek?” asked Kirov.
    Pekkala breathed in sharply. “Grodek? What do you know about him?”
    “I heard your brother say you put a man named Grodek behind bars.”
    Facing away from Kirov, Pekkala’s eyes blinked silver in the dark. “Grodek was the most dangerous man I ever met.”
    “What made him so dangerous?”
    “The question is not ‘what’ but ‘who.’ And the answer to that is the Tsar’s own Secret Police.”
    “The Okhrana? But that would mean he was working for you, not against you.”
    “That was the plan,” replied Pekkala, “but it went wrong. It was General Zubatov, head of the Moscow Okhrana, who came up with the idea. Zubatov wanted to organize a terrorist group whose sole purpose was to be the assassination of the Tsar.”
    “But Zubatov was loyal to the Tsar!” Kirov protested. “Why on earth would Zubatov want to assassinate him?”
    As the sound of Kirov’s voice echoed around the barn, Anton grumbled, muttered something unintelligible, and then fell back asleep.
    “The group would be a fake. Zubatov’s plan was to draw in as many would-be assassins as he could. Then, when the time was right, he would have them all arrested. You see, in ordinary police work, it is necessary to wait until a crime has taken place before taking people into custody. But in organizations like the Okhrana, the task is sometimes to anticipate the crimes before they have happened.”
    “So all the time these people believed they were working for a terrorist cell, they would in fact be working for Zubatov?”
    “Exactly.”
    The young Commissar’s eyes looked glazed as he struggled to fathom the depth of such deception. “Was Grodek a part of this cell?”
    “More than a part of it,” replied Pekkala. “Grodek was the one in charge. He was younger than you. His father was a distant cousin of the Tsar. The man had failed in business many times, but instead of accepting responsibility for his failures, he chose to blame the Tsar. Grodek believed that his family had been denied the privileges they deserved. When his father committed suicide after piling up more debts than he could ever repay, Grodek held the Tsar responsible.”
    “Why wouldn’t he,” said Kirov, “if he only knew what his father had told him?”
    “Precisely, and as Grodek grew into a young man, he made no secret of his hatred for the Romanovs. He was the perfect candidate for leading an assassination attempt.”
    “But how could a person like that be persuaded to work for the Okhrana? That seems impossible to me.”
    “That is exactly why Zubatov chose him. First, he had Grodek arrested in a public place. News of this soon spread. A young man, grabbed off the street and roughly shoved into a waiting car. Anyone witnessing such a thing, and Zubatov made sure there were many of these, would feel sympathy for Grodek. But once Zubatov had him in custody, the real work began.”
    “What did he do to the boy?”
    “He blindfolded Grodek, put him in a car, and drove him to a secret location. When Zubatov removed Grodek’s blindfold, the Tsar himself was standing there in front of them.”
    “What was the point of that?” asked Kirov.
    “Zubatov brought Grodek face-to-face with a man who had become only a symbol to him. But to see him there, as a man of flesh and blood, instead of what Grodek’s father had made him out to be, that was the beginning of the process. The Tsar explained his own version of events. Together, they looked over his father’s record books, which showed, in the father’s own handwriting, how his family’s wealth had been squandered. Of course, Grodek had never seen any of these things before. It left a deep impression on them both to be reminded that they