Satori by Don Winslow Page B

concessions — perhaps permanent bases in Manchuria.”
    It’s a classic Go ploy, Nicholai thought, to sacrifice a line of stones to lure your enemy into a misapprehension of your strategy. Uncharacteristic of Americans, who reveled in the childlike game of checkers. A deeper mind was behind this maneuver. It could be Haverford, but certainly he lacked the position to authorize a killing at this high level.
    Who is it, then? Nicholai wondered.
    Who is this Go player?
    “Tell me about Voroshenin,” he said.

12
    “D ISABUSE YOURSELF of the notion that we’re sending you to murder some innocent diplomat,” Haverford told Nicholai.
    Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin was a high-ranking member of the KGB, a fact that the Chinese knew and deeply resented.
    “Above all else,” Haverford warned, “our boy Yuri is a survivor.”
    He laid out what the CIA knew about Yuri Voroshenin.
    Born in St. Petersburg in 1898, the son of a schoolteacher, Voroshenin was a committed revolutionary even as a boy. By the time he was fifteen he had spent time in three Tsarist jails, at seventeen he barely escaped a traitor’s noose and was exiled to Siberia. The Bolsheviks ordered him to join the army in 1914, and he surfaced as a leader of the 1916 mutiny that sent soldiers streaming home from the front.
    Haverford took out a photograph that showed a young Voroshenin in an army greatcoat and soldier’s peaked cap. Tall and thin, with the typical wire-rimmed spectacles of the left-wing Russian intellectual, he sported an open, happy grin that was unusual for an earnest revolutionary.
    The great year of 1917 found him home, now an agent in the Petrograd division of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, the VchK, the “Cheka.” Violence was rife in the hungry city — demobilized soldiers shot, robbed, and raped. Mobs looted churches, stores, and the homes of the rich. The wives and daughters of bankers, generals, and Tsarist officials sold themselves as prostitutes to feed starving families.
    Nicholai knew all about the Petrograd Cheka.
    “You needn’t enlighten me,” Nicholai said. “My mother told me the stories.”
    The Cheka began the Red Terror, a war of extermination against its “class enemies,” shooting dozens, sometimes even hundreds of “White” Russians in any single day, without trial or due process. Voroshenin cheerfully participated in the slaughter. “Why bother with a Commissariat of Justice?” he asked once in a party meeting. “Let’s just call it the Commissariat for Social Extermination and get on with it.”
    They got on with it.
    His tortures became the stuff of nightmares. He tied captured White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces, he shoved prisoners into nail-studded barrels and rolled them down hills, he peeled the skin off captives’ hands to create “gloves” of flesh. His name became a tool that mothers used to frighten their children.
    In 1921 he helped suppress the mutiny at the naval base at Kronstad, accomplished with great bloodshed. Then he turned his attention to striking workers in the starving, freezing city. Through the firing squad, the truncheon, and the torture cell he reestablished order, then began tearing down sections of the city to provide fuel for the rest of it. All this activity brought him to the attention of the rising power in Moscow, Joseph Stalin.
    “He next shows up in China,” Haverford went on. “In, of all places, Shanghai.”
    It was, after all, at Stalin’s insistence that the Nationalists slaughtered the Communists there in 1927, and Uncle Joe thought Chiang Kai-shek could use an adviser experienced in such matters.
    Nicholai was just a small boy when this happened, but he nevertheless remembered it. He used to prowl the streets of Shanghai, knew the “Reds” from the “Greens,” and when the shootings, stabbings, and beheadings of thousands of young Reds occurred, it was for him childhood’s