The more power a ruler has, the less he can change. Nothing will work until you tame the top.
I told my husband: a coup. In Moscow they’re preparing to receive fifty thousand of their soldiers after the Belarus exercises. I propose setting the hook: we’ll build potato guesthouses for them, let them think everything is under control. All night I phoned the right people: bargaining, pressing, changing the exercise theme. Then I went to wake my husband to relieve stress and catch my breath.
In the morning I put aside the newspaper praising her for stability. In the evening I asked: arrest the infantryman, block the army, close the border, how do we do it all at once? She answered with a quotation and sent me to the border as “the new Milošević.” I wished her a light wound, not death.
They phoned and asked about my late father’s fund. They proposed an official levy on every sale, as in Kazakhstan. Then they named numbers: a hundred and twenty thousand fighters. I haggled down to fifty. They reminded me of the “three hundred” I’d boasted about. In the evening I was invited to report in Gelendzhik.
The “infantryman’s” fund, a thread from Belarus, fifty thousand places, and one invitation to a bunker. The empress is convinced a spy must be happy in love, and prays it isn’t the last time. And in the morning, columns of KAMAZ trucks will stop at the palace gates in Gelendzhik.
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