And they recognized that Zakharov was their man. They could always get another GRU chief, but there was no one else with the skill, training, and motivation to do what needed to be done on the ground in the most important foreign location for Russian interests.
Zakharov flew to Dagestan, where war raged against Shariat Jamaat; was declared dead on the battlefield after photographs were taken purporting to show his body; and spent the next two months undergoing cosmetic surgery. He grew the first beard he’d worn since fighting through the Afghan winter of 1983–84, and he darkened his hair several shades, making it almost black.
General Feodor Zakharov turned into David James Mars, a wealthy real estate mogul who’d lived most of his life in the Caribbean, which accounted for the fact that few around town knew much about him. By becoming David Mars, Feodor Zakharov himself became a sleeper, an operative who has not come to the attention of police or security forces.
He slipped into London’s elite circles with few questions asked, bolstered by contacts made through front companies run by the SVR around the world, and connections in the UK purchased with Russia’s billions funneled into UK banks.
He resumed working with the Solntsevskaya Bratva, whose leadership assigned him to an English-educated Vor named Artyom Primakov. Primakov had been an SVR agent and graduate of the school where Irina Zakharov taught, and he blended into London just as well as Mars.
Zakharov and Primakov, now David Mars and Roger Fox, spent the next several years working for Russian interests across the United Kingdom.
No one in the mafia other than senior leadership and Artyom Primakov knew David Mars was Russian, and neither did any but a very few at the Kremlin. Instead he went by a code name: Chernny Volk, Black Wolf.
The money for Mars’s operations came from Vladimir Belyakov, the billionaire Russian oligarch who, despite a very public falling-out with the government in Moscow, was in truth a dedicated foot soldier for the Kremlin, a member of the Siloviki, the politically influential elite. The Kremlin eased off the Solntsevskaya Bratva while simultaneously increasing their menace of other mafia groups to further bolster the operation.
David Mars had spent the past several years operating here in London against UK interests and in furtherance of Russian interests, but he had no ties to the Kremlin at all. He was the Russian president’s “fire and forget” weapon, sent to cause mayhem, set up with virtually unlimited men and money, and left to his own devices.
He was careful at first, building contacts in intelligence circles, not just in the United Kingdom but with all the Five Eyes nations, paying for dirt on IC personalities, socking it all away so he could initiate his schemes when the moment was right.
This was a time of great Russian expansion into the United Kingdom; secretive banking and property ownership laws saw to this, and London became, quite simply, the oligarch’s haven of choice.
And then Zakharov’s operational tempo increased when Britain began threatening to strip assets from the Russian kleptocrats who had taken up residence in and around London. The Kremlin let it be known to Mars, through a half dozen cutouts, that it was time the gloves came off.
A month later Mars had an MP killed in West Bromwich. He conducted many other assassinations, often with nerve agents, sometimes with polonium. He killed Russian dissidents on UK soil, he blackmailed bankers and lawyers to ease restrictions on and inquiries into questionable accounts full of Kremlin members’ money, and he did it all with no one knowing who he was, or even that he was Russian.
His work had been fulfilling, though he felt he would never do enough damage to the English for what they’d done to his family.
He’d already been planning some sort of intelligence operation against the British at the upcoming Five Eyes conference in Scotland when he learned the news that changed everything. Four months earlier, he learned that his beloved daughter, an SVR operative who was wholly unaware he was alive for operational security purposes, had been killed by American intelligence officers during a mission in Thailand.
Mars was once again inconsolable. But as before, he channeled his rage into action. He had a new foe, a second enemy who had caused him great personal pain.
And soon he knew what he was going to do about it.
The Five Eyes conference would have the elite of all the English-speaking spy agencies in one place at one time, here in the United Kingdom, the nation where Mars and his Bratva minions had operated with impunity for the past dozen years.
He would find a way to kill them all.
He first thought of polonium, but there was no way this would not lead all investigators directly to Moscow’s door. A biological attack, on the other hand, could be effectively pulled off, he decided, but only if he used deceptive measures to turn this into a false-flag operation.
He went to an old colleague from the Afghan war who now worked in biological warfare research. He told him he wanted the name of a foreigner who might be persuaded to attack the West, and the man understood exactly what Zakharov wanted.
Zakharov was at first surprised when the name he was given turned out to be that of a female North Korean doctor in Stockholm, but he was also handed access to her FSB file, which detailed both her capabilities and her stated wish to use her knowledge against the West. He learned that she was a North Korean intelligence agent, as well, and she possessed both the knowledge and the temperament to conduct the attack.
He realized by the time he closed the file that this had the potential to be a perfect symbiotic relationship. Zakharov, a warrior consumed with the desire to destroy his target, and Won, a weapon in human form, consumed with the desire to detonate.
He sent Fox to collect her, and he told her enough of his plan to move her to Scotland, where Mars convinced her that North Korea would never take the fall for what was to come.
And at the same time Mars created a paper trail, orders from North Korea, and photographic evidence of Won’s movements, and this was all kept safely hidden for the day when he needed to prove to the world that this was not a Russian operation but a North Korean one.
He was just days away from commencing his attack, and all was in place, when Vladi Belyakov met with him at St. James’s Park and told him Zoya was alive.
He never wavered a moment after getting this news. She was not dead, but she’d clearly switched sides, working for America, which meant working for the Five Eyes.
He’d rather she’d been killed in Thailand, died a hero, fallen to enemy fire.
He would do what he could for Zoya. He wouldn’t have her killed; she was his beautiful daughter, after all. But he would also do what he had to do to keep his operation on track. She was a direct threat to it, the only real potential compromise, and if she got in his way, then this machine he had built and put into effect would not be able to stop in time to keep from running her over.
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